Franco Montanari
ANCIENT SCHOLARSHIP TODAY
Abstract: This article outlines the state of the art in the field of ancient scholarship, the changes that have
occurred and the results that have been achieved in recent decades, the paths along which these studies have advanced and must still advance. Three subjects are specifically addressed: 1) what was the role of Aristotle and the Peripatos in the birth of Alexandrian philology, and what was their influence on the intellectual turning point signified by the birth of philology; 2) what kind of questions should we ask of the results of the ancients’ critical and exegetical activity, what answers should we expect, and what is their significance for our research; 3) what is the value and the historical-cultural role of the critical and philological activity of the Alexandrians, and on what is it based?
This volume completes the course of a project begun in 2013 and concluded in 2016, financed in the program FIRB – Futuro in Ricerca 2012 by the Italian Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università, della Ricerca, on the theme of “Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Aeschylus: Forms and transmission of the ancient exegeses.” The research was conducted by four groups directed by (in alphabetical order) Marco Ercoles (Università di Bologna), Lara Pagani (Università di Genova), Filippomaria Pontani (Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia), and Giuseppe Ucciardello (Università di Messina), who also carried out the task of coordinating the work of the various groups. The proposed scholarly program has been fully realized, with studies that have addressed the four great poets in various ways, exploring multiple themes in the exegesis of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Aeschylus. It may not be otiose to recall that these are four of the most important authors of ancient Greek poetry, whose interpretation, in the broad sense of the term, has a historical and cultural significance of enormous importance and of special significance for illuminating the meaning of culture and thought in antiquity. Actually the course of the research, while it has already been quite fertile in producing results, is anything but finished, since, in addition to the conferences1 and this volume, the project
has produced a conspicuous quantity of studies: as well as those already published, others are in print, yet more are in progress, and seeds for new currents of research have been planted. Thanks, therefore, to the effort and commitment of those who have lavished their energies and abilities on more than four years of work within this framework, the wave of research will last much longer and will continue to bear fruit in scholarly investigations. The result of the project is thus very visible and of great importance and utility for advancing our knowedge: this is what happens (obviously, one might add) when resources for research are allocated well. Alas, it is not always thus2.
Given this background, I would not say there is a need to ‘conclude’ in some way in relation to this project and the course of its work, but rather to express some reflections on research into ancient scholarship today: the current picture, the changes in recent decades, the results gained, the paths along which studies are proceeding and should now proceed. If we look broadly at the past half century, it is undeniable that there have been important changes in this field of research on the ancient world. The decisive turning point was undoubtedly marked by Rudolf Pfeiffer’s History, by 1 A series of meetings were held in itinere, at Venice (16 May 2013), Genoa (12 May 2014), and Messina (11 May 2015), and the end of the road was marked by the final conference at Bologna (23–25 May 2016), the majority of contributions to which are collected in the present volume.
2 I have in mind some peculiarities that have emerged from ERC calls in recent years, but these are certainly not the only cases of perplexing funding decisions, which produce results of rather dubious value and are thus a very poor use of resources.
its diffusion among scholars, and by the discussions to which it gave rise3. To abbreviate drastically,
through Pfeiffer’s account ancient scholarship definitively escaped the essentially ancillary role that it had traditionally occupied (abetted by the perspective of an often aestheticizing and ahistorical classicism) and rightly took on (thanks to the progressive abandonment of an increasingly jaded classicism) a role and function as one of the essential historical and cultural aspects of the ancient world, one that can no longer be overlooked. Exactly half a century has passed since Pfeiffer’s book, and I think we may say that fifty years ago such a large and challenging Companion to
Ancient Greek Scholarship as that recently published would not even have been thinkable.4
In the current research landscape of these studies, I believe that some basic ideas, which are essential for an accurate view and valuation of cultural and intellectual history, should be accepted by scholars as established. The fundamental themes which we should approach in the proper way can be identified as follows: 1) What was the role of Aristotle and the Peripatos in the birth of Alexandrian philology, and what was their influence on the intellectual turning point that this entailed? 2) What questions should we ask of the products and results of the ancients’ critical and exegetical activities, what answers should we expect, and what is their significance for our research? 3) What is the historical and cultural value and role of the Alexandrians’ critical and philological activity, and on what is it based?
1) From the Peripatos to Alexandria: a new cultural outlook
One of the aspects of Pfeiffer’s History that have been debated the most is the reduced role that he ascribed to Aristotle and his school as bearers of the decisive impulses in the birth of philology at Alexandria. Pfeiffer criticized the view, held already in antiquity, and traditionally, if rather automatically, repeated in modern studies, which identified Aristotle as the ‘father’ or ‘founder’ of Alexandrian philology; with this Pfeiffer opened up a problem and a debate that have not yet run their course and which continue to stimulate new analyses and studies in ever greater depth.5 It
seems worth underlining one more time that in Pfeiffer the elements that link Aristotle and the Peripatos with Alexandria are in fact present, and in good number, and are even noted explicitly. That is, Pfeiffer by no means omits to mention Aristotle and the work of the Peripatetics when the topic leads him to do so, but he then downplays any deeper connection: Aristotle was not the master of the first philologists, the Alexandrian philologists were not Aristotelians, Aristotle was not the founder or father of philology. I believe that it is clear that Pfeiffer’s approach arises from having privileged to an excessive degree and having even, as it were, isolated the relation between poetry and philology, instead of the much more complex and nuanced picture given by the whole sphere of erudite activity, with its search for documentation on literature and language. In reality I think that, if we put together all the elements that imply deep and concrete connections between
Aristotle/Peripatos and the work of the scholars of the Hellenistic period, we are led, rather, to emphasize and realize ever more fully that it was that environment and that line of development which provided the key impulses and inspirations. Aristotle took a new kind of interest in what we call ‘literature’ as a whole6. Firstly, it is connected with his marked, systematic interest in the
history of the various disciplines: ample space was given to scholarly research and to antiquarian collecting, with serious effort made towards historical documentation in the spheres of thought in which Aristotle himself developed his own doctrine. The link between the ordered collection of 3 Pfeiffer 1968; a general reassessment in Montanari 1994.
4 Montanari/Matthaios/Rengakos 2015.
5 See Montanari 2012, 2014, and 2017, to which I refer for further bibliography. 6 Montanari 2017.
opinions expressed by predecessors (which gave rise to doxography) and theoretical reflection seems to be a characteristic intellectual trait: for the scientific foundation of a discipline, a
conscious knowledge of its history is indispensable, and this is true also of rhetoric and poetry, the human activities that use words. This aspect of Aristotle’s approach cannot be underestimated or treated as secondary in scholarship. For example, most information available on the earlier techne
rhetorike is owed to Aristotle, even though his collection of Technai is lost. For our purposes, we
should give special consideration to everything that can be linked to studies of the great poetry of the past, of the traditional paideia of the Greeks. The great collections of historical and antiquarian erudition by Aristotle and his school undoubtedly had an organic connection to the field of literary history, to the study of literary works and the reconstruction of the lives of the authors, for which it provided indispensable notices and materials. Converging with this, literature itself was a source of information and an object of commentary and exegesis, and there was a profound link between erudite documentation and the interpretation of texts, the legacy of which was a fertile training in work and method; this had an important continuation both in the activity of some exponents of the Peripatetic school and also in the critical and exegetical activity of Alexandrian philology,
constituting the decisive intellectual inspiration for its development.
Alongside his scholarly researches on works and authors, Aristotle was committed to theoretical reflection and produced his own doctrine on the techne poietike: as in other fields of knowledge, here too the two aspects cannot be detached from each other, since his view of the sphere of poetic art within the framework of human activities sharply altered the standard approach. The emergence of varied interests in what we call ‘literature’ arose from the importance Aristotle accorded to the products of verbal art as a sphere of human activity, and was deeply rooted in the attention that he gave to the historical and cultural topics connected to them. The shift in approach, compared to the past, was firm and decisive. While Plato did not assign to poetry, as the imitation of sensible things, a value as knowledge, for Aristotle it produced its knowledge precisely as mimesis of nature, which is reality to all effective purposes; yet it is not so in the sense that it imitates the particular
accidental, but rather in the sense that it imitates the universal, because there is no true knowledge except of the universal. To the level of epistemology is firmly attached that which concerns the end and the effect. In Aristotle’s view, one no longer imposes to the poetic art the condition of
educating towards the good or of teaching things that are good and proper: its aim and function are of a cognitive order in relation to the intellect, and of a psychological-emotive order in relation to the passions. The specificity of the poetic art and the autonomy of poetry from reality in Aristotle’s conception are two elements that have emerged in a recent reconsideration of the historical relation between the school of Aristotle and the Museum of Alexandria, which systematically compares the two realities in order to investigate their shared theoretical outlook in the field of techne poietike7. Through his reflections, activity, and teaching Aristotle brought about a cultural shift and gave to the Peripatos a direction that is clearly encountered among his pupils, despite the near-total loss of their writings, of which unfortunately only fragments survive and even these usually rather meager and unsatisfying. But in what remains of the works of figures such as Demetrius of Phalerum, Dicaearchus, Praxiphanes, Chamaeleon, and others, we find that the study of literature and the poets is present to an increasingly important degree: as the lessons of Aristotle were digested ever more thoroughly, the investigation of poetic works and research into their authors now becomes a
common and productive terrain that is of primary importance for interpreting and understanding the reality of humanity and human life in the world.
A line of research that seems to me productive, and which I have pursued in some studies in recent years, is based on identifying Homeric passages about which Aristotle himself or one of the
Peripatetics of the first generation raised problems of interpretation of various types, and which were picked up again and had a continuation among the Alexandrian philologists in a different form – we could openly say, in a philological form. To abbreviate drastically: an exegetical difficulty pointed out by Aristotle or one of his followers can be found transformed into an Alexandrian athetesis, or addressed with other tools developed by the post-Aristotelian scholars. In its specificity, this type of research can give substance and content to forms of continuity that are precise and concrete, substantiating the picture of a more general intellectual and cultural continuity and relationship, in the sense outlined above. This therefore seems to be a path that should be pursued further8, also broadening the scope of observation beyond Homeric philology9.
2) The significance of ancient scholarship: what the texts tell us about themselves
For a long time the products we possess of ancient exegesis and scholarship were considered and studied essentially (even if the particular focuses were of course varied) for two reasons and with two approaches: 1) as testimonia to fragments of lost works and to information otherwise unknown (for example on Realien, historical facts, institutions, and so on); 2) as a source of information for the interpretation and comprehension of the work on which they comment (or occasionally on others). The first case is immediately comprehensible: all editions of fragmentary works (Hesiod, tragedy, lyric, Hellenistic poetry, as well as prose works) teem with quotations found in
scholiographic corpora, grammatical works, and lexicographical collections; not infrequently studies of various aspects of different historical eras benefit from scholarly sources (the one example of the FGrHist of Felix Jacoby can stand for them all). On the other hand, it sometimes happens that the exegesis of the surviving works of major authors of ancient literature gain some clarification from a scholion or a lexicon lemma. These are two indispensably important aspects which should certainly not be underestimated, far less brushed aside, given the exceptionally
important function that they fulfill. But for some time the approach has been changing, and this shift should now be consolidated as an established advance in knowledge. We can formulate it as
follows: as well as being important for what they tell us about everything other than themselves in their own right, the products of ancient scholarship are important, indeed fundamental, for what they tell us about themselves. We can appreciate the great importance of an unknown fragment of a lost work or an otherwise unknown fact about the ancient world, but at least as important and significant, or perhaps even more so, is what these texts, difficult and complicated to understand, tell us about the methods of the ancient exegetes, the cultural assumptions, ideas, and intentions of their times and their settings. It is a fact – and we can no longer deny or ignore it – that the exegesis of ancient authors, the scholarship, grammar, reflection on language, all that we usually define under the general term ‘ancient philology’, should be accepted as one of the essential and
indispensable aspects of the historical and cultural framework of the ancient world, and also as the final major step in the escape from an aestheticizing classicism (for which the products of ancient scholarship were usually late trivia of little or no value in themselves), whose scientific findings are irremediably ephemeral. Let us therefore ask of the texts of ancient scholarship, above all, that they tell us about themselves, and let us adopt as a basic principle that it does not matter whether what they tell us is correct or mistaken, whether their interpretations are good or bad from our point of view and with our methods; what matters, rather, is what they imply and what they mean in their 8 Montanari 2000, 2012, 2014; Bacigalupo 2018. A slightly different approach in Pagani (forthcoming).
own right: that a scholion to Homer or Aeschylus selects a mistaken reading is entirely secondary as compared to our understanding of the methods and assumptions that are brought to bear in making the selections. To defend the ‘usefulness’ of the texts of ancient scholarship does not mean to observe that sometimes they are right and interpret well according to our philology and ideas; it means understanding the reasons why they have interpreted in a certain way and have made certain choices; in short, to understand what they tell us about themselves, their era, and their setting. 3) The intellectual turning point: a question of method and ideas
The other point is whether we should hold that the phase of Alexandrian philology was a decisive intellectual turning point in the cultural history of our civilization or not, and whether or not it constituted the birth of a way of studying literary texts that lies at the origin of the discipline that we today call (classical) philology. On this dimension a debate has developed that has become
especially lively in recent times. Some scholars have wanted to deny to the Alexandrian philologists any kind of activity involving collating copies and selecting variants, and maintained that their readings were only conjectures, thus substantially downgrading their historical and cultural significance in the discipline of philology. This point is the central aspect in the evaluation of Alexandrian scholarship from the point of view of cultural history. It would perhaps be all too easy to begin by pointing out that conjecture is one of the fundamental instruments of the practice of philology, which would highlight an insoluble contradiction in this point of view, and be sufficient to discredit it. But, anyway, there are some clear and indisputable testimonia to the fact that
collation was done from copies and choices were made among variant readings; to the objection that this was an occasional phenomenon and not an established practice, we may respond that this is a problem of principles and methods, not of the quantity of data (the number of copies collated and variants discussed), or of the quality of the results (whether correct or mistaken from our point of view). We should not be trying to establish a minimum number of copies to be compared to each other or of variants to be considered, nor to determine how many ‘correct’ readings or ‘good’ interpretations (see above) would be necessary in order to speak of philology. Rather, in a historical approach, all that is necessary for there to be a crucial step forward, in terms of an intellectual advance, is the very fact that the problem is understood and addressed, even if in a partial, desultory, or incoherent manner: a literary text had had a multifaceted history of transmission, during which it could have been distorted; it was possible to restore the correct text (that is, which was an authentic line of verse and which a spurious one, and what was the original wording) by conjecture or by choosing the best reading among those offered by a discordant tradition.
Without any doubt the work of the Alexandrian philologists encompassed both variants drawn from the comparison of copies and also conjectures ope ingenii, that is, exactly the instrumentarium of modern philology. A further consideration has decisive force: it concerns the invention of the critical sign termed obelos by Zenodotus. He performed two different operations, which mark an important intellectual point: on the one hand the material deletion of lines regarded as certainly not authentic, and on the other hand the indication that a line could be suspected of being spurious, but without sufficient certainty to eliminate it physically and permanently from the text: such a line therefore remained in the text, with a mark of doubt that leaves to the readers the possibility of forming their own opinion. It was the codification of philological doubt, which we indicate in our critical editions with the marks of expunction, which signal the part of the text that is regarded as uncertain and debatable, but which remains in the text, available to its reader.
The idea of recognizing damage, and that a way needs to be found to repair it, reveals that the organic unity between interpretation and textual criticism was an advance that had been achieved.
Although much remained to be done, and ‘Wolfian’ philology, critical editions, and scientific commentary still lay far in the future, our point of view – far from being an anachronism – is the historical assessment that a crucial step was made in the period between Zenodotus and
Aristarchus10.
With these brief reflections I certainly do not claim to have drawn a complete picture of the research themes and problems that form the field of ancient scholarship in its many and varied aspects: a picture that has now become large and complex, whether through the many ancient grammarians who come into play, often known only through rare and problematic fragments, or through the many texts of exegesis and erudition that constitute its essential sources, texts that not infrequently are difficult and still relatively unexplored due to the long periods in which there was little interest in them. I hope merely to have succeeded in highlighting some points that I regard as key to the question of the history of ancient scholarship, in which there have been truly decisive advances in recent decades: advances and changes of approach that have set in their true light their historical-cultural and intellectual value and significance, by establishing them definitively as part of a legacy of achieved knowledge, which should never again be lost in studies of the ancient world. Many studies and more in-depth investigations must still be made, of course, and many texts await an adequate critical edition, and many figures of primary or secondary importance in ancient culture must still be examined to elucidate their activities, their position, and their role11. Yet today we
think of this sector of research not only in an entirely new light, but also with a different, and now accurate, perception of its role, importance, and influence in the context of ancient culture and thought.
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10 I have developed these ideas in some recent works: Montanari 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, to which I refer for a more detailed discussion and for the bibliography; cf. Montana 2012; see also nn. 8 and 9.
11 A prosopographical collection of figures important in the sphere of philology and scholarship in a broad sense in the ancient Greek world is presented in Montanari/Montana/Pagani (in progress).
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