History of Classical Philology

From Bentley to the 20th century

Diego Lanza, Gherardo Ugolini, Antonella Lettieri, Diego Lanza, Gherardo Ugolini

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110730463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An updated history of classical philology had long been a desideratum of scholars of the ancient world. The volume edited by Diego Lanza and Gherardo Ugolini is structured in three parts. In the first one ("Towards a science of antiquity") the approach of Anglo-Saxon philology (R. Bentley) and the institutionalization of the discipline in the German academic world (C.G. Heyne and F.A. Wolf) are described. In the second part ("The illusion of the archetype. Classical Studies in the Germany of the 19th Century") the theoretical contributions and main methodological disputes that followed are analysed (K. Lachmann, J.G. Hermann, A. Boeckh, F. Nietzsche and U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff). The last part ("The classical philology of the 20th century") treats the redefinition of classical studies after the Great War in Germany (W. Jaeger) and in Italy (G. Pasquali). In this context, the contributions of papyrology and of the new images of antiquity that have emerged in the works of writers, narrators, and translators of our time have been considered. This part finishes with the presentation of some of the most influential scholars of the last decades (B. Snell, E.R. Dodds, J.-P. Vernant, B. Gentili, N. Loraux).

Part I: Towards a Science of Antiquity

Richard Bentley and Philology as the Art of Conjecture

Francesco Lupi

1 Bentley and his Predecessors

“A critic far exceeding all other critics by wisdom and discernment”. With these words, Samuel Clarke honoured Richard Bentley (1662–1742) in a 1712 edition of Caesar’s Commentarii.¹ Between the end of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century, Bentley certainly played a key role in the field of philology, both in England and in Europe tout court. Bentley was a versatile scholar capable of brilliantly combining the two poles of English humanism, i.e., philologia sacra and classica (cf. Brink 1986, 19 f.), and offered insights into the discipline that would continue to influence the history of classical scholarship for a long time. He profoundly renewed seventeenth-century English philology while still partaking in some of its distinctive characteristics, as can be seen especially in his early works.²

In an England that was strongly influenced by the pre-eminence of the Dutch school,³ the history of classical studies lists among Bentley’s predecessors at least John Pearson (1613–1686), Thomas Stanley (1625–1678), and Thomas Gale (1635?–1702). Pearson – whom, according to Fraenkel (1950, I, 40), Bentley greatly admired – was second only to Bentley himself within the English context.⁴ Stanley was the author of an acclaimed edition of Aeschylus (1663), as well as a scholar of ancient philosophy. Thomas Gale, instead, stood out for the unusual extent of his interests – from studies on rhetoric and mythology to his editio princeps of Iamblichus’ De mysteriis Aegyptiorum (1678) – and for Photios’ Codex Galeanus, which is named after him. Before Bentley, these scholars made up the first generation of English classicists, who worked progressively to specialize their research interests (Haugen 2011, 16). It is in these scholars that the influence of continental classical scholarship, especially from the Netherlands and France, is more clearly recognizable.

So, what were the coordinates of classical studies in England during the seventeenth century? What were the identifying traits? First and foremost, this period in the history of classical studies in England was marked by the primacy of Greek over Latin, as well as a penchant for the literature of late antiquity with a preference for little-known authors, indicative of a taste for erudition. These characteristics were often accompanied by a fondness for chronological investigations (in the wake of the then celebrated Thesaurus temporum by Joseph Justus Scaliger, published in 1606 and based on Eusebius of Caesarea’s Chronicon)⁵ and a general lack of interest in textual criticism and poetry (with the important exception of Stanley’s Aeschylus).⁶ The generation before Bentley was ultimately more skilled in the reconstruction of a “broad historia litteraria, or cultural history of antiquity, than in studying poetry directly” (Haugen 2011, 8). Bentley shared with this generation a preference for unpublished fragments and problematic literary reliquiae rather than for complete works that were already well known (ibid.) (at least until the era of his great Latin editions). The interest in reliquiae, both literary and material, is also noticeable in the research of English scholars from the last generation of the sixteenth century, such as Thomas Gataker (1574–1654) and John Selden (1584–1654), as is exemplified by the fragments published by Selden in 1628 of the Marmor Parium, the chronological inscription found in Paros and later emended by Bentley himself, and the outlines of textual criticism of Greek dramatic fragments in some pages of Gataker’s Adversaria miscellanea posthuma (1659).⁷

Bentley broke from the previous generation, however, in leaving behind the deep-rooted interest in historical-chronological investigations, typical of the seventeenth century, in favour of an approach focused on the study of linguistic and poetic forms, following a model already set out by scholars such as Scaliger and Casaubon (Haugen 2011, 79 f.). This approach can be found, with admirable results, even in his first work, the Epistola ad Millium.

2 The Epistola ad Joannem Millium

In 1689, Bentley moved to Oxford to follow his pupil James Stillingfleet, the son of Dr Edward Stillingfleet, who had been Bentley’s patron since 1683.⁸ Bentley’s first meaningful contribution to classical studies dates back to his Oxford stay, which made available to him the treasures of the Bodleian Library. He was only 28 (having been born in 1662 in Oulton, Yorkshire) when he penned the famous Epistola ad clarissimum virum Joannem Millium, one of the works that is indissolubly linked to his fame. This work was attached as an appendix to the edition of the Byzantine John Malalas’ Chronographia (sixth century AD), edited by John Mill in 1691.⁹ The Epistola added to the edition a formidable apparatus of observations and corrections to several of the themes touched on by Malalas. It not only corrected factual mistakes scattered throughout the Chronographia, but also offered an in-depth analysis of several facets of ancient literature that already showcased Bentley’s critical talent and his interests. If, on the one hand, the historiographical value of the Chronographia was mostly negligible, its real interest lied in the wealth of literary fragments preserved by its author; among these, for example, the fragment attributed to Sophocles (currently, fr. adesp. 618 Kannicht-Snell) and later declared to be spurious in one of the most important passages of the Epistola (Dyce 1836, II, 255–258).¹⁰ The analysis of the pseudepigraphic fragment – which is preceded by a section on divine names in Orphic theology and on the Orphic fragments preserved by Malalas (ibid., 242–254)¹¹ – is a clear illustration of the critical method applied by Bentley to the study of literary fragments and, for the first time, of his interest in fragmentary literature in general. The attribution of the passage in the Chronographia to Sophocles is rejected by Bentley on many fronts, including the linguistic one, with a rigour and a level of technical skill that would go on to characterize his future works. Apart from the suspicions aroused both by text-historical considerations (Bentley wondered whether it could be possible for a passage by Sophocles to be transmitted only by Christian authors) and by the fragment’s content (the suspect ‘monotheism’ of the passage), Bentley reasoned that it was actually the unusual mix of Ionic and Attic forms detected in the text that called Sophocles’ authorship into question.

Bentley’s interest in Attic drama and his predilection for fragmentary literature also inspired the following, and much more substantial, Euripidean section (ibid., 258–297), which includes eleven notes. This section contains one of the most noteworthy contributions of the entire Epistola, namely, the rediscovery of synapheia in anapaestic systems,¹² which Bentley illustrates by discussing Euripides’ lost Cretans.¹³ Synapheia is defined as the rhythmic and prosodic continuity governing anapaestic systems (as well as other systems). Because of synapheia, the system rejects both the possibility of a hiatus between the last syllable of a dimeter and the first of the following and of a brevis in longo, i.e. two of the phenomena that mark the end of a verse.¹⁴ As Bentley himself noted, an anapaestic system behaves “non aliter [...], ac si unicus esset versus” (ibid., 274), ‘connecting’ the dimeters together until the clausula. This characteristic, as Bentley observed, was violated by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Latin versifiers, such as Scaliger and Grotius, whose translations sometimes had a tribrachic (⏑⏑⏑),¹⁵ a trochaic (–⏑), or even a cretic (–⏑–) foot instead of the anapaest (⏑⏑–) that would be expected at the end of a single dimeter, or rather created a hiatus with the following dimeter, a circumstance that was similarly inadmissible. The issue of synapheia fully shows Bentley’s interest in the ‘objective’ aspects of the study of classical authors, which would continue to be key to his more mature work. Specifically, the issue of metre would take centre stage in his essay on Terence’s metres (De metris Terentianis σχεδίασμα), published in his edition of the Roman playwright (1726; cf. sect. 4.2) and destined deeply to influence modern metrical studies.

Alongside the importance given to fragmentary texts in the Epistola,¹⁶ emerges Bentley’s idea – which was later abandoned, just like other ambitious projects of his youth¹⁷ – to write a grande opus, with emendations and notes, that would collect the fragments of every Greek ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Current Edition
• Introduction
• Part I: Towards a Science of Antiquity
• Part II: The Illusion of the Archetype. Classical Studies in Nineteenth-Century Germany
• Part III: Classical Philology in the Twentieth-Century
• Notes on Contributors
• Index of Names