History of Ancient Greek Scholarship: From the Beginnings to the End of the Byzantine Age

717 Pages·2020·3.184 MB·English

by  Franco Montanari (ed.)

History of Ancient Greek Scholarship

History of Ancient Greek
Scholarship
From the Beginnings to the End of the Byzantine Age
Edited by
Franco Montanari
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Venetus A: Marcianus Graecus Z. 454 (=822), folio 12, recto. © Center for Hellenic Studies,
Harvard University.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Montanari, Franco, editor.
Title: History of ancient Greek scholarship : from the beginnings to the
 end of the Byzantine age / edited by Franco Montanari.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2020. | Includes bibliographical
 references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020009940 (print) | LCCN 2020009941 (ebook) |
 ISBN 9789004427402 (paperback) | ISBN 9789004430570 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Greek philology—History. | Greek literature—History and
 criticism.
Classification: LCC PA51 .H57 2020 (print) | LCC PA51 (ebook) |
 DDC 880.9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009940
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009941
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
isbn 978-90-04-42740-2 (paperback)
isbn 978-90-04-43057-0 (e-book)
Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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Contents
Introduction 1
1 The Origins and Growth of Scholarship in Pre-Hellenistic Greece 9
Anna Novokhatko
1 Social Premises and Conditions Leading to the Establishment of
Scholarship 9
1.1 Reading and Writing in Archaic Greece 9
1.2 Writing, Literacy and the Development of New Media 13
1.3 Literacy as an Instrument in Learning 20
1.4 The Growth of Scholarly Environment 22
2 Social Institutions that Assisted in the Development of Scholarship 24
2.1 Education 24
2.2 Libraries and Archives 34
3 Philological Approaches in Pre-Alexandrian Greece 37
3.1 The Early Critical and Interpretative Approaches 37
3.2 The Beginnings of Homeric Textual Criticism and Editing 41
3.3 Early Text Exegesis and Literary Criticism 63
3.4 Fundamental Notions of Language Categories 93
3.5 Towards a Scholarly Methodology: the Development of Scholarly
Self-Awareness 110
3.6 400 BC to Alexandria: an Overview 113
2 Hellenistic Scholarship 132
Fausto Montana
1 Preliminaries 132
1.1 Court Poetry and Scholarship in Hellenistic Societies 132
1.2 Historiographic Pattern 138
1.3 Scholarship and Knowledge 140
2 Alexandrian Scholarship to 144 BC 142
2.1 Traces of Scholarship Outside Alexandria in the Early
Hellenistic Age 142
2.2 Culture and Royal Patronage in Early Ptolemaic Egypt: the
Museum 148
2.3 Making the ‘Universal’ Library 154
2.4 Philology for Books, Books for Philology 162
2.5 Librarians’ diadokhē and Learned Community 173
vi Contents
3 The Spread of Scholarship in the 2nd and 1st Centuries 217
3.1 Rise and Zenith of Pergamene Scholarship (2nd Century) 217
3.2 Pluralism and Exchange in Late Hellenistic Scholarship
(144–31) 227
3.3 Alexandrian Scholars in an Augustan World 244
3 Greek Scholarship in the Imperial Era and Late Antiquity 260
Stephanos Matthaios
1 State of Research, Presuppositions and Focal Points of a Historical
Survey 260
2 Philology and Grammar in the Imperial Era and Late Antiquity in
Context 268
2.1 Criteria for the Periodization of the History of Philology and
Grammar 268
2.2 The Institutional Character of Philology and Grammar 272
3 Persons, Works and Achievements 285
3.1 Judgments and Prejudices 285
3.2 Philological Studies 288
3.3 Linguistic Studies 326
3.4 Studies on Metrics 349
3.5 Lexicography 351
4 Scholarship in the Byzantine Empire (529–1453) 373
Filippomaria Pontani
1 From Justinian to Iconoclasm 373
1.1 Beginnings 373
1.2 Schools and Cultural Centers in the Mediterranean 377
1.3 Constantinople: Schools and Scholars 386
1.4 Iconoclasm 397
1.5 Transliteration 400
2 From the Byzantine Revival to the Age of Encyclopedism 401
2.1 General 401
2.2 Photius 406
2.3 Lexicography and Grammar 412
2.4 Manuscripts (9th Century) 414
2.5 Arethas 417
2.6 More Manuscripts (10th Century) 420
2.7 Schools 423
2.8 Collections 425
Contents vii
3 From Basil II to the Fourth Crusade 430
3.1 From Basil II to the 11th Century: the Context 430
3.2 Mauropous, Psellus, Italus 433
3.3 The Comnenian Age: General Features 440
3.4 The Comnenian Age: Schedography and Grammar 444
3.5 The Comnenian Age: Commenting Texts 449
3.6 John Tzetzes 452
3.7 Eustathius 460
3.8 The Comnenian Age: Manuscripts 467
3.9 Italy 469
4 From Nicaea to the Palaeologan Renaissance 472
4.1 Nicaea 472
4.2 Southern Italy between the 13th and the 14th Century 476
4.3 The Palaeologan Renaissance: Context and Early Personalities 477
4.4 Maximus Planudes 483
4.5 Constantinople after Planudes: Moschopulus, Grammar,
Lexicography 490
4.6 Constantinople after Planudes: between Christian and Classical
Culture 493
4.7 Thessalonica: Thomas Magistros and Demetrius Triclinius 496
4.8 Theodore Metochites and Nicephorus Gregoras 503
5 The Last Century of Byzantium 508
5.1 The Late 14th Century: between Hesychasm and Classicism 508
5.2 From Chrysoloras to the Council of Ferrara-Florence
(1397–1439) 514
5.3 The Last Years before the Fall 523
Bibliography 531
General Index 651
Passages Index 674

Introduction
The history of classical scholarship
is classical scholarship in the making
rudolf pfeiffer
∵
This book began from the idea of detaching the first four chapters, which
formed the historiographical part, of Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek
Scholarship (published in 2015) as a single independent volume, to produce
a History of Ancient Greek Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the
Byzantine Age. For this it was obviously necessary first of all to update the
bibliography,1 but also to reorganize and rethink as a unified treatment all
that we usually understand under the general term “ancient scholarship” or
“ancient philology.” This includes the exegesis of ancient authors and the ed-
iting of their texts, the orderly collection of materials useful for exegetical
purposes, the study of grammar, reflection on language as an instrument of
literature, and everything that can be linked to this sphere. It is easy to observe
that no such work covering a period from the origins of ancient scholarship to
the fall of Byzantium (i.e. a couple of millennia of history, a chronological span
that is hard even to conceptualize in a unified perspective) currently exists
in the research landscape on ancient scholarship, and that it is today hard to
imagine such a work being undertaken by a single person. In any case, while a
single-authored study, should it ever be possible, would have the advantage of
unity of perspective and cultural outlook, it would lose the benefits offered by
a volume with multiple voices in a field so complex and multiform.
It would be hard to deny that the history of ancient scholarship has been
one of the most significant innovations of the past century in the panorama of
studies on the ancient world, both in the importance achieved by this sector of
research in just a few decades, and in the quantity, breadth, and depth of new
critical editions of the texts of ancient philological erudition, which were at
first rather neglected in modern research but are now the subject of new and
philologically robust editions. Indeed we can say without risk of contradiction
1  The present volume contains an extensive bibliography that covers all the topics treated in
this introduction, so I choose not to repeat it here.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004430570_002
2 MONTANARI
that by now, in our century, the history of ancient scholarship has gained an
indisputable standing within the field of research on ancient culture. Only a
myopic and – thankfully – fading aestheticizing approach and outlook could
imagine taking the backward step of denying or downplaying its importance.
It is now accepted that the turning point, both intellectually and historical-
ly, was the publication of Pfeiffer’s History in 1968. The comprehensive discus-
sion and reflection dedicated to the book’s findings a quarter century after its
publication, in the Entretiens Hardt on this topic,2 demonstrated that Pfeiffer’s
work was already securely established as an indispensable point of reference,
while also indicating possible expansions, supplements, and adjustments of
its position. As regards the temporal range under consideration, many of us
hoped even back then that Pfeiffer would give us a second volume dedicated
to the Roman Imperial period, but sadly this did not happen.3 Since Pfeiffer
did not do what the scholars expected, the world of research felt as particularly
necessary to have a historical framework for the centuries of the Imperial peri-
od in continuity with the Hellenistic period and until the end of the Byzantine
millennium. The problem of continuity between the Hellenistic and the impe-
rial period is captured by the very title of the Entretiens of 1994 cited above,
and is discussed explicitly in their Introduction: “We wanted to avoid a sharp
cut-off date at the end of the Hellenistic period, which would be artificial, and
to broaden the view as far as possible towards a Hellenistic-Roman chrono-
logical span. We are convinced that a unified examination of this period would
strongly benefit our understanding of many phenomena and of their histori-
cal consequences. These include decisive interventions in the transmission
of classical texts; the history of production of Hellenistic commentaries and
treatises up to the early stages of the formation of scholiographic corpora; the
consolidation of grammatical theory up to Apollonius Dyscolus and Herodian;
the development of the lexicographical collections that would flow into the
Byzantine compilers; the foundations of the paroemiographical research
up to the first major collections; and the evolution of rhetorical thought.”4
2  L a philologie grecque à l’époque hellénistique et romaine. Sept exposés suivis de discussion
par Nicholas J. Richardson, Jean Irigoin, Herwig Maehler, Renzo Tosi, Graziano Arrighetti,
D. M. Schenkeveld, Carl Joachim Classen. Entretiens préparés et présidés par Franco
Montanari, Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique, Tome XL, Fondation Hardt, Vandoeuvres –
Genève 1994.
3  Pfeiffer chose instead to turn his attention to a different period, which he perhaps felt was
more in need of historical reflection by a classical philologist of his era: History of Classical
Scholarship: 1300–1850, Oxford 1976.
4  Montanari, Introduzione in Entretiens XL cit., p. 4, here translated from the original Italian.