More than Homer Knew – Studies on Homer and His Ancient Commentators

536 Pages·2020·5.774 MB·English

by  Antonios Rengakos, Patrick Finglass, Bernhard Zimmermann

More than Homer Knew – Studies on Homer and His Ancient Commentators
More than Homer
Knew – Studies on
Homer and His Ancient
Commentators
Edited by
Antonios Rengakos, Patrick Finglass, and
Bernhard Zimmermann
ISBN 978-3-11-069358-4
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-069582-3
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-069591-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934035
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Cover image: The Apotheosis of Homer © British Museum
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
www.degruyter.com
Preface
The editing of the present volume of collected essays on the occasion of Franco
Montanari’s 70th birthday has been much more than a call of duty. For us it is a
sheer delight to celebrate not only an exceptional scholar and a leading person-
ality in the field of Classical Philology– as Fausto Montana will set out in detail
and with heartfelt emotion in the introductory chapter–, but also a dear friend
and a long-time companion in the study of ancient Greek scholarship. Commen-
tators on ancient texts have not always had a positive press – Jonathan Swift
memorably and ironically accused them (in the words of our book’s title and ep-
igraph, On Poetry: A Rhapsody, 103f. [1733]: As learned commentators view/In
Homer more than Homer knew) of pretending to know more than the author about
whom they were writing. Franco Montanari’s research, by contrast, has vindi-
cated ancient scholarship as a hugely important topic of study for our under-
standing of ancient literature and society; and Swift himself would have to admit
that his research is founded not on any pretences of knowledge but on a pro-
found, humble, and inspiring engagement with the sources.
We want to thank all those colleagues who so willingly contributed to the
making of this collection; as a tribute to the honorand’s philological achieve-
ment, the chapters of the volume are thematically related to his research inter-
ests. Moreover, we are grateful to the publishing house De Gruyter (with which
Franco Montanari has an extremely productive cooperation for many years), and
especially to Serena Pirrotta and Marco Michele Acquafredda who embraced the
undertaking of this liber amicorum with great enthusiasm.
On a personal note, we wish our friend Franco to be an endless source of
inspiration and creativity for years to come. For he has changed our view of clas-
sical scholarship and literature in myriad innovative ways. This collection is a
small token of our appreciation.
Antonios Rengakos
Patrick Finglass
Bernhard Zimmermann

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695823-202
Contents
Preface  V
Introduction Homo faber. Franco Montanari: the Scholar (and the Man)  1
Part I: Homer and Homeric Philology
Herwig Maehler
Bemerkungen zu Homerischen Szenen auf griechischen Vasen  9
H.-G. Nesselrath
Heracles in Homer  27
Antonios Rengakos
Neoanalysis and Oral Poetry: A Historic Compromise?  37
Christos C. Tsagalis
The Darkest Hour: Odysseus’s Smile and the Doloneia  51
Anna Novokhatko
Homeric Hermeneutics on the way from Athens to Alexandria  87
Lara Pagani
Hybridization of Scholiastic Classes in the Iliadic Corpus  147
Fausto Montana
Poetry and Philology. Some Thoughts on the Theoretical Grounds of Aristarchus’
Homeric Scholarship  161
Margalit Finkelberg
The Dream Simile in Iliad 22 and Aristarchus’ Formula τῇ κατασκευῇ
εὐτελεῖς  173
René Nünlist
Some Further Considerations on Herodicus’ Epigram against the Aristarcheans
(SH 494)  185
Filippomaria Pontani
From Aristarchus to Vermeer: ἐνώπια παμφανόωντα  191
VI  Contents
Manuel Sanz Morales
Were the Homeric Poems the Work of a Woman? Ptolemy Chennus and the Di-
verse Faces of a Theory  217
William W. Fortenbaugh
A Scholion on the Odyssey: Penelope and Eurycleia  235
Margarethe Billerbeck
Im Dickicht der Quellenforschung. Eine kleine Nachlese zu den Homerzitaten in
den Ethnika des Stephanos von Byzanz  253
Part II: Reception of Homer
Adrian Kelly
With, or without, Homer: Hearing the Background in Sappho  269
André Hurst
Homère chez Pindare : le «paradis» de la deuxième Olympique  293
Gregory Nagy
On the Paraphrase of Iliad 1.012–042 in Plato’s Republic 3.393d–394a  313
Paul Demont
Un «brouillamini» platonicien à propos du «cycéon» homérique
(Λ 624–641)  323
Serena Perrone
Homer on the Comic Stage  339
Evina Sistakou
Homer in the Library: Callimachus’ Literary Response to Homeric
Philology  363
Michael Erler
Hilfe für den Gott: Zum Verhältnis von Muse, Dichter und Philosoph  389
Christiane Reitz
„Homer hat gelebt — Homer hat nie gelebt“. Ein kleiner Beitrag zur
Wissenschaftsgeschichte  401
Contents  VII
Alberto Bernabé
The Primordial Water: Between Myth and Philosophy  417
Part III: Beyond Homer
Anna A. Lamari
Sharp Objects: Metalepsis and the Madness of Ajax  441
Georgia Xanthaki-Karamanou
Euripides’ Reception of the Aeschylean Lycurgeia in the Bacchae: Themes and
Concepts  463
B. Acosta-Hughes
In the Glassy Stream. Some Further Thoughts on Callimachus and Pindar  485

List of Contributors  501
Publications by Franco Montanari  507
Index Locorum  521

Fausto Montana
Homo faber. Franco Montanari: the Scholar
(and the Man)
On a summer morning in 1986, at the Institute of Classical Philology of the Uni-
versity of Pisa, a young professor is wrapping up the examination of a student on
some issues of Byzantine philology. Immediately after having given him the high-
est mark, he asks, most unusually: “Would you like to write your dissertation un-
der my supervision? For the topic, I would suggest the editio princeps of a Byzan-
tine commentary”. The student barely just manages to keep it together and,
hardly concealing his satisfaction and pride, tersely – and obviously – replies:
“Gladly”.
This is how my discipleship with Franco Montanari started, a relationship
that over the years became a close and steadfast professional collaboration and,
if I may, friendship. This episode is worth telling not so much for its (auto)bio-
graphical value, which is subjective and personal, but rather because it bears wit-
ness, directly and tellingly, to a fundamental trait of the scholar and the man:
that is, his practicality. In the example just told, this quality is expressed con-
cretely in his scouting of a young scholar in pectore, in his constructive sense of
initiative towards a scientific idea, and in his indifference to hierarchies and ac-
ademic roles.
At the time when Montanari’s mentorship of me began, this feature of his
character was already obvious to all who knew him. Franco was a brilliant stu-
dent at the Liceo classico “Ugo Foscolo” in Pavia, where his teacher of Greek was
Domenico Magnino (who later became a professor at the University of Pavia). Re-
cently, a colleague who was a student in the same Liceo maybe ten years later
told me that in his days Montanari’s legend was still so alive that, when one
wanted to praise another student’s skill in Greek, one would just call them a
“Montanari”, meaning someone brilliant by antonomasia. Who could have
guessed that, many years later, “il Montanari” would also be the metonymy used
by Italian secondary-school students and their teachers to refer to the GI. Vocabo-
lario della lingua greca?1 This editorial feat powerfully symbolises the talents of
the scholar and the man, it being the product of the intersection of linguistic ex-
pertise, a pragmatic approach to the conveyance of complex knowledge, a sincere
||
1 Torino, Loescher, 1995, 20133. From GI originate the Greek edition, Σύγχρονο λεξικό της αρχαίας
Ελληνικής γλώσσας, Αθήνα, Εκδ. Παπαδήμα, 2013, and the English edition, GE. The Brill Diction-
ary of Ancient Greek, Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2015. A German edition is currently in preparation.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695823-001
2 | Fausto Montana
interest in quality school education, a natural ease when it comes to personal re-
lationships and the dynamics of a team and, last but not least, an “entrepreneur-
ial” and organisational inclination that was and is most unusual in the premises
(both physical and metaphorical) of the sciences of antiquity, in Italy and maybe
also elsewhere.
After secondary school, Montanari was a student at the University of Pisa, in
the ordinary course of the Scuola Normale Superiore. In 1973, he graduated in
Greek literature under the supervision of Graziano Arrighetti (who, in turn, had
studied under Giorgio Pasquali at the Normale) and was immediately admitted to
the post-graduate course (1973–1974) – once again at the Normale, an institution
towards which he has always fostered a strong connection, culminating in his
Chairmanship of the Associazione Normalisti from 2003 to 2009. In 1977, when he
was still very young, Montanari was appointed to the professorship of Byzantine
philology at the University of Pisa and, from the academic year of 1983/84, he was
Associate Professor of Greek grammar at the same University, where he met the
student from the anecdote.
Since 1986, Franco Montanari has been Full Professor of Greek language and
literature at the University of Genoa. Over the course of more than 30 years, he
has greatly honoured that University and has significantly contributed to its pro-
gress, both by taking on important institutional roles (let it suffice to mention the
headship of the Department of Antiquity, Philosophy and History from 2015 to
2018) and by working hard to rebuild the foundations of Greek and Latin studies –
such efforts include, but are not limited to, the ideation, promotion and organi-
sation of several initiatives and scientific projects, which over time have formed
and involved a great many scholars, both young and old, both Italian and foreign,
and made Genoa one of the national and international points of reference in the
field of Greek philology. When considering this side of Montanari’s scientific en-
deavours, another quality of the man and the scholar clearly comes to the sur-
face: his volcanic energy in envisioning projects. This energy is not limited only
to his visionary and creative intuition in imagining new and innovative paths for
research, but also expands to a great resolution in pursuing such trajectories and
to an extraordinary ability to captivate and appeal to others. The list is extremely
long and, to mention only some of the most important examples, it includes the
activities of the Centro Italiano dell’Année Philologique (CIAPh); the online ency-
clopaedic database Lexicon of Greek Grammarians of Antiquity (LGGA); the por-
tals Words in Progress (WiP), Catalogus Philologorum Classicorum (CPhCl) and
Scholia minora in Homerum; the Supplementum Grammaticum Graecum (SGG);
the updating and new edition (ongoing) of the fragments of the Supplementum
Hellenisticum and the ongoing project for a new critical edition of the scholia to