Prolegomena

Stuart Douglas Olson

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501501821
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Prolegomena provide an introduction to the Basler Iliad commentary. The volume includes essays on the history of Iliad commentaries and the text, formulaic language and the oral tradition, grammar, meter, characters, plot and chronological structure, narrative technique, and developments in Homeric criticism, as well as an Index of Mycenaean words with brief explanations.

Introduction:
Commenting on Homer.
From the Beginnings to this Commentary (COM)

By Joachim Latacz

1. Preliminary Remarks

2. Commenting on Homer in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

2.1. Oral Commentaries

2.2. Written Commentaries

2.2.1 Early School Exegesis (the so-called D-scholia)

2.2.2 Linguistic Studies of the Sophists

2.2.3 Exegesis by the Philosophers, especially Aristotle

2.2.4 Commentary Work of the Alexandrians

2.2.5 Compilation Commentaries in the Roman Imperial and Byzantine Periods

3. Commenting on Homer in the Modern Period

3.1. Before and after ‘Ameis-Hentze(-Cauer)’

3.2. ‘Ameis-Hentze(-Cauer)’

4. The Present Commentary

4.1. Institutions and Authors

4.2. Intended Readership and Objectives

4.3. Arrangement and Presentation

4.4. Summary (42-44)

1. Preliminary Remarks

1

A history of commenting on Homer has yet to be written.7 Given the unusual quantity and diversity not only of Homer Commentaries proper (beginning with the ancient scholia) but also of observations and interpretations of Homer embedded in other works since the 6th c. BC (e.g. Aristotle’s Poetics, Stoic interpretations, the tract On the Sublime, interpretations of the Neoplatonists, Church Fathers and Byzantines, Renaissance poetics, the literary debate ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’, interpretations by poets and philosophers in the German Classicism), a comprehensive work of this sort may need to remain a desideratum.8 Each new commentary must nevertheless provide an account of the scope and nature of the intellectual tradition in which it stands, if only in broad strokes; past achievements can only be maintained and surpassed when their scope, method, emphasis and research focus are kept in mind. The following sketch accordingly attempts to record at least an outline.

2. Commenting on Homer in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

2

The Iliad and Odyssey represent the highpoint and conclusion of an ancient living oral tradition of song that goes back centuries and perhaps millennia.9 The introduction of writing around 800 BC made the perfect conservation of this tradition possible, but brought with it the tradition’s demise as well: after the Iliad and the Odyssey, epic as a living art form belongs to the past (see FOR 45). Epic as a ‘national’, ever-changing poetry of the elite, supporting the social status quo, is replaced in the wake of the general societal change of the 8th/7th c. BC by lyric poetry, which with its new diversity and colorfulness, characterized by individuality and widely scattered in locale, is taken to be ‘modern’ in contrast to the monolithic nature of epic. Epic poetry continues to exist; it is no longer produced, however, in the moment by singers (aoidoi) spontaneously combining and inventing before an audience, but is recited by rhapsodes on the basis of a fixed text. The Homeric epics come to occupy a special position. Always admired for their superior artistic quality, they are increasingly used for the purpose of education, thanks to their universal potential to instruct;10 promoted to educational texts, they fossilize as an intellectual heritage. Homer as ‘school text’ forms the common basis11 of the new intellectual class, centered in Miletus in Ionian Asia Minor, that starting around 600 BC initiates the Greek enlightenment and later continues in the sophistic movement of the 5th c., particularly in Athens. A need for commentaries on both epics naturally arises in connection with this didactic function of Homer.

2.1 Oral Commentaries

3

The first commentators on the Homeric epics were their performers, the rhapsodes. The (original) Homeridai12 were a special group, perhaps the nucleus of the rhapsodic craft; they seem to have traced themselves back to Homer himself and to have restricted themselves to performing his epics. As is evident in Plato’s Ion, Platonic irony notwithstanding, for the rhapsodes commenting meant explication on all levels; the basis (as is still the case for us today) of this work was the elucidation of unusual words and phrases that were often no longer understood, the so-called glossai.13 On this basis, a multi-tier complex of layers and directions in interpreting of the content developed; this becomes tangible to us only after its transfer to a written form.

2.2 Written Commentaries

4

As long as the person-specific commentaries of the rhapsodes, subject to time, location and competence, remained oral and thus unfixed, no merger of different insights and methods and thus no continuous growth of knowledge beyond the individual was possible. Theagenes of Rhegion (last quarter of the 6th c. BC) appears to have made the move to written form, crucial for all subsequent commentaries on Homer; he supposedly ‘was the first to write about Homer’,14 namely ‘about his poetry, his genealogy and his life-time’,15 and later commentators16 numbered him among the founders of allegorical interpretation. Theagenes’ contemporary, Pherekydes of Syros, will have been part of the same direction in interpretation17

2.2.1 Early School Exegesis (the so-called D-scholia)

5

In school teaching, Homer was required reading from the earliest period (see 2 above). The rhapsodes’ fundamental explications (glōssai) were integrated into education in the form of word lists, arranged in the order of the Books (likely already in use – see HT 18 – as they still are today). The examination in Homeric glossai administered to a wayward son transmitted in a fragment (fr. 233 K.–A.) of Aristophanes’ comedy Daitales (staged 427 BC) probably reflects Athenian school education in the 5th c.: ‘Explain Homeric glossai: What does korumba mean?18 [...] What does amenend kdrena mean?’19 Such ‘vocabulary tests’ will have formed part of the curriculum from the 7th century on. The earliest ‘Homer– ic–Attic’ ‘dictionaries’ of Homer (in part contained even in the elementary section of the present commentary [see 41 below] in curtailed form) presumably developed from corresponding lists. They represent the basis for the word–explana– tions erroneously attributed to the Augustan period philologist Didymos (hence ‘D’–scholia).20 In most cases, these seemingly simple glosses could not be dealt with as 1:1 renderings, but required excurses into Homeric grammar, realia, religion and the like (as in the two Aristophanic examples), and assumed an ability to make meaningful sense of the passage in question.21 They consequently represented a constant challenge to further commenting on Homer.

2.2.2 Linguistic Studies of the Sophists

6

The development of written explication takes place within the framework of the first European educational movement, the Greek sophistic of the 5th c. BC. This initially encompasses the problematization of linguistic and factual details. The direction and level of enquiry of these early ‘commentaries’ are basic at first, as might be expected; much of the content is bizarre by modern standards.

7

The sole preserved example of a sophistic interpretation of poetry can be seen as the beginning of the line along which these ‘explanations’ developed: Plato’s staging in the dialogue Protagoras of a – still oral – ‘interpretation contest’ between the sophist Protagoras and Socrates (who calls in the sophist Prodicus for support) regarding a poem by the lyric poet Simonides (Plat. Prot. 338e6–347a5). Even granting Plato’s aim of ironically exposing interpretations of poetry as useless gimmicks in this ‘performance’ (347c3–348a6), the core of these early interpretations is clear: a grasp of the overall sense of the passage is less relevant than control of the meanings of individual words (which are therefore tenaciously and ‘sophistically’ contested).22 As Rudolf Pfeiffer showed,23 this is due less to a lack of explanatory ability than to the explanatory aim. At the very beginning of the interpretation of the poem, Plato has Protagoras say: ‘I am of the opinion that the major part of a man’s education is his knowledge of literature.’24 But the same Protagoras had just made Socrates define the aim of his instruction as politikē tíchnē, statesmanship, and describe his curriculum as an education for becoming a good statesman (319a3–7). The sophists are thus not concerned primarily with poetry per se but rather – aside from their own theoretical insights into the structure of language – with its ideal instrumentalization via (1) a logi– co–linguistic cognitive training of their students that is as efficient as possible, and (2) the students’ ability to use literature in argument. For their students were meant to become not literary scholars, but intellectually dexterous citizens and politicians. (School commentaries have faithfully retained this aim in European education, which is also still primarily literary.)

8

The sophists Prodicus and Hippias seem to have continued this line in their writings,25 and Diogenes Laertius transmits a long list of book titles on Homeric themes by Antisthenes.26° To the latter as well, poetry in and of itself was of no concern: ‘The Sophistic explanations of poetry foreshadow the growth of a special field of inquiry, the analysis of language; the final object is rhetorical or educational, not literary.’27

2.2.3 Exegesis by the Philosophers, especially Aristotle

9

The restriction to questions of language, in contemporary terms philological and especially linguistic matters, is retained by the philosophers. Where they do not aim at an ethical or allegorical reading of Homer, as did e.g. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae or Metrodorus of Lampsacus,28 they chiefly remain in the traditional field of word explanation, like e.g. Democritus,29 but also Plato and Aristotle.

10

Plato’s most influential contribution to commenting on Homer lies in his implicit deterrence from engaging in it. His deep–seated skepticism toward poetry – as toward the written word in general (Phaedrus 275d3–277a5) – is well known. It has been demonstrated elsewhere (Vicaire 1960, esp. 81–103) that Plato could not have dared to exempt Homer in this regard. Had his direct and indirect students followed their master’s forceful verdict in Protagoras (347e1–7) – ‘gatherings of respectable men do not require an alien voice, not even that of the poets, since, on the one hand, they cannot be consulted regarding their statements, while on the other hand, among the majority of those citing them, one group claims that the poet means this, the other group that, exchanging words about a matter they cannot prove either way’ (the classic denial of any point to literary studies) – the present commentary would not exist. Fortunately, however, Plato’s students instead took up the challenge of the following cry for help from him, trapped in his own system: ‘Still let it be said that we at any rate, if poetic imitation directed toward pleasure could give any account why it ought to be in a well–governed city, that we should receive it gladly, since we are aware that we are charmed by it [...]. For indeed, my friend, are not even you charmed by it, most of all when you view it in the form of Homer?’ (Republic 607c3–d1). Plato’s Cratylus could be seen (namely by his students) as a bridge to addressing this call to defend poetry and Homer, since here, despite all buffoonery, a fondness for language, and once more for Homer in particular (391c8–393b6), results in the presentation and discussion of an impressive catalogue of ‘linguistic’ insights (see Latacz [1979] 1994, 646f.).

11

Aristotle, in heeding Plato’s cry for help, accomplished more regarding Homeric philology as a whole, and commenting on Homer in particular, than is generally realized today. On the one hand, he brought together on a large scale and partially systematized findings regarding Homeric word use and problems of interpretation that had previously been collected for the purpose of instruction or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titel
• Imressum
• Inhalt
• Preface to the 1st Edition (2000)
• Preface to the English Edition
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: Commenting on Homer. From the Beginnings to this Commentary (COM) by Joachim Latacz
• 2. History of the html (HT) by Martin L. West
• 3. Formularity and Orality (FOR) by Joachim Latacz
• 4. Grammar of Homeric Greek (G) by Rudolf Wachter
• 5. Homeric Meter (M) by Rene Nunlist
• 6. Cast of Characters of the Iliad:Gods (CG) by Fritz Graf
• 7. The Structure of the Iliad (STR) by Joachim Latacz
• 8. Homeric Poetics in Keywords (P) by René Nunlist and Irene de Jong
• 9. New Trends in Homeric Scholarship (NTHS) by Anton Bierl
• 10. Character Index by Magdalene Stoevesandt in collaboration withSotera Fornaro, Andreas Gyr and Andrea Suter
• 11. Homeric - Mycenaean Word Index (MYC) by Rudolf Wachter
• Fußnoten
• Bibliographic Abbreviations