History of Classical Philology

Survival of classics in the People’s Republic of Slovenia after World War II was persistently determined by the long shadow of the Coryphaeus of the Sciences. Its contours were defined, from 1945 onwards, by the Communist Party which followed the Soviet example, shattering the local classical tradition in the process. Fran Bradač, head of classics at the University of Ljubljana, was removed for political reasons; classical gymnasium that belonged to the Church was closed; Greek was struck from the curriculum of the two remaining state classical gymnasia; Latin, previously a central subject at every gymnasium, was reduced severely in 1945, only to disappear entirely in 1946. Classicists who continued to teach were forced to take "reorientation courses" which allowed them to teach Russian and other more suitable subjects. By 1949, only 2 of the 42 classicists employed by the Ministry of Education were actually teaching Latin. Classics department at the university, where only 2 students were studying in 1949, was on the brink of closure.

Yet the classical tradition was also saved, paradoxically, by Stalin’s attack on the same Party. The Cominform conflict in 1948 astonished the Yugoslav communists and pushed them towards a tactical détente with the West, prompting a revision of some of the policies, including education. The process was led by the top echelons of the Party – such as Milovan Djilas, head of the central Agitprop, Boris Kidrič, in charge of Yugoslav economy, and Edvard Kardelj, Party’s chief ideologue – during the Third Plenum of the Central Committee Politburo in Belgrade in December 1949. Their newly discovered love of Latin and Greek, documented in the minutes of the Politburo Plenum, was overseen only by the discriminating eye of Josip Broz Tito. Classical gymnasia were revived, Latin was reintroduced to some of the other gymnasia, students returned to study classics at the university and a classical journal, Živa antika, was established in 1951, paying respects to the Third Plenum in its first editorial. Publicly, prominent classicists were praising the thaw. State Security records provide a nuanced picture, with agents noting their remarks about "Slovenian University lagging behind" and "nobody publishing anything, having no access to the recent literature."

The change which provided the discipline with a new lease on life did not last for long. Stalin’s death was followed by a rapprochement between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. With no particular political incentive to preserve classics as a hallmark of its unique understanding of Marxism-Leninism, the Party proceeded to dissolve the classical gymnasium at the end of fifties and to make Latin slightly more marginal with each subsequent reform, until its position during the years of "directed education" in the 1980s was worse than the one alleviated by the plenum of 1949.

This paper publishes and analyses the marginal notes present on the copy of the editio princeps of Euripides' 'Electra' (1545), which belonged to Piero Vettori and is now preserved at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek of Munich (Rar. 1844/2).

The complete edition of the remaining correspondence among Ermenegildo
Pistelli and Girolamo Vitelli, preserved in the Biblioteca Medicea
Laurenziana, is published here: it consists of thirty letters and nine
postcards, sent between the 16th of August 1883 and the 23rd of February
1925. These exchanges show the importance of Vitelli’s school in the history
of classical studies in Italy. Father Pistelli is a devoted student but
always sincere: after the advent of fascism, he will also criticize the illustrious
and revered teacher.

"This special issue of Comparative Literature Studies brings together talks, some extensively revised, others virtually unchanged, that were delivered at a conference entitled "What is Philology?" The gathering took place on Saturday, March 19, 1988 at Harvard University under the aegis of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies. The depth and breadth of interest in the conference was deeply gratifying. I had not experienced another occasion when so many scholars from different language and literature departments gathered at Harvard, and I hope that publishing the proceedings will benefit a larger community outside the University.

By way of introduction I will describe how the event originated. My description will explore a few of the reasons why an interdisciplinary conference of a dozen speakers and respondents attracted an audience of more than two hundred, and why a topic that 'may sound rarefied drew participants whose main fields of research and teaching interests ran the gamut from the most ancient Indo-European languages to the most recent African American literature. In short, I will offer tentative explanations for the urgency of the topic to students, professors, and independent scholars who engage in philology, linguistics, literary history, literary criticism, and literary theory."

Homero está morto. Quem matou Homero? A interrogação colocada por dois classicistas estadunidenses, Victor Davis Hanson e John Heath (1998), ecoa um tópos tradicional na história dos Estudos Clássicos e constitui o ponto de partida para uma investigação sobre a pretensa crise dessa disciplina na contemporaneidade. Para isso, o contexto das últimas décadas — em especial, no âmbito das culture wars — é analisado a partir dos conflitos entre diferentes perspectivas sobre a Antiguidade e seus significados para o presente: entre cânone e estudos culturais, entre filologia e teoria, aquilo que em inglês se chama de classics constitui um campo de batalha para classicistas e intelectuais, tanto conservadores quanto progressistas. Contudo, as questões suscitadas por esses debates sugerem que alguns dos impasses contemporâneos têm raízes mais antigas, remontando pelo menos à institucionalização da Altertumswissenschaft [Ciência da Antiguidade] na universidade alemã do século XIX, a partir da fusão de princípios humanistas e historicistas. O responsável por avançar a proposta de uma disciplina moderna para o estudo da Antiguidade é Friedrich August Wolf, autor também da obra que formaliza a “questão homérica” na Modernidade (Prolegomena ad Homerum, 1795). Essas duas frentes de seu trabalho intelectual estão profundamente imbricadas e revelam a que ponto uma reflexão sobre Homero e seus poemas fundamenta a ideia de uma prática filológica desde a Antiguidade. Homero seria não apenas metonímia dos Estudos Clássicos, mas condição de possibilidade para seu desenvolvimento desde os antigos até os (pós-)modernos. Para investigar essa hipótese, desenvolvida por Wolf e assumida como pressuposto pelos estudiosos que escreveram alguma História dos Estudos Clássicos (durante os séculos XIX e XX), a estratégia é remontar aos antigos e estudar suas práticas potencialmente filológicas à luz das especificidades de seus contextos históricos. Com isso, emerge um esboço de uma outra história dos Estudos Clássicos — de Homero a Wolf e além —, delineada a partir da perspectiva oblíqua de quem não deixa de refletir sobre a realidade contemporânea e, tomando consciência de sua própria história, busca enfrentar criticamente seus problemas.

The histories of philosophy and philology have long overlapped--and clashed. Yet the existence of either discipline in the Middle Ages has not always been accepted. May we speak convincingly of sceptical philology during the period? This essay examines the evidence for both scepticism and philology from Augustine through Lupus of Ferrières to John of Salisbury and beyond, with attention in passing to reawakened awareness of Cicero's Academics and Sextus Empiricus.

La filologia classica studia i passaggi attraverso i quali le opere letterarie greche e latine sono giunte fino a noi, cercando al contempo di depurarle dai numerosi errori e fraintendimenti accumulatisi nel corso dei secoli. In questo manuale vengono esposti in primo luogo i supporti concreti che ci hanno trasmesso i testi classici, a partire dai rotoli di papiro e dai codici medievali per giungere alle edizioni a stampa, con una rassegna delle scritture adottate nel mondo greco e latino. Una dettagliata tipologia degli errori compiuti dai copisti medievali è il preludio all'espo­sizione del metodo della critica testuale scientifica (il cosiddetto «metodo del Lachmann»), accompagnata da una riflessione sulle strategie da adottare di fronte a tradizioni testuali problematiche o contaminate, e da una rassegna dei dibattiti che hanno interessato la filologia classica anche alla luce delle tecnologie più recenti. Il libro è corredato da consigli pratici sulla preparazione di un'edizione critica, e da una bibliografia ragionata per approfondire gli argomenti trattati.

Indice
Ha senso un manuale di filologia classica?; 1. Dalla philologia alla filologia classica: evoluzione e necessità di una disciplina; 2. I supporti; 3. Le scritture; 4. I palinsesti; 5. Copie ed errori; 6. L'arte dell'emendazione; 7. La recensio; 8. Esaminare ed emendare; 9. L'edizione critica; 10. Critiche e dibattito metodologico; 11. Come si fa un'edizione critica: suggerimenti pratici; Appendici; Bibliografia ragionata; Abbreviazioni bibliografiche; Indice dei nomi; Indice dei passi citati; Indice dei manoscritti.

As a former student of Antonio La Penna (who supervised his dissertation at the University of Florence), the author offers a reading of La Penna’s Conversazione with Arnaldo Marcone that integrates his own recollections with a reassessment of the intellectual biography of an outstanding scholar and teacher. Drawing on the wealth of information made available in "Io e l’antico", the paper focuses on a number of aspects
and episodes from La Penna’s life and career, from his background and early education to his achievements as a classical scholar and his long association with the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and the University of Florence, without neglecting his contribution to the debate on public schools.

This investigation proposes a historical theory of the origins of political philosophy. It is assumed that political philosophy was made possible by a new form of political thinking commencing with the inauguration of the first direct democracies in Ancient Greece. The pristine turn from elite rule to rule of the people – or to δημοκρατία, a term coined after the event – brought with it the first ever political theory, wherein fundamentally different societal orders, or different principles of societal rule, could be argumentatively compared. The inauguration of this alternative-envisioning “secular” political theory is equaled with the beginnings of classical political theory and explained as the outcome of the conjoining of a new form of constitutionalized political thought (cratistic thinking) and a new emphasis brought to the inner consistency of normative reasoning (‘internal critique’). The original form of political philosophy, Classical Political Philosophy, originated when a political thought launched, wherein non-divinely sanctioned visions of transcendence of the prevailing rule, as well as of the full range of alternatives disclosed by Classical Political Theory, first began to be envisioned. Each of the hypotheses forming the theory – the hypotheses concerning the Ancient Greek beginnings of a “secular”-autonomous political rationale, political theory and political philosophy – is weighed against central evidence provided by the Histories of Herodotus. The passages thus given new interpretations are the Deioces episode in Book I, the Constitutional Debate in Book III and Xerxes’ War Councils in Book VII. Aside from the Herodotean evidence, a range of other relevant Greek literary sources from the archaic and classical ages – e.g. passages from Homer, Hesiod, several pre-Socratic thinkers, Plato and Aristotle – are duly taken into consideration. Included is also a reading of the Mytilenean Debate of Thucydides’ Book III, which shows how the political thought of the classical democracies worked in practice. Finally, the placing of the historical theory against a background of contemporary relevance provides an alternative to all text-oriented approaches not reckoning with the possibility of reaching historically plausible knowledge of real-world events and processes.

When Africologists talk of Stolen Legacy of Ancient Black African Philosophy and wisdom literature into/by Classical Greco-Romans or the Western, they blame first Homer and his “Iliad” and “Odysseys”.  Homer (700 BC) was, perhaps, the first-born or “ancient” of Greek Philosophy, a “classical”/“ancient” philosophy ONLY known as “known” but “lost” with all its cradlelands; almost all of the around 25 so-called “ancient” Greek cities associated with Homer are acknowledged as “lost” but SOME take a tea break if you ask them whether the language and the philosophies were also ‘lost’. Homer knows and mentions “Ethiopians” in his works. Here I discuss, only few points from Homer’s Iliad with comparative perspectives with the antique Oromo wisdom literature and Qaallu-Gada System. Significant level of similarities emerged from the analysis, none of which chance or universality cannot justify. Only cultural-historical origin from Oromo-Cush can explain it. The similarities might also be due to colonial era stolen legacy (by distortion in calque-parasitic tactic) or pre-colonial era world dominance of Black Africans.

Nel saggio si analizzano alcuni passi delle «Lectiones» e dei «Commentari»  vettoriani al trattato di retorica di Demetrio (pseudo-) Falereo, in cui il filologo fiorentino commenta la lingua, le metafore e le fonti della «Commedia»; anche per difendere l'opera dantesca dalle critiche rivolte alla lingua del poema da Giovanni della Casa nel «Galateo».

The essay is inspired by an unpublished letter by the famous philologist and papyrologist Girolamo Vitelli, sent to Michele Barbi on the occasion of the appearance of the so-called ‘Centenary Edition’: the edition of Dante’s Works promoted by the Italian Dante Society under the direction of Michele Barbi and published on the occasion of the Centenary of 1921. The volume, designed in the last years of the First World War and elaborated immediately after the end of the conflict, made available to the Italian public for the first time, not without an explicit reference to national pride, the complete and critical collection of Dante’s works. Pending the planned National Edition of Dante’s Works, the Centenary Edition was set up thanks to the commitment of qualified specialists, and included the critical text of De vulgari eloquentia and Vita nuova developed in two masterpieces of nineteenth/twentieth-century Italian philolo gy, respectively Rajna’s edition of 1896, and Barbi’s of 1907, as well as contained, again thanks Barbi, the new text of Dante’s Rhymes. The typographical-editorial history of the Centenary Edition is retraced through the examination of the correspondence between Barbi and the publisher, Enrico Bemporad, and framed in the scenario of intellectual relations spread in Florence in the early decades of the twentieth century. Thus, through the analysis of correspondence documents, re-enactments and commemorations, the lively academic and literary environment relives – between the University of Pisa, the Scuola Normale Superiore and the Istituto di Studi Superiori of Florence –, in which the editors of the Centenary Edition matured, between classical and romance philologists, historians, danteists, italianists and men of letters. Among others, the personality of Girolamo Vitelli emerges, due to his universally recognized authority and to the fascination exerted by him over time on an enormous number of students.

CONFERENCE PROGRAM
The circulation of linguistic and philological knowledge between Germany and the world (16th to 20th cent.)
By all measures, Germany played an overwhelming role in the development of philology and linguistics during the 19th century. This ascendancy rests on the transmission to other national academies of theoretical constructs and views, methods and institutional practices. Transmission, however, was not simply a matter of inheriting a body of knowledge. Scientific transfers were channeled through traditions and individuals who reshaped the body of knowledge that had been bequeathed to them.

On the other hand, German philological and linguistic ideas, methods and institutions were not constituted in a theoretical vacuum and in isolation from the rest of the world : Transfers to the German-speaking world and their role in the constitution of philological and linguistic ideas, methods and institutions must also be taken into account.

The 19th and the beginning of the 20th century were certainly an acme, but understanding the advent and consequences of this golden age encourages the adoption of a broader perspective. What transnational transfers occurred before this time? Were German ideas, methods, and institutions transmitted back to their purveyors, and in what ways? To what extent does it even make sense to speak of national traditions, in particular of a specifically German tradition?

ΤΙΣ ΔE ΒΙΟΣ, ΤΙ ΔE ΤΕΡΠΝOΝ AΤΕΡ ΧΡΥΣHΣ ΑΦΡΟΔΙΤΗΣ: A READING OF MIMNERMUS, FR. 1-6

ABSTRACT This paper aims to analyze the topic of old age and progression of time in Mimnermus's fragments 1-6. We will maintain that, besides subjective insight so typical of lyric poetry, Mimnermus offers an exhaustive inquiry of this topics, the study of which is essential to understand the originality of the poet's opinion.


RESUMEN
El presente trabajo se propone analizar la temática de la vejez y el paso del tiempo en los fragmentos 1 a 6 de Mimnermo. Nuestra intención será demostrar que, más allá del planteo personal y subjetivo propio de la lírica, Mimnermo expone a sus lectores una propuesta seria de investigación exhaustiva, cuya interpretación es clave para entender la mirada del poeta acerca del tema y su originalidad.