classical scholarship

Introduction

      the study, in all its aspects, of ancient Greece (ancient Greek civilization) and Rome (ancient Rome). In continental Europe the field is known as “classical philology,” but the use, in some circles, of “philology” to denote the study of language and literature—the result of abbreviating the 19th-century “comparative philology”—has lent an unfortunate ambiguity to the term. During the 19th century, Germans evolved the concept of Altertumswissenschaft (“science of antiquity”) to emphasize the unity of the various disciplines of which the study of the ancient world consists. Broadly speaking, the province of classical scholarship is in time the period between the 2nd millennium BC and AD 500 and in space the area covered by the conquests and spheres of influence of Greece and Rome at their widest extent.

      This article surveys the history of classical scholarship thus defined from antiquity until the late 20th century.

Antiquity and the Middle Ages

      Until the Renaissance, Greek scholarship in the East and Latin scholarship in the West tended to follow different courses, and it is therefore convenient to treat them separately during this period.

Greek scholarship

Beginnings

      Greek epic poetry was recited in early times by professional performers known as rhapsodists, or rhapsodes, who sometimes offered interpretations of the works as well. In the 6th century BC Theagenes of Rhegium is said to have “searched out Homer's (Homer) poetry and life and date,” to have offered an allegorical interpretation of the battle of the gods in the 20th book of the Iliad, and to have been cited for a variant in Homer's text. The Sophists (Sophist) of the 5th century BC—paid writers, lecturers, and teachers such as Protagoras, Prodicus, Gorgias, and Hippias—gave ethical instruction in the form of the exposition of poetry, particularly that of Homer, which from this time formed the staple of Greek education. Some of them were interested in etymology, phonetics, the exact meanings of words, correct diction, and the classification of the parts of speech. Hippias (Hippias Of Elis) laid the foundations of ancient chronography by making a list of victors in the Olympic Games, and Alcidamas (c. 400 BC) wrote a book on Homer. However, the efforts of the Sophists in this direction, considerable as they were, had a more or less casual and arbitrary character.

       Plato (c. 428/427–348/347 BC) strongly resisted the claim that the poets were reliable interpreters of religion and morality. In his dialogue Cratylus he rejected the theory that the study of words can reveal the meaning of things, insisting that things themselves must be studied. Plato's pupil Aristotle (384–322 BC) defended poetry against his master; he valued highly the Iliad and the Odyssey (Odysseus), which from his time were regarded (together with the mock-epic Margites) as the genuine works of an individual Homer. He took a similar view of tragedy, which he believed effected a purification (katharsis (catharsis)) of the emotions upon which it played. Aristotle wrote about linguistic, dramatic, and other problems in Homer, refuting such detractors of the poet as Zoilus, compiled lists of Olympic and Pythian victors, collected details about the Athenian tragic and comic festivals, and supplemented his Politics with a collection of 158 studies of the constitutions of various Greek states. He also carried further the discussion of the constituent parts of a sentence and discussed the nature of synonyms, compounds, and rare words in early poetry.

      The school of Aristotle, known as the Lyceum, or Peripatos, continued to make this kind of learned work an adjunct to its philosophical (philosophy) activities. Aristotle's successor, Theophrastus (c. 372–c. 287 BC), collected the opinions of earlier philosophers. Dicaearchus (flourished c. 320 BC) wrote about the life of Greece, and Aristoxenus (flourished late 4th century BC) about the history and the theory of music. Heracleides Ponticus (c. 390–c. 322 BC) wrote one book on Archilochus and Homer and another on the dates of Homer and Hesiod. Clearchus collected proverbs, and Demetrius of Phaleron fables. All these philosophers were guided by Aristotle's teleological concept of intellectual activity, according to which philosophy is the culminating element of civilization. A 4th-century commentary on an Orphic poem, discovered in 1963 on a papyrus from a grave in Derveni, Macedonia, deserves mention as the earliest known commentary on a text; it is not a linguistic commentary but offers an allegorical interpretation that is doubtless very different from what the poet had intended.

Library of Alexandria (Alexandria, Library of)

      During the Hellenistic Age (usually reckoned to extend from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to the 1st century AD) scholarship flourished nowhere more than in the great city of Alexandria, the capital of the Ptolemies, the kings of Egypt. Early in the 3rd century BC Ptolemy I founded the famous Mouseion (Museum (Alexandrian Museum)) of Alexandria, a community of learned men organized along the lines of a religious cult and headed by a priest of the Muses; part of the Museum was a splendid library that became the most celebrated of the ancient world. In its establishment the king is said to have had the assistance of the eminent Peripatetic scholar and statesman Demetrius of Phaleron, who left Athens about 300 BC; unfortunately, the evidence about the part he played is scanty and unreliable. The Museum community included both poets and scholars, as well as several individuals who combined these pursuits. From the time of the poet-scholar Philetas, or Philitas (c. 330–c. 270 BC), the tutor of Ptolemy II, the scholars there were much concerned with the collection and interpretation (glossae) of rare poetic words. Philetas' pupil Zenodotus Of Ephesus (c. 325–260 BC) was the first librarian at Alexandria; using the manuscripts collected for the Library but also trusting to his own judgment, sometimes in a manner that seemed to later critics dangerously subjective, he made the first critical edition of Homer, marking passages of doubtful authenticity with critical signs in the margins. Zenodotus also edited Pindar and Anacreon and perhaps other lyric poets; at about the same time the epic and elegiac poet Alexander Aetolus is said to have corrected the text of the tragic poets, and the dramatic poet Lycophron the comic poets, but singularly little is known about these editions.

      Somewhat later the great poet Callimachus (c. 305–c. 240 BC) compiled the Pinakes (“Tablets”), a vast catalogue raisonné of the chief authors, with biographical and bibliographical information. Callimachus is said to have written a book opposing the chief Peripatetic critic of the time, Praxiphanes, and is widely held to have criticized Peripatetic literary theory; but the scantiness of the evidence for this enjoins great caution.

      Rather later the great geographer and mathematician Eratosthenes (Eratosthenes of Cyrene) (c. 276–c. 194 BC), the third librarian, laid the foundations of a systematic chronography; more of his work would be known had it not been largely superseded in popular use by the 2nd-century chronicles of Apollodorus of Athens, which were a learned compilation but left out the important scientific and mathematical part.

      Zenodotus' editions of Homer and Hesiod were improved upon by the fourth librarian, Aristophanes Of Byzantium (c. 257–180 BC), who also edited the lyric poets, setting out their verses according to a systematic metrical theory; edited Aristophanes, Menander, and perhaps other comic poets; edited Sophocles and at least part of Euripides; and compiled useful summaries of the plots of plays with details of their productions. His Lexeis (“Readings”) was the most important of the numerous lexicographical works produced at this time, which included lexicons of particular authors and dialects; he also wrote some of the many treatises about literature that were now appearing.

       Aristarchus Of Samothrace (c. 217–145 BC), the sixth librarian, wrote not only monographs about poetry but also important commentaries on Homer, Pindar, and much of tragedy and comedy. Aristarchus was one of the many learned men who left Alexandria in consequence of the disastrous persecution of learning by Ptolemy VIII, from which that city's standing as a great centre of learning never quite recovered. (It seems that the great library survived a fire set in Alexandria in 47 BC by Julius Caesar, whose army supported Cleopatra in a civil war; it was finally destroyed in AD 272 in the civil war under the Roman emperor Aurelian.)

Grammar and language study

      During the 3rd century BC the Stoics (Stoicism), particularly Chrysippus (c. 280–c. 206 BC), made important contributions to the study of grammar, linked with the development of Stoic logic. Early in that century the Stoic Crates of Mallus emigrated to the court of King Eumenes II of Pergamum, which the Attalid dynasty had begun to make into a literary centre comparable with, though hardly equal to, Alexandria. Crates probably wrote commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey, characterized by the allegorical interpretation, by faith in the accuracy of Homer's geography, and by grammatical rigour typical of the Stoic school. Under Stoic influence the Pergamenes tended to stress the element of anomaly in grammar, while the Alexandrians stressed the element of analogy; that is, the Alexandrians insisted on the natural, inherent orderliness of grammar, while the Pergamenes approached the subject as empiricists, being content to organize observations of actual usage into a body of knowledge. But the details of the alleged controversy over this matter are obscure and known largely from suspiciously late sources. If the extant grammar ascribed to Dionysius Thrax, a pupil of Aristarchus active about 120 BC, is genuine, then the Alexandrian school of grammar was by that time already considerably influenced by the Stoics.

      During the 1st century BC, by which time Rome was beginning to be the chief centre of Greek scholarship, Philoxenus (Philoxenus Of Mabbug) wrote on Greek dialects, among which he included Latin; he was the first scholar to be aware of the existence of monosyllabic roots. Under Augustus, Tryphon studied the language of prose and made the first study of syntax, the first vocabulary of the written language, and a classification of the so-called figures of speech. About the same time Didymus (Didymus Chalkenteros), known as Chalkenteros (“Brazen-Gutted”), incorporated into huge variorum editions much of the precious material contained in the many commentaries on literature compiled during the Hellenistic Age. This vastly productive scholar was lacking in critical judgment, but it is on his work that the later less extensive commentaries that in part survive depended. Under Tiberius, Theon studied the Hellenistic poets, as well as Pindar.

      The 1st century AD saw the beginning of the “Attic Revival (Attic dialect),” the movement to imitate the language and style of the classical Athenian writers, which lasted far into the Byzantine period with disastrous effects that have not even yet died away. This resulted in the production of many lexica and manuals meant to help people to write correct Attic, such as the works of Phrynichus, Moeris, and Pollux, all probably dating from the 2nd century AD. At that time much learned work was still being done, but it was becoming increasingly mechanical and repetitive. More and more of the chief writers survived only in selections; texts were being produced, often with commentaries, but these derived mainly from the stores of learning accumulated in the past. However, under Hadrian, Apollonius Dyscolus produced a treatment of syntax that acquired great authority, and his son Herodianus (Herodian) produced the standard treatise on accentuation; they were the last known producers of important original work on grammar.

Christian versus classical scholarship

       Christianity proved less hostile to pagan culture than might have been expected. From the 2nd century on, Church Fathers such as Justin, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen used an impressive knowledge of pagan literature to debate with pagan philosophers on equal terms. Prominent on the pagan side was the Neoplatonist Porphyry (c. 234–c. 305). Besides his published attacks on Christianity, he wrote commentaries on Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Plotinus. Even after the triumph of Christianity in 313 under Constantine the Great, pagan and Christian scholars often attended one another's lectures. The pagan Libanius of Antioch, the most celebrated rhetor of the 4th century and author of the surviving hypotheses of the orations of Demosthenes, taught Theodore of Mopsuestia, St. John Chrysostom, and probably also St. Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus. Basil (c. 329–379) wrote a treatise on the value of pagan literature in which he recommends at least a passing acquaintance with the pagan classics, but he and the other leading Christian authors of his time possessed a good deal more than this. Theodore (c. 350–428/429), bishop of Mopsuestia and leader of the school of Antioch, applied what could be called pagan methods of criticism to the Bible by using his knowledge of history and language to illuminate passages of Scripture. Members of the Christian school of Gaza in the 5th and 6th centuries even wrote dialogues modeled on those of Plato. The school's leading member, Procopius, invented the catena (“chain”), a commentary on a book of the Bible consisting of a compilation of excerpts from earlier commentaries—something obviously suggested by the variorum editions of classical authors. Notes based on the learned commentaries of the Hellenistic Age now came to be written into the margins of manuscripts; to these scholia is owed most of what is known of ancient scholarship.

      The Neoplatonists of the 5th and 6th centuries produced commentaries on Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers, thus preserving many priceless fragments of earlier philosophical texts now lost. Grammatical work also continued: Proclus wrote a commentary on Hesiod's Works and Days; Hesychius of Alexandria compiled a Greek lexicon that preserved vocabulary from the Homeric age up to his own time; and Orus contributed to the work on Greek orthography. Education even received some government support; the 4th-century rhetor Themistius described a plan for the creation of a government scriptorium to ensure the survival of important writers, and some 50 years later, in 425, Emperor Theodosius II is said to have set up a university at Constantinople (Istanbul).

      The age of Justinian I (527–565) produced the antiquarian works of Johannes Lydus and the geographical gazetteer of Stephanus of Byzantium. The historians of that era, Procopius and Agathias, wrote in the classical tradition of historiography, publishing chronicles of warfare that weighed the influences on historical events of fate and divine retribution. But in 529 Justinian issued an edict closing the schools of pagan philosophy; some philosophical activity continued after that, but the edict marked an era of Christian intolerance of pagan scholarship. During the 7th century the Arab conquests cut off Syria, Palestine, and Egypt from Greek civilization. The Arab threat forced the Byzantine Empire to submit to the rule of vigorous but not well-educated emperors, some of whom were religious fundamentalists opposed to the use of images, or icons, which was a central feature of worship in the Eastern Church. The resulting Iconoclastic Controversy was a major factor in the creation of a dark age of Byzantine culture that lasted from about the middle of the 7th until the beginning of the 9th century.

The first Byzantine renaissance

      The dark age was not completely dark. It saw, for example, the extensive but exceedingly uninspired work of the grammarians Georgius Choeroboscus, active during the second half of the 8th century, and Theognostus, early in the 9th century, as well as the letters of the deacon Ignatius with their surprising wealth of literary allusions. Also, certain developments that occurred at this time were important for the future. In about 800, paper was acquired from the Arabs, who are said to have learned how to make it from Chinese prisoners taken in a battle at Samarkand. It came into general use only very gradually; the Byzantines continued to import it from the Arabs instead of making their own, but since it was less expensive than papyrus, its effect was bound to be important. The Italians acquired it from the Byzantines, and by the 13th century they had developed a flourishing paper industry. From the 9th century must date the invention of a new cursive script, the Byzantine minuscule, which was in its early forms the most elegant that the Greeks ever invented. The earliest surviving specimen, the Uspenskij Gospel, dates from 835, but this displays such accomplished writing that the new script probably originated some 50 years earlier. The invention greatly facilitated the rapid production of books. The Stoudion monastery in Constantinople, which flourished under its great abbot St. Theodore (759–826), was once thought to have introduced the new script—and indeed the monastery had a flourishing scriptorium—but this conjecture is by no means certain. During the 9th and 10th centuries the works of many classical authors were transferred from manuscripts in the old uncial writing to the new minuscule, and the surviving books of this period show that script in its most perfect form. Later the elegance of minuscule was spoiled by the admixture of uncial letters and the increasing use of ligatures.

      The first important scholar of the first Byzantine renaissance was Leo the Philosopher (c. 790–c. 869), a notable teacher in Constantinople who numbered among his pupils St. Cyril, one of the apostles of the Slavs; Leo had considerable knowledge of Greek culture, particularly of science and mathematics. But the dominant figure in the revival of the 9th century was the patriarch Photius (c. 820–891?), who not only compiled a notable Greek lexicon but also produced the Myriobiblon, or Bibliotheca, a vast collection of summaries and evaluations of various ancient books, mainly historical. Photius also compiled a learned miscellany called the Amphilochia and an interesting collection of letters. Arethas (born c. 850), archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, owned a remarkable private library, from which eight priceless books, commissioned from the finest calligraphers of the time, survive; Euclid, Plato, Aristotle, Lucian, and Aristides are among them. Other valuable classical manuscripts still extant formed part of his collection.

      During the 10th century education was encouraged by the learned emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (905–959), who apart from producing his own series of historical works preserved several histories by others and planned a vast 53-section encyclopaedia of human activities that was probably never completed. The 10th century also saw the production of a large encyclopaedia cum dictionary, formerly thought to have been the work of one Suidas, but now known to have been called the Suda, from a Byzantine Greek word for fortress. Platonism was actively studied by the chief intellectual figure of the 11th century, Michael Psellus (Psellus, Michael) (1018–c. 1078). His numerous writings show a wide acquaintance with classical culture, though also a very imperfect sympathy with some of its elements. His pupil, John Italus, was anathematized by the ecclesiastical authorities for allowing Platonism to contaminate his Christianity. But Platonic studies continued, and Isaac Sebastocrator, a brother or son of the emperor Alexius I Comnenus, wrote three essays based on Proclus. Early in the 12th century Alexius' daughter, Anna Comnena, was the centre of a circle of Aristotelian scholars, including Michael of Ephesus and Eustratius, who together produced a commentary on the Ethics. Gregory of Corinth, active during the same period, wrote works on syntax and style and also one of the few ancient treatments of the Greek dialects that have come down to the present. John Tzetzes wrote some 60 books on Greek literature that are learned but uncritical, and Eustathius of Thessalonica wrote vast commentaries on the Iliad and Odyssey that incorporate much earlier learning.

      This epoch of Byzantine learning was rudely put to an end when the knights of the Fourth Crusade, under Venetian leadership, sacked Constantinople in 1204. It may well be argued that this event was an even greater disaster for learning than the Turkish capture of the city in 1453, for which the crusaders paved the way. The sack of the city destroyed a quantity of Greek literature that is difficult to estimate; certainly included among the lost works were the Aitia and Hekale of Callimachus, which were known to Michael Choniates, archbishop of Athens at the time of the Crusade.

The second Byzantine renaissance

      Between 1204, when the imperial capital was moved to Nicaea, and 1261, when Constantinople was recovered by the Palaeologus dynasty, classical studies continued under the difficult conditions outlined in the autobiography of Nicephorus Blemmydes, the leading intellectual of the time. The emperor Theodore II Lascaris (reigned 1254–58) did much to assist cultural life during this time. The period sometimes called the Palaeologan Renaissance saw a revival of classical studies that, under the circumstances, must be called remarkable. Maximus Planudes (Planudes, Maximus) (1260–c. 1310) made many compilations, including a new anthology of epigrams, and even translated into Greek such Latin texts as parts of Ovid, Augustine, and Boethius. He also had some knowledge of Hellenistic poetry and even Arab astronomy and mathematics. From about 1300 the texts of the Greek dramatists were studied critically by Manuel Moschopoulos, Thomas Magister, and finally Demetrius Triclinius. Triclinius had read the metrical handbook of the 2nd-century scholar Hephaestion and understood the simpler metres, and he was also aware of the principle of strophic responsion. He was therefore able to make a number of emendations worthy of serious notice. Theodore Metochites (c. 1260–1332), one of the leading intellectuals and public men of his time, commented on Aristotle and wrote a miscellany that contains interesting reflections upon classical authors, especially orators and historians.

Greek in the West

      During the 3rd and 4th centuries the knowledge of Greek in the West died out with shocking suddenness; Augustine had only a rudimentary knowledge of the Greek language, and translators such as Jerome (c. 347–419/420) and Rufinus (c. 345–410/411) were scarce indeed. The few Greek studies were undertaken for the sake of theology or philosophy, and translation of secular authors was rare; Calcidius' (Chalcidius') 4th-century version of the Timaeus was for eight centuries the only Latin translation of a Platonic dialogue, Boethius' plan for a series of translations of Plato and Aristotle being interrupted by his execution. Sicily remained Byzantine until the Arab conquest of the 9th century, and Calabria, Lucania, and Apulia (Puglia) until the Norman conquest of the 11th century. The Normans and later the Hohenstaufen rulers favoured Greek studies. In the 12th century Greek, too, benefited from the intellectual revival; Henricus Aristippus, archdeacon of Catania, translated Plato's Meno and Phaedo, and the admiral Eugenius collaborated in a Latin version of the Almagest, an encyclopaedia compiled by the astronomer Ptolemy of Alexandria in the 2nd century AD. Also during the 12th century two Italian scholars, James of Venice and Burgundio of Pisa, traveled to Constantinople in search of theological and philosophical learning; Burgundio brought back literary as well as theological manuscripts, though he was probably incapable of reading them. The Aristotelian (Aristotelianism) revival of the 13th century led to the production of many translations of Aristotle by William of Moerbeke in Rome, and in England Aristotle was read in the original by Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon. During the 14th century contact between Rome and Constantinople was continued; Petrarch (see below Latin scholarship (classical scholarship)) acquired a Byzantine manuscript of Homer, though he never made the effort to enable himself to read it, and later in the century another such manuscript was in the hands of the humanists of Padua. In about 1397 the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras went to Italy to teach Greek in Florence. At the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–45 the union of the churches was agreed upon, but it was later repudiated. George Gemistus Plethon (c. 1355–1450/52), the famous Neoplatonist of Mistra, was present at that council; with him was his pupil John Bessarion of Trebizond (1403–72), who continued to support church union as an individual, so that when the repudiation took place he converted to the Western church. He stayed behind in Italy, became a cardinal, and made an important gift of books to Venice. Early in the 15th century Italians such as Francesco Filelfo and Giovanni Aurispa were bringing back Greek manuscripts from Constantinople in large quantities, so that well before the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 many Greek books had found their way to the West.

Latin scholarship

Republic and early empire

      From the beginning, Roman scholarship imitated Greek: Hellenistic techniques were applied to the treatment of Latin texts, and Latin grammar adopted Greek categories and terminology. Learned Greeks such as Tyrannion, Alexander Polyhistor, and Parthenius were brought to Rome as prisoners in the Mithradatic Wars. Even before that, as early as about 100 BC, the Roman knight Lucius Aelius Stilo Praeconinus had been teaching and writing about Latin grammar. Marcus Terentius Varro (Varro, Marcus Terentius) (116–27 BC) by his vast learning and prodigious output influenced almost every branch of scholarship; of his 25 books about the Latin language, books v to x survive in nearly complete form. In scholarship as in other matters the early imperial period was one of great achievement. It was the age of commentators such as Gaius Julius Hyginus (Hyginus, Gaius Julius), who was in charge of the Palatine Library in Rome founded by Augustus; of editors such as Marcus Valerius Probus (c. AD 20–105), who made critical editions of Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace; of grammarians such as Verrius Flaccus (Verrius Flaccus, Marcus), the author of a vast work on the meaning of words; of the elder Pliny (AD 23/24–79), whose encyclopaedic Historia naturalis (Natural History) was a major sourcebook during the Middle Ages; of Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c. AD 69–after 122), who wrote the lives of poets and grammarians as well as of emperors; and of Aulus Gellius, whose miscellany called Noctes Atticae preserved much ancient learning.

Later empire

      The barbarian invasions of the 3rd century marked the beginning of a testing time for Latin as well as for Greek scholarship, and the scholars of the 4th and 5th centuries—such as Aelius Donatus, the grammarian and teacher of rhetoric; Servius, the learned commentator on Virgil; Priscian, the Greek author of the most famous Latin grammar of antiquity; and Macrobius, who during the first half of the 5th century wrote the learned miscellany called Saturnalia—were epitomizers and compilers living on inherited capital. In the Western Empire the knowledge of Greek was practically extinct, and the earlier literature of Rome itself was threatened with extinction. The classics were still the staple of such education as there was, but the dominance of rhetoric favoured only certain authors; classical poets such as Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Terence were protected by critics and commentators, but among earlier authors Ennius and Lucilius disappeared and Plautus narrowly escaped. The book, in the form of the vellum or parchment codex, was superseding the papyrus roll, and authors who were not recopied were doomed to oblivion.

The early Middle Ages

      The period during which the Merovingian dynasty founded by Clovis (c. 466–511) was in power was a dark age for learning, but there was no complete breach with the past. Under the influence of the church the barbarian invaders wished to base their civilization on the Latin model, and since it was the language of the church, Latin continued to be the language of literature. Although interest in antiquity for its own sake had little part in the late imperial and early medieval ideal, under the protection of the church learning survived in the medieval schools, and classical texts provided a grounding in grammar, a training in logical thought, and a philosophical premise for theology. Flavius Cassiodorus, a retired statesman who founded a monastery at Vivarium, in southern Italy, sometime after AD 540, encouraged his monks to copy pagan as well as Christian authors, a practice that spread later to other monasteries, particularly those of the Benedictine order. About 563 the Irish missionary Columba (Columba, Saint) (c. 521–597) founded a church and monastery on the island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, and soon afterward Irish missionaries converted the whole of Scotland and established monasteries in the north of England. Later Irish missions led by Columban (Columban, Saint) (c. 543–615) founded Luxovium (Luxeuil) in the Vosges Mountains of Gaul (590), Bobbio on the Trebbia (c. 612–614), and St. Gall in Switzerland; Corbie near Amiens was founded from Luxovium a century later, and these monasteries played a leading role in the preservation of ancient literature. In England, Aldhelm (c. 639–709) and Bede (672/673–735) were men of considerable learning. At this time learning was also alive in Visigothic Spain, as is shown by the vast encyclopaedia of Isidore of Sevilla (Isidore of Sevilla, Saint) (c. 560–636), which was of great importance for the remainder of the Middle Ages. During the late 7th and 8th centuries the successors of Columban converted first the Frisians and then much of Germany; they founded the important monasteries of Fulda (744), Lorsch, in Hesse (764), and Hersfeld (c. 770), while Reichenau, on Lake Constance (724), and nearby Murbach (727) were founded by a refugee from Visigothic Spain.

The Carolingian Renaissance

       Pippin III the Short (reigned 751–768) began ecclesiastical reforms that Charlemagne continued, and these led to revived interest in classical literature. Charlemagne appointed as head of the cathedral school at Aachen the distinguished scholar and poet Alcuin of York, who had a powerful influence on education in the empire. Many ancient texts were now copied into the new Carolingian minuscule, and the palace library allowed its books to be copied for other libraries, so that learning was rapidly diffused. Latin poetry of some merit was composed at and about the imperial court, and Einhard's life of Charlemagne (probably written c. 830–833) is modeled on the biographies of Suetonius. Learned work was resumed, and the historian Paul the Deacon (Paulus Diaconus) abridged the abridgement of the lexicon of Verrius Flaccus that had been made by Festus during the 2nd century AD. The nearest approach in the Middle Ages to a humanistic scholar was Servatus Lupus, abbot of Ferrières (c. 805–862), who collected, copied, and excerpted ancient manuscripts on a large scale. Despite the splitting up of the Carolingian Empire in 843 and the troubles resulting from the barbarian attacks on Europe of the 9th and 10th centuries, the educational apparatus created by the so-called Carolingian Renaissance provided enough momentum to keep the classical tradition going until a new impulse arrived to carry it on to fresh developments.

The later Middle Ages

      A renewed period of intellectual activity in the ancient Benedictine foundation of Monte Cassino heralded the renaissance of the 12th century. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was familiar not only with Virgil but also with Lucan, Statius, and Ovid, and The Divine Comedy (Divine Comedy, The)'s picture of the cosmos is deeply indebted to Aristotle's On the Heavens. William of Malmesbury (died c. 1143) and John of Salisbury (1115/20–1180) were considerable Latin scholars. During the 13th century a group of scholars in Padua around Lovato Lovati (1241–1309) and Albertino Mussato (Mussato, Albertino) (1261–1329) were active humanists. Lovato read Lucretius and Catullus, studied Seneca's tragedies in the famous Codex Etruscus, and found and read some of the lost books of Livy. Both men wrote Latin poetry, Mussato composing a Senecan tragedy, the Ecerinis, designed to open the eyes of the Paduans to the danger presented by Cangrande della Scala, the tyrant of Verona, by describing the tyrannical conduct of their own former despot, Ezzelino III.

The revival of learning

Renaissance humanism

      The humanist movement was consolidated by the generation of Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca; 1304–74). Petrarch actively looked for manuscripts, building up what was for his day a remarkable library, and taught himself to write an elegant classicizing Latin very different from what had been customary during the Middle Ages. Like Politian later, he was a great poet in Italian; but he valued far more than his vernacular poetry his Latin epic Africa, a skillful imitation of the Roman poets. Like almost everyone before Politian, Petrarch knew little or no Greek (on the manuscript of Homer that he possessed, see above, Greek in the West (classical scholarship)). Giovanni Boccaccio (Boccaccio, Giovanni) (1313–75) also looked actively for ancient manuscripts and actively forwarded the aims of humanism.

      The revival of classical learning that Petrarch and Boccaccio promoted was only one aspect of the complex phenomenon of the Renaissance. In origin the movement was utilitarian, seeking to exploit classical antiquity in the service of modern man; the early Italian humanists were not scholars so much as litterati and educators, and it is a mistake to think that they were pagans. The earlier idea that the invention of printing was an effective agent in the revival is also erroneous; for by 1470, when the first editions of the Latin classics were quickly coming off the presses, the Renaissance was already well past its early stages. Thus, although Greek teachers and Greek manuscripts had long before begun to enter Italy, the advanced study of Greek, apart from the activities of an isolated genius like Politian, made little headway before the 16th century. The early humanists saw that the manuscripts they discovered contained many corruptions and enjoyed trying to emend them, but many of their conjectures were frivolous, and they often omitted to mark them as conjectures, a practice that irritated later scholars.

      Petrarch's successor as the leader of the humanist movement was Coluccio Salutati (Salutati, Coluccio) (1331–1406), chancellor of Florence, who acquired many manuscripts and built up a splendid library; it was he who invited Chrysoloras to Florence. A later chancellor, Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444), translated into Latin Plutarch, Xenophon, six dialogues of Plato, and Aristotle's Ethics and Politics. Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) was the most active and the most successful hunter of manuscripts, traveling to France, Germany, and even England in pursuit of them. The same period saw the beginning of the study of the ancient monuments of Italy and the collection of coins and inscriptions as well as works of art by scholars such as Flavio Biondo (Flavius Blondus; 1392–1463) and later Pomponius Laetus (1428–97). Cyriacus of Ancona (1391–1452) broke new ground by traveling to the countries of the Turkish Empire, where he drew monuments and copied inscriptions, thus providing the only record of many objects that were later lost.

Beginnings of modern scholarship

      What may be called professional standards of scholarship are seen first in the work of Lorenzo Valla (Valla, Lorenzo) (1407–57) and Politian (Angelo Poliziano; 1454–94). Valla in his Elegantiae demonstrated the technique of pure and elegant classical Latin, free of medieval awkwardness; when Pope Nicholas V ordered the chief Greek prose writers to be translated into Latin, Valla was responsible for Thucydides. He also translated part of the Iliad into Latin prose. In his philosophical works, which include treatises on pleasure and on free will, he was the first modern to throw light on Epicurus. Gifted with the historical sense of the true critic, Valla perceived the spuriousness of several famous documents: a treatise forged in the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the New Testament convert of St. Paul, by a later writer now called Pseudo-Dionysius; a collection of letters supposedly exchanged by St. Paul and the 1st-century-AD Roman philosopher Seneca; and the so-called Donation of Constantine, by which the emperor Constantine the Great was alleged to have granted to the papacy spiritual and temporal dominion over Rome and the West.

      Politian, like Petrarch a great poet in the vernacular, began studying Greek at the age of 10 and attained a better knowledge of it than any modern to that date; in his collection of notes called Miscellanea, the second volume of which was unfortunately lost and was published only in 1972, he threw light on a variety of ancient writers, including even Greek poets of the Hellenistic Age.

      By 1500 most of the chief Latin authors were in print. In that year Aldus Manutius (Manutius, Aldus, the Elder) (1449–1515) founded in Venice his “Neacademia” (or Aldine Academy), dedicated to, among other things, the issuing of large and relatively cheap editions of ancient authors. Working in conjunction with the learned Cretan Marcus Musurus (1470–1517), he brought out in 21 years 27 editiones principes (first editions) of Greek authors, including five in the year 1502 alone. During the century that followed, the book evolved from what was essentially an expensive facsimile of a medieval manuscript into a working tool for scholars. Other printers, such as the Giunta family in Florence, followed Aldus' example, and Zacharias Callierges in Rome brought out the first printed texts of Pindar, Callimachus, and the Homeric scholia. Aldus' son Paulus Manutius (1512–74) carried on his father's business and did much for the texts of Cicero. Petrus Victorius (1499–1585) was the leading Italian scholar of his time, editing Aeschylus and Euripides and writing commentaries on Aristotle's Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics, and Nicomachean Ethics, as well as editing other Greek texts and doing important work on Cicero; he concentrated on producing careful editions of the best manuscripts available, in a reaction against the excessive emendation of earlier scholars. Francesco Robortello (1516–67) also did important work on Aeschylus and Aristotle's Poetics. Fulvius Ursinus (1529–1600) built up the Farnese library in Rome, edited the Greek lyric poets, and made important contributions to numismatics and iconography. Carolus Sigonius (1523–84) and Pirro Ligorio (Ligorio, Pirro) (c. 1510–83) were active in the field of history and antiquities, Ligorio producing much genuine material besides his notorious forgeries. But after the 16th century, the atmosphere of the Counter-Reformation was not favourable to disinterested inquiry, and Italian scholarship declined. The Jesuits in their educational activities made use of the forms of humanism while abolishing its content.

The Renaissance outside Italy

      In Spain the Renaissance had made a promising beginning; Antonio of Nebrija (1444–1522) anticipated Erasmus in showing that the Greek language had been pronounced by the ancients differently from the modern Greeks, and later Antonio Agostino, archbishop of Tarragona (1517–86), did important work on ancient law and numismatics. But the Spanish Renaissance was frozen by the Counter-Reformation.

      During the late 15th and early 16th centuries the new learning began to establish itself north of the Alps. William Grocyn, who had studied in Italy, was probably the first man to teach Greek in an English university; he was friendly with John Colet and Thomas More, both of England, and later with the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (Erasmus, Desiderius). Thomas Linacre, later an eminent physician, studied Greek in Italy under Politian; on his return to England he gave lectures at which More was present.

      Erasmus (c. 1466–1536), the first editor of the New Testament, was more concerned with biblical and patristic studies than with the Greek and Latin classics for their own sake. Yet his philosophia Christi, an attempt to mediate between ancient wisdom and Christian faith, was closely linked with classical scholarship, and he found time to produce numerous editions and translations of Greek and Latin authors, besides making such contributions to scholarship as his famous collection of proverbs, the Adagia. The Utopia of his English friend Thomas More was profoundly influenced by Platonism. Erasmus' pupil Beatus Rhenanus was one of a group of German scholars who brought out important editions of Latin texts. Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) actively promoted scholarship in Germany; his associate Joachim Camerarius (1500–74) did much for Plautus, as did Hieronymus Wolf (1516–80) for the Attic orators.

      Erasmus formed a close connection with the great printer of Basel, Johannes Froben. Amerbach, Cratander, and Hervagius were other notable printers of that city, active in the production of critical editions of ancient texts.

      Obliged as they were to concede primacy in Latin studies to the Italians, the French (France) during the 16th century took the lead in Greek, although Denis Lambin (Lambinus; 1516–72) did valuable work on Cicero, Lucretius, and Horace. Guillaume Budé (Budaeus; 1467–1540) laid the foundations in Greek studies, and Jean Dorat (Auratus; 1508–88) and Adrien de Tournebu (Turnebus; 1512–65), pioneers in the study of Greek poetry, inspired the contemporary poets Ronsard and du Bellay, the leaders of the Pléiade group, with admiration for Greek literature. The great printer Robert Estienne (Estienne, Robert I) (Stephanus; 1503–59) produced the first critical edition of the Greek New Testament (1551), reprinting Erasmus' text but adding variants from 15 manuscripts. Estienne's son, Henri (Estienne, Henri II), published many editiones principes of Greek authors and a Greek Thesaurus (1572) not superseded until the early 19th century.

      Two French scholars—Joseph Justus Scaliger (Scaliger, Joseph Justus) (1540–1609) and Isaac Casaubon (Casaubon, Isaac) (1559–1614)—deserve particular mention. Like Erasmus, Scaliger saw that classical learning should be a unity. His diversity was that of the explorer, not the dilettante; each edition opened up a new path: that of Festus (1575) to Old Latin, that of Manilius' Astronomica (1579) to ancient astronomy, for example. He assisted Janus Gruterus (1560–1627) by compiling the indexes to his famous Inscriptiones antiquae totius orbis Romani and encouraged the collection of the fragments of classical literature. But his greatest achievement was to bring order into the chaos of ancient chronology in his De emendatione temporum (1583) and Thesaurus temporum (1606).

      Casaubon, too, perceived that antiquity must be studied as a whole and also (and this too Erasmus understood) that the study must begin from Greek. Through his series of detailed commentaries on difficult and prolific authors (Strabo, Athenaeus, Polybius), he was instrumental in turning scholarship—hitherto an art—into a science.

      Henri Estienne, Scaliger, and Casaubon were all Huguenots, and all died in exile—Estienne in Lyon, Scaliger in Leiden, and Casaubon in London. Another eminent Huguenot scholar of the time, Marcus Antonius Muretus (Marc-Antoine de Muret; (Muret, Marc-Antoine de) 1526–85), the most elegant writer of Ciceronian Latin since Cicero, who defended the practice of emendation against the cautious Victorius, left France when accused of homosexuality, became a Catholic, and enjoyed great success in Rome.

Scholarship in the 17th century

      After the conversion of Henri IV to Roman Catholicism French scholarship declined, as Italian scholarship declined during the age of the Counter-Reformation. But the action of the Jesuits in challenging the authenticity on which the privileges of the Benedictines depended caused the latter to turn to the study of paleography in order to defend themselves, thus occasioning the chief contribution of France to classical studies during the 17th century. Jean Mabillon (1632–1707) established Latin paleography as a modern science, and another inmate of the monastery of St. Germain-des-Prés, Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–1741), did the same for Greek paleography. This kind of work was continued by the great antiquarians of the following century, notably L.A. Muratori (1672–1750) and Scipione Maffei (1675–1755).

      As scholarship declined in France (where the series of Delphin Classics supervised by Pierre-Daniel Huet from 1670 to 1680 marks the summit of strictly classical achievement), so it rose and flourished in the Netherlands. Christophe Plantin had founded his great press in Antwerp in 1550 and the Elzevirs theirs in Leiden in 1580 and later in Amsterdam. Scaliger ended his days in the newly founded State University of Leiden. Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) produced important editions of Tacitus and Seneca, at the same time promoting a new Christian Stoicism. The great jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), in many ways the true successor of Erasmus, did brilliant work in classical studies as well as in many other fields. Nicolas Heinsius (1620–81) produced editions, based on extensive study of manuscripts, that earned him the title “saviour of the Latin poets.” His counterpart in prose, John Gronovius (1611–71), produced editions of Livy, Seneca, Pliny, and others. The letters of Heinsius and Gronovius testify to as ample a conception of classical studies as that of Scaliger and Casaubon.

      The Thirty Years' War (1618–48) had a disastrous effect on scholarship. Among the classicists in Holland and Germany, stagnation set in; unwieldy, uncritical variorum editions became the fashion, and the collection of “antiquities,” divorced from linguistic study and from critical scholarship, degenerated into the mere piling up of information.

The 18th century: the age of Bentley

      Since the late 16th century little had been heard of English (England) scholarship; once the study of Greek had been established by Linacre, Grocyn, Sir John Cheke, and their contemporaries, the English preoccupation with education had set in. John Selden is the most notable of few exceptions, and he was a jurist and antiquary, not an academic, though his De Diis Syris (1617) laid the foundations of Eastern scholarship. A new era began with the Epistola ad Joannum Millium (1691) of Richard Bentley (Bentley, Richard) (1662–1742). This collection of brilliant miscellaneous observations, prompted by the editio princeps of the 6th-century Byzantine chronicle of John Malalas, displayed already the comprehensive learning and rare power of divination that were to enable Bentley to lay the foundations of the critical scholarship of the coming age. Although his achievements in textual criticism were singularly brilliant, Bentley must not be thought of as a mere editor of texts but as the creator of a critical method that was to be applied with powerful effect in every department of antiquity. This is in evidence above all in his Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris (expanded edition, 1699), the first important work of classical scholarship written in a modern language. His editions of Horace (1711), Terence (1726), and Manilius (1739) were all of masterly quality. He did remarkable work in collecting fragments of Menander and Callimachus, and although he never completed his proposed editions of Homer and the New Testament, the preparatory work he did toward them had a revolutionary effect in both fields of study.

      After Bentley's death the only part of his inheritance taken up by his countrymen was his work in textual criticism. The work of his English contemporaries in this field, who include such important scholars as Jeremiah Markland (1693–1776), Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730–86), Benjamin Heath (1704–66), and Samuel Musgrave (1732–80), was carried further by the next generation. Richard Porson (1759–1808), Peter Elmsley (1773–1825), and P.P. Dobree (1782–1825) all concentrated upon Attic drama, Porson showing a particularly fine feeling for Greek.

      In 1786 Sir William Jones (1746–94) began the study of Sanskrit that was to lead to the establishment of the new discipline of comparative philology. Edward Gibbon (Gibbon, Edward) (1737–94), essentially self-educated despite his early residence at Magdalen College, Oxford, made with The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) the greatest single contribution to the study of ancient history in the whole 18th century. The Essay on the Original Genius of Homer by Robert Wood (c. 1717–71), printed privately in 1767 and published posthumously in 1775, not only marked a new stage in Homeric studies but also assisted the movement toward exploration of ancient sites in Greece. Exploration was powerfully promoted by the publications in London of the Society of Dilettanti, especially the drawings in The Antiquities of Athens (four volumes, 1762–1808), by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett.

      Meanwhile in the Netherlands, where Bentley's greatness had at once been recognized, a distinguished series of scholars—Tiberius Hemsterhuys (1685–1766), L.K. Valckenaer (1715–85), the German emigrant David Ruhnken (1723–98), and, later, Daniel Wyttenbach (1746–1820)—continued to do valuable work on Greek texts, including the difficult but rewarding remains of ancient lexicography. Bibliographical works and dictionaries were now improved; Johann Albert Fabricius (1668–1736) put the bibliography of Greek and then Latin literature on a new footing, and Egidio Forcellini in Padua superseded the Latin thesaurus of Robert Estienne. The study of ancient coins was greatly advanced by the work of the Swiss-born scholar Ezechiel Spanheim (1629–1710) and the Austrian scholar J.H. Eckhel (1737–98).

      In archaeology the 18th century saw the beginning of the excavation of Herculaneum and Pompeii and of exploration of the remains of the Etruscan civilization. Historical source criticism (Quellenkritik) began in the work of the German historian Barthold Niebuhr (1776–1831). But technical progress was not enough. A new spirit was needed to arouse classical studies to take their place in the modern world, and it came from Germany.

Modern classical scholarship

The new German humanism

      The “new humanism” that transformed German intellectual life in the late 18th century was a complex phenomenon, acting through scholarship, education, philosophy, and literature. Educationally the University of Göttingen played a leading part: there J.M. Gesner (1691–1761) and C.G. Heyne (1729–1812) introduced a new approach—an attempt to enter into the spirit of the past as displayed in its artistic monuments as well as in its literature. J.J. Winckelmann (Winckelmann, Johann) (1717–68) was the first to mark out the successive periods into which the history of Greek art falls. He was also the first to isolate and describe the essentially Hellenic element in Greek art and to relate the development of art in antiquity to other aspects of culture. He demonstrated that a large number of vases then known as Etruscan because they had been found in Etruscan cemeteries were in fact Greek, although the original error was to be perpetuated by Josiah Wedgwood, who named his pottery works “Etruria” in 1769. Winckelmann's influence ranged over the literary as well as the academic world, powerfully affecting such figures as Lessing, Herder, and Goethe (Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von), who named the memorial essay that he published in 1805 Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert (“Winckelmann and His Century”). Goethe (1749–1832) made a systematic effort to know and understand Greek art and literature, particularly Greek sculpture and the poetry of Homer, and to utilize them for his own purposes; it may be doubted whether anyone since ancient times had understood the Greeks so well. He was a friend of Wilhelm von Humboldt (Humboldt, Wilhelm, Baron von) (1767–1835), the great statesman and pioneer of the study of language who founded Frederick William University (later the University of Berlin), which rapidly became the leading university of Europe.

      Goethe was also in touch with F.A. Wolf (Wolf, Friedrich August) (1759–1824), a Göttingen pupil of Heyne. Wolf defined the “science of antiquity” (Altertumswissenschaft) and mapped out its constituent provinces and principles. Influenced by Herder, with his special interest in the early literatures of various peoples and their special characteristics, Wolf in his Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) raised such questions about Homer as to give rise to a debate that has continued ever since. Goethe was at first carried away by Wolf's theory that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed orally by a number of authors and that the artistic unity of the poems was a later imposition, but he eventually returned to his belief in an individual Homer, as scholars have done increasingly in the 20th century.

      Another great classical scholar in close touch with Goethe was Gottfried Hermann (Hermann, (Johann) Gottfried (Jakob)) (1772–1848), who continued the tradition of 18th-century rationalism, applying to the study of ancient poetry a critical method based on a strict Kantian logic. Hermann did much to advance the study of Homer, Pindar, late epic poetry, and Greek metre. By his editions of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and part of Euripides he effected a great and permanent improvement in the texts of these poets.

      Hermann had many distinguished pupils, including C.A. Lobeck (1781–1860), a grammarian of great learning and acuteness, who in his famous book Aglaophamus (1829) refuted the seductive but dubious theory of the Heidelberg professor G.F. Creuzer that the mythology of Homer and Hesiod contained symbolic elements of an ancient Oriental revelation from which it was ultimately derived. August Meineke (1790–1870) did important work on Hellenistic poetry and produced an excellent edition of the fragments of Greek comedy. August Immanuel Bekker (Bekker, August Immanuel) (1785–1871), a pupil of Wolf, took advantage of the accumulation in Paris of many previously inaccessible manuscripts from various countries following the Napoleonic conquests to make a valuable contribution to the texts of many prose authors. Wilhelm Dindorf (1802–83) edited many texts, including the scholia on Rome and on Demosthenes. With his brother Ludwig and K.B. Hase, he revised the great Greek Thesaurus of Henri Estienne. Hermann's son-in-law Moritz Haupt (1808–74) did important work on Latin poetry. H.L. Ahrens (1809–81) wrote on the Greek dialects and on the bucolic poets. August Nauck (1822–92), who taught in St. Petersburg, made a notable contribution to the establishment of the texts of Greek tragedy.

      The school of Hermann with its strong emphasis on linguistic study came occasionally into conflict with the representatives of a newer trend in the approach to antiquity. In Berlin August Boeckh (1785–1867) did important work on Greek poetry, particularly Pindar, but also established on a firm footing the study of Greek private and public economy and the systematic collection of Greek inscriptions. K.O. Müller (Müller, Karl Otfried) (1797–1840), the author of an important history of Greek literature, which first appeared in English, was a pioneer of the study of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan origins and of the mythology of the different parts of Greece, which he believed could shed much light on early history. He was a strong upholder of the importance of art and archaeology in the study of antiquity, as was F.G. Welcker (1784–1868), who applied deep knowledge of Greek art and religion to the interpretation of literature and did much to shape the wider conception of the study of antiquity that was now coming to maturity.

      The comparative (comparative linguistics) study of Indo-European languages that was initiated by Franz Bopp (Bopp, Franz) (1791–1867), one of the famous scholars who gave the University of Berlin its enviable reputation, profoundly influenced the study of the ancient as well as other languages. One field in which this was seen was the study of early Latin, which was now placed on a new basis by Friedrich Ritschl (1806–76), who applied knowledge gained from the study of inscriptions to the elucidation of early Latin texts. There followed much important work on early Latin, such as that of Johannes Vahlen (1830–1911) on Ennius and that of Otto Ribbeck (1827–98) on Roman tragedy.

The rise of textual criticism

      Knowledge of ancient literature must always rest on the standards of editing and criticism of Greek and Latin texts that have come down in a corrupt and sometimes mutilated state. Early in the 19th century great advances were made in this field of classical studies. Angelo Cardinal Mai (1782–1854) published hitherto unknown Greek and Latin texts, including much of Cicero's De republica, from newly discovered palimpsests. A.I. Bekker, as well as editing many unknown Greek texts in the Paris collections (see above The new German humanism (classical scholarship)), was able, by use of newly discovered earlier and better manuscripts, to produce better editions of the classical authors than those then current. But the formulation of a technique of systematic recension (i.e., analysis and evaluation of a manuscript tradition) was gradual, with its roots in the 18th century. Such New Testament scholars as J.A. Bengel (1687–1752) had established the principle that the witnesses to a text must be classified and their testimony evaluated according to their textual genealogy. For a time, the perceived barrier between “sacred” and “profane” texts limited the influence of such work on the analysis of “pagan” sources. During the first half of the 19th century the combined efforts of several scholars, notably Ritschl, Jakob Bernays (1824–81), and the Danish Latinist J.N. Madvig (1804–86), evolved the critical method usually associated with the name of Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) because it is most strikingly exemplified in his edition of Lucretius (1850).

      The respect felt for Lachmann by such men as his friend and successor, Moritz Haupt, turned into something like critical orthodoxy, however: the new techniques were rigorously applied by less gifted scholars, so that in this department of scholarship some work came to be distinguished by a blind confidence in the so-called scientific method as needing little intelligence in its handling. Madvig had realized the importance, restressed in the mid-20th century, of allowing for inequalities and anomalies in an author's style; but these warnings were lost on those who, exuberantly confident in their own powers, proceeded to wholesale athetesis, or rejection of works as spurious, based on inconsistencies within a text. It was a similarly rigid insistence on analogical methods of criticism that marred the achievements of even such a great critic as the Dutch C.G. Cobet (1813–89) and so set a bad example to lesser scholars.

Developments in the study of ancient history and philosophy

      Corresponding progress was made in the field of ancient history. Barthold Niebuhr, the pioneer in historical source criticism, applied a rational skepticism to ancient legends and traditions; he also promoted the collection of Latin inscriptions. J.G. Droysen (1808–84) wrote notable histories of Alexander the Great and of the Hellenistic Age; in fact, the very concept of a Hellenistic Age was his invention. Theodor Mommsen (Mommsen, Theodor) (1817–1903), starting as a professor of Roman law, made vast contributions to almost every branch of Roman studies, but particularly to the history of law and government and of the administration of the Roman provinces. He took a central part in the systematic collection of Latin inscriptions and was familiar with virtually every text and document relevant to Roman history. Mommsen's method of studying an entire civilization had influence on historical studies in general far beyond the limits of ancient history; perhaps the most distinguished of his pupils was the great sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920). In the second half of the century, Eduard Meyer (1855–1930), equipped with wide knowledge of Oriental as well as Greek and Latin sources, wrote an important history of the ancient world. Notable histories of Greece were brought out by Georg Busolt (1850–1920) and Karl Julius Beloch (1854–1929).

      At the beginning of the 19th century Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), another of the scholars who gave the University of Berlin its special lustre, revitalized the study of Plato. Eduard Zeller (1814–1908) wrote a history of ancient philosophy that has been several times revised and is still useful. Later Hermann Diels (1848–1922) collected the fragments of pre-Socratic philosophers and of the so-called doxographers who preserved much of the evidence for our knowledge of ancient philosophy. The texts relevant to Epicureanism were edited by Hermann Usener (1834–1905), who employed the new methodology of comparative religion to throw much light on the religion of Greece, not disdaining the study of popular culture and of folklore as well; his work was continued by a line of pupils, and he had an important influence on the great art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929). Late in the century Erwin Rohde (1845–98) wrote Psyche, an important study of Greek beliefs about the soul.

      Nations other than Germany made more modest contributions to scholarship, most of them being more concerned with teaching than with research. (For the Italian contribution to papyrology, see below Developments in archaeology and art history (classical scholarship).) The literary scholarship of the French, though elegant and polished, was superficial in comparison with that of the Germans. It is significant that the leading Hellenist of France was the German-born Henri Weil (1818–1909). Great figures were exceptional; among them were J.A. Letronne (1787–1848), an archaeologist and epigraphist, and Paul-Émile Littré (1801–81), the famous lexicographer and positivist philosopher whose remarkable translation of Hippocrates originated as a mere side interest of his philosophical vocation.

      In England a notable contribution to ancient history and to the study of Plato and Aristotle came from the banker George Grote (1794–1871), who saw antiquity from the viewpoint of modern liberalism and utilitarianism. Later in the century the ancient universities produced a few distinguished scholars: H.A.J. Munro (1819–85) did important work on Catullus and Lucretius; Sir Richard Jebb (1841–1905) wrote a good commentary on the newly discovered Bacchylides and also one on Sophocles, which despite some technical deficiencies is still useful because of the author's rare feeling for Greek; and Ingram Bywater (1840–1914) contributed significantly to the study of Aristotle's Ethics and Poetics and acquired rare knowledge of the history of scholarship.

      In the United States the leading figure was B.L. Gildersleeve (1831–1924), who insisted that American classical scholars should aim at the highest European standards. Germany was rightly taken as a model, and valuable work was done, especially in grammar, syntax, and linguistics, by such scholars as W.W. Goodwin (1831–1912), J.W. White (1849–1917), and H.W. Smyth (1857–1937). But too often it was not the admirable qualities of the best German scholars but the dryness, pedantry, and verbosity of the worst that were reproduced. This led to a reaction that went too far in the opposite direction and so did considerable damage. In archaeology, however, the vast resources of America were applied with ever-increasing effectiveness.

Developments in archaeology and art history

      The foundation of the Instituto di Correspondenza Archeologica in Rome in 1829 provided an international centre for archaeological studies in Italy, which now progressed rapidly. Eduard Gerhard (1795–1867) founded the study of Greek vase painting as a scientific discipline; his report on the numerous Greek vases excavated from the Etruscan necropolis of Vulci (1831) was epoch-making. In Bonn, Welcker built up the first large collection of plaster casts of Greek sculpture. Another pioneer of the study of Greek art was his colleague Otto Jahn (1813–69), also an excellent Latinist. After the establishment of the Greek kingdom in 1830 the various European nations set up schools in Athens as they had done in Rome, and excavations on a large scale took place not only in Greece but all over the eastern Mediterranean world.

      In archaeology the great impetus came from an amateur, Heinrich Schliemann (Schliemann, Heinrich) (1822–90), whom no one can deprive of the credit for having guessed that remarkable finds might be made at Troy, Mycenae, and Tiryns, for having deliberately made a fortune so that he might do so, and for having discovered and promoted the great archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1853–1940). In 1900 the ancient city of Knossos on Crete was excavated by the English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (Evans, Sir Arthur) (1851–1941), which enabled the study of Mycenaean civilization to be supplemented by that of Minoan. The French excavated the two great Apollonian shrines at Delos and Delphi.

      Papyri (papyrus) had been found in large numbers in the Epicurean library at Herculaneum discovered during the 18th century, and from 1878, when a roll turned up in Egypt, sporadic finds were made. From about the 1870s systematic excavation led to a steady stream of discoveries, mostly from al-Fayyūm, where the sunshine acts upon the soil in such a way as to preserve papyrus. The Italian Amedeo Peyron (1785–1870) was a pioneer in the new discipline of papyrology, as was Domenico Comparetti (1835–1927), the author of a famous book about the fortune of Virgil's works during the Middle Ages. The eminent Italian legal scholar and paleographer Girolamo Vitelli (1849–1935) became an expert papyrologist and had great personal influence. In Germany important papyri were published under the supervision of Wilhelm Schubart with the help of Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. In 1891 the Constitution of Athens by Aristotle and the poems of Herodas were published from a papyrus in the British Museum, and in 1897 they were followed by the poems of Bacchylides from the 5th century BC. In 1898 the Oxford scholars B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt brought out the first volume of the series, still not concluded, that contains the texts of the papyri found by them at Oxyrhynchus. Documentary papyri supply useful evidence for law and government in Roman Egypt, and literary papyri supply a priceless supplement to the knowledge of Greek (and occasionally Latin) literature.

      The 19th century saw the beginning of many great enterprises, both individual and collective, that have equipped scholars with invaluable tools: collections of fragments, inscriptions, and works of art; and improved dictionaries, special lexica, handbooks, encyclopaedias, and catalogs of manuscripts. The invention of photography made it possible to produce facsimiles of manuscripts and documents and to distribute better likenesses of monuments and works of art. Many of these projects were sponsored by the various national academies, which were now linked by the Association des Académies, the driving force of which was Mommsen.

The rise of professionalism

      Associated with Germany was the movement toward what may be called professionalism during the second half of the 19th century. Though Wolf's example in founding a classical periodical in the vernacular had been followed elsewhere (e.g., the English Classical Journal, 1810–29), journals written primarily by professional scholars for professional scholars only began to proliferate after about 1850. Coupled with this proliferation were the increased importance of universities, seminars, and academies (with their published proceedings) and the growing habit of early publication of, for instance, the Ph.D. dissertation, the academic “program,” and the technical monograph.

      Specialization was accompanied by a rise in technical standards of argument and presentation and a tendency toward the use of learned jargon—a phenomenon particularly noticeable in classical studies because of the contrast with earlier scholarly literature. An allied change was the replacement of Latin by the vernacular as a medium of scholarly intercourse and publication (with traditional exceptions, such as the preface and apparatus of a critical text). Thus, since about 1850 a classical scholar who wished to keep abreast of developments in the subject has had to be able to read at the least English, French, German, Italian, and, in some cases, Russian. These changes had more immediate results in continental Europe and the United States; in England their effects were delayed in part by the insularity that characterized English scholarship after Bentley, in part by the concentration of the older universities on teaching, and a consequent distrust by tutors of a strong professoriate and of “pure research.”

Late 19th-century developments in German scholarship

      Germany made so vast a contribution to 19th-century classical scholarship that it would be impossible to name all of the eminent scholars of the period. But from a time rather earlier than the establishment of the German Empire (1871), signs of decline might be observed; the new methods had begun to harden into orthodoxy, mechanically applied by a mass of inferior practitioners. There was a strong tendency toward excessive emendation and deletion, and the overconscientious accumulation of details led to much dullness. From this situation German scholarship was to make a remarkable, though not complete, recovery, thanks to the generation of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von) (1848–1931), who broke down the barriers that had grown up between the divisions of his subject, making important contributions to them all. He was the author of the first commentary on a Greek poem in which the entire apparatus of modern scholarship, encompassing not only literary knowledge but also that of history, art, archaeology, linguistics, and religion, was brought to bear on the elucidation of the work in question; this was his commentary on the Herakles of Euripides (1st edition, with a remarkable introduction to Attic tragedy, 1889; 2nd edition, 1895). Wilamowitz-Moellendorff produced many more texts and commentaries, besides important work on Greek history, religion, metre, and the history of scholarship. As a professor in Greifswald, Göttingen, and finally Berlin, he exercised a powerful influence.

      At the same time Eduard Schwartz (1851–1940) did much not only for the study of Greek history and literature but also for the history of the Christian Church; Georg Kaibel (1850–1901) advanced the study of Greek drama and of verse inscriptions; and Carl Robert (1850–1922) combined archaeological with literary expertise in remarkable fashion. Friedrich Leo (1851–1914) contributed significantly to Plautine studies and began a history of Latin literature of high quality. Jacob Wackernagel (1853–1938) of Basel and Wilhelm Schulze (1863–1935) used their mastery of comparative linguistics to throw light on Greek and Latin texts. Richard Reitzenstein (1861–1931) was eminent not only in the field of Greek literature and lexicography but also in that of ancient religion. Ludwig Traube (1861–1907) did important work in Latin paleography.

Classical scholarship in the 20th century

       World War I dealt a heavy blow to classical studies, as to all humane letters, and the numbers of those studying Greek and Latin were noticeably affected; but scholars showed courage and energy in adapting themselves to new conditions. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff continued to be active, and his last decade saw more abundant and more important publications than any other of his career. His pupils produced much important detailed work: Felix Jacoby (1876–1959) began and carried far a learned edition of the fragments of the Greek historians; Paul Maas (1880–1964) showed rare expertise in Greek metrics, textual criticism, and paleography; Eduard Fraenkel (1888–1970) did valuable work on Plautus' relation to his Greek originals and later devoted to Aeschylus' Agamemnon one of the most learned of all commentaries; and Rudolf Pfeiffer (1889–1979) wrote a masterly commentary on Callimachus and an important history of classical scholarship.

      Reacting against the classicism of the age of Goethe, scholars of the late 19th century saw the study of antiquity mainly from a historical standpoint: they accumulated masses of detail, which sometimes led to dryness, and tended to think exclusively in terms of concrete fact. Discontent arose with the recognition that an excessive preoccupation with the details of their development can harm the understanding of works of literature and thought. Attempts were made to revive classical scholarship by rescuing it from the domination of historical study. Werner Jaeger (1888–1961), an Aristotelian scholar who succeeded Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in his Berlin chair, attempted, without much success, to achieve this by institutional means. More was accomplished by Karl Reinhardt (1886–1958), who, though a devoted pupil of Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, had been in contact from his youth with the ideas of Nietzsche and of the circle around the poet Stefan George. Combining deep learning with refined sensibility, Reinhardt did important work on pre-Socratic philosophy and on Poseidonius and later on Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Homer.

      Even before the start of World War II, National Socialist persecution had gravely damaged scholarship in Germany, the main centre of classical studies. The United States and, to an even greater extent, England benefited from the efflux of scholars from the Continent. Jaeger and two other eminent pupils of Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Paul Friedländer (1882–1968) and Hermann Fränkel (1888–1977), spent the rest of their lives in the United States. So did the Russian M.I. Rostovtzev (1870–1952), who made a vast contribution to the study of the social and economic history of the ancient world. Thaddeus Zielinski (1859–1944), the Polish scholar who did important work on Ciceronian clausulae (clauses) and other topics, was murdered by the Nazis. Eduard Norden (1868–1941), who studied the formal prose of the ancients and did important work on ancient religion and on Latin literature, died in Switzerland. Jacoby, Maas, Fraenkel, and Pfeiffer, as well as the eminent archaeologist Paul Jacobsthal (1880–1957), settled in England, where Fraenkel in particular taught most effectively, creating links between English and continental scholarship. Pfeiffer, like Kurt von Fritz (1900–85), who spent the war years in America, returned to Germany.

      In Italy the school founded by Vitelli continued under the leadership of Giorgio Pasquali (1887–1952), a pupil of Schwartz and Leo, and Gaetano de Sanctis (1870–1957) did important work on ancient history. In Sweden Einar Löfstedt (1880–1955) and his school threw much light on Vulgar Latin and indirectly on Latin in general, and M.P. Nilsson (1874–1967) wrote a learned history of Greek religion.

      In France classical studies to some degree slumbered under the conservative establishment, but Antoine Meillet (1866–1936) and others advanced the study of linguistics, and Louis Gernet (1882–1962) founded an important school of scholars who applied the techniques of modern sociology and anthropology to the study of antiquity.

      In England A.E. Housman (1859–1936) continued with great distinction the tradition of exclusively textual study, editing Juvenal, Lucan, and most notably Manilius. J.D. Denniston (1887–1949) made a valuable study of the Greek particles. Edgar Lobel (1887–1981) from 1927 edited the literary papyri from Oxyrhynchus with unrivaled expertise. Sir Denys Page (1908–78) edited many Greek poetical texts with great success. Gilbert Murray (1866–1957) was not only a literary scholar but, like Jane Harrison (1850–1928), a pioneer in the use of anthropological and sociological methods in the study of antiquity. F.M. Cornford (1874–1943) shared this interest but went on to contribute significantly to the study of Plato and the pre-Socratics. E.R. Dodds, starting with Neoplatonism, applied psychological as well as anthropological knowledge to the study of early Greek thought, also writing excellent commentaries on Euripides' Bacchae and Plato's Gorgias. Sir John Beazley (1885–1970), with deep learning and refined sensibility, put the whole study of Greek vase painting on a new basis by applying the method of the 19th-century Italian art critic Giovanni Morelli to the identification of individual painters.

      The way in which research may (and indeed must) transcend the conventional limits of individual disciplines is exemplified during this period in the history of the Homeric (Homer) Question: the efforts of scholars in such diverse fields as linguistics, archaeology, Hittite studies, folklore, and comparative oral literature have materially advanced understanding of the poems. The problem was transformed by the proof of an American scholar, Milman Parry (1902–35), that the poems show many characteristics of a poetic tradition that has passed through a long phase of oral transmission.

      Excavation continued, despite many political and financial difficulties, and a steady stream of discoveries came from Greece, Italy, and other Mediterranean lands. Perhaps the most exciting new find after World War II was the discovery by the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos of a Minoan town, with fine and well-preserved frescoes, on the island of Thera. Although large-scale excavations in search of papyri have been discontinued for many years, new papyri have not ceased to be discovered. Since World War II the authors who have benefited most have been Callimachus, Menander, and Stesichorus. In 1952 Michael Ventris showed that the language of the so-called Linear B syllabic script on clay tablets found at Mycenae and other places is Greek, thus throwing light on a far earlier stage of the language than had previously been known.

      The history of classical scholarship has continued to be one of activity and progress. The publication of new inscriptions and of new papyri and other manuscripts has yielded important new material, and, considering the limited resources available, the task of presenting the texts of literary works and documents in up-to-date editions has been carried out with considerable success. Lately the Hellenistic and Imperial periods have received greater emphasis and have been given greater credit for their achievements.

      But such are the threats presented by social change and utilitarian pressures that heroic efforts will be needed if progress is to continue. In Europe at the beginning of the 20th century many schools gave a good grounding in the ancient languages. By late in the 20th century that was no longer the case, and, as a result, the years when the memory is at its best for learning new languages are wasted. In the United States, vast reserves not only of money but also of talent and enthusiasm have made a large contribution to classical studies, but progress has been impeded not only by the failure of the schools to teach the ancient languages but also by the materialism and utilitarianism that increasingly held sway both there and in Europe.

Additional Reading

John Edwin Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, 3 vol. (1903–08, reprinted 1998), while not a critical study, is useful for factual information. Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (1968, reissued 1998), is a masterly critical survey, and History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (1976, reissued 1999), contains much valuable material but is uneven and lacks adequate treatment of the important 19th-century period. The best brief survey is U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, History of Classical Scholarship (1982; originally published in German, 1921). A history of classical scholarship in antiquity is found in James E.G. Zetzel, Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity (1981, reprinted 1984). For a discussion of the transmission of Greek and Latin literature, see L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 3rd ed. (1991); and L.D. Reynolds (ed.), Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (1983). N.G. Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium (1983, reissued 1996), chronicles the history of Byzantine scholarship. Roberto Weiss, Medieval and Humanist Greek (1977), is a collection of essays detailing the use of the Greek language in the Latin Middle Ages. Weiss also covers a later age in The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (1969, reissued 1973). Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vol. (1983–93), presents a biography of the 16th-century French classicist. For English scholarship, see C.O. Brink, English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson and Housman (1985); and M.L. Clarke, Greek Studies in England, 1700–1830 (1945, reprinted 1986). On the history of Greek vase painting, see R.M. Cook, Greek Painted Pottery, 3rd ed. (1997). On the history of papyrology, see E.G. Turner, Greek Papyri: An Introduction (1968, reissued 1980). E.J. Kenney, The Classical Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book (1974), treats the development of textual criticism. For a discussion of classical influences in the 19th and 20th centuries, see Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts (1982), and Classical Survivals: The Classics in the Modern World (1982). In general see the collections of essays by Arnaldo Momigliano, many in English: vol. 1 appeared as Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (1955, reprinted 1979), and the last addition appeared as vol. 9, Nono contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (1992).Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones

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