Ancient Scholarship

Attacking and Defending Homer: Zoilus’ Against Homer’s Poetry

As one of the first prose writers and the author of an unusual cosmology, the sixth-century author Pherecydes of Syros is a fascinating and important figure. However, his work is fragmentary and difficult to reconstruct. Some progress has been made by Schibli (1990) and West (1963, 1971) among others, but much is still disputed. An overlooked aspect of this discussion is that there are unmistakable references to Pherecydes’ work in the poetry of Callimachus and Apollonius.

In this talk, I argue that the tragic scholia reveal distinct critical methodologies in their approach to mythography, thus shining new light on the reception of the tragedians and the culture of ancient scholarship. Specifically, the scholia to Euripides tend to explore the network of myths with which his stories intersect, while those to Sophocles consider the impact his versions have on the play’s success.

What do fishing nets do? They catch fish, but what about nets abandoned long ago, tattered and torn? One such net in Alciphron plays a frayed and fraught role in mediating the fictitious correspondence of two fishermen (1.17–19). In so doing, it sheds light on a perplexing but little-noticed puzzle: how so worthless a thing as this net becomes an object of envy and lust. (Zanetto 2018: 126; Rosenmeyer 2001: 294n48, 315.)

In this talk, I argue that the author of the Life of Sophocles decouples him from his tragic contemporaries as part of an overall strategy of distinguishing Sophocles as an incomparable tragedian. As evidence, I use Sophocles’s Life and the broader tradition of Greek Lives, especially Euripides’s and Aeschylus’s, where the biographers depict Sophocles’s success as dependent on those two poets.

The Theognidea is a crucial resource for the study of early Greek elegy and its function within the symposion. But performance of the entire corpus (over 1,400 lines) would not have been suitable for any such occasion. In order to understand how this poetry was performed over time and the goal and outcome of those performances, one must first decide how the performers assembled the verses into self-standing units.

The Iliad’s ancient scholia, and in particular the exegetical scholia, are remarkable for the degree of intentionality that they typically ascribe to the poet of the Iliad. While many twenty-first century readers hesitate to attach special significance to language produced under by the constraints of the hexameter and the formulaic nature of the poem’s composition, the exegetical critic sought to extract as much meaning from Homer’s language as possible.

In recent decades scholars have challenged the long-established view of Hellenistic poets as ivory tower intellectuals and demonstrated that they were fully-fledged members of the Hellenistic courts. It is increasingly recognized that scholar-poets like Callimachus had the lifestyles and sometimes titles of philoi, ‘courtiers’ (Cameron 1995, 3-11; Petrovic 2016; 2017; Strootman 2017, 104-8; Berrey 2017, 91-5).

Contained in Book XIV of the Palatine Anthology, among riddles, enigmas, and oracles, are forty-four epigrams that pose mathematical problems. While they may appear at first to be frivolous or even trivial both as poetry and as mathematics, these fascinating pieces lie at a crossroads of Greek intellectual culture, where theoretical and practical mathematics, elementary education and elite intellectual recreation all intersect.

Habent sua fata libelli: if you know anything of Terentianus Maurus (perh. late 2^nd c. AD), it’s probably this half-line. Fate has not been kind to Terentianus’ three polymetric poems, De litteris, De syllabis, and De metris. Their titles reflect their content, the first two covering the pronunciation of letters and syllables, and the third discussing the details of a bewildering array of meters.