New Age Servius

During one of the early planning meetings for the Digital Latin Library project (http://digitallatin.org/), in an attempt to enumerate all of the features one might wish to encode in a digital edition, we projected a page from the Harvard Servius onto a whiteboard and used markers to annotate all of the places where there was useful information implicit in the formatting

In Linderski’s Latomus review of G. Ramires’ Servio. Commento el libro VII dell’ Eneido di Virgilio (2008) the Harvard Servius project, as it was known for so long, was described as not just being moored, but ultimately a sunken ship. To a certain extent, Linderski was right to apply the nautical metaphor. Although the Harvard project was a grand attempt to surpass the previous edition of Thilo-Hagen (1881-7; repr. 1961), only two volumes were ever published: vol. 2 in 1946 (Aeneid 1-2) and vol.

The work of R. Schlunk and T. Schmit-Neuerburg has confirmed the intuition of R. Heinze, E. Fraenkel, and others that Virgil used commentaries on at least some of his Greek models to guide his imitations of them. The situation is clearest in regard to Homer and other authors of archaic or classical date on whom commentaries were written in the Hellenistic period, since these could certainly have been available to Virgil.

This paper will discuss the scholarly debate of the past generation on the value of variant readings preserved by early Latin philologists for establishing the text of Virgil by reviewing readings that appear in the text of Servius’ commentary on Virgil’s poems. Servius’ commentary had first and foremost an exegetical aim, but in the course of explaining his texte de base, Servius occasionally mentioned, explained and evaluated variant readings, which were known to him from reading other scholars and collating other manuscripts than his preferred text.