Receptions of Classical Literature in Premodern Scholarship

In my paper I examine the use of analogy as a lingusitic principle in Pollux' lexicon (Onomastikon) of the 2nd century CE.

Petra, the metropolis of the province of Palaestina Tertia Salutaris in Southern Transjordan, yielded a surprising papyrus find in 1993. The publication of this carbonized papyrus dossier is on the home straight (the volumes 1–4 of The Petra Papyri are published and the final 5th volume is on its way). This paper will study the language and education of the scribes and other writers appearing in these documents.

In her recent book, The Rhetoric of the Roman Fake (2012), Irene Peirano devotes a great deal of attention to the Catalepton. This diverse collection of fifteen poems, transmitted as part of the Appendix Vergiliana, presents itself—and often has been accepted—as Vergilian juvenilia. Peirano successfully makes the argument that these poems are better understood as part of the literary reception of Vergil in antiquity—“fakes” created to engage with the same questions we find in surviving Vergilian exegesis such as commentary and biography.

It has been argued that the Atticists adopted a special pronunciation of Greek, possibly modeled on the one current in Attica in the 2^nd century CE, but that they showed “very little overt interest in pronunciation both in their lexica and in other works in which the practices of sophists are discussed” (James 2008). My paper challenges this view: it shows that the Atticist lexica do contain information on the pronunciation of Atticistic Greek.

This paper explores a so far neglected aspect of the metrical work of Demetrius Triclinius (ca. 1280-1335), who famously was the first scholar since antiquity to understand the principle of strophic responsion in Pindar and the lyrics of Greek drama and used his expertise (to good or bad effect) as a basis for textual criticism.