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2. Forerunners: Aristotle, His Predecessors and Pupils 2.1 The Beginnings of Greek Philology and Literary History IT IS NOT my intention to repeat here the entire prehistory and early history of philology, since Pfeiffer has dealt with it extensively. But in order to clarify the situation of those Alexandrian scholars to whom the Ptolemies entrusted the care of the book treasures which they had collected, I must nevertheless begin fairly much at the beginning. Kallimachos was one of these scholars, and the result of his work as a librarian was his great bibliography of Greek authors, the Pinakes. Thus, we are going to deal here with the conditions of historical scholarship under which the work came into being that started the line of national biographical dictionaries which continues to this day. Greek philology grew out of scholarly inquiry into the life and works of Homer. What the Greeks had learnt from this endeavor, they applied to other poets and finally also to prose authors. The philology of Homer was, as it were, the model for philology as such. The process is not surprising, because the study of Homer constituted in Greece at all times and despite all political, economic, and cultural changes, the foundation of higher learning, the paideia which gave the Greeks a feeling of superiority over the surrounding peoples, the barbarians. In the 5th century B.C., when books had become more widespread, teachers put on the desks of their pupils "the poetic works", i.e. the works of the great epic and lyric poets, and later on also those of the tragic poets, but above all Homer's works; the pupils had to read them and to learn them by heart, as Plato tells us in the words of the sophist Protagoras.1 What they hoped to achieve by this for the education of young people, their mental and moral development, need not be discussed here. At any rate, many Greeks thought that Homer had educated Greece, as Plato relates elsewhere.2 The epic poetry of Homer was however already at that time no longer easily understood, not even by the teachers of young people. For example, the obsolete words used by the poet and the unusual customs which he mentioned needed some explanation. This led to the first lexical and antiquarian research. Other problems followed. It was found that Homer seemed to contradict himself quite often, and attempts were made to explain those contradictions. But above all people took offense at scenes that seemed to be irreconcilable with moral principles or with the dignity of gods and heroes. In order to defend Homer against critics such as Xenophanes of Kolophon (second half of the 6th century B.C.), Theagenes of Rhegion (late 6th century B.C.) resorted to an allegorical interpretation of offending scenes. He was presumably one of those itinerant bards who not only recited the Homeric epics at festivals but also interpreted them.3 Others adopted his method of interpretation. In the era of the sophists, the Greek age of enlightenment (5th century B.C.), Homeric problems of all kinds formed a popular theme for discussions, and this continued until the era of the Roman emperors. The proposed solutions were at first, and to some extent even later on, entirely devoid of scholarship, but just because they were so unsatisfactory they provoked a scholarly interpretation, the very core of philology. 14 When the epic works of Homer were written down, many educated Greeks were unpleasantly surprised. If, for example, a man who knew his Homer well visited a friend, and happened to take a look at his host's copy, he would notice immediately that the text he read there differed in certain respects from the one with which he was familiar. This was due to the rhapsodes who had spread Homer's works but had taken liberties with the wording of the text. Thus, the copies made in various cities contained not only different variants of single verses but also interpolations, omissions and inversions of entire verses and groups of verses. The copies of Homer's epics which were in use in the Greek colonies in Egypt until the middle of the 2nd century B.C. differed in part considerably from each other, as is evident from papyrus fragments.4 The same was true of the copies which were compared by the Alexandrian philologists of the third and second century B.C. in their critical studies of the texts. The ancient scholia...

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