Interpreting a Classic: Demosthenes and His Ancient Commentators

2. Sources, Agenda, and Readership

chapter 2 Sources, Agenda, and Readership 26 1. On his life and dates, see Cohn; Pfeiffer, Classical Scholarship, 274–79; Fraser, 1: 471–74. 2. Fraser, 1: 467–75; see Pöhlmann, 1: 61–68, on the first Greek philologists at Rome. Information, ideas, and arguments about Demosthenes’ orations were passed among various sorts of commentaries and lexica from at least the first century b.c. down to the end of antiquity and beyond, as we have seen in the previous chapter. But to characterize this exchange and transfer as the mechanics of transmission, and to stop at that, is to privilege the process over the purpose, the raw data of exchange over the commentators who developed and shaped it and the audiences for whom they did so. The intent of the present chapter, therefore, is to use the surviving texts to illuminate the sources, methods, and agenda of the commentators and—to the extent that it is possible—to reconstruct their intended audiences. secondary sources: didymus and his predecessors Any discussion of the sources used by the commentators should begin with Didymus. Little is known about Didymus’s life. He was born and raised in Alexandria, and he lived and worked in the second half of the first century b.c.1 He was part of the last generation of Alexandrian scholars before Rome became the new center of Greek learning.2 He Sources, Agenda, and Readership 27 3. On which see Wilamowitz, Einleitung, 158–66; Fraser, 1: 473. For the fragments of Didymus’s lexica, see Schmidt, 15–111. 4. Discussion in Cohn, 458–60; for the fragments, see Schmidt, 310–20. 5. There is no evidence that he knew or commented on the letters, the Essay on Love, the Funeral Oration, or the prooemia. 6. Lossau’s Untersuchungen zur antiken Demosthenesexegese, Palingenesia 2 (Bad Homburg, 1964) is the one exception. wrote commentaries on the full range of classical Greek authors. He also compiled lexica of rare and obscure words from tragedy, comedy, and the Hippocratic corpus.3 None of these writings survives except in quotations preserved in later authors (“fragments”). Also lost, except in fragments , are Didymus’s commentaries on the Attic orators Demosthenes (except Berol. 9780), Aeschines, Hyperides, Isaeus, and possibly Isocrates , Dinarchus, and Antiphon.4 More fragments of Didymus’s commentaries on Demosthenes survive than of his commentaries on all the other orators combined. These fragments show that Didymus commented on the orations we know as numbers 4–5, 9–11, 13, 18–19, 21–25, 30, 43, 46, 49, 53, 57, and 59. Based on the apparently random distribution of these fragments from speeches throughout the Demosthenic corpus, we may conclude that Didymus produced commentaries on the whole of the corpus as it was known to him.5 By all accounts Didymus is the key figure in the ancient philological and historical tradition of commentaries on Demosthenes. But how important was Didymus, actually? We shall begin by noting two undisputed facts: Didymus is the only philological and historical commentator on Demosthenes whose name we know, and his dates are earlier than the dates of the earliest surviving texts from the tradition. These two facts could be due merely to the chance survival of evidence from a period in which survival was the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless , they have helped to elevate Didymus to the rank of most important commentator in nearly every existing account of this tradition.6 Regardless of how important he actually is (a question to which we shall return momentarily), it is worth considering in some detail the other factors that have contributed to Didymus’s prominence in the story. Some of this discussion should also be applicable to the study of ancient scholarship in general. First and foremost, histories of ancient scholarship have traditionally been oriented toward the names of prominent individuals. Since Didymus ’s name is the only one known in the philological and historical tradition of commentaries on Demosthenes, the modern author of a nar- 28 The Ancient Commentaries 7. Daintree notes the common desire in modern discussions of late-ancient and medieval commentaries “to provide valuable anonymous scholia with a respectable paternity, certainly with a late antique pedigree if a classical one cannot be managed” (69). 8. Wessely in Archiv. 9. Laqueur, 220. 10. D-S1 , xvii. rative history is compelled to assign him a key role in the story. From there it...