Brief Mention: The Classicist's Thirst

( Od.11.582–92)

These are some of the first lines I read of Greek poetry, thanks to Schoder’s Homeric Greek,and they are part of the reason I became a classicist. Their simplicity, directness, and clear statement of a man’s desperate longing for what is necessary and beautiful stirred my unformed youth and incited me to master as best I could this delightful impossible language. Forever eager, forever denied, Tantalus now strikes me as the image of the scholar always hoping to reach and make his own the truth, always finding it receding from his lips, or scribbling pen.

In each century, ever since Petrarch rediscovered Cicero’s letters and Livy’s decades and thought he had found kindred spirits, with whom he could converse directly over the ages, scholars have sought for methods of establishing a closer tie to the classical past and modes of relating it to their own world. Every century has built on what has gone before, while criticizing previous work as inadequate or wrongheaded. Petrarch began the search for manuscripts, reassembling the decades of Livy, and inspiring Boccaccio and later humanists in a chase for treasures that continued into the sixteenth century. But bare manuscripts were not enough: soon the need for a renewed study of grammar and diction became apparent, for the collation and emendation of texts, for translation into the vernacular.

Let Poliziano stand for many: he brought to the work of emendation and interpretation of classical Latin texts a knowledge of Greek remarkable in his day, a precise familiarity with a wide range of authors and their commentators, and the technique of evaluating manuscripts by their age. He would hunt out and note the readings of the earliest codices available—he found many in Florence, assembled by previous scholars—and emend the vulgate tradition, often using Greek texts to correct the Latin. With these tools he was able to make an outstanding contribution to the text and interpretation of authors. Each short essay of the Miscellaneorum centuria primaand the unfinished Centuria secundais cut like a small jewel, the ingenuity and insight of each facet flashing the brilliance of his method. How often he seems to have escaped Tantalus’ fate, and sipped the water, tasted that delicious fruit.

Yet important as his work was, at a distance of time the elusive truth recedes, and must be sought all over again. The oldest manuscripts are not necessarily the best, stemmata can play strange tricks, contamination can confuse traditions, anonymous correctors are revealed as identifiable scholars. Methods are refined, new techniques tried, terminology clarified. Now Poliziano’s marvelous command of the Latin vocabulary is available to the undergraduate who troubles to do a word search on the PHI CD-ROM, though not with the linguistic skill or knowledge of context to use it well. Microfilm, copying machines, and air travel allow inspection of manuscripts scattered throughout the world. Students use texts annotated with the learning of five hundred years, and have at their fingertips information even a Poliziano could not know. Yet somehow our thirst is still there, our hunger not satisfied. The sense of the texts, the events and emotions of history, the culture of which they are a part, their meaning to our own lives, are still elusive.

Poliziano’s methods have not relieved our thirst, nor have those of Bentley or Mommsen, of Wilamowitz or Gildersleeve, though they have brought us closer to understanding the ancient texts and the world that created them, and have given us a taste of that world, those people. Their work has brought us where we are today. The Estienne motto, found on the cover of the summer issues of the Journal,is apposite: Noli altum sapere. ¹Some of the old limbs that did not bear fruit are pruned away and new ones grafted on, but the new depend on the vigor of the old trunk.

Each scholar, each generation of scholars, is condemned—or privileged—to repeat the experience of searching for a better method of understanding, of stretching once more toward the receding water.

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