Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises, from their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period (review)

Dickey’s aim is to provide a resource that helps newcomers orient themselves in the large and formidable array of the disiecta membra of the philological scholarship of antiquity and Byzantium. Her intended audience includes not only advanced students, but also colleagues who have not been specially trained for this subdiscipline. Because of the TLG, many of these works (without their apparatus criticus) are more accessible than in the past, but, in the absence of translations, they pose a challenge to potential users because of elliptical style, specialized terminology not adequately handled in LSJ, complex and corrupt textual traditions, and antiquated or difficult printed editions.

Dickey begins with a highly condensed survey of the major individual scholars from Alexandria to Demetrius Triclinius. Then in two far meatier chapters with almost 70 subdivisions she explains what scholia, commentaries, and lexica have survived in connection with the literary authors from Homer to the Second Sophistic and introduces grammatical treatises, lexica, and the like. In each case she traces the origins and transmission of the material; evaluates the editions that readers are likely to be able to use, noting their virtues, defects, or peculiarities; and provides bibliographic guidance for exploring each topic in more depth. In many cases she also attempts to point to some articles that exploit the information conveyed in the ancient scholarly source.

Dickey’s fourth chapter presents an “Introduction to Scholarly Greek” that gathers together relevant facts about postclassical Greek, advice about how to understand the elliptical syntax of many scholia and lexica, and pointers about specialized terminology (especially grammatical terms). The longest section of the book is a reader of ancient scholarship with selected passages: the first 104 passages are accompanied by notes, and there are also translations of these passages printed after the whole group (so that one has to flip back and forth); then there are another 97 passages with notes but no translation key. Finally, there is an extensive glossary of about 1800 grammatical terms, many of which are not accurately or adequately treated in LSJ.

Dickey has done a creditable job in meeting her self-limited goals. The glossary, the guide to scholarly language, and the bibliography provide excellence service to students and fellow scholars. I found her discussions of the Greek grammarians and Greek grammatical terminology especially helpful, which is no surprise, given Dickey’s background in the linguistics of Greek and Latin. The notes and translations give excellent guidance to anyone trying to learn to read Greek of this kind. Her summary treatment of the traditions of so many different texts is a monument of selfless industry. Many readers will be extremely grateful to Dickey and the APA for this unique scholarly tool.

Nevertheless, some users of the book will be frustrated by its limitations. The notes to the selections help one translate, but often say nothing or too little about what makes the material interesting. A much different selection of tragic scholia would raise interesting questions about literary and rhetorical theory, ancient education, and reception. A different selection of Homeric scholia could have revealed how precarious is our knowledge of the opinions of scholars like Zenodotus and how important argumentative one-upmanship was in the formation of some scholia. There is not an adequate warning that much of the apparent “historical” information in scholia to Aristophanes and Pindar (and others) is likely to be based on inference (often false) from the text.

Inevitably, when so much detail is covered in such a short compass, there will be some omissions or mistakes. On Euripides, the important monograph of W. Elsperger, Reste und Spuren antiker Kritik gegen Euripides gesammelt aus den Euripidesscholien (1908) is not...