Classical Commentaries: Explorations in a Scholarly Genre ed. by Christina Kraus, Christopher Stray, and: Homeric Epic and Its Reception: Interpretive Essays by Seth L. Schein, and: Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception ed. by Shane Butler (review)

Although all three of these collected volumes are published by major presses specializing in classical reception studies, the books vary widely in size, scope, theoretical orientation, and methodological approach. As such, they vividly embody the contemporary state of the long-standing divide between (to put it too briefly and broadly) traditional and radical approaches to classical reception studies.

Kraus and Stray’s Classical Commentaries is a collection of twenty-five essays covering a wide range of commentators, texts, series, and publishers over a very broad historical period, from Hipparchus of Nicea’s commentary on Aratus’ Phaenomena (147-127 BCE) to Peter Anderson’s print and born-digital commentaries on Seneca and Martial (2008-present). The focus, scope, and methodological approach of the essays also vary, from chapters on the contribution of individual Classical scholars from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to analyses of Renaissance Italian advertising for Terence commentaries. The volume is aimed at a specialist audience: not all the Latin, Greek, French, and German is translated, and the reader is assumed to be familiar with the principles of textual criticism and the vocabulary of bibliography and book history, as well as many acronyms and shorthands familiar to Classicists.

As is amply demonstrated in this volume, classical commentaries are a superbly rich archive of case studies for tracing the interweaving of cultural, linguistic, institutional, material, and economic factors in the production of interpretations. One of the major strengths of Kraus and Stray’s book is its determination to attend to the complexity of this interweaving, as almost all contributors combine analysis of the commentary as (interpretative, scholarly, pedagogical) text and the commentary as (material, physical) book.

The interpretations offered by commentaries are all the more interesting because they aspire to normative status. As one contributor writes, “commented editions set the terms on which . . . readers engage with the text” (Elliot, 136). Rather than simply recounting the history of interpretation of classical texts as revealed by commentaries, however, almost all the essays in the volume offer some reflection on the quality or value of the commentaries being discussed, whether contemporary or historical. The collection thus acquires a prescriptive, rather than descriptive, edge. This is not so much the product of a theoretical premise in the volume but more a result of its (partially) practical orientation. Almost all the contributors situate themselves as users or creators of commentaries, and many essays explicitly discuss the future of commentary, advocating for particular techniques and approaches.

The evaluative impulse in the book goes along with the assumption that there is a correct interpretation for texts, an idea that surfaces in a surprising number of the essays in this volume, as when Joseph Farrell declares that “Virgil’s ancient commentators were correct to read Eclogue 5 as a metapoetic allegory” (415). Of course, reading ancient Greek and Latin texts requires a high degree of linguistic, historical, and critical expertise, with commentaries being a major tool in imparting/acquiring that expertise. This means that the notion of a “correct” interpretation is in some ways central to the genre of classical commentary. However, more pressure could be put on this notion through a comparative and historical analysis of commentary, which a collection like this makes possible.

The notion of correct interpretation and the idea that ancient texts must be defended against error return in Seth Schein’s Homeric Epic and Its Reception, which is otherwise very different from Kraus and Stray’s book. Less than half the length of Classical Commentaries, Schein’s volume collects essays by a single scholar on a single...