Classical Commentaries: Explorations in a Scholarly Genre ed. by Christina S. Kraus, Christopher Stray (review)

As this book remarks, no commentary can contain everything, nor can any book about commentaries, but Kraus and Stray’s team covers a huge range — ancient, medieval, and Renaissance scholarship, as well as that of recent times. A particular interest, however, attaches to chapters assessing individual scholars. Stephen Oakley remarks that E. R. Dodds had an unusual combination of desirable attributes for the job, combining heavyweight learning with literary understanding and lively engagement with the intellectual currents of his age. Indeed, after seventy-five years his commentary on Euripides’ Bacchae still seems both masterly and humane; the Freudianism is of its time yet somehow works.

But writing a commentary is like being a prime minister: nobody has all the qualities needed. Patrick Finglass assesses with authority the strengths and weaknesses of R. C. Jebb’s late Victorian commentaries on Sophocles. Jebb has lasted a long time because he was (mostly) a safe pair of hands, but one misses brilliance and idiosyncrasy. Kraus and Stray, this book’s editors, observe that the commentator’s voice “is both impersonal . . . and intensely personal.” (A special case is Robin Nisbet and Niall Rudd’s joint commentary on Horace’s Odes 3, discussed by Stephen Harrison, in which “RN” and “NR” disagree repeatedly.) As with statesmen, so the greatest scholars may display the most conspicuous faults. It is a pity that there is not more than passing mention of J. D. Denniston and Denys Page’s commentary on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon; at times outrageous (Page’s doing), and presented with forensic brilliance and bluster, it is also a check on, and sometimes a corrective of, Eduard Fraenkel. Fraenkel’s Agamemnon is one of the largest commentaries ever written on anything, and Stray enjoys himself with this “Teutonic monster in Oxford” (which was Bernard Williams’s description of how lesser men regarded Fraenkel; Williams saw in him “humility in the face of dense and complex philological fact”).

Roy Gibson quotes a reader complaining of “a general air of weariness and unhappiness” pervading a famous series of commentaries. The editors of this volume, in contrast, speak of “a sense of fun shared by commentator and audience alike.” Commentary has been wrongly belittled as a pedants’ playground; this book offers a brighter view.