Classics Scholars, between Theory and Practice

INTRODUCTION ; ]^h book collects revised versions of the papers presented at a graduate conference held at the University of Turin in June 2011 under the title ‘Classics scholars : their work and methods’. Our intention in organising the conference was to invite graduate students and young researchers to discuss the history of classical scholarship. Our aim was to ofer fresh perspectives on scholars from the past, with an eye to the theory underlying their work and their relections on method. Our call for papers also put emphasis on the question of the relevance of classics, as we were also interested in the way the scholars of the past conceived the relationship of the discipline to contemporary society. Why did they think classics mattered ? And what were their views on the public function and impact of classical scholarship ? We also decided to focus on individual igures because this allowed us to receive contributions from outside the ield of classics. Classical scholarship spans from antiquity to the modern world, and we were looking forward to hearing what scholars working on, for instance, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance had to say about interactions with the classical tradition in these periods. This decision also allowed us to gather papers with diferent approaches and agendas. For instance, Floris Verhaart is interested in the development of classical scholarship and its relationship to both ethics and politics, especially regarding a little-known chapter in the intellectual history of early eighteenth-century Holland. Luca Gili, whose research mainly lies in the ield of medieval philosophy, uncovers the methodological approach to classical texts of a scholar, Thomas Aquinas, whose main agenda was not historical or philological but philosophical. The response to our call for papers was enthusiastic, and we regretted having to turn down a number of interesting proposals. The conference papers, too, proved extremely rich, and provoked stimulating discussions. Prof. Alessandro Schiesaro [Sapienza University of Rome] kindly agreed to give the keynote lecture, on psychoanalysis and classical scholarship, with special attention to the Dido episode in the Aeneid. We thought that many of the papers deserved publication, especially because they addressed topics which had not yet been suiciently investigated and shed new light on a number of historical and philological questions. Appunti Romani, with its speciic focus on giving young scholars the chance to publish the irst results of their researches, was the ideal destination for the contributions in our volume. We are therefore grateful to the journal’s editors, and especially to Emanuele Lelli, for agreeing to host our volume as a special issue of Appunti Romani. Following the custom of this journal, we asked our speakers to have their academic advisors act as referees for their papers. Given its breadth, the present volume does not aim to represent a unity. Papers cover diferent areas and contexts, and their degree of it with the conference topic varies. Some of the contributions are concerned with individual scholars (Buzzi, ®Vg[¯!14, 2012, 9-14 &% ^cigdYjXi^dc De Simone, Pezzini, Roy), while some look at a certain scholarly context (Verhaart, Malgieri, Scappaticcio). The last paper in the collection (Lef kowitz) is only indirectly connected to our main topic, but we thought it deserved to be included, as it contributes to the debate on the relevance of classics in modern academia. The contributions in this volume are arranged in chronological order, spanning from the 13th to the 21st century. Luca Gili’s article focuses on the philological interests of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). Aquinas’s approach is that of a philosopher, concerned merely with the content of the ancient texts, which he reads in translation ; the works of Aristotle are for him authoritative repositories of a knowledge which is still valid even given the Christian revelation. Nevertheless, even such an extreme content-focused approach does not imply a complete disinterest for issues which one may call (only slightly anachronistically) ‘philological’. In particular, Gili points out that Aquinas was concerned with the attribution of works, and also with the choice of variant readings, albeit mediated by the Latin translation and limited for religious reasons to non-scriptural texts. Moreover, Gili discusses Aquinas’ search for etymologies and their heuristic function, which Gili considers as another aspect of his ‘philological activity’. Despite focusing on a philosopher rather than a philologist, Gili’s contribution introduces some of the questions which are more directly addressed by the other scholars analysed in the volume. What problems arise when studying texts written centuries ago in a different socio-cultural context ? What is the best way to deal with them ? Do classical texts convey a knowledge or ‘wisdom’ which may have a direct impact on the life and culture of the readers ? This second question is central in Malgieri’s article, devoted to the French scholars Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), Jean Regnault de Segrais (1624-1701) and Pierre Daniel Huet (1630-1721). Malgieri analyses the work of these authors and highlights in it some elements of discontinuity with previous tradition of classical scholarship. In contrast with the traditional view of the Aeneid as a source of biographical, scientiic, ethical or philosophical truths, Bayle and Segrais, despite their diferent standpoints, share a concern to approach the poem as a mere work of art. This concern may itself be inluenced by the rationalism of the era : progress in the ields of science and logic made the alleged wisdom of Virgil look obsolete and epistemologically uncertain, making room for the view that the poem was to be appreciated uniquely for its literary value. This also led to a dualism between the ‘specialisti della logica’ and the ‘specialisti dell’esprit’, as Malgieri calls them. In particular, in his dictionary note on Virgil the rationalist Bayle sharply divides the poet’s life from his work, considering the latter, with a slight understatement, a mere jeu d’esprit ; in the preface to his translation, Segrais feels the need to justify the anachronisms of the Aeneid by talking enthusiastically of the divin esprit of poetry which transcends historical truth. Finally, Malgieri discusses Huet’s treatise on novels and his attempt to reconcile mythological and poetic language with the needs of human reason for a ‘true knowledge’. The contribution by Verhaart is closely related to these problems and focuses on the work of the scholars Pieter Burman (1668-1741) and Jean Le Clerc (1657- ^cigdYjXi^dc && 1736) and the controversy between the two schools to which they belonged. The historical and cultural context is that of ‘la querelle des anciennes et des modernes’ and of a widespread denial of the relevance of Greek and Latin literature. Once the knowledge or wisdom conveyed by the classics begins to be seen as only marginally relevant to modern life, one starts to challenge the need for and importance of a discipline dedicated to its study. To this issue Burman and Le Clerc respond in diferent ways. Burman on the one hand considers the classics as models of rhetoric, holding the view that ‘a colourful and elaborate use of language inspired by the ancients is particularly useful in the modern age’ ; on the other hand Le Clerc argues that content is more important than form and that ‘students of antiquity had to look for passages and elements in the texts that could be useful as an example with an eye to their own progress in virtue.’ As Verhaart argues, these diferent conceptions of the ‘relevance’ and purpose of classical instruction are at the heart of a conlict on the methodological level, that is, between a conception of philology merely as textual criticism (Burman) and one according to which it should also pay attention ‘to the actual contents of the text’ (Le Clerc). The dichotomy between rhetoric and moral instruction, between form and content, is thus relected in the conlict between ‘grammarians’, interested solely in textual matters, and scholars who wanted to provide the (non-specialist) reader with more historical background. Pezzini’s article deals with similar problems in a diferent age and considers the particular case of Amedeo Peyron (1785-1870). Peyron is essentially a ‘grammarian’, a lexicographer, papyrologist, and textual critic. Moreover, Peyron was one of the few Italian scholars of the time to be acquainted with contemporary developments in German philology, which, of course, holds a crucial place in the evolution of nineteenth-century classical scholarship. This ailiation engendered a conlict between Peyron and contemporary Italian scholars. The latter were sceptical of the ‘aridity’ of the German method, and their approach was dominated by two tendencies : on the one hand there was what we may call a humanistic approach, which considered the classics as repositories of wisdom and beauty, and on the other hand there was what we may call the antiquarian approach, which amounted to the indiscriminate collection of the material evidence of the past. Despite his ‘technical’ interests and his conviction of the importance of scientiic rigour, which he inherited from the German tradition, Peyron did not lose some elements which were characteristic of the traditional approaches, such as an interest in the contents and didactic potential of Classical texts. Moreover, he did not see textual criticism and linguistics as the only serious aspect of classical scholarship. The igure of Peyron also introduces the problem of the ‘scientiicity’ of classical scholarship, that is, whether and how classical scholarship can aspire to the same degree of knowledge claimed by science. The Italian reaction to nineteenth-century German philology is also the object of Buzzi’s contribution. Her brief article presents the work and personality of the linguist Domenico Pezzi (1844-1905), highlighting the inluence on him of the German Altertumswissenschaft and its optimism about the possibility of acquiring &' ^cigdYjXi^dc a complete and accurate knowledge of the classical world. Buzzi’s piece aims to draw attention to this neglected igure by highlighting his relationship with other classics scholars in late nineteenth-century Piemonte. For this, Buzzi relies on the corpus of unpublished letters by Pezzi, preserved in the Turin archives, which she has personally inspected. Roy’s substantial contribution analyses in detail the work and methodology of the French comparative scholar Henri Jeanmaire (1884-1960). Focusing on Jeanmaire’s seminal work on the Spartan Crypteia and his monographs ‘Couroi et Courètes’, Roy examines the origin of the comparative method and its application to the study of rites of initiation in Archaic Greece. Moreover, he discusses the theoretical foundations of Jeanmaire’s comparative work, emphasising their connection with the notions of evolutionism and Kulturkreis : behind Jeanmaire’s choice of comparing the Greek rites of initiation with analogous phenomena of modern African societies, Roy sees the conviction of a ‘césure infranchissable’ between the Classical world and modern European culture. Roy also considers the reception and criticism of Jeanmaire’s work by later exponents of the French school of history and anthropology, such as Vidal-Naquet and Gernet. By highlighting the cultural impact of Jeanmaire’s work and at the same time some of its laws, Roy’s paper is a convincing illustration of the heuristic potential of the comparative method. De Simone examines the German historian of religion and professor of exegesis Martin Hengel (1926-2009), whom she sees as an example both of a scholar who put the philological method at the service of history and of the beneits of a (serious) interdisciplinary approach. Moreover, De Simone presents the cultural context of Hengel’s work and discusses some practical examples of his methodology, in order to highlight his rejection of both the excesses of the Formgeschichte and of any « ostracism of historical [...] and critical methods ». Finally, the paper by Scappaticcio is a well-documented presentation of the corpus of Latin papyri, which highlights their nature, features and signiicance. Her contribution is not devoted to an individual scholar, but discusses the relationship of mainstream classical philology to a younger technical discipline within the ield of classics, namely Latin papyrology. Scappaticcio examines the role of Latin papyrology within classical scholarship and draws attention to the amount of material from the classical world which is still unknown or neglected. Analysis of this material requires a speciic methodology and expertise, but its results are relevant to the work of scholars working in other ields : as Scappaticcio points out, it will be certainly useful “abbandonare etichette e rinunciare ad ‘incasellamenti identitari’ e tentare semplicemente di valutare […] i materiali nella loro complessità e nella loro pluridimensionalità : il ilologo non potrà non essere ricettivo nei confronti delle acquisizioni che provengano da quelle scienze ritenute (per forse in troppo tempo) ‘ancillari’ e tentare di soppesarvi e modellarvi il suo approccio metodologico.” The volume is framed by the contribution of Lef kowitz, which is concerned with the question of the relevance of classics in the contemporary world. His paper does not look at a classical scholar, but is concerned with the role of clas- ^cigdYjXi^dc &( sics in contemporary society and academia. However, it bears points of contact with the above papers, especially in showing that the scholarly responses to the question of the relevance of classics have been profoundly afected by the attempt to model classical scholarship on the sciences. According to Lef kowitz, an excessive attempt to model classical philology on ‘pure sciences’ has engendered a lack of relection on the impact of classical scholarship on contemporary society and its connection to social and political issues. Moreover, by trying to adopt the standards of the sciences, classics has lost contact with those areas which are most familiar to the common man, the chaotic and immeasurable areas of human interaction. Lef kowitz also argues that the common distrust in the relevance of the classics partly depends on the scholars’ inability to ofer a valid rationale for their ield. Accordingly, classics scholars have for too long tended to explain the relevance of classics on the basis of elements that are ultimately external to the content of the discipline, namely a supposed moral authority or the idea that dealing with diicult languages and a signiicant cross-temporal gap helps to develop reasoning abilities. We would like to conclude this short introduction by expressing our gratitude to the people and institutions which made our conference and the publication of this volume possible. First of all, a warm thanks to the Facoltà di Lettere and Filosoia and the Dipartimento di Filologia, Linguistica e Tradizione Classica at the University of Turin for hosting the conference. We are particularly grateful to Prof. Federica Bessone, Prof. Enrico Maltese and Prof. Lorenzo Massobrio for encouragement and advice along the way, and to the students and researchers who attended the sessions and chaired the panels for contributing to the success of the event. We also owe a great debt to Prof. Michele Rosboch for his crucial assistance with the organisation and for his continuous help and direction. A warm thanks also to Prof. Alessandro Schiesaro, who supported our initiative from the very beginning and ofered invaluable encouragement. Prof. Schiesaro is also to be thanked for accepting to give the keynote. Finally, we are grateful to the Fondazione CRT and the Centro Culturale Piergiorgio Frassati for supporting the organisation of the conference. In addition, we would like to thank Giulia Tozzi and Rita Gianfelice at Fabrizio Serra editore for their help with the publication of the volume. <^jhZeeZEZoo^c^ÆHiZ[VcdGZWZ\\^Vc^