OUP (2016) h/b 533pp (and 4 plates) £120.00 (ISBN 9780199688982)
This substantial and important book is, in a sense, a sequel to Gibson and Kraus’s The Classical Commentary (2002), and saw its genesis at two meetings held in Oxford (2012) and the USA (2013). Its five sections contain 25 contributions, all of high standard (naturally, some are technical and/or recondite), but far too numerous for all of them to be noticed here: accordingly, the reviewer will concentrate on those likely to be of the widest interest and greatest current relevance: especially section 1, and items from sections 2, 3, and 5.
The five sections, which follow an interesting and helpful Introduction by the editors titled Form and Content, comprise (a) Individuals: Commentaries and modern commentators; (b) Traditions: Commentaries on specific authors and texts; (c) Material: Form, series, markets; (d) Reception: History of commentary; (e) Futures: Commentaries and the web. Bibliographies follow each article.
The first section opens with a searching account by P.J. Finglass of Jebb’s Sophocles, in which the strengths and weaknesses of that justly famous series are examined: in particular, L. Campbell’s work on the playwright, overshadowed as it has been, emerges as by no means inferior. F. tellingly quotes Wilamowitz’s letter to Jebb, in which he uses the word commodissima (‘most serviceable’) of his Philoctetes—hardly likely to give much pleasure to the recipient. (This comment by W. should ideally be read in conjunction with C.O. Brink’s more detailed account of his ‘modified rapture’ in his English Classical Scholarship of 1986). Since interest in Jebb has been revived of late, Pat Easterling’s sensitive account in Stray’s The Owl of Minerva (2005), which shows him at work in detail, should also be borne in mind. However, F’s summing-up (‘He unquestionably deserves respect: nevertheless it may be salutary to remind ourselves of where and how he sometimes falls short’) is both fair and judicious—but how many other commentaries are still in use after more than a century?
This is followed by Stray’s detailed description of the difficult genesis of Eduard Fraenkel’s ‘monstrous’ Agamemnon (1950), a notably brave undertaking by OUP in the circumstances of the time, though S. does not recount how Fraenkel, whose commentary and translation of the Greek both had to be translated from the German into English by colleagues, upbraided those colleagues—in a widely reported anecdote—for their unsatisfactory command of their native tongue. Reviews, as S. recounts, were mixed, though admiration for F.’s immense scholarship could not be withheld, and is perhaps still shown by the high prices that the three (famous) volumes now command: additionally, S. gives a very fair assessment of the man, whom he cannot have known personally. The ‘reply’ to Fraenkel, in the form of the Denniston/Page edition, is not ignored, yet, for all its virtues, it seems curiously insubstantial. (By an untypical slip, S. attributes the first volume in the Oxford ‘Red’ Euripides series to Platnauer’s Ion: it was actually his Iphigeneia in Tauris).
Those who were brought up on T.E. Page’s school editions of Virgil will welcome in Chapter 3 (as did the reviewer) R.F. Thomas’s favourable, and here well documented, reassessment of Page’s work vis-à-vis that of later commentators (Austin, Williams). Page, an Old Salopian under the headmastership of B.H. Kennedy, and for many years a teacher at Charterhouse, was a notably humane man and a scholar who transcended his austere training by ‘bringing to the fore Virgil the poet, along with his intertexts and reception texts, and all manner of stylistic and metrical aspects’. But since his unfavourable view of the conduct of Aeneas in the Dido episode did not chime at all well with the later editors, it was timely for J.J. O’Hara in his school edition of 2011 to restore the balance by referring to Page’s ‘valuable’ work as his own starting point: and, as T. reminds us, Page has his biographer in a study by N. Rudd (Schoolmaster Extraordinary,1961). As one might say, vetustior, non deterior.
In Chapter 6, S.P. Oakley considers E.R. Dodds’s justly famous edition of and commentary on Euripides’ Bacchae (1944) which lifted the Oxford ‘Reds’ series, after a stuttering start, ameliorated by Page’s Medea, to a new level. Dodds’s election to the Regius chair, against the local contenders (Bowra and Denniston) had not been without controversy (and there was personal animosity as well), but it proved to have been unquestionably the right choice: Dodds’s Sather Lectures on The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) remain among the most distinguished in that distinguished series, and his edition of Plato’s Gorgias (1959) was another fine achievement. Oakley quotes to good effect two passages from Dodds’s introduction to the Bacchae, demonstrating the manner in which his comments are related to his overall interpretation of the play; and Oakley also illustrates, via extracts from the notes, how Dodds brings alive and explains Euripides’ dramatic technique; but textual criticism is not ignored, and O. gives examples here too (not always agreeing), and he mentions Dodds’s brilliant article On Misunderstanding Oedipus Rex (1966) —see p.84, note 4. One may feel that O. shows indirectly that this Bacchae would have made an ideal candidate for CUP’s later ‘Orange’ series. Finally, the reviewer was glad to see reference here to John Jackson’s remarkable Marginalia Scaenica (1955) which so impressed Fraenkel, who had helped to see it published.
In Chapter 13, John Davies considers the ‘Historical Commentary’, from its relatively modest origins (e.g. How and Wells’s Herodotus), but already with growing awareness of ethnographic observations and theories, to the full impact of epigraphic, archaeological and papyrological documentation. This, argues D., has led to a kind of undesirable schism between (a) a ‘near exclusive concentration on events and factuality’ on the one hand, and (b) preoccupation with text, vocabulary, and literary form on the other. Although D. gives examples (notably contrasting Chilver’s ‘dry and limited annotations’ on a passage in Tacitus with Rhiannon Ash’s intentionally ‘historiographical commentary’ on the same section, and himself offering ‘unified’ accounts, of a short passage in Thucydides and a longer one from Justin’s epitome of Trogus), the reviewer wonders how grievous a problem this is in practice, and whether it is not satisfactorily surmounted in, say, Hornblower’s commentary on Thucydides—and who would go to the same scholar’s superb Lykophron for anything other than its historico-religious insights? D. is on stronger ground, and makes a telling point, when he reminds us of how many important texts still await their (detailed) commentator. He lists Xenophon’s Hellenica, Dio and Diodorus among many others; even much of Plutarch remains to be properly explored (or exploited by PhD candidates?), and there are many minor historians who have been virtually ignored.
Chapter 18 (Roy Gibson) discusses the Cambridge ‘Orange’ commentaries (CCTC), the big brothers of the ‘Green and Yellows’—and some very important books are among their number: one need mention only, say, James Diggle’s Theophrastus to find oneself in some notably distinguished company, and G. helpfully lists the 54 volumes published up to early 2015, of which perhaps 30 are of ‘mainstream’ authors, especially Cicero. G. goes on to describe the ‘character’ of an ‘Orange’ volume, distinguishing it, with a detailed example, from a ‘Green-and-Yellow’ (this passage, pp.351-3, repays careful attention). We then get an overview of the series, followed by the ‘Editorial Board and purpose of CCTC’. G. notes the ‘relative privileging of textual matters in the early volumes’, and rightly and relevantly points out that the series ‘does not foretell or predict the directions the Classics would begin to take from the 1980s onwards’: just so, but this subject is too big and important for further consideration here (see now R. Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers [2016], reviewed elsewhere on this site). Finally, G. considers the ‘impact’ of the ‘Orange’ series, with interesting results, the design and production of the series, and the ‘future of the commentary’ in the light of the first 50 years of CCTC. He concludes that (a) there ‘evidently remains a real need and desire for … volumes that establish and patiently interpret the texts on which all literary and much historical study of antiquity is based’; and (b) there is an ‘urgent need to bring the classical texts of Christian late antiquity within the fold’.
In the final chapter (26) Sander Goldberg calls up an apocalyptic vision, when there are ‘online all Greek and Latin texts, all sources and all conjectures about all texts, all commentaries about all texts, and all scholarship on all texts: how will we make informed decisions about the accuracy and utility of that information? What expertise will be required to make productive sense of all those resources, to distinguish the real value in them from the illusion of value?’ One may perhaps hazard a guess at what answer Housman would have given to those questions, and it would not have been a long one.
In so generous a book, one might have expected to find a discussion of why so many commentaries have been hugely growing in size, compared to their predecessors: contrast only A.M. Dale’s Oxford ‘Reds’ of Alcestis (1954) and Helen (1967) with the more recent, and extended, commentaries by Parker and Allan of those two plays, or, in the ‘Green-and-Yellow’ series, Webster’s Philoctetes (1970) with that of Schein 43 years later: instances could be multiplied. The editors may feel, not without justice, that this matter is addressed, implicitly if not systematically, at intervals here: but it raises questions of cost, audience, school, undergraduate, and graduate needs, ‘approach’, and of course academic standing.
Where do the later (and vastly improved) Loeb editions fit in today’s respublica litterarum? The Oxford ‘Reds’ had to use Murray’s OCT: could this (whether OCT, Budé, or Teubner) be a template for the future (after all, E.R. Dodds it was who said that we now have texts that we can live with, little though Shackleton Bailey agreed with him)? Are there lessons to be gleaned from the monster multi-authored bilingual Bern commentary on the Iliad still in progress? (Be it noted that, for Anglophone readers, the translation from the Greek into the version of Richmond Lattimore was predecided, and that Martin West’s Teubner text is also the given). These points, limited as they are to an Anglophone audience, barely scratch the surface.
The reviewer is sadly conscious that he has had to pass over all too many contributions of equal worth to those which he has, however briefly, noticed: Harrison on the ‘two-authored’ commentaries on Horace, Heslin on the ‘dream of a universal variorum’, Farrell on Virgil’s use of Theocritean scholia, and Elliott on the fragments of Ennius might be singled out. He therefore reiterates that this is a book of exceptional quality which deserves to be widely read, and its lessons absorbed. OUP has done a fine job, worthy of its contents.
Colin Leach
CLASSICAL COMMENTARIES: Explorations in a Scholarly Genre
OUP (2016) h/b 533pp (and 4 plates) £120.00 (ISBN 9780199688982)
This substantial and important book is, in a sense, a sequel to Gibson and Kraus’s The Classical Commentary (2002), and saw its genesis at two meetings held in Oxford (2012) and the USA (2013). Its five sections contain 25 contributions, all of high standard (naturally, some are technical and/or recondite), but far too numerous for all of them to be noticed here: accordingly, the reviewer will concentrate on those likely to be of the widest interest and greatest current relevance: especially section 1, and items from sections 2, 3, and 5.
The five sections, which follow an interesting and helpful Introduction by the editors titled Form and Content, comprise (a) Individuals: Commentaries and modern commentators; (b) Traditions: Commentaries on specific authors and texts; (c) Material: Form, series, markets; (d) Reception: History of commentary; (e) Futures: Commentaries and the web. Bibliographies follow each article.
The first section opens with a searching account by P.J. Finglass of Jebb’s Sophocles, in which the strengths and weaknesses of that justly famous series are examined: in particular, L. Campbell’s work on the playwright, overshadowed as it has been, emerges as by no means inferior. F. tellingly quotes Wilamowitz’s letter to Jebb, in which he uses the word commodissima (‘most serviceable’) of his Philoctetes—hardly likely to give much pleasure to the recipient. (This comment by W. should ideally be read in conjunction with C.O. Brink’s more detailed account of his ‘modified rapture’ in his English Classical Scholarship of 1986). Since interest in Jebb has been revived of late, Pat Easterling’s sensitive account in Stray’s The Owl of Minerva (2005), which shows him at work in detail, should also be borne in mind. However, F’s summing-up (‘He unquestionably deserves respect: nevertheless it may be salutary to remind ourselves of where and how he sometimes falls short’) is both fair and judicious—but how many other commentaries are still in use after more than a century?
This is followed by Stray’s detailed description of the difficult genesis of Eduard Fraenkel’s ‘monstrous’ Agamemnon (1950), a notably brave undertaking by OUP in the circumstances of the time, though S. does not recount how Fraenkel, whose commentary and translation of the Greek both had to be translated from the German into English by colleagues, upbraided those colleagues—in a widely reported anecdote—for their unsatisfactory command of their native tongue. Reviews, as S. recounts, were mixed, though admiration for F.’s immense scholarship could not be withheld, and is perhaps still shown by the high prices that the three (famous) volumes now command: additionally, S. gives a very fair assessment of the man, whom he cannot have known personally. The ‘reply’ to Fraenkel, in the form of the Denniston/Page edition, is not ignored, yet, for all its virtues, it seems curiously insubstantial. (By an untypical slip, S. attributes the first volume in the Oxford ‘Red’ Euripides series to Platnauer’s Ion: it was actually his Iphigeneia in Tauris).
Those who were brought up on T.E. Page’s school editions of Virgil will welcome in Chapter 3 (as did the reviewer) R.F. Thomas’s favourable, and here well documented, reassessment of Page’s work vis-à-vis that of later commentators (Austin, Williams). Page, an Old Salopian under the headmastership of B.H. Kennedy, and for many years a teacher at Charterhouse, was a notably humane man and a scholar who transcended his austere training by ‘bringing to the fore Virgil the poet, along with his intertexts and reception texts, and all manner of stylistic and metrical aspects’. But since his unfavourable view of the conduct of Aeneas in the Dido episode did not chime at all well with the later editors, it was timely for J.J. O’Hara in his school edition of 2011 to restore the balance by referring to Page’s ‘valuable’ work as his own starting point: and, as T. reminds us, Page has his biographer in a study by N. Rudd (Schoolmaster Extraordinary,1961). As one might say, vetustior, non deterior.
In Chapter 6, S.P. Oakley considers E.R. Dodds’s justly famous edition of and commentary on Euripides’ Bacchae (1944) which lifted the Oxford ‘Reds’ series, after a stuttering start, ameliorated by Page’s Medea, to a new level. Dodds’s election to the Regius chair, against the local contenders (Bowra and Denniston) had not been without controversy (and there was personal animosity as well), but it proved to have been unquestionably the right choice: Dodds’s Sather Lectures on The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) remain among the most distinguished in that distinguished series, and his edition of Plato’s Gorgias (1959) was another fine achievement. Oakley quotes to good effect two passages from Dodds’s introduction to the Bacchae, demonstrating the manner in which his comments are related to his overall interpretation of the play; and Oakley also illustrates, via extracts from the notes, how Dodds brings alive and explains Euripides’ dramatic technique; but textual criticism is not ignored, and O. gives examples here too (not always agreeing), and he mentions Dodds’s brilliant article On Misunderstanding Oedipus Rex (1966) —see p.84, note 4. One may feel that O. shows indirectly that this Bacchae would have made an ideal candidate for CUP’s later ‘Orange’ series. Finally, the reviewer was glad to see reference here to John Jackson’s remarkable Marginalia Scaenica (1955) which so impressed Fraenkel, who had helped to see it published.
In Chapter 13, John Davies considers the ‘Historical Commentary’, from its relatively modest origins (e.g. How and Wells’s Herodotus), but already with growing awareness of ethnographic observations and theories, to the full impact of epigraphic, archaeological and papyrological documentation. This, argues D., has led to a kind of undesirable schism between (a) a ‘near exclusive concentration on events and factuality’ on the one hand, and (b) preoccupation with text, vocabulary, and literary form on the other. Although D. gives examples (notably contrasting Chilver’s ‘dry and limited annotations’ on a passage in Tacitus with Rhiannon Ash’s intentionally ‘historiographical commentary’ on the same section, and himself offering ‘unified’ accounts, of a short passage in Thucydides and a longer one from Justin’s epitome of Trogus), the reviewer wonders how grievous a problem this is in practice, and whether it is not satisfactorily surmounted in, say, Hornblower’s commentary on Thucydides—and who would go to the same scholar’s superb Lykophron for anything other than its historico-religious insights? D. is on stronger ground, and makes a telling point, when he reminds us of how many important texts still await their (detailed) commentator. He lists Xenophon’s Hellenica, Dio and Diodorus among many others; even much of Plutarch remains to be properly explored (or exploited by PhD candidates?), and there are many minor historians who have been virtually ignored.
Chapter 18 (Roy Gibson) discusses the Cambridge ‘Orange’ commentaries (CCTC), the big brothers of the ‘Green and Yellows’—and some very important books are among their number: one need mention only, say, James Diggle’s Theophrastus to find oneself in some notably distinguished company, and G. helpfully lists the 54 volumes published up to early 2015, of which perhaps 30 are of ‘mainstream’ authors, especially Cicero. G. goes on to describe the ‘character’ of an ‘Orange’ volume, distinguishing it, with a detailed example, from a ‘Green-and-Yellow’ (this passage, pp.351-3, repays careful attention). We then get an overview of the series, followed by the ‘Editorial Board and purpose of CCTC’. G. notes the ‘relative privileging of textual matters in the early volumes’, and rightly and relevantly points out that the series ‘does not foretell or predict the directions the Classics would begin to take from the 1980s onwards’: just so, but this subject is too big and important for further consideration here (see now R. Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers [2016], reviewed elsewhere on this site). Finally, G. considers the ‘impact’ of the ‘Orange’ series, with interesting results, the design and production of the series, and the ‘future of the commentary’ in the light of the first 50 years of CCTC. He concludes that (a) there ‘evidently remains a real need and desire for … volumes that establish and patiently interpret the texts on which all literary and much historical study of antiquity is based’; and (b) there is an ‘urgent need to bring the classical texts of Christian late antiquity within the fold’.
In the final chapter (26) Sander Goldberg calls up an apocalyptic vision, when there are ‘online all Greek and Latin texts, all sources and all conjectures about all texts, all commentaries about all texts, and all scholarship on all texts: how will we make informed decisions about the accuracy and utility of that information? What expertise will be required to make productive sense of all those resources, to distinguish the real value in them from the illusion of value?’ One may perhaps hazard a guess at what answer Housman would have given to those questions, and it would not have been a long one.
In so generous a book, one might have expected to find a discussion of why so many commentaries have been hugely growing in size, compared to their predecessors: contrast only A.M. Dale’s Oxford ‘Reds’ of Alcestis (1954) and Helen (1967) with the more recent, and extended, commentaries by Parker and Allan of those two plays, or, in the ‘Green-and-Yellow’ series, Webster’s Philoctetes (1970) with that of Schein 43 years later: instances could be multiplied. The editors may feel, not without justice, that this matter is addressed, implicitly if not systematically, at intervals here: but it raises questions of cost, audience, school, undergraduate, and graduate needs, ‘approach’, and of course academic standing.
Where do the later (and vastly improved) Loeb editions fit in today’s respublica litterarum? The Oxford ‘Reds’ had to use Murray’s OCT: could this (whether OCT, Budé, or Teubner) be a template for the future (after all, E.R. Dodds it was who said that we now have texts that we can live with, little though Shackleton Bailey agreed with him)? Are there lessons to be gleaned from the monster multi-authored bilingual Bern commentary on the Iliad still in progress? (Be it noted that, for Anglophone readers, the translation from the Greek into the version of Richmond Lattimore was predecided, and that Martin West’s Teubner text is also the given). These points, limited as they are to an Anglophone audience, barely scratch the surface.
The reviewer is sadly conscious that he has had to pass over all too many contributions of equal worth to those which he has, however briefly, noticed: Harrison on the ‘two-authored’ commentaries on Horace, Heslin on the ‘dream of a universal variorum’, Farrell on Virgil’s use of Theocritean scholia, and Elliott on the fragments of Ennius might be singled out. He therefore reiterates that this is a book of exceptional quality which deserves to be widely read, and its lessons absorbed. OUP has done a fine job, worthy of its contents.
Colin Leach