Grammatical Commentaries

We should first observe that grammatical commentaries were different from the textual commentaries on ancient authors. The commentaries of the grammarians had to serve the needs of students at the second level of instruction, including those young pupils who were just out of elementary education. They needed special guidance because, to quote Gellius, they were part of a “vulgus semidoctum” (half-taught crowd) and had just started to breathe the air of education.¹ In addition to tailoring his teaching to advanced students, Didymus the Blind had to address those needy young men and adjust his teaching accordingly. Quintilian appropriately said that a lecture “was not like a dinner that was insufficient for many, but it was like the sun that offered light and heat to all.”² This eternal problem of teaching was more acute in late antiquity when, as we will see, the levels of instruction were not neatly divided as in the age of Quintilian and Plutarch. Commentaries had to respond satisfactorily to the requests of a diverse audience. In commentaries, grammarians could cover a text line by line and word by word or divide it into distinct lemmata. Their notes concentrated on punctuation, meter, and especially points of grammar, covering morphology and syntax. In the late fourth to early fifth century, the learned grammarian Servius wrote a commentary to Vergil, for which Robert Kaster has remarked on the disproportionate place of notes concerning language.³ The traditional text that described the expertise of the grammarian is the grammatical treatise of Dionysius Thrax.⁴ Grammar addressed the poets and rarely prose, and embraced prosody, explanation of literary figures, phraseology, subject matter, etymologies, analogical regularities, and the critical study of literature.

In the class of the grammarian, a young man achieved the status of a person of culture, and in this respect an expertise in rhetoric did not bring him a substantial advantage unless he aimed at political life.⁵ What he had learned in grammatical school served as a passport that allowed him to address cultured and sophisticated people in different parts of the ancient world and to be recognized by them. Quintilian described the grammarian’s activity as lecturing on correct speech, explaining problematic issues, giving the background of a text, or paraphrasing poems. The “historical” side of that activity consisted of extracting historical, geographical, and mythological figures and tropes. Scholia to an author taken from advanced commentaries inform us about that side of literary activity. We have seen that Epictetus regarded “historiae” with distaste as the epitome of the grammatical instruction to which his new students were addicted. Learning rules upon rules and imbibing often irrelevant information was simpler than aiming to improve one’s moral stature. “Histories” communicated the weight of tradition and a knowledge of the past that was fragmented into unconnected parts.

Grammatical commentaries also insisted on elucidation of unfamiliar vocabulary. Glossographical analysis was a powerful tool in the hands of the grammarian. Scholia minora to Homer, which appear in so many school papyri, consisted of lists of words or expressions that were given corresponding and easier terms taken from current usage.⁶ They are distinguished from the scholia vetera, a compilation of exegetical material that went back to the Alexandrian scholars. The most elementary part of grammatical commentaries addressed the correct reading of a text. It was crucial for students to learn how to approach a literary work with understanding. Didymus the Blind in fact was acutely aware of the power of words and the insufficient preparation of his pupils. Two more points need to be elucidated. It was typical of grammatical commentaries to be very detailed at the beginning of a book and then include only sparse notes.⁷ We will see that Olympiodorus observed the same method. In grammatical commentaries, moreover, the personality and quirks of the compiler disappeared entirely, leaving a work with little connection to him.⁸

Textual Commentaries: Hypomnemata

The last decades have seen a strong interest in ancient commentaries to authoritative texts that provided access to a cultural tradition. The primary motivation for writing commentaries was the need to fully understand ancient texts that had lost their immediate appeal or intelligibility to readers and to explain language and context to students. As Eleanor Dickey has shown, traces of ancient scholarship can be found in the fifth century BCE, but this reached a peak with the Alexandrian scholars who produced commentaries on authors in the first century BCE. More interest was aroused in the imperial period.⁹ The Alexandrian scholars established securely the texts of many classical authors and produced commentaries on them. These have not survived, but their influence and some fragments appear in the scholia, marginalia, and later commentaries. Aristarchus was the most conservative of them, and the standardization of the Homeric text that was a constant in education was due to his influence.¹⁰ His commentaries were little altered after they were created, although multiple versions circulated. The Alexandrian Didymus Chalcenterus (to be distinguished from Didymus the Blind), who lived in the Augustan Age, wrote innumerable books and was a tremendous producer of commentaries. None of those was preserved in its entirety, but again fragments appear in later works and in marginalia.¹¹ The same is true for the commentaries of the grammarian Theon in the age of Tiberius. The fragments of Theon that have been transmitted to us have lost their linguistic content and concern almost only mythography.

Craig Gibson has argued that earlier commentaries were not necessarily any more exempt from errors than later ones.¹² Commentaries could circulate independently from a text and were self-standing, but in what follows I consider those in which lemmata were explained through observations on the language and thus led to exegesis of a text. The commentaries of both Didymus and Olympiodorus maintain this format. They are not the kind of commentaries in which an author’s text is discussed in its entirety (or almost), but they cite selected passages.¹³

Marginalia in Papyri: Facts from Fragments

Marginalia consist of notes written in the margins or interlinear spaces of a text. They are fragments from ancient scholarship that refer to commentaries that have mainly disappeared.¹⁴ Not only are they of great importance because they preserve traces of those ancient commentaries that we would not know otherwise, but they also, something of great significance for this project, often represent the works of scholars, teachers, and students. The ultimate source of annotations was oral. Notes arose from the reading of commentaries, from lectures that took place in school, and from students’ memoranda.

Notes written in the margins are sometimes called scholia and need to be distinguished from hypomnemata, self-standing commentaries.¹⁵ The latter, which often are the remnants of ancient commentaries, have close connections with ancient authoritative texts, but in the former the connection is dispersed in sporadic notes and comments. Marginalia and notes on papyri are scattered on texts from the third century BCE to the seventh century CE, but until later antiquity annotation was not a frequent practice.¹⁶ Sometimes notes may look similar to commentaries, but undoubtedly the influence of commentaries like those of Didymus and Theon are the common factor. Papyrus commentaries preserve the names of these commentators only very occasionally, because the name of a commentator is most often concealed. The eminent interest of commentaries was to transmit some of the research of predecessors. We will see that Didymus’s text and the commentaries of the Neoplatonists such as Olympiodorus include several expressions that give us the flavor of teaching and oral communication. These expressions refer to parts already covered and to explanatory terms and expressions that often are responses to students’ questions. In the same way, the papyrus marginalia often commence with expressions like “instead of,” “that is to say,” “for example,” “this means,” and “the sense is” and let us perceive the atmosphere of the classroom.¹⁷

The notes in texts before late antiquity are shorter and sparser, but later they increase in length and become considerably denser. Kathleen McNamee rightly argued that the notes do not represent personal contributions to a text, such as ideas and original suppositions, but are records of information and most often refer to previous commentaries. I would like to point, however, to two papyri that contain corrections and notes written for school use. Both are autographs, that is, written by the author himself. Autographs are worthy of close attention because they refer to a text before it has been emended and show an author and his mind at work. One of these papyri is P.Lit.Lond. 138, a rhetorical exercise from the second century that was entirely written by a teacher or a student. The papyrus shows marginal signs, corrections, and interlinear notes that point to a didactic use. Another papyrus from the fourth century CE consists of two encomia written in honor of a deceased professor at Berytus, where there was a famous school of law.¹⁸ A different professor at the school wrote two versions of the exercise. He did not need to dictate a text to a scribe but penned his composition himself, adding in the margin corrections, additions, deletions, and more verses to be inserted. In both formal or less formal texts, marginalia might be written by the original writer, but often informal texts were annotated by readers in or out of school.

Marginalia refer mostly to poetic authors, especially to Homer, Euripides, Menander, Aristophanes, and Pindar, who are cited very often. Prose is rarely annotated, with some exceptions from Demosthenes.¹⁹ While texts from the school of the grammarian take the lion’s share,²⁰ oratorical texts are rarely represented, probably because observations on language in these texts were of lesser interest. One exception is a papyrus with notes jotted down during a lecture.²¹ It preserves some theory but also the personal contributions of a teacher or a student. Though one suspects that most of the notes originated from a scholastic context, sometimes it is difficult to be certain. The handwriting of students beyond the elementary level might be informal but not necessarily so clumsy as to constitute a clear marker. The fact that marginalia usually occur on the verso—that is, the back of a papyrus—is also an unsure clue.²²

Yet in some cases other evidence corroborates the suspicion that some annotated papyri likely originated in schools.²³ Such is the case of PSI VII 747, with the first book of the Iliad. The text and the notes are written by the original writer in an informal and not accomplished hand. The writer may have been a student.²⁴ Another papyrus shows fragments from Euripides’s Hypsipyle, a play that was a favorite in education.²⁵ The text is written by a scribe who occasionally added notes to dialogues regarding the speaker. Another hand, smaller and cramped, made alterations and additions in the text and added notes in the margin. The editors of this magnificent papyrus (P.Oxy. XXXIV 2694) remark that the scribe, who had a very accomplished and elegant hand, had probably been commissioned to write the text of Book 4 of Apollonius’s Argonautica on the recto and on the verso a commentary on the text. Though this elegant specimen was, because of its formality, not supposed to have annotations in the margins, notes were written on both sides in handwriting different from the main hand. This text was therefore probably read and annotated in school.²⁶ Many marginalia reproduce the format of commentaries with lemmata and explanations, as in the commentaries of Didymus and Olympiodorus. Many of them are extracts from the scholarly tradition, either directly or in a brief form. They always deal with issues from the commentaries of the Alexandrians and focus on the exegesis of the authoritative texts of the classical period and on language.

1. Gellius, NA 1.7.16–17.

2. Quintilian 1.2.14.

3. Kaster 1980 and 1988, 169–97.

4. As I explained in an earlier work (Cribiore 2001b, 185–87 and note 2), the initial section of Dionysius’s commentary where he defined grammar in all its aspects is considered authentic by scholarly consensus and should date to about 100 BCE. The rest of the work, however, was probably a product of late antiquity. See Wouters 1979, 1995 and Schenkeveld 1993.

5. On the education imparted in the class of the grammarian, cf. Cribiore 2001b, 185–219 with references.

6. Cribiore 2001b, 207, 210.

7. This is a characteristic of ancient educational works. The grammarians covered the first parts of a text, something that is present in ancient scholia; cf. Cribiore 2001b, 194.

8. Kaster observes that in contrast to Macrobius, Servius at times revealed a self-image. See Kaster 1988, 171; Kaster 1980.

9. Dickey 2007, 3–17. On Latin philology and commentaries, see Zetzel 2018.

10. McNamee (1981) has shown that while early papyri and annotations occasionally mention the work of other scholars, later ones recognize absolutely the authority of Aristarchus. On Aristarchus, education, and the papyri, see Cribiore 2001a.

11. See Dickey 2007, 7, 63.

12. Gibson 2002, 6–7.

13. Cf. in part I the observations about the commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias.

14. “Facts from Fragments” is the title of a great article written in 1982 by Peter Parsons.

15. See Dickey 2007, 11n25, 11–16, 18–71. Scholia were originally intended as “notes” and were so called by Byzantine scholars.

16. McNamee 2007, 60. In considering marginalia on papyri, I refer to this book, adding my interpretations.

17. Cribiore 2020a. “Instead of,” for example, refers to another term that was more current, a gloss

18. Cribiore 2020a.

19. Cf. Gibson 2002.

20. Marginalia in texts studied at elementary levels are nonexistent.

21. P.Oxy. XVII 2086; see Cribiore 2001b, 144. On a papyrus of Plato’s Republic annotated during a lecture, see Part I.

22. Cf. Cribiore 1996.

23. I will mention only a few of these papyri with notes from a school context.

24. McNamee 2007, 25.

25. P.Oxy. VI 852; Cribiore 2001c.

26. McNamee (2007, 55) observes that the text is reminiscent of scholia minora, that is, elementary glossographical material.