At the cradle of philology

The book is dedicated to the work of scientists of the Library of Alexandria, primarily its director Aristarchus of Samothrace, on the text of Homer’s poems. The author, Candidate of Sciences, Associate Professor at HSE, in this case understands philology in a narrow sense: as a science that deals with a specific text, determines its version closest to the original and provides the necessary commentary for understanding. This kind of philology was born already quite mature, like Athena from the head of Zeus, in Alexandria of Egypt in the 3rd-2nd centuries BC. The librarians there did not only study Homer, but the most detailed information about their work can be learned from the scholia (“school” commentaries) on the Iliad, to a much lesser extent on the Odyssey, and even less from other sources.

The name of Aristarchus became a household name for a strict, pedantic, caustic critic. Sixteen-year-old lyceum student Pushkin even titled a long humorous poem “To My Aristarch”:

And you, my boring preacher,

Quench the learned taste of anger!

Go scream and scold someone else

And throw away the young sloth

I quietly regretted it.

The main part of the book is a scrupulous analysis of the scholia devoted to the so-called “Homeric problems”, the range of which is very wide. It is clarified in detail: who Homer called Hellenes (not all Greeks, but the inhabitants of one specific region); whether Nestor fought Siamese twins; how many gates were there within the walls of Troy and the Achaean camp? Several pages are devoted to the sensational question “Was Patroclus the lover of Achilles?”, and it turns out that Aristarchus’ predecessor, Zenodotus of Ephesus, apparently deciding to become the guardian of morality, almost replaces the lesser obscenity of the text with a greater one.

More than a third of the book is devoted to explanations for inexperienced readers: the textology of Homer’s poems is described in detail, several pages are devoted to the basics of the Greek language and the metric of the hexameter, so the publication may be of interest not only to ancient scholars, but still it has more of a scientific than a popular character.

A.O.

Fire V.V. The Birth of Philology. M.: Dmitry Pozharsky University, 2014.