Most of the commentaries on Greek authors which circulated in the towns of Egypt during the late Ptolemaic and early Imperial periods ignored the critical and colometrical problems which had engaged the attention of the great Alexandrian grammarians. A few, however, based themselves on texts equipped with signs, included the signs in their lemmata and offered explanations. Such commentaries must be the source of the scattered references to signs in the older marginal scholia in Byzantine manuscripts of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar (...) and the Attic dramatists. The only Byzantine manuscript to transmit a pagan text still equipped with a large number and a variety of signs, namely cod. Venice, Bibl. Marc. gr. 454, is also the only one to transmit scholia with lemmata retaining prefixed signs. Just as texts and scholium-lemmata lost their signs in the course of transmission, so too did references to signs within scholia either disappear or become garbled. At best, a statement about the reasons for affixing a sign would turn into one about the content or style of the verse in question. The few mentions made of the great Alexandrians give no cause for thinking that we ever have a verbatim quotation of an πόμνημα written by one of them in order to explain his own signs. Time and again it is demonstrable that an explanation of a sign's presence against a particular verse goes back to some writer like Aristonicus. What survives of the ancient discussion of Latin literature is exiguous in comparison with the Greek material. (shrink)

From the scholarly activity of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. stem several collections of scholia to the poems of Virgil, most of which make copious reference to prose and verse composed in Latin before Virgil's time. The authors of these scholia were the last of a long line of commentators whose labours began soon after Virgil's death. Just as Virgil walked in the tracks of Theocritus, Hesiod, Aratus, Nicander, Homer, and Apollonius, so did his students in the tracks of (...) the great Alexandrian expositors of the Greek poets. They sought to explain Virgil not only through Virgil himself, but also through the poets and prose writers, Greek and Latin, whom they imagined Virgil to have read. Thus we have scholia citing early republican literature in order to parallel words uncommon in or absent from the fourth-century classical syllabus, as well as unclassical usages, inflections, and constructions; in order to demonstrate ‘imitations’ on the part of Virgil; and in order to elucidate the structure of episodes of the three poems where Virgil appears to depart from the most commonly known versions of myth and history. Argument concerning the text or interpretation of a disputed passage is frequently based on appeal to the usage of Virgil's Latin predecessors. (shrink)

From the scholarly activity of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. stem several collections of scholia to the poems of Virgil, most of which make copious reference to prose and verse composed in Latin before Virgil's time. The authors of these scholia were the last of a long line of commentators whose labours began soon after Virgil's death. Just as Virgil walked in the tracks of Theocritus, Hesiod, Aratus, Nicander, Homer, and Apollonius, so did his students in the tracks of (...) the great Alexandrian expositors of the Greek poets. They sought to explain Virgil not only through Virgil himself, but also through the poets and prose writers, Greek and Latin, whom they imagined Virgil to have read. Thus we have scholia citing early republican literature in order to parallel words uncommon in or absent from the fourth-century classical syllabus, as well as unclassical usages, inflections, and constructions; in order to demonstrate ‘imitations’ on the part of Virgil; and in order to elucidate the structure of episodes of the three poems where Virgil appears to depart from the most commonly known versions of myth and history. Argument concerning the text or interpretation of a disputed passage is frequently based on appeal to the usage of Virgil's Latin predecessors. (shrink)

The best-known fact about the interaction of the Republican Roman poet Gaius Lucilius (c.180–103/102b.c.e.), the inventor of the genre of Roman verse satire, with the doctrine of Scepticism is probably a statement of Cicero: that Clitomachus the Academician dedicated a treatise to the poet (Cic.Luc. 102). Diogenes Laertius makes much of that writer's, Clitomachus’, industry (τὸ φιλόπονον, 4.67), with the comment: ‘to such lengths did his diligence (ἐπιμελείας) go that he composed more than four hundred treatises’. This phraseology surely reminds (...) those interested in Lucilius’ influence on later Latin poetry of Horace's disparaging comment,in hora saepe ducentos, | ut magnum, uersus dictabat(‘as a bravura display, he would often dictate two hundred verses in an hour’,Sat.1.4.9–10); moreover, Horace shortly afterwards calls his predecessorgarrulus atque piger scribendi ferre laborem(‘talkative and too lazy to bear the work of writing’, 1.4.12). Yet, a sceptical view of Horace's critique might have to think of Lucilius as hard-working, like his putative friend the Academic philosopher, Clitomachus. (shrink)

This piece explores possible reasons for Lucilius’ suggestive reference to worms,emblemate uermiculato, in the famous comment (about speech arranged akin to mosaics) which has survived from Book 2 of the satirist. The fragment can be set metatextually amid other extracts of Lucilius to show the poet's agency and skill, considered as having influenced aspects of its own afterlife (especially in Hor.Sat. 2.4) and appreciated in its historical context as a hit at Publius Mucius Scaevola, who died from phthiriasis.