PHILOLOGY. — Philology is a discipline that seeks historically to restore the spiritual unity of a people through the manifestations of its being—poetry, letters, and art above all, but then also thought, religion, ethics, myth, public and private life, and so forth: in short, it seeks to be, as it has been understood for more than a century, the critical and historical reconstruction of the cultural ages of a people, and more directly of its artistic expressions and the revelations of individual genius. In a narrower sense, philology was and is the investigation of language, especially Greek and Roman, the criticism of poetic and prose texts, exegesis, and literary and aesthetic evaluation.
For centuries the philological field remained more limited, although there were no lack of significant beginnings toward even encyclopedic conceptions and visions of ancient life and knowledge; it restricted itself to formal study and learned intricacy. The technical terms for the science in Greece and Rome are γραμματτικὴ (sc. τέχνη) and grammatica (sc. ατ.), alongside κρατικὴ and κρατικὸς, and sporadically also critica and criticus. Nowhere does the term φιλολογία, or its corresponding φιλόλογος, clearly appear with this meaning, since the name “Philologist” adopted by Erastostene and Atoio Pretestato does not indicate a particular professional science, but rather a manifold and varied learning: Suetonius attests this to us. The dual terminology grammatica and critica expresses the substance of the discipline: the word scrutinized in its intimate formation and in its forms, in its syntactic organism, and in its semantic value;
the literary expression fixed in its genuine original form, interpreted and critically evaluated.
It took centuries for philology to rise to the status of a science: Homeric glossography stands at the beginning; then the pre-Socratic philosophers took up the problem of language; next the sophists discovered certain linguistic categories and laid the foundations of phonetics and synonymy, just as the comic poets did of literary criticism. A fixed point in this development is constituted by the genius of Plato and Aristotle, with whom, even if within the sphere of philosophy, some of the parts of speech, the fundamental ones, begin to take shape: the word is explored more deeply, including in poetic style and elevated prose, and discussion begins in earnest concerning the essence of art and poetry; with Aristotle, moreover, the elements of a history of the theater are established through the Didacotile, or official lists of Athenian dramatic performances, and the history of poetry is inaugurated.
Later the Peripatetics proceed in the master Aristotle’s footsteps: something is lost in the general vision, but something is gained in command of particulars; one moves from synthesis toward analysis, the foundation of every science, even if the proper spirit of inquiry is often lacking. Literary history (for example, the question of the age of Homer and Hesiod, and investigations into ancient poetry, or the hypotheses to the dramas, that is, judgments passed on the dramatists in theatrical competitions); in addition, biography and biographical legend concerning poets and philosophers, stylistics, and music constitute the terrain over which the Aristotelians range: Eraelide Pontico, Diccarco, Camelonte, Aristosseno, and Teofrasto. A pupil of the latter was Prassifane of Rhodes, whom tradition presents as the founder of scientific “grammar” after Aristotle, as the first to call himself γραμματτικὸς; together with Ermocrate of Jaso, a learned man who likewise seems to have adopted this name, he was the teacher of Callimaso, the Alexandrian poet and philologist; and thus the Peripatetic cultural movement flows directly into the new science that found its cradle and center in Alexandria, specifically among the librarians of the city of the Ptolemies, from Zenodoto to Aristarco. For a philological school, extensive collections of books were a necessary condition, and the Ptolemies provided them and placed profound connoisseurs at their head—those who became the masters of philology.
The great classical creation having by now been completed, the time had come to gather it in its entirety, to catalogue it, to establish its authentic text, interpret it, assess its value, outline its development at least through its principal representatives, study its language or dialects and its meter, and draw profiles of its writers: this was the work of Alexandrian philology. Textual criticism and exegesis in particular were here an achievement secured for all time: sound methodological criteria and fine, courageous intelligence sustained and ennobled both. If Homer, the tragedians, and the Greek lyric poets are read today in relatively correct texts, this is owed to these men and to their successors. As for interpretation, the scholia to Homer, with their broad Aristarchaean imprint, document how far the Alexandrians advanced: allegory was banished, the gaze delved into words and things, and the aim was directly to understand and elucidate. Aristofane of Byzantium surpassed all others in breadth of vision: as an editor of epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, and even Plato; as a lexicographer; as a metrician; and as a critic in the “hypotheses” prefixed to editions and in the so-called Canoni, or classifications of practitioners of the literary genres. Aristarco became an antonomastic name for a severe critic.
Alongside Alexandrian philology, the school of Pergamum flourished in the Greek world, with its own distinctive characteristics: on one side, the initiator was Peripatetic thought; on the other, Stoic teaching; its precursor was Cratete of Mallus (2nd cent. B.C.). From the conflict between Alexandrians and Pergamenes, respectively, in matters of language, analogists and anomalists, there emerged the definitive constitution of grammar in the strict sense, with its phonetics and morphological terminology, that which has essentially remained down to us: the organizing principle of Stoic logic made a substantial contribution to II. The taste of Pergamene philology lies in the moralism and allegorism of Stoic coloring that dominated interpretation, particularly Homeric interpretation; Cratete does not hesitate to force the text of the classics to conform to his moral and theological interpretations, and, scorning the labors and scruples of Aristarco as an editor of texts, he abandons the designation γραμματικα in the Alexandrian manner in order to assume the appellation of κρατικα.
After Aristarco and Cratete, the opposing tendencies were reconciled, and constructions and definitions of “grammar” now arose, as with Dionisio Trice, or Tirannione the Elder, or Asclepiade of Myrlea, in whom the influence of both schools is equally reflected. These are the divisions familiar to us from the Roman “grammarians”; language naturally has its part in them, but so too, in varying forms, do exegesis and textual and literary criticism.
Philology in Rome arose under the impulse of both Hellenic schools; Cratete il Mallore taught his doctrines and methods there directly. Here, too, philology proceeded in a manner similar to that of Alexandria and Pergamum: it penetrated more deeply into the national language, critically established the old legal and literary texts and glossed them, and turned its attention to literature and native traditions. Elio Stilone opened the series of philologists. Shortly thereafter his pupil Varro came to dominate the field, with the imposing industry that distinguished him and with the personality of a man who revived the teachings handed down from earlier ages in order to surpass and reshape them with an entirely personal stamp: one of humanistic awareness and hence of human universality, and of the dynamism of the past projected into the present. He was also a poet, a prose writer, and a writer on philosophy, jurisprudence, agriculture, and geography; he was a statesman and a fighter by temperament. Yet his genius lay in plunging into antiquity—or rather into the Rome that had been—in order to resurrect it in its culture and civilization, its political, social, literary, artistic, and mythical life, with a loving eye directed toward the language: its origins, its kinship with Aeolic, Sabine, and Oscan, its alphabet, phonetics, inflection, expression, style, correct usage, and hence analogy and anomaly—that is, the inner regularity of the linguistic phenomenon and the deviating force of habit.
Around Varro, in Rome and throughout the Roman world, there flourished a host of scholars working in various philological fields. We should recall Filosseno d'Alessandria, an etymologist who abandoned the fancifully capricious methods of the Stoics in order to seek the root of the word and monosyllabic prototypes; Trifone, one of the pioneers in syntactic investigations, from whom the grammarians of the Empire would take their start; Didimo il Calcattero and Teone, the former variously learned in accordance with Alexandrian tastes, and both accomplished in exegesis, of which extensive and valuable evidence survives in commentaries. Among the Romans, Cesare must not be omitted: he was one of the most gifted systematizers and disciplinarians of well-formed Latin speech, proceeding by way of analogy and the organic, rational laws of language. Here it was not merely his authority as a man and writer that counted, but also his authority as the author of the treatise De analogia.
The Imperial age continued to display vigorous original activity during the early centuries, down to the middle of the third century; thereafter the productive forces weakened and stagnated, and derivative literature prevailed, apart from rare exceptions. Several Roman figures dominated the field in the first century: Rammio Palemone, with his reform of the school, in which he substituted Virgilio for Ennio and, in general, the leading poets and prose writers of Latin for the ancients, and with his Art grammatica, worked out in every part, its syntax compressed, in which, among other things, the individual terminologies were definitively established in forms that have survived to the present day; Q. Asconio Pediano, with his learned and lucid exegesis of Cicerone the orator; Plinio il Vecchio, with acute linguistic investigations extensively exploited by his contemporaries and by posterity; and M. Valecio Probo, a philologist in the Alexandrian style, with critical editions of Lucrezio, Virgilio, Orazio, and certainly at least also Terenzio. Between the first and second centuries stands Svetonio, with his solid erudition, to whom we owe most of what is known personally about writers from the Augustan period downward, just as we owe to Varro what is known about those who preceded him; he also provides a rich mine of information about Greek and Roman culture. The elucidation of the classics developed during the second and third centuries and was the final efflorescence of the genre. Atticist and anti-Atticist dictionaries are another sign of the period, reflecting the struggle between purism, or a classicizing manner, and Asianism. Nor should the ultimate codification of syntax in the ancient world be omitted, with Apollonio Discolo, or that of prosody and orthography with Crodiuno, his son. After this, it is no longer possible to speak of living philology: the compilers take over. Only the exegesis and criticism of biblical texts continued to arise, the sole genuine and vital philological novelty among the Christians.
What follows these years belongs to the history of culture, no longer to that of philology, although between the fourth and sixth centuries there were no shortage of capable reworkers who dominated the schools of the Middle Ages, such as Donato and Prisciano. For philology as a science, the Middle Ages, an era so rich in inner ferment and in ethical, religious, and cultural values, is a closed book. For the history of learning and of the ancient idea, it offers manifold interests that do not belong here, except for one moment of capital importance: the scrupulous transmission of pagan and Christian literary works. The leader of this arduous undertaking in the West was Cassiodoro; with him, monasticism became the custodian of classical culture. The monastic libraries deserve the credit for having saved and handed down the finest flower of ancient art and thought. For the rest, “grammar,” the queen of the liberal arts, was not philology in the Middle Ages, but simply morphology and syntax; nor did it discover new points of view until the Doctrinale of Alessandro di Villadei (twelfth–thirteenth century), with which the spoken vernaculars, rather than the usual Latin authors, entered into consideration, and logical observation of language came to prevail. The Byzantine Middle Ages, like the West, abridged and transmitted. The signs of revival that erupted here and there in both worlds concerned only the love of antiquity, not criticism and scientific knowledge.
Humanism made its appearance in various forms in Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; it was then born in Italy with Petrarca, and consisted in an expansion of the soul toward ancient beauty, a systematic pursuit of the rediscovery of classical texts in order to draw near to them and relive them, and to hear again their intimate meanings and harmonies. With the arrival of Manuele Crisolera in Florence in 1397, knowledge of Greek returned to the West and spread widely—a language that for centuries had remained essentially dead among us, except for persistent or eruptive flames appearing in one place or another. This was a moment of particular importance, from which there followed the renewed influx of Greek and classical creativity into Italy and the practice of translation. Thus the book trade came to life and libraries were founded; the invention of printing marked an epoch here. The impulse toward a renewed, scientific form of learning was now present: celebrated masters emerged, critical procedures took shape with Lorenzo Valla at their head, lovingly prepared editions appeared, and the classics, grammars, and commentaries were reworked on the basis of the ancients. Literary criticism began to create new values, especially with the reappearance of Aristotle’s Poetics. To name the creators would be superfluous: in Angelo Poliziano the philology of the fifteenth century reached its culmination; and with the encyclopedic vision of knowledge that was his, he in some way anticipated the German philological period. In fact, he was essentially a textual critic and an interpreter.
Along these lines, the Italian sixteenth century broadened and deepened its scope with acumen, method, sound taste, liveliness of doctrine, artistic sensibility, and absolute mastery and penetration of the linguistic instrument. Pier Vettori reigns supreme among us. But from Italy now, following Humanism, the scientific spirit passes to Europe; Erasmo da Rotterdam is the first distinguished humanist and philologist who is not Italian. France is the first to advance beyond the other countries in developing our directives; it soon acquires a physiognomy of its own, especially with the master of masters, Giuseppe Giusto Scaligero, son of the Italian Giulio Cesare, the codifier of French classicism. He goes beyond classical Latin to ascend, with Varrone and Festo, to the more ancient period; he establishes historical chronology and, with Manilio in hand, investigates Greco-Roman astrology. He is an authentic scientist, and at times a diviner. Another figure of stature is Giacomo Cuiscio, the father of the exegesis of Roman law. The two Stefani, Roberto and Enrico, link their names to the Thesaurì of Latin and Greek, of which only the Latin has been surpassed by Forcellini and today by the Thesaurus Latinae linguae. Adriano Turnebo, Dionisio Lambino, and Isacco Cassubono leave vivid, at times indelible, marks on the interpretation of Latin and Greek authors.
France is followed by Holland and then England, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Dutch are generally collectors of documents and compilers (until the spirit of a Riccardo Bentley comes to revitalize them), but they are also elegant versifiers in Latin. With the Englishman Bentley, once again a coryphaeus, possessing the eye of an investigator, criticism becomes sharper and more finely honed, its range expands, and its hand grows more assured. Greek dialects, with the discovery of the Homeric digamma; Terentian metre; editions of Orazio and the New Testament; linguistic and historical-literary research that served as an example: such was his work of greatest significance and scope, in which even its less commendable feature—such as the rationalism that it accentuates—could, given its lively penetration of the subject matter, prove fruitful. Lofty goals now stand before the science of antiquity, with the English and the Dutch as leaders; Latinity and Hellenism are equally objects of investigation. The English possess this particular quality: although their studies delve deeply and are impassioned, they do not usually isolate them from active life in the service of their homeland; they are both scholars and citizens engaged in public affairs.
The nineteenth century marks a spiritual revolution that makes philology what was stated at the beginning: an integral vision of antiquity in its historical development, in all the phases of its being, no longer only in the highest expressions of classicism. It is the moment of Germany, which, although it had not remained extraneous to scholarly investigation since the fifteenth century, had also produced well-known profiles of practitioners and enthusiasts. Homer and ideal Hellenism, Ossian, primitive poetry, popular song, the voice and inspiration of nature set against cold rationalism, a new concept of history understood as an inner narrative rather than merely a record of facts, historical criticism firmly grounded in its sources but not concluded within them, spiritually constructive and fixed in the becoming of times and men: such were the conceptions and impulses that transformed the European soul—literature, art, thought, and science. Vico in the eighteenth century was a precursor; then came Winckelmann and Lessing; in Herder, Niebuhr, and the legions of the palingenesis, their number cannot be counted. Neohumanism and Romanticism delivered the coup de grâce to the old classicism. In philology, the renewing breath came from Cristiano Heyne and his school at Göttingen: Giorgio Zoaga, Enrico Voss, Federico Augusto Wolf, the Schlegel brothers and Humboldt, Bertoldo Niebuhr, and Carlo Lachmann. Beyond this school, the masters are Giacomo Grimm, Francesco Bopp, Federico Diez, and Federico Savigny. Everywhere facts rise to the level of ideas, to a historical consideration of the totality of the spirit and of civilization in general, including Roman law. Two schools hold first place within the sphere of classical antiquity: those of Augusto Boeck and Gotofredo Hermann. The former probes more broadly into the life and culture of ancient peoples; the latter seeks to deepen scientifically the centuries-old philological tradition and thus to establish the texts—above all, the classical texts and those of the best period—and to interpret them, their language, style, and versification. Illustrious scholars consequently emerge in Germany and throughout old Europe—in Italy, France, England, Holland, Belgium, the Scandinavian countries, and elsewhere—bringing scholarship to its present heights. Teodoro Mommsen is one of its greatest builders.
Now it is no longer only classical philology that is alive, but also Germanic, Romance, and Slavic philology. Germanic philology comes first: the idea of historical development, Romanticism, and comparative grammar lead Germany to contemplate scientifically its own past in its language and dialects, in its literature and art, with a strong attraction toward the popular and the primitive. Linguistic, lexical, dialectal, and grammatical lines of development—and, from the eighteenth century, also aesthetic ones—had anticipated this profound revolution in Germany, Holland, England, and Denmark; but the revolution itself is decisive. Augusto Guglielmo Schlegel signifies the history of medieval Germanic poetry; Giacomo Grimm, together with his brother Guglielmo, signifies saga, tale, legend, and chronicle; Giacomo alone signifies the comparative grammar of languages, and the mythology, antiquity, customs, and entire life of the Germanic peoples in their historical succession, particularly in prehistory. Alongside Grimm stands Carlo Lachmann, a pioneer as a Germanist through his original analyses of the Nibelunghi and his observations on the Hildebrandslied and Parzifal; he holds an equal position as a classicist.
For Romance philology as well, the point of departure naturally lies here, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The more distant beginnings had already been under way for some time in the various Neo-Latin countries: in Italy, from Dante and Humanism onward; then in Spain, Portugal, and France, especially seventeenth-century France. The eighteenth century brought a revival in Italy and France, above all through more profound knowledge in the field of letters and through higher criticism. Among us, the philosophical and historical thought of G. B. Vico, the precursor, dominates in solitude. In France, the first revealer of the ancient civilizations, following the new German ideas, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is Claudio Fauriel. The father of Romance philology in general is Federico Diez; then came the flourishing of historical investigations, in the linguistic and literary fields, with greater or lesser intensity among the Neo-Latin peoples, just as in Germanic and Anglo-Saxon lands, beginning precisely with Diez’s fundamental Grammatica and Vocabolario delle lingue romanze, and even earlier with his studies of the troubadours. Critical editions form the basis of everything, accompanied by the history of progressive civilization, analysis and synthesis, epic poetry in the first place, followed by lyric, dramatic, novelistic, and folkloristic studies, as well as comparative studies and linguistics. Here too there are illustrious names, no less than in classical philology, and more than one of these most representative figures received a classical education.
Slavic philology is of later date: Czech, Polish, and Russian collaborators follow the teachings of J. Dobrowsky, the founder. Old Church Slavonic and its history constitute a cultural problem, and behind them lies the essence of integral civilization. Nor are the Slavs alone in entering this world; Germans, French, and English do so energetically as well. Semitic philology, too, has developed vigorously, with broad participation by Italians.
BIBLI: For classical philology: A. Gudemann, Grundriss d. Geschichte der klass. Philologie, Leipzig 1900; J. E. Sandys, History of classical scholarship, 2 vols., Cambridge 1906–1908; H. Usener, Ein altes Lehrgebäude der Philologie, in Kleine Schriften, II, Leipzig 1913, pp. 265–282; W. Kroll, Geschichte der klass. Philologie, there 1919; R. Sabbadini, Il metodo degli Umanisti, Florence 1920; U. V. Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, Geschichte der Philologie, Leipzig 1921; G. Gerassani, Lince di storia della f. classica in Italia, Florence 1920; E. Dzerup, Perioden der Klass. Philologie, Nijmegen–Utrecht 1931; G. B. D'Alton, Roman literary theories and criticism, London 1931; G. Pasquali, Storia della tradizione e critica del testo, Florence 1934, passim; W. Atkins, Literary criticism in antiquity, Cambridge 1934; G. Funaioli, L'incomenzi d'una storia della f. attraverso i secoli, in Studi di letteratura antica, I, Bologna 1946, pp. 185–356. — For Germanic philology: R. V. Ranner, Geschichte d. german. Philologie, Munich 1890; H. Paul, Grundriss d. german. Philologie, I, Strasbourg 1891, pp. 6–131; G. Roeth, Wege d. deutschen Philologie, Berlin 1923. — For Romance philology: G. Gröber, Grundriss d. romanischen Philologie, 2 vols., Strasbourg 1889–98; 3rd ed., there 1924; P. Savi-Lopez, Le origini neolatine, Milan 1920; G. Bertucci, Programma di f. romanzo, Geneva 1923; A. Monteverdi, Neolatine, in La Cultura, 10 (1931), pp. 761–74. — For Slavic philology: V. Jagid, Istorija slavjanskoj filologii, Petersburg 1916.