PHILOLOGY. - Philology is a discipline that seeks to restore historically the spiritual unity of a people through the manifestations of its being, foremost among which are poetry, literature, and art, but also thought, religion, ethics, myth, public and private life, and so on. In short, as has been understood for more than a century, it aims to be a critical and historical reconstruction of the cultural ages of a people, more directly of its artistic expressions and the revelations of individual genius. In a stricter sense, philology has been and remains the investigation of language, especially Greek and Latin, textual criticism of poetry and prose, exegesis, literary and aesthetic evaluation.
For centuries the field of philology remained more limited, though significant strides were made toward encyclopedic conceptions of ancient life and knowledge; it narrowed to formal study and erudite complication. Technical terms for the science in Greece and Rome were τέχνη (techne) and grammatica (grammar), alongside sporadically used terms such as κριτική (kritike, "criticism") and κριτικός (kritikos, "critic"). Nowhere does the term φιλολογία or its Latin equivalent appear with this precise meaning, for the title "Philologist" borne by Eratosthenes and Attius Praetextatus does not denote a specific professional science but rather a manifold and varied learning, as Suetonius attests. The dual terminology of "grammar" and "criticism" reveals the substance of the discipline: the word "criticism" in its formation, its forms, its syntactic structure, and its semantic value; literary creation fixed in its original and genuine expression, interpreted and evaluated critically.
It took centuries for philology to rise to the status of a science: Homeric glossography stands at its beginnings; then the pre-Socratic philosophers took up the problem of language; the Sophists discovered certain linguistic categories and paved the way for phonetics and synonymics, just as the comic poets did for literary criticism. A decisive turning point in this development is marked by the genius of Plato and Aristotle, with whom certain fundamental parts of discourse—though still within a philosophical framework—begin to take shape: language is explored more deeply, including its poetic and elevated prose styles; the essence of art and poetry is deliberately discussed; and with Aristotle, the elements of a history of theater are established through the Didascaliae, or official records of dramatic performances, inaugurating the history of poetry.
The Peripatetics advanced further along Aristotle’s path: they lost ground in broad vision but gained in mastery of detail; they moved from synthesis to analysis, the foundation of all science, even if they often lacked the requisite spirit of scrutiny. Literary history (for example, the question of the age of Homer and Hesiod, investigations into ancient poetry, or hypotheses about dramas—i.e., judgments passed on dramatists in theatrical competitions), as well as biography and legendary accounts of poets and philosophers, stylistics, and music, formed the terrain over which the Aristotelians—Heracleides Ponticus, Dicaearchus, Chamaeleon, Aristoxenus, Theophrastus—ranged. A pupil of the latter, Praxiphanes of Rhodes, is traditionally regarded as the founder of "scientific grammar" after Aristotle, the first to call himself γραμματικός (grammatikos). Alongside him, Hermocrates of Iasos, a scholar who seems to have borne the same title, taught Callimachus, the Alexandrian poet-philologist; and thus the Peripatetic cultural movement flowed directly into the new science, which found its cradle and center in Alexandria, specifically among the librarians of the city of the Ptolemies, from Zenodotus to Aristarchus. For a philological school, vast collections of books were a necessary condition, and the Ptolemies provided them, placing at their head deep connoisseurs who were masters of philology.
With the exhaustion of the great classical creation, the moment had come to gather it in its entirety, to catalogue it, to establish its genuine text, to interpret it, to weigh its value, to trace its development at least in its principal representatives, to study its language or dialects and its metrics, and to sketch profiles of its writers. This was the work of Alexandrian philology. Textual criticism and exegesis were here achievements for all time: sound methodological criteria and refined intelligence guided both. If today we read Homer, the tragedians, and the Greek lyric poets in relatively correct texts, we owe it to these men and their successors. As for interpretation, the scholia to Homer, with their strong Aristarchean imprint, show how far the Alexandrians advanced: allegory was banished, and attention was directed to the word and its contexts, aiming directly at understanding and elucidation. Aristophanes of Byzantium excelled above all in breadth of vision: as an editor of epic, lyric, tragedy, and comedy, even of Plato, as a lexicographer, as a metrologist, and as a critic in the "hypotheses" prefixed to editions and in the so-called Canons or lists of canonical authors of literary genres. Aristarchus became a byword for severe criticism.
Alongside the Alexandrian school, the Pergamene school flourished in the Greek world with its own distinctive features: on one side advancing Peripatetic thought, on the other emphasizing historical study; its forerunner was Crates of Mallus (2nd century B.C.). From the clash between Alexandrians and Pergamenes over language—respectively, the Analogists and Anomalists—there emerged the definitive constitution of grammar in the strict sense, with its phonetics and morphological terminology, which has essentially remained down to our own time; a substantial contribution came from the systematic principle of Stoic logic. The weakness of Pergamene philology lay in its Stoic-tinged moralizing allegorism, which dominated interpretation, particularly of Homer. Crates did not hesitate to force classical texts into his moral and theological interpretations, and in contempt of Aristarchus’s scrupulous textual labors, he added demonic elements to the Alexandrian method, seeking to give himself the title of "spiritus."
After Aristarchus and Crates, the opposing tendencies were reconciled, and constructions and definitions of "grammar" now arose, as with Dionysius Thrax, Tyrannio the Elder, or Asclepiades of Myrlea, where the influence of both schools is equally reflected. These are the divisions familiar to us from Roman "grammarians"; naturally, language occupies a central place, but so too do textual and literary criticism in various ways.
The school in Rome arose under the influence of both Hellenic schools; Crates the Cynic taught there his doctrines and methods directly. And here too, in the school, there is a process similar to that of Alexandria and Pergamon: a focus on the national language, a critical examination of old juridical and literary texts, and their annotation, along with an attention to letters and national traditions. Aelius Stilo opens the series of philologists. Soon after, his pupil Varro stands out with his imposing productivity, marked by the personality of a man who revives the teachings of past ages to transcend and imprint them with a personal stamp, with a humanistic consciousness and thus a human universality, with a dynamism from the past to the present. He is also a poet, a prose writer, a writer of philosophy, of justification, of agriculture, of geography; he is a many-sided man, tempered like a fighter; but his genius lies in delving into antiquity, or rather into the Rome of the past, to revive it in culture and civilization—political, social, literary, artistic, mythical life—with a loving eye turned to language: its origins, affinities with Aeolic, Sabine, and Oscan; its alphabet, phonetics, inflection, expression, style, correct usage, and thus the analogy that is sick, i.e., the inner regularity of the linguistic and deviant phenomenon through the force of habit.
Around Varro, in Rome or within the Roman orbit, there flourished a host of scholars spanning various philological fields. Among them should be remembered Philoxenus of Alexandria, an etymologist who abandoned the capricious and fantastic methods of the Stoics to seek the root of the word and monosyllabic prototypes; Tryphon, one of the pioneers in syntactic studies, from whom the grammarians of the Empire would derive; Didymus the Copper-Smelter and Theon, the former a versatile scholar adhering to Alexandrian tastes, both valuable for their contributions, as evidenced by the extensive and precious documents preserved in their surviving commentaries. Among the Romans, Caesar should not go unmentioned, one of the most brilliant systematizers of his age, but in the realm of analogy or organic laws of speech; it was not merely his authority as a man and writer that counted here, but that of the treatise-writer in the volume *De analogia*.
The Imperial age still boasts a lively original activity in the first centuries up to the mid-3rd century; then comes a decline and stagnation of productive forces, a secondary literature with rare exceptions. In the 1st century, various Roman figures hold the field: Remmius Palaemon, who reformed the school by substituting Virgil for Ennius and, in general, the champions of Latin poetry and prose for the ancients, and with his *Ars grammatica* elaborated in every part, including syntax, where, among other things, individual terminologies were definitively fixed in those that survive to this day; Q. Asconius Pedianus with his clear doctrine and exegesis of the orator Cicero; Pliny the Elder with acute linguistic investigations widely exploited by contemporaries; M. Valerius Probus, an Alexandrian-style philologist, with critical editions of Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, and certainly at least of Terence. Between the 1st and 2nd centuries stands Suetonius, with his solid erudition, to whom we owe most of what is known about individual writers from the Augustan period onward, as Varro did for those before him; and also a rich mine of Greek and Roman cultural matters. The illustration of the classics developed between the 2nd and 3rd centuries and is the last flourishing of the genre. Antiquarian dictionaries are another sign of the times in the struggle between purism or classicizing tendencies and Arianism. Nor should the ultimate codification of syntax in the ancient world with Apollonius Dyscolus, and of prosody and orthography with Herodian, his son, go unmentioned. After this, there is no living school: compilers follow. Only biblical exegesis and textual criticism arise further, the sole true and vital philological novelty among Christians.
What follows these years belongs to the history of culture, not of the school, even if between the 4th and 6th centuries there are no lack of good compilers who dominate the medieval schools, such as Donatus or Priscian. The Middle Ages, an era so rich in inner fixations, ethical, religious, and cultural values, for the school as a science, is a closed book; for the history of ancient wisdom and thought, it holds many interests that do not belong here, except for one moment of capital importance: the scrupulous transmission of pagan and Christian literary works. In the West, Cassiodorus is the leader of this heroic enterprise; monasticism becomes, with him, the repository of classical culture. The merit of monastic libraries lies in having saved and transmitted the finest of ancient art and thought. As for the rest, grammar, the queen of the liberal arts, in the Middle Ages is not a school but simply morphology and syntax, and it does not develop new perspectives until the *Doctrinale* of Alexander of Villedieu (12th–13th century), with which spoken vernaculars come into consideration, no longer the usual Latin writers, and logical observation of language prevails. Byzantine medieval scholarship compiles and transmits, as does the West. The occasional sparks of revival that erupt here and there in both worlds pertain only to a love of antiquity, not to criticism or scientific knowledge.
Humanism announces itself variously in Europe between the 13th and 14th centuries: it then emerges in Italy with Petrarch and is an expansion of the soul toward ancient beauty, a systematic pursuit of the rediscovery of classical texts to make them close and to relisten to their intimate meanings and harmonies. With the arrival of Manuel Chrysoloras in Florence in 1397, knowledge of Greek returns to the West and spreads, a language that for centuries had remained substantially dead except for lingering and sporadic embers; this or that place, a moment of particular importance, from which the rejection of Greek and classical creation in Italy and translation stem. Thus, the book trade flourishes, and libraries are founded; the invention of printing marks an epoch. Humanism for a renewed scientific knowledge is at hand: here we see celebrated masters, critical methods with Lorenzo Valla at the forefront, lovingly curated editions, lexicons, grammars, and commentaries revised from the ancients; literary criticism begins to create new values, especially with the reappearance of Aristotle’s *Poetics*. To name creators is superfluous: in Angelo Poliziano, the philology of the Quattrocento reaches its peak; and he, with the encyclopedic vision that is his, somewhat anticipates the German philological period; in fact, he is essentially a textual critic and an interpreter.
On these paths the Italian 16th century broadens and deepens with sagacity, method, sound taste, doctrinal vivacity, a sense of art, and absolute mastery and penetration of the linguistic instrument. VETTORI reigns supreme among us. But from Italy, following Humanism, the scientific spirit now passes to Europe; ERASMUS of Rotterdam is the first non-Italian humanist and philologist of renown. France precedes other countries in developing our directives, soon acquiring its own physiognomy, notably with the master of masters, JOSEPH JUSTE SCALIGER, son of the Italian Giulio Cesare, the codifier of French classicism. He goes beyond classical Latin to ascend, with Varro and Festus, to the most ancient, founds historical chronology, investigates Greco-Roman astrology with Manilius in hand; he is a genuine scientist, often a true visionary. Another figure of stature is JACQUES CUJAS, the father of Roman law exegesis. The two STEPHANUS brothers, ROBERT and HENRY, link their names to the Thesauri of Latin and Greek, of which only the Latin has been surpassed by Forcellini and today by the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. ADRIAN TURNEBUS, DENIS LAMBIN, ISAAC CASAUBON leave vivid, sometimes indelible, marks on the interpretation of Latin and Greek authors.
Following France come Holland and then England in the 17th and 18th centuries. Dutch scholars are generally collectors of documents and compilers (until the spirit of a RICHARD BENTLEY revives), but also elegant verifiers in Latin. With the English BENTLEY, another leading figure, an investigator’s eye, criticism sharpens and hones, breath expands, hand becomes sure; Greek dialects with the discovery of the Homeric deception, Terentian metrics, editions of Horace and the New Testament, linguistic and historical-literary research that served as models: such is the work of highest significance and broadest scope, where even the less good, such as pronounced rationalism, can prove fruitful given the lively penetration of things. In the lofty ranks of classical antiquity studies now stand the English and the Dutch as leaders; language and Greekness are equally objects of investigation. The English have this particular trait: their studies, though probing deeply and passionately, do not segregate them from active life for the fatherland; they are militant scholars and citizens.
The 19th century marks a spiritual revolution that makes of philology what was said at the outset: an inner vision of antiquity in its historical development, in all phases of its being, no longer merely in the highest expressions of classicism. It is Germany’s moment, which even since the 15th century had not remained estranged from research but had also produced well-known profiles of scholars or amateurs. Homer and ideal Greekness, Ossian, primitive poetry, folk song, voice and inspiration of nature in contrast to cold rationalism, a new concept of history understood as inner narrative, not merely of facts, historical criticism firmly grounded in sources but not confined to them, spiritually constructed and fixed in the becoming of times and men: such are the conceptions and impulses that transform the European soul, literature, art, thought, science. VICO in the 18th century is a precursor; then come WINCKELMANN and LESSING; then HERDER, NIEBUHR, and the legionaries of the Palingenesis are countless. Neogrammarianism and Romanticism deliver the death blow to old classicism. In philology another great renewer comes from CHRISTIAN HEYNE and his school in Göttingen; GEORG ZOEGA, HEINRICH VOSS, FRIEDRICH AUGUST WOLF, the SCHLEGEL brothers and HUMBOLDT, BARTHOLD NIEBUHR, KARL LACHMANN. Beyond this school the masters are: JAKOB GRIMM, FRANZ BOPP, FRIEDRICH DIEZ, FRIEDRICH SAVIGNY. Everywhere phenomena that rise to ideas, to historical consideration of the totality of spirit, of civilization in general, including Roman law. Two schools emerge within classical antiquity: AUGUST BOECKH and GOTTFRIED HERMANN. One aims more broadly at the life and culture of ancient peoples, the other at scientifically deepening the second philological tradition, hence at the fixing of texts—classical or those of the best age above all—and their exegesis, language, style, versification. Illustrious scholars thus establish themselves in Germany and old Europe: Italy, France, England, Holland, Belgium, Scandinavia, and elsewhere, bringing studies to their present heights. THEODOR MOMMSEN is one of the greatest builders.
Now no longer one philology, the classical, exists, but the Germanic, the Roman, the Slavic. The Germanic leads: the idea of historical development, Romanticism, comparative grammar lead Germany to contemplate its own past scientifically in language with its dialects, in literature, in art, with a strong attraction to the popular and the primitive. Linguistic, lexical, dialectal, grammatical approaches, and from the 18th century also aesthetic ones, anticipate in Germany, Holland, England, Denmark this profound revolution; but it is decisive. AUGUST WILHELM SCHLEGEL means the history of medieval Germanic poetry; JAKOB GRIMM with his brother WILHELM saga, novella, legend, heroic tale; JAKOB alone comparative grammar of languages, and mythology, antiquity, customs, the totality of Germanic life in historical succession, particularly in prehistory. Beside Grimm stands KARL LACHMANN, an anti-Spanish Germanist with his original analyses of the Nibelungen and observations on the Hildebrandslied and Parzival, holding an equal place as a classicist.
For Roman philology, naturally, the point of departure is here, between the 18th and 19th centuries. The earliest stirrings date back some time in the various Romance countries; in Italy from Dante and Humanism downward; Spain, Portugal, and France follow, especially 17th-century France. The 18th century is an awakening in Italy and France, above all for a deepened knowledge in letters and high criticism. In Italy the solitary precursor was G. B. VICO’s philosophical and historical thought. In France, first revealer of ancient civilizations, following the new German ideas between the 18th and 19th centuries, is CLAUDE FAURIEL. Father of Roman philology in general is FRIEDRICH DIEZ; then the flourishing of historical research in the linguistic and literary fields with greater or lesser intensity among Romance peoples, as well as in Germanic and Anglo-Saxon lands, dating precisely from his foundational Grammar and Dictionary of Romance Languages, and even earlier from his various studies: critical editions as the basis of everything, alongside the history of progressive civilization, analysis and synthesis, epic poetry first and foremost, then lyric, dramatic, narrative, folkloric, and comparative linguistics. Here too names of resonance, no less than in classical philology, and more than one of these most representative men has a classical education.
Of later date is Slavic philology: Czech, Polish, and Russian collaborators under the guidance of J. DOBROWSKY, the archgete. A cultural problem is Old Church Slavonic and its history, and behind it the essence of integral civilization. Nor do only Slavs invest this world, but Germans, French, English energetically. Semitic philology has also flourished widely with substantial Italian participation.