Philology

PHILOLOGY. - Philology is a discipline that seeks to restore historically the spiritual unity of a people through the manifestations of its being — poetry, letters and art in the first place, but then thought, religion, ethics, myth, public and private life, and so on: it aims, in short, as it has been understood for more than a century, to be a critical and historical reconstruction of the cultural ages of a people, more directly of its artistic expressions, of the revelations of individual genius. In a narrower sense, philology was and is the investigation of language, especially Greek and Roman, the criticism of texts of poetry and prose, exegesis, literary and aesthetic evaluation.

For centuries the philological field remained more limited, even if there was no lack of significant beginnings toward conceptions and visions even encyclopedic of ancient life and knowledge; it was restricted to formal study and erudite complication. Technical terms for the science in Greece and Rome are γραμματικὴ (sc. τέχνη) and grammatica (sc. ars), alongside κριτικὴ and κριτικός, sporadically also critica and criticus. Nowhere does the term φιλολογία or the corresponding φιλόλογος appear with certainty in that sense, since the name of "Philologist" that Eratosthenes and Ateius Praetextatus took does not indicate a particular professional science, but rather a manifold and varied learning: Suetonius attests this to us. The twofold 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, in its semantic value; literary tradition fixed in the genuine original expression, interpreted and evaluated critically.

It took centuries for philology to rise to the status of a science: Homeric glossography stands at the beginnings; then the Presocratic philosophers come forward to confront the problem of language; then the Sophists discover certain linguistic categories and attend to phonetics and synonymics, as the comic playwrights do to literary criticism. A fixed point in this development is constituted by the genius of Plato and Aristotle, with whom certain parts of discourse are delineated, albeit on philosophical ground, the fundamental ones: the word is explored more deeply also in poetic style and in elevated prose, and people begin to discuss deliberately the essence of art and poetry; with Aristotle, moreover, the elements of a history of the theater are established with the Didascaliae or official lists of the Athenian dramatic performances, and the history of poetry is inaugurated.

Further on, the Peripatetics proceed in the footsteps of their master, of Aristotle: there is loss in general vision, but gain in the domain of the particular; from synthesis toward analysis, the foundation of every science, even if the due spirit of examination is often lacking. Literary history (e.g., the question of the age of Homer and Hesiod, and investigations into ancient poetry, or the hypotheses to the dramas, that is, the judgments given on the dramatists in the theatrical competitions); furthermore biography and biographical legend of the poets and philosophers, stylistics, music constitute the ground over which the Aristotelians range: Heraclides Ponticus, Dicaearchus, Chamaeleon, Aristoxenus, Theophrastus. A pupil of the latter is Praxiphanes of Rhodes, whom tradition presents as the founder of scientific "grammar" after Aristotle, as the one who first called himself γραμματικός; he, with Hermocrates of Iasos, a scholar who seems likewise to have borne this name, was the teacher also of Callimachus, the Alexandrian poet and philologist; and so the Peripatetic cultural movement flows directly into the new science that finds its cradle and its center in Alexandria, and precisely 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 and placed at their head profound connoisseurs, those who were the masters of philology.

Once the great classical creation was exhausted, the moment had come to gather it in its entirety, to catalog it, to fix its genuine text, to interpret it, to assess its value, to trace its development at least in its principal representatives, to study its language or dialects and its metrics, to sketch profiles of the writers: and this was the work of Alexandrian philology. Textual criticism and exegesis in particular were here a conquest forever: sound methodological criteria and fine intelligence sustained and attest both. If today we read Homer, the tragedians, the Greek lyric poets in relatively correct texts, we owe it to these men and their successors. And as interpretation, the scholia to Homer with their broad Aristarchean imprint document how far the Alexandrians arrived: allegory banished, the gaze plunges into the word and into things, aiming directly at understanding and illustrating. Aristophanes of Byzantium excels above all for breadth of vision: as editor of epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, even of Plato, as lexicographer, as metrician, as critic in the "hypotheses" prefixed to the editions and in the so-called Canons or classifications of the practitioners of literary genres. Aristarchus became an antonomastic name for the severe critic.

Alongside the Alexandrian school, the school of Pergamon flourishes in the Greek world with distinctive characteristics of its own: on one side the Peripatetic thought set it in motion, on the other the Stoic teaching; its forerunner is Crates of Mallos (2nd century B.C.). From the clash between Alexandrians and Pergamenes, respectively, in matters of language, analogists and anomalists, there emerges the definitive constitution of grammar in the strict sense, with its phonetics and its morphological terminology, the one that has in substance remained down to us: the systematizing principle of Stoic logic made a large contribution to it. The taste of Pergamene philology lies in the moralism and allegorism of Stoic tint, dominant in interpretation, particularly of Homer; Crates did not shrink from forcing the text of the classics to his moral and theological interpretations, and despising the labors and scruples of Aristarchus as a curator of texts, he disdained to call himself γραμματικός in the Alexandrian manner, in order to give himself the appellation of κριτικός.

After Aristarchus and Crates the opposing tendencies were reconciled, and constructions and definitions of "grammar" now arise, as with Dionysius Thrax, or Tyrannion the Elder, or Asclepiades of Myrlea, where the influence of the two schools is equally reflected. These are the divisions familiar to us from the Roman "grammarians"; language naturally has its part in them, but there is also variously exegesis, textual and literary criticism.

Philology in Rome was born under the impulse of both Hellenistic schools; Crates of Mallus taught his doctrines and methods there directly. And here too in philology there is a process similar to that of Alexandria and Pergamon: a penetrating gaze upon the national idiom, a critical fixing of the old juridical and literary texts, and a commenting on them, a looking to the letters and traditions of the homeland. Aelius Stilo opens the series of philologists. Shortly thereafter his pupil Varro reigns supreme with the imposing industry that distinguishes him, with the personality of a man who relives the teachings that came from previous ages in order to transcend them and reshape them with an entirely personal stamp, with a humanistic conscience and therefore of human universality, with a dynamism of the past into the present. He is also a poet, a prose writer, a writer on philosophy, jurisprudence, agriculture, geography; he is a political man and a fighter by temperament; but his genius lies in plunging into antiquity — or rather into the Rome that was — to revive it, in culture and civilization, political, social, literary, artistic, mythical life, with an eye of love turned to language: its origin, its kinship with Aeolic, with Sabine, with Oscan, alphabet, phonetics, inflection, expression, style, correct usage and therefore analogy versus anomaly, that is, the inner regularity of the linguistic phenomenon and the deviating force of habit.

Around Varro, in Rome or in the Roman world, there is a flowering of scholars ranging over different philological fields. Worthy of mention are Philoxenus of Alexandria, an etymologist who abandons the capriciously fantastic methods of the Stoics to aim at the root of the word and at monosyllabic prototypes; Tryphon, one of the pioneers in syntactic investigations, from whom the treatise-writers of the Empire would set out; Didymus the Brazen-Gutted and Theon, the former variously learned in accordance with Alexandrian tastes, both sound in exegesis, of which there are ample and precious documents in surviving commentaries. Among Romans, let Caesar not be passed over in silence, one of the most brilliant disciplinarians and systematizers of the oratio bene latina by way of analogy or the organic and rational laws of speech; it was not only his authority as a man and a writer that counted here, but that of the treatise-writer with his volume De analogia.

The age of the Empire still boasts a fervent original activity in the first centuries down to the middle of the 3rd century; then comes a languishing and a stagnation of productive forces, a patchwork literature save for rare exceptions. Various figures of Romans hold the field in the 1st century: Remmius Palaemon with his reform of the school, where he substitutes Virgil for Ennius and in general the leaders of Latin poetry and prose for the ancients, and with his Ars grammatica elaborated in every part, with compressed syntax, where among other things the individual terminologies are definitively fixed in forms that have survived to the present day; Q. Asconius Pedianus with his learned and clear exegesis of Cicero the orator; Pliny the Elder with acute linguistic investigations widely exploited by his contemporaries and by those to come; M. Valerius Probus, a philologist of the Alexandrian stamp, with critical editions of Lucretius, Virgil, Horace and certainly at least also of Terence. Between the 1st and 2nd centuries stands Suetonius with his solid erudition, to whom is owed most of what is known of a personal nature about writers from the Augustan period onward, as to Varro about those before him; and then 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 efflorescence of the genre. Atticist and anti-Atticist dictionaries are another sign of the age in the struggle between purism or classicizing manner and Asianism. Nor let the extreme codification of syntax in the ancient world with Apollonius Dyscolus, and of prosody and orthography with Herodian, his son, be passed over in silence. Then of a living philology one cannot speak: the compilers succeed. Only the exegesis and criticism of biblical texts arises subsequently, the sole true and vital philological novelty among the Christians.

What follows these years belongs to the history of culture, no longer of philology, even if between the 4th and 6th centuries there is no lack of good patchers-up who dominated the schools of the Middle Ages, such as Donatus or Priscian. The Middle Ages, an epoch so rich in inner ferment, in ethical, religious and cultural values, is for philology as a science a closed book: for the history of wisdom and of the ancient idea it has manifold interests that do not fall within this scope, except for one moment of capital importance: the scrupulous transmission of pagan and Christian literary works. The leader of the arduous enterprise in the West is Cassiodorus; with him monasticism becomes the depositary of classical culture. To the monastic libraries belongs the merit of having saved and handed down the finest flower of ancient art and thought. For the rest, "grammar," the queen of the liberal arts, in the Middle Ages is not philology, it is simply morphology and syntax, nor does it know new points of view until the Doctrinale of Alexander of Villedieu (12th-13th century), with which the spoken vernaculars come into consideration, no longer the usual Latin writers, and the logical observation of language dominates. The Byzantine Middle Ages compiles and transmits, like the West. The sparks of revival that here and there burst forth in the two worlds concern only the love of antiquity, not criticism and scientific knowledge.

Humanism announces itself variously in Europe between the 13th and 14th centuries; it is then born with Petrarch in Italy, and it is 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, to hear again 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 among us, save for persistent or exploding little flames in this or that place; a moment of particular importance, from which flows the re-entry of Greek and classical creation into Italy and the work of translation. Thus the book trade comes to life, and libraries are founded; the invention of printing marks an epoch here. The impulse toward a renewed knowledge of a scientific character is there: and behold celebrated masters, critical procedures with Lorenzo Valla at their head, lovingly curated editions, the classics, grammars, commentaries remade on the ancients; literary criticism sets out to create new values especially with the reappearance of Aristotle's Poetics. To name the creators is superfluous: in Angelo Poliziano the philology of the Quattrocento culminates; and he, with his encyclopedic vision of knowledge, in some way anticipates the German philological period; in fact, he is essentially a critic of texts and an interpreter.

Along these paths the Italian sixteenth century broadens and deepens its work with sagacity, with method, with sound taste, with liveliness of doctrines, with a sense of art, with absolute mastery and penetration of the linguistic instrument. Pier Vettori soars supreme among us. But now from Italy, following upon Humanism, the scientific spirit passes to Europe; Erasmus of Rotterdam is the first humanist and philologist of renown who is not Italian. France is ahead of the others in developing our own lines of direction, and she soon acquires a physiognomy of her own, notably with the master of masters, Joseph Justus Scaliger, son of the Italian Julius Caesar, the codifier of French classicism. He goes beyond classical Latin to ascend, with Varro and Festus, to the most ancient Latin, founds historical chronology, investigates Greco-Roman astrology with Manilius in hand; he is an authentic scientist, and more than once a diviner. Another man of stature is Jacques Cujas, the father of the exegesis of Roman law. The two Stephens, Robert and Henry, link their names to the Thesauri of Latin and Greek, of which only the Latin one has been surpassed by Forcellini and today by the Thesaurus Latinae linguae. Adrien Turnèbe, Denis Lambin, Isaac Casaubon stamp living, sometimes indelible marks on the interpretation of Latin and Greek authors.

France is followed by Holland and then by England, in the 17th and 18th centuries. The said collectors of documents and compilers are generally the Dutch (until the spirit of a Richard Bentley comes to quicken them), but they are also elegant versifiers in Latin. With the Englishman Bentley, again a coryphaeus, an investigator's eye, criticism grows sharp and is whetted, the breath expands, the hand becomes surer; Greek dialects with the discovery of the Homeric digamma, Terentian metrics, an edition of Horace and of the New Testament, linguistic and historical-literary researches, which served as an example: such is his work of highest significance and greatest scope, where even the less good, such as his accentuated rationalism, can prove fruitful, given his lively penetration of things. Lofty goals now stand before the science of antiquity, with the English and the Dutch as leaders; Latinity and Greekness alike the object of investigation. The English have this in particular: that their studies, though digging deep and passionate, do not usually segregate them from active life for the fatherland: they are scientists and militant citizens.

The nineteenth century marks a spiritual revolution, which makes philology what was said 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, to be sure, had not remained extraneous to inquiry since the fifteenth century, but had also produced well-known profiles of scholars or amateurs. Homer and ideal Greekness, Ossian, primitive poetry, popular song, voice and inspiration of nature as against cold rationalism, a new concept of history understood as inner narration, no longer of mere facts, historical criticism resting firmly on the sources but not concluded in them, but spiritually constructive and fixed in the becoming of times and of men: such are the conceptions and impulses that transform the European soul, literature, art, thought, science. Vico in the eighteenth century is a precursor; then come Winckelmann and Lessing; in Herder, Niebuhr, and the legionaries of palingenesis there is no counting them. Neo-Humanism and Romanticism give the death blow to old classicism. In philology the renewing breath comes from Christian Heyne and his Göttingen school; Georg Zoëga, Heinrich Voss, Friedrich August Wolf, the brothers Schlegel and Humboldt, Barthold Niebuhr, Karl Lachmann. Beyond this school the masters are: Jacob Grimm, Franz Bopp, Friedrich Diez, Friedrich Savigny. Everywhere facts that rise to ideas, to a historical consideration of the totality of the spirit, of civilization in general, including Roman law. Two schools predominate within the sphere of classical antiquity: that of August Boeckh and that of Gottfried Hermann. The one aims more broadly at the life and culture of the ancient peoples, the other at scientifically deepening the centuries-old philological tradition, and therefore at the establishment of texts, the classics or those of the best age before all others, and at their exegesis, at language, at style, at versification. Illustrious scholars therefore establish themselves in Germany and in the old Europe: Italy, France, England, Holland, Belgium, the Scandinavian countries and elsewhere, who bring these studies to their present heights. Theodor Mommsen is one of the greatest builders.

Now it is no longer one philology, the classical, that has life, but the Germanic, the Romance, the Slavic. The Germanic comes first: the idea of historical development, Romanticism, comparative grammar lead Germany to contemplate with scientific method her own past in language with its dialects, in literature, in art, with a strong attraction toward the popular and the primitive. Beginnings of a linguistic, lexical, dialectal, grammatical character and, with the eighteenth century, also aesthetic, precede in Germany, in Holland, in England, in Denmark this profound revolution; but it is decisive. August Wilhelm Schlegel means the history of medieval Germanic poetry; Jacob Grimm with his brother Wilhelm, saga, tale, legend, chronicle; Jacob alone, comparative grammar of the languages, and mythology, antiquities, custom, the entirety of the life of the Germans in historical succession, particularly in prehistory. Beside Grimm stands Karl Lachmann, a forerunner as a Germanist with his original analyses of the Nibelungen and his observations on the Hildebrandslied and on the Parzival, and he holds an equal place as a classicist.

For Romance philology too, naturally, the starting point is here, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The earliest beginnings date from some time back in the various Neo-Latin countries; in Italy from Dante and Humanism onward; then Spain, Portugal and France follow, especially France in the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century is an awakening in Italy and France, above all through a deepened knowledge of letters and through high criticism. Among us the precursor philosophical and historical thought of G. B. Vico reigns alone. In France, the first revealer of the old civilizations, in the wake of the new German ideas, is, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Claude Fauriel. The father of Romance philology in general is Friedrich Diez; then comes the flourishing of historical investigations, in the linguistic and literary field with greater or lesser intensity among the Neo-Latin peoples, as likewise in Germanic and Anglo-Saxon lands, dating precisely from Diez's fundamental Grammar and Vocabulary of the Romance languages, and even earlier from his studies on the troubadours: critical editions at the basis of everything, and beside them the history of progressive civilization, analysis and synthesis, epic poetry in the front line, then lyric, dramatic, novelistic, folkloristic, and comparativism, linguistics. Here too there are names of resonance, no differently than in classical philology, and more than one of these most representative men had a classical education.

Of later date is Slavic philology: Czech, Polish and Russian collaborators following the teachings of J. Dobrovský, the archegete. A cultural problem is Old Church Slavonic and its history, and behind it the essence of an integral civilization. Nor do only Slavs investigate this world, but Germans, French, English energetically as well. Semitic philology too has developed flourishingly, with a large participation of Italians.

Gino Funaioli