Classical Commentaries Explorations in a Scholarly Genre

This rich collection of essays by an international group of scholars explores commentaries in many different languages on ancient Latin and Greek texts. The commentaries discussed range from the ancient world to the twentieth century. Together, the chapters contribute to the dialogue between two vibrant and developing fields of study: the history of scholarship and the history of the book. The volume pays particular attention to individual commentaries, national traditions of commentary, the part played by commentaries in the reception of classical texts, and the role of printing and publishing. The material form of commentaries is also considered-including how they are advertised and their accompanying illustrations-as well as their role in education. Both academic texts and books written for schools are surveyed.

1 - Form and Content
2 - Jebb's Sophocles
3 - A Teutonic Monster in Oxford: The Making of Fraenkel's Agamemnon
4 - My Back Pages
5 - Two-author Commentaries on Horace: Three Case Studies
6 - Dodd's Bacchae
7 - Commentary Writing on the Annals of Tacitus: Different Approaches for Different Audiences
8 - Commenting on Fragments: The Case of Early Roman Poetry
9 - Between Scylla and Charybdis: Text and Conjecture in Greek Lyric Commentary
10 - Philosophers, Exegetes, Scholars: The Ancient Philosophical Commentary from Plato to Simplicius
11 - Italian Commentaries on Lucretius
12 - Citations of Ovid in Virgil's Ancient Commentators
13 - The Historical Commentary
14 - Selling Terence in Renaissance Italy: The Marketing Power of Commentary
15 - From Giovanni Pontano to Pierio Valeriano: Five renaissance Commentators on Latin Erotic Poetry
16 - Translation and Commentary: Pope's Iliad
17 - Agricolan Paratexts
18 - Fifty Shades of Orange: Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries
19 - Hipparchus Among the Detractors
20 - Ancient Commentaries on Theocritus' Idylls and Vergil's Eclogues
21 - Biblical Exegesis and the Twelfth-Century Expansion of Servius
22 - Christian Gottlob Heyne and the Changing Fortunes of the Commentary in the Age of Altertumswissenschaft
23 - Vauvilliers' Pindar and its Place in Pindaric Commentary
24 - Heracles' Choice: Thoughts on the Virtues of Print and Digital Commentary
25 - The Dream of a Universal Variorum: Digitizing the Commentary Tradition
26 - Afterword

Christina S. Kraus is Thomas A. Thacher Professor of Latin at Yale University Christopher Stray is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History and Classics at Swansea University