The work of Italian philologist Giorgio Pasquali, active in the first half of the twentieth century, is pivotal not only in defining a new philological approach to the study of antiquity but also in shaping the history of the discipline: in his books, Pasquali analysed and evaluated the rich tradition and varied methodological approaches adopted by the major German and Italian philologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
As a philologist, Pasquali combined Lachmann's somewhat mechanical theory with Bédier's attention to the historical relevance of single manuscripts, and stressed the importance of knowing the cultural milieu that gave rise to all textual and material testimonies of antiquity. Pasquali defined and implemented the principle that a text's relevance can be proved only if its influence is observed in two separate peripheral areas. Though Pasquali agreed that the philologist and scholar of ancient texts must search for common characters in any given culture, he rejected the positivistic position that the rules of textual analysis and criticism should abide to the three characteristics of ‘necessity, universality and eternity’ which, Pasquali believed, pertain only to the natural sciences. In response to Croce's distinction between ‘cronaca’ and ‘storia’, Pasquali clearly sided with ‘storia’ as the privileged scientific method for the reading and interpretation of antiquity, and of the history of philology as well.
G.'s book takes the reader on a detailed and methodical journey of Pasquali's assessment of the works of the major philologists of his time, and of the influence of classical tradition on three Italian writers: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Giovanni Pascoli and Vittorio Alfieri. These reflections are important because the ways these writers absorbed and reinterpreted classical literature shaped their works and proved influential to the development of Italian culture throughout the twentieth century.
G.'s study is fascinating in revealing how the interpretation of antiquity has been constantly changed and renewed by the mutable relation established with primary sources and material evidence. For his analysis, G. draws on Pasquali's following works: Pagine stravaganti (1968), Filologia e storia (1964), Storia della tradizione e critica del testo (1988), Storia dello spirito tedesco nelle memorie d'un contemporaneo (2013).
In the first and longest chapter, ‘Metodologie moderne per lo studio dell'antichità’, G. examines Pasquali's interpretation and assessment of the works of the following major European philologists and scholars of classical antiquity: Theodor Mommsen, Friedrich August Wolf, Ermenegildo Pistelli, Girolamo Vitelli, Guido Fava, Jacob Wackernagel, Christian Hülsen, Domenico Comparetti and Ulrich von Wilamowitz.
I will briefly highlight G.'s most poignant synthesis of Pasquali's position vis-à-vis the methodologies used by some of these philologists. Pasquali agreed with Jacob Wackernagel's resistance to explaining many variations in ancient Greek by taking exclusively into account the Indo-European underlying influence. Wackernagel used instead a more historical approach and revealed what forces facilitated or impeded innovation and conservation of Greek forms; he also combined the study of linguistics, which he considered a natural science, with philology, which he considered a historical discipline: through his method, language emerged as the expression of the Volksgeist, i.e. the spirit or national character of a people.
In his analysis of Domenico Comparetti's work, Pasquali highlighted the continuity between Latin and Greek cultures. This postulate was not at all taken for granted by Italian philologists of the turn of the century, so immersed as they were in Latin scholarship. Most of them had at best a superficial knowledge of ancient Greek, and downplayed the continuity from the classical to medieval tradition and the role that medieval copyists had in the transmission of classical texts to modern times. Pasquali particularly appreciated Comparatti's ability to take one single theme and show how it unfolds and develops straddling two different historical periods and cultural milieus. For example, he outlined a cultural history of Europe starting in the Augustan age and ending with Dante by studying how Virgil was received and interpreted from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages. This type of study may lead to interesting parallels between the significance of a text in a certain age, and the types of corruptions or changes suffered by that text during the same historical period.
Pasquali also agreed with Ulrich von Wilamowitz's opposition to the widespread contemporary tendency of seeing Latin writers as unoriginal imitators of their Greek predecessors. Wilamowitz replaced this model of interpretation with a view of Latin literature as an original appropriation of pre-existing Greek models. Pasquali also places Wilamowitz at the point in time when the influence of romanticism on the discipline of philology was waning: while abandoning a view that pointed to the ‘popular spirit’ of a people as the creator of epic and myths, Wilamowitz developed a vision according to which the single individual has a decisive place in the creative process.
The originality of G.'s book stands in positioning Pasquali's analysis of the major philologists of his time side by side with a reflection of the influence of classical texts on major Italian writers. His discussion of Gabriele D'Annunzio and Giovanni Pascoli in light of the classical tradition is particularly interesting.
Regarding D'Annunzio, Pasquali showed how the writer from the Abruzzi used the classical tradition to strip Italian literature of its ‘provincial’ limitations and to bring it to the level of European literature. D'Annunzio had a wide and profound knowledge of ancient Greek language and literature, a rarity in Italian academic circles where Latin was privileged and Greek literature was seen mainly through the lense of Latin studies. Pasquali also showed how D'Annunzio's decadent style was more akin to Hellenistic literature than to classical Greek literature. D'Annunzio shared with Hellenistic writers such as Callimachus a love for ornate, laboured style and exuberant vocabulary.
G.'s work brings to our attention the life and work of Pasquali, a great historian and philologist of antiquity who embraced a unitary idea of knowledge. G.'s book is a powerful reminder that Pasquali can still teach us important lessons. Pasquali's words in his Storia della tradizione still feel very true to all students and scholars of antiquity: ‘I am convinced that in the sciences of the “human spirit” there do not exist strictly defined disciplines, Fächer, but only problems that must be approached simultaneously with methods taken from the most diverse disciplines’.
