What is a commentator? This excellent volume varies the famous question of Foucault and explores how ancient commentators — especially Servius and other Virgilian commentators — operate and are received as authors, rather than as mere critical drones or, worse, parasites living off host literature (and sucking the life out of it by overexplaining it). The volume should appeal to those interested in ancient literary criticism, particularly that of Latin Late Antiquity, and in the history and theory of authorship. Of particular note is the contribution the book makes to our understanding of the commentator function, or the ways in which the authorial identity of the commentator is a construct generated from, and changed by, historical and discursive conditions.
The volume consists of an introduction and fourteen chapters — seven in English, four in German, two in Italian, and one in French. A fundamental strength lies in its contributors’ deep and sophisticated understanding of how an ancient commentator is a unique kind of author. The editors set the tone in their introduction. They of course recognise that any commentator is as much a reader as a writer, working with and from a source text with a completeness matched only by a translator, and subjecting that text to a form of microscopically close reading (7–10). The editors also lay out how ancient commentators drew freely from (often unnamed) predecessors to compile their texts (10); likewise, in the transmission of many commentaries, compilation continued apace, with material, especially that drawn from other ancient sources, often added to them as they circulated (10–11). Yet while all this complicates how to understand the act of commentary writing, by muddying criteria commonly used today to define authorship (originality, textual stability), the editors make a forceful case for seeing commentators as authors: the key is to adapt the definition to their discursive practices, and to excavate the strata of transmitted commentaries to locate an underlying author or underlying authors (13–20). This lays the groundwork for the rest of the volume, by establishing that the author ‘is not just historical ballast, but a useful and indispensable tool for the analysis and interpretation’ (13) of ancient commentators and commentaries, their cultural contexts and their transmission histories.
An especially complicated transmission history appears in the contribution of Fabio Stok. In one of the strongest chapters of the volume (91–117), Stok examines the origins and editions of the ‘Philargyrian’ corpus, a group of Virgilian commentaries: his focus lies with the uncertainty surrounding the name and identity of the commentator Philargyrius. While primarily concerned with the history of scholarship, Stok observes that the function of authorship shifted from the Middle Ages, when the names of commentators were just ‘labels’, to the Renaissance and later, when interest rose ‘in the historical person of the commentator(s)’ (112). The chapter thus uses careful philological inquiry to argue convincingly that, as Foucault puts it in a statement quoted by Stok (91), ‘the author-function is not universal or constant’.
While nearly every other chapter deals to some degree with issues of transmission, the prevailing concern among them is the authorial practices of the ancient commentators themselves. There is no runt in the litter: each chapter is a substantial contribution to the volume. But three stand out as especially compelling. The first is the chapter of Daniel Kozák (187–221), a wonderfully copious examination of how Servius and Servius Auctus discuss copia, or ‘(over)abundance’, in Virgil and in the works of other commentators. Kozák not only differentiates between the two commentaries by identifying the divergent ways they deal with copia, but also shows how references to ‘(over)abundance’ reflect Servius’/Servius Auctus’ broader critical goals and shape their self-definition as critics. The differences between Servius and Servius Auctus also interest Stefano Poletti (223–59), in his excellent treatment of the commentators’ approaches to Virgil’s subjective style. Along with using their responses to that style to distinguish between the commentaries, Poletti shows how Servius and Servius Auctus addressed a modern critical concern, thereby shedding the air of flat-footed fustiness that too often marks their work and instead demonstrating some literary sophistication as proto-narratologists. The third chapter to highlight comes from Daniel Vallat (369–405), who situates Servius in his contemporary culture by linking his approach in his commentary to the methods of the grammarian (of which, of course, Servius was one). By so historicising Servius, Vallat widens our perspective on his commentary, by linking it to broader exegetical practices in Late Antiquity. In addition, he confirms the essential link at that time between the commentary tradition and instruction, which of course is still very much in place today.
The commentary techniques of Servius occupy two other contributors as well, Massimo Gioseffi and Frances Foster. Gioseffi (155–85) precisely investigates how Servius uses different verbs to describe Virgil’s activities as a poet: the deliberate word choices highlight Servius’ authorial control over his commentary and his active attempts to shape perceptions of his subject. In her fine chapter, meanwhile, Foster (311–37) surveys how Servius anonymises his sources by recurrently referring to unnamed alii when treating his predecessors’ material. The underlying aim of the study is to show how Servius ‘uses this anonymised scholarship to add authority to his own work’ (312).
Other contributors vary Foster’s critical approach to Servius by investigating the construction of his and other Virgilian commentators’ authority in the course of their reception (Ute Tischer (119–52), Concetta Longobardi (407–35) and Janyce Desiderio (437–61)). As Foster and these chapters demonstrate, authority is crucial to the commentator function, in that it reaffirms the commentators’ individuated identities and grants them authorial legitimacy and power.
Contributors also examine the construction of authorship and authority in Pindaric scholia (Thomas Kuhn-Treichel (289–310) and Greek Byzantine scholia (Markus Hafner (339–65)). Yet the presence of these chapters, along with those of Joshua Smith on anonymity and curatorship in the Greek commentary tradition (67–89) and of Camilla Poloni on Aelius Donatus’ commentary on Terence (261–85), points up the one weakness in the volume: its struggle to achieve coherence. This is a challenge endemic to edited volumes, especially those that, like this one, emerge from a conference. (The conference that gave rise to the volume took place in Leipzig in 2019). The editors are upfront about that challenge, and to their credit they acknowledge the partly disjointed character of the book (23). Still, they may have been better served to focus entirely on Servius and the Virgilian commentary tradition. That would also have given them room to include a chapter or two on Tiberius Claudius Donatus beyond that of Luigi Pirovano (37–65), who persuasively argues that Donatus defines his text in opposition to private, unpolished aide-mémoires of other commentary writers.
Despite its mild bagginess, the volume is a deeply impressive piece of scholarship. By treating commentators as more than philological drudges and taking them seriously as authors, it joins with earlier work on commentaries (notably Gibson and Kraus’s The Classical Commentary: Histories, Practices, Theory, 2002) and Kraus and Stray’s Classical Commentaries: Explorations in a Scholarly Genre, 2015) to advance our understanding of the history and theory of an essential critical form in the discipline of Classics.
