This volume sets out to replace K. Lehrs's De Aristarchi studiis Homericis (18331, 18823) as a comprehensive treatment of Aristarchus of Samothrace as a Homeric critic. Amongst its predecessors, A. Ludwich's Aristarchs Homerische Textkritik (1885) focused on textual issues, whereas A. Roemer's Die Homerexegese Aristarchs (1924), while correcting and supplementing Lehrs, proved too apologetic and biased.
S. succeeds in producing a systematic descriptive encyclopaedia of Aristarchus’ philology: clearly written and elegantly produced, this volume is a major achievement, unlikely to be replaced for decades to come. After some well-informed introductory discussion of the sources and the nature of Aristarchus’ editorial and exegetical work, the longest chapter is devoted to the six parts of ars grammatica (orthography, tropes and figures, glosses and myths, etymology, analogy and literary criticism); the final sections address Aristarchus’ attitude towards his colleagues (chiefly Zenodotus and Aristophanes) and his view of Homer's language, characters, influence (the neoteroi) and identity (the ‘Homeric question’).
No complete work of Aristarchus has come down to us, and no comprehensive edition of his fragments has been produced. S. – the editor in 2004 of 73 fragments gleaned from Byzantine etymologica – deems that a collection of fragments would be ‘not only an immense task but actually less useful’ (p. xviii): she confines her inquiry to some 4,300 scholia of the first-century grammarian Aristonicus to Homer's Iliad, taken from H. Erbse's edition of the scholia vetera to that poem. Scholia to the Iliad transmitted by other Mittelmenschen (Didymus of Alexandria, Nicanor and Herodian) are generally disregarded as less reliable witnesses to Aristarchus’ ipsissima verba, even if they often certainly contain Aristarchan doctrine; so are the scholia to the Odyssey, whose manuscript transmission and terminological facies are less clear-cut. The scholia selected are equipped with an elegant and exact English translation, though with no apparatus fontium and no indication of the source manuscripts.
The selection of material has its rationale, but also its pitfalls. Aristarchus’ only commentary to be preserved in the direct tradition is the fragment on Herodotus Book 1 in PAmherst 2.12: this papyrus is barely mentioned (p. 6 n. 14); nor does Aristarchus’ exegesis to authors other than Homer fare any better. Among Iliadic commentators, Herodian is invoked – despite his alleged unreliability – on issues of prosody (e.g. pp. 103–22), but deserved a more important role; Nicanor's scholia on punctuation and other topics (see R. Nünlist, BICS 64 [2021], 35–47) are conspicuously absent.
As for Didymus Chalcenterus, one of the reasons for disregarding the scholia drawn from his Περὶ τῆς Ἀρισταρχείου διορθώσεως is that S. sides with M. West in believing that their terminology and doctrines go back to Didymus rather than to Aristarchus (pp. 18–22; 65–71); should we take this claim to the extreme, much of what S. writes about Aristarchus’ practice of consulting Homeric copies would become shakier. In a sort of mediation between the theories of van der Valk–West and Ludwich–Nagy, S. maintains that Aristarchus may have occasionally consulted other copies of the poems, but that he never relied on manuscript evidence alone for his textual choices (p. 69): this may be true, but it looks at odds with S.'s picture of Aristarchus (p. 759) as a champion of a ‘systematic’ method of textual analysis. S. also agrees with West in considering Zenodotus’ Homeric text as representing a rhapsodic copy from Asia Minor rather than the fruit of conscious editorial choices (p. 577 n. 157): again taken to the extreme, this view would cast doubts on the extent and value of Zenodotus’ critical activity, which S. admits and elaborates on (pp. 550, 592 etc.) – it would also make Aristarchus’ (mis?)conception of Zenodotus as an original editor somewhat surprising.
S.'s decision to mostly neglect the Odyssey scholia proceeds from the uncertainty about the latter's relationship to the Vier-Männer-Kommentar (and hence to Aristonicus) as well as from the unreliability of their terminology, but it conflicts with Aristarchus’ deep belief in Homer's sole authorship of both poems (pp. 623–50). Aristarchus’ reason for quoting Od. 9.21–2 in the scholium to Il. 15.193 is to be found in schol. H Od. 9.21f (not mentioned on p. 154 n. 136); one of the most exciting cases of interference between Alexandrian exegesis and medical vocabulary (see pp. 225–6 and 749–52) concerns Od. 11.579 δέρτρον, for which we have Aristarchus’ explanation in fr. 65 Schironi (from the Etymologica) etc.
As for S.'s discussion of the evidence, the sixfold division of Aristarchus’ grammatical principles follows the pattern of Dionysius Thrax's Techne grammatike: a more thorough inquiry into the relationship between Dionysius’ categories and Aristarchus’ terminology is missing, but may prove useful for understanding how justified it is to project later schemes back onto Aristarchus (e.g. the choice of the first-century Περὶ τρόπων of Trypho as the fountainhead of all doctrines on tropes is problematic, nor is PWürzburg 2 a papyrus of Trypho, as claimed on p. 127). In this respect, the best methodological lesson is offered by S. Matthaios's Untersuchungen zur Grammatik Aristarchs (1999), a substantial book not superseded by S.'s analysis and to be consulted throughout (the same holds, on literary criticism, for R. Nünlist's The Ancient Critic at Work [2009]).
The scholia discussed are fragments, and it is often hard to understand them outside of a wider net of exegetical materials normally listed in the apparatus fontium et testimoniorum of critical editions. For instance, Aristarchus’ note on the repetition of a word (Αἰθίοπας) in Odyssey 1.22–3 is taken by S. as a trace of the polemic against the so-called Chorizontes (pp. 152, 169–70), who complained that repetition was a frequent figure in the Iliad but not in the Odyssey: this may be true, but the later rhetorical tradition (Ps.-Plut. De Hom. 2.32; Ps.-Hermog. Meth. dein. 9) quotes the lines for different reasons. The ancient debate on why Achilles and Ulysses are defined as πτολίπορθοι, ‘sackers of cities’, is tackled (pp. 633–6) without reference to Porphyry's scholium to Od. 1.2h1 or to the earlier discussion of the topic by the fourth-century philosopher Antisthenes in his Odysseus. In Iliad 8.70 the κῆρες of Achilles and Memnon are weighed (p. 682), and Aristarchus blames Aeschylus for misunderstanding these κῆρες as ‘souls’ (rather than ‘destinies’) in his Psychostasia: this resonates with the Stoic interpretation of the Κῆρες as referring to the duplicity of the Μοῖραι (schol. bT Il. 8.69 = SVF II.931). Did Aristarchus’ mythographic studies (here pp. 661–78), for example on Niobe or on Theseus’ abduction of Helen, really ignore the works of earlier mythographers such as Pherecydes or Hellanicus (R. Fowler's Early Greek Mythography [2000] is not mentioned)?
S.'s ambition is to free Aristarchus from the negative light that some modern scholars have cast on him and to show the depth of his contribution to the shaping of classical philology as a discipline based on the systematic analysis of textual evidence (hence her insistence on Aristarchus’ empiricism, pp. 753–61: but how does this sit with his ubiquitous use of analogy, see e.g. pp. 277–312?). This is sound and interesting, but other, substantial questions are left unanswered. Was Aristarchus really the first (pp. xxiii, 52 etc.) to produce a line-by-line running commentary to his edition, or should we follow W. Slater in believing that Aristophanes of Byzantium already did? (S. leaves the door open to such a possibility on p. 581, but a fresh analysis of the X (chi) critical sign, which S., p. 57, misreads in P. Oxy. 1086, may yield new insights.) What is the relationship between Aristarchus’ refined philology and the didactic dimension of his work? (S., p. 123, believes this involved the ‘reading aloud’ of the poems to pupils: but the Museum and Library at Alexandria were not primarily places of teaching.) What is Aristarchus’ role in the definition of the technical methods of etymology? (S.'s fascinating analysis on pp. 340–76 insists on the ‘sharing of consonants’, but how does this otherwise poorly attested principle match what we know from other sources?) What is the relationship between Aristarchus’ grammatical categories and the earlier and contemporary – chiefly Peripatetic and Stoic – philosophical speculation? When Aristarchus presents Homer as an Athenian and his language as a form of ‘ancient Attic’ (pp. 601–21), does this resonate with the prestige enjoyed by Attic in Hellenistic literary culture and the desire to place Homer at the beginning of a glorious tradition? if so, why is no reference made to Aristarchus’ famous dictum that Homer is ‘the touchstone of hellenismos’ (fr. 125A Matthaios)?
S.'s book is an important achievement, which deserves to become the standard reference work on Aristarchus’ work on the Iliad. At the same time, it is not the last word on this grammarian, nor does it supersede some recent, more detailed scholarly inquiries. An edition of Aristarchus’ fragments is still an urgent desideratum.
