Ancient Scholarship and Virgil's Use of Republican Latin Poetry. I

Abstract

From the scholarly activity of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. stem several collections of scholia to the poems of Virgil, most of which make copious reference to prose and verse composed in Latin before Virgil's time. The authors of these scholia were the last of a long line of commentators whose labours began soon after Virgil's death. Just as Virgil walked in the tracks of Theocritus, Hesiod, Aratus, Nicander, Homer, and Apollonius, so did his students in the tracks of the great Alexandrian expositors of the Greek poets. They sought to explain Virgil not only through Virgil himself, but also through the poets and prose writers, Greek and Latin, whom they imagined Virgil to have read. Thus we have scholia citing early republican literature in order to parallel words uncommon in or absent from the fourth-century classical syllabus, as well as unclassical usages, inflections, and constructions; in order to demonstrate ‘imitations’ on the part of Virgil; and in order to elucidate the structure of episodes of the three poems where Virgil appears to depart from the most commonly known versions of myth and history. Argument concerning the text or interpretation of a disputed passage is frequently based on appeal to the usage of Virgil's Latin predecessors.