Introduction To Ancient Scholarship

Abstract

Abstract For Almost Four Thousand Years, The Peoples Living around the Mediterranean have been attempting to improve their ability to understand ancient texts by systematic study of their language, context, and textual tradition. The Greeks seem to have come to this practice relatively late in comparison with Near Eastern civilizations such as that of the Babylonians, who produced dictionaries of Sumerian in the second millennium bc. The earliest traces of Greek scholarship can be found in the fifth century bc, when philosophers and rhetors began thinking and writing about language in a way that led towards systematic linguistic scholarship and when attempts to explain Homer to schoolchildren resulted in the earliest ancestors of some of our scholia. In the fourth century Plato and Aristotle continued to think systematically about language, while the establishment of an official text of the Athenian tragedies showed a new concern for textual authenticity and the creation of texts like that preserved on the Derveni papyrus showed the development of exegesis. The Stoic philosophers also made important observations about the Greek language that laid much of the foundation for the later grammatical tradition. The real beginning of Greek scholarship in our sense of the term, however, occurred with the foundation of the library and Museum at Alexandria in the early third century bc, and for centuries the librarians and other scholars there were the most important Greek scholars. By the first century bc noted grammarians, lexicographers, and textual critics could be found in many parts of the GrecoRoman world, and scholarship was a flourishing and highly respected profession. These ancient scholars brought to their work a host of advantages that their modern counterparts lack: native-speaker fluency in ancient Greek, access to vast numbers.