Reviewed by: The Ancient Critic at Work: Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek Scholia Filippomaria Pontani René Nünlist. The Ancient Critic at Work: Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek Scholia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. x, 447. $108.00. ISBN 978-0-521-85058-2. In the preface to his pathbreaking essay of 1933 on Die typischen Scenen bei Homer, W. Arend claimed that our understanding of the Homeric poems as literary works had been impaired by the activity of Alexandrian scholars, with their mechanical procedures and their scant taste for archaic style. Nünlist’s book counters this approach, attempting to show the (more or less latent) principles and theoretical implications presiding over a large corpus of ancient exegesis of Greek poets (chiefly the scholia vetera to Homer, Hesiod, the dramatists, and Pindar, but the Iliad has the lion’s share). Following an introductory overview on the size and characteristics of the analyzed material are nineteen chapters: each one dealing with a particular topic (plot, time, style, characters, divine interventions, similes, speeches, etc.; more “technical” fields such as grammar, meter, rhetorical figures and textual criticism are understandably left out) and presenting a discussion generally embracing a sample of relevant scholia (all carefully introduced, translated, and annotated with parallels), all followed by a paragraph of “conclusions.” The book is rounded off by a glossary of Greek terms (which also partly serves as index rerum) and an index locorum. The outcome is excellent. This is the first comprehensive presentation of the guiding principles of Greek literary criticism “in action,” relying on a thorough study of terminology, and on a systematic analysis of various exegetical approaches as they appear throughout ancient scholia. In this respect, it puts into a new perspective (and to a large extent supersedes) the results of several old German dissertations on particular topics, as well as those of R. Meijering’s stimulating though uneven Literary and Rhetorical Theories in Greek Scholia (1988). Nünlist’s argument is always clear and straightforward, and while he generally refrains from delving into detailed interpretations of single scholia, he is always aware of the dangers immanent in the material he is handling; inaccuracies in translation are few, though the omission of the scholia’s lemmata is regrettable. The approach is descriptive, and cross-references between chapters help the reader observe the analogies between similar phenomena, or refer to treatments of crucial technical terms. This will prove particularly helpful as this book is bound to become less a cover-to-cover read than a reference work for graduate students and researchers, each time they are confronted with pieces of ancient exegesis. But the book, doing justice to the achievements of brilliant anonymous scholars sometimes dismissed as mere “scholiasts,” will also offer interesting terms of comparison with theoreticians of literary criticism and to specialists on Vergil’s, Dante’s, or Pope’s commentators. It is indeed surprising to observe how many “modern” concepts and problems were in fact familiar to our ancient colleagues: the dynamics of prolepsis, flashback and digressions (34–66), the relationship between story time and narrative time (69–93), issues of focalization (116–34), poetic license (174–84), the uses of irony (212–15), the exact cast of drama and narrative poetry (238–46), the correct staging and performance of dramatic texts (338–65), etc. Epithets later called “generic” by Milman Parry are discussed and problematized in Homeric scholia (though obviously not in an oral perspective; add here the “blameless Aegisthus” type, Od. 1.29 with schol.). Nünlist even shows that some ancient critics had conceived a basic grammar of type scenes, although this knowledge is never spelled out, but [End Page 264] can only be inferred from scholia focusing on deviations to a presupposed norm (307–14). To be sure, Nünlist’s method of discussing “the Greek material under modern rubrics” (3) has its risks: some connections are exaggerated by the author, for example between the “poetic custom” mentioned in schol. Eur. Hec. 74 and focalization (131), or between the principle of deliberate narratorial omissions (κατὰ τὸ σιωπώμμενα) and W. Iser’s “cooperative reading” (165). Not all the texts discussed on 94–115 will really...