This is the first book, after J. E. Sandys, to cover the multiform fied of “ancient scholarship” from the beginnings to the fall of Byzantium. It is worth underlining the benefits of a work with multiple expert voices in a field so complex. The book is based on the four historiographical chapters of Brill's Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship (2015), which have been updated and rethought.

Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship aims at providing a reference work in the field of ancient Greek and Byzantine scholarship and grammar, thus encompassing the broad and multifaceted philological and linguistic research activity during the entire Greek Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The first part of the volume offers a thorough historical overview of ancient scholarship, which covers the period from its very beginnings to the Byzantine era. The second part focuses on the disciplinary profile of ancient scholarship by investigating its main scientific topics. The third and final part presents the particular work of ancient scholars in various philological and linguistic matters, and also examines the place of scholarship and grammar from an interdisciplinary point of view, especially from their interrelation with rhetoric, philosophy, medicine and nature sciences.

Ancient greek sholarship constitutes a precious resource for classicists, but one that is underutilized because graduate students and even mature scholars lack familiarity with its conventions. The peculiarities of scholarly Greek and the lack of translations or scholarly aids often discourages readers from exploiting the large body of commentaries, scholia, lexica, and grammatical treatises that have been preserved on papyrus and via the manuscript tradition. Now, for the first time, there is an introduction to such scholarship that will enable students and scholars unfamiliar with this material to use it in their work. Ancient Greek Scholarship includes detailed discussion of the individual ancient authors on whose works scholia, commentaries, or single-author lexica exist, together with explanations of the probable sources of that scholarship and the ways it is now used, as well as descriptions of extant grammatical works and general lexica. These discussions, and the annotated bibliography of more than 1200 works, also include evaluations of the different texts of each work and of a variety of electronic resources. This book not only introduces readers to ancient scholarship, but also teaches them how to read it. Here readers will find a detailed, step-by-step introduction to the language, a glossary of over 1500 grammatical terms, and a set of more than 200 passages for translation, each accompanied by commentary. The commentaries offer enough help to enable undergraduates with as little as two years of Greek to translate most passages with confidence; in addition, readers are given aids to handling the ancient numerical systems, understanding the references found in works of ancient scholarship, and using an apparatus criticus (including an extensive key to the abbreviations used in an apparatus). Half the passages are accompanied by a key, so that the book is equally suitable for those studying on their own and for classes with graded homework.

Publisher description

This comprehensive history of classical learning from the sixth century BCE to 1900 was first published between 1903 and 1908.

In the last decades the field of research on ancient Greek scholarship has been the object of a remarkable surge of interest, with the publication of handbooks, reference works, and new editions of texts. This partly unexpected revival is very promising and it continues to enhance and modify both our knowledge of ancient scholarship and the way in which we are accustomed to discuss these texts and tackle the editorial and exegetical challenges they pose. This volume deals with some pivotal aspects of this topic, being the outcome of a three-year project funded by the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research (MIUR) on specific aspects of the critical re-appraisal of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Aeschylus in Greek culture throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. It tackles issues such as the material form of the transmission of the exegesis from papyri to codices, the examination of hitherto unexplored branches of the manuscript evidence, the discussion of some important scholia, and the role played by the indirect tradition and the assimilation of the exegetical heritage in grammatical and lexicographical works. Some strands of the ancient and medieval scholarship are here re-evaluated afresh by adopting an interdisciplinary methodology which blends modern editorial techniques developed for ‘problematic’ or ‘non-authorial’ medieval texts with current trends in the history of philology and literary criticism. In their diversity of subject matter and approach the papers collected in the volume give intended readers an excellent overview of the topics of the project.

The Bible was the essence of virtually every aspect of the life of the early churches. The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation explores a wide array of themes related to the reception, canonization, interpretation, uses, and legacies of the Bible in early Christianity. Each section contains overviews and cutting-edge scholarship that expands understanding of the field. Part One examines the material text transmitted, translated, and invested with authority, and the very conceptualization of sacred Scripture as God's word for the church. Part Two looks at the culture and disciplines or science of interpretation in representative exegetical traditions. Part Three addresses the diverse literary and non-literary modes of interpretation, while Part Four canvasses the communal background and foreground of early Christian interpretation, where the Bible was paramount in shaping normative Christian identity. Part Five assesses the determinative role of the Bible in major developments and theological controversies in the life of the churches. Part Six returns to interpretation proper and samples how certain abiding motifs from within scriptural revelation were treated by major Christian expositors. The overall history of biblical interpretation has itself now become the subject of a growing scholarship and the final part skilfully examines how early Christian exegesis was retrieved and critically evaluated in later periods of church history. Taken together, the chapters provide nuanced paths of introduction for students and scholars from a wide spectrum of academic fields, including classics, biblical studies, the general history of interpretation, the social and cultural history of late ancient and early medieval Christianity, historical theology, and systematic and contextual theology. Readers will be oriented to the major resources for, and issues in, the critical study of early Christian biblical interpretation.

Volume I of Franco Montanari's "Kleine Schriften" comprises some 66 papers on ancient scholarship, a topic which he decisively helped establishing as an extremely important field of study; they include general surveys of Alexandrian and Pergamene philology, major contributions to ancient Homeric scholarship (with a particular emphasis on Aristarchus), ancient scholarship on Hesiod and Aeschylus, as well as an important number of editions and notes on papyrological scholarly texts. Volume II consists of 42 contributions to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Pindar, Aeschylus, Herodotus, Euripides, the Athenaion Politeia, Lucian, Nonnus, philosophical papyri, the reception of antiquity and portraits of contemporary scholars.

This volume features an international group of experts on the literature, philosophy, and religion of the ancient Mediterranean world. Each paper makes a unique contribution, and together, the papers draw an engaging portrait of the idea of “repetition.”