## Metadata - Author: [[James Turner]] - Full Title: Philology - Category: #books ## Highlights - The first scholars actually to call themselves philologists stood at a distance from rhetoric. They worked in a library rather than in the public square. They devoted their labors to texts rather than to the spoken word. And the texts that most absorbed them were those of Homer. ([Location 581](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HONE39U&location=581)) - During the fifth century BCE, written works snowballed in prose as well as verse. At the same time, run-of-the-mill terms used to pass moral judgment on oral recitations acquired new, technical meanings; for example, μετρον (metron), meaning ‘measure’ (as in ‘due measure’), came to mean poetic ‘meter.’ These idioms better fitted discussion of written work and eventually provided jargon for critical scholarship. ([Location 597](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HONE39U&location=597)) - Many Greek cities had a Μουσεῖον (Mouseīon), a shrine to the Muses, sometimes a center for literary activity. Around 300 Ptolemy set up in Alexandria his own Μουσεῖον (whence our word museum). But he really created a new species: a college of scholars and scientists on royal salary engaged in both teaching and research. ([Location 621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HONE39U&location=621)) - Zenodotus of Ephesus probably served as the first librarian, until about 270. So far as known, he invented the idea of ordering items alphabetically. He likely applied his brainstorm to arranging the scrolls, sorted by author. ([Location 651](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HONE39U&location=651)) - Homer was most often replicated, ipso facto most corrupt of texts; so Homeric scholarship became the template. Zenodotus, around 275, took on the challenge. With multiple manuscripts of Homer at hand in the library, Zenodotus put together the earliest ‘standard editions’ of the Iliad and Odyssey—or of any book. He seemingly based his versions on the crucial principle of comparing manuscripts. (Collation is the technical term.) ([Location 665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HONE39U&location=665)) - Zenodotus and his successors forged other durable tools of textual scholarship. One was the line-by-line commentary on a text: a genre already exemplified in the Derveni Papyrus and probably practiced by Aristotle’s disciples in Athens. Aristarchus expertly honed it. In his hands the commentary became a book in which a passage from a work under study was followed by careful explication—of its meaning, of rare words in it, of any doubts of its genuineness, and so forth. Aristarchus, too, coined an enduring axiom of such text criticism: that a writer’s own words provide the best guide to his meaning. Scholars should resolve linguistic puzzles in a text by checking the same author’s usage elsewhere. Aristarchus also embedded in the philological tradition an axiom voiced by Aristotle: the critic must understand a text in relation to the customs of the period that produced it. Philologists should thus gauge passages against social and cultural context as one means of deciding their meaning or even their spuriousness. Eratosthenes of Cyrene (ca. 285–194) pioneered in using historical chronology to resolve textual puzzles. The Alexandrians upgraded yet another inherited implement, the glossary, a book defining uncommon or archaic words in a text. By arranging such words in Zenodotus’s newfangled alphabetical order, they created the ancestor of the modern dictionary.17 ([Location 676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HONE39U&location=676)) - In his Homer edition, Zenodotus set in motion another innovation. He flagged lines he judged doubtful with a horizontal pen stroke in the left margin. This came to be called an óβελος (óbelos, ‘spit’ or ‘skewer’; Latinized as obelus). The ball Zenodotus started rolling never stopped. We still put tiny marks on pages to guide readers through the maze of words. Succeeding Alexandrian critics dreamed up other marginal signs. These included the diplē (>) to signal something worthy of note in Homer (replaced in non-Homeric texts, puzzlingly, by the letter chi [χ]) and the asteriskos (*) to mark a wrongly repeated passage in a manuscript. Aristarchus even concocted a sign to object to Zenodotus’s deletions. Too arcane for ordinary readers, the system proved a huge boon to scholars. They could now show emendations without altering the words of a manuscript. Absent these editorial symbols and the commentary, we might be stuck today with an Iliad warped by even the wackiest of Zenodotus’s inspirations. Instead, the slash-and-burn approach that some Alexandrians took to Homer vented harmlessly in editions with obeli-littered margins. The most prolific inventor of signs for guiding readers through a scroll was Aristophanes of Byzantium. He not only came up with several new critical symbols but also devised accent marks in use today (acute, grave, and circumflex); these aided nonnative speakers of Greek (the majority in the Hellenistic world) to pronounce correctly words that they read. And he invented other new marks to help such readers know when and how long to pause in a text when reading—the comma, the colon, and the period (or full stop). The first textual philologists gave us punctuation. Any casual museumgoer trying to decode a Roman inscription knows the value of that gift. ([Location 693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HONE39U&location=693)) - Jews—like Greeks, Romans, and other ancient Mediterranean peoples—had a temple for their rites, where priests sacrificed animals to a god. Jews stood out for having only one god and one temple, in Jerusalem. Even a reader of the Christian Gospels learns how deeply pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem mattered to a pious Jew like Jesus. Yet a Jew living in Alexandria or Babylon had a tough haul getting to Jerusalem. Possibly for this reason (no one really knows), buildings for communal prayer and scripture reading as well as secular community activities began to appear among Jewish populations: synagogues. The first clear evidence for them (not yet called synagogues) comes from Egypt in the third century BCE. In these last centuries before the Common Era, teachers learned in interpreting Torah also appeared who became known as rabbis. (The Gospels call Jesus “rabbi.”) The synagogue complemented the sacrificial worship in the temple in Jerusalem; indeed, the temple itself may have contained one. But the synagogue could not displace the temple rites: Torah itself so dictated. Then, in 70 CE, crushing a Jewish revolt, Roman legions sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. Jewish sacrificial worship ended, from that moment to the present day.39 ([Location 895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HONE39U&location=895))