«Lachmann’s method» - Bernays, Madvig, Lachmann and others
p. 45-56
Texte intégral
1In his well-known Dutch Academy pamphlet on Bernays, Professor Momigliano writes1:
«In 1846 Bernays won the prize for a study of the manuscript tradition of Lucretius. His paper, which was published by Ritschl in Rheinisches Museum 1847, solved in all its essential elements the question of the relations between the four branches of the tradition of Lucretius – the Quadratus, the Oblongus, the Schedae and the Italici. Lachmann’s edition of Lucretius which appeared in 1850, inevitably obscured the merits of Bernays’ essay. Bernays himself, in his own edition of Lucretius published by Teubner in 1852, had nothing but admiration for Lachmann and minimized his own contribution. Though Lucretian scholars such as Usener and Monro [sic!] were aware of the importance of Bernays’ paper, the true state of affairs was first re-established by S. Timpanaro in his little volume La genesi del metodo del Lachmann (1963). Il metodo del Lachmann was really to a great extent il metodo del Bernays».
2The value of Bernays’ Teubner edition of Lucretius had only occasionally been recognized by the experts2. So, occasionally, was the importance of his De Emendatione Lucretii of 18473. No one would deny Professor Timpanaro the merit of having been the first to point out that, in all that concerns the stemma codicum of Lucretius, Lachmann had been fully anticipated by Bernays4. Lachmann himself, on page 4 of the preface to his commentary on Lucretius5, treats Bernays with the condescension so typical of Classical scholars of the University of Berlin during its first few generations when speaking of their colleagues of the University of Bonn6. Moreover, we now know, thanks to Professor Kenney’s work, that «the language in which in another letter he refers to Bernays’work on Lucretius does not suggest that it was the truth at all costs that was his main preoccupation. The suspicion arises that it was with an ill grace that Lachmann could bring himself to recognize the merits of a man who had been praised by the detested Ritschl»7. But all this is beside the point.
3For we are concerned here, not with priorities in establishing a proper stemma codicum of Lucretius8. Nor are we concerned even with priorities in establishing a stemma and an archetype in general. Timpanaro has already demonstrated9 that the first genealogical stemma was most probably drawn by Johann Caspar Orelli in the first volume of his great edition of Cicero, as early as 1826; that the first proper stemma codicum called by that name was produced by Karl Gottlob Zumpt in the Prooemium to his edition of the Verrines of 183110; that it was Ritschl, in his 1832 edition of Thomas Magister, who first used Greek sigla for reconstructed manuscripts11, and who, in his dissertation on Dionysius of Halicarnassus of 1838, first designated the archetype with the letter Ω12; and that it was Madvig, in a dissertation on the manuscripts of two speeches of Cicero first published in 1833, who first drew a stemma with the words Codex archetypus at its head13. Moreover, one could search in vain in Lachmann’s edition of Lucretius for a proper stemma or a list of manuscripts and their sigla; and in his commentary, the manuscripts are regularly called by their full names: Quadratus, Oblongus, Corrector Quadrati etc. If, in his De Emendatione Lucretii of 1847 (p.570, n.), Bernays has already a stemma with the word Archetypus at its head, he is only following in the footsteps of his immediate predecessors, with whose works in this field he was already thoroughly familiar as a student. Had «Lachmann’s method» consisted merely in reducing all the extant manuscripts of a given text to a stemma with an archetype at its head, one might as well have called it «Zumpt’s method», or «Ritschl’s method» – or, perhaps most appropriately, «Madvig’s method».
4If indeed «Lachmann’s method» consisted only in the procedure he follows in his edition of Lucretius… In assuming that this is the case, Professor Momigliano is in good company. One can find this presupposition-that «Lachmann’s method» means his Lucretius: stemma, «closed transmission» and archetype-in manuals of textual criticism and Classical philology in general which are still in the hands of students14. Paul Maas’ Textkritik of 192715 is essentially an apotheosis and a codification of this approach: a stemma and an archetype are the normal, healthy state of affairs; contaminatio is an anomaly and a disease. Gegen die Contamination ist kein Kraut gewachsen.
5Lachmann himself knew better. He had to: for he was the editor not only of Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius and Lucretius, but also of the Greek New Testament; and if there ever was an example of an «open transmission», surely the Greek New Testament is one. An editor of the New Testament cannot afford to believe that all transmissions are «closed» like that of Lucretius, or that the method of recensio is the same for all texts, and must inevitably and invariably lead to a neat stemma headed by an archetype. Nor was Lachmann’s real method based on any such misconceptions. A masochist or a red herring addict is cordially invited to look through Lachmann’s Lucretius for any exposition of «The Critical Method». He will be wasting his time16.
6For, if Lachmann ever expounded a method, he did it not in his edition of Lucretius of 1850, but in the preface to his second edition of the Greek New Testament of 1842. This method consisted essentially in the separation of recensio from emendatio and the priority of recensio to emendatio. That this was really «Lachmann’s method» was well known to most of Lachmann’s contemporaries, like his pupil and hagiographer Martin Hertz17, and to some historians of Classical scholarship like Bursian and Sandys18. We now know, thanks once again to Timpanaro and Kenney, that Lachmann had been anticipated in every step of this method by some of his predecessors and contemporaries. We know that the principle of recensio before emendatio was announced – although not in these terms – by Hermann Sauppe in a work devoted especially to «the critical method» as early as 1841, nine years before the appearance of Lachmann’s Lucretius19. It had already been adumbrated by Madvig in his Ad Virum Celeberrimum Io. Casp. Orellium Epistola Critica of 1828 – although there, it was done in the more specific context of the text of two Ciceronian orations. Thus even what disciples like Hertz and Haupt and historians like Bursian and Sandys regard as Lachmann’s proper method (since he did expound it as such), has now turned out to be «Sauppe’s method», «Madvig’s method» – or, perhaps, to borrow Sauppe’s own felicitous expression, ars…nova, his nostris demum temporibus inventa20.
7The question as to when and why scholars began to ascribe this particular method – recensio before emendatio – to Lachmann, has been raised by Kenney, who provides us with a most plausible answer21. But there is another question of equal, or perhaps greater, importance, which has already been adumbrated earlier in this article. When and why did scholars begin to identify «Lachmann’s method» not with what Lachmann himself presents as the critical method in his New Testament introduction of 1842, but with his own practice in his edition of Lucretius of 1850?
8We have already seen that Lachmann’s immediate contemporaries and some proper historians of Classical scholarship22 did not make this mistake; but we have also seen that it was already taken for granted in a popular handbook for students written by a competent scholar and editor of texts as early as 190923. By 1913, the assumption that all normal transmissions were «closed» and should be reduced to a stemma with an archetype was firmly embedded in a standard handbook of textual criticism24. By 1927, this was already the central dogma – which needed no specification – behind Paul Maas’ Textkritik. But I suspect that this identification of the method with a stemma and an archetype – as in Lachmann’s Lucretius – began much earlier. I have been unable to detect the first scholar (if indeed there was a first one) who made this identification. It may well be that the prestige of Lachmann’s Lucretius made a number of scholars, no longer aware of the real «Lachmann’s method» of the New Testament introduction, take it for granted that every transmission was closed and culminated in an archetype. Most Teubner texts of the second half of the last century and the first half of the present one display such a stemma. The two severest critics of «Lachmann’s method», Dorn Henri Quentin and Joseph Bédier, took it for granted that this – «closed transmission», stemma, archetype – was indeed the method and the only one. Quentin does not dispute these aims as the final target of recensio25: he merely offers what he believes to be a more efficient and objective method of classifying the manuscripts into families in order to arrive at an archetype. Bédier, too, had taken it for granted that Lachmann’s method consisted in a procedure culminating invariably in a stemma with one archetype26; and when he discovered through his experience in editing Jean Renart’s Lai de l’ombre that such a stemma could not always be established with certainty, the most natural conclusion he could draw was that one had to discard the whole method27. By the late 1920’s, this misconception of «Lachmann’s method» as the application to all texts of a procedure designed to deal only with «closed transmissions» was plainly the communis opinio.
9Voices of sanity were occasionally raised. Friedrich Heimsoeth, in his works on the text of Aeschylus published in 1861 and 1862, already anticipated Pasquali’s discovery of recentiores non deteriores. For this, he was branded by Lachmann’s pupil and vicar on earth Moritz Haupt as unmethodisch28 F. W. Flail, in his underrated but still extremely useful Companion to Classical Texts of 1913, already treated cases of contaminatio and of two separate transmissions not united by an archetype as normal and natural phenomena, to be discussed on an equal footing with «closed transmissions29 ». And when, in 1926 – the year in which Quentin’s Essais de critique textuelle appeared, and only one year before the publication of Maas ’Textkritik – Housman published his great edition of Lucan, he came near enough to saying that here we had a clear case of an open transmission30. But it was only with the publication of Giorgio Pasquali’s long review of Maas in Gnomon 5, 1922, p. 417-435; p. 498-521; and of his Storia della tradizione e critica del testo in 1934 (since revised in 1952 and reprinted in 1962), that the normal and common existence of open transmissions, double recensions by the author, and other such phenomena hitherto regarded as abnormal and morbid, came to be established beyond doubt. That many scholars still regard the old «Lachmann’s method» of the Lucretius variety as the method is one of the inescapable misfortunes of Classical scholarship. In Classical learning, as in other branches of academic studies, the excessive industry of scholars, students, research students and amateurs, spurred on in many cases by the «publish or perish» principle, has made each successive volume of L’Année philologique thicker and heavier than its predecessor, and no scholar who still reads his texts can manage to be «up to date» even on what has been written in his own special field. Pasquali’s work is long (492 pages in the 1962 reprint), technical, and available only in Italian. But it is time scholars came to realize the revolution in our whole conception of textual criticism brought about by Pasquali31. A Classical scholar can only ignore it at his own risk.
10But our starting-point was Jacob Bernays and his work on Lucretius. Where does all this lead us as far as Bernays is concerned?
11Bernays undertook his work on the manuscripts of Lucretius as an undergraduate prize-essay. For a young man of twenty-two to anticipate a discovery of Karl Lachmann was no mean achievement. But even when he produced his Teubner text of 1852 – again, no mean achievement for a man of thirty – Bernays was already conscious of the fact that his own talents lay in other directions. His edition is distinguished mainly by the sanity and felicity of some of the emendations it offers32. He soon found other fields of activity which better suited his own genius and temperament. This is how Professor Momigliano puts it33:
«Bernays had certainly intended to do more work on the history of Classical scholarship which he knew so well, but he did not share the interest in the continuity of Classical forms or in the transmission of Classical texts which was to become typical of Jewish scholars of the next generation such as Eduard Norden, Ludwig Traube, Ernst Kantorowicz and of course Aby Warburg. To him, Scaliger was not a link in the chain, but an absolute. Like any other Jewish boy Bernays carried in his mind – and almost in his blood – the rule of Raban Gamaliel34: «make thee a master». Even more than Ritschl, Scaliger was the master he gave himself. Scaliger was his master because he had kept out of theological controversies and had worked out a philological method which applied equally to Hebrew and Classical writers and was beyond sectarian doubt. What Bernays wanted was an uncontroversial philological interpretation of what Greeks and Romans, Jews and Christians, had thought and done».
12But this is only part of the picture. Bernay’s book on Scaliger, published in 1855 when he was only thirty-three, is one of his earlier works. Scaliger was, among other things, an editor of Manilius – an edition which Housman regarded as «except the Emendatio Temporum, which is too dissimilar for comparison… his greatest work35» He spent much of his time on manuscripts, editions and textual criticism36 and on ancient chronology and mathematics37. What is even more important is that Scaliger had no great aptitude for, or interest in, ancient philosophy. Bernays was soon to discover that, if there was a focus to most of his studies, it was to be found in the accurate philological and historical study of ancient philosophical and related texts. In this field, he had no master. He became «his own man», developed his own methods, intuitions and sensibilities, and paved the way to all those who have made the accurate study of ancient thought what it has been for some generations and what, to some of us, it still is.
13A proper commented edition of Lucretius was one of Ritschl’s great ambitions; and being one of the great academic entrepreneurs in a century abounding in academic entrepreneurs, he considered his starpupil Bernays the most suitable candidate for this task. This is what Bernays’ friend and fellow-student has to say of this project in his biography of Ritschl-38:
«Eine Textausgabe des Lucrez ‘mit genauen und vollständigen Varianten der alten Quellen’ hielt R. auch nach der Lachmannschen für ein Bedürfnis zu Nutz und Frommen sprachlicher Studien, und hatte gern Jacob Bernays, der die Überlieferung des Textes so gründlich und scharfsinning durchgeforscht hatte, dazu vermocht dasselbe zu befriedigen. Auch als dieser sich von dem ‘Fanatiker der Verwesung’ losgesagt hatte, gab R. die Absicht, auf andere Weise für die Verwirklichung seines Wunsches zu sorgen, nicht ab».
14We have a private letter of the same Otto Ribbeck, dated September 2, 1863 – only eleven years after the appearance of Bernays’ Teubner text of Lucretius – which makes Bernays’ attitude to work on manuscripts at the time quite clear39:
«Von einer ‘Antipathie’ gegen Bernays kann gar nichts die Rede sein, vielmehr bin ich mit alter Anhangigkeit treu zugetan. Aber ich habe ihn doch zu oft in Zwiesprache versichern hören, dass all die sogennante Philologie, die ich nun doch einmal treibe, im Grunde Sklavenarbeit und Strohdrescherei ist, um die elenden Proben aus meiner Fabrik viel höher als Makulatur in seinen Augen zu schatzen».
15This at a time when Ribbeck had already produced the first edition of his epoch-making text of Virgil, his Scaenicae Poesis Romanorum Fragmenta, and was working on his Juvenal.
16The Jacob Bernays Centenary Conference convened in Tel-Aviv in order to celebrate the manifold original and seminal contributions to various fields of Classical scholarship made by a unique, archetypal and sensitive mind. We have heard of the lasting legacy he bequeathed to the interpretation of authors of different periods and backgrounds, such as Heraclitus and Lucretius, Aristotle, Theophrastus and Philo; and of the impact of his studies and teaching on subsequent work in Classical, Hellenistic, Roman and Jewish literature and thought40. We have even heard of his often eccentric, but no less fascinating and original views of World history, contemporary Germany, and the Jewish world of his time. We should have heard – unfortunately, we have not heard on this occasion – of his influence on the study of the Renaissance, Renaissance Latin, and the history of scholarship, a subject which Professor Momigliano has treated with his customary dexterity and erudition. All this – despite the meagre quantity of his published productions, so typically deplored by the industrious Wilamowitz41 – constitutes an impressive achievement for a man who died at the early age of fifty-seven; who was a voracious reader in many fields of scholarship, including Hebrew and Jewish studies42; who was a perfectionist, and who regarded writing, including academic writing, as a work of art, to be reread and repolished again and again before being submitted to publication. There is no need to give Bernays credit for a method of textual criticism of which neither he nor Lachmann were the «onlie begetters». Bernays’ flirt with «the critical method» was a fleeting experience of his early years as a scholar. In his discovery of the proper stemma of Lucretius, he was merely utilizing methods already established and tested by his older contemporaries. In later years, when dealing with the critical aspects of editing and interpreting an ancient text, Bernays followed his penchant for the more creative activity of divination, and came to despise the more minute preoccupation with the study of manuscripts indulged by friends like Otto Ribbeck. One might even venture a suggestion that having liberated himself from the spirit and preoccupations of Ritschl’s school did not help Bernays (whose fidelity to the faith of his fathers was a major obstacle in any case) in obtaining the place in the German academic world which he richly deserved.
17Be that as it may, Bernays’ manifold achievements are real enough and lasting enough without any need to turn him into an all-knowing, all-discovering Mikhail Vasilievitch Lomonosoff of Classical scholarship.
Notes de bas de page
1 Arnaldo Momigliano, «Jacob Bernays», p. -9 (156-57).
2 Munro’s judgement of Bernays’ Teubner edition (in the third edition of his Lucretius, Cambridge 1873, «Introduction to Notes», I, p. 21-22) is easily accessible and not unknown. A more interesting and accurate judgement, which I do not find mentioned in any work on Bernays or on the text of Lucretius, is that of Adolf Brieger in the Prolegomena to his own 1909 Teubner edition of Lucretius, p. I: «… iam cum pectus hortetur ut in huius viri laudes me effundam, succurrit illud ah omnibus probatum, Lachmannum laudare velle ambitiosum esse. quod qui primus dixit Jacobus Bernaysius anno MDCCCLII carmen de rerum natura «recognitum», ut ipse modestissime dicit, edidit sumptibus Teubnerianis. qui vir, quo erat acumine quaque et sermonis Latini et philosophiae scientia, ut tempore proximus a Lachmanno fuit, ita etiam mentis ab eo esset proximus, nisi nimis hrevi spatio interiecto unici viri auctoritate praegravante suo ipse iudicio interdum non tantum quantum par erat tribuisset. quod ei accidisse nemo, opinor, mirabitur, qui ipse senserit, quam difficile esset recenti illius paene divini ingenii admiratione ab eo dissentire. itaque Bernaysium censeo vel maxime laudandum esse in eis, quae a Lachmanno discedens emendavit, excusandum vero, si quando vel cum Lachmanno vel cum aliis vel solus erravit: quodsi perseverasset in Lucreti perscrutandi emendandi interpretandi studio, non dubito quin eo perventurus fuerit, ut magnam negotii partem absolveret. cum vero ille se brevi post totum ad alia studia dedisset, in stadium paene desertum ingressus Hugo Munro Britannicus etc…» But even Brieger, when he comes to speak of the manuscript tradition (p. XIII), begins with Lachmann, as if Bernays’ De Emendatione Lucretii had never existed.
3 Munro, loc. cit., last note, p. 0: «The most important contribution of this kind was made by Jacob Bernays in an article printed in the Rhenish museum of 1847. This able paper would have produced a greater effect than it did, if it had not been so soon superseded by Lachmann’s more complete and systematic work». Following on these four lines of faint praise for Bernays, the reader is treated to two pages of an apotheosis of Lachmann.
4 Sebastiano Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann, Firenze 1963 (henceforth: Timpanaro), p. 57ff. German translation by Ditter Irmer, supervised and revised by the author, Die Entstehung der lachmannschen Methode, Hamburg 1971 (henceforth: G. t.), p. 55ff. (Bernays’stemma: p. 0 = p. 8 G. t. ; Lachmann’s stemma: p. 5 = p. 4 G. t.).
5 Caroli Lachmanni in T. Lucretii Cari De Rerum Natura Libros Commentarius, Berlin 1850, p. .
6 One is reminded of Wilamowitz’savage attack on Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie. In a letter to Erwin Rohde of June 8, 1872, Nietzsche writes of Wilamowitz: «Er muss noch sehr unreif sein - offenbar hat man ihn benutzt, stimuliert, aufgehetzt - alles atmet Berlin». A similar case is Hermann Diels’ reprimand of Nietzsche for his view that the succession in the philosophical schools of Athens ceased by the age of Augustus: Nietzsche should have read the seminal work of that Berlin scholar, Karl Gottlob Zumpt (see my Antiochus and the Late Academy, Gottingen 1978, p. 36 and 347). Both Wilamowitz and Diels had been pupils of Bernays, one of Ritschl’s star-pupils, in Bonn before they transferred to Berlin. When Bernays on p. III (the first page) of the Praefatio to his Teubner edition of Lucretius of 1852, spoke of Lachmann’s edition in superlatives and without a trace of malice, he was fully aware of the patronizing manner in which Lachmann (loc. cit., last note) had treated Purmann and himself ut adulescentes neque satis in Lucretii ingenio cognoscendo verasti. Had he been aware of what Lachmann had written in private letters to Moritz Haupt (see next note), I still believe that he would have treated Lachmann’s edition with the same respect and admiration. Bernays could be a severe critic, but never out of personal motives.
7 E. J. Kenney, The Classical Text, University of California 1974 (Henceforth: Kenney), p. 07. Mr. Kenney (ibid., note 3) quotes the relevant passage from Lachmann’s letter to Haupt of April 1, 1847 (Karl Lachmanns Briefe an Moritz. Haupt, hrsg. v. J. Vahlen, Berlin 1892, p. 80). But he only refers (note 4) to his letter to Haupt of October 23, 1846 (Briefe, p. 74). The relevant passage is: «Dann hat mich Ritschls überschwängliches Lob des Jacob Bernays doch auch bewegt, ut quam primum in publicum edito tam eximio eruditionis specimine de ipsis litteris Latinis augendis promovendisque bene mererer».
8 Here, both Purmann and Bernays were following in the footsteps of Madvig’s Disputatio de Aliquot Lacunis Codicum Lucretii, Copenhagen 1832, as Lachmann himself (loc. cit., p. , n. 1) points out with relish. See Timpanaro, p. 7 and note 1 (G. t., p. 56 and note 164).
9 Timpanaro, ch. V, p. 3-55 (G. t., p. 42-54). Kenney, p. 105ff.
10 Stemma: Timpanaro, p. 6 (G. t., p. 45).
11 Stemma: Timpanaro, p. 8 (G. t., p. 47).
12 Timpanaro, p. 9 and n. l (G. t., p. 47 and n. 147). Stemma: p. 0 (G. t., p. 48).
13 Timpanaro, p. 2 and note 1 (G. t., p. 50-51 and note 146). The precise reference is to Madvig’s Programmschrift, De Emendandis Ciceronis Orationibus pro P. Sestio et in P. Vatinium, Copenhagen 1833, p. 9. Thus Lachmann’s famous words (loc. cit., p. 3, n. 1), id exemplar ceterorum ARCHETYPON (a appellare soleo)… are not entirely ingenuous: see Timpanaro, p. 8, note 1 (G. t., p. 57, note 168). One should add that, as early as 1828, in his Programmschrift, De Q. Asconii Pediani et aliorum veterum interpretum in Ciceronem Commentariis Disputatio Critica, Copenhagen 1828, p. 23-33, Madvig had demonstrated, on the basis of errores coniunctivi in the manuscripts and letters of Poggio and other humanists, that all the extant manuscripts of Asconius are derived from Poggio’s apograph of a St. Gallen manuscript.
14 Hermann Kantorowicz, Einfiihrung in die Textkritik, Freiburg i. Br. - Leipzig 1921, p. : «Es werde bekanntlich seit Lachmann unterscheiden, die ‘Musterung’ der Überlieferung, ‘Recensio’, und ihre ‘Besserung’, ‘Emendatio’. Der Meister selber scheint unter Recensio verstanden zu haben, dass man von der erhaltenen Überlieferung rückschliesst auf den-richtigen oder verderbten-Text ihres ‘Archetypus’, d. h. des jüngsten veschollenen Vorfahren…». Otto Immisch, Wie Studiert man klassische Philologie?, Stuttgart 1909, p. 07: «Lachmann’s berühmte Lukrezausgabe (1850) die mit bewundernswerter Knappheit die Textgeschichte oder Recensio auf elf Seiten zusammendrangt, bietet ein leuchtendes und unvergangliches Muster für die Anwendung seiner Methode». Wilamowitz, Geschichte der Philologie, Leipzig 1921, p. 9: «Kurz vor seinem nur zu frühen Ende hat er in dem Lukrez mit seinem Kommentar uns das Buch gegeben, an dem wir alle die kritische Methode gelernt haben, dessen Studium wir von jedem Studenten verlangen». Even a modern critic who knows the limitations of a method based on «closed transmissions» only, still identifies it as Lachmann’s: B. A. van Groningen, Traité d’histoire et de critique des textes grecs, Amsterdam 1963, p. 5: «L’existence ou la reconstruction d’un véritable archétype n’est qu’un cas spécial, et probablement plus exceptionnel qu’on n’a souvent cru. Depuis Lachmann, les historiens des textes classiques ont eu une véritable manie des archétypes». See also his description of Lachmann’s method on p. 1-2. And even Giorgio Pasquali in his epoch-making Storia della tradizione e critica del testo, repr. of 2nd. ed., Firenze, Le Monnier, 1962, p., makes the same mistake: «Il Lachmann fondava il suo metodo sul presupposto che la tradizione di ogni autore risalisse sempre e in ogni caso a un unico esemplare già sfigurato di errori e lacune, quello ch’egli chiamava archetypo». One could multiply examples, but I have only chosen a few representative passages. Martin L. West’s Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique, Teubner, Stuttgart 1973, esp. p. 2-15 and 29-47, is the first handbook in general use which does full justice to «open transmissions» as a normal fact of life. (Kenney, of course, is fully aware of the Pasqualian Revolution-but his work is caviare to the general rather than a handbook in general use).
15 Paul Maas, Textkritik (Gercke-Norden, Einleitung in die Altertthumswissenschaft, VII, I), Leipzig 1927 (2 Ausg. 1949 ; 3 Ausg. 1957; English translation by Barbara Flower, Oxford 1958).
16 Timpanaro, p. 67-8 (G. t., p. 67-8) concedes this point. But he adds: «E nemmeno si puo dire che ‘il Lachmann fondava il suo metodo etc’. (see quotation from Pasquali, above, n. 14). Una simile teoria generale, il Lachmann non l’ha mai formulata, né l’hanno formulata, che io sappia, i suoi contemporanei». So far, so good. But: «Fu, suppongo, il gran numero di casi in cui la derivazione da un archetipo è sicura, a far sorgere a poco a poco tra i filologi la convenzione che un archetipo vi sia stato in tutti i casi». But Lachmann and his contemporaries edited not only texts with «closed transmissions», but also texts like Virgil, Lucan and the New Testament.
17 Martin Hertz, Karl Lachmann. eine Biographie, Berlin 1851, p. 89-197, where (esp. p. 91-95) «Lachmann’s method» is described in terms of what Lachmann says in his New Testament preface, and the influence of Bentley’s New Testament studies on Lachmann’s work is emphasized.
18 Conrad Bursian, Geschichte der classischen Philologie in Deutschland, München u. Leipzig 1883, p. 88-98, esp. p. 88-91; J. E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, Cambridge 1908, III, p. 30-31. Both quote extensively from Lachmann’s New Testament preface, and Sandys offers an English translation of the more relevant passages.
19 Hermanni Saupii Epistola Critica ad Godofredum Hermannum… Lipsiae MDCCCXLI; reprinted in: Hermann Sauppe, Kleine Schriften, Berlin 1896, p. 0-177; esp. p. 2: Qui artem criticam recte facere velit, eum oportet ante omnia lihros manu scriptos circumspicere eorumque rationes perquirere et investigare… Sed haec ars codicum ordines certos familiasque describendi… fere nova sit, nostris demum temporibus inventa… sed certum est, criticum nisi hoc fundamento operae suae iacto incerto gradu titubare… Sauppe goes on to mention, as examples of this new method, Bekker’s and Baiter’s work on Isocrates; Lachmann’s on Catullus and Tibullus; Orelli’s and Madvig’s on Cicero; Bentley’s on Horace, and to hint to his own work on the text of the Orators. This is a far more balanced description of the growth of the method than the later ascription of it all to Lachmann. Sauppe’s Epistola is probably the first manual of textual criticism based on the modern method. Although much of the technical terminology we have become accustomed to was developed later, it still repays a careful reading.
20 See last note.
21 Kenney, p. 105f., esp. p. 109f.
22 But, unfortunately, not Wilamowitz: see above, n. 14.
23 See quotation from Immisch, above, n. 14.
24 Theodor Birt, Kritik und Hermeneutik, in: Iwan Müller’s Handbuch der Alterthumswissenschaft, I, 3, Munich 1913, p. 17ff.
25 Dom Henri Quentin, Essais de critique textuelle (ecdotique), Paris 1926, esp. p. 9-11. The literature on Quentin’s method is very considerable, and it seems to have enjoyed something of a revival recently with the growing use of computers in textual criticism.
26 Joseph Bédier, «La tradition manuscrite du Lai de l’ombre», Romania 54, 1928, p. 161-196; 321-356. On «Lachmann’s method» see esp. p. 164-66.
27 His reasons are more complex, and they include his famous «astonishing discovery» of the prevalence of the stemma bifide. On this see – apart from Bédier’s article – Maas, Textkritik (see above, n. 15), Appendix I; Timpanaro, p. 111-135 (G. t., p. 115-150, with additional material); Kenney, p. 133-4. One of the most interesting attempts to explain the frequency of the stemma bifide in Mediaeval texts is Arrigo Castellani, Bédier avait-il raison?, éd. Univ. Fribourg, Suisse 1957. Castellani, too, takes it for granted that «the method» consists in arriving at an archetype. For the influence of Bédier’s anti-Lachmannian conclusions, see H. Peri, «Une méthode expérimentale de critique de textes», Atti del’VIIIo Congresso Internazionale di Studi Romani, Firenze 1960, Vol. II, p. 719-747, esp. p. 721-727. Peri’s own experiments are vitiated by the fact that his «experimenters» invariably produced a stemma with an archetype; but it does show that, by the use of ratio et res ipsa, an editor can arrive at a fairly satisfactory «synthetic» text even when he has made serious mistakes in establishing the stemma.
28 F. Heimsoeth, Die Wiederherstellung der Dramen des Aeschylus, 1861; Die indirekte Überlieferung des Textes des Aeschylus, 1862; Kenney, p. 10.
29 F. W. Hall, A Companion to Classical Texts, Oxford 1913, Chapter VI, «Recension», p. 08-150.
30 M. Annaei Lucani Belli Civilis Libri Decem, editorum in usum edidit A. E. Housman, Oxford 1926 (repr. 1927; 1950; 1958), p.VI-VII: «The circumstances in which Lucan’s text was transmitted from his own time to the scholars of the Carolingian renascence did not afford the requisite privacy and isolation. There were no sequestered valleys through which streams of tradition might flow unmixed, and the picture to be set before the mind’s eye is rather the Egyptian Delta, a network of watercourses and canals. Lucan was popular; variant readings were present not only in the margin of books but in the memory of transcribers; and the true line of division is between the variants themselves, not between the manuscripts that offer them. The manuscripts group themselves not in families but in factions; their differences and agreements are temporary and transient, like the splits and coalitions of a political party; and the utmost which can be done to classify them is to note the comparative frequency of their shifting alliances». Housman hardly made any collations; he was working from the abundant materials in Karl Hosius’ second and third Teubner editions of 1905 and 1913. But it is no wonder that, having realized the sort of transmission he was dealing with, Housman was able to demonstrate the futility of the various stemmata concocted by Hosius. One of the first critics of Housman’s Lucan (I cannot, at the moment, trace the reference) described the work as «ganz unmethodisch»: presumably because, among other things, it had no «proper» stemma and archetype. Ordnung muss sein!
31 Kenney, of course, has: p. 140ff. So has West-see above, n. 14. Their books leave no excuse for scholars who have difficulty in reading Italian (if not reading Italian could be excused in a Classical scholar).
32 Many years ago, when I was reading some Lucretius in a seminar, an outstanding student (Mr. Terence J. Hunt of London, now for some time a scholar in his own right) remarked to me that of all those whose name appeared frequently in the apparatus, he found Bernays the most brilliant. He applied to his emendations the Lucretian expression once applied by Housman to Bentley, lucida tela diei.
33 Loc. cit., above n. 1, p. 3-4 (171-2).
34 In fact, Joshua ben Perahiah: Mishnah, Abboth, I, 6.
35 M. Manilii Astronomicon Liber Primus, recensuit et enarravit A. E. Housman, London 1903, p. XIII.
36 Kenney, p. 54-7.
37 On his unfortunate attempt to square the circle, and its background, see my article «An Autograph Letter of Joseph Scaliger to Sir Henry Savile», Scientiarum Historia, 8, 4, 1966, p. 214-224.
38 Otto Ribbeck, Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philologie, Bd. 2, Leipzig 1881, p. 98.
39 Otto Ribbeck, ein Bild seines Lebens aus seinen Briefen, 1846-1898, Stuttgart 1901, p. 268-9 (letter to Ritschl).
40 This was originally the last lecture of the conference. See the programme reproduced at the beginning of the volume.
41 Geschichte der Philologie (see supra, n. 14), p. 64.
42 See the article by Professor Ephraim E. Urbach in the present volume.
Auteur
Professor of Classical Philology and Philosophy, Tel Aviv University
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