Heavy reading.

Grabbed a volume of (Saint) Eustathius' massive commentary on the Iliad, written in the 12th Century. Right now I'm reading Book 22 with my Homeric Greek student, and I'm interested to see what a Byzantine scholar might have to say about this passage or that. I've already acquired the Cambridge University modern commentary edited by Kirk and am on the lookout for Walter Leaf's 19th Century Companion to the Iliad, for some additional insight. Frankly I'm surprised at how little actual commentary there is out there on Homer. Sure, there are books galore written on epithets or the role of Athena or female sexuality in Greek epic poetry, but what I want is a summary of what all the Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance scholars thought about a certain word in a certain line (and not just the pet interpretation of whoever's writing the primer or college text).

I think I'm finally beginning to understand how important what my employer Athan Anagnostopoulos is doing over in Greece right now, compiling as many of the commentaries and critical apparatus in electronic format so that they can easily be searched and compared and used to gain some perspective on an author. Right now there's a filtering effect going on, partly because all but the most specialized of Classics scholars shy away from the deep end of criticism, but also in part to what I now think of as the "Chicago Effect", after the University of Chicago's famous teaching method of eschewing secondary scholarship in favor of directly interrogating the text. Though I'm all in favor of going one-on-one with an ancient author, and encourage it as much as possible in my classes, the fact of the matter remains that sometimes critics or commentators who lived centuries before us were privy to a bigger literary picture that is now lost to us, and so we ignore what they have to say - even if it seems contrary to modern conventional wisdom - at our own peril.

Now technically what the modern scholars and textbook editors are supposed to be doing for us is diving into the critical tradition for us and fishing out what is relevant and useful, but the more time goes by, the more I'm concerned about letting one person or small group of people (however erudite) make decisions like that. And the more we depend on such "tertiary" scholarship, the more the process feeds back into itself, until the majority of Hellenists are only encountering Ancient and Byzantine criticism through the filter of modern scholarly biases.

So I guess what I'm really proposing here is a revised Chicago Method: go face to face with the authors by all means, but tackle the tradition which immediately surrounds them in the same spirit. Ancient texts are not like their modern counterparts - those edited and glossed editions of the former have only been made to look like the latter after a long and painstaking extraction from the so-called "secondary sources", during which process myriad critical decisions were made that might in fact seem questionable to you. Yes, it can be a pain in the ass to slog through a Byzantine commentary on Homer, when what you really want to do is read Homer - but then again, maybe someone had an insight all those centuries ago that successive generations of scholars have missed or ignored. We owe it to ourselves and to our Ancient and Medieval colleagues to consider the possibility that those closer in time to the original composition of a work might have something useful to contribute to the understanding of its author, in spite of centuries of scientific method and philological advances that we all too often put our complete and total faith in.