A chapter in the history of annotation : being Scholia Aristophanica vol. III

516 Pages·1905·28.008 MB·English

by  William Gunion Rutherford

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A CHAPTEK
IX THE
HISTOEY OF ANXOTATION

A CHAPTEE
IN THE
HISTOEY OF ANNOTATION
BEIXG
SCHOLIA AEISTOPHANICA
VOL.
III
BY
WILLIAM RUTHERFOED
G.
FOBMERLT HEAD-MASTER OF WESTMCsSTER
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PEEFACE
When he who may do as he likes puts the best aside and
takes an inferior quality !
Should that take place whicli some who watch the drift
of opinion are prepared for, so that contact with the
alert and adventurous Greek mind cease, at least for a
time, to play any considerable part in English education,
many good reasons are siire to be found why that which
has happened could not but happen. Will one of them
—
be a smother of annotation obscuring the word, clear in
itself and finely attuned, uttered by Greeks to Greeks
long ago ?
Nobody can persuade or delight, or even make himself
understood, if somebody else louder and more voluble
keep up a running comment upon what he says, praise
him, blame him, bid him hold his tongue altogether at
times, until something which he does not know, or of
set purpose discards, has been tiresomely expounded.
The bystanders, when this happens, are not distracted
merely they turn indolently towards the clamorous
;
interpreter who engages to save them the trouble of
thinking for themselves.
This, or something not unlike this, happens in the
teaching ofGreek now. There is so much commentary that
;
THE HISTOEY OF ANNOTATION
vi
the learner never lays liis own mind close to tlie Greek
thouglit. The monstrous unreason seems actually to grow.
For sometimes tradition takes a dropsical habit in age
and this tradition is very old. It began life in the dreary
period in which Greece, no longer her own mistress, made
shift to give her masters what they wished, such a know-
ledge of Greek literature as could be acquired without
mental exertion by men who were out of sympathy with
Greek thought, and did not care to understand it, yet
desired to turn it to some use. In the attempt to
describe how master and servant were both punished for
their greedy insincerity lies the main interest of the
following pages.
But how comes a motive of this sort to be present at
all in a work which at first contained no hint of it ?
To answer the question entails apeccavi.
It was a mistake, I can now see, to break the Scholia
up as they are broken up in the two earlier volumes. But
time has gone by since then, in which the Scholia have
had to shift for themselves, yet have always run up and
down in my head. So by rumination a vice in method
has been turned into a piece of good luck. For the
Scholia analysed and dissected have revealed gradually
their veritable nature. The purely mechanical process
which produced them has pushed itself into notice.
Meanwhile as comments they have lost little, nay, have
rather gained on the whole by the trenchant surgery.
Not that this is of much consequence. It is very rare
for these tedious annotators to throw any light at least
directly upon textual disorders ; their literary criticism is
recremental ; and of the information they furnish there is
very little that is at once useful and unsuspect.