GRAFTON, Prolegomena Wolf - Desconhecido

Warburg Institute
Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf

Author(s): Anthony Grafton
Source: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 44 (1981), pp. 101-129
Published by: Warburg Institute
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PROLEGOMENA TO FRIEDRICH AUGUST WOLF*
Anthony Grafton
N classical philology was still important enough to provoke a satire. Ludwig
I908
Hatvany provided it. His Die Wissenschaftdes nicht Wissenswertenis a slashing parody
of - of all things - a Berlin student's notes on a year's work in classics. The
professors whose lectures it records are nightmare figures, academic hobgoblins. The
Latinist, Woepke, buries Catullus's Lesbia poems under heaps of unnecessary lexical
distinctions: 'Vivamushere means not only "let us live" but "let us enjoy life"; we find this
expression used in the same sense in an inscription in the C.I.L. . . .'1 The Greek professor
spews out over Plato's Protagorasa flood of details about the daily trivia of ancient life: 'As
you see, gentlemen, the porter shut the gate [on Socrates and his companions]. At this
passage anyone would be struck by the question of how this gate was constructed, and also
by the important, still unsolved problem of door-shutting in antiquity.'2 Hatvany's fellow
students are no better than their masters. One barges into Hatvany's room on an April
morning, waking him, to introduce himself: 'My name is Meier, student of philology. I've
come to explain why I'm so serious.'3 Hatvany's own mock-seminar report uses the
fragments of Sappho to argue that she was the headmistress of a Midchenpensionat.4
Like most elaborate satires, Hatvany's had a serious message. It was an attack on the
main tenets ofAltertumswissenschaft- above all, on the demand that the student pay equal
attention to every aspect of the Greek and Roman worlds and fit every text into an
elaborate political, social and material context. For Hatvany this approach destroyed the
literature it was meant to explain. The student was too bogged down in a swamp of facts to
appreciate any single work of art, too worried about the details ofCatullus's hypothetical
- and the place of pet sparrows in Roman society - to take fire from his
biography
poems.
Hatvany admitted that the eighteenth-century founders of Altertumswissenschafthad
not been misguided. In the Enlightenment, Homer and Plato had ceased to be thought of
as real men. They had become colourless counters in the abstract intellectual games of the
philosophes.The only way to breathe life back into them had been to learn - as F. A. Wolf
and his contemporaries had - to see them vividly, in all their colours and dimensions.
And the only way to do that was the one Wolf had taken: to master the apparently
inconsequential details of public institutions and private life, architecture and mythology,
* In the interests of economy, the Editors have sug-
vany see F. Lilge, TheAbuseofLearning, New York 1948,
gested that quotations from Wolf himself, and from p. Io9; Mythology and Humanism. The Correspondence of
certain other texts which are widely available, should ThomasMann and Karl Kerenyi,tr. A. Gelley, Ithaca and
not be given in the original language in the notes as well London 1975,
as in translation in the text of this article. Earlier drafts 2 Hatvany (n.PP- I112, 171-72-
I above), p. 14.
were read at the Warburg Institute (23 January 1980) 3 Ibid., p. 7.
and to the Oxford Philological Society (2 May 1980). 4
Ibid., pp. 91-io6 ('Sappho und die sapphische
The research for it was supported by a Rollins Bicenten- Liebe. [Eine missratene Seminararbeit.]'); on the inter-
nial Preceptorship. For advice, criticism and informa- pretations of which Hatvany was making fun, see e.g.
tion I thank H. Lloyd-Jones, A. M. Meyer, A. D. H. Riidiger, Sappho. Ihr Ruf und Ruhm bei der Nachwelt,
Momigliano, J. Montagu, A. Morpurgo Davies and Das Erbe der Alten, 2nd ser., xxi, Leipzig 1933; pp.
J. Weinberg. 102-09 (Welcker); 150-53 (Wilamowitz).
1 L.
Hatvany, Die Wissenschaftdes nicht Wissenswerten.
Ein Kollegienheft,2nd edn, Munich 1914, p. 6. On Hat-
IOI
Journalof the Warburg Institutes,Volume 44, 1981

and Courtauld
102 ANTHONY GRAFTON
- and so learn to imagine the ancient world as it had been.s Wolf's
etiquette and coinage
successors, however, had made the means into the end. They did not read (lesen) ancient
literature, they read it to pieces (zerlesen) in their frenzied search for raw materials from
which to make new lexica and handbooks - but never a new vision of the past. This
perversion of Wolf's discoveries Hatvany sought to expose.
Unlike his dissections of Mommsen and Wilamowitz, Hatvany's praise of Wolf was
conventional in tone and content. But the estimate of Wolf's work and worth that he
accepted needs more examination than he gave it. Claims for Wolf's originality as thinker
and scholar rest on the work he did as Professor at Halle. He arrived in I783 as a
stiff-necked but promising young product of G6ttingen. There - so he later told the story
- he had learnt much from the matchless library but little from the lectures of his teacher
C. G. Heyne. He had been a great success at Gymnasium teaching and had published
very little. That was all. By i806-07, when the closing of the university forced Wolf to
leave Halle, he had become the dominant scholar in north Germany. His lectures and
seminars had made him so famous that Goethe hid behind a curtain to hear him teach. He
had created a school of originatl scholars and competent Gymnasium teachers. He had
won and declined the offer of a chair at Leiden, still the centre of Greek studies in Europe.
Throughout this time
- so the histories tell us - his teaching, his research, his mental life
aimed at one end: to replace the sterile polymathy of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries with a new, historical brand of philology.6
To judge this account we must venture outside the orderly, well-mapped intellectual
landscape found in most histories of scholarship. We must confront Wolf's ideas and
results with those of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. These are buried in
hundreds of forgotten books, whose neo-classical title-pages unfairly raise the hopes of the
reader, soon to be discouraged by foxed paper and ugly type. Most of them are too
technical to attract historians and too obsolete to interest classicists. No wonder, then,
that the dusty sectors of eighteenth-century culture bounded by their covers have become
a terralargely incognita. But two forays into this intellectual heart of darkness may prove
rewarding. The spoil will amount to a new background for Wolf's thought; set before it,
both his general ideas and his specific results will look quite different.
II
The case for Wolf's originality as a thinker rests largely on the general programme for
Altertumswissenschaftwhich he set out in his lectures on 'The Encyclopedia of Philology'
and applied in his teaching to a wide variety of texts and problems. In Halle, a newish
university, educational theorists had for years been calling for the abandonment of
ancient languages in favour of modern, useful subjects.7 Wolf had to prove that classical
s See esp. Hatvany (n. I above), p. 15: 'Die stolze senschaftund Geistesgeschichte,
xxxmIII,1959, pp. 187-236,
Wissenschaft der antiken Welt als einheitliches Ganzes with ample references to the earlier literature; the best
betrachtet, wie sie einst Wolfdachte, liefert dem Gelehr- treatments in English are M. Pattison, 'F. A. Wolf',
ten die ganze Vergangenheit aus, sie verhilft dem Glin- Essays, Oxford 1889,1, pp. 337-414; R. Pfeiffer, Historyof
zenden und dem Verborgenen gleichmiissig zu seinem Classical Scholarshipfrom i3oo to i8oo, Oxford I976,
guten Rechte; so aber, wie sich diese Wissenschaft in pp. 173-77.
den Hiinden unserer Gelehrten allmihlich verindert 7 Cf. C. E. McClelland, 'The Aristocracy and Uni-
hat, ist sie eine urteilslose gleiche Wertung von Wesen- versity Reform in Eighteenth-Century Germany', in
tlichem und Unwesentlichem geworden.' For the use of SchoolingandSociety,ed. L. Stone, Baltimore and London
Plato-interpretation as an example, see ibid. 1976, pp. 146-73.
6 On Wolf, see in general M. Fuhrmann, 'Friedrich
August Wolf', Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fir Literaturwis-
FRIEDRICH AUGUST WOLF 103
studies offered a form of knowledge still worth having. He did so by identifying the central
subject of philology as the Greek national character. Each subdiscipline had value in so
far as it contributed to 'the knowledge of human nature in antiquity, which comes from
the observation of an organically developed, significant national culture, founded on
study of the ancient remains'.8 Greek culture, of course, was more organically developed
and significant than any other. To know it the student must master all twenty-four
-
disciplines that inform us about the ancient world 'introductory' like grammar and
textual criticism and 'material' like geography and mythology.9 Thus he could control all
the evidence. More important, he could read literary documents historically, in the light
of the situation, needs and values of their original audience. Above all, he could follow the
evolution of the Greek spirit, which was faithfully reflected in each period by language,
art, social and political life. By watching the uniquely independent and creative Greeks
learn to exercise in harmony all the powers of their souls, modern men could wake and
harness the powers of their own souls. True, no modern man could know everything about
the Greeks. But a serious effort to make their world and culture one's own would ennoble
the mind and soul. And the modern student could understand those aspects of the Greek
mind that were represented by several forms of evidence 'in some respects more
profoundly than the ancients themselves'.10
Wolf's programme was elegantly thought out, powerfully described, and rooted in
deep knowledge of the sources. Novel it was not. As a research programme it differed little
from Heyne's practice. As Menze and Mettler have shown, Heyne too believed that the
scholar must employ a historical method and exploit all relevant disciplines and forms of
evidence.1" In his lectures on Homer, for example, he carefully treated what was known of
the poet's life, the culture of his Ionian homeland, the mythological background he had
reworked, and the geographical setting of the Trojan wars. He envisioned Homer's world
as a whole, comparing Ionian 'dialect, trade, elegance, refinement of customs and
language' with those of Attica.12 And he treated the details of the texts as clues to the
general history of Greek culture. At Iliad I. 599, for example, Homer describes the gods as
bursting into 'unquenchable laughter' at the sight of Hephaestus hopping about to pour
nectar. Heyne explained:
y•kwg (laughter) here merely means joy. Because his age was uncultivated, Homer can only
express 'joy' through 'laughter'.'3
Homer, in other words, was trying to say not that the gods were amused but that they were
-
joyful. But the Greek language of his time like other primitive languages, as Heyne
knew from contemporary anthropology - lacked abstract terms, especially for anything
8 Wolf,
DarstellungderAlterthums-Wissenschaft (1807), Study of Antiquity', Greek,Romanand ByzantineStudies,
in his Kleine Schrifien, ed. G. Bernhardy, Halle 1869 xxI, 1980, pp. 83-99.
(hereafter Kl. Schr.), ii, p. 883: 'Es ist aber dieses Ziel 10 Wolf, Darstellung, in Kl. Schr. (n. 8 above), ii,
kein anderes als die KenntnissderalterthimlichenMenschheit pp. 825-26.
selbst, welche Kenntnissaus der durchdas Studiumder alten 11 W.
Mettler, DerjungeFriedrichSchlegelunddiegriechi-
UeberrestebedingtenBeobachtungeiner organischentwickelten scheLiteratur.Ein Beitrag zum ProblemderHistorie, Ziirich
bedeutungsvollen National-Bildung hervorgeht'(Wolf's ital- I1955; C. Menze, Wilhelm von Humboldt und Christian
ics). GottlobHeyne,Ratingen I966.
9 For Wolf's list of subsidiary disciplines, see ibid., 12 See the description and
samples from W. von Hum-
pp. 894-95; for discussion see esp. A. Boeckh, Encyklo- boldt's notes, in the Akademie-Ausgabe of Humboldt's
padie und MethodologiederphilologischenWissenschaften, ed. GesammelteSchrifien,vIi, pt. 2, 1907, pp. 550-53; cf. P. B.
E. Bratuscheck, Leipzig 1877, pp. 39-44; G. Pasquali, Stadler, WilhelmvonHumboldtsBild derAntike,Zilrich and
Filologia e storia, 2nd edn, Florence I964, pp. 67-73; Stuttgart 1959, pp. 17-25.
13 Humboldt, Ges.Schr.(n. 12
J. Bolter, 'Friedrich August Wolf and the Scientific above), vii, pt. 2, p. 553-
104 ANTHONY GRAFTON
so rarefied as a mental state. Hence Homer had had to use the existing, concrete term and
image. However leaden its execution, Heyne's approach was clearly historical, not
grammatical, in conception.14
But Heyne too was less original than most of his modern students have argued. He was
at G6ttingen, after all, the university for noblemen in eighteenth-century Germany.
Founded in 1734, it was meant to train public servants. Its curriculum stressed the fields
of social philosophy most closely related to the needs of government: history, statistics,
political economy. In the history school of Achenwall and Gatterer, training in diplo-
matics, sigillography and numismatics gave the future governor the tools to sift his
information until only facts were left. The analytical tools of 'statistics' enabled him to see
his country's history not as a succession of reigns but as the natural fruit of its permanent
traits: population, natural resources, climate and institutions.15s Heyne's official address
on the opening of Gatterer's Historical Institute admirably summed up the school's
principles:
History cannot be studied properly unless you know the geniuses of peoples, their customs, rites,
institutions, laws, arts, crafts, and all products of the human intellect. You must also know the
causes that lie behind these things: above all the quality, nature, gifts and benefits of the soil and
climate. From these, unless they are corrected or corrupted by deliberate action, all those other
phenomena necessarily proceed, as it were from their seeds.16
If Wolf heard little about historical method in his few visits to Heyne's classroom, he
certainly knew the essays in which Heyne put such principles to work. In his description of
'The Genius of the Age of the Ptolemies', for instance, Heyne portrayed the Hellenistic
mind through key characteristics - subtlety, love of detail, lust for the strange and
marvellous - that ran through all fields of thought. He explained these habits of mind by
reference to the geographical, political and cultural situation of Greek intellectuals in
Egypt: their contact with Asian cultures, isolation from politics, and excessive learning. 17
And Wolf used Heyne's analytical scheme, giving due credit, in his Prolegomena ad
Homerum of I795, to explain why Hellenistic intellectuals had devoted themselves so
heartily to minute pieces of grammatical and philological work.18
The G6ttingen scholars, in turn, were also codifying principles that were well known
elsewhere. In treating the Iliad and the Odysseyas primitive poetry, Heyne owed much to
the English traveller Robert Wood, as his colleague Michaelis suggested in a letter to
Wood: 'It seems to the three of us, Heyne, Beckmann, and me, that Homer ought to be
read as you have read him; and we would prefer that no one in Germany read him
differently.'19 Wood was in part refining arguments advanced by the Neapolitan jurist
Gravina years before, in a famous letter to Scipione Maffei.20
14 Cf. Menze (n. II above), pp. 12-13. Wolf's n. 59 ad loc.: 'Erudite haec persecutus est Hey-
15sSee e.g. H. Butterfield, Man onhis Past, repr. Boston nius in Diss. de genio saeculi Ptolemaeorum...
19J. D. Michaelis to R. Wood, I770, in R. Wood, An
1960, Chap. 2; P. H. Reill, The GermanEnlightenmentand
the Rise of Historicism, Berkeley etc. I975. On Heyne's Essay on the Original Geniusof Homer (0769 and 1775), ed.
self-conscious use of the methods of 'statistics', see esp. B. Fabian, Hildesheim and New York 1976, Bibliogra-
C. Antoni, La lotta controla ragione, 2nd edn, Florence phical Note, p. xiii*: 'Tribus enim nobis ita videbatur,
1968, pp. 153-56. Heynio, Becmanno et mihi, sic Homerum legi oportere,
16 C. G.
Heyne, Opusculaacademica,I, G6ttingen 1785, ut Tu legisti: mallemusque neminem in Germania aliter
p. 287. eum legere' (reference kindly supplied by B. Fabian).
17 Heyne (n. 16 above), I, pp. 76-134; elaborate dis- 20 Gravina
argued that the differences between Virgil
cussion in Mettler (n. II above), pp. 46-97. and Homer stemmed less from their talents per se than
s18Wolf, Prolegomenaad Homerum,3rd edn, ed. R. Pepp- from the different cultural and political worlds for which
milller, Halle I884 = Hildesheim 1963, cap. xli, p. I45. they wrote. He explicitly treats Homer as a primitive.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST WOLF
o105
To take a more general case, Heyne's Leipzig teacherJ. F. Christ had argued for the
combined use of separate disciplines as early as the 1720s:
Students of Roman Law should take considerable care to keep in mind the clearest possible images
of ancient life. But it is almost impossible to give a proper account of visual matters unless they are
before one's eyes. Hence antiquaries should collect coins, vases, marbles and the like, which
preserve the images of ancient use ... 21
Christ's fascination with visual evidence led him to reproduce ancient works of art in his
own endearingly naive engravings (P1. I3a). His desire to bring complementary runs of
evidence together sometimes led to coherent analyses of aspects of ancient society very
alien from his own. Take his discussion of the Venus of the type known as aux bellesfesses.
He took her to be pulling her clothes aside to engage in what he modestly called - in
Greek - 'congress moreferarum'.22He remarked that sodomy and similar goings-on were
not common in Germany, 'thanks more to the Northern cold than to our morals', 'save
that as I recall simple shepherds who debauch their beasts must now and then be
restrained by the law'.23 Hence he refused to shock German readers with an engraving of
the statue. But he admitted that such things were managed differently in France, where a
Venus aux bellesfesses had been set up at Versailles (P1. 13b may be the very Venus that he
had in mind).24 He continued:
In different ages customs were different. The books of the Greeks and Romans show that they not
only did not detest this sort of statue as we do, but loved and almost adored them... In those
(Roman) days to love boys - if not considered praiseworthy, as it was by the Greeks - was not
considered blameworthy. In those days Martial's wife, doubtless a respectable lady, dared to
protest to her husband that if he was so mad for boys, 'she too had a bottom.'25
Here was historicism indeed.
For the text of his letter, see his Opusculaad historiam simultaneously; p. o105:'In eo autem habitu hoc simula-
litterariamet studiorumrationempertinentia,ed. Th. Burgess, crum exsculptum adparet, ut femina virum alterum
Oxford I792, e.g. pp. 236-37: 'Quare quid mirum, si veste subducta ex adverso, alterum ad posticam corpo-
Homerus, qui teste potissimum Aristotele ac Platone, ris partem respiciens, &vtLiyp congressu, excipere
homines aetatis nationisque suae tales, quales natura velle videatur.'
23
ipsa reddidit, generositatis vestigium prope nullum Ibid., pp. 105-06.
24 Ibid., p. 105: 'Quo magis mirari
delineaverit; ceterarum virtutum vero perrarum: cum convenit, cum ea
exempla libidinis, avaritiae, feritatis singulis prope ver- res inspectantem, nisi valde obtusum, haud facile fugiat:
sibus effuderit? Quae hominum, regionum, temporum- esse tamen illius inpudicae statuae exemplum auctorit-
que vitia in divini Poetae dedecus detorquent homines ate regia in Galliam translatum, et apud aquas Versa-
imperiti potissimum antiquitatis. Quasi heroibus suis, liarum publice positum. Quod consentire cum nostri
quibus nomen hoc vires et virtus militaris meruerant, seculi moribus non videtur...'; ibid., p. io6: 'Et haec
adscribere salva imitationis lege debuisset Homerus omnia nostri homines exsequuntur sane quam severe.
virtutes illis ignotas: quas non modo nationes barbarae, An mitius Galli, aliis usi moribus, fortasse per conniven-
sed et ipsimet recentiores Graeci, qui philosophorum tiam; non liquet.' The Venus depicted in Pl. 13b is from
vocibus eas vane iactaverant, non ante conferre coep- an almost contemporary German work on Versailles
erunt in morem, quam exemplis et institutis assuescer- and may well have provoked Christ's excursus.
ent Romanorum.' Gravina no doubt owed some of his 25 Ibid. On
Christ, see E. Schmidt, Lessing,3rd edn, i,
historical insight to his long study of the works of Cujas, Berlin Igog, pp. 40-48; and A. D. Potts, 'Winckel-
but he was by no means the only scholar of his time to mann's Interpretation of the History of Ancient Art in
take such an approach to Homer. See K. Simonsuuri, its Eighteenth-Century Context', Diss. London 1978
Homer's Original Genius. Eighteenth-Century Notions of the (copy in the Warburg Institute), I, pp. 94-98. For
Early GreekEpic (1688-1798), Cambridge 1979. Wolf's own assessment of Christ, see his contribution to
21J. F. Christ, Noctes Academicae . ., II, Halle 1727, Goethe's Winckelmann undseinJahrhundert,repr. in Goethes
p. 99. Briefe an F. A. Wolf ed. M. Bernays, Berlin 1868, p. 129.
22 Ibid., pp. 102-11. Christ takes Venus as
being
about to undergo intercourse from the front and the rear
i06 ANTHONY GRAFTON
Christ stood out in Germany, but not in Europe. His French contemporary Caylus put
a similar range of questions to a similar array of material remains.26 Indeed, a working
knowledge of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century work in philology and antiquities - and
it needs to be said that most German students of the history of scholarship have lacked this
-
suggests that the best scholars had long known how to set literary documents into a rich
context. A seventeenth-century polymath like Lucas Holstenius, who learned Greek in
Leiden and archaeological field technique in Italy, knew perfectly well that the Passio
Perpetuae was the record of a tragedy played out in a late-antique legal, religious and
cultural setting.27 He brilliantly used the art of the catacombs to illustrate the manifest
content of Perpetua's vision:
In habitupastorisovesmulgentem('A man dressed as a shepherd, milking his sheep'). Christ appeared
to Perpetua in the form in which he was presented in the oratories and sacred vessels of that time.
For since the Gospels assign the title and character of a shepherd to Christ, the early Christians
loved to show him in this most amiable of forms to the faithful, who were regularly called his sheep.
In Bosio's RomaSotterranea there are many scenes taken from funeral monuments, in almost all of
which Christ is depicted in the form of a shepherd with his flock - in the first, in the very form
shown here of a shepherd milking his sheep.28
Holstenius was doing no more than he had been taught to do by his own master Cluverius
- or than had been done by his master's master, Joseph Scaliger.29
To watch Wolf applying his general programme to a specific document is to confirm
the view that much of his work was traditional in character. His 1789 edition of
Demosthenes Against Leptines- which he passed out to his students sheet by sheet as it
was printed - is a case in point. Superficially this looks like a brilliant specimen of the
new Altertumswissenschaft.Wolf explicitly connected his work on the speech with his
general hermeneutics. He dealt with 'both what can serve to explicate the speech and
what can be learnt from it', and he promised that the reader would 'so far as possible
understand the speech in the same way as those who originally heard the orator deliver
it'.30 His Prolegomenanot only summarized the speech and analysed its style but set out in
26 M. Wegner,
Altertumskunde,Freiburg and Munich expressa, pastoris oves mulgentis.'
29 For Cluverius and Scaliger, see e.g. H. J. Erasmus,
1951, pp. 85-87.
27 On Holstenius see R.
Almagid, L'operageograficadi The Origins of Rome in Historiographyfrom Petrarch to
LucaHolstenio,Studi e testi cii, Vatican City 1942; for the Perizonius,Assen 1962. No adequate history of scholar-
study of the early Church see in general S. Bertelli, ship in early modern Europe has yet been written. The
Ribelli, libertinie ortodossinellastoriografiabarocca,Florence best introduction is perhaps Wegner (n. 26 above),
1973, Chap. 3 (to be used with caution); G. Wataghin pp. 75-ioi; the most incisive analysis is A. D. Momi-
Cantino, 'Roma sotterranea. Appunti sulle origini gliano, 'Ancient History and the Antiquarian', this
dell'Archeologia cristiana', Ricerchedi storia dell'arte,x, Journal, XIII, 1950, pp. 285-315. Some of the more infor-
g198o,pp. 5-14 (with good bibliography). mative and original monographs are: T. D. Kendrick,
28 Passio sanctarummartyrumPerpetuaeet Felicitatis, ed. British Antiquity, London 195o; J. G. A. Pocock, The
L. Holstenius, Rome 1663, p. i18: 'In habitupastorisoves Ancient Constitutionand the Feudal Law, Cambridge 1957;
mulgentem.Repraesentatus est Perpetuae Christus ea A. Ellenius, De artepingendi.Latin Art Literaturein Seven-
forma, qua pictus cernebatur in oratoriis et vasis sacris teenth-Century Swedenand its InternationalBackground,Upp-
illorum temporum. nam cum Evangelia titulum et per- sala and Stockholm I96o; E. Iversen, The Myth of Egypt
sonam pastoris praecipue Christo attribuant, gaude- and its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition, Copenhagen
bant primorum temporum Christiani, hanc eius amabi- 196 1; P. Rossi, Le sterminateantichita.Studi vichiani, Pisa
lissimam speciem, fidelium, nomine ovium passim I969; G. Cantelli, Vicoe Bayle. Premesseper un confronto,
designatorum, frequentissime oculis obiicere. habes in Studi vichiani iv, Naples 197I; A. Dupront, L. A. Mura-
Roma subterranea Bosii, pag. 59 et deinceps, multas despr6-Lumieres,Florence 1976.
toriet la sociiti europeenne
imagines e Coemeteriorum monumentis expressas, in 30 Wolf, Prolegomena,in DemosthenisoratioadversusLep-
quibus ferme omnibus, Christus pastoris specie cum tinemcumscholiisveteribuset commentario perpetuo,ed. Wolf,
ovibus pingitur, in prima etiam hac ipsa forma hic Halle i789, p. cxxxxv: 'Hactenus scribendo ea sum
economical, lucid prose the Athenian liturgies which were at issue and the form of legal
action in which the Leptinea fell.31 They inspired his students - notably Boeckh, who
developed Wolf's sketch into his own massive Public Economyof Athens - and remained
standard until late in the nineteenth century.32
Though he did not say so, however, Wolf had a model - one neither contemporary
nor German. Jacques de Tourreil, robinand member of the Acad6mie des Inscriptions et
Belles Lettres, had argued in his own Demosthenes of 1721 that the serious reader must
'act and think like the Athenians of that time, take on their feelings and prejudices,
embrace their interests, their quarrels, their envies, their fears, their hopes. Otherwise
Demosthenes would hardly find his audience'.33 He repeatedly explained that facts or
events which seemed bizarre 'par rapport 'i nos usages' were 'not at all surprising in the
context of ancient customs'.34 Like Wolf, he covered a wide range of points in Athenian
law and institutions in deft and concise notes.35 And Wolf borrowed more than one might
infer from his admiring reference in a footnote to Tourreil's Gallic lucidity.36 Wolf
argued elaborately that the many conflicting ancient descriptions of the trierarchy could
only be reconciled by scholars aware that the institution itself had 'repeatedly been
changed from top to bottom'.37 Tourreil had commented:
What makes this subject so obscure are the continual changes that took place in the Trierarchy, as
a result of which the ancient authors, each describing it in the state in which it was in his time, have
almost all disagreed.38
Again, Wolf tried to show that the repetitions that cropped up in the speech would have
been effective, not annoying, in oral delivery to a mixed audience: 'a speech affects a
potissimum secutus, quae ad hanc Leptineam caussam 1721, I, p. 266. Tourreil died in 1714, but I have seen
partim illustrandam valere, partim disci ex ea queant'; only the quarto and duodecimo editions of 1721 which
(for the second passage quoted see n. 31 below). On are apparently much revised versions of the earlier
Wolf's hermeneutics seeJ. Wach, Das Verstehen, I, Tiib- editions. On Tourreil's life and the various forms in
ingen 1926, pp. 62-82, and the recent symposium which his Demosthenes translations appeared, see
volume on Philologie und Hermeneutikim 19. Jahrhundert, G. Duhain, Un traducteurde la fin du XVIIe siecle et du
ed. H. Flashar et al., Gottingen ig979g.Wolf's debt to commencement du XVIII siecle.Jacquesde Tourreil,traducteur
Semler - on whom see H. W. Frei, TheEclipseofBiblical de Dimosthene (1656-1714), Paris I910.
Narrative.A Studyin Eighteenthand NineteenthCenturyHer- 34 See
e.g. Tourreil's remark on the 'three statues
meneutics,New Haven and London I974, esp. pp. 246-48 sixteen cubits high' mentioned in De coronaxci, Oeuvresde
- would repay further study. Mr. de Tourreil,II, p. 529: 'Que sur le Port l'on irige trois
31 Wolf, Prolegomenain Leptineam,p. lxxxv: 'Satis dixi- Statuesde seize coudieschacune.Quelqu'un trouvera peut-
mus de argumento Orationis et statu caussae: itaque etre ces Statues d'une grandeur demesur6e. 11 est vrai
videmur nobis eos quoque adiuvasse, qui forte a graecae que cette hauteur est enorme, par rapport nos usages.
linguae cognitione imparatiores ad hanc lectionem Mais elle n'a rien de surprenant par rapport aux usages
accesserint. Patet iam, quo in orbe rerum et sententia- des Anciens, qui pour marquer leur reconnoissance
rum versetur Oratio; in quo multum adiumenti est ad envers leurs bienfacteurs, leur e61evoient souvent,
melius intelligendum. Attamen ut ea a nobis, qui legi- comme l'on sgait, des Statues Colossales.' Cf. Duhain,
mus, quoad eius fieri possit, eodem modo intelligatur, Jacquesde Tourreil(n. 33 above), p. 252.
quo intellecta quondam est ab iis, qui Oratorem coram 3s For example, his crisp account of the trierarchy,
audierunt: inprimis cognoscenda est ratio, quae Athenis Oeuvresde Mr. de Tourreil(n. 33 above), II, pp. 535-39.
obtinuit, publicorum munerum curandorum, nec non 36 Wolf, Prolegomenain Leptineam,
pp. lxxxv-vi, n. 58,
legum ad Populum ferendarum abrogandarumque.' on p. lxxxvi: 'Qui, quae virtus est Gallorum paene
32 See The Speech of Demosthenes
against the Law of propria, dilucide, multoque, quam Petitus et alii, aptius
Leptines,ed.J. E. Sandys, Cambridge i89o, pp. xliii-xlv; ad communem intelligentiam de ea re [scil. the trier-
cf. Boeckh (n. 9 above), p. 166: 'Fiir das Studium archy] scripsit.'
werden die Ausleger die besten sein, welche die richtige 37 Wolf, Prolegomenain Leptineam,p. c.
Mitte halten, wozu Wolf in seinem Commentar zur 38 Oeuvresde Mr. de Tourreil(n. 33 above), ii,
p. 535.
Leptinea... das erste Muster gegeben hat.' The point was not new with Tourreil; see S. Petit's
33Jacques de Tourreil, 'Preface historique' to the standard Leges Atticae, Paris 1635, nI. 4, e.g. p. 271:
Philippics, Oeuvresde Mr. de Tourreil,quarto edn, Paris 'Ratio autem Trierarchiarum subinde
mutavit...'
io8 ANTHONY GRAFTON
reader quite differently than it does a listener.'39 This seems a characteristic sample of
Wolf's sensitivity to conditions of performance in an oral or partly oral culture. But it is
also an updated version of Tourreil's neat remark: 'one fails to see the need for these
repetitions unless one puts oneself in the place of those to whom they were originally
addressed.'40 Tourreil, of course, was no exception to French norms, but a competent
practitioner of the interdisciplinary approach seen at its best in the medieval scholarship
of his confrere La Curne de Sainte-Palaye.41 No wonder then, that German students and
observers met Wolf's pedagogical programme with so much sympathy.42 Eloquently and
incisively, he was telling them what well-read scholars already knew.
It could be argued in favour of Wolf's originality that he wished to reform contempor-
ary culture as a whole as well as classical scholarship, while Heyne, an unpolitical
German avant la lettre,cultivated his detachment from the life of his time. This view, which
has been advanced, implies a misunderstanding of Heyne.43 He loved and exploited
G6ttingen's privilege of free speech. He discussed the possibility of an American
revolution with Benjamin Franklin in the 1760s. And he clearly saw classical studies as a
key to understanding pressing modern problems. His defence of the Athenian condemna-
tion of Phocion and his essay on the agrarian law both commented by indirection on
political crises of his day.44 Yet there is something to this point of view. For Heyne did not
anticipate Wolf's thesis that a broadly historical training was per se the best discipline for
mind and soul. His own arguments for the value of the classics were the established ones of
the humanist tradition, and very lame they sounded in the 177os.45
But Wolf's thesis was not his own. He owed it to his close friend Wilhelm von
Humboldt, whose self-obsession - unusually intense even for a member of Werther's
generation - had led him to devote much of his life to thinking about the best way to form
his mental powers and sensibility. In the 1790s, impressed by Wolf, he decided that Greek
culture held the key, and sent Wolf an essay 'On the Study of the Ancients'.46 This Wolf
drew on in his lectures and in his published Darstellung derAltertumswissenschaftof 1807.47
Wolf also learned from letters and conversation. Naturally he coined formulas of his own.
Humboldt admitted that the definition of Altertumswissenschaftas 'knowledge of human
39 Wolf, Praefatio in Leptineam,pp. xxxxix-l: 'Quid? Exxkqotafouoatauchvornehmlich ausdemGrunde,

quod in ea, quanquam rarius, et multo crebrius in aliis weildiessLustspieldieDenkungsart, dieSittenunddie
huius auctoris, eaedem subinde diversis in locis senten- StaatsverfassungderAthenienser so trefflichschildert.'
tiae resumuntur: id quod miretur aliquis, qua ratione Cf.Wolf'spreface,Kl.Schr.(n. 8 above),I, p. 287:'Ex
aures Atheniensium tulerint tam fastidiosae. Sed ego sic Aristophanequamaddidifabulam,in hac praeterea
omnino statuo, aliter oratione affici legentem, aliter spectavinotationemingenii,morumreiquepublicae
audientem.' Atheniensium...
40 'Preface 43 Cf. the comparison Menze draws between Heyne
historique', Oeuvresde Mr. de Tourreil(n. 33
above) 1, p. 266. and Humboldt, in his HumboldtundHeyne(n. I above).
44
41 Both Duhain,
Jacquesde Tourreil(n. 33 above), and J. Bernays, PhokionundseineneuerenBeurtheiler,Berlin
U. Schindel, Demosthenesim 18.Jahrhundert,Zetemata 31, 188i, pp. 1-14, 10O-02 (apparently not used by Menze
Munich 1963, pp. 78-81, somewhat exaggerate the or Mettler); Schindel, (n. 41 above), pp. 65-69.
singularity of Tourreil's approach. On the scholarship 4s See e.g. Heyne's 'Epistola. . . ad auctorem', 1771,
of the Academy of Inscriptions in general and La Curne in FragmentaStesichoriLyrici . . . , ed. J. A. Suchfort,
de Sainte-Palaye's work in particular, see L. Gossman, G6ttingen 1771, pp. xliii-xlvii.
MedievalismandtheIdeologiesofthe Enlightenment.The World 46 Text in the Akademie-Ausgabe of Humboldt's Ges.
and WorkofLa Curnede Sainte-Palaye,Baltimore 1968. Schr. (n. 12 above), i, 1903, pp. 255-81; cf Stadler (n. 12
42 See e.g. the quite accurate review of Wolf's 1787 above), pp. 32-53.
47
TetralogiadramatumGraecorum in the HumanistischesMaga- Ibid., pp. 53-56.
zin, 1788, p. 271: 'Vom Aristophanes wihlte er die
FRIEDRICH AUGUST WOLF 10o9
nature in antiquity' was Wolf's.48 But Wolf's most striking general tenets were borrowed.
His description of language as the bearer of 'what is highest and deepest' in human
nature, for instance, came directly from one of Humboldt's letters to him.49 And the
excerpts from Humboldt's draft essay that Wolf quoted in the footnotes of his Darstellung
put the main points with a sharpness and generality that his own work did not attain:
The treatment of ancient works is most rewarding when one considers less the works themselves
than their authors and the period from which they come. Only this approach can lead to a true,
philosophical knowledge of man. For it forces us to work out the character and complete situation
of a nation, and to grasp all aspects of it in their correlation. The effort to attain such knowledge -
for no one can hope to complete the search - can be called necessary for any man . . . so50
Wolf's importance as a thinker, then, lay less in his originality than in his ability -
something like Gibbon's - to fuse materials from the divergent realms of philosophy and
erudition. Heyne could not provide a cogent programme for educational reform. Hum-
boldt did not know in detail what the sort of education he called for should look like. Wolf
was less original than either, but his capacious mind enabled him to compose a forceful
manifesto. And even the deficiencies of his Darstellung had one happy result. They helped
to stimulate Wolf's student August Boeckh to make his own incomparably more subtle
and discerning effort to solve the same set of problems.51s
III
The claim for Wolf's originality as a scholar rests not on his general theories but on his
technical research - above all on the notorious Prolegomenaad Homerum, which he
published in 1795 after spending almost twenty years framing and solving and reframing
the same set of problems. Here, as is well known, he argued that the standard text of
Homer barely resembled the original poems. In the first place, Homer had not known how
to write; in fact, the Greeks of his day had been illiterate. Hence he could not have
composed epics of the size of the Iliad and Odyssey.His poems - like the ballads of the
Druids and the early Germans - must have been short enough for professionals, the
rhapsodes, to memorize them and recite them in public. The rhapsodes freely altered their
material. And even the altered poems were not written down and arranged into coherent,
48 Humboldt to Wolf, 23 Jan. man nicht sowohl auf sie selbst sieht, als auf ihre Urheber
1793; Humboldt,
GesammelteWerke,v, Berlin 1846, p. 18: 'Dass der End- und die Perioden,aus denen jedes herstammt. Nur diese
zweck des Studiums des Alterthums Kenntniss der Betrachtungsart kann zu wahrer philosophischer
Menschheit im Alterthum ist, sind Ihre eignen Worte Kenntniss des Menschen fiihren, in sofern sie uns no-
(misinterpreted by Pattison (n. 6 above), i, p. 365). thigt den Zustand und die ganzliche Lage einer Nation
49.'Wolf,
Darstellung, Kl. Schr. (n. 8 above), n, p. 870: zu erforschen und alle Seiten davon in ihrem grossen
...
an den Sprachen, die das Hochste und Tiefste, was Zusammenhange aufzufassen. Das Streben nach einer
in dem Menschen liegt, zusammenfassen. . .' Cf. Hum- solchen Kenntniss (da niemand eigentliche Vollendung
boldt's now famous letter to him of 16 June 1804; derselben hoffen darf) kann man jedem Menschen, als
Humboldt, Ges. Werke(n. 48 above), v, pp. 266-67: 'Im Menschen, in verschiedenen Graden der Intension und
Grunde ist alles was ich treibe, auch der Pindar, Sprach- Extension unentbehrlich nennen, nicht nur dem han-
studium. Ich glaube die Kunst entdeckt zu haben, die delnden, sondern auch dem mit Ideen beschdftigten,
Sprache als ein Vehikel zu brauchen, um das Hochste dem Historiker im weitesten Sinne des Wortes, dem
und Tiefste, und die Mannigfaltigkeit der ganzen Welt Philosophen, dem Kiinstler, auch dem bloss Geniessen-
zu durchfahren, und ich vertiefe mich immer mehr und den.'
mehr in dieser Ansicht.' s51 Boeckh (n. 9 above); cf. B. Bravo, Philologie,histoire,
so Quoted by Wolf, Darstellung,Kl. Schr. (n. 8 above), philosophiede l'histoire.Etude sur]. G. Droysen,historiende
II, pp. 884-85 n.: 'Die Betrachtung der Werke des l'antiquiti, Wroclaw, Warsaw and Cracow, 1968.
Alterthums ist gewiss dann am fruchtbarsten, wenn
8"
II GRAFTON
OANTHONY
unified epics until the time of Peisistratus. In the second place, the Athenian written text
had been further altered, emended, cut and added to by early revisers, or diaskeuastai,and
above all by such Hellenistic critics as Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and
Aristarchus. The extant manuscripts preserved a corrupt form of this final Alexandrian
revision. A modern editor could only hope to restore the Alexandrian vulgate. He could
never know which sections really went back to Homer.52
The Prolegomenaevoked violent reactions. Wolf presented his thesis as novel and
daring (one long, defensive footnote begins lacta est alea. .. ). Others agreed. J. H. Voss,
who had made Homer come alive in modern German, denounced it. Herder, the
passionate student of folk poetry, annexed it. Goethe took it as encouragement to carry on
with an epic of his own, now that he need no longer fear to be overshadowed. Then he
rejected it in favour of his old belief in Homer's unity and perfection. Heyne reviewed it
favourably, suggesting that some of Wolf's central arguments were well known. Hermann
took it as a brilliant solution of an unusually intractable problem of editorial method.53
To argue that Homer had not written his poems, and that they had undergone radical
changes as they were preserved only in performers' memories, was a commonplace of
eighteenth-century literary theory. Robert Wood had argued that Homer's poems, like
Ossian's, only took on their coherent form thanks to the deliberate intervention of learned
collectors, after centuries of oral transmission as separate ballads:
Just as some curious fragments of ancient poetry have been lately collected in the northern parts of
this island, their reduction to order in Greece was a work of taste and judgment: and those great
names which we have mentioned [Lycurgus, Solon, Peisistratus, Hipparchus] might claim the
same merit in regard to Homer, that the ingenious Editor of Fingal is entitled to from Ossian.54
Wolf used the evidence Wood had collected to show that the Greek alphabet was a late
invention. Though he did not yet know the related, much more complex ideas of Vico on
the true Homer, he did know and use other ideas first advanced by contemporary critics
and philosophers, such as Rousseau's argument that writing came late to the Greeks.5ss
Scholars had raised related problems even before literary critics took up the Homeric
-
question. After all, reputable authors Cicero, Aelian, Plutarch - suggested that the
Homeric poems were only put into the accepted order after centuries of transmission in a
rough and confused form.s6 Obertus Giphanius wove these hints into a short but
suggestive history of Homer's text in his edition of the Iliad and Odyssey(1572). He knew
from Josephus that 'traces of the earlier confusion are still to be found in Homer... since
52 Accounts of the Prolegomenaare legion. R. C. Jebb, 54 R.

Wood, An Essay on the OriginalGeniusand Writings
Homer:An Introductionto theIliad and the Odyssey,5th edn, of Homer, London 1775, p. 279; previously quoted by
Glasgow 1894, Chap. 4, remains one of the most incisive J. L. Myres, Homerandhis Critics,London 1958.
55
and judicious treatments. Later works are assessed in Wolf learned of Vico from the writings of Melchior
the excellent critical bibliography in G. Broccia, La Cesarotti, to whom he wrote to ask for a copy of the
questioneomerica,Florence 1979, PP. 121-25. Of the most Scienza Nuova in 1802; see Prose edite e ineditedi Melchior
recent accounts, Broccia is violently prejudiced against Cesarotti,ed. G. Mazzoni, Bologna 1882, p. 393. Cesa-
Wolf and sets out, following the line established by rotti gave him a copy of the book; ibid., p. 399. For
Berard, to deny him all originality; ibid., pp. 22-31. Wolf's reaction see Kl. Schr. (n. 8 above), ii, pp.
M. Murrin, The Allegorical Epic. Essays in its Rise and I 157-66. Wolf quotes Rousseau's Essai sur l'origine des
Decline, Chicago and London 1980, pp. 189-96, treats "languesat length in Prolegomenaad Homerum,cap. xx, n.
Wolf with sympathy and argues forcefully that much in 54, pp. 69-70.
56 See
the Prolegomenawas original. e.g.Jebb, n. 52 above, pp. 114-15.
5
R. V.olkmann, Geschichteund Kritik der Wolfschen
Prolegomenazu Homer.Ein Beitragzur GeschichtederHomeri-
schenFrage, Leipzig 1874, Chaps 4-5.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST WOLF III
some passages contain contradictions'.57 He also knew that Peisistratus was said to have
interpolated verses in the text.58Soon after Giphanius, Isaac Casaubon drew much more
radical conclusions. In his commentary on Diogenes Laertius (1583), he remarked that
If what Josephus says is true, that Homer did not leave his poems in written form, but they were
preserved by memorization and written down much later, then I do not see how we can ever have
them in a correct form, even if we have the oldest MSS. For it is likely that they were written down
in a form quite different from that in which they were first composed.59
Menage, commenting on the same passage, agreed. Richard Bentley, whom Wolf
admired greatly, went even further in a passing remark, and denied the original unity of
the epics:
Homer wrote a sequel of Songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small earnings and good
cheer, at Festivals and other days of Merriment; the Ilias he made for the Men, and the Odysseis
for the other Sex. These loose Songs were not collected together in the Form of an Epic Poem, till
about 500 years after.60
Wolf knew all and quoted many of these remarks in his footnotes. Accordingly, his
claim to be advancing novel and audacious views was at least partly insincere. And his
critics' attacks on his 'literary impiety' applied less to his ideas per se than to his having
dared to state them so directly and to make them the foundation of true Homeric studies.
Wolf himself paradoxically complained in 1804 that his views had been far less revolution-
ary than his opponents had claimed.61
Since the late nineteenth century, competent historians of scholarship have accepted
these points. Some have reacted to them by denying that Wolf did anything of interest, or
at least anything original.62 Others, however, have tried to save the originality of the
Prolegomena.They have done so by drawing attention to the more technical - and less
popular - concluding sections of the book, where Wolf used the Venice scholia on the
Iliad, published by Villoison in 1788, to trace in detail what each of the Alexandrian
critics had done to the text of Homer.63
These chapters reveal impressive technical dexterity and attention to detail. Wolf
worked again and again through the Venice scholia, collecting in enormous footnotes
every reading and interpretation that they attributed to each of the major ancient critics
57 HomeriIlias seu 60
potius omniaeius quaeextantopera,ed. Bentley, Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Free-
O. Giphanius, Strassburg 1572, I, p. 15: 'Confusionis thinking,as quoted by Wolf, Prolegomenaad Homerum,cap.
quoque prioris vestigia quaedam esse reliqua monet xxvii, pp. 86-88, n. 88, on p. 84. Wolf's quotation is not
losephus in Apionem, quod quaedam in Homero re- quite accurate - for example, he omits the significant
periantur inter se pugnantia. Quorum ex numero hoc sit words 'till Pisistratus' time' between 'Epic Poem' and
fortasse quod taxat Scaliger de Sole, qui boves suos 'till about 500ooyears after'. On Bentley's view, cf.
devorari non viderit, cum alia videat et audiat omnia.' J. Bernays, GesammelteAbhandlungen, ed. H. Usener, Ber-
s58 Ibid.: 'Aiunt autem Pisistratum non satis bona fide lin 1885, 1, pp. 356-59, andJebb, Homer,pp. o105-o6.
in his componendis esse versatum: quosdam enim ver- 61 Wolf, Kl. Schr. (n. 8
above), 1, pp. 237-39.
sus de suo admiscuisse.' Cf. sigs. kkk ii'V-kkkiiir ad II. ii, 62 See e.g. Broccia, La questione
omerica, pp. 22-31.
557 More moderate treatments include Volkmann (n. 53
59iff-
Both Casaubon and Menage are quoted by Wolf, above), and Myres (n. 54 above).
Prolegomenaad Homerum,cap. xxxix, pp. 137-38, n. 42. 63 See e.g. R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship
Menage also speculated on the Homeric interpolations from the Beginningsto theEnd of theHellenisticAge, Oxford
inserted by Solon and Peisistratus. J. Schefferus, in his 1968, p. 214; S. Timpanaro, La genesi del metododel
edition of Cl. Aeliani Sophistae variae historiaecum notis, Lachmann,Florence 1963, p. 26. Even Broccia calls the
Strassburg I647, pp. 368 adviii.2, 385 ad xiii. 14, tried to technical part of the Prolegomena' . . . una pregevole
reconcile Aelian's conflicting stories about the services rassegna degli studi omerici nell'antichita' (La questione
to Homer of Peisistratus and Hipparchus. omerica,p. 24).
112 ANTHONY GRAFTON
and recensions. He paid careful attention to the language of the scholiasts and the nature
of the ancient critical signs, and was at pains to work out the limits of what can be known
about the work of each ancient critic.64 Every assertion, however uncontentious, rested on
a solid base of close-packed references and quotations. In support of his contention that
the ancient vulgate was based largely on the recension of Aristarchus, for example, Wolf
wrote:
Relevant to this are the words beulOi n'agadctootg in the scholia, as in 8 138, E 289,
i1 'AQLoT~g)•p
UaUTOU3,
357, or EELo0flocv aLuTpoLyQcaLtcaTLXol, '
7 415, or eXQdT(loEv11cvdcyVWotg aX572, E
69, ? 150, TI289,X? 67, or owg EXELta Tg avayvwoaewg,X651 (652), V 387, cf. Apollonius De
synt. ii, p. 158, Ill. p. 222. . . The contraryis very rarelyfound, o?x EwWlo01i( cq'na ootg, as 4 162,
wo316 etc.65
Wolf's work was not only thorough but full of insight. Anyone used to nineteenth-
century treatments of ancient scholarship will be refreshed by a dip into the Prolegomena.
Wolf's successors, Lehrs and - to a lesser extent - Ludwich, set out to refute Wolf. They
described Aristarchus et al. as professional scholars like themselves, who had collated
manuscripts, established critical editions of texts, and presumably published them with
the Alexandrian equivalent of B. G. Teubner.66 Wolf's historical vision was far clearer.
He argued that improvement of the text as a literary masterpiece, not preservation of the
text as an historical document, had been the aim of Hellenistic criticism:
We must completely rid ourselves of the notion that makes us imagine the critics of that age in the
terms of the modern state of the art ... Some of them perhaps tried to represent Homer as
accurately as they could. But they worked harder to ensure that he never seemed inconsistent or
weak, often removing verses, elsewhere adding polish where none belonged... This whole art had
its origin in what we Germans call the aesthetic rather than the critical faculty - or, to put it
another way, relied on poetic, not diplomatic standards of argument.67
Wolf did not blame the Alexandrians for having aims different from his. He merely
insisted that their ends be understood - that modern scholars realize that, even if an
Alexandrian critic did consult manuscripts while seeking the 'genuine' form of the text,
'the genuine form was the one that seemed most appropriate to the poet; and that
obviously depended on the arbitrary judgement of the Alexandrians'.68
It was not unusual for a major eighteenth-century edition to begin with a history of its
text. Heyne's great Tibullus began with one; so did more modest productions like van
Oudendorp's edition of Julius Obsequens.69 And even the bare texts of the Bipontine
Press started with elaborate bibliographies of earlier editions and commentaries.70 But as
one might expect from editors with rich libraries of printed books, no travel grants, and a
64 See e.g. cap. xl, where Wolf treats the work of the 67 Wolf, Prolegomenaad Homerum, cap. xxxviii, pp.
pre-Hellenistic Homeric critic Antimachus of Colo- 132-33.
68 Ibid.,
phon: Prolegomenaad Homerum,pp. 139-40; cap. xliii, on cap. xlvii, p. I83.
69 See Albi Tibulli Carmina, ed. Chr. G.
Zenodotus, ibid., pp. 153-66; cap. xliv, on Aristophanes Heyne, 3rd
of Byzantium, ibid., pp. I66-75. For a characteristic edn, Leipzig 1798, pp. xiii-lxiv ('De Tibulli lectione, per
reflection on the limits of the evidence, see p. I62 and libros scriptos prelo excusos propagata; adeoque de
pp. I62-63, n. 8o. Tibulli codicibus et editionibus'); Julii Obsequentisquae
65 Ibid.,
cap. xlvii, p. I86, n. 27. supersuntex libro de prodigiis, ed. F. van Oudendorp,
66 See e.g. J. E. G. Zetzel, 'Emendaviad Tironem.Some Leiden I720, sigs. *-r3r (van Oudendorp), **4 - r
Notes on Scholarship in the Second Century A.D.', (J. Schefferus).
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, LXXVII, 1973, 70 Some Bipontines - like the Varro of 1788 -
pp. 225-43; Zetzel, 'The Subscriptions in the Manu- include selected commentaries as well as prefaces,
scripts of Livy and Fronto and the Meaning of Emenda- others - like the Ausonius - prefaces only.
tio,' ClassicalPhilology, LXXV, 1980, pp. 56-57.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST WOLF
i13
strong interest in the history of scholarship, Heyne and his colleagues concentrated on the
history of their texts in the age of printed editions. They investigated this field with
exemplary bibliographical skill and historical insight, carefully evaluating the work of
Renaissance editors in the light of the more primitive critical methods they had known.7'
The manuscript traditions of their texts they usually treated in less detail, and with less
hope of arriving at definitive results. Ernesti and Heyne turned up important textual
witnesses and had their insights into the genealogy of manuscripts.72 But for the most part
they lacked access to the evidence.73 As to ancient editions and variants, they knew that
such things had existed but made little serious effort to reconstruct them.74
Wolf defied readers' expectations and warned them not to expect a detailed account of
modern Homeric scholarship:
We will examine ancient sources above all, not these modern ones of printed books. The changes
that the latter have produced in the text, compared with those produced by the former, hardly
deserve the attention of a busy man.7s
He explicitly pointed out that this limitation was unusual. And in the announcement of
his edition that he printed in theJena Literatur-Zeitung,he claimed that his work on Homer
was novel precisely because he was the first editor to master the sources for the ancient
history of the text.76 Within the genre of eighteenth-century prefaces, then, the Prolegomena
were something of an exception.77
But they were a predictable sort of exception. Scholars had long seen that Homer's
text could not be established except by investigation of what the Alexandrians had done to
it. Giphanius knew that the Hellenistic scholars had divided Homer's continuous poems
into books. He also knew that Aristarchus had 'noticed many spurious verses in the text of
Homer, and marked them with the obelus':
This is why many verses are cited by the ancients, such as Aristotle and others, which are not found
in our texts today. For they used other recensions, we that of Aristarchus.78
71 Tibulli Carmina,ed. Heyne (n.
69 above), pp. xxiii, pleniore codice facta continebat. Hinc illae lacunae,
xlvi-vii, lii, lvii, and see n. I4I below. On p. xxx Heyne hinc hiantes sententiae, distichis comprehensae. Simile
writes: 'Exposita est tanquam in stemmate prosapia ac eclogarium versaverat los. Scaliger' (ibid., p. xx, n **).
stirps lectionisTibullianaeper tot editiones deducta . . .' 7s Wolf, Prolegomenaad Homerum,cap. vii, p. 17, n. 2.
72 See ibid., pp. xxxvi-xl, for 76
Wolf, Kl. Schr. (n. 8 above), I, pp. 587-90.
Heyne's interesting
description of the Guelpherbytani of Tibullus. On 77 An interesting contemporary parallel is D. Wytten-
Ernesti see Timpanaro (n. 63 above), pp. I5-16, 24, bach's preface to his edition of Plutarch's Moralia (1794;
n. i; 25 and n. 3 (his innovations, as Timpanaro shows, repr. in his Opuscula,i, Leiden and Amsterdam 1821,
lay in theory not practice). pp. 266-434). In cap. iii, 'Historia studii a prioribus in
73 This of course continued to be true of most editors frequentandis edendisque Plutarcheis scriptis positi',
until well into the i9th century; see e.g. G. Pasquali, Wyttenbach makes clear that he would trace the history
Storia della tradizionee critica del testo, repr. of 2nd edn, of his text in antiquity if the evidence allowed him to do
Florence The ClassicalText, so (pp. 300-o0). What follows is rather more interesting
1971, pp. 4-5; E.J. Kenney,
Berkeley etc. 1974, Chap. 4. than Wyttenbach's own comment suggests: a
74
Cf. Heyne on the archetype of Tibullus and its century-by-century list of imitations, quotations, sum-
parent: 'Quid? quod nec illud satis exploratum est, maries, MSS and translations, ending with the I5th
codexne ille, cui lacunae Tibulli debentur, fuerit is ipse, century. He distinguishes four 'recensiones et aetates' of
e quo recentiores illi descripti sunt. Potuit iam is, et eius the Moralia (ibid., pp. 350-51).
exemplar adeo, prodire ex antiquiore aliquo, qui vetust- 78 HomeriIlias, ed. Giphanius (n. 57 above), i, p. I6:
ate ac situ aut casu vitiatus erat, isque hanc fortunam 'Multi postea consecuti sunt Grammatici, qui certatim
experiri potuit haud multo post Tibullum tempore . . .' in hoc poeta expoliendo elaborarunt. Quorum tamen
(Tibulli Carmina(n. 69 above), p. xv);' . . . nos in multis princeps fuit et est habitus Aristarchus, quare et huius
poetae partibus tantum lacinias et fragmenta habere Editio magno semper fuit in precio: adeo quidem ut sola
censui: seu, quia exemplum illud, unde codices nostri haec ad nos pervenisse videatur. Eius iudicium certe
ducti sunt, lacerum erat et mutilum, seu quia illud tam fuit limatum et Homericis versibus tritum, multos
exemplum tantum excerpta alicuius viri docti opera ex ut versus in Homeri corpore spurios animadverterit, et
14 ANTHONY GRAFTON
J. R. Wettstein, speaking in 1684 'de fato scriptorum Homeri per omnia secula', seems to
have agreed." Ludolf Kiister - whose Historia critica Homeri of 1696 Wolf reprinted -
disagreed. Eustathius's comments showed that the Homeric vulgate contained passages
and lines which Aristarchus had condemned; hence it could not be the text he had
established.80s In two careful dissertations defended in 1732, the Wittenberg scholarJ. M.
Chladenius outdid both Giphanius and Kiister in subtlety. Assembling cases in point
from almost all the Greek scholia in print, he showed how to study the ancient critic
'completing a job in his workshop'.8 His results anticipated Wolf's. Ancient critics had
had other aims in mind than reconstructing a text wie es eigentlichgewesen:
The ancients will give us the example of a criticism that serves piety rather than the integrity of
poets' works. For they allowed nothing to remain that did not accord with their religion- or rather
superstition.82
Unfortunatelyhe drewno detailedconclusionsaboutthe historyand state of the text of

Homer.
By the I 780s evenveryordinaryscholarsweretakingpositionson the Alexandrians'
work.ThomasBurgess- later a marvellouslycreduloustheologian,who defendedthe
Comma Johanneum and argued that the De doctrinaChristiana
could not be by Milton, since it
was not orthodox - in I78I described the text of Homer as a rifacimento'not so radically
altered as Berni's Boiardo or Dryden's or Pope's Chaucer,but more so than John
Hughes'sSpenser'.He explainedthat
many ancient critics set out to emend Homer. And though the extant scholia often call our
attentionto changesAristarchusandothersmade,we haveonlya smallpartof the commentaries
-
especially the older ones - on the poet. Hence we probably fail to recognize many of their
emendations, which are today believed to be by Homer.83
Wolf himself had argued a parallel case as early as 1783. In his edition of Hesiod's
Theogony, he argued that the extant scholia revealed 'only the names of those who
commented on' Hesiod.84 To produce a really satisfactory edition one would have to know
obelo notarit; etsi Plutarchus in libro de poetis omnes conficiendo, conspiciatur, quod ibi ignorantia, vel etiam
eius obelismos non probat. Hac autem re factum est, ut negligentia, in ipsum statim opus redundat, ita ut a
multi versus a veteribus proferantur, ut Aristotele et quovis animadverti, ac manibus velut palpari possit, sic
aliis, qui in nostris libris hodie non extent: quod illi aliis praestantiam veterum Criticorum cognituris adeundi
editionibus, nos Aristarchica utamur.' sunt illorum Commentarii, solliciteque animadverten-
79J. R. Wettstein, 'Dissertatio inauguralis de fato dum, quae loca, quibus de caussis, qua ratione, emen-
scriptorum Homeri per omnia secula', in his Pro Graeca darint.' This and the Diatribeprima quampraesideI.M.C.
et genuina linguae Graecaepronunciatione... orationesapo- . . defendetChrist.FridericusWeidnerus,Wittenberg I1732,
.
logeticae,Basle 1686, 2nd pagination, p. 155. are both evidently by the praeses(as was normal practice
so L. Kiister, Historia critica Homeri, Frankfurt a. O. in many German universities); copies of both are in a
1696, V.iii, pp. 101-02. For Wolf's preface to his British Library collection (shelf-mark T.2236).
82 Chladenius, Diatribesecunda(n. 8I above), p. I7: 'Et
reprint, see Kl. Schr. (n. 8 above), i, pp. 196-97. For
further discussion of what I7th- and i8th-century scho- dabunt veteres exemplum Criticae magis pietati quam
lars knew of the history of the Homeric texts, see Th. integritati Poetarum inservientis, cum nihil in iis tol-
Bleicher, Homer in der deutschenLiteratur (1450-174o), erarent, nisi quod cum religione, vel potius superstitione
Stuttgart 1972, pp. 166-77. sua, conveniebat.'
81 De praestantia et usu scholiorumGraecorumin poetas 83 Th. Burgess, Appendix, in R. Dawes, Miscellanea
diatribe secundaquam praesideIo. Martino Chladenio ... critica, 2nd edn, Oxford 1781, pp. 416-1 7.
Heekius,Wittenberg 1732, sect. xvI, 84 TheogoniaHesiodea,textusubinderefictoin usumpraelec-
defendetIo. Godofredus
p. 17: 'Vti enim non melius de praestantia artificis tionum,seorsumeditaa Frid. Aug. Wolf Halle 1783, p. 58.
iudicatur, quam si in sua officina, opereque aliquo
FRIEDRICH AUGUST WOLF I15
from sources more solid than conjecture 'exactly what the Alexandrian critics contributed
to it, and from whose recension our form of the text derives'.85
Villoison quoted this body of scholarship lavishly in the Prolegomenato his edition of
the Venice manuscript. He saw that the new material he was publishing provided just the
information whose absence Burgess and Wolf had lamented: 'Our great collection of
ancient commentaries and scholia will remedy this confusion.'86 And he set out to
assemble what the scholia revealed about the ancient critics.87 In short, it was well known
before 1795 that a critical edition of Homer would have to be based on a critical history of
Alexandrian learning, itself to be based on the Venice scholia.
Indeed, Wolf knew - and told his students - that he was hardly the first scholar to
anatomize in detail a set of scholia on the Iliad. He regarded L. C. Valckenaer's Dissertatio
on Leiden manuscript Voss. gr. fol. 64, which appeared in I747, as the first important
essay: 'after that time scholars became more interested in bringing scholia to light from
libraries.'88 Valckenaer had argued that all scholia are mixtures of old and new, useful
and useless materials. Those in his Vossianus included Homeric questions and answers
apparently derived from Porphyry, excerpts from Eustathius which helped to date them,
and many notes by a gentleman oddly named Senacherim - who, Valckenaer rightly
guessed, was a grammarian of the twelfth or thirteenth century.89 With minute care and
copious examples he dissected marginal and even interlinear notes:
Wherever Homer omitted articles that normal Greek usage required, they were carefully entered
between the lines. Iliad vii. 177, which reads as follows in the MS, can serve as an example:
0 LhJavrTO
TOL; xCutCLcgCEETEAVOV
xQeCgg vEo'ov
(i77) Acoto ~gJocvro E0o6ig, 7,6
5'
('[The] people prayed to [the] Gods, and raised [their] hands.').90
85 Ibid. Wolf's edition is now rather looked down on. facts and texts that makes Villoison's work a trial even
Contemporary readers treated it with great interest; see to the best-disposed reader (cf e.g. S. Chardon de la
e.g. Heyne's 'Ad editorem epistola', ibid., pp. I43-66, Rochette, 'Notice sur la vie et les principaux ouvrages de
and G. Hermann's annotated copy of the work (Cam- Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard d'Ansse de Villoison', in his
bridge University Library, shelf-mark Adv. d. 83. 21). Milanges de critiqueet de philologie, Paris 1812, iii, pp.
86J. B. G. d'Ansse de Villoison, Prolegomena,in Homeri 45-46). And Wolf is generally better on technical points
Ilias ad veteriscodicis Venetifidem recensita,Venice I788, of historical criticism. Of the recensions E'xutovn6tEWv,
p. vi, n. (a comment on the passage by Burgess cited in for instance, Villoison remarks: 'Ubi intelligo Editiones
n. 83 above). For Villoison's use of Wolf's edition of the publice servatas, vel publico iussu a quibusdam civitati-
Theogony,see the Addenda,ibid., pp. lvi-ii, and Murrin bus factas' (Prolegomena,p. xxvi). Wolf rightly replied:
(n. 52 above), p. 257, nn. 53, 56. 'Publico iussu illas factas esse vel servatas publice, cave
87 Wolf owed more to Villoison than is usually real- cuiquam ante credas, quam probabili argumento
ized. In cap. xlvii, p. I84 of the Prolegomena,Wolf argues demonstratum fuerit, eiusmodi instituta olim in civitati-
that Aristarchus did not produce two full, separate bus Graeciae obtinuisse, quae res, meo quidem iudicio,
recensions of Homer; the second one attributed to him, non cadit in ista tempora' (Prolegomenaad Homerum,cap.
he suggests, could have been assembled by others 'vel ex xxxix, p. 137).
adnotamentis exemplaris, heredibus relicti, vel ex libris 88 Wolf,
Vorlesungeniiberdie Alterthumswissenschaft,ed.
Commentariorum, vel ex scholis, in quibus sententias J. D. Giirtler and S. F. W. Hoffmann, Leipzig 1839, 1,
suas secundis curis retractarit . . .' (p. 184). In Rudolf p. 167.
Pfeiffer's Historyof ClassicalScholarship... to theendof the 89 L. C. Valckenaer, Dissertatiode praestantissimocodice
HellenisticAge, Oxford 1968, p. 215, Wolf is credited with Leidensi, et de scholiis in Homerumineditis, in his Hectoris
this argument. In fact, as he himself says, 'Hae proba- interituscarmenHomeri, sive Iliadis liber XXII cum scholiis
biles coniecturae sunt doctissimi Villoisonii' (ibid.); cf. vetustis Porphyrii et aliorum, Leeuwarden 1747 (bound
Villoison's Prolegomena,p. xxvii. Similarly, Wolf's com- with Valckenaer's edn of F. Orsini, Virgiliuscollatione
parison of the textual histories of Homer and the Koran, scriptorum Graecorum illustratus, Leeuwarden 1747),
cap. xxxv, p. I19, comes from Villoison's Prolegomena, pp. 133-35.
90
p. xxiii, n. i. On the other hand, Wolf's work suffers Ibid., p. I Io.
from none of that inability to impose order on swarms of
116 ANTHONY GRAFTON
He reproduced and defined the technical terms and signs used in his manuscript and
other Homeric commentaries. And he took an informed interest in the general history of
Alexandrian scholarship:
I believe that a great many PoeticQuestionshad their origin in the Alexandrian Museum. Scholars
spent their spare time in devising them and finding clever solutions for them. Thus they passed
their holidays and refreshedminds tired out by dealing with more serious problems. If this is true,
the custom will not be cause for criticism. That it is likely will be clear from the scholium of
Porphyry given at the end of Iliad Ix. I will give only its beginning, from the Leiden MS.
PORPHYRY:
In the Alexandrian Museum it was the rule for questions to be proposed and
their answers recorded . . . 9
Valckenaer made clear that his method was not original: 'Hemsterhusius disclosed
the true method of dealing with scholia in his notes on the scholia to Aristophanes's Plutus
(1744)'.92 Hemsterhusius had argued there that the historical analysis of scholia was
central to Greek studies. He had also laid down specific rules for carrying it out. All
scholia should be treated as conglomerates. And the occurrence of divergent or contradic-
tory glosses in one note should be taken as evidence that two different sets of scholia had
been conflated.3 Drawing on Casaubon and Bentley, he had also shown how to
understand and classify the special language of scholiasts: 'Grammarians often use TL
('that') in such a way that one must understand,or"tstof) ('Note' [imperative]) to
complete the sentence.'94
Hemsterhusius's views were shared by most of his Dutch followers. Valckenaer
published scholia on Euripides as well as on Homer, and drew on scholia as well as Seneca
and Stobaeus to reconstruct the HippolytusKalyptomenos- the original, unsuccessful form
of Euripides's Hippolytus.9" David Ruhnken, the dominant Greek scholar in Holland in
91Ibid., p. 146 ' . . . et credidi plurimas Poeticarum magni interesse censui, ut ipsi tirones intelligerent in
Quaestionum natas in Alexandrino Museo, quibus studiorum vestibulo, quanti sit vetusta a recentioribus,
excogitandis et argute solvendis homines eruditi vaca- a genuinis spuria, aurea a quocumque deterioris metalli
verint, ut his lusibus otium dispungerent, animumque genere secerni.' For further statements of principle and
rebus gravioribus versandis defessum repararent. Hoc samples of Hemsterhusius at work, see the passages
si verum est, res vacabit vituperatione: vero certe simile listed in the Index rerum et verborum, s. vv. 'Scholia
apparebit e Scholio Porphyrii ad finem Iliadis 'IrTa saepius ex duobus exemplaribus confuse descripta',
deposito, cuius priora tantum verba describam '
e libro 'Scholia quae ad Plutum extant, locupletiora, quam
Leidensi petita: Ho iovtov: 'Ev T6 MotoElop T CXT quae Suidas habuit', etc. Cf. alsoJ. G. Gerretzen, Schola
tIv 'AXCedv6Qetov
v6ctog i~v QoJ3dkeoXXotL Znl'- Hemsterhusiana,Diss. Nijmegen 1940.
94
[tata, xaTc T&gA3oeLg Tag ytLVOtvag &vayp6 e- Aristophanis Plutus, ed. Hemsterhusius (n. 93
GOaL. . .' above), pp. 218--19, comm. on schol. to 652, on p. 218
92 Ibid., pp. 12-13. Valckenaer's 'Nam 6TLsic saepius a Grammaticis usurpatur, ut ad
carefully annotated
copy of Hemsterhusius' edition is in Cambridge Uni- implendam sententiam adscisci postulet ontpetof'.
versity Library (shelf-mark Adv. d. 72. 8); so is a copy of 9s Euripidis Tragoedia Hippolytus, ed. Valckenaer,
the Basle 1560 edition of Eustathius with notes by both Leiden 1768, pp. xvi-xx, on the HippolytusKalyptomenos;
men (shelf-mark Adv. a. 72. 1-3); on i, p. ia character- see also the appended Diatribe in Euripidis perditorum
istic note by Valckenaer reads; 'Multa apud Eust. ex dramatumreliquias,Leiden 1767 (in cap. xii, pp. 128-36,
Heraclide non nominato promta. T. Hemst. Miscell. Iv, Valckenaer publishes 'Holoboli scholia in Aram Dosia-
p. 290.' dae,' with an elaborate discussion). Valckenaer's Euri-
93 AristophaniscomoediaPlutus, ed. T. Hemsterhusius, pidis TragoediaPhoenissae,Franeker I 755, contains the
Harlingen 1744, pp. xii-xiii: 'Antiqua vero Scholia vide- scholia and an elaborate commentary on them. This
bantur in primis hac cura indigere, quippe quae vulgo format - used by both Hemsterhusius and Valckenaer
paulo negligentius tractari soleant, eumque in modum a - of separate commentaries on the text and the scholia
Viris Eruditissimis ad partes vocentur, quasi omnia seems to come from L. Kiister's edition of Aristophanes
forent unius auctoris, eiusdemque pretii, et nihil plane (1710). Cf. also U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Ein-
referret, quid inde ad conciliandam dictis fidem petere- leitungin diegriechischeTragodie,Berlin 1910, p. 232.
tur. Equidem ad fructum literarum Graecarum per-
Wolf's time, drew evidence from the scholia about the first version of Apollonius
Rhodius's Argonautica, and devoted more than forty years to editing the Plato scholia.96
Wolf certainly knew that he was entering Dutch territory in the Prolegomena.That may
help to explain why he dedicated the book 'Davidi Ruhnkenio principi criticorum'.97
Wolf also knew that he was not the first German to encroach on this Dutch speciality.
Ernesti, setting out to make German Greek scholarship as rigorous as Dutch, included the
scholia in his 1753 edition ofAristophanes's Clouds.He explained the proper point of view
from which to examine them:
I must warn at the outset that these scholia - I mean the Aldine - are not the work of one man,
even when they are presented as one man's, and are not separated by the normal term kEXXWg ['An
alternative explanation is. . . ']. One must imagine a farragoof excerpts from the commentaries of
grammarians on Aristophanes, Apollonius Rhodius, and other poets, from ancient glossaries, even
from writers of quite a differentsort: Thucydides, Plutarch, Lucian, Stephanus de Vrbibus
and many
others, sometimes cited under their names, often anonymously. Nor did the farrago itself have a
single author.98
In his lectures he used the confused and corrupt text of the scholia as a body of cases from
which his students could learn the elements of textual and historical criticism. His
successor Reiz continued to lecture on scholia.99 Heyne planned an elaborate study of the
ancient commentators on Virgil, which he abandoned on learning that Ruhnken was
already at work in the field.100 His pupilJ. P. Siebenkees published a long account of the A
scholia to the Iliad in the Gottingen BibliothekderaltenLitteraturundKunstin 1786, two years
before Villoison's edition came out.101 This careful essay dwelt on the ancient critical
signs and important, puzzling subscriptions that appeared at the end of each book in A:
Why does the subscription never mention Zenodotus, whose recension seems to be used very
heavily in the MS? This seems surprising . . . Perhaps the scholia which cite and criticize
Zenodotus' emendations - and usually reject them - are the notes of Aristonicus [who was
mentioned in the subscriptions]?102
96 E. Hulshoff
Pol, Studia Ruhnkeniana,Diss. Leiden 1807, Praefatio,p. lix; cf. item 12, ibid. (each section of
1953, pp. 134-36 (Apollonius Rhodius), 166-67 (Plato the bookhas its own pagination).
scholia).
" Wolf's own accounts of his motives contradict one o101J.P. Siebenkees, 'Nachricht von einer merkwiir-
digen Handschriftder Iliade des Homer,in der venetia-
another. Cf. Wolf to C. G. Schiitz, 13 Sept. 1796, in nischen S. Markusbibliothek',BibliothekderaltenLitte-
S. Reiter, Friedrich August Wolf Fin Leben in Briefen, raturundKunst,I, I1786,pp. 63-89; Nachtrige, ibid., in,
Stuttgart 1935 (hereafter Reiter), I, p. 215 with W. 1788,pp. 58--72.
Peters, Zur Geschichteder WolfschenProlegomenazu Homer, 102 Ibid., 1, pp. 70-71. 'Am Ende einerjeden Rhapso-
Beilage zum Progr. des Koniglichen Kaiser- die befindet sich eine von einer neuern Hand
Friedrichs-Gymnasiums in Frankfurt a. M., 1890, p. 40. geschriebeneUnterschrift,welche den Inhalt der Scho-
98 Aristophanis Nubes cum scholiis antiquis e recens. lien anzeigt. Sie heisst: HctEQCtExLtTCLt
a AQtorovtLxov
L. Kusteri in usum lectionumcum praefatione lo. Augusti olqetLC, XatLTa ALt6tgo TE~trTg AGtoactQXo 6toQ-
Ernesti, in qua Scholiapluribus locis emendanturillustrantur, OwoEwg,Tva be xat uxTg IXLCtax•gQoow(tag 'H ~w-
Leipzig 1753, p. vi. ctavov, xctt~ax TovNLxacvo@og ntEo otypxjg. Durch
99 I infer this from G. Hermann's notes on Reiz's diese Unterschrift,und das oben angefhihrteFragment
lectures given 'semestr. hib. a. 1787 & 8', in Hermann's sind der Werth der Zeichen und ihr Alterthumhinlin-
copy of Ernesti's edition: Cambridge University glich bestitigt. Warum aber diese Unterschriftnie des
Library, shelf-mark Adv. d. 83. 10. For a more detailed Zenodotus, dessen Recension doch mit dem grdssten
discussion of Ernesti's preface and Reiz's lectures, see Fleiss bey der Handschriftgebrauchtworden zu seyn
A. Grafton, 'Polyhistor into Philolog. Notes on the scheint, gedenkt? Diess scheint befremdendzu seyn.
Transformation of German Classical Scholarship, Vielleicht geh6ren die Zeichen, welche die ver-
1780-1850', forthcoming in a collection of essays on the schiedenen Lesarten dieses kiihnsten Kritikers des
History of Professions, ed. G. Geison. Homer bezeichnen,schon unter die von dem Aristoni-
100 See Opuscula Ruhnkeniana,ed. Th. Kidd, London kus erfundene;vielleicht sind die Scholien, welche des
118 ANTHONY GRAFTON
And if one looks -
as any German scholar of the 8os and 90os regularly did - outside the
Dutch and German world, one finds that English and Italian scholars had had their say as
well- notably A. Bongiovanni, who had published the B scholia to IliadI in 1740, with an
exemplary preface. 103 No wonder then that C. D. Beck, writing his inaugural dissertation
De rationequa scholiastaepoetarumGraecorumveteres,inprimisqueHomeri, ad sensumelegantiaeet
venustatisacuendumadhiberirectepossint (1785), could cite a rich body of monographic work
to support his perverse belief that no extant set of scholia antedated Eustathius: 'rivalry
led others to follow his example, and even to try to surpass Eustathius' diligence.'104 No
wonder, too, that a far less conventional man like J. J. Reiske denounced the study of
scholia as a fad as early as 1770o:
Had the decision lain wholly with me, I would have added no scholia at all to my Demosthenes.
Most of them are emptier than a nut with no meat, futile, footling, trivial, childish. The language is
full of unbearable solecisms. But who can stand against a flood? I therefore decided to leave the
commentaries commonly attributed to Ulpian to others to edit - if anyone wants to do so - and
give here only what my Bavarian and Augsburg codices affordedme. It is not that they are better
than the common ones - they are about the same - but that they will give my edition the
attraction of novelty and make it more 105
saleable...
By 1788, then, German scholars were well prepared to see the historical importance of
the A and B scholia. Pre-publication announcements had made them curious as well.106
Hence several of them - including Wolf and Heyne - spread themselves to skim the
cream from this material in elaborate reviews.107 The anonymous reviewer in the
Bibliothek der alten Litteratur und Kunst, for instance, took Villoison's edition as the
starting-point for a long investigation of all the Homer scholia in print, which he traced
back to two distinct original sources.108 G. C. Harles assembled the views of Villoison and
his critics in staggering detail in the first volume of his new edition of Fabricius's
Bibliotheca Graeca (1790). He dealt with the scholia in all their forms, assembled the
Zenodotus Verinderungen anfiihren und beurtheilen, Eustathii studerent.' On p. ix, n. 21, Beck argues that
meistens auch verwerfen, Anmerkungen des Aristoni- even the Venice scholia were not necessarily older than
kus selbst? - Dieses war wahrscheinlich in der Eustathius (Bongiovanni had rightly argued that they
Nachricht enthalten, die grossentheils verloren gegan- were). A copy of Beck's work is in a British Library
gen ist.' Sammelband(shelf-mark T. 2216). His thesis was refuted
10o3 Graecascholiascriptorisanonymiin HomeriIliados lib. I, in the anonymous 'Beschreibung der Handschriften des
ed. A. Bongiovanni, Venice 1740; cf. his descriptions of Homer in der Escurial- und k6nigl. Madriter-
both A and B in his GraecaD. Marci Bibliothecacodicum Bibliothek', Bibliothek der alten Litteraturund Kunst, vi,
manuscriptorum per titulosdigesta,Venice 1740, pp. 243-44. I1789,p. 141.
E. Mioni wrongly describes the scholia Bongiovanni 0osJ. J. Reiske, 'Ad Scholia in Demosthenem praefa-
edited as 'tratti dai codici omerici A. . . e B' (Dizionario tio', in OratorumGraecorum, quorumprincepsestDemosthenes,
biograficodegli italiani, xII, 1970, p. 61); an accurate quae supersuntmonumentaingenii, ii, Leipzig I1770, pt. 2,
description in Scholia Graecain Homeri Iliadem (Scholia p. 4.
vetera),ed. H. Erbse, i, Berlin 1969, p. lxvii. See e.g. Beck (n. 104 above), p. ix, n. 21; Siebenkees
o106
104 C. D.
Beck, De rationequaScholiastaepoetarumGraeco- (n. ioi above), I, 1786, p. 63.
rum veteres . . . adhiberi recte possint, Leipzig 1785, Volkmann (n. 53 above), pp. 40-43.
o107
10osBibliothek der alten Litteratur und Kunst, v, 1789,
pp. viii-ix: 'Sed nullum Grammaticorum puto ante
Eustathium, Archiepiscopum Thessalonicensem, saec. pp. 26-55, esp. pp. 41-51. For a recent discussion of the
xii. florentem, compilasse copiosiores animadversiones problem see H. Erbse, 'F. A. Wolf e gli scoli all'Iliade',
et disputationes e variis antiquis interpretibus. Is vero Annali della Scuola Normale Superioredi Pisa, Classe di
postquam lHaQEx3oPXag Rig T6v W "Otlgov edendis lettere e filosofia, ser. Iii, ix, 1979, pp. 39-58 (the section
exemplum talis laboris proposuerat, aemulatio effecit, on Wolf himself, pp. 39-46, adds little; that on the
ut plures illud sequerentur, et vel vincere diligentiam scholia per se is most informative and convincing).
FRIEDRICH AUGUST WOLF I19
information they yielded about the lives and lost works of the Alexandrian scholars, and,
imitating Fabricius's treatment of Eustathius, had indices to the new scholia drawn up.109
Wolf was as excited as anyone by the Venice Scholia, but his treatment of them
differed markedly from those summarized by Harles. As C. G. Schiitz put it in 1796:
Anyone who compares Harles' edition of Fabricius and Villoison's Prolegomena will easily see that
Mr. Wolf has done more than emulate in his own further investigations their Sammlerfleiss - a
quality really valuable in the light of the intention behind their works. By historical reasoning and
ingenious rapprochements [of facts] he has established new results, and thus greatly surpassed
them.11o
A more precise way of expressing the difference would be to say that Wolf wrote the
history of scholarship rather than the history of scholia. He knew that the scholia needed
analysis, that each Alexandrian needed reliable dates and bibliography. But what he
reconstructed was the technical method each ancient critic had used - and, through
them, the story of Homer's fate. Villoison and others, as we saw, had known that the
scholia should be made to tell this tale. But they did not make them tell it.111 Paradoxi-
cally, Wolf learned more than others had from the scholia precisely because the scholia
themselves did not interest him as much.
IV
There was a model for the 'reasoning' and 'rapprochements' that set Wolf's work
apart. Since the Reformation, the textual history of the Bible - especially that of the Old
Testament - had received much passionate attention. It posed intractable problems.
The Hebrew text of the extant manuscripts and the printed editions had undergone
radical changes since the days of Moses and David. The square-charactered alphabet in
which it was written was not the original one, as Jerome and others pointed out. The
109J. A. Fabricius, BibliothecaGraeca,4th edn, ed. G. C. se iactans verbose, obscuriorum contra enarrator magis
Harles, i, Hamburg and Leipzig 1790o. quam interpres, veritatis lectionum rarissime curiosus,
110Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,30 January 1796, col. denique novorum postillatorum in modum inanibus
271; Heyne was enraged by the laudatory tone of this circumlocutionibus et dissectionibus Oratorem ene-
review. See Heyne to Herder, 18 February 1796, in Von cans, adeo ut legenti saepe nauseam moveat ac bilem.
und an Herder. UngedruckteBriefe aus HerdersNachlass, ed. Vix viginti locos in toto Demosthene putem reperiri, in
H. Dintzer and F. G. von Herder, Leipzig 186i, quibus ille, quod non horum quoque temporum doc-
n,
p. 232: 'Aber was lkisst sich erst zu der parasitischen trina possit expedire, suppeditet. Sed eo maxime nom-
Recension von Wolfs Homer in der Allgemeinen Litte- ine succenseas homini, quisquis fuit, quod tam pauca
raturzeitung sagen! Dass sich Schiutz so erniedriget!' excerpsit e commentariis antiquorum, quorum tamen
The review is also discussed by Volkmann (n. 53 copiam habere debebat, suaque inepta conscribillare
above), pp. 97-o101; he failed, however, to discover that maluit, quam bona aliena dare. Verum cogitandum,
Schiitz was the author. quod et ipsa subiicit res, et post Casaubonum aliosque
111That Wolf could
play the contemporary game of bene Valesius observavit ad Harpocrationem, multa in
scholia-analysis is clear, for instance, from the descrip- his quoque Scholiis a serioribus assuta esse, viderique
tion of the scholia attributed to Ulpian at the beginning ea, qualia nunc leguntur, nihil aliud quam Scholiorum e
of his commentary on the Leptinea,ed. cit. (n. 30 above), vero Ulpiano ductorum, admistis et aliorum antiquis et
pp. 2IO-1: 'Nomen quod praeferunt ULPIANI, plane novis rebus, factam a Grammatico infimi saeculi
parum nos iuvat, hominis aetatem, locum, reliqua eius et ordinis congeriem.' Ruhnken evidently recognized
omnia plane ignorantes. Neque in Scholiis ipsis invenias Wolf's expertise; see his letter to Wolf about the Prole-
quidquam, unde verior coniectura ducatur; ut gomena, 3 August 1795, in Epistolae Bentleii, Graevii,
incertissimum sit, quod posuerunt nonnulli,... Rhe- Ruhnkenii, Wyttenbachiiselectae,ed. F. C. Kraft, Altona
torem seu Grammaticum ad Constantini Imp. tempora 1831, p. 143: 'Platonis Scholiastes vereor ne exspecta-
videri demittendum. Etsi meliore vix dignum habeas tionem tuam fallat. Non affert ille eruditionem eam,
saeculo. Sane enim quam multa dat puerilia, falsa, a re quam Aristophanis aut Apollonii Rhodii, sed quam
et loco prorsus aliena, in dilucidis et verbis et sententiis Pindari aut Nicandri'.
120 ANTHONY GRAFTON
word-divisions, the vowel points, the accents, the marginal apparatus of variant readings
had apparently been introduced by the Masoretes, the Hebrew grammarians of the Near
East, during the first millennium A.D. Some Protestants inferred from these facts that the
Septuagint was more reliable than the Hebrew. After all, it had been translated with
divine help from good manuscripts. The Greek and Hebrew texts disagreed because
perfidious Jews had deliberately altered their manuscripts. Others denied patristic and
Jewish evidence alike and claimed that the extant Masoretic text of the Pentateuch went
back to Moses, vowel points, variants and all. Catholics on the other hand tended to claim
that the Latin vulgate surpassed both the Hebrew and the Septuagint.112
Fuelled by odium theologicumas well as philologicum, the debate ran long and hot.
Scaliger, Casaubon, the Buxtorfs, the Cappells, Morin and the Vossiuses took sides. By
1678 the Oratorian Richard Simon had produced a Critical History of the Old Testament,
which used the patristic evidence, the Talmud, and the Jewish scholarly apparatus and
commentaries, to reconstruct the state of the Biblical text century by century from its
origins to his own time. His object was to show that no version was complete and reliable.
Hence one had to rely on Mother Church, which was guided by infallible Tradition, to
compensate for faulty Scripture.113
This tradition of Biblical research and controversy was still very active in the
eighteenth century; and Wolf had it very much in mind as he worked on Homer. In calling
for more collations of manuscripts, he wrote that 'Homer still awaits his Kennicott'.114 He
was referring to Benjamin Kennicott, whose critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, based on
obsessively minute collations, had appeared at Oxford in I1776-8o.115 In reviewing
Villoison, Wolf explicitly compared the Alexandrian scholars to the Masoretes.116 In the
Prolegomena,he likened the Venice scholia to the apparatus of the Masoretic Bible: 'Let the
Oriental masters, proud of their Masorah, cease to deplore the bad fortune that makes us
rely on such late manuscripts for the text of Homer. . . We too now have a sort of Greek
Masorah.'117 And he made clear that his efforts to reconstruct the methods of Alexan-
drian scholars were exactly similar to what the Orientalists had already done for ancient
Jewish scholars (though they had been hindered by the comparative poverty of their
sources):
The Oriental masters would, I think, be delighted if they knew for certain what Gamaliel or any
other early Jewish doctor read in three passages of Moses and the Prophets. We know what
Zenodotus read in Homer in almost four hundred passages, what Aristophanes read in almost two
hundred, what Aristarchus read in more than a thousand.118s
112See in general The MassorethHa-Massorethof Elias anzufeuern. Nur war es unm6glich, hierin gleich von
Levita, ed. C. D. Ginsburg, London 1867, pp. 40-61; sichern Grundsiitzen auszugehen; zumal da nirgendseine
W. Schwarz, PrinciplesandProblemsofBiblical Translation, Spur von alten Handschriften, weder der des Pisistra-
Cambridge 1955; D. C. Allen, TheLegendofNoah, repr. tus, noch weniger einer von den halbfabelhaften Ho-
Urbana 1963; A. Klempt, Die Sikularisierungderuniversal- meriden verfassten vork6mmt, die den ersten Kritikern
historischenAuffassung,G6ttingen, etc. 1960. zur Grundlage gedient hiitte. Sofern scheint die Ho-
113 See e.g. P. Hazard, TheEuropeanMind
(168o-1715), merische Kritik einen ifihnlichen Anfang gehabt zu
tr.J. Lewis May, New York 1963, pp. 180-97. haben, wie die Masoretische. Nur ungleich temerairer
114
Wolf, Prolegomenaad Homerum,cap. iv, p. I1i:'Nunc war jene, in einem Grade, der uns ohne die nunmehr
ille adhuc Kennicottum suum exspectat . . .' erhaltenen Belege unglaublich scheinen wiirde.' On the
115 VetusTestamentum Hebraicumcumvariislectionibus,ed. authorship and content of this review see Volkmann
B. Kennicott, Oxford I1776-80. (n. 53 above), pp. 41-43.
116AllgemeineLiteratur-Zeitung,I February 1791, col.
117
Wolf, Prolegomenaad Homerum,cap. iv, pp. 9-IO.
118 Ibid.,
246: 'Die Ehrwilrdigkeit der Gesdinge trug das ihrige cap. xlii, p. 153.
bey, den Fleiss zur Erforschung der wahren Lesarten
Wolf even compared those who tried to defend the authenticity of the standard text of
Homer to the Buxtorfs, who had defended the OonvEtvvo(a of the Masoretic Old
Testament.119
It is not surprising that Wolf knew this body of work. Many of his best friends were
theologians who used a historical method. One of the few G6ttingen teachers he had liked,
Michaelis, had been a pioneer in applying a critical technique to the Old Testament.
Wolf's closest ally in the early days at Halle, Semler, was a radical theologian and textual
critic of the New Testament. And he knew and greatly respected Semler's pupil
Griesbach, whose edition of the New Testament was the model for Wolf's own final de
luxe Homer.120
But there is more than general analogy and biographical anecdote to connect Wolf's
work to that of the Biblical scholars. The evidence suggests that the Prolegomenawere
directly modelled on one of the most controversial products of the German Biblical
scholarship of Wolf's time: J. G. Eichhorn's Einleitung ins Alte Testament,which began to
appear in I780. Like Wolf, Eichhorn studied at G6ttingen under Heyne and Michaelis.
He returned there as professor in 1788.121 His works on the Old and New Testaments
fascinated literati of widely different stripe. Coleridge filled the margins of his copies with
approving, detailed notes.122 Wolf thought the volumes on the New Testament exemp-
lary. He cited those on the Old Testament in passing in the Prolegomena,and recom-
mended them to his friends and students.123 But the connexion between his work and
Eichhorn's is far closer even than his remarks suggest.
Like Wolf, Eichhorn treated his text as an historical and anthropological document,
the much altered remnant of an early stage in the development of human culture.124 Like
Wolf, he held that the original work had undergone radical changes, so that the serious
Biblical scholar must reconstruct 'the history of the text'.125 Like Wolf too, he saw the true
119 Ibid., cap. iii, p. 7: 'Tantum aberat ille [scil. J. A. Homer: '.. . ac si cui forte placebit eius copiam prae-
Ernesti] a perversa opinione eorum, qui hodieque hunc here Mosi, ut ipse Pentateuchum contexat25, ne linteam
textum, qualis paullatim forte fortuna factus est, genui- quidem Iliada nobis confingere licet' (p. 47). n. 25 ad
num ac prope Movo6nvEvoUrov habere videntur; loc.: 'Vide prae ceteris Eichhornii Introd. in V. Test.
istorum exemplo Buxtorfianorum, qui eandem rem olim For Wolf's praise of Eichhorn, see Vorlesungen iber
..'
praedicabant de Hebraico codice suo, quum ab eo die Alterthumswissenschaft (n. 88 above), I, p. 305, and cf.
omnem ingenii et tantum non rationis humanae usum n. 146 below. Cf. Fuhrmann (n. 6 above), p. 220 n. 135.
arcerent, ea quoque tanquam r06'rvEUora reveriti, 124J. G. Eichhorn, Einleitung ins Alte Testament,2nd
quae nunc a doctis vitiosissima putantur.' edn, Leipzig 1787, ? 2; i, p. I4: 'Sie [Scripture] enthalten
120See in general J. F. J. Arnoldt, Fr. Aug. Wolf in also nicht bloss Geschichte der Hebriier, und ein Gem-
seinemVerhiltnissezumSchulwesenundzur Paedagogikdarges- aihlde ihrer Cultur und Aufklirung, sondern-, durch ihre
tellt, Braunschweig 1861-62, I: 'Ueber Wolfs Sammlung der Sagen aus der Vorwelt, auch Beytriige
n, Beilage zur Geschichte des gesammten Menschengeschlechts.
Stellung zur Theologie und Religion,' pp. 387-406. See
also Reiter (n. 97 above), I, pp. 320, 322, 335, 339, 354, Wo wiiren sonst noch die Biicher, welche uns so reine
366, on Griesbach; I, pp. 5o, 68, 84, 92, 95, 96, 99-Ioo, Sagen aus dem im Nebel der Zeit sich verlierenden
101, 102, and esp. ii, p. 345, on Semler. Kindheitszustand des Menschengeschlechts aufbehal-
121On Eichhorn see the excellent Marburg disserta- ten hitten?'
tion by E. Sehmsdorf, Die Prophetenauslegung bei ]. G. 125 Kap. ii of the Einleitung (n. 124
above), bears the
Eichhorn,G6ttingen 1971, esp. Pt. 2. title 'Geschichte des Textes der Schriften des A. T.'
122 The
marginalia will appear in a future volume of (I, p. 133); cf. Timpanaro (n. 63 above), pp. 47-48 and
the Collected Works, to be edited by G. Whalley; see n. 3 for the use of this phrase by Wolf and Ritschl. In
provisionally E. S. Shaffer, Kubla Khan and the Fall of normal editorial language the phrase meant 'history of
Jerusalem,Cambridge 1975. the editions'; see e.g. C. F. Heinrich's edn of Musaeus,
123 In
Prolegomenaad Homerum,cap. xv, pp. 46-47, Wolf I793, p. ix. The broader sense in which Wolf and
discusses - and dismisses - the possibility that Homer Eichhorn used it apparently came from R. Simon, and
could have written on linen. He admits - with evident was popularized in Germany byJ. S. Semler. See e.g. his
irony - that Moses might have written on linen, but Lebensbeschreibung, nii,1782, pp. 121-28.
points out that this would still not prove anything about
122 ANTHONY GRAFTON
history of the text as its ancient history, before the standardized manuscripts now extant
had been prepared. With the work of the Masoretes, he wrote,
properly ends the history of the written text; for the chief work was accomplished, and the Hebrew
text continued now, some insignificant changes excepted, true in all its copies, to its once-for-all
established pattern, as is clear from Kennicott's 'Collection of Variations'.126
Unlike Kennicott, Eichhorn spent hardly any space on the printed editions of the Hebrew
text.
Eichhorn ransacked the Masorah for evidence about the methods of its creators as
ruthlessly as Wolf later attacked the Venice scholia. His conclusions, set out point by
point in heavily documented chapters, resemble Wolf's far more closely than anything I
have been able to find in strictly classical philology. If Wolf showed great resource in
classifying the critical signs by which Alexandrian scholars expressed their opinions of the
received text of Homer, Eichhorn had already done the same for the critical remarks that
filled the margins of the Masoretic text (and which, like the Alexandrian signs, assumed
that the received text should be respected). Here, for example, is his chapter on the
Masoretic marginal direction QerJ velo Cethib (literally 'read and not written'), which
instructs the reader to insert a word into a given passage of the Bible when reading it aloud
or analysing it, but not when copying the text proper:
The Talmud already knows seven instances of the Qere velo Cethib; the Masorah lists ten of them
at the beginning of the fifth book of Moses. Our editions, finally, note a still greater number, but
they deviate from one another in the passages where they omit the Qere velo Cethib. The passages
in the Masorah are:Judges 20. 13; Ruth 3.5, 17;II Sam. 8.3; 16. 23; I8.20; II Kings 19. 31, 37;
Jerem. 31I. 38; 50. 29. In our editions cf. ii Kings 20. 13; Ezech. 9. II; Is. 53. 4, 9; Ps. 46. 2; Jos. 22.
24...
The Qere velo Cethib are not variants, as they have been previously presented, but exegetical
glosses... For all the words added in the Qere could be omitted without harming the sense. An
interpreterpresumably added them for the sake of clarity in meaning. Further, in the passages that
I checked by way of trial, there is no evidence that the ancient translators read them. Finally, they
are simply exegetical glosses 127
...
Even the Dutch had not made such systematic use of evidence from scholia.
These parallels, though striking, do not prove that Wolf imitated Eichhorn. For
Eichhorn was not the first to classify and analyse Masoretic critical methods. The
Masoretes themselves sometimes listed the passages at which a given marginal direction
occurred; the Masora magna to Deuteronomy i. i, for instance, gives ten cases of Qerevelo
Cethib.12sJacob ben Chajim and Elias Levita discussed in the sixteenth century the
origins and nature of the different forms of variant found in the Masorah.129 Louis
Cappell reworked the evidence in his Criticasacraof 1650; in the case of the Qerevelo Cethib
as elsewhere, he provided the bulk of Eichhorn's collections of cases in point.130 The
younger Buxtorf went over the same ground from the opposite point of view in his reply to
126 Eichhorn (n. 124 above), ?
134; I, pp. 260-61 (here 128Quoted, e.g., by J. Buxtorf, jr, Anticritica, Basle
and elsewhere I use the partial translation by G. T. I653, p. 478.
129Jacob ben Chajimibn Adoniah's Introductionto theRab-
Gollop, privately printed, 1888, which extends to ? 147
only). There are copies of Gollop's translation in Dr binicBible, HebrewandEnglish, ed. C. D. Ginsburg, 1867,
Williams' Library and in the Speer Library of Princeton pp. 42-57; Elias Levita, ed. Ginsburg (n. 112 above),
Theological Seminary. pp. 102-19.
127 Eichhorn (n. 124 above) 130 L. Cappell, CriticaSacra,ii, ii.4; ed, Halle 1775-86,
? 152; 1, pp. 299-300 (my
translation). Eichhorn's reference to Isaiah 53.9 is I, pp. 182-83.
probably to 55- Ii.
Cappell, the Anticritica.131 Brian Walton summarized Buxtorfs and Cappells in his
Prolegomenato the London Polyglot of 1657. Those who referred the Qere'to the traditio of
Moses on Sinai', he wrote, 'deserve laughter rather than serious refutation'. It was clearly
the work of later scholars, and consisted partly of variant readings drawn from manu-
scripts, partly of rabbinical conjectures designed to replace 'voces obscoeniores'.132 The
most active eighteenth-century textual critics of the Hebrew Bible, Kennicott and de
Rossi, naturally also raised and gave answers to what had become a canonical set of
problems about the extent to which the Qere came from collation or conjecture.133 And
Simon had shown long before Eichhorn how to insert a systematic analysis of the Masorah
into a diachronic account of the history of the Biblical text. Wolf did not have the Hebrew
to study the Masorah on his own; but the scholarship of the Republic of Letters could
obviously have offered him a plethora of sources and partial models for the Prolegomena
even if he had not read the Einleitung.
Yet it seems all but certain that Eichhorn was Wolf's source. For Eichhorn provided
both formulations and solutions for technical problems that the scholia posed Wolf. I will
give two examples. First, Wolf argued that the Venice scholia did not fully explain the
methods Alexandrian scholars had used in collating manuscripts and assessing the worth
of variants:
The most important facts - that is, what innovations Aristarchus made in the poems as a whole,
how scrupulously he dealt with old MSS, how he used the recensions of Zenodotus, Aristophanes
and the rest - these cannot now be ascertained by certain or even probable arguments.134
Wolf explained this gap in the information offered by the scholiasts historically, in terms
of the cultural situation of the ancient grammarians. Exact details of a critic's reasoning
about variants simply had not interested them: 'The ancients apparently never worried
about our problem'.135sEichhorn had already solved a parallel problem in a parallel way:
namely, why the Masoretes did not bother to preserve the older, unpunctuated manu-
scripts of the Bible from which they copied their own more usable texts:
Truly the manuscripts of the ancient pattern were worthy of preservation for the sake of their
critical value. But at that time criticism was regarded in a different point of view from that of our
days. The Jews believed themselves to have furnished manuscripts better, and containing more
information, than those of their ancestors, and to have imparted to the formerall that was valuable
in the latter; they were flattered also at beholding the manuscripts of their creation adopted and
preferred. How probable then, under such circumstances, is the disuse and neglect of the older
manuscripts.136
Second, Wolf argued that in the Venice scholia the opinions of individual scholars
were irretrievably mingled and confused, since the Alexandrians had not considered it
worthwhile to keep them separate:
Once Aristarchus's avayvvWotgbecame the vulgate.. . new emendations and observations were
generally added to it; the names of the original authors of the readings were omitted, except
perhaps where they disagreed.137
131 Buxtorf (n. I28 above), pp. 478-79. of collation. See in general W. McKane, 'Benjamin
132 B. Walton, In Biblia Polyglotta Prolegomena,ed. Kennicott: an Eighteenth-Century Researcher', Journal
F. Wrangham, Cambridge 1828, I, p. 474. Cf. of TheologicalStudies,n.s. xxviii, 1977, pp. 445-64.
134 Wolf,
pp. 480-83. Prolegomenaad Homerum,cap. xlvii, p. 186.
a133VetusTestamentum Hebraicum,ed. Kennicott (n. I 15 135asIbid., n. 26.
above), I, pp. 16-I 7; G. B. de Rossi, VariaelectionesVeteris 136Eichhorn (n. I24
above), ? 133; i, p. 260.
Testamenti,I, Parma I784, esp. p. lii; de Rossi is more a137 Wolf, Prolegomena ad Homerum, cap. xlvii,
ready than Kennicott to see the Qere in some cases as pp. 186-87.
the result of efforts at conjectural emendation as well as
124 ANTHONY GRAFTON
Hence no single recension - even the best-attested, that of Aristarchus himself- could
be reconstructed line by line or word for word. Eichhorn had made exactly the same point
about the Masorah:
We must regret that in the Masorah the earlier and later recensions of theJews are mixed together,
that each Jew did not publish the results of his critical work separately or designate his own
contribution more precisely - in short, that we can no longer distinguish the old Masoretic
recension from the new one.138
In each case, Eichhorn's argument combined existing methods in a novel way. Michaelis
had given him the techniques for studying Masoretic scholarship, and the conviction that
the Masoretes had introduced changes and errors into their text.139 But Michaelis had
freed himself from the established Lutheran view that the Masoretic text was perfect only
at the cost of refusing any sympathy to the Masoretes 'whose names we do not even know',
and whose arguments were often 'jiidische Grillen'.140 It was Eichhorn's other teacher,
Heyne, who had consistently taught that one must bring imaginative sympathy to every
-
past person and phenomenon that even early textual critics deserved admiration for
their learning and brilliance 'if one considers the times in which [they] lived':.141 What
Eichhorn did was to apply Heyne's historicism to the material Michaelis had made
available. Only in the Einleitung could Wolf have found a method so apt to fit his own
prejudices and interests.142
It will be clear by now that Wolf's treatment and Eichhorn's both led, like so many
modern Textgeschichten,to results of great historical interest but minimal utility to editors.
In both cases, close study of the evidence showed that the work of the ancient scholars
could not be reconstructed fully - and thus that a really critical text could not be
produced. It would be hard for two treatrrients of different bodies of evidence to resemble
one another more closely.
Three further bits of evidence confirm the view that Wolf imitated Eichhorn. In a
brilliant essay in the RepertoriumfitrBiblischeundMorgenliindischeLitteratur,Eichhorn argued
that t'he stories about Ptolemy Philadelphus and the LXXII translators of the Bible had
138Eichhorn (n. 124 above), ? 158; I, p. 309. Admit- und durch Jiidische Grillen seine Gedenkungsart nicht
tedly, this point was an old one in the literature of verdorben hatte, anstatt aller ihrer grundgelehrten, von
Masoretic scholarship. The translation here is mine. Meister zu Schiler treulich und immer mit Wucher
139See Michaelis's Vorrede,in his DeutscheUebersetzung iberlieferten, Vorurtheile, nichts als gesunde Vernunft
des Alten Testaments,i (welcherdas Buch Hiobs enthalt), hatte, konnte eine bessere Uebersetzung der Bibel
G6ttingen and Gotha 1769, esp. sigs b 2-b 3r; Sehms- geben, als mancher grosse Philologe, dessen Collegia er
dorf (n. 121 above), pp. 121-24. vielleicht gern als Schiiler besucht hitte.'
141 Heyne's verdict on the Tibullus
140
Michaelis, Vorrede,sig. bY:'Die Punkte, dadurch im commentary by
Hebriischen die Vocales und sonst noch allerley die B. Cyllenius, 1475, in Albi Tibulli Carmina(n. 69 above),
Erkliirung bestimmendes ausgedriickt wird, sind nicht pp. xlvi-xlvii: 'Neque tamen is ipse editionem adornasse
von den heiligen Schriftstellern selbst, sondern erst von videtur, vel verba Tibulli castigasse: ipsius enim lectio
Juden, die etliche hundert Jahr nach Christi Geburt perpetuo ab ea abit, quae in textu servatur. Doctrinam
lebten, und deren Nahmen wir nicht einmahl wissen, vero illius viri, et ingenium tum in interpretatione, turn
zum alten Hebriischen Text, welcher blos aus Conso- in critica, si tempora, in quibus vixit, consideres, satis
nanten ohne einzigen Zwischenraum der Worte bes- admirari non possis...' Cf. Sehmsdorf (n. 121 above),
tand, hinzugesetzt.' Ibid., sig. b 3v: 'Dis musste nun pp. 125-28.
142 It is worth
freilich Luthern einen sehr grossen Vorzug vor allen noting that R. Pfeiffer called attention to
denen geben, die ihr Vorurtheil verband, dem gedruck- the resemblance between Wolf's Textgeschichte and that
ten Hebriischen Text in allen seinen Lesearten schlech- of R. Simon, though he was not able to suggest a link
terdings zu folgen, wenn sie auch sonst viel gr6ssere between the two; see his History of Classical Scholarship
Gelehrte als Er gewesen wiren. Der Mann, der eben from i3oo to 185o, pp. 130, 174. The resemblances
deshalb, weil er gegen sie gerechnet ein Anffinger war, between Wolf and Eichhorn seem far closer.
been conflated from two divergent accounts, both intended to win credit for the
Septuagint. He compared them explicitly with the story transmitted by a scholiast to
Dionysius Thrax: that Peisistratus had reassembled the poems of Homer with the help of
LXXII grammarians.143 Wolf, discussing the story about Peisistratus, made the same
analogy in reverse. The LXXII Homeric grammarians were a Hellenistic invention, and
should be eliminated from history just as 'viri docti' had already eliminated the 'Jewish
invention of the LXX interpreters'. Wolf's footnote made his reference clear: Eichhorn
had treated this problem 'acutissime omnium'.144 In this one case Wolf admitted how
much his historical insight owed to Eichhorn's.145
Second, at least one contemporary observer saw the resemblance between Wolf and
Eichhorn. In 1827 H. K. A. Eichstaidt remarked that Eichhorn had set out 'to achieve with
equal success for Biblical criticism what Wolf did for Homeric criticism'.146 Both, he
reflected, had destroyed far more than they had built, but that was only to be expected in
critics. Eichstlidt's chronology was backwards - but such an error is not surprising in a
man so cavalier with details.147
Third, Wolf himself hinted in a variety of ways that Biblical scholarship was the model
that anyone interested in the history of ancient scholarship must imitate. In Chapter 4 of
the Prolegomenahe wrote that the true nature of ancient criticism would become clear
'through comparison of both of these farragoes, Greek and Hebrew'.148 Of the two
chapters of Part II of the Prolegomenathat he completed, one compared at length the
textual histories of the Old Testament and Homer, and the origins of the Masorah and the
Venice scholia:
Our Hebrew text derived from a H so, did our vulgate Homer. In each
a was ta60ootg; whichclearly,
we
IagQ0Lbotg choice made among readings, may none the less rework. In each text,
the THad60ootgitself has undergone some mutilation and corruption .. . The Masorah is full of
trifles and feeble, superstitious inventions; this mass of scholia does not lack similar things. True,
Greeks rave in one way, Jews in another... 149
143 Eichhorn, 'Ueber die Quellen, aus denen die ver-

[scil. Wolf] quid tribuerit Eichhornio, et quantopere
schiedenen Erzihlungen von der Entstehung der alex- criticam eius facultatem suspexerit, ut nihil hoc loco
andrinischen Uebersetzung geflossen sind', Repertorium referam de iis, quae ipse aliquoties ex ore optimi viri,
fir Biblische und MorgenliindischeLitteratur, I, 1777, pp. theologos censentis, coram excepi, in libris suis passim
266-80. declaravit, velut in Prolegomenis ad Homerum, p. cl
144
Wolf, Prolegomenaad Homerum, cap. xxxiii, pp. [the passage referred to in n. 144 above]. Quod dixi
112-I4 and p. 114, n. 12. Eichhornium diruisse plura, quam aedificasse, idem de
145
Cf. esp. Eichhorn (n. 143 above), I, p. 280 with sese dixit Wolfius in praefat. ad Iliad. p. xi, ed. Hal.
Wolf, Prolegomena,p. I14: 'Aber auch gar keine wirkli- Neutri hoc potest opprobrio verti. Nam in re critica non
chen Thatsitze zur Grundlage annehmen wollen, die omnino verum est, quod Isocrates ad Philippum
Zeit und jiidischer Witz vermehrt und versch6nert hat, scribens pronunciavit, 6n otxfloat IIEV'Voiv anavra
wiirde eben so th6rigt als blinder K6hlerglaube seyn. OmL&t&LE6tov.'
XaXFk6v, 6ta
K6rner liegen unter dem Kehricht: aber wer kann, wer 147 On Eichstidt's character cf. CrabbRobinsonin Ger-
will, wer mag sie ausklauben?' 'Nos, qui scire nobis many i8oo-i8o5, ed. E. J. Morley, London 1929,
videmur, quid inter fabulam et historiam intersit, illic pp. I61-62; S. H. Rinkes, Disputatio de orationeprima in
historiam sub fabula occultatam agnoscimus, simili Catilinama Ciceroneabiudicanda,Leiden 1856, p. iii, n. 9.
eruendam modo, quo versati sunt viri docti in ludaico 148 Wolf, Prolegomenaad
Homerum,p. o10.
commento de LXX interpretibus.' 149 Wolf, Prolegomenaad Homerum,Pars
ii, cap. ii; ed.
146 H. K. A.
Eichstddt, Oratiode Io. Godofr.Eichhornio Berlin 1876, pp. 178-79 (the first publication of Pars iin,
in his Opusculaoratoria,2nd edn, Jena 1850, which had previously been described in print by
... , 1827,
p. 607: 'Quas ille disputationes sic instituit, ut, quod F. Ranke, in VerhandlungendererstenVersammiung deutscher
Wolfius praestitit in Homerica crisi13), idem nec dispari PhilologenundSchulminner... , Nuremberg 1838, p. 20).
eventu in biblica praestaret.' Pp. 634-35, n. 13: 'Hic
9*
126 ANTHONY GRAFTON
And he explicitly advised his students, if they hoped to understand Greek textual
criticism, to approach it through that of the Jews:
One who wants to penetrate more deeply must concern himself with the history of the Masoretic
MSS. True, these came into being much later than Greek criticism. But there is much similarity
with the earliest Greek criticism. It is at least clear that they were not so bold as the Greek scholars.
But one must not think that we have the Old Testament in its original form.150
I do not think that it is stretching a point to take this passage as autobiographical. Wolf
himself had learned from the Masorah, as analysed by Eichhorn, to read the Venice
scholia.
Moreover, Wolf stated in the preface to his Homer of 1804 that he was using critical
techniques 'established by Griesbach, that outstanding practitioner of Critica sacra'.1s51
Griesbach had argued that the extant manuscripts of the New Testament fell into three
great recensions and laid down rules for choosing among the readings they offered.15s2
Wolf held that these rules should guide the Homeric scholar as well. He too had to choose
not merely among manuscripts but among distinct recensions - the ancient ones that
Wolf had reconstructed. This passage shows that Wolf could set out deliberately to
borrow tools from another discipline. And it suggests that his grand plan was to forge a
Homeric criticism that drew both on Old and New Testament scholarship. The former
would show how to reconstruct ancient recensions, the latter how to use them.153
Wolf, then, did not create a new model of philological criticism. Rather he annexed for
classical studies the most sophisticated methods of contemporary Biblical scholarship -
just as Lachmann was soon to annex with greater success the methods of New Testament
textual criticism.154 True, the Biblical scholarship that Wolf used had received powerful
help from eighteenth-century classical scholarship; but Heyne, not Wolf, deserves the
credit for that.
V
What remains of the Prolegomenaafter all this is subtracted? A great deal. Wolf
combined detailed work on textual criticism with a general contribution to broad and
fashionable literary problems. He thus made philology more intellectually respectable
and interesting than it had been since the late Renaissance. As Humboldt put it in another
context, he showed that the study of grammatical details could be geistvoll.s155This was the
best possible response to thv philosophes'scoffing about pedantry.
150soWolf, Vorlesungen i?berdieAlterthumswissenschaft

(n. 88 saw Wolf in much the light in which he is presented
above), I, p. 311. It would be most useful to know the here: Peters (n. 97 above), p. 34: 'Den meisten Beifall
exact date when this passage was taken down. hat sich Wolf von den neueren Theologen zu verspre-
151sWolf, PraefationovissimaerecensionisHomeri,1804, Kl. chen, die kein geringes Triumphlied dariiber anstim-
Schr. (n. 8 above), 1, p. 252. men werden, dass nun auch dieser heidnische Moses
s152See e.g. B. M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testa- entthront ist.'
ment, 2nd edn, Oxford 1968, pp. I 19-21 ; Timpanaro 154 See the classic studies of Pasquali (n. 73 above),
(n. 63 above), esp. p. 22. J. J. Griesbach.Synopticand pp. 3-12; Timpanaro (n. 63 above).
Text-CriticalStudies1776-1976, ed. B. Orchard and T. R. 1ss AllgemeineLiteratur-Zeitung,16 June 1795 = Hum-
W. Longstaff, Cambridge 1978, provides further infor- boldt, Ges. Schr. (n. I2 above), Akademie-Ausgabe, i,
mation and full references to primary and secondary pp. 370-76.
sources.
s153A characteristically perceptive remark by Goethe,
recorded by B6ttiger, shows that some contemporaries
Wolf also achieved a masterpiece of presentation. He could state the commonplaces of

eighteenth-century scholarship in a style that gleamed with polish. No one could put the
insights of Bengel and Griesbach more pithily:
Newness in MSS is no more a vice than youth in men. Forjust as age does not always make men
wise, so in so far as each MS closely follows an old and good authority, it is a good witness.s56
No one could admit with a prettier pretence of humility that poets understand the growth
of an epic more profoundly than scholars:
I have done what I could... But this is a subject worthy of the study of many, and of men who will
follow a different path; above all, of those who can measure the poetic abilities of the human mind
by the standard of their own intellect, and possess powers of judgment trained by classical
literature: the Klopstocks, Wielands, Vosses.157
No one could explain more powerfullyjust what it meant to think historically, to recognize
the pastness of the past:
Here we must completely forget the archives and libraries that nowadays preserve our studies, and
transport ourselves into a different age and a differentworld. There a great many devices that we
think necessary for good living were unknown to wise men and fools alike.1s58
If the ideas were well-known, Wolf's axioms and images were his own. To that extent at
least - as a literary masterpiece composed from already existing sources - the
Prolegomenadeserved the enthusiastic reception they received from such connoisseurs of
style as Flaxman, Goethe and Leopardi.s59
The ultimate fate of the Prolegomenahad little to do with the work's real origin and
merits. In a sense, it is emblematic of Wolf's own larger fate as a writer. The Prolegomena
became the model of philological criticism. Even those who lived through the origins of the
HistorischeSchule, men like Niebuhr and Varnhagen von Ense, came to see the Prolegomena
as the work 'in which the higher criticism attained completion'; as the work which
inspired a revolution in Biblical as well as classical scholarship.160 Newcomers to German
philology, like the American George Bancroft, were told to master 'Wolf & yet Wolf & yet
1s6 Wolf, Prolegomena ad Homerum,ed. 1884, cap. ii, p. aries, and other technical aids to memory, judge, what
For the precedents on which Wolf drew, see Timpanaro 4.-
her use and powers were, at a time, when all a man could
(n. 63 above), Chap. ii. know, was what he could remember. To which we may
s'7 Wolf, Prolegomena adHomerum,cap. xxvii, pp. 87-88. add, that, in a rude and unlettered state of society the
For a well-known earlier statement of this kind, see memory is loaded with nothing that is either useless or
Michaelis's preface to his edition of R. Lowth, De sacra unintelligible; whereas modern education employs us
poesi HebraeorumpraelectionesacademicaeOxonii habitae, chiefly in getting by heart, while we are young, what we
G6ttingen I1758, sig. a 2v: 'Poetam de poesi Hebraeorum forget before we are old.'
dicere, statim intelligent lectores, ingenio praestantem, 159Goethe's reaction is especially revealing; see Peters
quod elegantissimis Graecorum Latinorumque literis (n. 97 above), p. 34: 'Wolfwiurde, wenn er nicht 6ffent-
excoluerat. Rarum hoc et exoptatum munus Hebraicis licher Lehrer wire, diese Ideen schwerlich so fein ausge-
carminibus contigit: aliter enim poetas vates tractabit, sonnen haben. Der Drang u. die Begeisterung 6ffent-
aliter merus grammaticus.' licher Mittheilung bewirken Wunder' (recorded by Bot-
158s Wolf, Prolegomena ad Homerum,cap. xxii, p. 71. For a tiger).
precedent cf. Wood (n. 19 above), pp. 259-60: 'But the 160 B. G. Niebuhr, 'Die Sikeler in der Odyssee', in
oral traditions of a learned and enlightened age will RheinischesMuseumfir Philologie, Geschichteundgriechische
greatly mislead us, if from them we form ourjudgement Philosophie,1,1827, p. 257 (' . . in den bewundernswiir-
on those of a period, when History had no other digen Untersuchungen mit denen? die h6here Kritik ihre
resource. What we observed at Palmyra puts this matter Vollendung erreichte . . .'); K. A. Varnhagen von Ense,
to a much fairer trial; nor can we, in this age of Diction- Tagebiicher,Leipzig I86I = Bern I972, 1i,p. Io6; nii,p. 68.
128 ANTHONY GRAFTON
Wolf'.'6' The Prolegomenawere reprinted several times in the nineteenth century so that
students could have direct access to them.
Like some other classics of German scholarship - F. Schlegel's book Ueberdie Sprache
und Weisheitder Indier is a case in point - Wolf's work was seldom criticized in detail.162
Even those who denied the novelty of his general thesis applauded the rigour and
originality of his technical work.a63 This need not surprise us. The admission that Wolf
could have had predecessors in his technical discoveries could have suggested that the
HistorischeSchuleitself did not spring full-grown from the SturmundDrang.
What is more surprising, at first, is that even those who continued Wolf's work did not
mention or follow up his comparisons between Alexandrians and Masoretes. Karl Lehrs,
a converted Jew, set out in the I830s to show that Wolf had greatly underestimated the
consistency and seriousness of Alexandrian textual criticism. He did not use the Masorah
and made clear in passing that he had no knowledge of things or languages oriental.164
Parthey, the historian of the Alexandrian Museum, followed Wolf rather than Lehrs in his
discussion of textual criticism. He too failed to refer to or use Jewish material. Parthey's
critic Ritschl showed no greater comparative interest.165sEven Grfifenhan, whose com-
prehensive GeschichtederklassischenPhilologie im Alterthumsummed up all that was known of
the subject by the mid-40s, used strictly Greek sources to reconstruct Greek methods.166
Only in very recent times have historians of Judaism started to raise again Wolf's
questions - apparently in ignorance of Wolf's work.167 The 'two farragoes' have not yet
been compared in detail.
The reasons why Wolf's programme was not carried out are not far to seek. Jews and
Judaism were far less attractive in Res-toration Germany than they had been in the late
161 Bancroft to Andrews an interesting use of Old Testament scholarship on
Norton, 14 December 18i18;
quoted in C. Diehl, Americansand GermanScholarship, pp. Io05-o6.
1770-187o, New Haven and London 1978, p. 71. 166 A. Grdifenhan, Geschichteder klassischenPhilologie im
Students were long instructed to grapple with the Prole- Alterthum, Bonn 1843-50. The dismissive account of
gomena;for a late case see E. R. Dodds, Missing Persons. Alexandrian critical methods in C. D. Beck, Dephilologia
An Autobiography,Oxford I977, p. 27. saeculiPtolemaeorum, Leipzig 1818, pp. xiv-xv, had added
162 On the
meaning and reception of Schlegel's book, nothing to Wolf and used no comparative material.
see H. Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, Wolf's pupil and admirer G. Bernhardy tended to
'786-186o, Princeton 1967, pp. 134, 154-59. follow his master rather than Lehrs in his analysis of
163sThe most perceptive criticism of Wolf along these Alexandrian scholarship; see his Grundrissdergriechischen
lines is perhaps K. Lehrs, 'Einleitung zu Homer', in his Litteratur,3rd edn, nii,pt. I, Halle 1867, pp. 182-215, esp.
Kleine Schrifien,ed. A. Ludwich, K6nigsberg 1902, esp. I93. Even Bernhardy, however, did not use the Maso-
pp. 21-25 (a text based on Lehrs's notes for his lectures rah.
in the Wintersemester 1831-32). 167See e.g. S. Lieberman, Hellenismin Jewish Palestine,
164See esp. the revealing passage about the gram- New York I950, pp. 28-37; M. Greenberg, 'The Stabili-
marian Senacherim in Lehrs's De AristarchistudiisHom- zation of the Text of the Hebrew Bible. . .', in Journalof
ericis, K6nigsberg 1833, pp. 36-38. Lehrs wondered if theAmericanOrientalSociety,LXXVI,1956 = The Canonand
the name 'Senacherim' might not be a pseudonym Masorah of the Hebrew Bible. An IntroductoryReader, ed.
chosen by a scholar, perhaps from a non-western langu- S. Z. Leiman, New York I974, pp. 317-18, 325-26. It is
age: 'Adii virum orientalium linguarum scientissimum worth noting that one earlier Jewish scholar may have
Petrum a Bohlen; cum eo rem meam communicabam applied Wolf's methods. Leopold Zunz wrote for the
quaerebamque possetne fortasse in Hebraica lingua Zeitschriftffir die WissenschaftdesJudenthumsan elaborate
nominis etymon inveniri' (p. 37). Lehrs's parents were essay on 'Salomon ben Isaac, genannt Raschi' (1, 1823,
Jewish - but their favourite reading was Lessing. pp. 277-384). He treats Rashi much as Wolf had treated
Evidently Lehrs himself saw Jewish culture as com- the Alexandrians, insisting that he be understood as
pletely foreign to him. Hence his need to consult a part of 'Talmudic-Jewish life' and not as a precursor of
specialist on a question of Hebrew. the Berlin Enlightenment; in particular, Zunz argued
165 G. Parthey, Das AlexandrinischeMuseum, Berlin that Rashi's knowledge of Hebrew grammar was unsys-
1838, pp. 111-35; F. Ritschl, Die Alexandrinischen tematic (ibid., pp. 285, 326 [' . . . in wissenschaftlicher
BibliothekenunterdenerstenPtolemiernunddie Sammlungder Grammatik zurfick ...']). And he made clear that
HomerischenGedichtedurchPisistratus .. ., Breslau 1838; Rashi had possessed neither the wide factual knowledge
Enlightenment. To use Jewish material to clear up Homeric problems would perhaps

have seemed an oxymoron in 1840. More generally, the ready cross-cultural comparisons
that had been Wolf's normal practice seemed suspect in the age of pure historicism.
Classical scholars were professional specialists, who neither expected nor were expected
to deal with Semitic philology.168 It is not that Wolf was condemned for his excursions
intoJudaica; rather, they were not noticed. The founder of German Philologie simply could
not have done something so uncharacteristic of the true Philologe. Generations of scholars
apparently read and digested the Prolegomenawithout even noticing - far less building on
- the remarks about the Masorah.
Nineteenth-century readers failed to see that Wolf, for all his self-conscious mod-
ernity, remained a good citizen of the old-fashioned, Latin-speaking Republic of Letters
- that rich continent of the mind, whose baroque contours have not yet received their
map. Wieland, a fellow citizen of the Republic, sketched Wolf's true historical location far
more vividly than Wolf's professional successors could:
I have always wanted to see the vast learning of Salmasius, which I know from his Exercitationes
Plinianae,united in one mind with the elegance of my idol Hemsterhuys. I have now found them
truly united in Wolf.169
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
nor the theological tolerance that modernJews ascribed Judaism. But Wolf evidently had no impact on Jewish
to him. Zunz had studied with Wolf at Berlin and scholarship after Zunz.
admired him greatly; see M. A. Meyer, The Originsofthe Even Jacob Bernays, the one I9th-century scholar
a168
ModernJew. Jewish Identity and EuropeanCulturein Ger- really equipped to carry out the comparison Wolf pro-
many, 1749-1824, Detroit I967, pp. I57-62. It is at least posed, apparently never attempted to do so.
possible that his essay on Rashi was shaped by Wolf's 169Peters (n. 97 above), p. 36.
teaching as well as by Zunz's own view of traditional
F. A. WOLF 13
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Warburg Institute

Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf

Journalof the Warburg Institutes,Volume 44, 1981

39 Wolf, Praefatio in Leptineam,pp. xxxxix-l: 'Quid? Exxkqotafouoatauchvornehmlich ausdemGrunde,

52 Accounts of the Prolegomenaare legion. R. C. Jebb, 54 R.

Unfortunatelyhe drewno detailedconclusionsaboutthe historyand state of the text of

143 Eichhorn, 'Ueber die Quellen, aus denen die ver-

150soWolf, Vorlesungen i?berdieAlterthumswissenschaft

Wolf also achieved a masterpiece of presentation. He could state the commonplaces of

Enlightenment. To use Jewish material to clear up Homeric problems would perhaps

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