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138-760: Classical philology studies classical languages . Classical philology principally originated from the Library of Pergamum and the Library of Alexandria around the fourth century BC, continued by Greeks and Romans throughout the Roman and Byzantine Empire . It was eventually resumed by European scholars of the Renaissance , where it was soon joined by philologies of other European ( Romance , Germanic , Celtic ), Eurasian ( Slavic , etc.), Asian ( Arabic , Persian , Sanskrit , Chinese , etc.), and African ( Egyptian , Nubian , etc.) languages. Indo-European studies involve

276-479: A School of Translators was set up in the border city of Toledo, Spain , to translate from Arabic into Latin. Along with the unavailability of Greek authors, there were other differences between the classical canon known today and the works valued in the Middle Ages. Catullus , for instance, was almost entirely unknown in the medieval period. The popularity of different authors also waxed and waned throughout

414-473: A 21st-century author's work. Historically, scribes who were paid to copy documents may have been literate, but many were simply copyists, mimicking the shapes of letters without necessarily understanding what they meant. This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand. Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example, the censoring of printed work for political, religious or cultural reasons. The objective of

552-478: A Best-text edition essentially a documentary edition. For an example one may refer to Eugene Vinaver's edition of the Winchester Manuscript of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur . When copy-text editing, the scholar fixes errors in a base text, often with the help of other witnesses. Often, the base text is selected from the oldest manuscript of the text, but in the early days of printing, the copy text

690-466: A Roman audience saw a play adapted from the Greek by Livius Andronicus. Andronicus also translated Homer's Odyssey into Saturnian verse. The poets Ennius, Accius, and Patruvius followed. Their work survives only in fragments; the earliest Latin authors whose work we have full examples of are the playwrights Plautus and Terence . Much of the best known and most highly thought of Latin literature comes from

828-468: A branching family tree and uses that assumption to derive relationships between them. This makes it more like an automated approach to stemmatics. However, where there is a difference, the computer does not attempt to decide which reading is closer to the original text, and so does not indicate which branch of the tree is the "root"—which manuscript tradition is closest to the original. Other types of evidence must be used for that purpose. Phylogenetics faces

966-418: A comprehensive exploration of relations among seven early witnesses to Dante's text. The stemmatic method assumes that each witness is derived from one, and only one, predecessor. If a scribe refers to more than one source when creating her or his copy, then the new copy will not clearly fall into a single branch of the family tree. In the stemmatic method, a manuscript that is derived from more than one source

1104-420: A computer, which records all the differences between them, or derived from an existing apparatus. The manuscripts are then grouped according to their shared characteristics. The difference between phylogenetics and more traditional forms of statistical analysis is that, rather than simply arranging the manuscripts into rough groupings according to their overall similarity, phylogenetics assumes that they are part of

1242-482: A document's transcription history, depending on the number and quality of the text available. On the other hand, the one original text that a scholar theorizes to exist is referred to as the urtext (in the context of Biblical studies ), archetype or autograph ; however, there is not necessarily a single original text for every group of texts. For example, if a story was spread by oral tradition , and then later written down by different people in different locations,

1380-516: A few witnesses presumably as being favored by "objective" criteria. The citing of sources used, and alternate readings, and the use of original text and images helps readers and other critics determine to an extent the depth of research of the critic, and to independently verify their work. Stemmatics or stemmatology is a rigorous approach to textual criticism. Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) greatly contributed to making this method famous, even though he did not invent it. The method takes its name from

1518-521: A learned vocabulary of international application. Thus, Latin grew from a highly developed cultural product of the Golden and Silver eras of Latin literature to become the international lingua franca in matters diplomatic, scientific, philosophic and religious, until the 17th century. Long before this, Latin had evolved into the Romance languages and Ancient Greek into Modern Greek and its dialects . In

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1656-524: A new spirit of critical enquiry was boosted by the attention to textual states, for example in the work of Lorenzo Valla on the purported Donation of Constantine . Many ancient works, such as the Bible and the Greek tragedies , survive in hundreds of copies, and the relationship of each copy to the original may be unclear. Textual scholars have debated for centuries which sources are most closely derived from

1794-474: A number of errors in common, it may be presumed that they were derived from a common intermediate source, called a hyparchetype . Relations between the lost intermediates are determined by the same process, placing all extant manuscripts in a family tree or stemma codicum descended from a single archetype . The process of constructing the stemma is called recension , or the Latin recensio . Having completed

1932-471: A reconstructed text accompanied by a " critical apparatus ", i.e., footnotes that listed the various manuscript variants available, enabling scholars to gain insight into the entire manuscript tradition and argue about the variants. A related study method known as higher criticism studies the authorship, date, and provenance of text to place such text in a historical context. As these philological issues are often inseparable from issues of interpretation, there

2070-512: A restricted set of hypothetical hyparchetypes. The steps of examinatio and emendatio resemble copy-text editing. In fact, the other techniques can be seen as special cases of stemmatics in which a rigorous family history of the text cannot be determined but only approximated. If it seems that one manuscript is by far the best text, then copy text editing is appropriate, and if it seems that a group of manuscripts are good, then eclecticism on that group would be proper. The Hodges–Farstad edition of

2208-504: A scribe is unlikely on his own initiative to have departed from the usual practice. Internal evidence is evidence that comes from the text itself, independent of the physical characteristics of the document. Various considerations can be used to decide which reading is the most likely to be original. Sometimes these considerations can be in conflict. Two common considerations have the Latin names lectio brevior (shorter reading) and lectio difficilior (more difficult reading). The first

2346-531: A script used in the ancient Aegean, was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick , who demonstrated that it recorded an early form of Greek, now known as Mycenaean Greek . Linear A , the writing system that records the still-unknown language of the Minoans , resists deciphering, despite many attempts. Work continues on scripts such as the Maya , with great progress since the initial breakthroughs of

2484-453: A selection of readings taken from many sources. An edited text that draws from multiple sources is said to be eclectic . In contrast to this approach, some textual critics prefer to identify the single best surviving text, and not to combine readings from multiple sources. When comparing different documents, or "witnesses", of a single, original text, the observed differences are called variant readings , or simply variants or readings . It

2622-520: A transcendent single deity. Different cities often worshipped the same deities, sometimes with epithets that distinguished them and specified their local nature. The earliest surviving philosophy from ancient Greece dates back to the 6th century BC, when according to Aristotle Thales of Miletus was considered to have been the first Greek philosopher. Other influential pre-Socratic philosophers include Pythagoras and Heraclitus . The most famous and significant figures in classical Athenian philosophy, from

2760-526: A version of Bengel's rule, "The reading is less likely to be original that shows a disposition to smooth away difficulties." They also argued that "Readings are approved or rejected by reason of the quality, and not the number, of their supporting witnesses", and that "The reading is to be preferred that most fitly explains the existence of the others." Many of these rules, although originally developed for biblical textual criticism, have wide applicability to any text susceptible to errors of transmission. Since

2898-603: A version of it to many parts of the Mediterranean region and Europe; thus Classical Greece is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the foundation of Western civilization. Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning the Archaic ( c.  8th to 6th centuries BC), Classical ( c.  5th to 4th centuries BC), and Hellenistic ( c.  3rd century BC to 6th century AD) periods of ancient Greece and

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3036-545: Is a Greek creation". Ancient philosophy was traditionally divided into three branches: logic, physics, and ethics. However, not all of the works of ancient philosophers fit neatly into one of these three branches. For instance, Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics have been traditionally classified in the West as "ethics", but in the Arabic world were grouped with logic; in reality, they do not fit neatly into either category. From

3174-588: Is a professor of philology in an English university town . Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld , the main character in Alexander McCall Smith 's 1997 comic novel Portuguese Irregular Verbs is a philologist, educated at Cambridge. The main character in the Academy Award Nominee for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012, Footnote , is a Hebrew philologist, and a significant part of the film deals with his work. The main character of

3312-423: Is derived from the Greek φιλολογία ( philología ), from the terms φίλος ( phílos ) 'love, affection, loved, beloved, dear, friend' and λόγος ( lógos ) 'word, articulation, reason', describing a love of learning, of literature, as well as of argument and reasoning, reflecting the range of activities included under the notion of λόγος . The term changed little with the Latin philologia , and later entered

3450-423: Is necessary when these basic criteria are in conflict. For instance, there will typically be fewer early copies, and a larger number of later copies. The textual critic will attempt to balance these criteria, to determine the original text. There are many other more sophisticated considerations. For example, readings that depart from the known practice of a scribe or a given period may be deemed more reliable, since

3588-514: Is no clear-cut boundary between philology and hermeneutics . When text has a significant political or religious influence (such as the reconstruction of Biblical texts), scholars have difficulty reaching objective conclusions. Some scholars avoid all critical methods of textual philology, especially in historical linguistics, where it is important to study the actual recorded materials. The movement known as new philology has rejected textual criticism because it injects editorial interpretations into

3726-402: Is not always apparent which single variant represents the author's original work. The process of textual criticism seeks to explain how each variant may have entered the text, either by accident (duplication or omission) or intention (harmonization or censorship), as scribes or supervisors transmitted the original author's text by copying it. The textual critic's task, therefore, is to sort through

3864-471: Is one of the most influential works of twentieth-century literature. Textual criticism Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship , philology , and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts (mss) or of printed books. Such texts may range in dates from the earliest writing in cuneiform, impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of

4002-568: Is opposition to the teaching of Latin in Italy, it is nonetheless still compulsory in most secondary schools. The same may also be said in the case of France or Greece. Indeed, Ancient Greek is one of the compulsory subjects in Greek secondary education, whereas in France, Latin is one of the optional subjects that can be chosen in a majority of middle schools and high schools. Ancient Greek is also still being taught, but not as much as Latin . One of

4140-399: Is said to be contaminated . The method also assumes that scribes only make new errors—they do not attempt to correct the errors of their predecessors. When a text has been improved by the scribe, it is said to be sophisticated , but "sophistication" impairs the method by obscuring a document's relationship to other witnesses, and making it more difficult to place the manuscript correctly in

4278-558: Is still seen as a foundational aspect of European culture. The legacy of the classical world is not confined to the influence of classical languages. The Roman Empire was taken as a model by later European empires, such as the Spanish and British empires . Classical art has been taken as a model in later periods – medieval Romanesque architecture and Enlightenment-era neoclassical literature were both influenced by classical models, to take but two examples, while James Joyce 's Ulysses

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4416-405: Is the general observation that scribes tended to add words, for clarification or out of habit, more often than they removed them. The second, lectio difficilior potior (the harder reading is stronger), recognizes the tendency for harmonization—resolving apparent inconsistencies in the text. Applying this principle leads to taking the more difficult (unharmonized) reading as being more likely to be

4554-445: Is very well regarded and remains at the heart of much of our art today. For example, ancient Greek architecture gave us the classical orders: Doric , Ionic , and Corinthian . The Parthenon is still the architectural symbol of the classical world. Greek sculpture is well known and we know the names of several ancient Greek artists: for example, Phidias . With philology, archaeology, and art history, scholars seek understanding of

4692-584: The Alexandrian text-type , are the most favored, and the critical text has an Alexandrian disposition. External evidence is evidence of each physical witness, its date, source, and relationship to other known witnesses. Critics will often prefer the readings supported by the oldest witnesses. Since errors tend to accumulate, older manuscripts should have fewer errors. Readings supported by a majority of witnesses are also usually preferred, since these are less likely to reflect accidents or individual biases. For

4830-676: The Archaeological Institute of America in 1879), including many foreign archaeological institutes in Athens and Rome (the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 1881, British School at Athens in 1886, American Academy in Rome in 1895, and British School at Rome in 1900). More recently, classical archaeology has taken little part in the theoretical changes in the rest of the discipline, largely ignoring

4968-466: The Comma was known for Tertullian . The stemmatic method's final step is emendatio , also sometimes referred to as "conjectural emendation". But, in fact, the critic employs conjecture at every step of the process. Some of the method's rules that are designed to reduce the exercise of editorial judgment do not necessarily produce the correct result. For example, where there are more than two witnesses at

5106-545: The Greek New Testament . In his commentary, he established the rule Proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua , ("the harder reading is to be preferred"). Johann Jakob Griesbach (1745–1812) published several editions of the New Testament. In his 1796 edition, he established fifteen critical rules. Among them was a variant of Bengel's rule, Lectio difficilior potior , "the harder reading is better." Another

5244-557: The Roman Empire destroyed most evidence (cultural artefacts) of earlier, conquered civilizations, such as that of the Etruscans . The English word philosophy comes from the Greek word φιλοσοφία, meaning "love of wisdom", probably coined by Pythagoras. Along with the word itself, the discipline of philosophy as we know it today has its roots in ancient Greek thought , and according to Martin West "philosophy as we understand it

5382-432: The beginnings of two lines are similar. The critic may also examine the other writings of the author to decide what words and grammatical constructions match his style. The evaluation of internal evidence also provides the critic with information that helps him evaluate the reliability of individual manuscripts. Thus, the consideration of internal and external evidence is related. After considering all relevant factors,

5520-513: The late antique period . Late Latin survived long after the end of classical antiquity, and was finally replaced by written Romance languages around the 9th century AD. Along with literary forms of Latin, there existed various vernacular dialects, generally known as Vulgar Latin , in use throughout antiquity. These are mainly preserved in sources such as graffiti and the Vindolanda tablets . Latin literature seems to have started in 240 BC, when

5658-465: The "technical research into languages and families". In The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis , the main character, Elwin Ransom, is a philologist – as was Lewis' close friend J. R. R. Tolkien . Dr. Edward Morbius, one of the main characters in the science fiction film Forbidden Planet , is a philologist. Philip, the main character of Christopher Hampton 's 'bourgeois comedy' The Philanthropist ,

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5796-584: The 1960s at the University of Konstanz . Reception studies is concerned with how students of classical texts have understood and interpreted them. As such, reception studies is interested in a two-way interaction between reader and text, taking place within a historical context. Though the idea of an "aesthetics of reception" was first put forward by Hans Robert Jauss in 1967, the principles of reception theory go back much earlier than this. As early as 1920, T. S. Eliot wrote that "the past [is] altered by

5934-497: The 19th century, little new literature was still being written in Latin – a practice which had continued as late as the 18th century – and a command of Latin declined in importance. Correspondingly, classical education from the 19th century onwards began to increasingly de-emphasise the importance of the ability to write and speak Latin. In the United Kingdom this process took longer than elsewhere. Composition continued to be

6072-666: The 20th century, the study of classics became less common. In England, for instance, Oxford and Cambridge universities stopped requiring students to have qualifications in Greek in 1920, and in Latin at the end of the 1950s. When the National Curriculum was introduced in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland in 1988, it did not mention the classics. By 2003, only about 10% of state schools in Britain offered any classical subjects to their students at all. In 2016, AQA ,

6210-421: The 2nd century AD the word was used in literary criticism to describe writers of the highest quality. For example, Aulus Gellius , in his Attic Nights , contrasts "classicus" and " proletarius " writers. By the 6th century AD, the word had acquired a second meaning, referring to pupils at a school. Thus, the two modern meanings of the word, referring both to literature considered to be of the highest quality and

6348-796: The 5th to the 3rd centuries BC, are Socrates , his student Plato , and Aristotle , who studied at Plato's Academy before founding his own school, known as the Lyceum . Later Greek schools of philosophy, including the Cynics , Stoics , and Epicureans , continued to be influential after the Roman annexation of Greece, and into the post-Classical world. Greek philosophy dealt with a wide variety of subjects, including political philosophy, ethics , metaphysics , ontology , and logic , as well as disciplines which are not today thought of as part of philosophy, such as biology and rhetoric. The language of ancient Rome

6486-463: The Bible, and, for Anglo-American Copy-Text editing, Shakespeare, have been applied to many works, from (near-)contemporary texts to the earliest known written documents. Ranging from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to the twentieth century, textual criticism covers a period of about five millennia. The basic problem, as described by Paul Maas , is as follows: We have no autograph [handwritten by

6624-899: The English language in the 16th century, from the Middle French philologie , in the sense of 'love of literature'. The adjective φιλόλογος ( philólogos ) meant 'fond of discussion or argument, talkative', in Hellenistic Greek , also implying an excessive (" sophistic ") preference of argument over the love of true wisdom, φιλόσοφος ( philósophos ). As an allegory of literary erudition, philologia appears in fifth-century postclassical literature ( Martianus Capella , De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii ), an idea revived in Late Medieval literature ( Chaucer , Lydgate ). The meaning of "love of learning and literature"

6762-490: The Greek New Testament attempts to use stemmatics for some portions. Phylogenetics is a technique borrowed from biology , where it was originally named phylogenetic systematics by Willi Hennig . In biology, the technique is used to determine the evolutionary relationships between different species . In its application in textual criticism, the text of a number of different witnesses may be entered into

6900-477: The Old English character Unferth from the heroic epic poem Beowulf . James Turner further disagrees with how the use of the term is dismissed in the academic world, stating that due to its branding as a "simpleminded approach to their subject" the term has become unknown to college-educated students, furthering the stereotypes of "scrutiny of ancient Greek or Roman texts of a nit-picking classicist" and only

7038-477: The United States, philhellenism began to emerge in the 1830s, with a turn "from a love of Rome and a focus on classical grammar to a new focus on Greece and the totality of its society, art, and culture." The 19th century saw the influence of the classical world, and the value of a classical education , decline, especially in the United States, where the subject was often criticised for its elitism. By

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7176-599: The ancient languages of the Near East progressed rapidly. In the mid-19th century, Henry Rawlinson and others deciphered the Behistun Inscription , which records the same text in Old Persian , Elamite , and Akkadian , using a variation of cuneiform for each language. The elucidation of cuneiform led to the decipherment of Sumerian . Hittite was deciphered in 1915 by Bedřich Hrozný . Linear B ,

7314-513: The ancient world. It is predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek. Its Hellenistic phase is known as Koine ("common") or Biblical Greek, and its late period mutates imperceptibly into Medieval Greek. Koine is regarded as a separate historical stage of its own, although in its earlier form it closely resembles Classical Greek. Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classical and earlier periods included several regional dialects. Ancient Greek

7452-620: The applicability of the different methods for coping with these problems across both living organisms and textual traditions is a promising area of study. Software developed for use in biology has been applied successfully to textual criticism; for example, it is being used by the Canterbury Tales Project to determine the relationship between the 84 surviving manuscripts and four early printed editions of The Canterbury Tales . Shaw's edition of Dante's Commedia uses phylogenetic and traditional methods alongside each other in

7590-418: The author and scribes, or printers, were likely to have done). The collation of all known variants of a text is referred to as a variorum , namely a work of textual criticism whereby all variations and emendations are set side by side so that a reader can track how textual decisions have been made in the preparation of a text for publication. The Bible and the works of William Shakespeare have often been

7728-422: The author must be regarded as equivalent to an autograph manuscript". The lack of autograph manuscripts applies to many cultures other than Greek and Roman. In such a situation, a key objective becomes the identification of the first exemplar before any split in the tradition. That exemplar is known as the archetype . "If we succeed in establishing the text of [the archetype], the constitutio (reconstruction of

7866-501: The canons of criticism are highly susceptible to interpretation, and at times even contradict each other, they may be employed to justify a result that fits the textual critic's aesthetic or theological agenda. Starting in the 19th century, scholars sought more rigorous methods to guide editorial judgment. Stemmatics and copy-text editing – while both eclectic, in that they permit the editor to select readings from multiple sources – sought to reduce subjectivity by establishing one or

8004-482: The city of Rome was founded in 753 BC; in reality, there had been a settlement on the site since around 1000 BC, when the Palatine Hill was settled. The city was originally ruled by kings, first Roman, and then Etruscan – according to Roman tradition, the first Etruscan king of Rome, Tarquinius Priscus, ruled from 616 BC. Over the course of the 6th century BC, the city expanded its influence over

8142-487: The classical period written in the classical languages of Latin and Greek. The roots of classical philology lie in the Renaissance , as humanist intellectuals attempted to return to the Latin of the classical period, especially of Cicero , and as scholars attempted to produce more accurate editions of ancient texts. Some of the principles of philology still used today were developed during this period; for instance,

8280-478: The classical period, with poets such as Virgil , Horace , and Ovid ; historians such as Julius Caesar and Tacitus ; orators such as Cicero ; and philosophers such as Seneca the Younger and Lucretius . Late Latin authors include many Christian writers such as Lactantius , Tertullian and Ambrose ; non-Christian authors, such as the historian Ammianus Marcellinus , are also preserved. According to legend,

8418-485: The comparative philology of all Indo-European languages . Philology, with its focus on historical development ( diachronic analysis), is contrasted with linguistics due to Ferdinand de Saussure 's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis . While the contrast continued with the emergence of structuralism and the emphasis of Noam Chomsky on syntax , research in historical linguistics often relies on philological materials and findings. The term philology

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8556-559: The correct reading. After selectio , the text may still contain errors, since there may be passages where no source preserves the correct reading. The step of examination , or examinatio is applied to find corruptions. Where the editor concludes that the text is corrupt, it is corrected by a process called "emendation", or emendatio (also sometimes called divinatio ). Emendations not supported by any known source are sometimes called conjectural emendations . The process of selectio resembles eclectic textual criticism, but applied to

8694-471: The critic forms opinions about individual witnesses, relying on both external and internal evidence. Since the mid-19th century, eclecticism, in which there is no a priori bias to a single manuscript, has been the dominant method of editing the Greek text of the New Testament (currently, the United Bible Society, 5th ed. and Nestle-Åland, 28th ed.). Even so, the oldest manuscripts, being of

8832-459: The dominant classical skill in England until the 1870s, when new areas within the discipline began to increase in popularity. In the same decade came the first challenges to the requirement of Greek at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, though it would not be finally abolished for another 50 years. Though the influence of classics as the dominant mode of education in Europe and North America

8970-479: The earliest to survive to us today, probably composed in the eighth century BC. These early epics were oral compositions, created without the use of writing. Around the same time that the Homeric epics were composed, the Greek alphabet was introduced; the earliest surviving inscriptions date from around 750 BC. European drama was invented in ancient Greece. Traditionally this was attributed to Thespis , around

9108-484: The editor used (names of manuscripts, or abbreviations called sigla ); second, the editor's analysis of that evidence (sometimes a simple likelihood rating), ; and third, a record of rejected variants of the text (often in order of preference). Before inexpensive mechanical printing, literature was copied by hand, and many variations were introduced by copyists. The age of printing made the scribal profession effectively redundant. Printed editions, while less susceptible to

9246-400: The eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes, along with a few fragments. Sixty years after the end of Aristophanes' career, the next author of comedies to have any substantial body of work survive is Menander , whose style is known as New Comedy . Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the ancient Greeks concerning their gods and heroes , the nature of the world, and

9384-457: The end of the fifth century BC. Surviving Greek comedy begins later than tragedy; the earliest surviving work, Aristophanes ' Acharnians , comes from 425 BC. However, comedy dates back as early as 486 BC, when the Dionysia added a competition for comedy to the much earlier competition for tragedy. The comedy of the fifth century is known as Old Comedy , and it comes down to us solely in

9522-640: The entirety of Latium . Around the end of the 6th century – traditionally in 510 BC – the kings of Rome were driven out, and the city became a republic. Around 387 BC, Rome was sacked by the Gauls following the Battle of the Allia . It soon recovered from this humiliating defeat, however, and in 381 the inhabitants of Tusculum in Latium were made Roman citizens. This was the first time Roman citizenship

9660-399: The evidence of contrasts between witnesses. Eclectic readings also normally give an impression of the number of witnesses to each available reading. Although a reading supported by the majority of witnesses is frequently preferred, this does not follow automatically. For example, a second edition of a Shakespeare play may include an addition alluding to an event known to have happened between

9798-535: The famous decipherment and translation of the Rosetta Stone by Jean-François Champollion in 1822, some individuals attempted to decipher the writing systems of the Ancient Near East and Aegean . In the case of Old Persian and Mycenaean Greek , decipherment yielded older records of languages already known from slightly more recent traditions ( Middle Persian and Alphabetic Greek ). Work on

9936-599: The fifth and fourth centuries BC, has traditionally been considered the height of Greek civilisation. The Classical period of Greek history is generally considered to have begun with the first and second Persian invasions of Greece at the start of the Greco-Persian wars, and to have ended with the death of Alexander the Great . Classical Greek culture had a powerful influence on the Roman Empire, which carried

10074-456: The first time after the reforms of the 1880s, though it did not become part of Oxford's Greats until much later. The second half of the 19th century saw Schliemann 's excavations of Troy and Mycenae ; the first excavations at Olympia and Delos ; and Arthur Evans ' work in Crete, particularly on Knossos . This period also saw the foundation of important archaeological associations (e.g.

10212-580: The form of both popular public religion and cult practices. These different groups varied enough for it to be possible to speak of Greek religions or "cults" in the plural, though most of them shared similarities. Also, the Greek religion extended out of Greece and out to neighbouring islands. Many Greek people recognized the major gods and goddesses: Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, Dionysus, Hephaestus, Athena, Hermes, Demeter, Hestia and Hera; though philosophies such as Stoicism and some forms of Platonism used language that seems to posit

10350-518: The history and culture of a civilization, through critical study of the extant literary and physical artefacts, in order to compose and establish a continual historic narrative of the Ancient World and its peoples. The task is difficult due to a dearth of physical evidence: for example, Sparta was a leading Greek city-state , yet little evidence of it survives to study, and what is available comes from Athens , Sparta's principal rival; likewise,

10488-494: The largest army Rome had yet put into the field was wiped out, and one of the two consuls leading it was killed. However, Rome continued to fight, annexing much of Spain and eventually defeating Carthage, ending her position as a major power and securing Roman preeminence in the Western Mediterranean. The classical languages of the ancient Mediterranean world influenced every European language, imparting to each

10626-515: The largest exam board for A-Levels and GCSEs in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, announced that it would be scrapping A-Level subjects in Classical Civilisation, Archaeology, and Art History. This left just one out of five exam boards in England which still offered Classical Civilisation as a subject. The decision was immediately denounced by archaeologists and historians, with Natalie Haynes of The Guardian stating that

10764-421: The last decade of the eighteenth century, scholars of ancient philosophy began to study the discipline historically. Previously, works on ancient philosophy had been unconcerned with chronological sequence and with reconstructing the reasoning of ancient thinkers; with what Wolfgang-Ranier Mann calls "New Philosophy", this changed. Another discipline within the classics is "reception studies", which developed in

10902-535: The loss of the A-Level would deprive state school students, 93% of all students, the opportunity to study classics while making it once again the exclusive purview of wealthy private-school students. However, the study of classics has not declined as fast elsewhere in Europe. In 2009, a review of Meeting the Challenge , a collection of conference papers about the teaching of Latin in Europe, noted that though there

11040-461: The method was not as rigorous or as scientific as its proponents had claimed. Bédier's doubts about the stemmatic method led him to consider whether it could be dropped altogether. As an alternative to stemmatics, Bédier proposed a Best-text editing method, in which a single textual witness, judged to be of a 'good' textual state by the editor, is emended as lightly as possible for manifest transmission mistakes, but left otherwise unchanged. This makes

11178-488: The middle of the sixth century BC, though the earliest surviving work of Greek drama is Aeschylus ' tragedy The Persians , which dates to 472 BC. Early Greek tragedy was performed by a chorus and two actors, but by the end of Aeschylus' life, a third actor had been introduced, either by him or by Sophocles . The last surviving Greek tragedies are the Bacchae of Euripides and Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus , both from

11316-505: The most notable characteristics of the modern study of classics is the diversity of the field. Although traditionally focused on ancient Greece and Rome, the study now encompasses the entire ancient Mediterranean world, thus expanding the studies to Northern Africa and parts of the Middle East . Philology is the study of language preserved in written sources; classical philology is thus concerned with understanding any texts from

11454-537: The observation that if a manuscript could be shown to be a copy of an earlier extant manuscript, then it provides no further evidence of the original text, was made as early as 1489 by Angelo Poliziano . Other philological tools took longer to be developed: the first statement, for instance, of the principle that a more difficult reading should be preferred over a simpler one, was in 1697 by Jean Le Clerc . The modern discipline of classical philology began in Germany at

11592-464: The original author] manuscripts of the Greek and Roman classical writers and no copies which have been collated with the originals; the manuscripts we possess derive from the originals through an unknown number of intermediate copies, and are consequently of questionable trustworthiness. The business of textual criticism is to produce a text as close as possible to the original ( constitutio textus ). Maas comments further that "A dictation revised by

11730-412: The original principles of textual criticism have been improved and applied to other widely distributed texts such as the Bible . Scholars have tried to reconstruct the original readings of the Bible from the manuscript variants. This method was applied to classical studies and medieval texts as a way to reconstruct the author's original work. The method produced so-called "critical editions", which provided

11868-450: The original text than any existing manuscript, could be reconstructed. Classical archaeology is the oldest branch of archaeology, with its roots going back to J. J. Winckelmann 's work on Herculaneum in the 1760s. It was not until the last decades of the 19th century, however, that classical archaeology became part of the tradition of Western classical scholarship. It was included as part of Cambridge University's Classical Tripos for

12006-408: The original) is considerably advanced." The textual critic's ultimate objective is the production of a "critical edition". This contains the text that the author has determined most closely approximates the original, and is accompanied by an apparatus criticus or critical apparatus . The critical apparatus presents the author's work in three parts: first, a list or description of the evidence that

12144-556: The original, hence which readings in those sources are correct. Although texts such as Greek plays presumably had one original, the question of whether some biblical books, like the Gospels , ever had just one original has been discussed. Interest in applying textual criticism to the Quran has also developed after the discovery of the Sana'a manuscripts in 1972, which possibly date back to

12282-422: The original. Such cases also include scribes simplifying and smoothing texts they did not fully understand. Another scribal tendency is called homoioteleuton , meaning "similar endings". Homoioteleuton occurs when two words/phrases/lines end with the similar sequence of letters. The scribe, having finished copying the first, skips to the second, omitting all intervening words. Homoioarche refers to eye-skip when

12420-440: The origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. They were a part of religion in ancient Greece. Modern scholars refer to the myths and study them in an attempt to throw light on the religious and political institutions of ancient Greece and its civilization, and to gain understanding of the nature of myth-making itself. Greek religion encompassed the collection of beliefs and rituals practiced in ancient Greece in

12558-524: The origins of older texts. Philology also includes the study of texts and their history. It includes elements of textual criticism , trying to reconstruct an author's original text based on variant copies of manuscripts. This branch of research arose among ancient scholars in the Greek-speaking world of the 4th century BC, who desired to establish a standard text of popular authors for both sound interpretation and secure transmission. Since that time,

12696-521: The period: Lucretius , popular during the Carolingian Renaissance , was barely read in the twelfth century, while for Quintilian the reverse is true. The Renaissance led to the increasing study of both ancient literature and ancient history, as well as a revival of classical styles of Latin . From the 14th century, first in Italy and then increasingly across Europe, Renaissance Humanism , an intellectual movement that "advocated

12834-404: The philologists R.D Fulk and Leonard Neidorf who have been quoted saying "This field "philology's commitment to falsification renders it "at odds with what many literary scholars believe because the purpose of philology is to narrow the range of possible interpretations rather than to treat all reasonable ones as equal". This use of falsification can be seen in the debate surrounding the etymology of

12972-615: The phonetic approach championed by Yuri Knorozov and others in the 1950s. Since the late 20th century, the Maya code has been almost completely deciphered, and the Mayan languages are among the most documented and studied in Mesoamerica . The code is described as a logosyllabic style of writing. In English-speaking countries, usage of the term "philology" to describe work on languages and works of literature, which had become synonymous with

13110-423: The phrase "lower criticism" refers to textual criticism and " higher criticism " to the endeavor to establish the authorship, date, and place of composition of the original text . Textual criticism has been practiced for over two thousand years, as one of the philological arts. Early textual critics, especially the librarians of Hellenistic Alexandria in the last two centuries BC, were concerned with preserving

13248-551: The plays of William Shakespeare were rewritten along neoclassical lines, and these "improved" versions were performed throughout the 18th century. In the United States, the nation's Founders were strongly influenced by the classics, and they looked in particular to the Roman Republic for their form of government. From the beginning of the 18th century, the study of Greek became increasingly important relative to that of Latin. In this period Johann Winckelmann 's claims for

13386-436: The popularity of " New Archaeology ", which emphasized the development of general laws derived from studying material culture, in the 1960s. New Archaeology is still criticized by traditional minded scholars of classical archaeology despite a wide acceptance of its basic techniques. Some art historians focus their study on the development of art in the classical world. Indeed, the art and architecture of ancient Rome and Greece

13524-520: The possibility that the original author may have revised her or his work, and that the text could have existed at different times in more than one authoritative version. The critic Joseph Bédier (1864–1938), who had worked with stemmatics, launched an attack on that method in 1928. He surveyed editions of medieval French texts that were produced with the stemmatic method, and found that textual critics tended overwhelmingly to produce bifid trees, divided into just two branches. He concluded that this outcome

13662-406: The practice of consulting a wide diversity of witnesses to a particular original. The practice is based on the principle that the more independent transmission histories there are, the less likely they will be to reproduce the same errors. What one omits, the others may retain; what one adds, the others are unlikely to add. Eclecticism allows inferences to be drawn regarding the original text, based on

13800-629: The practices of German scholars, was abandoned as a consequence of anti-German feelings following World War I . Most continental European countries still maintain the term to designate departments, colleges, position titles, and journals. J. R. R. Tolkien opposed the nationalist reaction against philological practices, claiming that "the philological instinct" was "universal as is the use of language". In British English usage, and British academia, philology remains largely synonymous with "historical linguistics", while in US English , and US academia,

13938-478: The present as much as the present is directed by the past"; Charles Martindale describes this as a "cardinal principle" for many versions of modern reception theory. Ancient Greece was the civilization belonging to the period of Greek history lasting from the Archaic period , beginning in the eighth century BC, to the Roman conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth in 146 BC. The Classical period , during

14076-410: The proliferation of variations likely to arise during manual transmission, are nonetheless not immune to introducing variations from an author's autograph. Instead of a scribe miscopying his source, a compositor or a printing shop may read or typeset a work in a way that differs from the autograph. Since each scribe or printer commits different errors, reconstruction of the lost original is often aided by

14214-448: The relationship between languages. Similarities between Sanskrit and European languages were first noted in the early 16th century and led to speculation of a common ancestor language from which all these descended. It is now named Proto-Indo-European . Philology's interest in ancient languages led to the study of what was, in the 18th century, "exotic" languages, for the light they could cast on problems in understanding and deciphering

14352-508: The results of human mental processes. This science compares the results of textual science with the results of experimental research of both psychology and artificial intelligence production systems. In the case of Bronze Age literature , philology includes the prior decipherment of the language under study. This has notably been the case with the Egyptian , Sumerian , Assyrian , Hittite , Ugaritic , and Luwian languages. Beginning with

14490-483: The same difficulty as textual criticism: the appearance of characteristics in descendants of an ancestor other than by direct copying (or miscopying) of the ancestor, for example where a scribe combines readings from two or more different manuscripts ("contamination"). The same phenomenon is widely present among living organisms, as instances of horizontal gene transfer (or lateral gene transfer) and genetic recombination , particularly among bacteria. Further exploration of

14628-417: The same level of the tree, normally the critic will select the dominant reading. However, it may be no more than fortuitous that more witnesses have survived that present a particular reading. A plausible reading that occurs less often may, nevertheless, be the correct one. Lastly, the stemmatic method assumes that every extant witness is derived, however remotely, from a single source. It does not account for

14766-413: The same reasons, the most geographically diverse witnesses are preferred. Some manuscripts show evidence that particular care was taken in their composition, for example, by including alternative readings in their margins, demonstrating that more than one prior copy (exemplar) was consulted in producing the current one. Other factors being equal, these are the best witnesses. The role of the textual critic

14904-618: The science fiction TV show Stargate SG-1 , Dr. Daniel Jackson , is mentioned as having a PhD in philology. Classical philology Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity . In the Western world , classics traditionally refers to the study of Ancient Greek and Roman literature and their original languages, Ancient Greek and Latin . Classics may also include as secondary subjects Greco-Roman philosophy , history , archaeology , anthropology , art , mythology , and society. In Western civilization,

15042-473: The seventh to eighth centuries. In the English language, the works of William Shakespeare have been a particularly fertile ground for textual criticism—both because the texts, as transmitted, contain a considerable amount of variation, and because the effort and expense of producing superior editions of his works have always been widely viewed as worthwhile. The principles of textual criticism, although originally developed and refined for works of antiquity and

15180-617: The specialised science and technology vocabularies, the influence of Latin and Greek is notable. Ecclesiastical Latin , the Roman Catholic Church's official language, remains a living legacy of the classical world in the contemporary world. Latin had an impact far beyond the classical world. It continued to be the pre-eminent language for serious writings in Europe long after the fall of the Roman Empire. The modern Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Galician, Catalan) all derive from Latin. Latin

15318-504: The standard texts used as part of a curriculum, were both derived from Roman use. In the Middle Ages , classics and education were tightly intertwined; according to Jan Ziolkowski, there is no era in history in which the link was tighter. Medieval education taught students to imitate earlier classical models, and Latin continued to be the language of scholarship and culture, despite the increasing difference between literary Latin and

15456-431: The stemma, the critic proceeds to the next step, called selection or selectio , where the text of the archetype is determined by examining variants from the closest hyparchetypes to the archetype and selecting the best ones. If one reading occurs more often than another at the same level of the tree, then the dominant reading is selected. If two competing readings occur equally often, then the editor uses judgment to select

15594-424: The stemma. The stemmatic method requires the textual critic to group manuscripts by commonality of error. It is required, therefore, that the critic can distinguish erroneous readings from correct ones. This assumption has often come under attack. W. W. Greg noted: "That if a scribe makes a mistake he will inevitably produce nonsense is the tacit and wholly unwarranted assumption." Franz Anton Knittel defended

15732-589: The study and imitation of classical antiquity", developed. Humanism saw a reform in education in Europe, introducing a wider range of Latin authors as well as bringing back the study of Greek language and literature to Western Europe. This reintroduction was initiated by Petrarch (1304–1374) and Boccaccio (1313–1375) who commissioned a Calabrian scholar to translate the Homeric poems . This humanist educational reform spread from Italy, in Catholic countries as it

15870-594: The study of the Ancient Greek and Roman classics was considered the foundation of the humanities , and they traditionally have been the cornerstone of an elite higher education. The word classics is derived from the Latin adjective classicus , meaning "belonging to the highest class of citizens." The word was originally used to describe the members of the Patricians , the highest class in ancient Rome . By

16008-732: The subjects of variorum editions, although the same techniques have been applied with less frequency to many other works, such as Walt Whitman 's Leaves of Grass , and the prose writings of Edward Fitzgerald . In practice, citation of manuscript evidence implies any of several methodologies. The ideal, but most costly, method is physical inspection of the manuscript itself; alternatively, published photographs or facsimile editions may be inspected. This method involves paleographical analysis—interpretation of handwriting, incomplete letters and even reconstruction of lacunae . More typically, editions of manuscripts are consulted, which have done this paleographical work already. Eclecticism refers to

16146-418: The superiority of the Greek visual arts influenced a shift in aesthetic judgements, while in the literary sphere, G. E. Lessing "returned Homer to the centre of artistic achievement". In the United Kingdom, the study of Greek in schools began in the late 18th century. The poet Walter Savage Landor claimed to have been one of the first English schoolboys to write in Greek during his time at Rugby School . In

16284-403: The text and destroys the integrity of the individual manuscript, hence damaging the reliability of the data. Supporters of new philology insist on a strict "diplomatic" approach: a faithful rendering of the text exactly as found in the manuscript, without emendations. Another branch of philology, cognitive philology, studies written and oral texts. Cognitive philology considers these oral texts as

16422-430: The textual critic seeks the reading that best explains how the other readings would arise. That reading is then the most likely candidate to have been original. Various scholars have developed guidelines, or canons of textual criticism, to guide the exercise of the critic's judgment in determining the best readings of a text. One of the earliest was Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752), who in 1734 produced an edition of

16560-526: The textual critic's work is to provide a better understanding of the creation and historical transmission of the text and its variants. This understanding may lead to the production of a critical edition containing a scholarly curated text. If a scholar has several versions of a manuscript but no known original, then established methods of textual criticism can be used to seek to reconstruct the original text as closely as possible. The same methods can be used to reconstruct intermediate versions, or recensions , of

16698-498: The traditional point of view in theology and was against the modern textual criticism. He defended an authenticity of the Pericopa Adulterae (John 7:53–8:11), Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7), and Testimonium Flavianum . According to him, Erasmus in his Novum Instrumentum omne did not incorporate the Comma from Codex Montfortianus , because of grammar differences, but used Complutensian Polyglotta . According to him,

16836-415: The turn of the nineteenth century. It was during this period that scientific principles of philology began to be put together into a coherent whole, in order to provide a set of rules by which scholars could determine which manuscripts were most accurate. This "new philology", as it was known, centered around the construction of a genealogy of manuscripts, with which a hypothetical common ancestor, closer to

16974-429: The two editions. Although nearly all subsequent manuscripts may have included the addition, textual critics may reconstruct the original without the addition. The result of the process is a text with readings drawn from many witnesses. It is not a copy of any particular manuscript, and may deviate from the majority of existing manuscripts. In a purely eclectic approach, no single witness is theoretically favored. Instead,

17112-553: The variants, eliminating those most likely to be un -original, hence establishing a critical text , or critical edition, that is intended to best approximate the original. At the same time, the critical text should document variant readings, so the relation of extant witnesses to the reconstructed original is apparent to a reader of the critical edition. In establishing the critical text, the textual critic considers both "external" evidence (the age, provenance, and affiliation of each witness) and "internal" or "physical" considerations (what

17250-743: The vernacular languages of Europe during the period. While Latin was hugely influential, according to thirteenth-century English philosopher Roger Bacon , "there are not four men in Latin Christendom who are acquainted with the Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic grammars." Greek was rarely studied in the West, and Greek literature was known almost solely in Latin translation. The works of even major Greek authors such as Hesiod , whose names continued to be known by educated Europeans, along with most of Plato, were unavailable in Christian Europe. Some were rediscovered through Arabic translations;

17388-470: The versions can vary greatly. There are many approaches or methods to the practice of textual criticism, notably eclecticism , stemmatics , and copy-text editing . Quantitative techniques are also used to determine the relationships between witnesses to a text, called textual witnesses , with methods from evolutionary biology ( phylogenetics ) appearing to be effective on a range of traditions. In some domains, such as religious and classical text editing,

17526-450: The wider meaning of "study of a language's grammar, history and literary tradition" remains more widespread. Based on the harsh critique of Friedrich Nietzsche, some US scholars since the 1980s have viewed philology as responsible for a narrowly scientistic study of language and literature. Disagreements in the modern day of this branch of study are followed with the likes of how the method is treated amongst other scholars, as noted by both

17664-483: The word stemma . The Ancient Greek word στέμματα and its loanword in classical Latin stemmata may refer to " family trees ". This specific meaning shows the relationships of the surviving witnesses (the first known example of such a stemma, albeit without the name, dates from 1827). The family tree is also referred to as a cladogram . The method works from the principle that "community of error implies community of origin". That is, if two witnesses have

17802-599: The works of antiquity , and this continued through the Middle Ages into the early modern period and the invention of the printing press . Textual criticism was an important aspect of the work of many Renaissance humanists , such as Desiderius Erasmus , who edited the Greek New Testament , creating what developed as the Textus Receptus . In Italy, scholars such as Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini collected and edited many Latin manuscripts, while

17940-461: Was Lectio brevior praeferenda , "the shorter reading is better", based on the idea that scribes were more likely to add than to delete. This rule cannot be applied uncritically, as scribes may omit material inadvertently. Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901) and Fenton Hort (1828–1892) published an edition of the New Testament in Greek in 1881 . They proposed nine critical rules, including

18078-451: Was Latin, a member of the Italic family of languages . The earliest surviving inscription in Latin comes from the 7th century BC, on a brooch from Palestrina . Latin from between this point and the early 1st century BC is known as Old Latin . Most surviving Latin literature is Classical Latin , from the 1st century BC to the 2nd century AD. Latin then evolved into Late Latin , in use during

18216-645: Was adopted by the Jesuits , and in countries that became Protestant such as England, Germany, and the Low Countries, in order to ensure that future clerics were able to study the New Testament in the original language. The late 17th and 18th centuries are the period in Western European literary history which is most associated with the classical tradition, as writers consciously adapted classical models. Classical models were so highly prized that

18354-583: Was extended in this way. Rome went on to expand its area of influence, until by 269 the entirety of the Italian peninsula was under Roman rule. Soon afterwards, in 264, the First Punic War began; it lasted until 241. The Second Punic War began in 218, and by the end of that year, the Carthaginian general Hannibal had invaded Italy. The war saw Rome's worst defeat to that point at Cannae ;

18492-460: Was in decline in the 19th century, the discipline was rapidly evolving in the same period. Classical scholarship was becoming more systematic and scientific , especially with the "new philology " created at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. Its scope was also broadening: it was during the 19th century that ancient history and classical archaeology began to be seen as part of classics, rather than separate disciplines. During

18630-412: Was narrowed to "the study of the historical development of languages" ( historical linguistics ) in 19th-century usage of the term. Due to the rapid progress made in understanding sound laws and language change , the "golden age of philology" lasted throughout the 19th century, or "from Giacomo Leopardi and Friedrich Schlegel to Nietzsche ". The comparative linguistics branch of philology studies

18768-409: Was often a manuscript that was at hand. Using the copy-text method, the critic examines the base text and makes corrections (called emendations) in places where the base text appears wrong to the critic. This can be done by looking for places in the base text that do not make sense or by looking at the text of other witnesses for a superior reading. Close-call decisions are usually resolved in favor of

18906-581: Was the language of Homer and of classical Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to the vocabulary of English and many other European languages, and has been a standard subject of study in Western educational institutions since the Renaissance. Latinized forms of Ancient Greek roots are used in many of the scientific names of species and in other scientific terminology. The earliest surviving works of Greek literature are epic poetry . Homer 's Iliad and Odyssey are

19044-488: Was unlikely to have occurred by chance, and that therefore, the method was tending to produce bipartite stemmas regardless of the actual history of the witnesses. He suspected that editors tended to favor trees with two branches, as this would maximize the opportunities for editorial judgment (as there would be no third branch to "break the tie" whenever the witnesses disagreed). He also noted that, for many works, more than one reasonable stemma could be postulated, suggesting that

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