CLASSICS. The term “classic” is derived from the Latin epithet classicus, found in a passage of Aulus Gellius (xix. 8. 15), where a “scriptor ‘classicus’” is contrasted with a “scriptor proletarius.” The metaphor is taken from the division of the Roman people into classes by Servius Tullius, those in the first class being called classici, all the rest infra classem, and those in the last proletarii.[1] The epithet “classic” is accordingly applied (1) generally to an author of the first rank, and (2) more particularly to a Greek or Roman author of that character. Similarly, “the classics” is a synonym for the choicest products of the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. It is to this sense of the word that the following article is devoted in two main divisions: (A) the general history of classical (i.e. Greek and Latin) scholarship, and (B) its place in higher education.
(A) General History of the Study of the Classics
We may consider this subject in four principal periods:—(i.) the Alexandrian, c. 300-1 B.C.; (ii.) the Roman, A.D. c. 1-530; (iii.) the Middle Ages, c. 530-1350; and (iv.) the Modern Age, c. 1350 to the present day.
(i.) The Alexandrian Age.—The study of the Greek classics begins with the school of Alexandria. Under the rule of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247 B.C.), learning found a home in the Alexandrian Museum and in the great Alexandrian Library. The first four librarians were Zenodotus, Eratosthenes, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus. Zenodotus produced before 274 the first scientific edition of the Iliad and Odyssey, an edition in which spurious lines were marked, at the beginning, with a short horizontal dash called an obelus (—). He also drew up select lists of epic and lyric poets. Soon afterwards a classified catalogue of dramatists, epic and lyric poets, legislators, philosophers, historians, orators and rhetoricians, and miscellaneous writers, with a brief biography of each, was produced by the scholar and poet Callimachus (fl. 260). Among the pupils of Callimachus was Eratosthenes who, in 234, succeeded Zenodotus as librarian. Apart from his special interest in the history of the Old Attic comedy, he was a man of vast and varied learning; the founder of astronomical geography and of scientific chronology; and the first to assume the name of φιλόλογος. The greatest philologist of antiquity was, however, his successor, Aristophanes of Byzantium (195), who reduced accentuation and punctuation to a definite system, and used a variety of critical symbols in his recension of the Iliad and Odyssey. He also edited Hesiod and Pindar, Euripides and Aristophanes, besides composing brief introductions to the several plays, parts of which are still extant. Lastly, he established a scientific system of lexicography and drew up lists of the “best authors.” Two critical editions of the Iliad and Odyssey were produced by his successor, Aristarchus, who was librarian until 146 B.C. and was the founder of scientific scholarship. His distinguished pupil, Dionysius Thrax (born c. 166 B.C.), drew up a Greek grammar which continued in use for more than thirteen centuries. The most industrious of the successors of Aristarchus was Didymus (c. 65 B.C.-A.D. 10), who, in his work on the Homeric poems, aimed at restoring the lost recensions of Aristarchus. He also composed commentaries on the lyric and comic poets and on Thucydides and Demosthenes; part of his commentary on this last author was first published in 1904. He was a teacher in Alexandria (and perhaps also in Rome); and his death, about A.D. 10, marks the close of the Alexandrian age. He is the industrious compiler who gathered up the remnants of the learning of his predecessors and transmitted them to posterity. The poets of that age, including Callimachus and Theocritus, were subsequently expounded by Theon, who flourished under Tiberius, and has been well described as “the Didymus of the Alexandrian poets.”
The Alexandrian canon of the Greek classics, which probably had its origin in the lists drawn up by Callimachus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus, included the following authors:—
Epic poets (5): Homer, Hesiod, Peisander, Panyasis, Antimachus.
Iambic poets (3): Simonides of Amorgos, Archilochus, Hipponax.
Tragic poets (5): Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ion, Achaeus.
Comic poets, Old (7): Epicharmus, Cratinus, Eupolis, Aristophanes, Pherecrates, Crates, Plato. Middle (2): Antiphanes, Alexis. New (5): Menander, Philippides, Diphilus, Philemon, Apollodorus.