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| Scholiast on Pindar | |
|---|---|
| Name | Scholiast on Pindar |
| Known for | Ancient scholia on the odes of Pindar |
| Era | Archaic Greece / Classical Greece / Hellenistic period (attributed) |
| Notable works | Scholia to the Epinician Odes, Pythian Odes, Olympian Odes, Isthmian Odes |
| Language | Ancient Greek |
| Region | Greece |
Scholiast on Pindar
The Scholiast on Pindar is the conventional designation for the anonymous commentator or assemblage of commentators responsible for the medieval scholia attached to the extant odes of Pindar, preserved in Byzantine manuscripts and transmitted into Renaissance and modern editions. These scholia record philological notes, mythographic explanations, textual variants, and historical annotations that link Pindar to a network of authors, traditions, and institutions central to ancient Greek literature and scholarship.
The scholia form a corpus of marginalia and scholastic commentary accompanying the Epinician corpus, including the Olympian Odes, Pythian Odes, Nemean Odes, and Isthmian Odes, and they cite authorities such as Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Thucydides, Pausanias, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Euripides. Their notes preserve references to intellectual centers and figures like Alexandria, Library of Alexandria, Callimachus, Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Didymus Chalcenterus, and later Byzantine scholars such as Arethas of Caesarea and Michael Psellos. These scholia thus connect antiquity’s lyric culture with institutions including Delphi, Olympia, Thebes, Corinth, Argos, Syracuse, and Athens.
Scholarly consensus resists attributing the scholia to a single hand; instead they appear to be an anthology compiled from Hellenistic and Roman commentators and later Byzantine glossators. Attributions in the scholia suggest dependence on Alexandrian scholarship of the 3rd–1st centuries BCE, with later strata reflecting engagement by grammarians active under Roman patrons like Augustus, Hadrian, and Trajan, and Byzantine copyists linked to centers such as Constantinople and Mount Athos. Citations of authors like Aristarchus of Samothrace, Apollonius Dyscolus, Crates of Mallus, Homeric scholiasts, Didymus, and Scholiast on Aristophanes imply a longue durée transmission spanning from Hellenistic period antiquity through the Byzantine Empire.
The scholia are preserved principally in medieval codices deriving from Byzantine exemplar traditions, notably illuminated and rubricated manuscripts held in collections at Vatican Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bodleian Library, Laurentian Library, British Library, Biblioteca Marciana, and monastic repositories associated with Mount Athos and Saint Catherine's Monastery. Critical witnesses include codices cited in the printed editions by Henricus Stephanus (Estienne), Franciscus Sylburgius, Richard Bentley, Johann Jakob Reiske, Theodor Bergk, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, and later editors such as Karl Lachmann and Richard Snodgrass. The transmission shows common palaeographical features: marginal glosses, interlinear corrections, scholia maior and scholia minor divisions, and contamination from lexica like Harpocration, Suda, and Etymologicum Magnum.
The scholia combine textual criticism, lexical glosses, mythographical summaries, historical annotations, and performance-related remarks on patronage, choruses, and tyrants. They offer emendations paralleling conjectures found in works by Richard Bentley and echo exegetical methods used by Aristarchus of Samothrace and Didymus Chalcenterus. Methodologically, the scholiast(s) employ philological tools: variant readings, etymologies referencing Herodian, metrical analysis influenced by Aristophanes of Byzantium, and citation of epigraphic evidence from sanctuaries like Delphi and Nemea. The notes frequently juxtapose poetic diction with authoritative prose exemplars such as Plutarch, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, and Lucian, and engage with Hellenistic literary criticism as practiced in the Library of Alexandria.
The scholia incorporate a wide array of sources: oral traditions represented by Homeric Hymns and the oral Homeric tradition; lyric precursors including Alcaeus, Sappho, and Simonides of Ceos; tragedians such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; historians and geographers like Herodotus, Thucydides, Pausanias, and Strabo; and grammarians and lexicographers including Harpocration, Suidas, Scholiast on Sophocles, and Didymus. Intertextual links extend to epigraphic traditions (inscriptions from Olympia and Delphi), numismatic evidence from city-states like Syracuse and Thebes, and to rhetorical handbooks of Isocrates and Demosthenes.
The scholia shaped Renaissance humanist readings of Pindar and influenced editors such as Aldus Manutius, Desiderius Erasmus, and Ioannes Meursius, and later philologists including Friedrich Nietzsche and Wilhelm von Humboldt. They informed nineteenth-century classical scholarship at institutions like University of Göttingen, University of Berlin, Collège de France, and Oxford University through figures like Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, and Gottfried Hermann. The scholia also affected modern receptions of Greek lyric in comparative studies with Horace, Ovid, Virgil, and influenced translations by T. S. Eliot and commentary traditions in journals such as Classical Quarterly, Classical Philology, and Hermathena.
Modern critical editions and commentaries draw on the manuscript tradition and earlier printed editions, notably those by J. L. Heiberg, Martin West, D. A. Campbell, G. S. Kirk, E. D. Gerard, and the scholia collections in editions of the Loeb Classical Library. Philological studies analyze the stratification of the scholia using methods from textual criticism, philology, and palaeography, with recent work appearing in venues like Mnemosyne and Transactions of the American Philological Association. Digital humanities projects hosted by institutions such as Perseus Digital Library, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, and national libraries are facilitating new codicological and stemmatological analyses, advancing understanding of the scholiastic corpus and its role in the transmission of Pindaric lyric.