Scholia (: scholium or scholion, from , "comment", "interpretation") are grammar, critical, or explanatory comments – original or copied from prior commentaries – which are inserted in the margin of the manuscript of ancient authors, as glosses. One who writes scholia is a scholiast. The earliest attested use of the word dates to the 1st century BC.[
Cicero Ad Atticum 16.7.
]
History
Ancient scholia are important sources of information about many aspects of the ancient world, especially ancient literary history. The earliest scholia, usually anonymous, date to the 5th or 4th century BC (such as the
scholia minora to the
Iliad). The practice of compiling scholia continued to late Byzantine times, outstanding examples being Archbishop Eustathius' massive commentaries to Homer in the 12th century and the
scholia recentiora of
Thomas Magister, Demetrius Triclinius and Manuel Moschopoulos in the 14th.
Scholia were altered by successive copyists and owners of the manuscript, and in some cases, increased to such an extent that there was no longer room for them in the margin, and it became necessary to make them into a separate work. At first, they were taken from one commentary only, and subsequently from several. This is indicated by the repetition of the Headword ("headword"), or by the use of such phrases as "or thus", "alternatively", "according to some", to introduce different explanations, or by the explicit quotation of different sources.
Important sets of scholia
Greek
The most important are those on the
Iliad, especially those found in the 10th-century manuscripts discovered by Villoison in 1781 in the Biblioteca Marciana in
Venice (see further
Venetus A, Homeric scholarship), which are based on Aristarchus and his school.
[J E Sandys, A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (London 1894) p. 65] The scholia on
Hesiod,
Pindar,
Sophocles,
Aristophanes and Apollonius Rhodius are also extremely important.
Latin
In
Latin, the most important are those of Servius on
Virgil;
[J E Sandys, A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (London 1894) p. 683] of
Helenius Acron and Porphyrio on
Horace;
[A Palmer, The Satires of Horace (London 1920) p. xxxvii] and of
Aelius Donatus on
Terence.
[J E Sandys, A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (London 1894) p. 197]
Also of interest are the scholia on
Juvenal attached to the good manuscript P;
[J D Duff, Fourteen Satires of Juvenal (Cambridge 1925) p. xliii] while there are also scholia on
Statius,
[R Sweeny, Prolegomena to an Edition of Scholia on Statius (1969) p. 2-8] especially associated with the name Lactantius Placidus.
[H J Rose, A Handbook of Latin Literature (1967) p. 483]
List of ancient commentaries
Some ancient scholia are of sufficient quality and importance to be labelled "commentaries" instead. The existence of a commercial translation is often used to distinguish between "scholia" and "commentaries". The following is a chronological list of ancient commentaries written defined as those for which commercial translations have been made:
Other uses
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Baruch Spinoza provided his own scholia to many of the propositions in his Ethics, commentaries upon and expansions of the individual propositions, or sometimes short conclusions to sections of argumentation running over a number of propositions.
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In modern mathematics texts, scholia are marginal notes which may amplify a line of reasoning or compare it with proofs given earlier. A famous example is Thomas Bayes' scholium, in which he presents a justification for assuming a continuous uniform distribution for the prior of the parameter of a Bernoulli process.
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Scholia is an academic journal in the field of Classics.
[ Scholia, Scholia reviews ]
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Scholia is a search engine relying on Wikidata, mainly for scientific publications.
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Nicolás Gómez Dávila was one of the most radical critics of modernity whose work consists almost entirely of aphorisms which he called "escolios" ("glosses") of an implicit text.
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In each of Bill Blackbeard's Krazy Kat Sunday strip collections, the back of the book includes an Ignatz Mouse Debaffler Page: a page of notes that clarify references that have faded into obscurity or may otherwise require explanation. When a strip has a scholium about it, the lower outer corner of the page is marked with the likeness of Ignatz.
See also
Citations
Sources
-
Eleanor Dickey. Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises. Oxford: OUP for the APA, 2007. .
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Reynolds, L.D. and N.G. Wilson. Scribes & Scholars: a Guide to the Transmission of Greek & Latin Literature, 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. .
External links
