Philolog

I'm just reading R. Schlunk's dissertation on Vergil's use of the Homer Scholia - rather hard to find, full of interesting points, rather amazing in its minute proof of the Roman poet's total familiarity with Alexandrian Homer criticism - and I would like to make an outrageously ambitious suggestion.

But before I do that, one melancholy thought. There is, indeed, no overestimating the learnedness of Vergilian scholars; yet neither can the inhuman immensitity of the Vergil bibliography be overstated. What are the odds that Schlunk's excellent points regarding Vergil's sources for particular lines will ever be included in the next commentary on the Aeneid? Or in any such commentary? No commentator could hope to include every interesting observation ever made on any given line of Vergil by every scholar. That is quite simply beyond human capacity, and ever more so with each passing year. And if one did include Schlunk's notes in a Borgesian omni-commentary, no publisher would print the 17 000 pages required to include his and others' thoughts on the poet in their full length: one would have to cite, to refer, to abbreviate. And in the case of Schlunk's interesting book, this is problematic as it was never published and is extremely hard to find: how many readers will be able to access it? Yet his observations are of permanent value for a reading of the Aeneid.

Well, that's fairly melancholy. But the cure for melancholy is ambition, so here's my ambitious solution.

The essence of the web is connectivity. The difficulty is in finding a way to relate information systematically - there's lots of casual connectivity out there, and more power to it, but as scholars we not only observe the logoi but construct the logoi: we make system. Once the principle of a system has been established, and it has proven itself, the individual connections make themselves. How then can connectivity solve the Schlunk problem? What principle could reweave the web of Vergilian criticism, its strands (as things stand) unstickily wafting off into oblivion?

The clear principle underlying all literary criticism of ancient poetry is that of line-numbering. This is quite a new phenomenon. The first Homer text to be published with line numbers - and that, needless to say, includes manuscripts and papyri editions - appeared in the mid 16th century. However new, however, line-numbering is here to stay. The results are curious. An invisible connection exists between a book published in Hungarian in 1924 on the Aeneid and a book published in English in 2005 on the same subject in that, even if they have never heard of each other, they both quote the text (even if translated into mutually incomprehensible languages) by the same system of book- and line-numbers. The line number takes on a Platonic superreality.

Which is to say, it's Candidate #1 for a unifying principle that /already/ connects Vergilian scholarship, even if those connections remain (very often) inexplicit. And it is thus through the line number that the World Wide Web can express those heretofore inexplicit connections.

Which leads me at long last to my point. The Schlunk problem - not /his/ problem, of course, but the problem of the existence of a very valuable book which cannot be incorporated into a traditional commentary - can be solved by the web, through the system of line number. I say:

Let us have Neo-Scholia.
Let us associate commentary by means of line number.
Let us do so collaboratively: Vergil's text itself is the natural Vergilian wiki.
Let me explain.

Imagine an edition of the Aeneid online. Next to each line would be a little box indicating that the line had been the subject of X number of comments - scholarly comments, drawn from learned tomes; or comments from schoolchildren; or you name it. You click on the box, and are immediately faced with the choice of various categories of comment. You select "scholarship." You wind your way down the hierarchy until you reach "scholia" (this could be organised by meme or anything else). There you find a list of five works which comment on the line in question with regard to scholia; most of them will have to do with Servius, but lo & behold there is Schlunk, whom you have come to respect from reading /other/ lines. You click on his name, and he tells you something interesting about Vergil's negotiation of Zenodotean and Aristarchean views of Nausicaa. Perhaps you had not known Schlunk's comment existed. Certainly you had no idea it fit so well with Barchiesi's remarks (available nearby, regarding the same line) on the Ovidian intertext. You are prompted in turn to add a comment on Vergil as a conduit for Alexandrian scholarship to Ovid, referencing both Schlunk and Barchiesi. You have casually enriched knowledge, and done so in a public place where you comment will endure (perhaps after a benign stylistic edit). You have accomplished a day's paper-trail work in approximately 112 seconds.

This is a dream scenario, of course - but not impossible. "Indices locorum" already exist, so one could salvage a great deal of Vergilian criticism, inputing its contents by line number onto the new Vergil-scholiwiki; and future work could be actually produced /on the scholiwiki/ and not on printed pages which would later have to be inputed. Living scholars could take responsibility for inputing their own observations; dedicated teams of graduate students could take care of the 19th century. Of course individual entries could interlink, more and more, and would be commented upon in turn: the Homer scholia set the precedent for this! The scholarly dialogue regarding the Aeneid would be transfered into intimate contact not only with the poem itself but with all the dialogues of yesteryear, frozen cryogenically (by line) beside the text itself. The problem of compelling some poor soul to labour for fifty relentless years only to have his dream of definitiveness blow away in Time's cheerless gale would be solved. One could even personalise one's own interface with the omni-commentary, selecting such themes and topics as particularly synch with one's peculiar love of Vergil.

Of course, this would not be the last word in scholarship. I rather prefer the independent, global approach to a work of art - in which the line number means little. But there is also a great deal of information about to be destroyed forever - about to achieve 99% inaccessibility - unless we seize the opportunity the Web offers to preserve it. We can acquiesce in its destruction, or we can remember our scholarly duty, which is not least a duty to our own eternity.

[well, it's not Friedrich Engels, but I tried]