BMCR 2009.02.06, Antonina Kalinina, Der Horazkommentar des Pomponius

Antonina Kalinina, Der Horazkommentar des Pomponius Porphyrio:
Untersuchungen zu seiner Terminologie und Textgeschichte. Palingenesia,
Bd. 91.  Stuttgart:  Steiner, 2007.  Pp. 154.  ISBN 9783515091022.
EUR 38.00.

Reviewed by James Zetzel, Columbia University ([email protected])
Word count:  1918 words
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Even among classicists, Pomponius Porphyrio is not a household name.
The real Porphyrio was a scholar who worked in the early third century.
The one useful chronological indication (in Charisius) shows that he
made use of the dictionary of Festus and was in turn used by Julius
Romanus; hence probably he was active around 200 CE. What survives
under his name is a commentary on Horace which contains the usual
amalgam of useful knowledge, idiocy, and misinformation and also shows
an interesting taste (appropriate to his date) for archaic literature,
displaying (or having taken from someone else) a broad and fairly
precise knowledge of Plautus and Lucilius. His comments on rhetoric and
even on grammar are sometimes useful. But 'Porphyrio' is not exactly by
the real Pomponius Porphyrio: it is generally agreed, with some
variations, that the extant text stems from the fifth century, not the
third,  and that it has been to some (not altogether clear) degree
altered both by addition and by simplification, as is usual in the
transmission of commentaries. That does not diminish the usefulness of
what we have, but it does raise questions about the patterns of
scholarship and its transmission in late antiquity.

The commentaries on Horace that survive from late antiquity are a mess,
and one that could still use sorting out. Traditionally, two related
'authors' have been recognized, Porphyrio and Pseudo-Acro (Acro was a
very good scholar, earlier than Porphyrio, but what goes under his name
has not for a long time been thought to have anything to do with him):
Porphyrio is relatively terse, and was pillaged by Pseudo-Acro, who is
often wordy and even less to the point than most ancient commentaries.
But about 40 years ago it was argued by G. Noske that Pseudo-Acro is
not one pseudepigraphic work, but at least two: the commentary on the
Odes is not part of the same work as the commentary on the hexameter
poetry (it is more complicated than that, but let that pass).[[1]] In
retrospect, that discovery is hardly surprising: the commentary on the
Odes is transmitted in a different manuscript (Parisinus Latinus 7900A,
one of the most interesting manuscripts of Latin poetic commentary)
written in a different country (Italy, probably Milan) from the many
busy northern European manuscripts of scholia and commentary on the
rest of Horace. One might also mention that there are lesser sets of
scholia too in the margins of many manuscripts, as well as the
mysterious 'commentator Cruquianus,' a set of notes printed in a
sixteenth century edition of Horace based on a lost manuscript, but
containing unique and unquestionably ancient material. Faced with this
mess, one heaves a deep sigh, picks up an axe, and heads into the
tangled thicket.

As far as Porphyrio is concerned, the first (and until recently pretty
much the only) serious attempt to distinguish the early layer from
later accretions was Paul Wessner's 1893 dissertation.[[2]] Wessner
established some useful criteria for recognizing interpolations; his
arguments are summarized in the first chapter of Antonina Kalinina's
monograph. Wessner was by far the most intelligent student of Latin
scholia in the past century and more; but, as his edition of the
scholia vetera on Juvenal shows, he believed strongly in carving an
'original' commentary out of the mass of late antique and Carolingian
accretions. In the case of Juvenal, it works fairly well because of the
existence of trustworthy guides to the ancient commentary in the Bobbio
fragment and the scholia of the Pithoeanus. For Porphyrio, the fates
have been less kind: there are a few Carolingian manuscripts that need
to be balanced against a humanistic tradition. Nothing provides an easy
way to pry the extant commentary apart.

Prying apart the text of Porphyrio, however, is just what K. wants, in
a relatively restricted area, to do. She examines just one aspect of
the language of the text, technical rhetorical terminology. In
particular, she looks at the uses of the words allegoria, translatio,
metaphora, metonymia, and figura together with other words derived from
them (allegorice, figurate and the like); she examines their meanings,
uses, and contexts; and she tries to argue from inconsistencies among
those uses that certain passages should be seen as interpolations. By
removing such inconsistencies (by emendation or deletion), she wants to
get a little closer to the ur-Porphyrio.

K.'s analysis is careful and painstaking, but it is not altogether
successful, for several reasons. In the first place, simple numbers:
there are only 16 uses of translatio or translatiue in the commentary,
nine of metonymia or metonymicos; and while there are rather more
instances of allegoria and figura, there are hardly enough to be
statistically significant. One simply cannot say that one usage is
right, the other wrong, when they can be counted on the figures of two
hands. More important is her assumption (with which Wessner would have
agreed) that a given commentator will use one and only one form of
words to describe the same stylistic or linguistic phenomenon. The
rigidity and circularity of such an assumption is obvious: only if one
assumes that each person uses only one form of words can one use that
to emend the text to prove that each person uses only one form of
words. Some people are probably like that, but it is not a particularly
realistic assumption, and in fact, the very flexible transmission of
commentaries between the fourth and the ninth centuries suggests both
that multiple sources fed into single texts and that single works were
used by multiple followers. No extant text of ancient commentary is a
monolithic whole, and it is not likely that we can ever reconstruct or
emend our way to a single ur-text. It just doesn't work that way.

Beyond the basic methodological problem, however, is the simple fact
that K. is working with a very small body of text (and with very few
particular lexical items) and has relatively little to correct. When
she does have enough to work with, moreover, the results are sometimes
very odd, as with the largest group of passages she discusses as a set,
those in which the two phrases figurata elocutio and figura elocutionis
appear. The first of these appears in five passages (and one closely
related), the second in three (and one closely related). K.'s decision
is that in all instances figurata elocutio should be emended, and that
figura elocutionis is the 'correct' expression for Porphyrio. There is
an argument to be made for K.'s view: figura elocutionis is certainly
the less common expression in commentaries, and as a rhetorical term it
fits what we can observe about Porphyrio's interests. The difficulty is
that the emendations seem at best unnecessary, at worst quite wrong.
Thus, at Carm. 2.9.17-18, she emends 'Graeca elocutione figuratum est'
to 'Graeca figura'. The latter phrase is certainly common, but there
are parallels for the former: Servius (Comm. in Don. 4.411.24K) uses
'Graeca elocutio' and (on Aen. 12.25) 'elocutio figurata de Graeco'. At
Carm. 1.6.3-4, 'quam rem cumque ferox . . . miles te duce gesserit' not
only is the emendation unnecessary, but K. misunderstands the text. The
note (unemended) reads: 'Figurata elocutio: nam cum dixisset
"scriberis", intulit "Quam rem miles gesserit te duce." Simplex autem
haec elocutio erat: scribentur res, quascumque miles gesserit te duce.'
K. (following Diederich) thinks that the figure is the tmesis of
quam...cumque, but the opposition between 'figurata' and 'simplex'
shows that the figure is the switch from second person to third. And in
emending 'figurata elocutio' to 'figura elocutionis', K diminishes (as
she recognizes) the balance in the note between 'figurata' and
'simplex'.

To say that usage of technical terms should never be regularized would
be excessively conservative, but to say that they should always be
regularized fails to recognize the amorphousness of the tradition. It
is possible that figura elocutionis represents an early layer of the
tradition (perhaps Porphyrio himself) while figurata elocutio is a
later one; but it is also possible either that the two phrases
represent different sources amalgamated at a later stage of the
tradition or even that they are used by the same person in slightly
different contexts. What K. does not seem to realize is that the two in
fact do come from very different contexts: figurata elocutio is a
frequent phrase in scholiastic language, and in that context elocutio
merely means 'choice of expression'--other similar uses are absoluta
elocutio, honesta elocutio, or antiqua elocutio, and even Latinior
elocutio, all found in Servius. Figura elocutionis, however, appears
nowhere in Servius, and except in Porphyrio only (as far as I can see
from consulting PHI and TLL) in rhetorical texts where it means, as one
expects, 'figure of speech' as opposed to 'figure of thought.' When
Porphyrio uses it, it should probably be understood as meaning 'this
passage displays a (rhetorical) figure of speech,' while figurata
elocutio means 'this word or construction is used in an interesting or
irregular way.'

In this respect, K. is not only too dogmatic about the meaning of
technical terms, she is also curiously uninterested in parallels from
other scholiastic texts that might help locate the various layers of
Porphyrio in the tradition of late antique scholarship. In many ways,
this lack of interest is surprising, as she is the only scholar I know
to mention a curious feature that occurs only once in Porphyrio but
frequently (as K. notes) in Donatus' commentary on Terence, the
numbering of rhetorical figures, as in apodosis prima and anacolouthon
tertium. This is, as K. notes, an otherwise unknown (and as far as I
know, completely unstudied) system of classifying rhetorical figures;
it very much deserves closer study. But if Porphyrio shares a rare
feature with Donatus and shares some of the technical language of
stylistic analysis with Donatus' pupil Servius, then it would be worth
exploring further whether the extant (fifth-century) Porphyrio is
indebted to Servius' methods as is, for instance, Pseudo-Asconius on
Cicero, or if the original (third-century) Porphyrio was someone to
whom Servius and Donatus were themselves indebted.

If K.'s attempt to use a limited range of technical terms to emend and
to analyze the text of Porphyrio is not very successful, her
examination of the distribution of these terms over the text of
Porphyrio leads to one very interesting and significant discovery,
namely that the terms she studies are found throughout the commentary,
except in the commentaries on the Carmen Saeculare and Ars Poetica,
where they never appear. The absence from the commentary on the Carmen
may be simple coincidence--it is a short text--but it is clearly not
that for the Ars, and K. reveals a completely different set of Greek
critical terms found in the commentary on the Ars and nowhere else in
Porphyrio. While it has long been known that various ancient scholars
commented on one or another separate work of Horace, this is the first
evidence I know that such commentaries have left traces of their
individuality in one of the extant texts. K. studies the commentary on
the Ars carefully in terms of both language and structure, and that is
in itself a worthwhile contribution.

In sum, K.'s major argument is careful and clearly set out, but is much
too dogmatic and ultimately does not lead very far. The discovery about
the commentary on the Ars, however, is of genuine importance. If K. had
been willing to follow her own original observations and given up on
the textual archaeology of Porphyrio, she could have written a much
more satisfying monograph.

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Notes:


1.   G. Noske, Quaestiones Pseudoacroneae (Munich, 1969).

2.   P. Wessner, Quaestiones Porphyrioneae in Commentationes philologae
Ienenses 5 (1894) 153-96.