What Is It That Philologists Do Exactly?

HOLT PARKER – UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

“If any one of them can explain it”, said Alice, “I’ll”
give him sixpence. I don’t believe there’s an atom of
meaning in it”.
The jury all wrote down on their slates, “She doesn’t
believe there’s an atom of meaning in it”, but none of
them attempted to explain the paper.
“If there’s no meaning in it”, said the King, “that saves
a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find
any. And yet I don’t know”, he went on, spreading out
the verses on his knee, and looking at them with one
eye, “I seem to see some meaning in them, after all”.
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Ch. 12

I. Meaning

We begin in wonder and bewilderment. We wander into the hall of Oceanic

Art at the Metropolitan Museum. We look at the gigantic “ancestor pole”
and we wonder, “What does that mean?”
And so we begin with the one most important question, What does this
mean? This question is central to the Seder and is posed at various points
in the Bible: “What mean ye by this service?” (Exodus 12.26). Indeed the
role of archaeology within the human sciences might be encompassed in
two questions from Joshua: “What mean ye by these stones?” (4:6) and
“What mean these stones?” (4:21). The first question is anthropology (ask ­
ing informants), the second is archaeology (asking the material). 1
1
I will return to archaeology at the end: the classical trope of ring composition.
152 Holt Parker

To be aphoristic the first question a philologist asks is, “What does this
mean?” The first question an archaeologist asks is, “What does this do?”
But the second question the new archaeologist asks is, “What does this
thing mean?” and the second question the new philologist should ask is,
“What does this text do?”
We philologists – Nietzsche’s phrase, by which he and I mean classical
philology – have one advantage over our colleagues, and that is ignorance. 2
We are faced with texts that are clearly not transparent, manifestly not self­
contained. They are written in dead languages. We need dictionaries and
grammars to hand. We want to know what they mean. Now, we may also be
interested in deconstructing the opposition of male and female within a he ­
gemonic discourse, or identifying the voice of the subaltern in Pompeian
graffiti, but first we need to know what it means.3
So what do we do? Philologists read. Therefore, the things I want to
look at – look through – are primarily theories that address the problem of
reading. And with the “linguistic turn”, theories of reading come to domin ­
ate in the human sciences. 4 Accordingly, our focus is firmly on semantics,
on hermeneutics, and the god we worship is Hermes.
So let us look at reading. Then we can look at what is peculiar about
reading ancient literature.

II. What happens when we read?

Let us begin with the one of the greatest openings in English literature,
P. G. Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters (1938):

2
Millar (1981:63): “Those who study and teach the history of the ancient world suf­
fer from a great disadvantage, which we find difficult to admit even to ourselves: in a
perfectly literal sense we do not know what we are talking about. Of course, we can dis­
pose of a vast range of accumulated knowledge about what we are talking about. . . .
We can study the remains of temples, the iconography of gods and goddesses, the
nature of myth, ritual and sacrifice; but how and in what way did all this provide an im­
portant or intelligible context for a peasant in the fields?”
3
But to get ahead of ourselves, learning what it means may very well necessitate
deconstructing the opposition of male and female within a hegemonic discourse.
4
For surveys and criticisms, see Rorty 1992/1967, Spiegel 2005. My purpose here
is not to give an exposition of literary theory for classicists, or even a full discussion of
the theorists whom I do touch upon, but merely to grab certain points that I have found
useful in figuring out the role of the reader of ancient texts.
 What Is it that Philologists Do Exactly? 153

I reached out a hand from under the blankets and rang the bell for Jeeves.
“Good evening, Jeeves”.
“Good morning, sir”.
This surprised me.
“Is it morning?”
“Yes, sir”.
“Are you sure? It seems very dark outside”.
“There is a fog sir. If you will recollect, we are now in autumn—season of
mists and mellow fruitfulness”.
“Oh? Yes. Yes, I see. Well, be that as it may, get me one of those bracers of
yours, will you?”
“I have one in readiness, sir, in the icebox”.
Even within a couple of lines, we have formed a pretty clear picture in our
heads of what is going on. So we have learned that:
1. Bertie Wooster is in bed. Our initial curiosity about the movement (“I
reached out a hand”) is now satisfied (“from under the blankets”).
2. If we didn’t already know from our general cultural or literary know­
ledge (i.e., if we’ve never read or heard of Wodehouse) that Bertie and
Jeeves are respectively master and man, we can perhaps deduce it from the
“sir” and “rang the bell for”.
3. It is morning. This we’re told explicitly, but it also helps establish a
later point.
4. It’s autumn. We’re told this explicitly, too, but the way of telling us
helps establish that
5. Jeeves has read Keats’ ode, “To Autumn”.
6. Bertie hasn’t, and is not perhaps very intelligent.
7. Bertie’s been to an all­night party. At best he lost tract of time, at
worst he doesn’t fully remember getting home. Oh, and he’s hung over. All
this, beginning with the hint at “I reached out a hand”, is confirmed by the
single word “bracer”. 5
8. He’s utterly dependent on his gentleman’s gentleman.
9. Jeeves knows Bertie’s habits very well: the bracer was already pre­
pared.

5
Oxford English Dictionary: “3. That which braces (the nerves) spec. A drink taken
to brace one up (colloq., orig. U.S.)”.
154 Holt Parker

10. And though not part of the author’s intention, 6 the phrases “rang the
bell for” and “icebox” place the events in a time of servants and iceboxes,
in this case, 1938.
The author proceeds to confirm our set of initial hypotheses in the next
paragraph.
“He shimmered out, and I sat up in bed with that rather unpleasant feeling you
get sometimes that you’re going to die in about five minutes.”
This is an astonishing amount of information to pack into a couple of sen ­
tences. Which leads to our next question:

III. How exactly do we come to figure all this out?

We can be more explicit about how this “picture” forms in our head, or
rather, how we piece together this picture, by turning to various theories of
The Act of Reading (a title by Wolfgang Iser). I want to return to certain
phenomenological views of reading, that is, how the work we are reading
appears as a phenomenon to our senses.
The work of Roman Ingarden, a pupil of Husserl, is especially useful in
setting out the stages of reading and the various strata of the literary work. 7
According to Ingarden’s analysis, as we read, we work our way up a hier ­
archy of meaning, beginning with the “word­sounds” (Wortlaute), that is,
the base level of phonology. Here lie all the effects on the reader of meter,
alliteration, assonance, and sound patterning. The next level is that of “se ­
mantic units” (Bedeutungseinheiten), words, sentences, and higher struc­
tures. The third stratum is labeled the “schematized aspects” ( schematis­
ierte Ansichten), which lead in turn to the object of the exercise, the “rep­
resented objects” (dargestellte Gegenstände). 8 The reader passes from
schemata to representation by a process Ingarden calls “concretization” 9:

6
Yes, authors have intensions. The point is, we may not be able to know what they
are from only the author’s work. Wodehouse did not put in the detail about the icebox
in order to locate the reader in time, as a writer of a historical novel today might,
though it has that effect.
7
Ingarden is opaque even by the standards of philosophical German. Clear over­
views in Ray 1984:27­33, 41­50; Selden 1995:295­303.
8
Ingarden 1965:26 = 1973a:30. The phonetic level occupies pp. 34­61, the meaning
units pp. 62­216. He then jumps to represented objects, pp. 217­54, and passes rather
too rapidly over the schemata, 264­66. A succinct statement at Ingarden 1968:10­11 =
1973b:12­13.
9
Ingarden 1965:353­80 = 1973a:332­55, esp. 336­41; 1968:49­63 = 1973b:50­63.
 What Is it that Philologists Do Exactly? 155

“I call this complementing determination the ‘concretization’ of the portrayed

objects. In concretization the peculiar cocreative activity of the reader comes
into play. On his own initiative and with his own imagination he ‘fills out’
various places of indeterminacy with elements chosen from among many pos­
sible or permissible elements.” (Ingarden 1968: 52 = 1973b: 53).
Ingarden uses the example of a story beginning, “An old man was sitting at
a table”. The table is clearly a table, but the author does not tell us whether
it is made of wood or iron, has three legs or four. More importantly, we as­
sume the old man was sitting on a chair or stool, though nothing was said
directly about it. Should it later turn out that the old man is Japanese, we
may erase the chair from our picture. If the old man turns out to be a king,
we may change the chair to a throne. The role of the reader is to fill in
these “places of indeterminacy” (Unbestimmtheitsstellen), to complete the
author’s work. 10
How “concretization” works was explained more clearly by Wolfgang
Iser. As we read, we form a continuous stream of images (Gestalten) in
which we complete the author’s schemata. “It is as if the schema were a
hollow form into which the reader is invited to pour his own store of know ­
ledge” (Iser 1978:143). Just as we integrate words into sentences, sen ­
tences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters, so we integrate these
Gestalten, our hypotheses about what we think the text says, into a hier ­
archy of meaning (Iser 1978:119­28). Iser distinguishes three parts to the
act of reading: the repertoire, the strategies, and the realization:
“The conventions necessary for the establishment of a situation might more fit­
tingly be called the repertoire of the text. The accepted procedures we shall
call the strategies, and the reader’s participation will henceforth be referred to
as the realization.
The repertoire consists of all the familiar territory within the text. This may be
in the form of references to earlier works, or to social and historical norms, or
to the whole culture from which the text has emerged—in brief what the
Prague structuralists have called the ‘extratextual reality’.” 11

10
Ingarden 1965:264 = 1973a:249. For “Unbestimmtheitsstellungen” in general, see
1965:261­70 = 1973a:246­54; 1968:300­3 = 1973b:289­92.
11
Iser 1978:69, see also Iser 1974:274­94, esp. 288. On “textual strategies”, see
Harari 1979.
156 Holt Parker

IV. Do you realize what you’ve just written?

The metaphor of “realization” is the core of phenomenological theories of

the act of reading. “Realization” is a technical term from music (early mu ­
sic especially). Just as a musical text consists only of a skeleton (e.g.,
figured bass), a schema that is completed in the performance, so, too the
reader realizes the text. “The process of image­building begins, then, with
the schemata of the text; in assembling it, he [the reader] will occupy the
position set out for him [by the author in the schemata], and so create a se ­
quence of images that eventually result in his constituting the meaning of
the text” (Iser 1978:141). When we read, we take what Umberto Eco calls
“inferential walks” (1979:31­32) 12 We rapidly, usually unconsciously, for­
mulate hypotheses, confirm or reject them, test them against what we
know, and then revise them in the light of what the author tells us. 13
“Literary texts take on their reality by being read” ( Iser 1978:34). Thus
the reader is, to a very real extent, a fellow worker with the poet. As Valéry
said, “C’est l’exécution du poème qui est le poème”. 14 So, too, Barthes:
“Parce que l’enjeu du travail littéraire (de la littérature comme travail),
c’est de faire du lecteur, non plus un consommateur, mais un producteur du
texte”.15
As so often, Shakespeare was there first:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings
And eke out our performance with your mind.
Henry V, I.prol.23­31, III.prol.35.

12
Eco’s “inferential walks” correspond to Barthes’ “hermeneutic code”, Eco taking
the reader’s point of view; Barthes, the author’s (Barthes 1970:24, 26; 1974:17, 19).
13
Cf. Gadamer 2004:269.
14
Valéry 1957:I, 1350: “It is the realization of the poem that is the poem”.
15
Barthes 1970:10; 1974:4: “The goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to
make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text”. Cf. Blanchot’s para­
doxical formulation (1955/1988:254; 1982:193): “Lire, ce serait donc, non pas écrire à
nouveau le livre, mais faire que le livre s’écrive ou soit écrit, – cette fois sans l’intermé­
diaire de l’écrivain, sans personne qui l’écrive” (“To read is not to write the book again,
but to allow the book to be written – his time all by itself, without the intermediary of
the writer, without anyone’s writing it”.).
 What Is it that Philologists Do Exactly? 157

V. The repertoire

Kein Text je verfaßt worden ist, um philologisch von

Philologen gelesen und “interpretiert” zu werden.
(No text was ever written to be read and interpreted
philologically by philologists).
Walther Bulst (1954:323).

And Philip ran thither to him, and heard him read the
prophet Esaias, and said, “Understandest thou what
thou readest?” And he said, “How can I, except some
man should guide me?”
Acts 8:30­31

Let’s look more closely at the repertoire, for this is where classical philo ­
logy differs most from her sisters. The repertoire consists of all the know ­
ledge of the language, of literature, of the real world, that the author pre­
supposes his intended readers have. Chladenius set down the idea very
clearly (1742:82; Mueller­Vollmer 1985:55): “A history which is told or
written to someone assumes that that person will use his knowledge of the
prevailing conditions in order to form a reasonable resolution”. 16
This is what Eco has called the “cultural encyclopedia” or “social treas ­
ury” (Eco 1992:67­68):
“I mean by social treasury not only a given language as a set of grammatical
rules, but also the whole encyclopedia that the performances of that language
have implemented, namely the cultural conventions that that language has
produced and the very history of the previous interpretations of many texts,
comprehending the text that the reader is in the course of reading...”
Barthes, too, labeled this code “the cultural” (1974:18):
“The unit has been formed by a gnomic code, and this code is one of the nu­
merous codes of knowledge or wisdom to which the text continually refers; we
shall call them in a very general way cultural codes (even though, of course,
all codes are cultural), or rather, since they afford the discourse a basis in sci­
16
§149: “Eine Historie, die erzehlt, oder an jemanden geschrieben wird, hat ihre
Absicht, welche ordentlich darinne bestehet, dass der andere den Begriff, den er von
den dermaligen Umständen hat, zur Ergreiffung eines vernünfftigen Entschlusses
brauche”. See Henn 1976.
158 Holt Parker

enti6c or moral authority, we shall call them reference codes (REF. Gnomic
code).”17
But Barthes continues (1974:18; 1970:27):
“The cultural codes are references to a science or a body of knowledge; in
drawing attention to them, we [i.e. Barthes in his analysis] merely indicate the
type of knowledge (physical, physiological, medical, psychological, literary,
historical, etc.) referred to, without going so far as to construct (or recon­
struct) the culture they express.” 18
Barthes does not have to construct the culture of Sarrasine, since it is his.
But I, the non­native speaker of French, need help. “Midnight had just
sounded from the clock of the Elysée­Bourbon”? What the hell does that
mean? I need to have the culture constructed (or reconstructed) for me.
And Barthes kindly does so (1974:21; 1970:28):
“A metonymy leads from the Elysee­Bourbon to the seme Wealth, since the
Faubourg Saint­Honoré is a wealthy neighborhood. This wealth is itself con­
noted: a neighborhood of nouveaux riches, the Faubourg Saint­Honoré refers
by synechdoche to the Paris of the Bourbon Restoration, a mythic place of
sudden fortunes whose origins are suspect; where gold is produced without an
origin, diabolically (the symbolic definition of speculation) (SEM. Wealth).”
Only now do I understand.
To hazard a new definition of the repertoire, more precisely, the reper ­
toire consists of all the things the author does not say, indeed of the things
he never even thinks of saying. He need not specify a chair for “sat at the
table”, since we all know that we sit at tables on chairs. This would not be
the case for The Tale of Genji.19 In short, the repertoire is nothing other

17
Barthes 1970:25: “L’énoncé est proféré par une voix collective, anonyme, dont
l’origine est.la sapience humaine. L’unité est donc issue d’un code gnomique et ce code
est l’un des très nombreux codes de savoir ou de sagesse auxquels le texte ne cesse de
se référer; on les appellera d’une façon très générale des codes culturels (bien qu’à vrai
dire tout code soit culturel), ou encore, puisqu’ils permettent au discours de s’appuyer
sur une autorité scientifique ou morale, des codes de références (REF. Code
gnomique)”.
18
Barthes 1970:27: “Les codes culturels enfin sont les citations d’une science ou
d’une sagesse; en relevant ces codes, on se bornera à indiquer le type de savoir
(physique, physiologique, médical, psychologique, littéraire, historique, etc.) qui est
cité, sans jamais aller jusqu’à construire – ou reconstruire – la culture qu’ils articulent”.
19
A question of method (one for a later time) is how do we fill in the spaces in an
foreign/ancient text both well and sensibly. To put the matter differently, where do we
stop? How precisely do I have to image the poem? “Chair” is different for us (Danish
 What Is it that Philologists Do Exactly? 159

than the hors­texte, the “outside the text”, that Derrida claimed “il n’y a
pas de”.20
When reading a contemporary text, written in our own language, set in
our own culture, we do almost all of this work unconsciously (Ingarden
1973b:53). That is why all this minute anatomizing of the process of read ­
ing (like any detailed description of a familiar process, such as eating or
sex) looks so odd. However, nothing shows how much linguistic, social,
literary, and practical knowledge the author assumes in his audience, how
much cultural knowledge is embedded in the text, than the experience of
reading a text which is not set in our own time, language, or culture. As the
distance between us and the author increases, so does the gap between
what we know and what the author assumed his audience knew. So too the
work that we as readers must do grows more explicit.
Classics offers to literary theory the gifts of time and space. The reper ­
toire that a Roman author assumed his readers could draw upon in order to
fill out his schemata is radically different from the cultural encyclopedia
that we possess. The painful process of elucidation makes clear the levels
of reading, the strategies, the realizations, the cultural referents. In short,
the classical repertoire shows precisely how vast, how essential is the hors­
texte, and how very much it exists. Here, too, I think, Kristeva and Barthes’
idea of intertexuality is better understood as a recognition of the role of the
repertoire in reading, which includes, among many other things, other
texts, more specifically, at the level of genre.

modern) than for the Elizabethans (oak and rushes), but in a poem “chair” may be just
“thing for sitting on”: “Jenny kissed me when we met / Jumping from the chair she sat
in”­Leigh Hunt. Who cares what kind of chair? Do we need to visualize Victorian
heavy horse­hide? But in the Odyssey, thronos is not the same as hedra, and it makes a
difference who’s sitting in what. The classical scholar runs the danger of returning to
Hatvany’s Die Wissenschaft des nicht Wissenswerten (1914), where the primary discus­
sion of Catullus 8 (“Miser Catulle”) concerns what year it took place (12) and Plato’s
Protagoras grinds to a halt to consider “the still unresolved problem of door­shutting in
antiquity” (14: “das noch unaufgeklärte wichtige Problem des antiken Türschlosses.”)
20
Derrida 1976:158. It is an interesting exercise to deconstruct this famous utter­
ance. Derrida claims “there has never been anything but writing; there has never been
anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a
chain of differential references” (159). All very jolly; but “supplements” therefore de­
pend on all the author did not, need not, could not say. The act of interpreting some ­
thing as text depends on the assumption of all that is not text. Otherwise, the text would
have to specify everything in the universe of discourse and we find ourselves walking
on Borges’ map (“On Exactitude in Science” 1998:325) or attending the Academy of
Lagado (where, “since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient
for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular
business they are to discourse on”.– Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, III.5.
160 Holt Parker

VI. So what is it that philologists do exactly?

We are now in a position to attempt an answer to our question, “What is it

that philologists do exactly?”
Croce’s answer may be the best (1966:789): “The reader of poetry asks
the critic to remove the obstacles and help him to enjoy the poetry; that,
and nothing else”. 21 But the obstacles for an ancient text are not merely
those of establishing the correct text. Boeckh, one of the pioneers of sys­
tematic thinking on the discipline of classics, divided the role of the philo ­
logist (like Gaul) into three parts (1886:81; Mueller­Vollmer 1994:135):
“In explicating the text, philologist must understand:
1. The writing, the symbol of the thing signifying.
2. Language, the thing signifying.
3. The thing signified, the knowledge contained in language.”
The first, says Boeckh, is the job of the palaeographer, mere eikasia [“rep­
resentation”]. The second is the job of the grammarian, the level of doxa
[“belief, opinion”]. But the third: “Only when one presses on to the thing
signified, the thought, does genuine knowledge arise, episteme”22.
Our job is to help modern readers, beginning with ourselves, read an ­
cient texts. We must therefore supply the full repertoire contemporary
readers needed to complete an ancient author’s work. We have not only to
understand the repertoire, we have to recreate it.
So our first stab at an answer:
The job of the philologist is to give to the modern reader all the relev ­
ant information that the author assumed the original readers would have
had in order to read the work.

21
Croce 1936:412: “Il lettore di poesia chiede al critico unicamente di sgombrargli
gli ostacoli e aiutarlo al godimento della poesi”.
22
“Da nämlich die Hauptmasse der sprachlichen Tradition durch die Schrift fixirt
ist, so hat der Philologe bei der Erklärung 1) das Zeichen des Bezeichnenden, die
Schrift, 2) das Bezeichnende, die Sprache, 3) das Bezeichnete, das in der Sprache en­
thaltene Wissen zu verstehen. Der Paläograph bleibt beim Zeichen des Zeichens stehen;
es ist dies die Erkenntnissstufe, welche Platon in der Republik (VI, 509) εἰκασία nennt;
der blosse Grammatiker verharrt bei dem Zeichen für das Bezeichnete, auf der Erkennt­
nissstufe der δόξα; nur wenn man bis zum Bezeichneten selbst, bis zum Gedanken
vordringt, entsteht ein wirkliches Wissen, ἐπιστήμη”.
 What Is it that Philologists Do Exactly? 161

VII. The classical repertoire

Jonathan Culler in Structuralist Poetics is perhaps the most explicit of the

literary theorists in defining exactly what goes into the repertoire, the ex ­
tratextual reality that we bring to bear on any text we read (1975:138­48).
He distinguishes a number of different levels of what he calls “naturaliza­
tion” or, borrowing a term from Tódorov (1987:85­94), vraisemblance.
The first is what Culler labels the “real”: “This is best defined as a dis­
course which requires no justification because it seems to derive directly
from the structure of the world” (1975:140). Though Culler does not label
it as such, this is the level of de Saussure’s langue, i.e., the actual meaning
of words, at a particular time and place. Here is all the realia, the know­
ledge that I, the reader, have of natural phenomena, objects and actions,
how they are named, the way they function, etc. Such knowledge would
seem to be universal, but what I know about my world, what Catullus knew
about his world, and what an Inuit knows about his are quite different. We
refer to different languages, and hence different worlds. 23
The second level is “cultural vraisemblance”. Again, though not labeled
as such, this is the level of sociolect, of de Saussure’s parole, i.e., the
meaning that words have for a specific group. Here we find not only the
meanings of individual words (some of which cannot be used by outsiders)
but the vast set of social assumptions, the encoded prejudices of a culture.
This is Flaubert’s Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues. If I say, “As boring as
an insurance salesman”, my fellow Americans know what I mean. This is
why the poetry of social relations, Catullus on napkins, Horace on drink ­
ing, is sometimes so difficult to understand and so invaluable to our under ­
standing. The poems are comprehensible only as part of a social language,
which we in turn have to deduce from the poems.
As in any cultural matter, it is very easy for the foreigner to go wrong
here. What, exactly, is so wrong with yellow stockings and cross­gartering?
24
No one really knows. For Rome, I need to know just why it is so wrong
for Maecenas goes around with his tunic too loose, 25 what the big deal is
about turbot, 26 why it’s such a dead give­away that a man who scratches his
head with one finger must like to be sodomized. 27

23
“Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenze meiner Welt”. Wittgenstein
(1922:118), Tractatus 5.6.
24
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night.
25
Seneca Epistulae 114.4.
26
Horace Epodes 2.50, Satires 1.2.116, 2.2.42, 2.8.30, etc.; Juvenal Satire 4.
27
Calvus FPL 18 Bländsdorf (Seneca Contoversiae 7.4.7), Seneca Epistulae. 52.12,
Juvenal 9.133, Ammianus 17.11; Plutarch Moralia 89e, Julius Caesar 4.9, Pompey
162 Holt Parker

The third level is genre, i.e., literary “naturalness”. In murder myster­

ies, every time Hercule Poirot shows up someone is horribly murdered. In
“real life” people would soon stop inviting Hercule Poirot over to dinner.
In romance novels, all the characters behave in ways as formalized as a
Noh play. Jauss writes of “objectifying the horizon of expectation” 28
(1982:24) – a better image than Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons” – and
much of its work is done at the level of genre.
We are now ready perhaps to tighten our definition and change the
slightly petulant tone of our question “What is it that philologists do ex­
actly?” to “What is it exactly that philologists do?”
The job of the philologist is to give to modern readers the repertoire
that the author assumed the original readers would have had in order to
read the work.
This repertoire consists of information on the following levels:
1. Phonology
2. Syntax
3. Semantics
4. Culture
5. Genre

VIII. Is there a scriptum in this class? 29

Our goal then is to make ourselves, and help make others, “informed read ­
ers” in Stanley Fish’s sense of the phrase (Fish 1980:48):
“The informed reader is someone who 1.) is a competent speaker of the lan­
guage . . . 2.) is in full possession of ‘semantic knowledge that a mature . . .
listener brings to this task of comprehension’. This includes the knowledge . . .
of lexical sets, collocation probabilities, idioms, professional and other dia­
lects, etc.”
That is, the reader the author has in mind is a native speaker, one who
knows all the words and phrases, connotations and denotations of the lan ­
guage. But in order to be a reader, there is a third necessary qualification:
“3.) has literary competence. That is, he is sufficiently experienced as a reader
to have internalized the properties of literary discourses, including everything

48.7, Lucian 41 (Rh. Pr.) 11.

28
Jauss 1970:177: “den Erwartungshorizont zu objektivieren”.
29
An intertextual appropriation of Siegel’s 1990 article “Is there a Fish in this
class?” in turn a mere allusion to Fish’s 1980 Is There a Text in This Class?
 What Is it that Philologists Do Exactly? 163

from the most local of devices (figures of speech, and so one) to whole
genres.”30
Not only then must readers of Greek and Latin literature be experienced in
the languages, they must already be experienced in the languages of Greek
and Latin literature, “the underlying system which makes literary effects
possible” (Culler 1975:118).

IX. Putting ourselves in the reader’s place

I emphasize reader, not author. The philologist’s role is not to recreate the
mental world of the author. This is the common misunderstanding of his­
toricism that Gadamer was reacting against. Here I would modify Schleier ­
macher’s keen observations:
“The primary task of interpretation is not to understand an ancient text in view
of modern thinking, but to rediscover the original relationship between the
writer and his audience.”31
Rather, our goal is to rediscover the original relationship between the text
and the audience. The relationship between author and audience is already
and always mediated by the work of art. The first relation is biographical
or psychological criticism, which is at best opaque for modern authors and
non­existent for ancient. Only the second is philology. We can interpret not
because we understand the author’s mind, but because we both intend the
same object.
Staiger, I think, dealt directly with the ancient repertoire and what read­
ers need from it (1939:12):
“The same objection applies to explaining poetry in terms of society, political
situation, cultural circumstances – for all attempts to understand the essence
of the artwork as a result or a function. That said, the value of cultural­histor­
30
Fish 1980:48, citing Wardhaugh 1969:92. Fish builds the term “literary compet­
ence” on Chomsky’s notion of linguistic competence (Chomsky 1965:4, Fish 1980:5,
44). Culler develops the idea of “literary competence” as “a set of conventions for read­
ing literary texts” shared by authors and readers (Culler 1975:118).
31
The translation by Jan Wojcik and Roland Haas (Schleiermacher 1978:6) is
preferable to that of Bowie (1998). Schleiermacher 1959:84: “Eben so wenig (entsteht
eine Mannigfaltigkeit), wenn man historische Interpretation von der Berücksichtigung
von Begebenheiten versteht. Denn das ist sogar etwas vor der Interpretation herge­
hendes, weil dadurch nur das Verhältniß zwischen dem Redner und ursprünglichem
Hörer wiederhergestellt wird, was also immer vorher sollte berichtigt sein”.
164 Holt Parker

ical or sociological introductions cannot be denied. Who would want to do

without them, especially for older poets, whose way of life has become alien to
us. Only, one should always be aware that such introductions escort us only as
far at the gates of poetry, that real literary critical work only begins once we
have put ourselves in the position of a contemporary reader.”32

X. Philology or How does this differ

from New Criticism?

Rather a lot, really. As philologists we find ourselves in sympathy with the

New Critical goal of giving “close readings”. Yet we know, more strongly
than most humanist disciplines, that we cannot look on the poems we want
to read as “well­wrought urns” divorced from their historical circum­
stances. 33 Culler speaks movingly of the “sense of release” that the New
Criticism brought (1981:3):
No longer was discussion and evaluation of a work something which
had to wait upon acquisition of a respectable store of literary, historical,
and biographical information. No longer was the right to comment some ­
thing earned by months in a library.
Classicists, on the other hand, are trained in how to look at well­
wrought urns. We know that it is important to know if we are looking at a
“Grecian Urn” and not (as had been thought up till very soon before Keat’s
wrote his ode in 1819) an Etruscan urn. We have always been aware the
texts we read were deeply implicated in their cultures. We know we cannot
even read words, much less sentences or poems, without a library of know ­

32
“Derselbe Einwand gelte auch für die Erklärung des Dichterischen aus
Gesellschaft, politischer Lage, kulturellen Verhältnissen – für alle Versuche, das Wesen
des Kunstwerks als Ergebnis oder als Funktion zu verstehen. Damit wird der Wert
kulturgeschichtlicher oder soziologischer Einführungen nicht geleugnet. Wer wollte sie,
zumal bei älteren Dichtern, deren Lebensraum uns fremd geworden ist, entbehren?
Allein, man sei sich stets bewußt, daß solche Einführungen nur bis zur Pforte des
Dichterischen geleiten, daß die eigentlich literaturwissenschaftliche Arbeit erst beginnt,
wenn wir bereits in die Lage eines zeitgenössischen Lesers versetzt sind”. Gadamer
(2004:372) disagreed.
33
The Well­Wrought Urn, by Cleanth Brooks (1947), one of the seminal works of
the New Criticism. So Krieger (1956:20) in a foundational statement: a poem consists
of a ‘self­contained and self­sustaining world of linguistic interrelationships...To allow
the poem to function referentially is to break the context. It is to allow the poem to
point outside itself and thus to lead me into the world of what meaning had been for me
before I came to the poem”.
 What Is it that Philologists Do Exactly? 165

ledge patiently acquired. At the same time, however, our “store of literary,
historical, and biographical information” makes us very susceptible to the
biographical and other fallacies, which I want to examine at another time.

XI. Philology or How does this differ from the New

Historicism? And what was wrong with the
Old Historicism?

Philologists are thus much closer to New Historicism in its general aims, if
not in many of its specific instances. We know that all ancient texts must
be recontextualized. Ancient historians are and have been well­aware of the
“historicity of texts and the textuality of history” (Montrose 1989:20).
The main difference between historicism and “the new historicism” is
perhaps the awareness that not only does culture shape texts, but that texts
shape culture. 34 The new­historical emphasis on the “nonliterary”, on less­
er forms of literature, is one of the unifying characteristics of the somewhat
amorphous mass of new historicism. Even so, it must recognized that
Greenblatt and others read washing bills in order to understand
Shakespeare. Nobody reads Shakespeare in order to understand washing
bills. But their choice is our necessity. We are so hungry for even the
crumbs from the rich table that we devote our lives to fragments of pots,
papyri, parchments, palimpsests.
In short, in order to understand a text, we need to understand a culture.
We have described our task in terms of anthropology. Clifford Geertz de­
scribed anthropology’s task in terms of philology, indeed, in terms of pa­
laeography (Geertz 1973:10):
Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a
reading of”) a manuscript – foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies,
suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in
conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped be­
havior.

34
Greenblatt (1991) gave a seasoned reflection on the practices of New Historicism.
Cf. Schleiermacher 1978:9: “18.1. Objective historical reconstruction considers how the
discourse behaves in the totality of the language, and considers a text’s self­contained
knowledge as a product of the language. Objective divinatory reconstruction assesses
how the discourse itself developed the language. Without both of these, one cannot
avoid qualitative and quantitative misunderstanding”.
166 Holt Parker

Jauss is clear on the role of philology in reading ancient texts (1982:28):

“The reconstruction of the horizon of expectations, in the face of which a work
was created and received in the past, enables one on the other hand to pose
questions that the text gave an answer to, and thereby to discover how the con­
temporary reader could have viewed and understood the work...”
The method of historical reception is indispensable for the understanding
of literature from the distant past. When the author of a work is unknown,
his intent undeclared, and his relationship to sources and models only in ­
directly accessible, the philological question of how the text is “properly”
– that is, “from its intention and time” – to be understood can best be
answered if one foregrounds it against those works that the author expli ­
citly or implicitly presupposed his contemporary audience to know.
Not Quellenforschung but intertextuality; not biography but conven­
tions (and their subversions).

XII. Philology The Queen of Sciences?

Philology, in my version, then seems to be fair set on its way to becoming a to ­

talizing discourse, the master discipline. 35 Since there is nothing that may not
find its way into a text, there is nothing that is not the philologist’s purview:
“Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre” (Mallarmé 1945:378).
I have to admit I find this vision rather splendid. I can still recall as a
kid reading possibly the most thrilling definition to be found in the great
second edition of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (1931):
“phil.lol’ogy
orig., love of, or devotion to, learning or literature; hence, the study of literat­
ure in a wide sense...literary, classical, or polite learning...The study of the
cultures of civilized peoples as revealed chiefly in their languages, literature,
and religions; including study of languages as such, grammar, etymology,
phonology, morphology, accent, syntax, semantics, textual criticism, mytho­
logy, folklore, and many other phases.”
Philology seemed to me then (it seems to me now) the one “subject” that
embraced the greatest area of human knowledge. 36 This vision of philology
35
See the volume edited by Thouard, Vollhardt and Zini 2010, Philologie als Wis­
senmodell/la philologie comme modèle de savoir.
36
Boeckh’s grand definition of Philology (1886:10): “Hiernach scheint die eigent­
liche Aufgabe der Philologie das Erkennen des vom menschlichen Geist Producierten,
 What Is it that Philologists Do Exactly? 167

bears a resemblance to the program for Altertumswissenschaft as sketched

by Wolf (six master disciplines of language and eighteen attendant discip ­
lines, including history, literary history, mythology, numismatics, archae­
ology, and architecture), 37 as further developed by Boeckh.

XIII. So what about archaeology?

1892 Athenæum 25 June 816/1. The fact that philology

is not a mere matter of grammar, but is in the largest
sense a master­science, whose duty is to present to us
the whole of ancient life, and to give archaeology its
just place by the side of literature.

Citation in the OED, s.v. philology.

Is archaeology then to be reduced to the handmaid of philology, only al ­
lowed in when we need to know how doors closed in antiquity or provide a
bit of background color? Are we to revive the ancient (and largely artifi ­
cial) quarrel between a “philology of things” (Sachphilologie), and a
“philology of words” (Wortphilologie)?38 In short, is archaeology merely a
subset of philology (as grandly conceived)? 39 Quite the opposite. Philology

d.h. des Erkannten zu sein” (“The proper activity of philology therefore seems to be the
knowledge of what has been produced by the human spirit, i.e. of what is known”). Re ­
stated (11) as “so ist die Philologje – oder, was dasselbe sagt, die Geschichte – Erkennt­
niss des Erkannten’ (“And so philology, or what is the same thing, history – is the
knowledge of what is known”). See Horstmann 1992 for the background.
37
See Wolf 1807:144 = 1833:76; Markner and Veltri 1999; Horstmann 1978. The
best introduction for English readers to Wolf’s place in intellectual history is Grafton
1981. For an excellent overview of the intellectual background, see Donohue 2005: 3­
10.
38
The common summation of the quarrel between Boeckh and Herrmann in the
1820’s. For a convenient account, see Ungefehr­Kortus 1999; also Sandys 1903­8: vol.
3, 89–101. Bursian (1883: vol. 2, 665­705) cast the subsequent history of classics as a
war between these two “factions”. Pfeiffer (1976:182) dismantled this oversimplifica­
tion.
39
For Eduard Gerhard’s (1795–1867) view of archaeology as “monumentale Philo­
logie”, see most conveniently (for English speakers) Donohue 2005:3­10.
168 Holt Parker

is merely a subset of archaeology. Archaeology embraces (etymologically)

all that is old; texts are only part of its bailiwick.
But, of course, both philology and archaeology are subsets of the mas ­
ter discipline of anthropology. Anthropology has traditionally been divided
into archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and lin­
guistic anthropology. 40 As philologists we share the defining heuristic of
archaeology as a distinct branch of anthropology: our informants are dead;
we can’t ask them questions. The Greeks and Romans can occasionally
give us answers to what we want to know, but it’s usually in passing, while
they are discussing things that are of interest to them. Philologists are also
cultural anthropologists within the subset of archaeology, but our interest
lies primarily in the production of literary texts. I may be interested in Ro ­
man kinship patterns, but really only because I’m interested in reading Vir ­
gil better. We’re also linguistic anthropologists when the need arises. But
again, our primary interest is how the writers used the language not the
language as such.
Thus classical philology emerges as a quite curious subset of anthropo­
logy: the study of the literary remains of two vanished civilizations.

XIV. How do we do this?

Or in the broadest terms, what is the “Role of the Reader” of ancient liter ­
ature? Horace is separated from us by vast gaps. We share scarcely any ­
thing with him, neither language, nor culture, nor literature.
Our first step must be one of ground clearing. “Tradition ist Sch ­
lamperei” said Mahler. “Tradition is slovenliness”.
So Housman in the Cambridge Inaugural Lecture of 1911, now made
famous by Tom Stoppard’s Invention of Love.
“What is the likelihood that your notion or your contemporaries’ notions of
the exquisite are those of a foreigner who wrote for foreigners two millenniums
ago.? And for what foreigners? For the Romans, for men whose religion you

40
Montrose 1989:20: “By the historicity of texts, I mean to suggest the cultural spe­
cificity, the social embedment, of all modes of writing – not only the texts that critics
study but also the texts in which we study them. By the textuality of history, I mean to
suggest first1y, that we can have no access to a full and authentic past, a lived material
existence, unmediated by the surviving textual traces of the society in question ... and
secondly, that those textual traces are themselves subject to subsequent textual medi­
ations when they are construed as the ’documents’ upon which historians ground their
own texts, called ’histories’.”
 What Is it that Philologists Do Exactly? 169

disbelieve, whose chief institution you abominate, whose manners you do not
like to talk about, but whose literary tastes, you flatter yourself, were identical
with yours. No: in this aspect we must learn to say of our taste what Isaiah
says of your righteousnesses: they are as filthy rags.
Our first task is to get rid of them, and to acquire, if we can, by humility and
self­repression, the tastes of the classics; not to come stamping into the library
of Apollo on the Palatine without so much as wiping our shoes on the
doormat.”41
Our job then as philologists is three­fold to begin with.
1) We must understand the language. Not only the raw dictionary mean ­
ings but the overtones, implications, histories, prejudices that every word
brought with it. This includes the realia, the physical world. When Horace
tells us about the propugnacula (“battle castles”) on the Liburni (“heavy
freighters”; Epode 1.1­2) we know not to imagine a modern ship, but we
must try to understand the precise type of boat his readers would have
been imagining.
2) We must try to understand the sociolect. This is even harder. Not
only what the words mean but what they meant to the literate and literary
audience. We have to try to pick up their slang, their catch phrases, the
praise or condemnation inherent in the use of word, phrase or image. This
is where intertextuality in its fullest sense comes into play.
3) We must understand the genres, try to figure out the expectations that
a reader brought to a particular poem of a particular type, to follow lit erary
allusions, to have a mind stocked with the same reading as Horace’s audi ­
ence.
4) Finally we have to stay aware of the textual strategies to follow the
clues as to how we are supposed to read. We do something still very close
to a New Critical “close reading” (Ray 1984:45): “to determine how the
various elements of the text function with respect to its overall structure,
how various readings are generated by these configurations, and how par ­
ticular stylistic, rhetorical, and symbolic systems cause corresponding con ­
cretizations on the part of the reader”. We must make the poem mean so
that it can be.42

41
Housman 1969:34­35. Not the “tastes” of the classics (slavery, fish sauce), but
their knowledge. So, too, if less memorably, Gadamer 2004:251.
42
Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”: “A poem should not mean / But be”.
170 Holt Parker

Clearly even the most basic of these tasks is impossible. All we can do
is try to read slowly, as Nietzsche said, and intelligently. 43 Ritschl’s advice
was, “Read, read more, read even more, read as much as possible”. 44 But
we need to try and read both deeply (as our ancestors did) but even more
widely, in archaeology, in literary theory, in anthropology.
Stephen Greenblatt opened Shakespearean Negotiations with the state­
ment: “I began with the desire to speak with the dead”. But like Odysseus,
we know that the dead can only speak if they are given blood. The blood is
ours and it comes from our hearts.

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