Toward a New History of Classical Scholarship

Abstract

here were times when classical philologists studied the history of classics merely as a pastime. This meant that a certain methodological approach was preferred, which emphasized the continuity of the scholarly tradition from antiquity to the present. This was the argument of two pioneering studies, the three-volumeHistory of Classical Scholarship (1903–8) written by Sir John Edwin Sandys and the still widely read Geschichte der Philologie (1921) by the discipline’s doyen, Ulrich WilamowitzMoellendorff. Another consequence was that the study of the discipline’s history was likened to philological research: both required similar training, attention to historical evidence, and philological scrutiny. This can be observed already in Sandys and Wilamowitz, but it becamemore prevalent in the work of scholars who followed in their footsteps, for example, in the History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (1976) by Rudolf Pfeiffer, which continues to be referenced widely, or in Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries