Servius in context: reading late antique commentaries on Virgil

• In Event: What is Commentary?

Abstract

The commentary to works of Virgil by the late fourth century CE scholar Maurus Servius Honoratus represents one of the earliest and most extensive exegetical work on a Roman poet to have survived from antiquity. Though individual aspects of Servius’ engagement with Virgil have received attention, the scholarly focus has traditionally been on the creation of an edition and on Servius as a source for Roman customs, language, scholarship and early Roman literature. Servius’ intellectual milieu, as famously represented in Macrobius’ Saturnalia in which he is a participant, has been identified by scholars with the Pagan aristocratic circles of the Roman elite of the late fourth century/early fifth century. Yet Servius, whose teacher Donatus also trained the Church Father and Christian commentator Jerome, operated in a culturally rich and complex world where the word of God and the word of poets, orators and philosophers were equally subject to scrutiny, philological reconstruction and interpretation. While scholars have pointed to Servius’ relation to the Alexandrian commentary tradition on Homer, his identity as a “pagan” has traditionally discouraged any analysis of the wider intellectual context of Judeo-Christian exegesis and reading to which he belongs. Using as a case study the work on Pauline exegesis in the fourth century by Origen and Jerome, this chapter will re-examine prevailing scholarly assumptions about interpretative methods. Through a comparative exploration of Servius’ exegetical method and of his approach to the author and to the philological problems raised by the text, the paper seeks to interrogate the traditional distinction between exegetical practices on sacred and profane (or pagan) texts: how is the author constructed by exegesis and commentary as critical practices across these diverse reading communities? How do genre and target community of text affect the roles of author and commentator? What impact on notions of textuality and readership does the rise of scripture as commented text have on non-sacred texts and authors? Comparative exploration of the exegetical modes and methods of Servius in his cultural context will ultimately test the boundaries between interpretation, authorship and readership and the continuities, ruptures and dialogue between scripture and the Classics.

Author

• irene peirano garrison, Yale