Greek Literature

Abstract

Academics have a professional need to be published; publishers have a commercial incentive to create demand. In recent years these convergent interests have released a flood of edited volumes, not all of which can demonstrate a compelling claim to intrinsic or lasting scholarly importance. So it is reassuring to be reminded that a publishing house that contributes liberally, if not recklessly, to the flood continues to produce heavyweight volumes of unquestionable scholarly importance. Consider, for example, the new edition of the Thucydides scholia, on which Alexander Kleinlogel worked from 1960 until a few months before his death on 1 January 2007. The complex task of bringing his material to publishable form was undertaken by Klaus Alpers; illness prevented Alpers from steering the volume through its final stages, which were overseen by Stefano Valente. The introduction comprises 202 pages (the chapter on transmission is incomplete, breaking off after four pages); the lavish edition of the scholia vetera occupies 705 pages. The material for a projected second volume containing the scholia recentiora was not left in a publishable state, except for the Lexicon Patmense, which is included as a forty-eight-page appendix to the present volume's introduction. Reviewing Karl Hude's Teubner edition of the scholia, published in 1927, H. T. Deas concluded: ‘obviously this is work which will not require to be done again. Indeed, were it not a praiseworthy task for the sake of completeness, one might be permitted to doubt whether it was worth doing at all’ (CR 42 [1928], 145–6). That reminder of the extremes of fallibility should strike terror into every reviewer's soul.