On a current thread in the Greek board the subject of commentaries has come up. Once again, someone has expressed an unwillingness to use commentaries, and the reason given is quite common:
It’s going to seem like I’m picking on Pete here, but I’ve heard people express this sentiment several times, even for English literature. I think the reasoning is unsound. I’ve stared into space over a pot of jasmine tea thinking about it, and here is why I think everyone should use a commentary. I’ll talk in terms of Greek literature, but it all applies to Latin, too.
A commentary isn’t a tyrant. That is, the subtext of “draw my own conclusions” is “I don’t want anyone telling me how to think.” I hear some people express their disdain for commentaries with exactly that later wording. But why should reading a commentary imply that we shut down our critical faculties while we read it? I disagree with commentaries regularly. Especially in scholarly commentaries which may go over several competing views, I have no qualms in dismissing the commentators’ reading in favor of one they dismissed if I think the reasoning is unconvincing.
Neither do we come to these texts untainted by other people telling us what to think. The more popular a text (like Homer), the more likely we are to have encountered it before, either in translation or in modern interpretations. Every film about Greek mythology we’ve seen leaves us with ideas that will influence our interpretation of a text. A commentary can correct ahistorical interpretations, though of course it may also introduce its own.
No reference is passive. If you believe a commentary is telling you what to believe, let me assure you that so too are every other reference you use. Especially on less common words, a dictionary is just as likely to mislead you as a commentary.
Further, the very texts we use are making decisions for us about how we draw our conclusions. Whether I open a OCT, a Teubner, a Loeb or a student edition of a text, the editor has made decisions about how to interpret the text by selecting from the manuscript evidence and the work of previous scholars. Even with punctuation and capitalization the editor decides for us. The variations available are visible in the app crit of a good text, but without a commentary it you may have no idea how an editor makes a choice, or even where genuine disagreement exists.
I am not an ancient Greek aristocrat. I have not grown up saturated in Greek religion, culture and literature. I am, frankly, ignorant of quite a lot. Very often in my reading I find a completely innocuous phrase that turns out to be pregnant with historical or literary meaning. Without the commentary, I might blow right by, and miss the deeper meaning entirely. True, the more I read Homer, the more likely I am to notice Homeric echos in other authors, but the commentary helps me where my own reading has failed, or where the referenced author has not yet made it onto my reading list.
Scholarship hasn’t stopped. Many of the reference tools we use are quite old, as often are the editions of the texts themselves. No dictionary or critical edition is perfect. A recently published papyrus scrap may clarify an ambiguity, as we have recently discovered with Sappho 58. Modern lexicographical work may give us a sounder understanding of a word. A reasonably current commentary also serves as a summary of scholarship that has gone on since the publication of whatever text you are reading, and gives us a better chance of drawing sound conclusions on our own.
