Luciano Canfora
From the Quest for the Archetype to the History of
Texts. A Short Note on the French Critical Style
Luciano Canfora
‘It is not possible to settle on a method of classifying manuscripts in the abstract; the lost works
whose content is being reconstructed can be dated more or less precisely and the classification
only acquires significance if it is accompanied by the history of the text. Then many apparent
anomalies of tradition automatically disappear [ . . . ]. In several of his articles Paul Maas has
helped to clarify the notion of Byzantine conjecture; it would have been nice if he had placed
greater emphasis in his summary on the importance of a critical history.’
This is in my view the crucial passage in the review Jean Irigoin wrote of the second
(1950) edition of Paul Mass’s Textkritik (L’antiquité classique, 1953, p. 186).
The position Textkritik takes up is quite clear. Our starting point available to us when
we reconstruct an ancient text is the surviving texts in libraries that tell us something
about it (the witnesses). Thus the best result we can aim for is the reconstruction of the
lost manuscript on which the extant witnesses depend. This manuscript is called the
‘archetype’. It may date from any period close to or distant from the surviving witnesses,
which themselves may originate from the very distant or less distant past. In any event
we cannot, by definition, go back beyond the archetype, since we are using its descendants as our starting point.
Beyond the archetype, then, is something we could define, using Kant’s terminology,
as ‘the thing in itself’ (Ding an sich): the unattainable, unless we can – on some very lucky
occasions – reconstruct it by conjecture. Sometimes of course, for some part of a given
work, for instance when there is an extant papyrus or a good ‘indirect’ tradition (an
ancient quotation or commentary, for example), the archetype retreats considerably further
into the past, it becomes more distant from us, so to speak. And this means we can access
an earlier phase of the text we are considering, sadly only for short passages in most
cases. So this changes only minimally the limits the extant manuscripts impose on the
overall reconstruction of the text of an ancient work.
Nevertheless, there is a way – and this is the meaning of the quotation from Jean
Irigoin that appears at the beginning of this paper – of getting closer to the ‘thing in
itself’: through the ‘history of the text’, the reconstruction of the first stages in the ancient
transmission of a text. This ‘history’ is important in several respects and first of all because it allows us to assess the quality, the historical significance, the origin, etc., of this
‘chance’ manuscript that we call the archetype. This ‘archetype’, as Lachmann and Maas
saw it, was appropriately defined by Alphonse Dain as ‘the closest common ancestor of
tradition’: and this definition expresses very well the fortuitous nature of the place this
manuscript occupies in a text’s tradition and its variable distance from or proximity to
Diogenes, No. 186, Vol. 47/2, 1999
© ICPHS 1999
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Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
From the Quest for the Archetype to the History of Texts
our own time. Quite rightly Dain suggests that the term ‘archetype’ should be reserved
for those manuscripts from Late Antiquity which have nearly always been, in the Greek
as well as the Latin tradition, the starting point for the manuscript tradition that has come
down to us. Compared with the geometrical abstraction of Paul Maas, Alphonse Dain’s
Les Manuscrits (a work that, unsurprisingly, Giorgio Pasquali admired very much) signifies
concrete progress, as does Jean Irigoin’s account quoted at the start of this paper.
But we must go further. This time I shall begin with a sentence from Alphonse Dain:
‘How did Herodotus or Xenophon, Statius or Lucan compose their original? [ . . . ]. So
many questions about the composition of an ancient text would perhaps be answered if
we had more information on this subject’ (Les manuscrits, 2nd edition, p. 105). With these
questions in mind, we can extend our investigation as far as attempting to identify the
internal characteristics (composition) and the sociological features (audience and channel
of communication) of ancient works and maybe whole literary genres. The means by
which ancient works, and particularly Athenian texts from the fifth and fourth centuries
bc, were first disseminated decisively influenced and sometimes distorted later tradition.
The greatest damage had already been done, in several stages, before the works were
taken up by Alexandrian philologists of the Hellenistic period.
In this respect, Giorgio Pasquali’s Storia della tradizione e critica del testo remains a
seminal work. It is a model because of the way in which it goes beyond the narrow
boundaries of ‘verbal criticism’; it is not satisfied with celebrating the history of the text
as such, but deals with various significant and specific traditions and tackles the delicate
but crucial question of the author’s edition (or editions) and variants. In 1941 Hilarius
Emonds published the first systematic piece of research into manuscript traditions with
signs of author’s corrections (Zweite Auflage im Altertum). And many suggestions along
these lines had already been made in Havet’s Manuel de critique verbale, which is often
treated with some arrogance but too little read.
If it was carried out systematically, this research into the author’s method of composition and the early stages of editing could also bring us much new information as regards
the critical edition. I believe this systematic ‘internal’ history of ancient literary documents
is or could be one of the factors that still today would make the study of classical Antiquity
essential even for non-classicists.
Luciano Canfora
University of Bari
(translated from the French by Jean Burrell)
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