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Cuius in Usum? Recent and Future Editing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2012
Extract
In 1993 Michael Winterbottom remarked that we have reached ‘what may be the last decades of the systematic editing of classical texts’. If he was right, what has been dwindling: capacity, interest, scope, or confidence?
When editors' prefaces include such Latin as ‘ad huius operis finem … longdudum exspectatum’ (1983), ‘non solum hominibus, sed ne libris quidem non pepercit’ (1991, of the War), ‘ex Italia, ut Munk Olsen videtur, ortus’ (1997), or ‘latet uel peritus’ (1997, of an untraced manuscript), it is tempting to blame incapacity, and to blame that in turn on a decline of interest in Latin and more narrowly in textual criticism. Not just a laudator temporis acti se puero could document the decline by looking at statistics and syllabuses; but there would be widespread agreement that in so far as textual criticism has given way to greater concern with content its proportional decline is no bad thing. Relevant too, some would say, is the decline of composition; but I am not convinced by either the obvious or the deeper reason that they give. Obviously, a preface should not be the first thing, or the first thing for thirty years, that the editor composes in Latin. Need it be, though? Lloyd-Jones and Wilson chose English in their O.C.T. of Sophocles (1990), and Green has now followed their example in a Latin O.C.T., his very handy editio minor of Ausonius (1999). Anyone who takes the view expressed to me by a distinguished German Latinist, that by abandoning Latin in prefaces one cuts off the branch that one is sitting on, should answer Merkelbach's charge that the policy of writing the notes in Latin has held up Inscriptiones Graecae. At a deeper level, composing in a language is said to be the best way of learning it; but surely reading large amounts of it observantly is just as good or better, unless the distinction between active and passive knowledge of a language holds only for the modern languages that one reads comfortably and sometimes makes a pitiful attempt to speak. Even without mystical claims for the value of composition, declining knowledge of Latin is quite enough of a threat to editing.
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References
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