La fureur d'innover. Homer between Wolf, Villoison and the Scholia

This chapter does not aim to question the role of the 1795 Prolegomena ad Homerum in the history of the Homeric Question, but more modestly to challenge F. A. Wolf’s assumption (frequently bought into by later scholars) that the de-construction of the unity of the Homeric poems could rely on a textual basis, namely the scholia of ms. Venetus A of the Iliad (Marc. gr. Z. 454), first published by J.-B.-G. d’Ansse de Villoison in 1788. In fact, Wolf postponed to the second part of the Prolegomena (never published) a thorough, analytical discussion of variant readings, scholia, and their implications on the authorship of the poems. In this respect, the posthumous Conjectures by Abbé d’Aubignac, however biased and idiosyncratic, represent a much more detailed and text-oriented critique of the conventional idea of Homer as the author of the Iliad. As they stand, the Prolegomena resemble much more closely a work of the eighteenth century, as they insist on the few ancient sources about the oral transmission and the scattering of the text of Homer, and they add a conscious distortion of Villoison’s statements about what could be gleaned from the scholia about the rhapsodes and the transmission of the poems – while Villoison was adamant about the existence of Homer and a long phase of oral circulation, Wolf believed that Homer never existed and that the text of the rhapsodes was constitutively fluid, deftly invoking to this end the evidence of the Alexandrian critics quoted in the scholia, who in fact were persuaded of the opposite idea. The chapter investigates these contradictions, and the enormous impact they had on the history of the Homeric Question down to our own day.