The Cave analogy in Book 7 of the Republic admits of no single consistent interpretation. It communicates not one philosophical vision but two. One is developed in the initial narrative, which tells its own compelling story, dropping plenty of hints – varying in directness or mysteriousness – on how it is to be read. The other vision is articulated mostly in the philosophical commentary on the Cave that Plato’s Socrates supplies when he tells his interlocutor Glaucon how to decode it. We should take the commentary as enunciating inter alia a set of instructions not on what the narrative means as originally articulated, but on how it is to be reread as an allegory of the trainee philosopher’s education. The Cave as narrated begins as a moral and political allegory of the condition of ordinary people in the city – in the first instance, the democratic city – and of their need for redemption from it. The Cave as reinterpreted in philosophical commentary is an image of the reorientation of the soul which can be achieved by the practice of mathematics. Consistency of interpretation as between original narrative and subsequent commentary is therefore not mandatory.

The edition of all the papyri, with introduction, critical text, translation and line-by-line commentary. The manuscripts are grouped chronologically and not according to typology, from sub-chapters 5.1 to 5.8, 5.7. including the papyri of uncertain date, and 5.8. the unpublished items I inspected at the Beinecke Library.

What was literary theory in the Middle Ages? What was literary criticism? How did medieval scholars record their interpretations of texts? What forms did those interpretations take? And how do the forms of medieval literary criticism contribute to the shape of medieval literary theory? By teasing out answers to these questions from a series of examples of medieval (chiefly twelfth-century) commentary on classical literature, this chapter offers an introduction to the study of literary texts, its norms, assumptions, sources and priorities in the Latin Middle Ages. It concludes with an overview of the volume as a whole, focusing on how the various chapters relate to three overarching concepts: interpretation, invention and imagination.

This introduction sets forth the approach to Byzantine commentaries on ancient Greek texts taken in this volume: it places the Komnenian and Palaiologan commentaries firmly within their intellectual and sociocultural contexts and examines the process of commenting on ancient texts as a deliberate and culturally significant choice made by the commentators. We define commentary both in a narrow and a broad sense. In the narrowest sense, commentaries are concerned with explaining an ancient text and the knowledge related to it, often in a didactic context. Defined more broadly, commentaries include treatises on ancient literature and paraphrases of ancient authorities, which likewise demonstrate how these texts were read and taught. In the broadest sense, commentaries can be any literary texts that creatively engage with ancient texts and thus shed light on Byzantine attitudes towards their ancient heritage. The very practice of composing commentaries on ancient texts was a creative and targeted enterprise of identity building. The introduction discusses different kinds of Byzantine commentaries on ancient poetry and prose within the context of the study and teaching of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and science, and introduces some of the key figures of the Komnenian and Palaiologan periods.

Exploring what could have been the particularity of Sanskrit mathematical commentaries in the larger landscape of the scholarly commentaries of South Asia, this chapter explores how Prthūdaka (ca. 850) carries out ‘explanations’ on two mathematical verses of Brahmagupta's Theoretical Astronomical Treatise of the True Brahma [School] (Brahmasphuṭasiddhānta-628) concerning progressions. As the commentator explores in many different ways the scope of the rule, a multiplicity of meanings is drawn out, among which one may find the interpretation of a progression as a pile of areas of rectangles within a ‘proof’, or the reading of one procedure as being an algebraical consequence of a previous one. It is within examples and their variations that such mathematical explorations are made, and these may very well be the textual particularity of mathematical commentaries in South Asia.

While scholars have outlined the general characteristics of ancient Mesopotamian commentaries from the first millennium BCE, much work remains to be done in examining the outliers among these compositions and what they can tell us about this important tradition. In an effort to better understand these outliers, we consider two of the few Mesopotamian commentaries that are extant in multiple copies. Focusing on celestial-divinatory commentaries, which are the best attested genre of commentary in Assyria and Babylonia, this chapter begins by introducing celestial-divinatory commentaries and the source text upon which most seem to comment, the omen series Enuma Anu Enlil (“When (the Gods) Anu, Enlil, (and Ea)”). The bulk of this contribution then considers the commentary on Tablet 14 of Enuma Anu Enlil and the exegetical series Šumma Sîn ina Tamartišu (“If the Moon at Its Appearance”), which are both atypical celestial-divinatory commentaries extant in multiple copies. We ask how the commentary on Enuma Anu Enlil 14 and Šumma Sîn ina Tamartišu interpret and relate to their source texts, how copies of these compositions are associated with one another, why these exegetical texts may have been copied in the first place, and how they may have been used in antiquity. Our analysis illuminates important, understudied aspects of both of these compositions while noting how the features therein should alter our conception of Mesopotamian commentaries on the whole.

This part of the book offers a guide to writing about poetry. It addresses the two main kinds of essay you might be invited to write about a poem – a commentary or close reading, and the more discursive essay – and shows how to manage them, from annotation, to planning, to constructing an argument, to editing and proof-reading.

Dante’s life-transforming experience of Beatrice is at once a theophany and a poetic epiphany. It is made such particularly in and through its literary elaboration. Beatrice’s living appearances to Dante become inseparable from his imaginings of her in the complex weave of interpretations preserved in the book of his memory and in the existential witness of his poems. Dante’s rhetoric of appearing marks the visionary quality of his narrative and his verses, but it also underscores certain enigmas pertaining to the veracity of his personal experience of what is, for him, an unshakable truth. A proliferation of variants of his experience – whether of dissemblance or of death – riddles Dante’s testimony to one incomparable person and event. As in the fourfold Gospels, experience of the transcendent is inescapably multiple: every individual witness differs from the others. The emergence of modern self-reflective subjectivity in Dante’s rendering of his witness to a religious experience results in a dialectic between reflection and inspiration. The more Dante reflects on his experience, the more reflection itself is revealed as at least the proximate source of his however exalted perceptions. His inspiration comes to him in and through his deeply subjectivized reflection – for instance, in his spontaneously “receiving” the incipit for his canzone “Women who have intelligence of love” during prolonged solitary meditation. The boundaries between inner and outer realities dissolve when all definable realities show up as produced by reflection. Reflection finds itself at the origin of its world to such an extent that even the self has no content not produced by reflection, and in this Dante’s little book anticipates the eventual implosion of the modern subject. For him, this is also its explosion in a direction opening to the infinitely other and divine.

The Greek commentary tradition devoted to explicating Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was extensive; it began in antiquity with Aspasius’ commentaries on selected books of the EN and reached a stage of immense sophistication in the twelfth century with the works of Eustratius of Nicaea and Michael of Ephesus, which served primarily educational purposes. The use of Aristotle’s ethics in the classroom continued in the late Byzantine period as well, but until recently scholastic use of the EN was known mostly through George Pachymeres’ compendium of Book 11 of his Philosophia. I am currently editing the last surviving exegetical commentary on the EN in the strict sense of the term, also penned by George Pachymeres, which represents a new witness to the resurgence of Aristotelian studies in late Byzantium. It also improves our knowledge of Pachymeres’ role as a teacher in the context of higher education, and of the use of ethics as a practical discipline. The discussion also takes into account the religious underpinnings of Pachymeres’ moralism, pointing to the way pagan ethics in late Byzantium are rendered relevant to their Christian readership.

In 1756, George Harris, a civilian, member of the Doctors’ Commons and holder of numerous ecclesiastical offices, published the very first full English translation of Justinian’s Institutes. In every possible way, the publication was unique. First of all, Harris was not involved in academia. After graduation, he devoted himself to the practice of law. Second, the full translation of the Institutes was unprecedented in English history. Finally, Harris’s project reached much further than just to translate the ancient legal textbook into English. The main goal of Harris was to encourage young people to study their own, national legal system. How was it possible? Harris equipped his translation with numerous “notes” – short commentaries where he was explaining, interpreting and comparing Roman and English law. The main aim of the presented chapter is to evaluate the content of Harris’s translation as well as to appraise his scholarship and knowledge regarding Roman and English legal literature.

In his Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, the fourth-century exegete Calcidius makes ample use of musical theory and its kinship with the related sciences arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. Musical theory impacts upon the metaphysical, physical and ethical aspects in his account of the composition of the cosmic soul. Calcidius draws upon the soul’s musical make-up to show how it translates into the arrangement of the heavenly bodies, the relationships between the immortal and mortal creatures in the cosmos, and the tripartite human soul. Emphasizing the overall significance of harmonics for his exegesis, Calcidius, in fact, likens the creator god to a musician who composed the All as a well-tuned symphony. I shall discuss these aspects of his exegesis by placing them, initially, into the context of his sources, thereafter focusing on more idiosyncratic aspects: Calcidius’ referencing of musical composition for the question of the soul’s (un-)createdness, the relationship he establishes between harmonics and his demonology, and his view on human psychological conditions such as anger and passion. These conditions, according to Calcidius, are not merely a consequence of the human soul’s association with the body, but psychological manifestations of its natural make-up, which is determined by numeric-musical proportions.

Jean de Sponde’s commentary of Homeric poems, published in Basel (1583), appears as a defense of Homer against Jules César Scaliger’s criticisms, by showing the Greek poet as a master of both virtue and rhetoric.

This chapter focuses on unedited and largely unstudied Middle English commentaries on Matthew. In all of these texts, vernacular exegetes turned to Matthew primarily for the book’s moral teaching, and, in line with the arguments advanced in Chapter 1, they favored moralizing glosses without concern for how these interpretations fit into the different senses of Scripture. This chapter begins with consideration of a vernacular commentary likely produced in Durham Priory in the second half of the fourteenth century, almost certainly inspired by the precedent of Rolle. It then takes up the most ambitious work (or collection of works) of English vernacular exegesis, the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels, tracing their compilers’ changing ways of handling the various components of the vernacular exegetical form – close translation, gloss, and citation. The long and short recensions of their commentary on Matthew are compared at length, and the chapter concludes with a new discussion of Wycliffite interpretive theory in light of these unfortunately neglected texts.