scholium

Not to be confused with skolion

Scholia (singular, scholion; from Greek Greek: σχόλιον "comment", "lecture"), are grammatical, critical, or explanatory comments, either original or extracted from pre-existing commentaries, which are inserted on the margin of the manuscript of an ancient author, as glosses. One who writes scholia is a scholiast.

History

Ancient scholia are important sources of information about many aspects of the ancient world, especially ancient literary history. The earliest scholia date to the 5th or 4th century BCE (such as the "D" scholia on the Iliad). The practice of compiling scholia continued through to as late as the 8th century in the Byzantine Empire.

Scholia were altered by successive copyists and owners of the manuscript, and in some cases, increased to such an extent that there was no longer room for them in the margin, and it became necessary to make them into a separate work. At first, they were taken from one commentary only, subsequently from several. This is indicated by the repetition of the lemma ("headword"), or by the use of such phrases as "or thus", "alternatively", "according to some", to introduce different explanations, or by the explicit quotation of different sources.

For the most part, the Greek scholia on record are anonymous.

List of ancient commentaries

Some ancient "scholia" are of sufficient quality and importance to be labelled "commentaries" instead. The existence of a commercial translation is often used to distinguish between "scholia" and "commentaries". The following is a chronological list of ancient commentaries written defined as those for which commercial translations have been made:

• Asconius (c. 55 AD) on Cicero's Pro Scauro, In Pisonem, Pro Milone, Pro Cornelio and In toga candida
• Servius (c. 400 AD) on Virgil's Aeneid
• Macrobius (c. 400 AD) on Cicero's Dream of Scipio
• Proclus (c. 440 AD) on Plato's Parmenides and Timaeus and Euclid's Elements
• Boethius (c. 520 AD) on Cicero's Topics

Other uses

• In modern mathematics texts, scholia are marginal notes which may amplify a line of reasoning or compare it with proofs given earlier. A famous example is Bayes' Scholium, a well-known result for interpreting observations of a Bernoulli process.
• Scholia is an academic journal in the field of classical studies. Websites: Scholia; Scholia reviews.

References

• L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, 1974, Scribes & scholars: a guide to the transmission of Greek & Latin literature, 2nd ed. (Oxford). ISBN 0-19-872146-3.

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.