Christina Colombo under the guidance of Professor Ilaria Marchesi Background Mondadori Publishing has contacted a group of scholars to collaborate on a new edition of its Lorenzo Valla commentary on the Aeneid, its previous edition having been completed in 1983. Professor Ilaria Marchesi, head of the Classics Department at Hofstra, and her husband, Professor Simone Marchesi, who teaches at Princeton University, have been selected to write a commentary on Book 6 – the book describing Aeneas’s catabasis, or descent into the Underworld. Project Objective To produce a rigorously researched sample commentary on a fifty-line portion of text from Aeneid 6, to be sent to Mondadori Publishing and compared with submissions from scholars who submit similar samples as they begin working on
the other books. In order to ensure a measure of consistency throughout the commentary, all scholars involved in the project are submitting brief samples of commentary with the aim of arriving at a common vision for their work. Selected Text Lines 6.337-383, the “Palinurus episode” in which Aeneas encounters the shade of his deceased helmsman, who pleads with Aeneas to either bury his bones (thus allowing his shade to rest) or to take him back to the overworld. The narrative significance of the episode to the Aeneid as a whole, some apparent contradictions it presents with other parts of the Aeneid, and its poetic richness and grammatical complexity in parts render the episode an excellent subject for a sample commentary.
Project Description
Close Reading: We read the Latin text of the Palinurus episode slowly and examine it stylistically, literarily, and grammatically to determine where notes were needed. We began with an introductory note to the episode as a whole and then moved into line-by-line analyses. Preliminary Research Working note by note, we read and evaluate for relevance as many articles as possible pertaining to the text on which a note is to be written – searching most importantly L’Année Philologique but also JSTOR, Google Scholar, and Project Muse. Articles which provide substantial input on the broad or particular topic of a potential note are cited in an annotated bibliography, located and downloaded (via Interlibrary loan, if necessary), and uploaded into a shared Google Folder.
Focused Research Based on preliminary research results, we conduct new searches with greater specificity, often in pursuit of a single word or phrase, to ensure that the final note takes into account all pertinent scholarship. If the translation or import of a particular word is in question, we look up the word in the Oxford Latin Dictionary. Often, we conduct searches via the Packard Humanities Institute Classical Latin Texts site to locate all instances of a particular word or phrase, whether in the Aeneid or in all archived Latin texts.
Composition The remarks of scholars, together with our own analyses, are synthesized into a note (appended to a particular word or group of words in the text) that identifies the topic under concern, contextualizes it, and, to the extent possible, interprets and explains it.
Procedure Episode Introduction Our first task for this project was to compose an introductory note to the episode as a whole, addressing those topics which warranted a note, but which did not tie directly to any particular line, or which tied to too many lines to neatly address within the line-by-line episode commentary. We drafted this note at the beginning of the semester and continued to revise it as our research moved us deeper into the episode. In the end we had composed a lengthy introductory note discussing several issues including the discrepancies between Palinurus’s account of his death and that recounted by the Aeneid’s narrator in Book 5, the potential status of Palinurus as a “sacrificial victim” for the safe landing of Aeneas’s fleet in Italy, and some parallels between the Palinurus episode and a scene earlier in the epic during which Aeneas meets Polydorus, another unburied soul who asks Aeneas for aid.
Commentary Notes Beginning with a note on gubernator, the second word of our selected episode, and ending with a note on terra, the last word of the episode, we have notes on the entire Palinurus episode with topics ranging from odd grammatical structures and rare Latin expressions to fine points of literary interpretation. Bibliography Our bibliography for the Palinurus episode consists of more than 40 entries, each article listed having been uploaded into our shared Google Folder. Each entry is followed by an abstract and/or notes on the content of the source and its relevance to the text of Book 6, enabling the bibliography to be searched and desired articles to be located as efficiently as possible.
Results Sample Commentary Submission Our commentary on the Palinurus episode will be submitted to the publisher for analysis. Further Research The sources gathered for this episode, with the numerous sources in another, much larger annotated bibliography on the entirety of Book 6 which was put together by Professor Marchesi’s previous research assistant, Isabella Colombo, provide a vast body of scholarship from which to draw as the remainder of the commentary on Book 6 is completed. Further research will grow out of this base.
Commentary Completion When sample commentaries from all scholars working with Mondadori Publishing have been evaluated and a universal commentary format decided upon, Professor Ilaria Marchesi and husband Professor Simone Marchesi will proceed onto the composition of the remainder of their commentary on Book 6. That work will ultimately appear as part of the commentary to be published on the full twelve books of the Aeneid.
Next Steps