Scholia (sg.:scholium orscholion, fromAncient Greek:σχόλιον, "comment", "interpretation") aregrammatical, critical, or explanatory comments – original or copied from prior commentaries – which are inserted in the margin of themanuscript of ancient authors, asglosses. One who writes scholia is ascholiast. The earliest attested use of the word dates to the 1st century BC.[1]
Ancient scholia are important sources of information about many aspects of the ancient world, especially ancientliterary history. The earliest scholia, usually anonymous, date to the 5th or 4th century BC (such as thescholia minora to theIliad). The practice of compiling scholia continued to late Byzantine times, outstanding examples being ArchbishopEustathius' massive commentaries to Homer in the12th century and thescholia recentiora ofThomas Magister,Demetrius Triclinius andManuel Moschopoulos in the14th.
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, and subsequently from several. This is indicated by the repetition of thelemma ("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.
The most important are those on theHomericIliad, especially those found in the 10th-century manuscripts discovered byVilloison in 1781 in theBiblioteca Marciana inVenice (see furtherVenetus A,Homeric scholarship), which are based onAristarchus and his school.[2] The scholia onHesiod,Pindar,Sophocles,Aristophanes andApollonius Rhodius are also extremely important.[3]
InLatin, the most important are those ofServius onVirgil;[4] ofAcro andPorphyrio onHorace;[5] and ofDonatus onTerence.[6]Also of interest are the scholia onJuvenal attached to the good manuscript P;[7] while there are also scholia onStatius,[8] especially associated with the nameLactantius Placidus.[9]
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:
The dictionary definition ofscholium at Wiktionary
This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Scholium".Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
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