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FUSSNOTEN: DAS FUNDAMENT DER WISSENSCHAFT

STEVE NIMIS

When Classicists discuss their discipline, theydon't get down to the root of the matter: theydon't adduce classical scholarship itself as aproblem. Bad conscience? Or simplyinadvertence?

Nietzsche

I

THE EXCESSIVE OR ECCENTRIC USE OF footnotes is often the butt of jokes

which ridicule the pretentiousness or compulsiveness of various types of

scholarly inquiry. Even the frequent abuse of this convention, however,

could hardly offset the effectiveness of footnotes for such functions as givingan intellectual context for one's argument, referring the reader to further or

contrary discussions of the subject, giving credit to predecessors, etc. This last

function is particularly interesting from the standpoint of the

professionalization of knowledge, for it indicates the way in which ideas

even in literary studies have become commodities, the personal property of

individuals protected by copyright laws. The "theft" of an idea without propercredit to its original "owner" is a serious breach of professional ethics which

can lead to ostracism. An equally serious or perhaps more serious breach of

scholarly behavior is to discuss a subject without referring to predecessors out

of ignorance of their writings. Omission of reference to significant or even


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insignificant scholarship in an area about which one professes to be an expert

inevitably gives rise to the most scornful reprisals. "How could he omit

mention of Wilamowitz' seminalUntersuchungen zum antiken Telegraph !"

"Had our author only turned to Heinze'sVergils epische Technik . . . ." Thedocumentation of the work of predecessors can be one of the most odious

tasks of the professional scholar, but there is no other requirement which is

more insisted upon than this one. To be trivial, to be over-speculative, to be

downright boring are all minor failures often they can be endearing traits

in comparison to the failure to demonstrate a comprehensive knowledge of

what in literary studies is called "secondary literature," but is more generally

referred to simply as "the scholarship."

The reasons for the importance of knowing the scholarship are not difficult to

see. To be a professional means to master an esoteric body of systematic

knowledge by means of a process of both theoretical training and

apprenticeship leading to the reception of a license from a recognized

institution (Bledstein 1976: 86-7). The competence acquired during therigorous training period is confirmed by skillful practice and a concrete record

of achievement which confers authority on the professional in his field. In a

field such as literary studies, which is not oriented toward specific utilitarian

goals, or at least whose utilitarian goals are only vaguely formulated

(instilling "humanist" values, critical thinking, aesthetic competence, etc.),

what constitutes a concrete record of achievement is often difficult toascertain. In such disciplines, relatively greater attention tends to be focused

on the form of scholarly practice, on establishing and reproducing a certain

kind of discourse on one's subject matter; and the reproduction of a certain


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kind of discourse demands, among other things, the situation of one's

argument in an authorized tradition of inquiry.

It is not, of course, necessary to slavishly submit to the views of one'spredecessors, but thorough acquaintance with and acknowledgment of the

scholarship," effected by documentation in footnotes, is an indispensable

assurance that the rules of the game have been followed, and that the new

opinion is not simply the result of amateurish intuition. Footnotes, therefore,

are intimately bound up with authority; not only in the general sense of the

phrase, "an argument from authority," but also in a more restricted,

specifically professional sense, the ability to impose symbols.1 This latter sense

involves the relations of power among journal referees, professional

associations, department chairs and faculty, determining in many cases who

gets tenure, promotions, salary increments, etc. Since these aspects of

professional life are rarely discussed in the forums of scholarship, it will be

useful to consider the lowly footnote as the meeting place of scholarly

authority and professional authority. The point will not be to urge theabandonment of the use of footnotes, anymore than professional inquiry

itself; rather, the point will be to try to make explicit that which is hardly ever

acknowledged: namely, that no discipline can be defined in such a way that

severs it completely from the determinant. influences of cultural life as a

whole. The professional ideal of the "disinterested" scholar who pursues

truth in an unbiased (i.e., disciplined) way is not only, like most ideals,unattainable; but it is also a pernicious myth which insures the

misrecognition of the operation of professional politics in the conduct of

1 This sense of authority is developed by P. Bourdieu (1977), esp. pp. 17191, and Bourdieu andPasseron (1977), esp. in the chapter 'Toundations of a Theory of Symbolic Violence."


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scholarship, as well as the misrecognition of the general social effects of the

practice of literary criticism and literary pedagogy.2

For the two imaginary examples of scholarly indignation cited above,I purposely chose German titles, for there is nothing which strikes greater

awe in the heart of the typical American classicist than the prospect of a

vast tome of German scholarship. Indeed, historically the professionalization

of classical studies was largely a nineteenth-century German affair,

and all that is best and worst about classical scholarship is to be found

copiously exemplified among the works of German classicists. Within that

august company, furthermore, there is no figure who is more awesome and

more ambivalent to American classicists than Ulrich von Wilamowitz-

Moellendorf. Interestingly enough, this monumental figure of classical

scholarship made his first splash in the classical world by writing an un

bridled polemic against the book of a fellow classicist, Friedrich Nietzsche,

charging him with unprofessional behavior. The encounter between Nietz

sche and Wilamowitz occurred in crucially formative years of the professionalization of classics in Germany, and it could be argued that the

boundaries constituting classics as a discipline were decisively drawn by

the exclusion of Nietzsche. The book which Wilamowitz attacked,The

Birth of Tragedy, has not been ignored by classicists, but it is a significant fact

in itself that it is to be found not in the classics section of academic libraries,

but in the philosophy section with Nietzsche's other works. The encounter between Nietzsche and Wilamowitz will therefore be a useful starting point

2 The term "misrecognition" (mconnaissance) is used by P. Bourdieu and J. C. Passeron todescribe the "process whereby power relations are pereeived not for what they objectively are, but in a form which renders them legitimate in the eyes of the beholders" (Bourdieu andPasseron. 1977b, p. xiii).


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for an historical inquiry into the professional functioning of the footnote.

II

Nietzsche and Wilamowitz

Nietzsche'sThe Birth of Tragedy has no footnotes. Nor does it have any

Greek quotations. Nor does it seriously come to grips with the traditional

scholarly opinions on most of the issues it raises. What it does contain is a

number of long quotes from Schopenhauer (a philosopher not a professional

classicist), a number of murky metaphysical concepts, and, worst of all from a

professional standpoint, ten chapters on the imminent rebirth of the true

spirit of Greek tragedy in Richard Wagner's opera. Wilamowitz, in 32 pages,

with 52 footnotes and many Greek citations, blasted Nietzsche, not so much

for being wrong about this or that, although he had much to say about

individual philological points, but for the unprofessional nature of the book.

The following citations from Wilamowitz's review entitled "Philology of theFuture" will demonstrate this clearly:3

Indeed, the main indictment against this book lies in its tone and

inclination. For Mr. Nietzsche does not proceed as a scientific

investigator (wissenschaftlicher Forscher): wisdom attained by

intuition is presented partly in the style of the pulpit, partly in adiscourse related only to daily newspapers, "the paper slaves of the

3 K. Grnder (1969) has collected all the relevant rnaterial. These include Wilamowitz'attackon Geburt (Zukunftsphilologiel), Erwin Rohde's rebuttal (Afterphilologie), Wilamowitz'counterrebuttal (Zukunftsphilotogie II), and reviews by Rohde and R. Wagner. Page numbers toZukunftsphilologiel are from this edition. A summary and discussion of all this can be found inM. S. Silk and J. P. Stern (1981).


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moment." Mr. Nietzsche proclaims the wonder, past, and future, of his

god, like a prophet.... (p. 29)

Naturally, Aristotle and Lessing did not understand drama. Mr.Nietzsche does. To Mr. Nietzsche, in fact, was afforded an insight into

the hellenic so surprisingly personal that it must seem to him as if our

classical-hellenic discipline, conducting itself so proudly, has been able

to nourish itself until now (i.e., until Mr. Nietzsche) only on shadows

and superficialities.... That I incur the curse of Dionysus I know, and I

prefer to deserve the title "Socratic man," or at least a "sound man." . . .

I wish to have nothing to do with Nietzsche the metaphysician and

apostle. Were he only that, I would, like a "new Lycurgus," set upon

the Dionysian prophet since I would in that case hardly embrace the

content of his revelations. But Mr. Nietzsche is also a professor of

classical philology; he handles a series of very important issues of

Greek literary history. He fancies that he has solved the puzzle of the

chorus, that the development of tragedy is crystal clear to him; he givesan entirely new understanding of Aeschylus, Euripides, and makes

other such earth-shaking discoveries. This is what I will examine, and

it should be clear that here feigned geniality and insolence in the

presentation of his assertions is directly proportional to lack of wisdom

and disregard of truth.... (p. 30)

That this [the application of the views of Schopenhauer and Wagner

on music to Attic tragedy] is the exact opposite of the mode of study

which the heroes of our discipline and of every true discipline

developed: undiverted by any presuppositions about the end result,


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thinking truth alone to be noble, to stride forward from finding to

finding, to grasp all historically produced phenomena in terms of the

assumptions of the time in which they developed, and to see their

justification in terms of their own historical necessity, that this at leastin principle scientific and generally accepted historical-critical method

is, I would say, the exact opposite of a mode of inquiry which, bound up

in dogmas, must find confirmation for these dogmas in all times, that

Mr. Nietzsche cannot escape. His way out is to besmirch the historical-

critical method, to cast insults on any aesthetic insight different from

his own, and to dismiss the generation in which philology in

Germany, especially through G. Hermann and K. Lachmann, was

raised to an inimitable height, as "a complete misunderstanding of

classics." . . . Among those "who have striven the most to understand

the Greeks" in contrast to those who have "misunderstood" them, Mr.

Nietzsche counts, besides Schiller and Goethe, only Winckelmann. He

writes well only for someone who, like himself, has never read

Winckelmann. . . . For is it not Winckelmann who provides animperishable example, how the general rules of scientific criticism

must apply also to the history of art, indeed, for the understanding of

each individual artwork, how aesthetic evaluation is possible only

from the perspective of the time in which the artwork was situated, out

of the spirit of the people which brought it forth? (pp. 31-32)

One last thing I should say: Let Mr. Nietzsche speak his opinions, let

him brandish his thyrsus, let him carry it from India to Greece, but let

him step down from the chair from which he ought to be teaching

science; let him gather the tiger and panther to his knees, but not the


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young philologists of Germany, who should learn by ascetic, self-

denying study to seek above all only the truth, to liberate their

judgment by a willing surrender, in order to insure to the classical

period its singular immortality which the grace of the Muses promises,for in this fullness and purity alone can the classics bestow

The substance in their breast

the form in their spirits. (p. 55)

Several points about professional activity are laid out in these passages with

exceptional clarity. First of all, a scholarly discourse has a specific "tone and

inclination" which is utterly at odds, on the one hand, with the passionate

evangelical who is in the business of persuading, and on the other, the

contingent and superficial flashiness of journalist discourse. The professional

always defines and approaches his object in a systematic manner. Unlike the

craftsman, writes Bledstein, "the professional excavated nature for its

principles, its theoretic rules, thus transcending mechanical procedures,individual cases, miscellaneous facts, technical information and instrumental

application" (Bledstein 1976: p. 88). The rigorous training of the professional

classicist inures him against wild speculation based on superficial

phenomena. Unlike the journalist, the professional approaches his specific

object in terms of the deep-structural rules which organize it. Similarly, the

professional cannot rely on personal revelations or intuitions, but must basehis findings on accepted scientific paradigms. To suggest that amateurs like

Schiller and Goethe could have a better grasp of the classics than professionals

like Hermann and Lachmann was, in fact, a direct assault on the soundness of

scholarly authority. The possibility that Nietzsche may have landed on


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something correct here or there is practically beside the point, since he so

conspicuously severed his opinions from the authorized tradition of

professional philologists. The image of the "sound Socratic man," who by an

ascetic and self-denying (selbstverleugnender) rigor surrenders himself to theperspective of his discipline and in this way liberates himself from personal

or intuitive prejudices, is invoked by Wilamowitz as the professional ideal in

contrast to the "prophetic" discourse of Nietzsche. Like a "new Lycurgus"

Wilamowitz would have dismissed Nietzsche's Dionysian musings out of

hand had they been delivered from a pulpit; but from a fellow professional

speaking as a philologist, such writings are utterly insolent - and their

insolence is "directly proportional to the lack of wisdom and disregard of

truth." The very form of Nietzsche's discourse virtually guarantees its

falseness. Like a true professional, however, Wilamowitz does not leave it at

that, but authenticates his point by a series of systematic refutations of major

and minor points, in this way grounding his own intuitive indignation.

A related point of the greatest importance is Wilamowitz opposition of thehistorical-critical method and what he calls Nietzsche's ahistorical

dogmatism. The notion of the "disinterested" scholar is intimately bound up

with the historical objectivism of nineteenth-century classical philology and

literary history, an objectivism which does not take into account the historical

conditions of its own inquiry. The philosophical underpinnings of such a

project have been repeatedly pilloried in the present century so that fewwould feel comfortable grounding literary studies as boldly and naively as

Wilamowitz. From Kuhn's analysis of paradigm changes in the natural

sciences, to the "hermeneutic circle" of phenomenology, to the various forms

of reader-response theory in literary criticism, to the "decentering" of the


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knowing subject in post-structuralist semiotics and psychology, every kind of

principled inquiry has had to face in some degree the necessity of self

reflexivity, of facing the fact that meaning is produced, not found, that

disciplines do not simply focus on a certain object, but constitute that object assuch, and that coherence of theory produces not certainty, but a mise-en-

abime.

The degree and real effect of self-reflexivity, of course, varies from discipline

to discipline. Primarily "utilitarian" professions can at least rely on what

works, or what seems to work (another mise-en-abime); at least the customer

must be kept modestly happy. In the humanities, however, self reflexivity

often degenerates into mere hand-wringing, terminating in a debilitating

aporia or a spineless eclecticism divorced from any attempt at explicit

theoretical justification. The "what works" of utilitarian disciplines tends to

become translated, in literary studies, to what is "interesting" a word whose

entanglement with economic investments and pay-offs is both the best kept

and worst kept secret in literary studies: the latter because everyone knows it,the former because to explicitly connect scholarly investigation with the

pursuit of rewards is a scandal all tacitly agree to avoid.4 Indeed, the enigma

of the professional mandate to produce interesting scholarship in a

disinterested manner suggests the degree to which academics misrecognize

the nature of their own enterprise.

4 The connection between rewards and scholarship is, to be sure, an oftdiscussed topic, but isvirtually banned from public forums. Thus when W. Calder 111 recently justified a reorientationof research topics by reference to the economic pressures of the profession, there was a storm of controversy raised for and against this apparent challenge to the "inherent interest" of classical research. See Calder (198 1) and replies in CW 75, No. 2 (Nov.Dec. 198 1), 12022;CW 75, No. 6 (JulyAugust 1982), 36266.


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Since the historical objectivism espoused by Wilamowitz became and, for the

most part, has remained the epistemological cornerstone of the practice of

classics, it is worth noting more precisely what was excluded as unscientific

and unprofessional; for Wilamowitz's characterization of The Birth of Tragedy as ahistorical dogmatism significantly misses the mark. As a

classicist, Nietzsche should be likened to the more traditional, .'amateurish"

perspective on Greek and Roman culture: namely, that it should be studied

pro nobis, in order to divine models of behavior for the present an explicitly

"interested" type of criticism. This pre-professional attitude toward the

classics is typified by the education of the British "gentleman," for whom an

amateurish acquaintance with the best literature of the past was an essential

aspect of the "symbolic capital" which justified his participation in upper class

society. Nietzsche was forever complaining about the disparity between

philologists themselves and the figures from the past whom they studied,

complaining that the study of the classics no longer produced great men.

William Arrowsmith has collected and translated several of Nietzsche's

written remarks about classicists and the classics, of which the following arerepresentative:

Greeks and Classicists

The Greeks: The Classicists:

pay homage to beauty are windbags and dilettantesdevelop the body are repulsivelooking

creatures

are articulate stutter

are religious transfigurers of ordinary things

are filthy pedants


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are listeners and observers are hairsplitters andscreechowls

are prone to symbolism are incapable of symbolistn

possess freedom as men are passionate slaves of the state

have a pure outlook on

the world

are Christians in disguise

are intellectual pessimists. are Philistines (1963a, 12)

Other than the great number of incompetent classicists, there is at

present a number of men who are born classicists, but who areprevented for various reasons from realizing themselves. But the

crucial obstacle in the way of these born classicists is the

misrepresentation of classical scholarship by unqualified classicists

(1963a, 6).

The shades in Homer's Hades what sort of existence are they reallymodeled on? I think it must be a portrait of the classicist. Surely it is

better to be the lowest serf on earth" than to have such a bloodless

recollection of the past of things great and small (1963a, 7).

An example and a common one of the way in which classical

studies are carried on.

A man unthinkingly throws himself or is thrown into some field

of study. From this vantage he looks about him and sees much that is

good and new. But in some unguarded moment, he says to himself.


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"What the devil does this have to do with me?" In the meantime he

has grown old, gotten used to it, and goes on in his rut just as in

marriage (1963a, 1213).

The purpose of quoting these passages is not merely to be irreverent. It is

important to note that disinterested historical objectivism displaced a sort of

interested historical "appropriation," which had previously functioned on

behalf of a specific class ideology,5 for the traditional idea that exposure to the

classics makes one a better person still persists as a justification of the

enterprise of classics as a whole. That is, the modern university has become

an institution where, on the one hand, professional scholars pursue research

"disinterestedly" and on the other, where classics is taught as an essential

component of a "liberal education."6 The grounds of this justification of

classical studies in secondary and college education, moreover, becomes

almost entirely erased from the forums of scholarly research, manifested in

times of institutional crisis as a split between theory and practice, teaching

and scholarship, etc. and the most ignorant and scandalous question onecan ask a professional classicist is "What is this stuff good for?"

Classics is probably the most naive and least selfreflexive of the literary

disciplines. It is highly implausible that Nietzsche is correct in assigning this

fact to the caliber of classicists themselves. The reasons for the exceptional

position of classics must be a function of its institutional life. Clearly, the pre5 M. SarfattiLarson (1977) discusses the class dynamics of professionalization.6 L. Veysey (1965) analyzes the ideologies of humanism, service and research which cametogether from different educational traditions to coexist uneasily in the American university.Even when sorne effort has been made to introduce paradigms from other disciplines, classieistsoften appropriate only enough to give a modish face to what they have always been doing. Thetruly revolutionary character of poststructuralist perspectives, for example, has hadpractically no effect on classics articles in America. See J. Peradotto (1983).


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professional status of classics as the basis of education in the west is a factor.

So is the fact that, since it is ancient, classical literature can be more easily

"objectified" than living literary traditions. In any case, classics is a privileged

locus for studying the ways in which the institutionally guaranteedmisrecognition of the objective basis of university education as a form of

"symbolic violence" reproduces the cultural conditions of which it is a

product. This is, of course, a vast subject. The purpose of the rest of this paper

will be to investigate how the footnote functions in the reproduction of a

certain type of scholarly discourse, how it insures that the assumptions of that

discourse remain unformulated and unexamined, and how scholarly

discourse itself contributes to the misrecognition of the real social effects of

the discipline's practice. The focus of our attention will be on the scholarly

discourse of classicists in America.

III

The Wilamowitz Footnote

In 1879, seven years after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy and

Zukunftsphilologie!, Nietzsche took Wilamowitz's advice and stepped down

from his chair of philology. After the publication of several philosophical

texts and a twelve year spate of madness, he died in 1900, one of the most

enigmatic figures of European letters. Wilamowitz, on the other hand, wenton to a brilliant philological career, publishing books and articles on

practically every aspect of Hellenic culture, pursuing the kind of disinterested

scholarship he defended as a young man until his death in 193 1. He is

arguably the greatest professional Hellenist who ever lived, and as such,


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Wilamowitz became an eminent authority. We all would like to think that

the validity of an idea in the context of a discipline is determined solely by its

pertinence within a given conceptual network, but we all know that this is

not completely true even in a "hard" science like physics. Stephen Toulminsuggests that any rational enterprise has two faces: "We can think of it as a

discipline, comprising a communal tradition of procedures and techniques

for dealing with theoretical or practical problems; or we can think of it as a

profession, comprising the organized set of institutions, roles, and men

whose task it is to apply or improve those procedures and techniques"

(Toulmin 1972: 142). These two "faces" are closely related and

interdeterminant, but each has a set of factors specific to it. The primarily

disciplinary aspects of, say, classics have to do with epistemological questions

about evidence, argumentation, etc. The primarily professional aspects

pertain to the dynamics of professional associations, journals, departments,

etc. Since we will be interested in analyzing the rhetoric of footnotes, it will be

useful to observe this distinction with regard to the "authorizing" effect of

footnotes. The purpose of distinguishing between disciplinary authority andprofessional authority will not be to contrast some ideal, nonrhetorical form

of argument to empty rhetoric, but to delineate the strategies by which appeals

oriented towards the professional face of classics are masked as appeals

oriented towards its disciplinary face. If professional and disciplinary

authority are always intertwined, it will nevertheless be possible to identify

greater or lesser degrees of the presence of each.The professionalization of classics in America was accomplished by the

importation of the German research model into the American university

(Veysey 1965). Hence Wilamowitz became, as an outstanding practitioner of

the German style of Altertumswissenschaft, an authority ubiquitous in the


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footnotes of American classicists. It will be possible, therefore, to take

footnotes to Wilamowitz in scholarly writing as an index of the functioning

of disciplinary and professional authority. In the end it will be seen that

Wilamowitz continues to produce a sort of professional authority long afterthe eclipse of his disciplinary authority, resulting in that enigmatic rhetorical

device, what I will call the "Wilamowitz footnote."

The professionalization of classics in America takes its formal

beginning with the founding of the American Philological Association in

1867. In order to cover this early ground more quickly, a key article by Paul

Shorey, "50 years of Classical Scholarship" (TAPA 50, [1919] 3361), can be

taken as indicative of the situation as it had progressed to that point. Shorey's

essay is a masterful tour de force whose main thesis is that American

scholarship is a happy medium between the pedestrian study of minutiae

exemplified by German scholarship, on the one hand, and the tasteful and

"brilliantly amateurish" (p. 48) British scholarship on the other. The task was

a difficult one: Shorey must not seem to give too much credit to the"indefatigable labors" (59) of a Wilamowitz; but at the same time he must not

undermine the scientific basis of scholarship by giving too much weight to

the cultured gentility of the British. In each case, moreover, he must show

that the Americans can beat both the Germans and the British at their own

games. The explicit chauvinism of this postWorld War I document and the

almost hubristic selfassurance of Shorey make parts of this article seem to usas naive as some of Wilamowitz' more extreme remarks. But, I would argue,

many of the assumptions explicitly put forth here still persist in less easily

recognized forms right up to the present.


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American chauvinism aside, the main issue Shorey addresses is how

to find a happy medium between a scholarship grown too "disinterested"

(and hence uninteresting and useless) and a study of the classics which,

although insightful and useful, has insufficient scientific basis. As the essayunfolds, there is much to remind us of the terms of the Nietzsche

Wilamowitz conflict. Wilamowitz himself is mentioned repeatedly as the

embodiment of one extreme, wissenschaftliche Methode run wild. In fact, the

article concludes with a comparison of Jebb, Wilamowitz and Gildersleeve as

representatives of British, German and American qualities, respectively.

"Wilamowitz," Shorey concludes, "has published many big volumes and a

long series of Lesefrchte filled with more or less plausible conjectures, and

has won many a famous victory. But what came of it? What do you

remember of it all? What definite new and true thing have you learned? You

will not find it easy to say" (p. 60). Nietzsche is evoked as well in a comment

on the work on Greek religion of Harrison and Cornford, two of the few

scholars who took The Birth of Tragedy seriously (p. 56):

A few of our students of religion, I regret to say, pursue theignis fatuus

of pseudoscience on the trail of Miss Harrison and Mr. Cornford into

the swamp of "afterphilologie."

Afterphilologie ("philology of the behind," a pun on Wilamowitz' title

Zukunftsphilologie!, "philology of the future.") is the title of Erwin Rohde'srebuttal of Wilamowitz. Significantly, this last quote is followed by a

harangue against the "contamination of the classical books which by some fad

or fatality are always most prominent on the reference shelves of the

departments of sociology, psychology, history, and general literature. The


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difficulty of Shorey's position can be gleaned from these quotes. The classics

must be studied "objectively" in and for themselves for the study to be

scientific; they must not be subjected to the interests of other disciplines or

modish "infections." But then whose "interests" are served at all by theresults?

Shorey does not really solve this dilemma as much as he finesses it by

holding up American scholarship as exemplary of the proper conduct of

classics, particularly with the example of Gildersleeve. His career began in the

preprofessional period to which the lack of scholarly apparatus was not at all

a loss" (39). He had the "instinctive certainty of feeling for Greek idiom" (39)

characteristic of the amateur study of the classics and still observable in the

British "who do not in their hearts believe in dissertations" (43). This,

however, is no longer enough. One must also have, as Gildersleeve later

acquired, disciplinary authority, which can be got only through scientific

method. Hence, it is necessary to "retain our admiration for the industry and

organization of German scholarship ... trusting that Wilamowitz wascorrectly reported as saying that die Wissenschaft is a higher and a neutral

sphere" (43). Shorey boasts that Gildersleeve and other American classicists

do indeed have the disciplinary authority produced by the proper application

of method, but he deplores its lack of recognition: "many excellent American

dissertations are neglected in order to quote inferior German work on the

same subject" (43). "There are still too many Americans," he goes on to say,"who regard a German book as in itself an authority" (44). What Shorey

identifies here as an already advanced state of affairs is the ascendance of a

kind of professional authority over disciplinary authority. A few pages later,

he describes more fully the use of this authority (48):


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Many of us think it more scholarly, as the English still do and, to judge

by the Most recent publications (as, for example, Barker's Political

Thought of Plato and Aristotle) always will, to quote any German book a Joel, a Dummler, as well as a Wilamowitz.

Even Gildersleeve, who complains of the scholar who quotes a

German program of 1848 which is superseded by a good Hopkins

dissertation, will give twice the consideration to a study of Prodicus

and Greek synonyms in the Drerup series, which completely misses the

point as to Plato's relation to Prodicus, that he would give to an

American essay that got it right.

Here, in nuce, is the Wilamowitz footnote. By Shorey's time, Wilamowitz,

the champion of the neutrality of scholarly discourse and of disinterested

scholarship, had become a privileged example of the presence of professional

authority, an authority able to be divorced (as Shorey implies) from thedisciplinary aspects of classical studies.

If we take Shorey's word for the early period of American classics, it

will be possible to begin in the twenties and look at examples of footnotes to

Wilamowitz in the Most important of the profession's journals: Transactions

of the American Philological Association. I will, of course, need to reproducereal footnotes, but I will identify them only by the decade in which they fall.

This is not because I fear to besmirch someone's academic career by exposing

him or her to ridicule. On the contrary, the Wilamowitz footnote is an

institutional function; it is not simply a neutral rhetorical device available for


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use and chosen by this or that scholar in preference to some other device. The

Wilamowitz footnote is an inevitable concomitant of a discipline which

continues to reproduce, without selfreflection and without any clearly

defined goals, its own discourse. The following examples will clarify what aWilamowitz footnote is and, it is hoped, what is served by its perpetuation.

IV

Fifty Years of Wilamowitz Footnotes

Our first example is from an essay of the 20's which begins like this:

The Handbooks and commentaries which treat of Athenian life and

society in the fifth and fourth Centuries B.C. are wellnigh a unit in

asserting the great prevalence of the practice of exposing newborn

infants. A few representative statements on the subject may be quoted

as examples....

What follows is a list of the names of eight prominent philologists, with

seven sentencelong citations, each stating that infanticide was a fact of Greek

life in historical times. One of the quotes is in French, one in German. "Me

latter is from Wilamowitz and is cited in the following way:

Staat und Gesellschaft , 35, where, however, Wilamowitz is not

speaking of Athens alone, nor yet of the fifth and fourth centuries

merely.


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After this series of citations, the purpose of the paper is given:

At the outset it may be conceded that the exposing of newly born infantsregarded as superfluous or undesired was practiced to a greater or lesser

degree throughout the Greek world from earliest times. It is also true, I

believe, that the practice was by no means unknown to Athens of the fifth

and fourth centuries, B.C. I am of the opinion, however, that the arguments

presented to prove the great prevalence of the custom in Athens at this

period are far from conclusive and are not well supported by the evidence

and by actual conditions so far as it is possible for us to know them.

A regular reader of classics journals will recognize this opening as a generic

one: there is the scholarship review of some topic, the identification of a

shortcoming or need and then the statement of the nature of the present

contribution. The list of banal (in the sense that they all say the same thing)

quotations is unusual; more common is a single monster footnote at the beginning listing authors who have spoken to the topic. In either case, the

literature review has the character of a "pile," a collection of opinions which

is ahistorical: not because dates are not given, but because the judgments

recorded are "reified" knowledge. Since the historical critical method is

intimately caught up with disinterestedness and selfabnegation, scholarship

itself has no "history." That is, the opinion of Wilamowitz, is an "object"totally separated (ideally) from the opining subject; and its validity and

justification can be sought only in terms of the rational inquiry from which it

arose. It is this rational inquiry, some network of axioms, evidence and logical

moves (the philological method) which the author of our article is invoking


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here, in abbreviated form, as a context for his own argument. But it is also

this rational inquiry which our author is passing over as given in some sense,

and hence unnecessary to articulate.

There is no question here of an "argument from authority" in the

sense of positing something as true because a competent professional said it

was true (indeed, the purpose of the article is to contradict this communal

opinion); rather, the function of these citations is to establish that the topic

itself is a legitimate one: since other competent classicists have spoken about

childkilling in historical Greece, it is a topic about which classicists can speak

professionally. The necessity of invoking such a context is a result of the

disinterestedness of the discipline's practice. Since classics is not oriented

toward a clientele of consumers, how does it define its goals? What needs to

be done? What should be done first? It is precisely to avoid these potentially

embarrassing questions that it is necessary to establish from the outset a

disciplinary context which legitimizes the object of inquiry as pertinent to the

discipline itself, as knowledge worth knowing in and for itself. I am notsaying that childkilling in Athens is inherently uninteresting, for nothing is

interesting except to someone for something. The point is that classics has

been constituted as a discipline which avoids the question of interest

altogether, as a discipline with the goal of reconstructing the past as accurately

as possible (a step by step approximation of the Truth, to use Wilamowitz'

expression) without bothering to wonder who will be interested in what theyreconstruct indeed, by the exclusion of this question. As such, classics has

become a discourse which continually reproduces itself in its own terms.


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This, of course, is true to some degree in any type of principled inquiry.

It can be connected with what Kuhn (1970) calls "normal science." But, with

the possible exception of certain more technical areas of the field, classics lacks

an essential prerequisite for the conduct of "normal science": an explicittheoretical paradigm which has won the acceptance of most competent

practitioners and the lack of such explicit theory is nowhere more evident

than in the conduct of classical literary scholarship. The result is a potentially

endless proliferation of interpretations and reinterpretations based on little

more than a preexisting "pile" of traditional interpretations (note the

waffling of our author in the statement of his proposed addition to the pile,

cited above). In this pile, inevitably, will be, if not Wilamowitz himself, some

comparable figure who functions to legitimate the discourse. We will return

to this issue again.

Another aspect of the Wilamowitz footnote can be seen in the above

example. The citation to Wilamowitz is accompanied by the comment that

Wilamowitz is, in the passage, "not speaking of Athens alone, nor yet of thefifth and fourth centuries merely." Since the subject of the essay in question is

childkilling in fifth and fourthcentury Athens, the quote turns out to be

only marginally relevant; and indeed,Staat und Gesellschaft is not referred to

again. Why quote it at all then? Is it not because the presence of a footnote to

Wilamowitz is the clearest indication that one has conducted a thorough

search through the scholarship? To impute such a motive to this particularauthor (which 1 can assure the reader is in part a projection from my own

scholarly practice) is idle speculation; but even the small number of examples

to be looked at in this essay will suggest that such a procedure is


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institutionally recognized and rewarded, however misrecognized as such by

both authors and journal referees.

B. Our second example is from the thirties and deals with the palace of theAtridae in Attic tragedy. Two pages into the article, we have the following

note:

Among commentators who take this view [that Argos is the scene of

the Agamemnon] may be mentioned: Scholiast on Il. xi, 46; Dissen,

Pindari carmina (Gothae, 1830), Introd. to commentary onN e m . 10; K.

O. Mller, Aeschy lus , Eum eniden (Gttingen, 1833), pp. 121ff.; G.

Dindorf, Aeschyli tragoediae (Oxford, 1841), p. 324; W. G. Clark,

Peloponnesus (London, 1858), pp. 7072; G. Hermann, Aeschyli

tragoediae, II (Berlin, 1869), p. 649; Wecklein,Orestie (Leipzig, 1888), p.

13; Finsler,Die Orestie des Aeschylus (Bern, 1890), p. 14, n. 42; Kennedy,

Aeschylus, Agamennon (Cambridge, 1882), p. xviixviii; Croiset,

Histoire de la li terature grecque , Ill (1898), p. 180; Wernicke,P.W.,

RealEncyclopdie, 1 (1894), 725; Wilamowitz, Aeschylus,

Interpretationen (Berlin, 1914), p. 190 (cf. his Aischylos,Orestie, II

(Berlin, 1896), p. 255); Haigh, At tic Theatre (Oxford, 1907), p. 181;

Headlam, Agamemnon of Aeschylus (Cambridge, 1925); Introd. pp. 25f.;

Zomarides,Aisxl ou drmat a (Leipzig, 1910), III, p. 38; Christ,

Griechische Litteraturgeschichte, I (1912), p. 299; Kranz, Hermes LIV(1919), 307; Smyth, Aeschylus (Loeb Class. Lib), 11 (1926), p. 3; Geffcken,

Griechishe Literaturgeschichte (Heidelberg, 1926), 1 p. 159 and n. 123.


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I have chosen this example because of its thoroughness, the heterogeneity of

the different discourses of this "pile," and because the author intends to

disagree with all this accumulated authority. Such a note convinces the

reader immediately that no stone has been left unturned. Not one, but twoworks of Wilamowitz are cited, so that the author was not content to find a

single reference to him. The reference to a Homeric scholiast is remarkable,

since it would not be a likely place to look for information about the setting of

Aeschylus' play. It is likely, in fact, that this reference was noted by one of the

other authorities or reference works and added by our author, since no

edition of the scholia is cited; but this is uncertain. In any case, this detail is a

very powerful addition of professional authority an anonymous

commentator from antiquity could hardly have any disciplinary authority.

The same is true of the reference to the introductory remarks in the

commentary on a Pindaric ode by Dissen. We are given no indication of the

context in which the various opinions are given, but it is dubious that the

Homeric scholiast or Dissen made any attempt to justify their opinion in

either of those two places. In the next paragraph of the text, the authorschematically presents the "reasons suggested by commentators" for the

opinion and then rejects them as unconvincing. The whole matter is dealt

with rather quickly because the point, although not minor in any discussion,

is a minor one in this one.

The author could have simply said "most commentators say this . ..and then cited only the authors who actually give reasons. But from a

professional point of view, the note gains assent for the whole argument by

displaying the kind of conduct likely, in the minds of professional classicists,

to bring one to the truth of this and other such matters. Such a note is much


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more effective than the following one in the same volume appended to the

text of a fragmentary inscription:

Of course I am aware of the arguments of Henzen, Huelson, andMerkel. There is no need of repeating these arguments here. Merkel

and Mommsen are, I think, absolutely right and I accept as inevitable

and true the text that I give.

This note shows less savoir faire than the preceding one, but both of these

and the first example as well, are essentially the same thing: praeteritio. A

Wilamowitz footnote, once introduced, can be contradicted, modified or

dismissed; it matters little which, for such "piles" are of little value frorn a

strictly disciplinary standpoint. They pass over rather than address

epistemological issues.

That the Wilamowitz footnote should become a praeteritio is a function of

the contradictory status of classics: it is conceived of as "progressive" and"scientific" (a step by step approximation of the truth), but it has proven

practically impervious to explicit theoretical research models.' A scientist

would never refer to past opinions on a scientific matter, particularly if those

opinions were outdated. Presumably, everything that is worth saving has

been translated forward and found a place in the current theoretical

paradigm, detached from its originator and the whole issue of his "authority."There are limitations to this procedure (as well as enormous advantages), but

that is the way science works (Kuhn 1970). Although there have been, in

classics, innovations which suddenly rendered older scholarship obsolete

(one need only think of the Homeric question), the general rule, as indicated


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by footnotes in TAPA, has been to reward (by publication) scholars who are

able to demonstrate a mastery of all the scholarship, however irrelevant, a

task which becomes increasingly difficult.

C. The following passage from a forties' article on the epyllion states this

dilemma clearly:

The bibliography of the Greek and Latin Alexandrian periods,

especially on points of style, is enormous, and no one can claim

omniscience. The handling of it is rendered more troublesome by the

fact that so much of the older scholarship is more useful than the

recent. Some of the work is not worth mentioning, even to refute it,

and I have not done so.*

The implications of this passage are clear: although the scholarship is so huge

that no one can claim mastery of it, our author has gone to the trouble to do

so and is very likely in complete control of the material. The footnoteof his sentence, as one might expect, functions to validate the praeteritio

which has been announced:

*Sometimes one meets with oddities when a scholar will feel the need

of modifying the general viewpoint, e.g.., M. Lenchantin de Gubernatis,

P. Vergili Maronis Ciris (Turin, 1930), xviii....

What follows is a quote in Italian which, like a Wilamowitz footnote, proves

that the author has read everything, for Italian scholarship is esteemed very

low in American classics, and anyone would be forgiven for omitting it. The


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forties, Wilamowitz had been so thoroughly discredited that his word on

anything is negligible as an argument from authority. Later in the same

paper, our author blurts out with regard to a different matter: "Certainly we

need not be influenced by Wilamowitz, who says that we are dealing withanother Apollonius!" The only way that Wilamowitz functions at all in this

article is as a legitimation of the discourse itself: specifically, as a proof that the

author is professional.

Whatever the merits of the body of this article, it is clear that a

Wilamowitz footnote, however irrelevant to the argument, is a crucial

scholarly symbol; and everything in the two paragraphs we have cited is

calculated (but not necessarily "intended") to impose that symbol on its

reader, including the journal referee. The imposition of symbols is what

Bourdieu identifies as the characteristic form of power in an institution, a

power whose efficacy depends on its being misrecognized by all the agents

involved. This misrecognition is inscribed in our example by the conflicting

messages about scholarship: on the one hand, we are told that much of it isuseless, that one need not refer to it, that it is in decline; on the other hand,

we are told that one must search it all for the good stuff, that the present

article is superior to both old and new scholarship, and that a mastery of all

previous scholarship is a prerequisite for this superiority.

D. In a fifties' article on Antisthenes, we read the following:

Aristotle's evidence is definite and clear, and as far as it goes no one

really denies it; but many attempts have been made to make it go a

great deal further, by construing the passages so as to credit to


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Antisthenes the comments of Aristotle himself. The next step is then

to follow this will of the wisp through the Platonic dialogues and to see

references to Antisthenes in every passage where anything resembling

these comments is found. On the evidence of these supposed allusionsa philosophy of Antisthenes is built, and further references to this are

found.*

This process has been going on for more than a century and some of its

conclusions are in danger of being taken for granted on impressive

authority alone. Our object here is to look afresh at the actual evidence,

which is found in three passages of Aristotle.

The first isTopica 104.21, though here there is no possibility of

controversy as Aristotle simply gives as an example of a paradoxical

thesis the opinion of Antisthenes that contradiction is impossible:

[Greek citation].... No other words can be made relevant, and we thus

have a simple statement, which, however, should be noted.

This passage contains a fairly clear example of a literature summary which is

going to be swept away in a single stroke. The obligatory Wilamowitz

footnote runs as follows:

*The boldest and least convincing recent attempt to build up Antisthenes into agreat logician is C. M. Gillespie's The Logic of Antisthenes" in Archiv fr

Geschichte der Philosophie 26 (1913) 479500, and 27 (1914) 1738. A much more

sober attempt is K. von Fritz' "Zur Antisthenischen Erkenntnistheorie und Logik"

in Hermes 62 (1927) 453484. Natorp's article on Antisthenes inPaulyWissowa


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gives a very full account of all the scholars who built up Antisthenes in the last

century, and what Platonic passages each believed to refer to him. See also

Zeller,Socrates and the Socratic Schools (London, 1877) 284ff. Zeller admits that

the doctrines of Antisthenes were subversive of all knowledge (pp. 291 and 301),yet is led to credit him with constructive logical theories (p. 296). G. C. Field, in

Plato and His Contemporaries (London, 1930) 1604, also accepts the usual

interpretation of Met. 104 3n, as does D. R. Dudley (above, note 3) 115. See

also Wilamowitz,Platon (Berlin, 1929) 1, 2614 and 11 1601; P. Friedlnder,

Platon (Leipzig 1930) 11, 4534; and C. RitterPlaton (Mnchen 1923) 11, 115.

On the other hand P. Shorey,What Plato Said (Chicago 1933) 378, is very

skeptical of this "vast fabric of hypotheses about the relations of Plato and

Antisthenes." L. Campbell, in the preface to his edition of theTheaetetus, XXIX,

speaks of a "misunderstanding" of Met. 104 3n. A. Levi, 'Le Teorie Metafisiche

Logiche e Gnoscologiche di Antistene," inRevue d Histoire de la Philosophie 4

(1930) 227249 comes nearest to my interpretation of that passage. A. E. Taylor,

Plato: The Man and His Work (London 1926) pp. 86, 89, 96, 331, 386, refuses to

see any references to Antisthenes' theories in Plato and Burnet,Thales to Plato

(London 1920) 2512 is equally definite about theTheaetetus. F. M. Cornford is

more doubtful inPlato's Theory of knowledge (London 1949), 144 and 254.

Many of the characteristics of our previous examples of the Wilamowitz

footnote are obvious in this example: the ahistorical pile, with its "see also"

formula, the heterogeneity of the discourses cited, the praeteritio interspersedwith examples of argument from authority (Zeller agrees with our author but

contradicts himself; Levi "comes nearest to my interpretation," etc.) and the

implication that our author's labors to master the scholarship were both


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necessary and useless. But there is also something new in the rhetoric of this

praeteritio, and it is tempting to indulge here in some historical speculation.7

From World War 1 on, in classics as well as in literary studies

generally, there was a perceptible shift from the historical emphasis tovarious types of formalism. This may have been a reaction to the abuses of

historicism, or the result of antiGermanic sentiment, or an attempt by

academicians to dissociate themselves from the politics of the modern states

by focusing on the enduring and ahistorical aspects of art and culture.

Whatever its origin, the important point for us is the fact that this shift had

almost no consequences for the discursive practice of scholarship. The new

element in the praeteritio of the above passage is a function of this new

formalism: it is the focus, after invoking and dismissing the evidence of the

scholarship, on the texts themselves. The new formalism, culminating in

America in the triumph of the socalled "New Criticism," is generally

associated with bellelettristic articles on patterns, symbolism and such in

literary masterpieces; but as an alternative to the excesses of the historical

critical method, it exercised its effect throughout all aspects of classical study.In its most extreme form, this new focus replaced the disinterested

objectivism of traditional philology with an unmediated encounter with the

text, as though the text's meaning was locked up in its structure and available

as such to all men in all times. But this shift of emphasis, legible in the rise of

arguments involving continuity of imagery, symmetry, in short, the "unity"

of the text, substituted, from a practical standpoint, one type of reifiedknowledge for another. The autonomy of the historical moment was replaced

by the autonomy of the text. As such, the new formalism made its way into

7 For an account of literary historiography which takes up these issues, see H. R. Jauss. 1982. pp.345.


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classical journals without significantly changing the nature of scholarly

discourse itself. Wilamowitz continues to be used as a straw man, now more

than ever, a straw man whose explicit slaying in a footnote still authorizes

scholarly discourse by legitimizing its objects and by giving professionalauthority to the scholar him/herself.

E. The following examples are found in a volume of TAPA from the sixties:

[a] Wilamowitz supposed that Daphidas was a partisan of the Seleucids

in their wars with Attalus I. If Daphidas was a citizen of Telmessus, as

Hesychius and Suidas say, he had every right to support the Seleucids

against Attalus I since Telmessus, whether the Carian or the Lycian

city, was then in Seleucid territory except for the short time when

Attalus I held it.* Only if he had been a Pergamene or Mysian in a high

position of trust ...

* See Wilamowitz loc. cit., who thinks, however, that Daphidas was not

Telmessian, but from AlexandriainTroad; forCIG 1564 (=OGIS 316), which

Wilamowitz dates about 235220, mentions Agedieus, Daphitas' son, citizen of

Alexandria. Dittenberger, however, dates it in the second century; hence if this is

the same Daphidas (this is the only other instance of the name), the case for

putting him under Attalus I is weakened, though still possible. Wilamowitz

explains away the sources' Telmessus as solita ariolatio of ancient scholars: ". . .

impium divinationis irrisorem ad vatum nobilem patriam retulit (ariolatio)" butthis too is ariolatio.

[b.] [In an article on staging in Euripides] Symptomatic of the difficulties

involved in arriving at an accurate view of the staging are the


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discrepant treatments of Phaedra's action at this point. Few modern

commentators would agree with the scholiast who posits Phaedra's

absence during the choral ode (ad 565: "Enter Phaedra, distraught."). L.

Meridier,L'Hippolyte d Euripide (Paris, 1935) 11416, describes her asresting on her couch where she has been throughout, but up against

the door where she can overhear Hippolytus. Wilamowitz in his stage

directions, Griechische Tragoedien (Berlin 1899), has her get up at 215,

sink back at 238, get up at 311, go back to the bed at 353, and get up for

good at 373. Most descriptions of Phaedra during the choral song would

agree with Wilamowitz: "She listens at the door with increasing

agitation."

[c.] I begin my demolition of the theory* by refuting the external

evidence from the scholia.

*A murderous attack on the theory forms a particularly enjoyable chapter of

Wilamowitz' Homerische Untersuchungen (Berlin, 1884), Part 2, ch. 3. In this

paper I have used rather different arguments to come to very different

conclusions.

Example "a" more or less speaks for itself. It is a typical praeteritio in a fairly

traditional historicalcritical article. I cite it only because Wilamowitz'

remark that an ancient opinion is "typical nonsense" (solita ariolatio) isturned against Wilamowitz himself ("this too is ariolatio"). Our author

apparently hopes to escape a similar judgment, even though he is, after all,

reproducing precisely the same kind of discourse as Wilamowitz indeed,


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even though he uses Wilamowitz in this same footnote to legitimize such a

reproduction.

Example "b" is remarkable because it shows clearly the generative

power of scholarly disagreement. The "difficulties at arriving at an accurateview" of something does not provoke despair; on the contrary, it means that

the problem is real and that reinforcements are needed. Ironically, the '.step

by step approximation of the truth" which the epistemology of nineteenth

century philology bequeathed to classics has made of it a self contained

discourse which simply gathers more and more mass. The illusion that there

is a correct solution to every problem defined within this discourse

guarantees the unlimited availability of such difficult problems and

authorizes the endless proliferation of tentative solutions to them.

In example "c," both Wilamowitz' arguments and conclusions are

passed over," but the standard derision is replaced here by the assertion that

the author particularly enjoyed reading the chapter of Wilamowitz. This is

the device of praeteritio raised to an art form. Despite the frequency of references to Wilamowitz, there are probably only a few scholars who do not

read him through the indexes to his work or through other scholarly

footnotes. Our author here gives the distinct impression that he actually reads

Wilamowitz cover to cover, perhaps even as casual reading. Only the most

committed professional classicist would be so masochistic and this note takes

the prize for producing professional authority.

There is also something macho and intimidating about this declaration

of war. Every footnote I have cited so far, in fact, has been in the context of a

disagreement with past opinion. Indeed, the majority of classics articles in


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TAPA take their inspiration from someone else's (very often Wilamowitz')

"mistake." The founding of most professions was some identifiable common

goal which required collaboration entailing division of labor, refining of

skills, etc. Classics, however, is a field where collective inquiry is theexception not the rule, where "productivity" is a function of disagreement

rather than agreement. Classicists rarely "stand on the shoulders" of their

predecessors except perhaps to better kick them in the face. Do classicists even

really have a collective goal of any kind?

The first two footnotes of a fourth example from this same sixties

volume run as follows:

*I wish to record my deep gratitude to ... who very kindly consented to examine

this paper and who made many valuable suggestions for its improvement.

**For the sake of convenience I shall mention in one note all those whom I have

consulted with regard to this line, grouping them according to the interpretation

they defend. Those in bold type are works which in future will be referred to only

by name. All references to and quotations from Pindar are from Bowra's Oxford

text.

In support of the first interpretation: C. M. Bowra, "Pindar,

Pythian II,"Problems in Greek Poetry (Oxford 1953) 86f. L. Dissen,Pindari carmina 2, rev. by F. G. Schneidewin (Gotha and Erfurt 1847);

I. W. Donaldson,Pindar's Epinician or Triumphal Odes (London 1841);

C. A. M. Fennell,Pindar: the Olympian and Pythian Odes (Cambridge

1879); G. Fraccaroti,Le Odi di Pindaro (Verona 1894) 367, note 1; H.


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Gundert,Pindar und sein Dichterberuf (Frankfurt am Main 1935) 141, note

372; C. G. Heyne,Pindari carmina et fragmenta 1 (Oxford 1807); F. Mezger,

Pindars Siegeslieder (Leipzig 1880) 57; G. Perrotta,Saffo e Pindaro (Bari

1935) 141; W. Schadewaldt,Der Aufbau des Pindarischen Epinikion (Halle1928) 33, note 2; E. Schmid,PINDAROS PERIODOS (Wittenberg

1616); T. A. Seymour,Selected Odes of Pindar (Boston 1882):

Of the second: W. Christ,Pindari carmina (Leipzig 1896); L. R. Farnell,The Works

of Pindar 2 (London 1932); J. H. Finley,Pindar and Aeschylus (Cambridge [Mass.]

1955) 95; 0. Schroeder,Pindars Pythien (Leipzig and Berlin 1922) 19; L. Traverso

and E. Grassi,Pindaro, Odi e frammenti (Florence 1956); U. von Wilamowitz

Moellendorff, Hieron und Pindaros (Berlin 1901) 29:

Of the third: B. L. Gildersleeve,Pindar, the Olympian and Pythian Odes (New

York 1890); R. Lattimore,The Odes of Pindar (Chicago 1947); A. Puech,Pindare,

Pythiques (Paris 1955); 0. Regenbogen, quoted by Gundert; J. Sandys,The Odes of

Pindar (London and Cambridge [Mass.] 1915); H. Strohm,Tyche (Stuttgart 1944)

47, note 33:

Of the fourth: A. Boeckh,Pindari opera 2, pt. 2 (Leipzig 1821); G. Coppola,

Introduzione a Pindaro (Rome 1931) 143 L; P. Feine,De Aristarcho Pindari

interprete (Diss. Leipzig 1883) 290; E. Fraenkel, quoted by Schadewaldt; E.

Thummer,Die Religiositt Pindars (Innsbruck 1957) 100:

Of the fifth: C. del Grande,Filologia minore (Milan and Naples 1956) 114.


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The second footnote is the most remarkable pile I have come across and the

indefatigable labor of this author is truly awesome. No less awesome is the

fact that the purpose of this lengthy and heavily annotated article is the

construal of a single line of poetry. Also of interest is the first footnote, whichexemplifies a type destined to become a regular feature of TAPA articles, the

identification of a venerable colleague or teacher who "made many useful

suggestions." Later the tag "all remaining mistakes are my own

responsibility" will become a mandatory addition. There is no denying that

such thanks are generally sincere; but there is also no denying that such

accolades contribute to the professional authority of the article.

F. The following footnote appears in a seventies' TAPA volume:

The suggestion of a closing was not lost on Wilamowitz, who twice in

his illuminating article on the proem (above note 22) suggests that it

might well have ended here, wenn er ein gewhnlicher Hymnus

wre" (474, see also 468). What precisely Wilamowitz had in mind isnot clear, except that it had something to do with names.

This note and another in the same volume which cites K. O. Mller's "still

useful Erluterungen in Aeschylos Eumenides (1833)" introduce formulas of

etiquette in referring to venerable masters of the past. To say that

Wilamowitz is useful or illuminating (or "stimulating," "perceptive,"enjoyable," "important," and of course, "interesting") functions in exactly

the same way, from a professional point of view, as condemning his

pedantry: in each case it is the question of the mastery of the scholarship

which counts as well as legitimizing the object in a way that avoids the


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question "useful for whom and for what?" Etiquette, of course, is formal

behavior, but behavior whose formality has less to do with the object on

which it operates than on the operator herself; that is, it makes a statement

about a person; and if they do not actually fly in the face of utility, as theyoften do, the elements of etiquette nevertheless are generally the result of

cultural lag of apocryphal origin they are reproduced without ever being

questioned. I began by saying that disciplines tend to focus on reproducing a

certain form of discourse. It can be said now that this formality with respect to

classics is basically a type of etiquette; classical scholarship has become, to a

degree which cannot be precisely determined from a handful of examples, a

matter of proper behavior; and the presence of this propriety is likely to be

directly proportional to the lack of an explicit theoretical paradigm which

could itself become an object of debate and inquiry. The Wilamowitz footnote

is thus a part of a much larger ensemble of practices which insure that the

question, "why do we do these things?" is either not asked or, if asked, that it

is answered in the way that all assaults on etiquette are answered: "they have

always been done."v

Footnotes and Ideology

A more exhaustive study of footnotes to Wilamowitz may or may not

have qualified or substantiated the picture I have drawn of classicalscholarship. There are, of course, classics articles which begin not with a

Wilamowitz pile, but with a reference to or restatement of the ParryLord

theory of oral composition, or some other theoretical construction, which is

itself at stake in the article. The choice of my examples was determined by my


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interests (as always), among which is the effect of professionalization

(preconstructed for me by sociologists, historians and philosophers) on the

conduct of literary studies. Such theoretical constructions are heuristic, and

the value of heuristic devices is inversely proportional to the degree to whichthey become reified into orthodoxies which are "taken for granted." The

relegation of the assumptions underlying various practices into the realm of

the undiscussed and the unquestioned insures that the ideological function of

these practices remain misrecognized by the agents of those practices. I would

therefore like to repeat the observation that the Wilamowitz footnote is an

institutional function, and its use cannot be explained simply as personal

quirk, cynical opportunism or character flaw. It would be dangerous to

consider such factors as primary.

Another related danger involves the use of Wilamowitz and Nietzsche

in this study and the focus throughout on the use and abuse of Wilamowitz.

One should not suppose that Wilamowitz was personally responsible for the

professionalization of classics, that he was a fatal influence, or that had he notlived things would have turned out vastly different. Nor should one suppose

that had Nietzsche stuck with classics, things would have been different.

Nietzsche was neither the saintly visionary painted by Arrowsmith (1963b. 5

15), a man who saw what the classics could and should be; nor was he the

classicist in wolf s clothing Hugh LloydJones delineates in his patronizing

appropriation of Nietzsche (LloydJones 1970). Nietzsche's "vision" of a trueeducational institution often sounds about as liberal as Plato's Republic, as

the passage cited above about "born classicists" indicates; for "inherited

excellence" is the key aristocratic mystification of the arbitrary cultural

mechanisms which guarantee the privileged classes a disproportionate share


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of the symbolic capital of their community. 1 will cite two other notes of

Nietzsche translated by Arrowsmith in Arion which may clarify the negative

aspects of the ideology Wilamowitz opposed (1963b. 24):

A purer knowledge of the classical world is now perhaps possible, but

also perhaps a less effective, a weaker, knowledge? This is correct, if

by "effect" we mean effect upon the masses; but for the molding of

great men the classics are more potent than ever. Goethe as German

poet-classicist; Wagner as a still higher stage: his clearsightedness for

the only dignified position of art. Never has a classical work had so

powerful an effect as that of the Oresteia on Wagner. The classicist who

has been castrated by objectivity, who is as much a cultural philistine as

anybody else, and who dabbles in pure scientific research, is obviously a

sorry spectacle.

Chief points of view with respect to the subsequent value of the

classics:

1 . They are not for the young, since they exhibit man in a state

of freedom from shame.

2. They are not to be imitated directly; but they teach us how art

achieved its highest perfection to date.

3. They are accessible only to a few, and there should be a police

des moeurs in charge of them, as there should be for bad pianists

who play Beethoven.


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4. These few, as critics, evaluate our own age in terms of the

classics; and they evaluate the classics in terms of their own ideals

and are thereby critics of the classics.

The professionalization of knowledge was, from one perspective, a radically

democratic idea, wresting the knowledge monopoly from the privileged

classes and making it available (in theory) to all. It was a liberation of sorts,

but one which created new forms of tyranny and struggle. The neutrality of

knowledge, like the "freedom" of the market, turned out to be a cruel myth.

But Wilamowitz' call for disinterested scholarship is neither less nor more

ideological than Nietzsche's call for an allout appropriation of the past. The

rise of the new formalism in literary studies could even be seen as a

"liberation" from the historicalcritical discourse which had become such a

burden by the twenties. The ways in which these initially liberating ideologies

and many others like them have ended up being harsh tyrannies is one of the

most depressing aspects of the history of higher education. The true legacy of Nietzsche, to try to end on a more positive note, is not his fanciful vision of

an ideal university composed of bermenschen, but is the relentless call for

selfreflexivity which informs all his writing. If we do not ask the

fundamental question, "what are we all doing this for?," we can be sure that

someone's interests will nevertheless be served.

Miami University (Ohio)


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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arrowsmith, William. 1963a. Arion 11, No. 1 (Spring), 518.

------------------------------. 1963b. Arion II, No. 2 (Summer), 527.

Bledstein, Burton. 1976.The Culture of Professionalism. New York.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977.Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. Richard Nice.Cambridge, England.

Bourdieu, Pierre and J.C. Passeron. 1977.Reproduction in Education, Societyand Culture . tr. R. Nice. London.

Calder III, W. 1981. "Research Opportunities in the Modern History of Classical Scholarship,"Classical World 74, No. 5 (Feb.). 2415 1.

Grnder, K. 1969.Der Streit um Nietzsches "Geburt der Tragdie."Hildesheim.

Jauss, H. R. 1982,Towards an Aesthetics of Reception, tr. M. Bahti,Minneapolis.

Kuhn, T. S. 1970.The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago.

LloydJones, Hugh. 1976. "Nietzsche and the Study of the Ancient World," inStudies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition , ed. J. O'Flaherty et al.Chapel Hill.

Peradotto, J. 1983. "Texts and Unrefracted Facts: Philology, Hermeneutics andSemiotics," Arethus a 16, Nos. 12 (Spring/Fall), 1533.

SarfattiLarson, M. 1977.The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Approach. Berkeley.

Shorey, Paul. 1919. "Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship."TAPA 50, 3361.

Silk, M. S. and J. P. Sterne. 1981.Nietzsche on Tragedy. Cambridge.

Toulmin, Stephen. 1972. Human Unde rstand ing . Princeton.

Veysey, L. 1965.The Emergence of the American University. Chicago.


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