Giorgio Pasquali

Giorgio Pasquali (29 April 1885, Rome – 9 July 1952, Belluno) was an Italian classical scholar who made a fundamental contribution to the field of textual criticism.

Biography

Pasquali was born in Rome, the son of a barrister. He graduated in Classics from La Sapienza, defending a dissertation which bore the title "La commedia mitologica e i suoi precedenti nella letteratura greca" ("Mythological comedy and its antecedents in Greek literature"; tutor: Nicola Festa). In 1908 and 1909 he continued his studies in Basel and Göttingen.

He went on to teach in Rome, Messina, Göttingen and Florence, where he became full professor of Greek literature in 1924; he then moved to the chair of Greek and Latin literature. In 1925 he signed the Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. From 1931 onwards he also taught at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He received various honours, including an honorary degree from the University of Göttingen (1937) and being elected to the Royal Academy of Italy (1942).

Even if he initially didn't show support to the Italian Fascist Party, he apparently reduced his anti-fascism through time—or, at least, he made it less evident and explicit; in 1936 he was elected to the Accademia della Crusca and in 1942 he became member of the Royal Academy of Italy; for this reason, in 1946, he was expelled from the Accademia dei Lincei.

He died in a car accident in Belluno in 1952. The Department of Classical Philology of the University of Florence is entitled to his name.

Research

Pasquali has been described as a child prodigy of classical philology. When he published his critical edition of Proclus' commentary on Plato's "Cratylus" (Teubner, 1903), he was barely 23. He was interested both in the dynamics of textual transmission and literary criticism, and his mentor Nicola Festa encouraged him to work on late ancient or non-canonical authors such as Proclus, Tertullian, Eusebius and Gregory of Nyssa. Festa also introduced him to philology, by making him read the edition of Euripides' "Herakles" by Wilamowitz (Weidmann, 1889).

He worked both on Greek and Latin literatures, mainly from the Hellenistic and Roman age onwards: Horace, Callimachus, Theophrastus, Pausanias and above-mentioned authors Proclus, Tertullian, Eusebius and Gregory of Nyssa. On another hand, he deeply despised Byzantine literature: "la letteratura bizantina è tra le più noiose al mondo" ("Byzantine literature ranks among the most boring [literatures] in the world"); he spoke of "inferiorità del medioevo bizantino rispetto a quello occidentale" ("inferiority of the Byzantine Middle Ages compared to the Western Middle Ages") and of the Byzantines as a "civiltà, diciamo pure inferiore" ("an inferior civilization, let's say").

His written production counts about 150 works. He critically edited Proclus' "Commentary on Plato's Cratylus", Theophrastus' "Characters" (Sansoni, 1919) and Gregory of Nyssa's "Letters" (E. J. Brill, 1951; GNO, vol. VIII/2); he produced authoritative monographs on Horace ("Orazio lirico" / "Horace, the lyric", Le Monnier, 1920) and Callimachus ("Quaestiones Callimacheae" / "Callimachean questions" [in Latin], Hubert, 1913), and also on theory of textual criticism ("Filologia e storia" / "Philology and history", Le Monnier, 1920; "Storia della tradizione e critica del testo", Le Lettere, 1934: see below). Several of his papers were collected in the "Pagine stravaganti" (literally: "Extravagant pages", meaning that the contents aren't necessarily related to philology) series: "Pagine stravaganti di un filologo" ("A philologist's extravagant pages", 1933); "Pagine meno stravaganti" ("Less extravagant pages", 1935); "Terze pagine stravaganti" ("Extravagant pages: third series", 1942); "Stravaganze quarte e supreme" ("Fourth, supreme extravaganza", 1951).

Contribution to textual criticism

Pasquali's greatest claim to fame is the book "Storia della tradizione e critica del testo" ("History of the tradition and textual criticism").

It was born as a reaction to Textkritik by Paul Maas, of which Pasquali first wrote a long review that appeared in several instalments in the journal Gnomon. Pasquali's book, which came out in 1934, complements the work of Maas rather than refuting it. A thoroughly revised second edition appeared in 1952, the year of Pasquali's death. As of 2023, the book has not been translated into English yet.

Eduard Schwartz's critical edition of Eusebius' "Church History" (GCS 2) played a major role in defining Pasquali's book. Schwartz, in fact, showed that the text of the "Church History" still contained variants by the author, meaning that more than one recension was known in the antiquity and traces of it were preserved.

The book makes several major contributions to textual criticism, and especially to its sub-field of stemmatics. Pasquali concentrates on ancient Greek and Latin texts, which we know mostly through manuscript copies written in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Before him, scholars had concentrated on abstract relationships between the manuscripts and drew up geometric stemmata codicum or "manuscript family trees"; Pasquali shows the benefit of seeing the transmission of a text as a historical process. He also studies special cases of textual transmissions, for example where the manuscripts contain different versions of the same passages, both (or all) of them written by the author; and where anomalous sources such as collations (textual notes) by humanists conserve readings from lost manuscripts. He shows that a fairly recent manuscript may conserve valuable textual variants, if it goes back to a valuable lost source, an idea that is expressed in the maxim recentiores non deteriores.

Bibliography

• A. La Penna, Pasquali, Giorgio, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani vol. 81, 2014 [1].
• G. Pasquali, Orazio lirico, Florence, Le Monnier, 1920.
• G. Pasquali, Lingua nuova e antica, Florence, Le Monnier, 1985.
• G. Pasquali, Scritti filologici: letteratura greca, letteratura latina, cultura contemporanea, recensioni, Florence, Olschki, 1986.
• G. Pasquali, Storia della tradizione e critica del testo, Florence, Le Monnier, 1952 (1st ed. 1934).
• G. Pasquali, Pagine stravaganti di un filologo, Florence, Le Lettere, 1994 (1st ed. 1933).
• G. Pasquali, Pagine stravaganti vecchie e nuove, pagine meno stravaganti, Florence, Le Lettere, 1994 (1st ed. 1935).
• G. Pasquali, Filologia e storia, Florence, Le Monnier, 1998.
• Giorgio Pasquali e la filologia classica del Novecento: atti del Convegno (Firenze-Pisa, 2-3 dicembre 1985), Florence, Olschki, 1988.