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works by the same author in different genres or by different authors in the same genre, but all will normally have more weight than a parallel from a different author in a different genre to say nothing of a parallel from a completely different culture. |
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These principles and canons of evidence guide most interpretations, consciously or unconsciously, but neither alone nor together do they guarantee results which we can have any reason to believe will coincide with the truth of the matter. We may wish to think that they direct us towards what the author really intended or what his text really means, and it may even be the case that, psychologically, our activity as interpreters is largely dependent upon our belief that these principles really do work they may function, in other words, rather like Kantian regulative ideals. But it seems better to regard them not in terms of the author and his text, to which they bear no obvious relation, but rather in terms of the interpretative community that of professional philologists which actually makes use of them. This is a community defined not only by the texts it reads but also by the way it reads them; and despite pluralism and polemics, the area of difference within it is far smaller than that of consensus. In that sense, it may be said that these rules are the methodological assumptions that structure the discourse of philology. |
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Interpretation of Contexts |
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In the present context, Simonides' ode to Scopas is of interest not only because Socrates' discussion of the poem, to which we owe its fragmentary preservation, centrally problematizes the role of contexts in the interpretation of texts, but also because unresolved issues of external and internal context seem often to have haunted interpretations of the text. On the one hand, it was already recognized early in the nineteenth century that even though Socrates' exegesis could not provide a reliable guide to the meaning of Simonides' poem, wary criticism might still succeed in detaching the text of the poem from the context of Socrates' discussion of it; and in the course of that century generations of German scholars from Heyne through Wilamowitz gradually managed to establish a fairly reliable text of Simonides' ode.19 Though controversy continues to simmer on points of detail,20 the following text, that of Page, may be taken as representative of |
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19 For brief sketches of the history of the problem and bibliographical references, see Aars (1888) 34, Gentili (1964) 27880 and n. 1, Michelangeli (1896) 2830, and Smyth (1900) 311. Michelangeli (1896) 2227 provides a useful synopsis of the various texts proposed up to his time. |
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20 A resolutely minority position with regard to the constitution of the text is assumed by Gentili (1964) 28590 and 297302. |
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