Greek Case in the Hellenistic and Byzantine Grammarians

GREEK CASE IN THE HELLENISTIC AND BYZANTINE GRAMMARIANS

Andrew W. Pitts

Observations on Greek grammar are found in the pre-Socratic philosophers, fth-century bc rhetoricians, as well as philosophers within and after the Socratic period, including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. During this period of linguistic scholarship, however, grammar was still viewed under the topi- cal heading of φιλοσοφία (philosophy).1 It was not until the Hellenistic period that linguistic studies—and Greek grammar in particular—began to have separate recognition.2 The development of this history indicates that there was little continuity among the Hellenistic grammarians and their treat- ments of case were either philosophical rather than linguistic (the Stoics), extremely elementary (Dionysius Thrax) or lacked an adequate context for the discussion of case (Apollonius Dyscolus). The most signi cant advances came from the Byzantine grammarians. While their work as a whole was not entirely innovative (including Maximus Planudes), few have recognized the importance of the Byzantine commentators on the Hellenistic grammarian Theodosius. Though they clearly had their problems, their remarks on his Κανόνες were more linguistically advanced than their predecessors and, in

1 On this period, see I. Sluiter, “The Greek Tradition,” in Wout Jac. van Bekkum et al., eds., The Emergence of Semantics in Four Linguistic Traditions: Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science 82; Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997), 147–224. 2 Cf. R.H. Robins, A Short History of Linguistics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 16; though this is not meant to suggest that there was much theoretical coherence or a generally accepted metalanguage, cf. I. Sluiter, Ancient Grammar in Context: Contributions to the Study of Ancient Linguistic Thought (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990), 39; Daniel J. Taylor, “Rethinking the History of Language Science in Classical Antiquity,” in Daniel Taylor, ed., The History of Linguistics in the Classical Period (Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1990), 15–27. There was, however, enough continuity by the rst century for grammar to be codi ed in school-texts. For papyri, see Alfons Wouters, The Grammatical Papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt: Contributions of the ‘Ars Grammatica’ in Antiquity (Brussels: Paleis der Academien, 1979); Alfons Wouters, “The Grammatical Papyri and the Techn¯eGrammatik¯e of Dionysius Thrax,” in Vivien Law and Ineke Sluiter, eds., Dionysius Thrax and the Techn¯e Grammatik¯e (Münster: Nodus Publikationen, 1995), 95–109; Fredric G. Kenyon, “Two Greek School-Tablets,” JHS 29 (1909): 29–40; cf. e.g. P.Yale 446. 262 andrew w. pitts my view, even most of those who came after them—including especially grammarians of the Greek of the New Testament.

1. Hellenistic Grammarians

1.1. The Stoics The Stoic philosophers played a signi cant role in the development of Ancient Greek grammatical theory (for the testimony of other ancients, see Ammonius, In De int. 43.4–5; Leo Mageninus, Scholia in Aristolelem, Brandis, 104n) including Zenon (335–326bc), Chrysippus (280–207bc), and his pupil Diogenes of Babylon (230–150bc). There are no authentic extant Stoic grammatical texts.3 Fortunately, some of the work on case has been preserved in the grammatical and logical tradition (e.g. Ammounius, Commentaria 4.5; Stephanos, Commentaria 18.3). The earliest mention of grammatical case that we know of is the now lost work of Chrysippus, “On the Five Cases,” referred to by Diogenes Laertius (7.192). There are those who have argued that the traditional grammatical case categories are of Stoic origin.4 Some go so far as to attribute a signi cant portion of the tradition of generative grammar to the Stoics.5 Others are more unsure of the extent of the Stoic inuence,6 primarily due to the fact that the little we do know about Stoic grammatical theory is derived from secondary sources that tend to make

3 For Stoic grammatical sources, see R.T. Schmidt, Stoicorum Grammatica (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1967; orig. 1939) or the various scholia in I. Bekker, Anecdota Graeca (2 vols.; Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck- und Verlaganstalt, 1965; orig. 1816), which have been the traditional sources, but now a little more recently, see M. Pohelnz, Die Begründung der abendlan- dischen Sprachlehre durch die Stoa (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1939); K. Barwick, Remmius Palaemon und die romische ars grammatical (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1922); and esp. the list and survey in Jan Pinborg, “Classical Antiquity: Greece,” in Hans Aarslef, ed., Historiog- raphy of Linguistics (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 69–126 (77–79); David Blank and Catherine Atherton, “The Stoic Contribution to Traditional Grammar,” in Brad Inwood, ed., The Cam- bridge Companion to the Stoics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 310–312; and various references in M. Frede, “Principles of Stoic Grammar,” in John M. Rist, ed., The Stoics (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaP ress, 1978), 27–57. 4 Pohlenz, Die Begründung, 151; Barwick, Remmius Palaemon, passim. 5 Urs Egli, “Stoic Syntax and Semantics,” Historica Linguistica 13 (1986): 281–306. 6 R.H. Robins, “Dionysius Thrax and the Western Grammatical Tradition,” Transactions of the Philological Society (1957): 67–106; M. Frede, “The Origins of Traditional Grammar,” in R.E. Butts and J. Hantika, eds., Historical and Philosophical Dimensions of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science (A Series of Books on Philosophy of Science, Methodology, and Epistemology 12; Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1977), 51–80 (57–58).