"Servius" redirects here. For the personal name, see Servius (praenomen)

Servius (praenomen)

Servius is a Latin praenomen, or personal name, which was used throughout the period of the Roman Republic, and well into imperial times. It was used by both patrician and plebeian families, and gave rise to the patronymic gens Servilia. The feminine form is Servia...

. For the Roman king, see Servius Tullius

Servius Tullius

Servius Tullius was the legendary sixth king of ancient Rome, and the second of its Etruscan dynasty. He reigned 578-535 BC. Roman and Greek sources describe his servile origins and later marriage to a daughter of Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, Rome's first Etruscan king, who was assassinated in 579 BC...

. For the 1st century BC Roman jurist, see Servius Sulpicius Rufus

Servius Sulpicius Rufus

Servius Sulpicius Rufus , surnamed Lemonia from the tribe to which he belonged, was a Roman orator and jurist.He studied rhetoric with Cicero, and accompanied him to Rhodes in 78 BC. Finding that he would never be able to rival his teacher he gave up rhetoric for law...

.

Maurus Servius Honoratus was a late 4th-century grammarian, with the contemporary reputation of being the most learned man of his generation in Italy; he was the author of a set of commentaries

Commentary (philology)

In philology, a commentary is a line-by-line or even word-by-word explication usually attached to an edition of a text in the same or an accompanying volume. It may draw on methodologies of close reading and literary criticism, but its primary purpose is to elucidate the language of the text and...

 on the works of Virgil

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...

. These works, In tria Virgilii Opera Expositio, constituted the first manuscript to be printed

Incunabulum

Incunable, or sometimes incunabulum is a book, pamphlet, or broadside, that was printed — not handwritten — before the year 1501 in Europe...

 at Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

, by Bernardo Cennini

Bernardo Cennini

Bernardo Cennini was an Italian goldsmith, sculptor and early printer of Florence. As a sculptor he was among the assistants to Lorenzo Ghiberti in the long project producing the second pair of doors— the Doors of Paradise— for the Battistero di San Giovanni. He produced the first book printed at...

, 1471.

In the Saturnalia of Macrobius, Servius appears as one of the interlocutors; allusions in that work and a letter from Symmachus

Symmachus

Symmachus can refer to several different people of Roman antiquity:*Symmachus the Ebionite , was the author of one of the Greek versions of the Old Testament;*Pope Symmachus, pope from 498 to 514....

 to Servius show that he was a pagan.

Commentary on Virgil

The commentary on Virgil has survived in two distinct manuscript traditions. The first is a comparatively short commentary, which is attributed to Servius in the superscription in the manuscripts and by other internal evidence. A second class of manuscripts, all deriving from the 10th and 11th centuries, embed the same text in a much expanded commentary. The copious additions are in contrast to the style of the original; none of these manuscripts bears the name of Servius, and the commentary is known traditionally as Servius auctus or Servius Danielis, from Pierre Daniel who first published it in 1600. "The added matter is undoubtedly ancient, dating from a time but little removed from that of Servius, and is founded to a large extent on historical and antiquarian literature which is now lost. The writer is anonymous and probably a Christian", perhaps Aelius Donatus

Aelius Donatus

Aelius Donatus was a Roman grammarian and teacher of rhetoric. The only fact known regarding his life is that he was the tutor of St...

. A third class of manuscripts, written for the most part in Italy, gives the core text with interpolated scholia, which demonstrate the continued usefulness of the Virgilii Opera Expositio.

The authentic commentary of Servius Maurus Honoratus is in effect the only complete extant edition of a classic author written before the collapse of the Empire in the West. It is constructed very much on the principle of a modern edition, and is partly founded on an extensive Virgilian critical literature, much of which is known only from the fragments and facts preserved in this commentary. The notices of Virgil's text, though seldom or never authoritative in face of the existing manuscripts, which go back to, or even beyond, the time of Servius, yet supply valuable information concerning the ancient recensions and textual criticism of Virgil. In the grammatical interpretation of his author's language, Servius does not rise above the stiff and overwrought subtleties of his time; while his etymologies

Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...

, as is natural, violate every modern law of sound and sense in favour of creative excursus.

Servius set his face against the prevalent allegorical methods

Allegory

Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...

 of exposition of text. For the antiquarian and the historian, the abiding value of his work lies in his preservation of facts in Roman history, religion, antiquities and language, which but for him might have perished. Not a little of the laborious erudition of Varro and other ancient scholars has survived in his pages.

Other works

Besides the Virgilian commentary, other works of Servius are extant: a collection of notes on the grammar (Ars grammatica) of Aelius Donatus

Aelius Donatus

Aelius Donatus was a Roman grammarian and teacher of rhetoric. The only fact known regarding his life is that he was the tutor of St...

; a treatise on metrical endings in verse (De finalibus); and a tract on the different poetic meters (De centum metris).

The edition of Georg Thilo and Hermann Hagen (1878–1902), remains the only edition of the whole of Servius' work. Currently in development is the Harvard Servius (Servianorum in Vergili Carmina Commentariorum Editio Harvardiana); of the projected five volumes, two have so far appeared, i (Aeneid 1-2), 1946; ii (Aeneid 3-5), 1965, and the project continues glacially.

Sources

• E. K. Rand, "Is Donatus's Commentary on Virgil Lost?" Classical Quarterly 10 (1916), 158-164. Donatus's authorship of the supplementary material.
• "The Manuscripts of the Commentary of Servius Danielis on Virgil", Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 43 (1932), 77-121;
• "The Manuscripts of Servius's Commentary on Virgil", Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 45 (1934), 157-204.

External links

• Commentary on the Aeneid of Virgil is at the Perseus Project in Latin.
• De Centum Metris at Intratext.com
• De Centum Metris at Forum Romanorum