Virgilian Parerga

Book excerpt: Together with "Critical Notes on Virgil" (De Gruyter 2016), this volume offers an enlightening complement to the critical text of the Georgics and the Aeneid recently published in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana. In "Virgilian Parerga: Textual Criticism and Stylistic Analysis" can be seen the progress owed to the insight of four of the finest scholars of the past (Heinsius, Heyne, Ribbeck and Sabbadini). The first chapters trace the steps of the arduous path that from the middle of the 17th century on led these outstanding erudites to free themselves from the uulgata and compose a new critical text for the works of Virgil. The later chapters tackle important questions of textual criticism and Virgilian style, and propose new answers to inveterate exegetic problems. The volume ends with an interesting theoretical discussion on the methodological principles that combine the rules of philology with those of law. Here the author questions the logical assumptions that dominate not only the philological process but also the judicial one.