An Unpublished Letter from Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff to Grigory E. Saenger

Аристей. Aristeas: Вестник классической филологии и античной истории. 2022. Vol. 26. P. 255–263.

Shumilin M., Kostyleva T., Rezvykh P. V.

The publication presents an edition of a hitherto unpublished letter from Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff to Grigory E. Saenger (1853–1909), a classical scholar from Russia. The text of the letter is accompanied by an introduction, an English translation and brief notes. The letter (in German; preserved in Moscow, Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, F. 504, Inv. 4, Unit 314, Fol. 1–2) is dated 22 July, 1909 and was written in response after Saenger sent to Wilamowitz a copy of his 1909 edition of Statius’ Siluae. Wilamowitz does not give a detailed assessment of the edition, but instead formulates briefly his general attitude to Saenger’s approach and to the situation in the studies of Statius’ text. While Saenger adopted a radically interventionalist approach to the text of the Siluae, opposed to the conservatism of Friedrich Vollmer’s 1898 edition, Wilamowitz, though also being critical of Vollmer, opts for the general policy of seeing in the strange features of the transmitted text instances of Statius’ poetic boldness rather than scribal errors

Keywords: критика текста, textual criticism, история классической филологии, history of classical scholarship, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ульрих фон Виламовиц-Мёллендорфф, Statius, Стаций, Grigory E. Saenger, Г.Э. Зенгер, Silvae, Сильвы