Tuesday, September 09, 2025
What Is Classical Philology?
Solveig Lucia Gold and Joshua T. Katz, "Apology for Philology," Antigone (September, 2025):
Newer› ‹Older
What is Classical philology? The best point of reference for an American audience may be this: it looks a lot like textualist and originalist approaches to constitutional interpretation. Classical philology, as we were trained to do it, is the attempt to understand a text as it was produced in its historical context, with as few anachronistic preconceptions as possible. The Classical philologist unpacks each word or phrase by comparing it with other uses of the word or phrase in a given author's corpus — and in the broader corpus of texts to which that author would have been exposed.
