‘IN PONDERE NON MAGNO SATIS PONDEROSAE ...’:
GRONOVIUS AND THE PRINTED TRADITION OF THE
THEBAID∗
Valéry Berlincourt‘In pondere non magno satis ponderosae ...’ It is with these words
that one of his contemporaries praised the exegetical notes that Johann
Friedrich Gronovius (1611–1671) included in his edition of Statius.^1
The minute in-24° volume published by the Elzeviers in Amsterdam
in 1653 may indeed be termed pondus non magnum, and it also seems
legitimate to describe as satis ponderosae the clever and shrewd ob-
servations of the Hamburg-born scholar. My purpose here will be to
use the specific case of Gronovius’ notes on the Thebaid to offer some
reflections on the history of scholarship: What was the weight of a
scholar’s authority in the printed tradition of a Classical text, and how
might its effects be felt?
Before addressing this question, it might be of use to give a very
brief sketch of the exegetical material discussed below. The notes on
the Thebaid that Gronovius published in 1653 are highly selective:
they fill merely forty-one pages of this volume, and are concerned
with little more than two hundred passages. Their scope is almost
entirely limited to the emendation of the text of Statius.^2 Gronovius
∗ This paper is part of a larger work in progress, dedicated to the printed commen-
taries and printed texts of Statius’ Thebaid from the fifteenth until the ninteenth cen-
tury. I present here only such elements as are necessary to my main point; the content
of Gronovius’ notes, as well as their elaboration and that of the text printed in his
edition, will be discussed elsewhere in more detail. I am extremely grateful to Jean-
Jacques Aubert, Michael Dewar, and Harm-Jan van Dam for their suggestions, and to
Sjef Kemper and Hans Smolenaars for giving me access to the dissertation of Bugter
1980.
1 On Gronovius’ philology, see Bugter 1980 and (in the perspective of the broader
cultural background) Lomonaco 1990, 37–125. On Gronovius’ role in the epistolary
exchanges of the Respublica literaria, Dibon 1978; inventory of the correspondence
in Dibon, Bots and Bots-Estourgie 1974, edition of selected letters and supplements to
the inventory in Dibon and Waquet 1984.
2 Ad 1.53 and 4.386, not concerned with textual problems at all, are exceptions.
The preeminence of emendation in Gronovius’ philological work on Tacitus is dis-
cussed at length in Bugter 1980, 85–192 (summary 195–6).