Aristide Colonna


Aristide Colonna was an Italian classical scholar and university professor.

Biography

Colonna was born in contrada Torre del piccolo of Fiumefreddo Bruzio, a Calabrese comune in the province of Cosenza, from Enrico and Annamaria, who at the time of his birth were not yet married. After graduating from high school he moved to Rome and enrolled at the Sapienza University; here, Colonna studied Ancient Greek literature with Nicola Festa, Linguistics with Antonino Pagliaro, and Byzantine philology with Silvio Giuseppe Mercati, graduating on 26 June 1930, advised by Festa, with a thesis titled Heliodori Aethiopica ad codices nunc primum excussos recognovit adnotatione critica instruxit A. C. . He was encouraged to pursue this research by Mercati, who pointed him at MS. Vat. gr. 1390.
From 1947 to 1951 worked as adjunct librarian at the Accademia dei Lincei. In 1952 he became Professor in Greek literature at the University of Messina, and delivered the opening speech for the 1952–1953 academic year. In 1954 he moved to the University of Perugia where he taught until 1979. In that year he became "professore fuori ruolo", and retired in 1984. From 1957 to 1961 he was the first chair of the newly founded Faculty of Humanities.
He was a member of the Società Tiburtina di Storia e d'Arte from 1968.
He died in 1999, aged 90. He was married and had two children, Annamaria and Enrico.

Research activity

Colonna studied Greek literature from the beginnings to the Byzantine era, working on Phrynichus, Himerius, Hesiod, Themistius, Libanius and Sophocles, and also on Tzetzes, Psellus and Eustathius. Related to Heliodorus, he studied Philagathus of Cerami and his commentary on the Aethiopica. Occasionally he worked on textual transmission of Greek texts through papyri and published two papyri of the University of Milan collection.
Colonna published critical editions of Hesiod's Works and Days, of the plays by Sophocles, of two critical essays by Psellus and of the Etymologicum Genuinum. He also studied the Byzantine reception of said writers, and published the Introduction to Hesiod and the Life of Hesiod written by John Tzetzes as well as studying his Commentary on Oppian's "Halieutica"; a Life of Oppian written by Constantine Manasses; and both the ancient Life of Sophocles and the Byzantine rewriting by Manuel Moschopoulos. For a learned audience, he edited and/or translated the poems by Catullus, the speech Against the Corn-Dealers by Lysias, Book I and an anthology of Livy, the Georgics by Virgil, two books of the Odyssey, the treatise Contra Celsum by Origen, Hesiod's works, and the Histories by Herodotus. He published an anthology of Latin literature and a history of Greek literature.
His greatest claim to fame is the critical edition of the Aethiopica by Heliodorus, which expanded his dissertation and was published by the Accademia dei Lincei in 1938. It came with almost all the testimonia pertaining to Heliodorus and his novel, including the commentary by Philagathus and verses which Colonna attributed to Theodore Prodromos, but for which Niketas Eugenianos has also been proposed. Colonna published his edition in parallel with the Budé edition by R. M. Rattenbury and T. W. Lumb, whose first volume he had reviewed; his edition was reviewed by Rattenbury in return. Colonna's work was considered the most advanced stage of research on the novel although it was open to some criticism, e.g. by Michael Reeve. Twelve years after his edition, Colonna gave other significant contributions to the chronology of Heliodorus, showing that it was Heliodorus who took inspiration from the descriptions of the siege of Nisibis given by Julian and Ephraem the Syrian for his own description of the siege of Seine, and not the other way round, supporting a thesis already proposed by Marchinus van der Valk in 1940. Decades later, he revised the text and newly published it, with facing Italian translation and commentary, including an assessment of Heliodorus' life and possible influences.
After publishing his edition of Heliodorus, Colonna began working on the late antique rhetor and sophist Himerius. Originally encouraged by Festa, his work was delayed by World War II:
He eventually published the critical edition of Himerius' orations and declamations, which became the reference text. He had planned a second edition in order to include an Oslo papyrus published in 1956, which was never completed.
His third and last large-scale critical edition were the plays by Sophocles, which started the Greek series of the corpus Paravianum. With the help of his students, he investigated the textual transmission and the Byzantine reception of Sophocles, publishing his whole seven plays in three volumes. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, then-Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and future editor himself of Sophocles for the OCT, reviewed both the second and the third volume, highlighting its strong points.
Those of his scripta minora written in Latin were collected after his retirement and published in 1981.

Works

Colonna's full bibliography up to 1979 was published in his scripta minora of 1981 and again, following his death, in 2000. An updated account was compiled in 2000 by his student Fiorenza Bevilacqua. Abbreviations are in accordance with the standards set by L'Année Philologique, with the addition of:

Books

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  • — augmented ed. of the previous.
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Articles

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Festschriften

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