« Mental paratext? Homeric criticism in the Progymnasmata »
Résumé
This article addresses the role played by commentaries on Homer in the preliminary exercises to rhetoric, or Progymnasmata, in Imperial and Late Antiquity (1st-4th century), with emphasis placed on narration, contestation, confirmation, praise and blame. A comparison between the scholia and the Progymnasmata shows that the rhetors familiarized their pupils with a critical approach to the Iliad and the Odyssey when demonstrating how to compose narratives or how to confirm and refute them. We can treat this knowledge as a mental paratext: classical paideia enabled its recipients to have in mind a whole set of comments. They could activate these when they alluded to, quoted, or rewrote Homer in their own discourses, in a way that blurs the boundaries between intertext, metatext and paratext, as defined by Genette, and also runs counter to the modern representation of a text separate from its exegesis.