1547), TheocritusTheokrit (1530, 1545), Dio ChrysostomDion Chrysostomos (1531), SophoclesSophokles (1534, 1556), MacrobiusMacrobius (1535), CiceroCicero (1538, 1540, 1542, 1543, 1550, 1552, 1562, 1570), Homer (1538, 1540, 1541, 1551), QuintilianQuintilian (1532, 1538, 1542, 1546, 1549), AesopAesop (1538, 1539, 1571), PlautusPlautus (1538, 1558, 1566), XenophonXenophon (1539, 1543, 1545, 1553, 1561, 1572), ThucydidesThukydides (1540, 1565), HerodotusHerodot (1541, 1557), EuclidEuklid (1549, 1577), VergilVergil (1556), PlutarchPlutarch (1576). His editions of AristotleAristoteles appeared mostly after his death; three opera aristotelica edited by him are Explicatio librorum Ethicorum ad Nicomachum (Frankfurt 1570), Politicorum et Oeconomicorum interpretationes (Frankfurt 1581), and Oeconomica scripta, quae extant titulo Aristotelis in sermonem Latinum conversa et explicata, adiunctaque eis interpretation Oeconomici libri Xenophontis (Leipzig 1564). As it can be seen, works on Greek authors predominate; it should nowadays be generally accepted that Camerarius effectively founded the study of Greek in Germany.
Camerarius’ philological logic, applied in his commentary on book one of the IliadHomerIl. (1538), has been called “the first attempt to write a true commentary” on the work of HomerHomer in the early modern period.29 His practical aim in writing the commentary seems to have been to make the first book of the IliadHomerIl. accessible not only to his students,30 but also available to readers on several varying levels of sophistication as well, since it would have been difficult for all of his prospective readers to have a thorough background in Greek, and therefore he occasionally provides glosses for lines that a reader familiar with Greek would have no particular trouble with. The Basle editions of the IliadHomerIl. and the OdysseyHomerOd. μετὰ τῆς ἐξηγήσιος (“with the explanation”) which he edited together with Jacob MicyllusMicyllus, Jakob (1541 and 1551, respectively), are remarkable contributions to the essential exegetical apparatus handed down from antiquity (namely the D-scholia). Camerarius also produced a commentary on IliadHomerIl. A and B (Straßburg 1538 and 1540, respectively), in which he offered a pedantic elementary grammatical and syntactical analysis of the text, together with some references to later authors and some antiquarian details, but with very little emphasis on Platonic or Stoic allegory, which he mostly dismissed with utter scepticism. It is noteworthy that in pp. 35–39 of his commentary under the heading De interpretibus Homericis he compiled the first modern list of Homeric exegetes. Though he aimed not at showing off a vast amount of learning towards his colleagues, but rather at determining the moral tenets of the Greek world, all represented in Homer’s epics, his obvious purpose of learning the Greek language is expanded in the promotion of their thought so that it would enhance both the cultural and the moral level of his pupils. This constant and enduring conflict between philology and allegory, between a “textual” and a “moralistic” approach, has been infused in Camerarius’ thought through a commentary viewed not only as a work of scholarship aimed at fellow cultivators of optimae litterae, but also as a multifaceted resource in fact available to readers on several varying levels of sophistication. Although original textual criticism, which is an important feature of Renaissance commentaries on other works, seems to be a noteworthy omission, it is true that Camerarius acknowledged the unique manuscript tradition of the Homeric epic poems in terms of their undisputable reliability in the classical world, which is a philological situation quite different from the one his contemporaries faced when writing commentaries on other classical texts rescued from obscurity. Beyond that, however, Camerarius also displayed a genuine interest in earlier commentators at the fortune of Homer’s poetry among Greeks and Romans, by emphasizing on Homer’s eloquence. His commentary aims at providing the reader with a taste both of the peculiarities a particular Renaissance scholar’s approach to an ancient text would have coped with, and of the culture of classical scholarship within which scholars were studying it. Due to the fact that for him the study of ancient classical texts in an academic sense is in no way separate from the study of them for reasons of aesthetic appreciation and particularly moral instruction, Camerarius tried to exercise the role of translation in perceiving both ideology and rhetorical scope of classical literature; by including two different translations into Latin in the commentary and by proposing in his preface to the line-by-line commentary that the first book of the IliadHomerIl. would have been useful not only in rhetorical or legal settings but also as an exemplum vitae, he managed to draw regularly in the course of his commentary the reader’s attention to passages which he deems artistically noteworthy. Such a commentary could not have been complete, unless laced with passages from other ancient sources, intended as a tool for understanding the text itself and simultaneously as a resource for seeking instruction from authors outside of Homer, especially VirgilVergil. Probably, VirgilVergil could also provide us with an equally useful set of examples for human instruction and education to those found in the IliadHomerIl..31HomerVergil The content of the commentary ranges widely, from etymological observations, grammatical and syntactical explanations to metrical analysis, paraphrasing and background ideological information.32
Eloquence dressing an elegant and flawless style is always admirable; this was the reason for admiring HerodotusHerodot and setting forth in 1541 an edition, based on a codex that had belonged to Richard CrokeCroke, Richard, Camerarius’s teacher of Greek in Leipzig in the 1510s. Apart from regarding this edition as pointing to a historicization of the father of history metaphor,33 coloured by his esteem for a father figure from his student years,34 Camerarius’ preference for HerodotusHerodot seemed to arouse for HerodotusHerodot’ exemplary figures which overwhelm many historical inaccuracies in the Histories. Camerarius identified the Herodotean historical methodology not with mere rhetorical refinery, but he embroidered it in particular with moral instruction:35 he could admire the ancient historiographer for the latter’s decision not to satisfy a desire for knowledge, but also to provide instruction and to obtain moral edification through enlivening his narratives which included fables or mythic elements. These personified exempla virtutis found in HerodotusHerodot opened the way for seeking much of the same in other Greek historians, such as ThucydidesThukydides or LivyLivius.36Livius How else could a protégé and close friend of MelanchthonMelanchthon, Philipp not agree with the Lutheran reformer that the main purpose of the study of history was to offer moral examples? Therefore, his biography about MelanchthonMelanchthon, Philipp (De Philippi Melanchtonis ortu, totius vitae curriculo et morte […] narratio diligens et accurate Ioachimi Camerarii, Leiden 1566)37 testifies to this belief in so far as it focused in particular on the exemplary virtues of its protagonist.38 It was finally as an exemplar of eloquence and morality in style and spirit that HerodotusHerodot was described by Camerarius in his 1541 edition of the Histories as “in all respects the chief writer of history”.39
The summit of his oeuvre, however, was the first complete printed edition of the comedies of PlautusPlautus, adiectis […] argumentis et adnotationibus, first published in 1552 at Basel, which ushered in a new phase in the history of early modern Plautian philology. Whereas all previous editions had been based on late and haphazardly distorted Humanist manuscripts, Camerarius was the first to draw on two medieval texts, one of which, the Palatini B still called the Codex vetus Camerarii,40 is a manuscript of German provenance dating from the 10th century, and offers the oldest and by far the most reliable textual basis for the entire Plautian corpus. Admittedly, the degree to which he used that manuscript is variable from play to play. He did achieve the first reasonably reliable division of lines throughout the text, cleansed the text of its many Humanist accretions, and broke with the vulgate of the day in hundreds of passages. The other manuscript is C (Codex alter Camerarii decurtatus). To this day, no philologist has more generally accepted conjectures in the Plautus texts than Camerarius and no significant improvement in the state of the text he achieved was made until Friedrich Ritschl, working over 300 years later.41
Being a follower of elegance in style he insistently tried to combine it with allegorical composition and allegorical interpretation as basic exercises to foster mental agility. Thus, for AphthoniusAphthonios’ progymnasmata that we find almost every day in the schoolrooms of Lutheran Germany, making the same easy transitions between rhetoric and fictional narration, the new translator J. Camerarius did not only append some notes on the exercises but using the fable of Apollo and Daphne he accused AphthoniusAphthonios of self-contradiction when blaming
