Around the middle of the ninth century, in Constantinople, the preservation and transmission of the Greek intellectual heritage experienced yet another decisive moment — one of the many ‘Renaissances’ that punctuate the history of classical culture: the so-called Macedonian Renaissance, named after the ruling dynasty. This occurred roughly a century after the Carolingian Renaissance, which marks, in broad terms, a similar turning point for the ancient Latin tradition. The renewed intellectual ferment coincided with another, more technical, transformation in the production of manuscripts. Up to that time, codices had been copied in majuscule script — visually imposing, but uneconomical both in terms of execution time and use of space. From at least the late eighth century onwards, texts were gradually transcribed in various forms of ‘minuscule’ script, which could appear more or less calligraphic or cursive depending on the period, the environment, and the individual scribe.

More specifically for our discussion, it is from this period that literary texts accompanied by commentaries consistently take on the form most familiar to us today — a mise en page that has entered the cultural imagination even of those who are not specialists in textual transmission. The exegetical apparatus is contained within the same volume as the text under commentary, often placed in the margins, sometimes at the end of textual sections. Rarer — at least for literary works — is the layout typical of the Hellenistic-Roman period, namely codices containing only the commentary, without the corresponding text. These are the so-called scholia (Greek σχόλιον, diminutive of σχολή), whose literal meaning is «brief comment» or «short exegetical note» without any necessary reference to their position relative to the base text.

The stratified body of exegetical material originating in the Hellenistic and Roman eras is thus found re-cast into corpora generally transmitted within the same codicological unit as the text itself. This constitutes, in essence, the primary source for our knowledge of ancient erudite literature, as well as the form in which we encounter it. As for the formation and arrangement of these corpora within the manuscript context — whether of late-antique or middle-Byzantine origin — there are no unequivocal answers, as has already been noted. Indeed, this is a scholarly issue that has been the object of a fruitful debate for at least a century, with diverse methodologies and approaches developing over time. For present purposes, it will suffice to note that what we read and ‘see’ in most cases represents the outcome of an editorially organized enterprise: a product of selection and conflation of heterogeneous materials. To the best of our current knowledge, no such arrangement is attested prior to the Macedonian Renaissance of the ninth century. It goes without saying that each author and work must then be examined in its own specificity with regard to the mechanisms of textual transmission.