The second half of the twelfth century was marked by several eminent philological scholars who devoted themselves to the collection and organization of exegetical material. From this perspective, the most significant figure is undoubtedly Eustathius of Thessalonica (ca. 1115–1195). Among his numerous works are two monumental commentaries on the Homeric poems, in which he brought together the entire preceding scholia tradition into a single corpus, while separating the exegesis from the text—thus returning to the original form of the autonomous hypomnema (see 1.1).

The manuscript C 222 inf., produced in the capital at the end of the twelfth century, was conceived as a private poetry anthology, with blank leaves interspersed for possible notes. It contains an impressive collection of non-Homeric poetry — tragic, comic, lyric, hexametric, etc. — and serves as a primary witness to, among others, Aeschylus, Pindar, Oppian, and Theocritus. In this endeavor, the owner was assisted by another scribe, probably a paid professional. The scholia to Theocritus’ Idylls are arranged as a frame around the text, in the upper, outer, and lower margins, with the exegetical apparatus complemented by a series of interlinear glosses. The mise en page of text and paratext, however, changes depending on the type of work within the manuscript. For instance, in the theatrical texts—Aeschylus and Aristophanes—portions of text written in two columns are followed by corresponding portions of commentary written full-page, a device adopted by the copyist to facilitate the difficult management of the two parts, carefully calculating each time how much exegetical material corresponded to the text. It is worth noting that the principal (anonymous) scribe and owner of the manuscript filled a number of originally blank leaves with personal excerpts of various kinds. The content of these dense annotations — covering a wide range of topics — allows us to reconstruct not only a fairly detailed portrait of this learned scholar’s intellectual personality, but also the modes through which literary and general knowledge (music, astronomy, etc.) were acquired and practiced. More broadly, it provides valuable insight into the learned milieu of Constantinople at the end of the twelfth century, only a few years before the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade (1204). We are thus in the lively scholarly environment of the generation immediately following that of Eustathius. The anonymous erudite owner of the manuscript maintained close connections with another distinguished philologist, a contemporary of Eustathius — John Tzetzes (ca. 1110–1180) — an important figure for the exegesis of both epic and tragic poetry, and he frequented the vibrant intellectual circles surrounding the higher school attached to the Church of the Holy Apostles, near the monastery of the Pantokrator.

Approximately a century later, in the full Palaiologan period (see 1.2), another anonymous scribe produced a small-format paper manuscript now catalogued as G 32 sup. The codex is factitious, that is, composed of three distinct units spanning a chronological range from the thirteenth to the late fourteenth century. The first section contains Theocritus’ Idylls, accompanied — again in this case — by marginal scholia. An important witness of one of the three textual families into which the tradition of the bucolic poet is divided, it presents cross-references between text and commentary, marked mostly by Greek numerals and, more rarely, by reference signs. In addition, a series of interlinear glosses, primarily paraphrastic in nature, provide further aids to interpretation. Most of these were written by the original scribe, although later readers also added occasional annotations. In the initial folios, the copyist generally used red ink for the reference numerals, albeit inconsistently; the final Theocritean folios, however, lack both numerals and interlinear glosses by the first hand, indicating that the work remained unfinished. Among the manuscript’s later owners, two figures stand out for their connection to the Italian Humanist movement: Leontius Pilatus, who translated Homeric poems into Latin for Petrarch and Boccaccio and was the first to promote the study of the Greek language in Western Europe; and Constantine Lascaris, the renowned teacher of Greek in Italy who, after teaching in Milan, Rome, and Naples, settled in Messina in 1466, where students from across the peninsula came to study with him.

We thus move into a new cultural climate and a new kind of  ‘Renaissance’ (see 2.3).