Ancient and Medieval Thought on Greek Enclitics

This book has two complementary aims: to improve our grasp of the ideas about Greek enclitics that ancient and medieval scholars have passed down to us, and to show how a close examination of these sources yields new answers to questions concerning the facts of the ancient Greek language itself. New critical editions of the most extensive surviving ancient and medieval texts on Greek enclitics, together with translations into English, lay the foundations for an improved understanding of thought on Greek enclitics in those periods. Stephanie Roussou and Philomen Probert then draw out the main doctrines and the conceptual apparatus and metaphors that were used to think and talk about enclitic accents, consider the antiquity of these ideas within the Greek grammatical tradition, and make use of both ancient and medieval sources to explore two much-debated questions about the facts of the language itself. Firstly, the Greek sources turn out to shed new light first of all on the
circumstances under which enclitic ἐστί was used and the circumstances under which non-enclitic ἔστι appeared. Secondly, ancient and medieval evidence from several directions comes together in a way that has gone unnoticed until now, and suggests a new answer to the question of how sequences of consecutive enclitics were accented in antiquity.

About the Author:
Stephanie Roussou, Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek Literature, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Philomen Probert, Professor of Classical Philology and Linguistics, University of Oxford

Stephanie Roussou is Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research interests lie in ancient and Byzantine scholarship, grammar, and lexicography; ancient and Byzantine scholars and scholiasts; the reception of ancient scholarship and grammar in Byzantium; textual criticism; papyrology; and the history of classical scholarship. Her book Pseudo-Arcadius' Epitome of Herodian's De Prosodia Catholica (OUP 2018) won the 2020 Academy of Athens award for the best monograph or critical edition of a work of classical literature and the 2020 First Book Award from the Classical Association of the Middle West and South.

Philomen Probert is Professor of Classical Philology and Linguistics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College. She has written A New Short Guide to the Accentuation of Ancient Greek (Duckworth 2003), Ancient Greek Accentuation: Synchronic Patterns, Frequency Effects, and Prehistory (OUP 2006), Early Greek Relative Clauses (OUP 2015), and Latin Grammarians on the Latin Accent: The Transformation of Greek Grammatical Thought (OUP 2019). She is also the co-editor, with Andreas Willi, of Laws and Rules in Indo-European (OUP 2012).