Cynthia DAMON Where Is the APA/Harvard Servius

Cynthia DAMON Where Is the APA/Harvard Servius?: Editing Servius and the APA

In its monograph series of those times (Special Publications of the APA), the APA published in 1946 and 1965 two volumes of the Harvard edition of the commentaries of “Servius.” Progress, slow to begin with—the new edition had been announced as early as 1938—slowed further after an extremely critical review of the first installment by Eduard Fraenkel. As of 1999, three scholars were involved in the project: George Goold, who had taken over as lead editor of the project and was to work on the commentaries on Eclogues and Georgics; Peter Marshall, who joined the project in the early 1980’s and was working on the commentaries on Aeneid 6-8; Charles Murgia, who has been working on the commentaries on Aeneid 9-12 since the late 1960’s and has made substantial progress towards an eventual volume 5 of the “Harvard Servius.” The deaths of Marshall and Goold in 2000 and 2001 called into question more than at any time previously the future of the project. In January 2002 the APA Committee on Publications delegated to an ad hoc committee (Damon, Kaster, Mastronarde) the task of assessing what had been accomplished in recent years and what materials (facsimiles, collations, drafts) are available for successor-editors, if such could be identified. This paper reports on the materials that were in the possession of Goold and Marshall and have subsequently been turned over to the APA by their widows, and provides background information to the contributions of the other panelists.