«Madre e maestra delle altre materie»: la filologia classica come scienza e metodo

This article commences with a passage from Giuseppe Billanovich’s preface to Reynolds and Wilson’s Scribe and Scholars (Italian translation). As Billanovich wrote, «classical philology is an ancient discipline: mother and master of the other disciplines in our Faculties of Humanities». Starting from this quotation, this article debates the role and the place of classical philology within the other ‘philologies’; it also touches upon the new borders of this discipline, now open to a more global perspective and urged to reconsider its traditional boundaries, both geographical and conceptual; the article shortly summarizes the history of philology as a method, born in Alexandria in the 2nd cent. b.C., developed through antiquity (a couple of papyri and a passage from Galen are mentioned to elucidate such development) up to the 19th cent., when it was best systematized as a science, and now challenged as never before.