but categorically rejecting the workings of divine justice against the wicked being punished upon what they deserve, because in such cases the spectators or the readers could neither feel nor have pity, elements that in AristotleAristoteles’s concept of ἁμαρτία must result as the emotional effect of tragedy from its plot structure. When Camerarius began in his influential work what Michael Lurie has called the “Aristotelization of Greek tragedy”,24 the interpretation of the plays according to contemporary understanding of the PoeticsAristotelesPoet., he merely understood tragedy presenting a virtuous person suffering an undeserved fate that arouses in the spectators pity and fear. By reflecting this Aristotelian conception of Greek tragedy, Camerarius sees AntigoneSophoklesAnt. as the virtous protagonist unjustly destroyed; even Oedipus, a morally good being, commits crimes unknowingly, as an outcome of ignorance.25SophoklesAnt. After all, these moral insights into tragedy reflect Humanist receptions of Greek tragedy,26Stählin, Friedrich especially in the seminal works of Camerarius and MelanchthonMelanchthon, Philipp.
The extant and thematic range of Camerarius’ writings are typical of a scholar of German Humanism in the 16th century, in that he left a prodigious oeuvre both of quantity and of thematic usage; unfortunately, there is still no modern complete edition, nor is there a comprehensive and chronologically reliable bibliography, so as to reinforce his eminent position in German classical scholarship. The number of books printed under his name are at least 183 – translations from Greek to Latin and an almost equally large number of commentaries on Greek and Latin authors, and original works on historical and antiquarian topics –, not to mention minor revisions of works or re-printings; besides, poems in Greek and Latin which attest his excellent knowledge of both classical languages and literary style. In that considerable body of Latin verse, published in vol. II of the Delitiae poetarum Germanorum (1612), we can read two eclogues appearing among the pastorals, literary in inspiration but not wholly derivative in content, and eighteen Latin and two Greek pastorals in Libellus continens eclogasCamerarius d.Ä., JoachimEclogae (Leipzig 1568).27 His pastorals are interesting as a philological project in which he combined various elements from VirgilVergil to present a new bucolic situation that creates new myths, so as to add a new motif to the classical repertoire; for instance, in the attractive second of his eclogues Dirae, seu Lupus, a poem of 112 hexameters with a few elisions.28 Well-known are also the translation into Latin of two of his friend Albrecht DürerDürer, Albrecht’s (1471–1528) vernacular works on art expressing the German Renaissance and his composed Epistularum familiarum libri VI, Epistularum familiarum libri V and Epistulae posteriores, published as a corpus of five volumes at Frankfurt in 1583 and 1595. The influence on Camerarius from such poets as TheocritusTheokrit, BionBion von Smyrna and MoschusMoschus, and Camerarius’ role in reconnecting 16th-century bucolic verse with the Greek origin of the genre, attribute much to the evaluation of his poetic personality, which lies beyond his philological oeuvre including biographies of celebrated contemporaries, e.g. Helius Eobanus HessusHessus, Helius Eobanus, Philipp MelanchthonMelanchthon, Philipp, George of Anhalt and Albrecht DürerDürer, Albrecht, ecclesiastical history, theological treatises, works of pedagogy and natural science, and a substantial correspondence with contemporary Humanists.
The most extensive, however, are his philological works, obviously intended for use in university tuition, as can be seen not only in the manuals of style, rhetoric and grammar, but also in the forewords to his many commented editions of Greek and Latin texts, from HomerHomer to Christian late antiquity. These editions formed the core of Camerarius’ philological activity and form the qualitative arguments upon which he might be considered the most important Humanist after ErasmusErasmus von Rotterdam, Desiderius. His primary activity was that of a critic, editor, and commentator; he edited and annotated, among others, the following: DemosthenesDemosthenes (1524, 1547), TheocritusTheokrit (1530, 1545), Dio ChrysostomDion Chrysostomos (1531), SophoclesSophokles (1534, 1556), MacrobiusMacrobius (1535), CiceroCicero (1538, 1540, 1542, 1543, 1550, 1552, 1562, 1570), Homer (1538, 1540, 1541, 1551), QuintilianQuintilian (1532, 1538, 1542, 1546, 1549), AesopAesop (1538, 1539, 1571), PlautusPlautus (1538, 1558, 1566), XenophonXenophon (1539, 1543, 1545, 1553, 1561, 1572), ThucydidesThukydides (1540, 1565), HerodotusHerodot (1541, 1557), EuclidEuklid (1549, 1577), VergilVergil (1556), PlutarchPlutarch (1576). His editions of AristotleAristoteles appeared mostly after his death; three opera aristotelica edited by him are Explicatio librorum Ethicorum ad Nicomachum (Frankfurt 1570), Politicorum et Oeconomicorum interpretationes (Frankfurt 1581), and Oeconomica scripta, quae extant titulo Aristotelis in sermonem Latinum conversa et explicata, adiunctaque eis interpretation Oeconomici libri Xenophontis (Leipzig 1564). As it can be seen, works on Greek authors predominate; it should nowadays be generally accepted that Camerarius effectively founded the study of Greek in Germany.
Camerarius’ philological logic, applied in his commentary on book one of the IliadHomerIl. (1538), has been called “the first attempt to write a true commentary” on the work of HomerHomer in the early modern period.29 His practical aim in writing the commentary seems to have been to make the first book of the IliadHomerIl. accessible not only to his students,30 but also available to readers on several varying levels of sophistication as well, since it would have been difficult for all of his prospective readers to have a thorough background in Greek, and therefore he occasionally provides glosses for lines that a reader familiar with Greek would have no particular trouble with. The Basle editions of the IliadHomerIl. and the OdysseyHomerOd. μετὰ τῆς ἐξηγήσιος (“with the explanation”) which he edited together with Jacob MicyllusMicyllus, Jakob (1541 and 1551, respectively), are remarkable contributions to the essential exegetical apparatus handed down from antiquity (namely the D-scholia). Camerarius also produced a commentary on IliadHomerIl. A and B (Straßburg 1538 and 1540, respectively), in which he offered a pedantic elementary grammatical and syntactical analysis of the text, together with some references to later authors and some antiquarian details, but with very little emphasis on Platonic or Stoic allegory, which he mostly dismissed with utter scepticism. It is noteworthy that in pp. 35–39 of his commentary under the heading De interpretibus Homericis he compiled the first modern list of Homeric exegetes. Though he aimed not at showing off a vast amount of learning towards his colleagues, but rather at determining the moral tenets of the Greek world, all represented in Homer’s epics, his obvious purpose of learning the Greek language is expanded in the promotion of their thought so that it would enhance both the cultural and the moral level of his pupils. This constant and enduring conflict between philology and allegory, between a “textual” and a “moralistic” approach, has been infused in Camerarius’ thought through a commentary viewed not only as a work of scholarship aimed at fellow cultivators of optimae litterae, but also as a multifaceted resource in fact available to readers on several varying levels of sophistication. Although original textual criticism, which is an important feature of Renaissance commentaries on other works, seems to be a noteworthy omission, it is true that Camerarius acknowledged the unique manuscript tradition of the Homeric epic poems in terms of their undisputable reliability in the classical world, which is a philological situation quite different from the one his contemporaries faced when writing commentaries on other classical texts rescued from obscurity. Beyond that, however, Camerarius also displayed a genuine interest in earlier commentators at the fortune of Homer’s poetry among Greeks and Romans, by emphasizing on Homer’s eloquence. His commentary aims at providing the reader with a taste both of the peculiarities a particular Renaissance scholar’s approach to an ancient text would have coped with, and of the culture of classical scholarship within which scholars were studying it. Due to the fact that for him the study of ancient classical texts in an academic sense is in no way separate from the study of them for reasons of aesthetic appreciation and particularly moral instruction, Camerarius tried to exercise the role of translation in perceiving both ideology and rhetorical scope of classical literature; by including two different translations into Latin in the commentary and by proposing in his preface to the line-by-line commentary that the first book of the IliadHomerIl. would have been useful not only in rhetorical or legal settings but also as an exemplum vitae, he managed to draw regularly in the course of his commentary the reader’s attention to passages which he deems artistically noteworthy. Such a commentary could not have been complete, unless laced with passages from other ancient sources, intended as a tool for understanding the text itself and simultaneously