Memorial reading Raphael Schwitter, Herisau, 2015

Raphael Schwitter, now a research associate at the IRG (Institut für Reformationsgeschichte – Institute of Reformation Historiy) at the University of Zurich, attended Virgilio Masciadri’s lectures at the University of Zurich. Below is his text on Virgilio Masciadri’s scientific work.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I have been asked to introduce you to an area of Virgilio’s work that is probably rather unfamiliar to most of you. I am happy to honour this request, as Virgilio was both my academic teacher and a long-time friend.
During my studies at the University of Zurich, Virgilio hardly gave a lecture that I did not attend. His teaching was too perceptive and witty, his methodological approach too stimulating and controversial for me to have wanted to miss out on this firework of erudition.
In the following, I would like to give you an impression of his working methods.
With a view to your patience, which I do not want to tax beyond measure, I will concentrate on the two main scientific works, the dissertation and the habilitation thesis.
It should only be mentioned in passing that Virgilio also devoted almost 30 years to climate and seismohistorical topics, both in the form of palaeographical and philological advice and corrections as well as the translation and interpretation of Latin texts into German.
Virgilio began his academic career with ancient comedy. More precisely with Plautus. He dedicated his dissertation to the motif of mistaken identity in the Menaechmi and the Amphitruo, two Plautinian plays whose Greek models have not survived.
Virgilio argued that a certain genre of Greek theatre could be inferred from these two Latin stage plays. He wanted to deduce the existence of a Greek comedy of confusion from them.
It is important to know that Roman comedy, with its well-known representatives Plautus and Terence, was strongly oriented towards contemporary Greek theatre in terms of subject matter and performance practice at the beginning of the 2nd century BC. The New Comedy, which flourished at the time, was set in the bourgeois sphere of the ancient city and mainly dealt with private and realistic themes.
The best-known poet of the New Comedy was Menander. His stage plays were the model for several plays by Plautus and Terence.
Ancient drama recognises certain plot patterns on which the individual plays are based: In comedy, for example, these are intrigue and the recognition of a person believed to be lost. A typical plot pattern in New Comedy is the following incident: a young man enjoys love and life, while his father or an older relative tries to control the family estate and social norms. The young man needs money and deceives the old man with the help of a cunning slave. The old man then spins a counter-intrigue. The end is crowned by a reconciliation, a happy ending.
Plautus’ Menaichmi lives from the motif of confusion. Twins, both named Menaechmus, were separated at birth and suddenly find themselves in the same city without knowing about each other. This leads to numerous entanglements and misunderstandings, which are only resolved when the two recognise each other with the help of a clever slave.
The second play, Amphitruo, is somewhat isolated within Plautus’ oeuvre and is probably one of the most influential dramatic texts in terms of reception history.
Here, too, the idea of the doppelganger is central: Iuppiter approaches Alcmene in the form of her husband Amphitruo, who is out of the country as a general. The messenger of the gods Mercury takes on the role of Amphitruo’s servant, Sosia. After Amphitruo and Sosia’s return, a chain of confusion ensues, which ends amicably in the end.
As most of the Greek models have not survived, it is often difficult for modern researchers to determine what is “Plautinian” and what is “Greek” in Plautus’ plays. Plautus did not simply translate the Greek plays, but independently remodelled them and adapted them to Roman circumstances.
I will spare you the details of this controversy. What is important, however, is that more recent research has focussed primarily on Plautus’ peculiarities.
Virgilio attempted to place the two plays mentioned in the historical context of the New Comedy in terms of theatre and motifs.
For this methodologically difficult task, which involves reconstructing texts that no longer exist, Virgilio drew on the work of the Italian literary scholar Maurizio Bettini and the Russian semiotician Yuri Lotman. Both focus on the plot structure of a text and attempt to determine its most elementary building blocks. The description of the rules according to which these building blocks are linked is ultimately the aim of their structuralist approach. Virgilio applied this approach to the two Plautinian comedies in order to visualise the plot structure and its associated building blocks and reveal their dramatic function.
From the resulting analogies, he drew conclusions about the type of Greek genre he postulated. He did this, of course, on the assumption that the plot of Plautus’ comedy corresponded fairly closely to the Greek model. He defined the basic structure thus revealed, which is common to both comedies, as an essential recognisable feature of the comedy of confusion.
The work is controversial in several respects and has been received as such by the research community.
One reason for this lies not least in Virgilio’s scientific prose at the time. It is elegant and creative, but often imprecise and irritating as a result. It was not only with chapter titles such as ‘The weaving error’, ‘Reading lesson’ or ‘Glue rods’ that he deliberately defied the conventions of the scientific community. His language is also characterised by a not unpleasant pedagogical and instructive tone, with which he takes the reader by the hand to guide him through his not always easily comprehensible train of thought.
The sought-after break with convention, the ‘esoteric jargon’, as one reviewer put it, is certainly an expression of Virgilio’s literary creative will, but also quiet self-irony and staged provocation. To illustrate this, let’s let him have his own say here:
This is an extract from the chapter ‘Reading lesson’. It is about the definition of “reading”:
(quote) “Wherever one speaks of reading, sooner or later one also speaks of meaning, of significance, of understanding. This shifts “reading” towards “interpretation”. The question is led over into a field (…) that has already been occupied by two powerful national churches of science: the structural-semiotic and the reception-aesthetic-hermeneutic. The reader can easily guess that we will show no inclination whatsoever to make a commitment to one or the other denomination, nor to seek refuge in a binding ecumenism. Not because we thought that there was nothing to learn in the regional churches, on the contrary: we trustfully ask the reader to believe us that we have been instructed about quite a few things there, even if we lack the desire for now to prove this in a long note with the beautiful-sounding names of all auctoritates.” (end of quote)
The method focussed on the structure of a text, which he used as the basis for his dissertation, also had a decisive influence on Virgilio’s later work.
He was primarily interested in the “fabric” of a text. The German word “Text” goes back to the Latin word for fabric (textura). For him, the task of a literary scholar was primarily to recognise the weaving patterns of a text, its texture, and to distinguish and count the individual threads.
In this structuralist philology, both the author and the reader disappear into insignificance. Accordingly, he was rather critical of the established working methods of classical philology. In fact, he was a master at tracking down the flaws in these methods and mercilessly exposing them.
It was probably no coincidence that Virgilio then wrote his habilitation thesis on Greek myths. Myths are a central field of application of structuralism, as coined by the French cultural scientist Claude Lévi-Strauss. According to Lévi-Strauss, structuralist research is not concerned with surface phenomena, but with the deep structures that determine these phenomena in the first place. It focusses its interest on the underlying system and attempts to describe the laws that govern this system. This model is just as applicable to human language as it is to anthropological phenomena such as kinship relationships.
In his analysis of myths, Lévi-Strauss emphasised that it is not words or sentences, i.e. their linguistic form, that are important in myths, but the individual steps of the narrative. The individual plot elements represent the smallest meaning-forming units. Lévi-Strauss called these mythemes.
So when a researcher studies a myth, his task is to recognise these mythemes and examine them in relation to each other. In a real sense, this is about the fabric of the texts.
Virgilio chose as the object of his analysis those myths that revolve around the Greek island of Lemnos in the North Aegean. These are three large mythological circles whose relationship to each other he wanted to determine in more detail:
The first deals with the Greek hero Philoctetus, who is bitten by a poisonous snake and left behind on Lemnos by the Greeks travelling to Troy.
Hypsipyle is at the centre of the second circle of legends. She was the only one to spare her father in the so-called Night of Murder on Lemnos, when the women murdered all the men on the island in revenge. Finally, the third circle of legends centres on the god Hephaestus, who fell to earth on Lemnos after being hurled from Olympus by Zeus. At first glance, these three Lemnian mythological circles appear to have hardly any cross-references.
In a first step, Virgilio collected the surviving material in order to extract the system of narratives from it. Myths are rarely linear. Variants, deviations and even contradictions are the norm in a tradition that draws on different sources. Virgilio’s approach to the text resembled that of a cartographer who wanted to map the mythological terrain. In doing so, he mistrusted established records and interpretations, wanted to measure the terrain in his own steps and raised the plumb line anew in places that seemed important to him.
In this way of working, he meticulously pieced together a map from individual fragments that had perhaps never been seen before.
Virgilio knew how to discover patterns of action and create meaning precisely where it was difficult to recognise anything in the flickering of different narratives. The cartography of invisible connections, narrative duplications and motivic reversals was his speciality.
It would perhaps be appropriate to briefly explain his working method to you using an example. But such an attempt is bound to fail.
Let’s just take the legendary cycle that has Philoctetus at its centre. Virgilio dissected 11 different variants from the confusion of the textual tradition of this hero, which stretches from the 7th century BC to the 2nd century AD.
Apart from the lack of time, this diversity alone makes it impossible for me to tell you the myth without deciding in favour of a particular variant and thereby giving the story a binding force that it probably never had.
The only common denominator of all variants is the fact that Philoctetus was bitten by a snake. However, the place and time, the type of snake and the consequences and causes of the bite vary considerably in the different tales.
With meticulous attention to detail, Virgilio succeeded in categorising the individual legend variants into a system and, as he himself said, bringing them into dialogue with each other.
So if you want to listen to these legends in their silent dialogue, you had better pick up Virgilio’s book yourself instead of listening to my helpless explanations.
I will stop here, but I hope that I have succeeded in giving you a brief but revealing insight into Virgilio’s scientific work. His death undoubtedly leaves a gap in science and university teaching. I, too, will miss him sorely in my future life.

Thank you very much for your attention.