| Sumario: | Is the middle voice a chimera? It could indeed be represented as a hybrid, a mixture of the passive and the active voice. The modern definition of the middle voice did not arise spontaneously, but was the result of a long investigation--also chimerical in a way--that occupied grammarians for around 2000 years. This book proposes to describe the laborious creation of the concept of the middle voice, tracing the evolution of the concept from the ancient Hellenistic philologists to modern humanists, including a discussion of the Byzantine scholars, especially those of the diaspora of the 15th century, who transplanted their concept of Greek grammar to Italy. The history of the middle voice involves a chain of definitions that were progressively converted into our definition of the middle voice. Thus the middle voice, which was initially a residual category intended to explain some diathetical ambiguities in certain tenses, was transformed into a concept central to the analysis of the Greek verb and even to a universal linguistic. Over the course of this transformation, errors abound, as well as misunderstandings on the part of the authors under consideration, who frequently misinterpret or overinterpret their predecessors. This book outlines the biographies of those scholars and provides the writing of each one on the concept of the middle voice, accompanied by brief commentary. The goal is that the collected documentation will serve to provide an intellectual overview not only of the history of the Greek grammatical tradition, but also of a linguistic tradition determined by historical events.
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