In 1902, Hermann Hagen published two commentaries (Explanationes) on Vergil’s Eclogues under the name “Iunius Philargyrius.” Although one of these is longer than the other, the two have many scholia in common and appear to derive from a single source; Hagen consequently printed the scholia on the same page, divided into two columns. 

The codices record the author’s name as “Iunius Filargirius,” but it has become normal to use the form “Philargyrius”, since Poliziano, who knew the commentary from ms. Laur. plut. 45, 14 and cited it both in a chapter of his Miscellaneorum centuria prima (1489) and in the margins of a copy of Vergil that was printed at Rome in 1471 (currently in the Bibliothèque nationale de France).  Poliziano’s copy of Vergil was known to Fulvio Ursini, who published a collection of scholia to the Georgics under the name “Filargyrius” in 1587 even though these had nothing to do with the author under consideration here.  Georg Thilo later published Ursini’s scholia under the name “Servius Auctus”.

Later, in 1860, Thilo identified the real commentary of “Philargyrius”, on the basis of the Laurentian ms. cited above and of ms. Par. lat. 7960.  Indeed, he first identified the similarities between the commentary in question and those on the Eclogues and the Georgics that Müller had published in 1847 under the name “Iunilius Flagrius”, an attribution the latter scholar had made on the basis of ms. Bernensis 172.  Mommsen also recognized that these commentaries were related in 1861. Hagen subsequently published the texts of “Philargyrius” and “Flagrius” separately from one another.  In 1867 he printed the collection that Müller had already published under the title Scholia Bernensia (owing to the fact that it was transmitted by a codex held at Bern, viz. ms. Bernensis 172, which was the copy known to Müller; the text, however, is also transmitted by mss. Bernensis 167 and 165, as well as ms. Leidensis Voss. F 79, which attaches the name “Iunilius Flagrius” to it); then, as part of the Appendix Serviana in 1902 (= Vol. III.2 of Thilo’s edition of Servius), Hagen published the two Explanationes – there attributing them to “Iunius Philargyrius” – together with the Brevis Expositio to the Georgics that follows the Explanationes in the codices and that likewise displays affinities with the cognate Scholia Bernensia.  Starting from the assumption that “Iunius Philargyrius” and “Iunilius Flagrius” were the same person and from a note in the manuscripts indicating that the text was composed at Milan and dedicated to a certain Valentinian, the most probable form of the author’s name was “Philagrius,” as Heraeus maintained as early as 1930, and the commentary was dedicated to Valentinian II (r. 425-455 AD); Geymonat then hypothesized in 1984 that this could refer to the homonymous individual cited by Sidonius Apollinaris in his Panegyricus for Emperor Avitus, written in 456 AD (cf. Jones, Martindale, and Morris 1971: 696 = Philagrius n. 4). Morgan and Ziolkowski have adopted the form “Philagrius” in their Virgil Encyclopedia (2014). 

The commentary of “Philagrius” will have been used by the early medieval compilers of the anthologies that have come down to us (the two Explanationes, the Brevis expositio, and the Scholia Bernensia); the role of the two other late antique names that appear in the same anthologies together with that of “Philagrius” – viz. Gaudentius and T. Gallus – remains unclear.  Analyses of the anthologies confirm this reconstruction and suggest that they are based on exegetical material that was composed after Donatus, interspersed with comments from Servius and early medieval writers (Barwick 1908; Brewer 1973; Daintree-Geymonat 1988).  That the compilation enjoyed an insular circulation is guaranteed by certain attributes of the manuscripts (cf. Beeson 1932) and glosses into Old Irish that are especially frequent in the Explanationes (cf. Daintree 1985; Lambert 1986; Ziolkowski and Putnam 2008: 698-700): it can be deduced from these facts that the anthologies were compiled at an insular center of writing, probably in the 7^th and 8^th c. AD, even if it cannot be determined with precision whether this occurred on the British Isles proper or in one of the continental monasteries founded by the Irish.  Basing his determination on the inclusion of the name “Adamnanus” in one of the scholia in the Explanationes, Thilo identified the compiler as the Adamnanus who served as abbott of the monastery of Iona in the Hebrides Islands from 679-704 AD (Thilo 1860: 132-3).  Although this theory was repeated by Funaioli and numerous other scholars, it finds no basis in the known production of Adamnanus (Funaioli 1930: 61-2; Daintree in Ziolkowski and Putnam 2008: 675); doubts have also been raised about the reliability of the name attested in the scholion (cf. Herren 1999: 57-9).  Greater weight should be given to the name “Fatosus,” which is found in the subscriptio to the codices of the Explanationes; this name corresponds to the Irish “Toicthec” (cf. Miles 2011: 28), which may have been the original name of the Irish monk who compiled the commentary.  As for the transmission of the late-antique commentary (or commentaries, if T. Gallus and Gaudentius are to be considered authors of commentaries distinct from that of Philagrius / Philargyrius), Thilo hypothesized that they were brought from Italy to England in the period of Theodore of Tarsus, who served as Archbishop of Canterbury from 669 AD (Thilo 1860: 132-3); Gino Funaioli, on the other hand, proposed a direct transmission via the monastery of Bobbio, founded by Saint Columbanus in 613 AD (Funaioli 1915: 61-2).  In 1930 the latter scholar began preparing an edition of Philargyrius’ original commentary, to be printed together with that of T. Gallus, but the project proved unworkable (cf. Geymonat 1984; Daintree and Geymonat 1988).  In 2003 Cadili published the first part of the commentary on the Georgics in a synoptic edition that prints the various early medieval redactions side-by-side.  [F. Stok; tr. C. L. Caterine].