Poggio, and the Latin Classics in 15th-Century Italy, France and Germany

Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees. One obvious conclusion to be drawn from Poggio's having "rescued" manuscripts including Lucretius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Silius Italicus, Vitruvius, Quintilian, Manilius, parts of Valerius Flaccus, Frontinus on aqueducts and several of Cicero's speeches, which Poggio found in Germany and France, where -- according to Poggio -- they were moldering away, neglected by barbarous German and French monks who did not know what treasures they had, who could barely read Latin -- one obvious conclusion is that, up until Poggio bringing these texts back to Italy, they had gone missing in Italy. 

 

As for there having been no noteworthy Latinists anywhere but in Italy in Poggio's time, that is nonsense obvious enough that I hope I don't need to comment on it. 

As far as the manuscripts of the Classics having been laying neglected and worm-eaten in German and French monasteries before Poggio "rescued" them, perhaps one reason so many of these manuscripts vanished after Poggio had "rescued" them and after they had been copied, is very simply that, had they survived, their physical condition might have given the lie to Poggio's account of the state of German and French libraries. 

Poggio wrote a celebrated treatise denouncing hypocrisy. Who would've known the subject better than an accomplished and ruthless hypocrite?

The relatively few manuscripts which did not disappear after Poggio "rescued" them from France and Germany do not present a worm-eaten, neglected appearance. 

And as far as Poggio's greatest claim to fame today, after Stephen Greenblatt's best-selling collection of errors entitled The Swerve, namely that he and he alone rescued Lucretius from oblivion: besides the northern mauscript which Poggio "discovered" and then lost, there are two other northern manuscripts of Lucretius which have survived to this day, both from the 9th century, and fragments of yet another, also from the 9th century.

I do not wish to make Poggio's nationalistic ravings any worse by adding to them nationalistic ravings of my own. One of the best things about Classical studies is its international character. All I wish to do is to encourage scholars to reflect upon to what extent Poggio's accounts of his manuscript-hunts, and above all, his descriptions of the places where he found manuscripts, make any sense.

100 Hot Books

Here Come The Clean, Quiet, Non-Stinky EV's

The night before yesterday, I woke up a few hours earlier than I had planned to. I imagine many other others in my neighborhood may have awoken at the same time, for the same reason: because an extremely loud pickup truck was parked at the curb and revving. Honestly, it was rattling my windows. 

I don't know whether the truck's driver was intentionally altering people's sleep patterns. I don't know whether his truck has been modified to be that loud, or if it has a broken muffler. I suspect the second, because the truck is usually dirty and full of tools and the driver doesn't look well-off enough to have a budget for a fancy, intentionally-noisy exhaust.

Later that day, yesterday, the Ford F-150 Lightning, the first all-electric pickup truck from Detroit, was officially released, and deliveries to paying customers began. And, yesterday, it occurred to me that it's going to be much harder to wake people up with a loud engine, when EV's replace ICE vehicles. 

And they will replace ICE. Not as soon as some of us would like, but a lot sooner than many people think. Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, says that he expects Ford to produce about 200,000 F-150 Lightnings in the first 12 months after yesterday launch. He also says that Ford's combined production of all its EV models to be at a rate of around 600,000 per year by the end of 2023, and 2,000,000 by the end of 2026. 

By 2035, or sooner, new ICE vehicles will be somewhat rare. If a pickup truck driver or a motorcyclist wants to wake up his neighbors in the middle of the night, it will be much harder for him to do so. He'll have to find some other way of dealing with his frustration and hostility -- like maybe talking to somebody about how he feels, which might actually help him feel much better.

If he feels bad about waking people up, then the new electric vehicles will be a relief. 

Those who are already used to being in EV's all the time already assure us that they now hate the stink of internal combustion, the stink they hardly noticed before, the stink most of us hardly notice, because it''s always there. 

The noise is also always there. 

It's not as if an electric motor is entirely silent, but an electric vehicle is quiet enough that you can't wake up your neighbors with it. The absence of the stink, of the noise, of the pollution -- startling changes are coming faster than some of you think. In some neighborhoods they're already here.

Grizzly Zombie Apocalypse

You know, I'm not really so impressed by a lot of horror movies.

Take what is supposedly the most scary horror movie thing ever: zombies. Reanimated human corpses, ravenous for the flesh of the living.

Yawn -- seriously, yawn! Take a shovel, an axe or a baseball bat, your choice, or any one of many other objects easily to hand, give the zombie one good shot to the dome, done, on to the next problem, the next zombie. Truly easy-peasy. 

Bears, on the other hand. 

 Bears are not so easy. They can be as big as 1,500 pounds, their muscles and teeth and claws are massive, a bear can kill a human about as easily as a human can kill a fly. No, much easier, actually, because flies often evade us, whereas bears are much faster and more agile than we are.  If you ever see a bear which is angry at you for some reason, charging at you as fast as a fast horse runs, you won't have time to shit your pants. The only reason we're not all hair-on-fire night-and-day terrified of bears is because bears are rarely the slightest bit interested in us, and they keep their distance.

But you take that science-fiction lab accident, and have it infect bears instead of humans, so that dead bears now want nothing else but to eat the flesh of living humans, and suddenly the kind of zombie apocalypse we were used to becomes, just, totally adorable. 

You can't take a swing at the head of a grizzly zombie with an axe, bat or shovel, because the bear zombie will tear you apart before you can even get that close to its head. And even if one particular grizzly zombie can't move at all for some reason, you're not going to be able to hurt it with a shovel, axe or bat. Maybe if you're particularly strong for a human, and you hit it over and over for hours. But in such a case, such a bear was obviously not a high priority to begin with, and the other grizzly zombies will easily arrive and kill and eat you before you're halfway done. 

Even most guns won't be much help. You city slickers, you may have heard the term "loaded for bear"? It reflects the reality that only extremely powerful cartridges -- extremely powerful "loads" -- will work against bears. The kinds of loads you can't fire with most guns. 

So! What will you do? What WILL you do, when the grizzly zombie apocalypse begins to rampage?

And that's just one example, just off the top of my head. You don't want to know about the REALLY scary stuff I imagine. You DON'T want to KNOW.

Rangeman Meets Some Very Tough Guys

Rangeman went around, doing what he did, mostly telling people to be nice and rescuing cats from trees.

Turned out that a lot of cats got stuck up high in trees in NYC. Soon Rangeman was getting very busy with the cats. He was becoming more well-known. He was getting some respect from the NYFD, the normal go-to guys for cats stuck in trees. 

At first the firemen regarded him as a nuisance, a crazy person would just get in the way, possibly injure himself or the cat or one of them. But soon he won them over, above all with his absolute dedication to get the job done, his nothing-is-impossible attitude, and his rapidly-increasing climbing skills. Do anything strenuous all day long every day, and work out when you're not doing it, and chances are you might get very good at it. 

Now the firemen would see him from down the block as they rolled in, and they'd yell, "Rangeman, my man!" Sometimes now they'd just watch, confident he'd get the job done. If he was up very high they would stretch out those stretchy round bouncy things that fireman stretch out, just in case he or the cat fell. But he didn't fall, the cats didn't fall. He was getting very good at this. He hadn't been in bad physical shape before he became Rangeman, but he was definitely more cut now. 

One beautiful crisp afternoon he was just walking around, guarding his city, when someone called, "Hey, Rangeman!" He turned around to see half a dozen very bad-looking guys walking up on him, with lots of denim and shiny black leather and sneering faces, and three of them had handguns leveled at him.

The first group of thugs Rangeman had dealt with, the ones who were there during his transformation, playing keep-away with a lady purse -- those guys might have been intimidated by a hypothetical second group of bad guys who were clearly tougher and meaner. And the second group might have been afraid of a third group of bad man. But that hypothetical third group would still have nightmares about these guys who were pulling guns on Rangeman. Murder and intimidation just oozed from the pores of this fourth, non-hypothetical group.

Even before he spoke, it was clear that one of the three with the guns was the leader of the whole bunch. Rangeman wagged a finger at this one and said, "Hey now ! Be nice!"

The leader and a couple of the others laughed. Rangeman saw that one of them who wasn't pointing a gun at him had a gun in a holster at his waist, clearly visible over his knit shirt and under his black leather jacket.

"I'm not a nice guy," the leader told Rangeman, and some of his gang laughed some more. 

"And how's that working out for you?" Rangeman asked.

"We're doing okay."

"It looks like you all spend a lot on clothes."

"Oh, we got plenty to spend on clothes. We see something we want to wear, we buy it, we don't need to ask the price first."

"Uh-huh. But you don't look happy. You're laughing at me, but it sounds like hollow laughter." 

The head gangster stopped smiling and said, "You're giving me mental-health advice?! The guy who choked Tony Stark?!"

"I only choked Tony for a moment. Just to establish some boundaries. He was being a real dick, and I knew he knew better. I didn't choke him out, nothing like that. Any bad feelings about it were over with the same day."

"Uh-huh. TONY STARK DOESN'T EXIST," the lead bad guy yelled in Rangeman's face. "He's a fictional character, played by Robert Downey, Jr in movies, and drawn in comic-books."

"Yes, yes," Rangeman spluttered, "there are movies and comics about Tony and the other Avengers, but they're real. Stark Tower is right over there."

"Where?"

"Umm... You can't see it from here, the buildings on this block are blocking the view, and --"

"Wanna walk to where there's a view of it? It's imaginary! It's CGI in those movies! And your 'superpowers' amount to telling people to be nice, and saving cats, and getting your picture in the news every now and then, because --"

"The Rangeman has an altimeter in it! And a barometer! And an ambient-air thermometer! And solar panels that re-charge the batteries, and every 24 hours it synchs its time with an atomic clock in Colorado, and it's especially durable, even compared to other G-Shocks, and --"

"Wait a minute, an atomic clock in Colorado? What's up with that?"

"Yes, even if you turn off the synch, it's still spec'ed at plus-minus 15 seconds a month, so if the synch is on it's always within a split-second, AND it springs forward and falls back by itself!"

"Hey, now, that last thing," the main bad guy, "that I like. That's a real pain in the ass with watches." By now all of their guns were holstered. "Give me your Rangeman, Rangeman."

"No."

"No. huh? Just like that."

"You want it, you're going to have to take it."

All of the bad guys laughed at that, and now the laughter sounded more relaxed, less hollow.

"How much does one of those cost?" the boss of the bad guys asked.

A second bad guy spoke up: "That's a GW9400-1, right?" he asked, and Rangeman nodded. The second thug told the first, "Retail's $330. You can find them for less. Down to about $100 off of retail." The boss looked nauseous on hearing such a low price, but the second one went on, insisting, "it's not always all about the price. Maybe 99.9% of the time in life, but with G-Shocks..."

"So they're a couple hundred bucks, these things?"

"That particular model. There's thousands of models."

"THOUsands?"

"Thousands, boss. From $30 up to several thousand."

"Huh," the boss said, and turned back to Rangeman: "So you're risking your life over a couple hundred dollars."

"Like your guy just said -- not everything is even about money."

"Well, you're a brave guy."

"I don't know if am brave. But I have to act that way, because I'm a superhero. I have an important job to do."

"Superhero! There's no such thing as superheros! You're a great, big, huge, nice, somewhat charismatic crazy person!"

"Agree to disagree?"

The boss crook raised both his hands and was about to start shouting again. But then he lowered his hands again and said, "Sure." He turned to the second guy and asked, "You know where we can shop for G-Shocks?"

"Sure, Boss."

"For the fancy expensive ones?"

"Yeah, I know that too."

The boss turned back to Rangeman: "You want to come with us? We'll buy you a watch."

"Oh! Oh. Thank you very much," Rangeman said, "but --"

"But what?" 

"It's this time of day. I don't know why, maybe it's because the firehouse nearby is changing shifts, but this time of day I'm usually pretty busy."

"Okay. Some other time."

"Thanks, that would be nice."

"And, you know -- I like cats."

Hey, you know what?" Rangeman said.

"What?"

"YOU'RE BEING NICE!"

The other 5 crooks laughed at the boss. The boss looked confused for a moment. Then he smiled, shook Rangeman's hand and said, "You're okay." 

4 German Novels on Classical Themes

The intense German interest in Classical culture had, by the late 18th century, extended into plays, poems and novels on Classical themes by Goethe (Iphigenie auf Tauris, for example), Wieland (Geschichte des Agathons and many other works) and others. In this post I will examine 4 German novels of the 20th century which use Classical subject matter in 4 distinctly different ways.

Lion Feuchtwanger, born 1884 in Munich, died 1958 in Los Angeles, published Der falsche Nero in 1936. An English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir, The Pretender,  appeared in 1937. Out of brief ancient accounts of several different men who claimed to be the emperor Nero after Nero had died, Feuchtwanger weaves the tale of Terence the potter, who bears a striking resemblance to the late Emperor, is used by powerful men who persuade him to lead an uprising, and then leave him to be exposed and crucified after he has served his purpose. 

 

The resemblance of Terence to Hitler, and of other characters to leading Nazis and German capitalists, is obvious, but Feuchtwanger's narrative skill and attention to historical detail make this novel fascinating.

Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil, published simultaneously in June 1945 with Jean Starr Untermeyer's English translation The Death of Virgil, is one of the most highly-acclaimed German novels of the 20th century. Broch's prose style, employing stream of consciousness techniques, has been compared to that of his friend James Joyce. 

Broch was Jewish, and was arrested by the Nazis when they annexed his native Austria in 1938. It was during this period of arrest, assuming he would die soon, that Broch developed the concept of his novel about the death of Vergil: in Broch's version, Vergil is old and very ill when the Emperor Augustus summons him to an audience, and dies on the Journey home. In Broch's version of events, Vergil's determined to destroy his copy -- the only copy a that point -- of the Aeneid, but is prevented by the Emperor from doing so. Contemporary scholars debate whether Vergil saw Augustus and his new Empire in a positive or negative light. Broch's Vergil see the new state of things as a disaster, as the end of a world, and asks whether literature makes any sense in such a time. Broch asks the same questions, by clear implication, about writing fiction while the Third Reich is waging war. He's asking: aren't there mosre important things to do than to indulge in literature's vanity and hypocrisy?

It's ironic, and Broch clearly knows it's ironic: he's asking such questions in a literary work of the highest level of sophistication and exuberance. The fact that the novel exists and is written to the end may be seen as an answer. Maybe.

Ernst Schnabel published Der sechste Gesang (The Sixth Chorus) in 1951. I do not know whether there is an English translation. The novel is a fairly straightforward prose version parts of the Odyssey (and the last part of the fifth) in which Odysseus, shipwrecked, swims ashore on the beach of Scheria, is welcomed by the beautiful princess Nausikaa, and learns the inhabitants of the island have heard of his deeds, causing him to reflect on what it means to be a man, about fame, honour, duty, and all of that. 

Sten Nadolny's novel Ein Gott der Frechheit, published in 1994, with an English translation, The God of Impertinence, published in 1997, is somewhat different than the other three described in this post. In this story, in the year 1990, Hermes, the messenger-god, the god of merchants, thieves, frivolity and other things, breaks free from his confinement within a cliff in a volcanic Greek island, where he has been chained for over 2000 years, because he finally became too frivolous even for the Olympian gods, who, most of them anyway, never were known to be humourless. 

In Nadolny's version of things, the Greek gods, being immortal, are all still around, but they tend to hide themselves from humans. The newly-freed Hermes, true to form, does not conform to this, or to much else. 

This book is wonderfully full of many degrees of humor, from deadpan irony to unrestrained slapstick and back again, as gracefully as can be. It is profoundly funny. What is its message? I don't know. Maybe Nadolny's only intention was to amuse. Maybe there are messages here which can't be easily summed up. Maybe I'm just a bit slow. Maybe experts in Hermetic literature would say Aha and... I don't know. But I'm pretty sure most of you would enjoy this book.