Ancient Greek and Latin Novels

I hope that not all of the nonsense I was taught in school is still being taught to schoolchildren. I learned that the literary genre of the novel was invented in England in the 18th century. In the Signet Classic edition of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, copyright 1963, the highly-respected critic Frank Kermode asserts that "Tom Jones, published in 1749, was the second great novel. The first, Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, preceeded it only by a year." 

Fielding himself knew better. On the title page of his earlier novel Joseph Andrews Fielding acknowledges that he is imitating Cervantes -- Don Quixote, anyone? And before Cervantes -- and his clear mockery of earlier Spanish novels -- came Rabelais with Gargantua et Pantagreul, which in turn was preceded by Medieval novels in Latin and Greek, and, to cut right to the chase, ancient Greeks wrote novels beginning in the first century BC at the latest, imitated by two Latin authors, Petronius with his Satyricon and Apuleius with the Golden Ass (stop giggling, it means donkey). 

 

Aside from ancient Greek novels which exist only in fragments, there are five entire ones: one each by Chariton in the 1st century AD, Achilles Tatius, Longus, Xenophon of Ephesus in the 2nd century, and Heliodorus of Emesa in the 3rd.

Lucian, a much more skilled writer, lived in the 2nd century AD and wrote in many genres including the novel, although none of his novels has survived entire. Lucian made fun of absolutely everything, including the gods. (Is this why we don't have the complete text of any of his novels?)

Many fragments of previously-lost ancient Greek novels are among the papyri unearthed, primarily at Oxyrhynchus, since the late 19th century. In 1995 Susan Stephens and John Winkler collected all of the known fragments in their volume Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments, which includes texts, translations and commentaries; since 1995, however, still more new fragments have come to light, primarily from Oxyrhynchus.

We know that the ancient novel was more a Greek and a Latin phenomenon; however, the two finest examples of the ancient novel which survive are both Latin. In the first century AD, Petronius, generally believed to have been the official of the same name who served under the Emperor Nero, published a huge novel, the Satyricon, which only survives in fragments; however, the fragments add up to several hundred pages. Petronius relentlessly lampoons the decadence and tastelessness of Rome's newly-rich, a favorite literary pastime of ancient Romans whose families had been rich for a little longer. Although a rich and varied pageant of life is related by the narrator, he himself, distanced from the author's intended audience by a thick layer of irony, cares for little besides his comically unsuccessful attempts to prevent others from making love with his beloved, the young, beautiful, perpetually-available man Giton. 

Perhaps the greatest surviving novel of Greek or Latin antiquity, until the possible unearthing of a complete masterpiece by Lucian, is the 2nd-century Golden Ass by Apuleius. 

Apuleius' novel is beloved, but linguistically, it is strange. Apuleius himself apologizes at the beginning of the work, in case his Latin should offend native speakers. But he says that it is right that his tale should be told in strange speech, for it has to do with the transformation of a man into a donkey and back again, and is itself the transformation of a Greek novel into Latin. 

It was once believed, but no more, that the Greek novel on which Apuleius based his work was written by Lucian. Certainly the world views of the two authors are far, far apart: Lucian mocks everything, even the gods, while Aouleius is a very pious pagan. The protoganist of his novel is turned into a donkey accidentally, because he had too much curiosity and too little awe before supernatural things. And he is rescued and turned back into a man by praying to the Goddess of Heaven -- we generally know her as Isis, but as the pleading donkey says to Her, She is known by many names, and he lists many of them -- and then he becomes a very pious monk of Her cult.

The hilarious, rollicking story (with its very serious pagan religious underpinnings) is full of bad people doing bad things. However, they often interrupt their various bad deeds to tell each other stories, the longest of which, the story of Cupid and Psyche, takes up nearly a quarter of the entire novel, and has often been published separately, and has inspired many, many painters and sculptors.  Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream is based partly on the Golden Ass, which appeared in a very popular English translation by William Adlington in 1566.

The Summa perfectionis, a Medieval Book on Alchemy

The Summa perfectionis of pseudo-Geber is a Latin book on alchemy which appeared in the 13th or early 14th  century. "Pseudo-Geber" alludes to the fact  that for a long time, the book was believed to be the work of Jabir Ibn Hayyan, or Geber, as he was known in the Latin West. 

 

Today, most or all of the many works on alchemy once attributed to Geber are believed to have been written by others, and it is even disputed whether Geber really existed. 

William R Newman published a critical edition of the Summa perfectionis in 1991, and has argued that it was authored by the 13th-century Franciscan friar Paul of Taranto, a judgement which has come to be widely accepted. 

Paul also published works on alchemy under his own name. Whether it is thought that he published the Summa perfectionis anonymously, and that it later was attributed to Geber, or whether Paul claimed that his own work was that of Geber, I do not know. I also am not expert enough in the position of alchemy, vis a vis the Church authorities of the 13th and 14th century, to hazard a guess as to whether the Summa perfectionis was more objectionable than other alchemical works, which might have made it prudent to claim not to have been its author.

Perhaps Paul attributed the work to Geber, not out of fear of the disapproval of the Inquisition, but because Muslim scholars in general, and Geber, mythical or not, in particular, were highly-esteemed in the Latin West as authorities on alchemy, and Paul hoped to gain more attention with a purported translation of Gerber than he otherwise could have attained. "Alchemy" is an Arabic word, like "algebra" and "zero."

As so often: the key words in the above are "perhaps" and "I do not know." I also don't know exactly when or how the belief in Geber as a real author began to fade. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries some of the many editions of the Summa perfectionis were being published with attribution to Geber without the "pseudo-", and in the 19th century Kopp, Hoefer and others were questioning his authorship, and I can't tell you what came in between.

The Summa perfectionis is written in an admirably clear and direct style, explaining the instruments used by the alchemist, the methods of combining and heating various materials, results thus far attained and future results hoped for -- all remarkably similar, in substance and tone, to a modern textbook of chemistry. Two major differences from modern chemistry were the assumption that all metals were combinations of sulfur and mercury, and the belief that an elixer could transform base metals such as lead into precious metals such as gold. 

But only particularly ignorant modern chemists would claim that science today works with absolutely no false assumptions. People in different times and places saw the world differently than we do, and interpreted data differently. Only those particularly ignorant of those other times and places, or particularly ignorant of our own present, could assume that the present is vastly superior in every way.  

Billionaires

I'm going to go way out on a limb here and claim that billionaires aren't all exactly the same.

At least, I'd be going out on a limb if I said that in some of the places I hang out. I like those places, it's nice to have found places where nearly everyone hates Elon Musk, but all the same, the frequent, unchallenged assertion that all billionaires are the same is getting to be a pain in the ass. 

 

It's possible that I might dislike every single billionaire, if I examined each one closely. But I haven't examined each and every single billionaire closely. Which is why I'm unable to say that they're all the same.

But there's more than that. Yes, even more. There are differences which anyone can see. Some billionaires are Republicans, some are Democrats. The they're-all-the-same yahoos will respond that they're just pretending to be different, while they pull the strings behind the scenes in our one-party system. Have we gotten to the 100 mark yet, 100 times of me mentioning, in this blog, that brilliant remark of Kurt Vonnegut's, that we are what we pretend to be?

Gotta be at least close to 100 by now. 

There are differences, though. When Warren Buffett says publicly that he should pay more taxes, that's different from Elon Musk publicly saying that he shouldn't have to pay ANY taxes, because he's already publicly benefited mankind so much. And whether Musk really means that, or can barely keep a straight face while he says it and is as amazed as, for instance, I am, that anyone believes he's a public benefactor (we are what we pretend to be!), both Buffett and Musk are decidedly different than most billionaires inasmuch as they've talked about taxes at all in any way except privately.

Musk and Trump and Cuban, and very few other billionaires, seem to live for the spotlight, for public attention. They can't get enough of it, it seems. Many other billionaires seem to live very strictly by the code: "Fools' names and fools' faces often appear in public places." So that we've very rarely, or perhaps never, even heard their names.

Which would make it even harder to tell if they really are all the same, and also exactly the same as the publicity-hungry type of billionaire. 

As with taxes, so also with philanthropy: some billionaires practice it openly, some by stealth, some hardly at all. Instead of "hardly at all," I was going to say "not at all," but it seems even Trump and Musk may have engaged in some charitable giving. Not as much as they would like people to believe, but a little, milked for as much publicity as possible, timed to divert from scandal.

Now, even in the cases of billionaires who give the great majority of their wealth to good causes, it could be argued that they are not making up for all of the damage they caused while accumulating that money. The Andrew Carnegie Syndrome. I'd be more than glad to debate that. On a case-by-case, billionaire-by-billionaire basis. I'm still not going to even debate the nature of all billionaires at once. 

Because, as Denzel Washington said in Philadelphia: "This is the essence of discrimination: formulating opinions about others not based on their individual merits, but rather on their membership in a group with assumed characteristics." Simple as that. I'm not having it.

But wait, there's EVEN MORE: I have come to believe that a great many of these people claiming that all billionaires are evil and all the same, are themselves millionaires who would much rather debate something else than whether and to what extent their own existence benefits society as a whole. The B-word gives them a very convenient way to change the subject. Might even work if the people they're talking to are also millionaires. Yeah, I bet in would work real well in those circumstances.

Perhaps it was just a coincidence that the first two people I heard spreading the billionaires-are-all trope were millionaires. Gore Vidal, and then Bernie Sanders. 

In fact, in retrospect, I've got to wonder whether Gore Vidal himself was a billionaire when he warned the public to keep both hands planted firmly over one's wallet whenever in the vicinity of a billionaire. Vidal was not merely a bestselling author when he said, he had written a great many very big bestsellers, besides some screenwriting and having been born the grandson of a US Senator and being the first cousin of Al Gore and a cousin by marriage of Jacqueline Kennedy, and living half the year in a villa in Ravello and the other half in the Beverly Hills Hotel. If he wasn't worth at least $100 million in the late 1980's, when he issued his dire warning about billionaires, then he must have given most of his wealth away, or followed terrible investment advice, or been a really amazingly big tipper, or something.

You know what, maybe Gore was a billionaire and knew it, and was ironically warning his more perceptive readers, those capable of reading between the lines just as he spoke between them, to watch out for him, and maybe go into business with less treacherous types. If so -- good one, Gore! and ain't I a dope.

My point was that when I read that article in Vanity Fair where Gore talked about the billionaires and the hands clamped on wallets just for safety's sake, it struck me as very odd that someone that rich was warning the public about the rich. 

And then in 2016, Bernie Sanders went on and on at such length about billionaires that he got a billionaire elected President. And I noticed that during 2016 he and his wife sold their second house for half a million. 

Their SECOND house. Making me very suspicious that the rest of their holdings might tally up to another half, making them the dreaded M-word, as are no doubt many if not most of Bernie's colleagues in the Senate and House. 

That was before 2019, when it became widely-known that Sanders' income in 2017 had been over $1 million, leading to his famous public gaff about how you, too, can become a millionaire if you write a bestselling book. 

Who knew it was so easy, right?

Seemed disingenuous to me, because Sanders seemed to be saying that only in 2017 had he become a millionaire. 

But again my point is: a rich person warning me about those evil, evil rich people like movie stars and the Clintons!

Also, I suspect that very many of the people around me these days repeating the all-billionaires-are-the-same trope, may have learned it directly from Bernie Sanders, thus adding to the reasons I dislike him.

Boethius

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, born probably in the 470's AD, died 524, has been the subject of great controversy from his lifetime to the present: Does he belong to late antiquity or to the Medieval period? Was he a Christian or a pagan? Was he guilty of plotting to overthrow Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogothic King of Italy, under whose regime he had risen to the rank of consul? Did he and other descendants of ancient Roman aristocracy wish to re-instate a non-Christian Roman Empire or Republic? Or were they simply cold toward the Christian faith, drawing no political consequences from this, and was this coldness enough to condemn Boethius and several of his friends? 

 

There is yet another conjecture: was Boethius conspiring with the Orthodox Byzantine Emperor Justinian to overthrow the Arian Theodoric and re-unite the entire Empire, from Britain to the Euphrates?

Theodoric apparently considered Boethius to be guilty of something, and had him imprisoned and executed. Perhaps Boethius really was conspiring against Theodoric. Or perhaps he was under suspicion for no other cause than his familial relations to the most prominent pagan holdouts of late 4th century and early 5th Rome. We really don't know why Boethius was imprisoned and executed.

While awaiting his execution, Boethius wrote De consolatione philosophiae, The Consolation of Philosophy. For all of the controversy surrounding Boethius in other regards, the high regard in which this last work of Boethous' has been held for nearly 1500 years seems remarkably unanimous. It was very widely read in the Middle Ages, and has not yet ceased to be widely read.

In the book, a man in prison laments his misfortunes, and is visited by a beautiful women who embodies philosophy. The man speaks in prose, and philosophy answers in beautiful verse, and convinces the man that the pursuit of wisdom is always an occasion for great joy and perfect comfort, no matter what happens in the physical realm, which doesn't matter much compared to the eternal and perfect realm of the mind.

This is Platonic philosophy, written so beautifully that one need not be the slightest be Platonically inclined in order to be swept up in it.

Among the most prestigious of the many translations of The Consolation of Philosophy, Alfred the Great (known until recently as the King of England) translated it into Angloe Saxon, Chaucer and Elizabeth I into English, Jean de Meun into French, Nottker into German, and Varchi and several other Renaissance humanists into Italian.

Boethius reminds me of Spinoza and Jesus in being so well-liked by all that almost every party -- theist, atheist, Christian, pagan, conservative, socialist, etc, etc -- wants to claim him as one of their own. I'm not free of this temptation myself, although I am trying not to let my emotions overcome what little good sense I possess. There are some contemporary scholars who seem convinced that Boethius was a Christian. With no offense meant to them, I have seen nothing which convinces me of this. Works of Christian theology which have been included in collection of Boethius' works have been shown to be spurious -- again, some would disagree -- and The Consolation of Theology, which has started this and a few other controversies, shows a very conspicuous absence of the name of Jesus and of anything else which is Christian. 

It's a pity that very little of Boethius' other writings has survived: some works on  music and arithmetic. His translations of and commentaries on Aristotle, Plato and Porphory might have shed great light on his own religion or lack of it. Perhaps that's why they haven't survived. PS: Thanks to qed1 at Reddit for pointing out that I was wrong, and that translations and commentaries by Boethius on Aristotle and Porphery have survived. See, for example, Migne, vol 64, online all over the place. Maybe after I've read more, the chances will improve that I will know what I'm talking about.

The Commentary on Vergil of Servius Grammaticus... and Donatus

In the Saturnalia of Macrobius, set in the early 380's AD, published decades later, there appears a shy young man named Servius, who doesn't say much and is praised by his elders for his learning. 

This Servius is generally thought to be a representation, perhaps fictionalized, perhaps not, of the Servius Grammaticus who decades later authored a commentary on Vergil, which, besides grammar, rhetoric and style, also has much to say about subject matter, and besides its interest in strict relation to Vergil, is also of interest for the readings of many other authors cited.

 Or, more likely, he authored parts of the commentary, and for the rest reproduced passages written by Donatus, the grammarian probably best known today as the pagan tutor of the young Jerome. This combination of his own work and contributions from Donatus published by Servius is known as the short version. Some manuscripts contain only the short version, while others, fewer, contain a longer version. It has been conjectured that the passages added to form the longer version were the work of a learned scholar in Ireland in the 7th or 8th century. The more popular opinion today is that they are the parts of Donatus' commentary which Servius had not already used.

By this thesis, the entirety or at least the greater part  of Donatus' commentary on Vergil, long considered lost, could be reconstructed from the various versions of what traditionally had been known as Servius' commentary.

I am not going to conjecture which parts were authored by whom. What is now called [S], the version published by Servius, and [DS], the version with passages now generally agreed to have been written by Donatus and added by a later 3rd party, are each represented by manuscripts as early as the 9th century.

The makers of what many consider to be the best complete edition, published in 4-volumes by Teubner from 1881-1902, George Thilo and Hermann Hagen, present the thesis of the 7th or 8th century Irish contributor, and put what they take to be his contributions, and what is now generally believed to be the parts of Donatus not included by Servius himself, in italics. 

An edition which was hoped will be a great improvement over Thilo and Hagen is in progress from Harvard. Very slow progress. Or perhaps it is not progressing at all anymore. In 1946 (!) vol II of 5 planned volumes appeared, covering Aeneid, book I-II, and in 1948 (!) E Fraenkel is considered to have established a highly negative opinion of this volume in a very widely-respected review. Vol III, on Aeneid, books III-V, appeared in 1965. Vol V, on Aeneid books IX-XII, appeared in 2018. I have not been able to find any trace of a vol I or a vol IV, and presumably there are now planned more than the original 5 volumes.

I am not aware of any other plans for new editions of Servius. As always, if some of my readers know more than I. I'm very glad to hear from them.