The Division Between Art and Science, And the Decline of the Study of Greek and Latin

This is one of those posts where I offer no answers, but simply pose a question which has struck me recently. In this case the question is: can the division between the arts and the sciences in Western society seem natural only to those who have not studied ancient Greek and Latin?

In case there are readers to whom it is not already obvious: I have no idea whether the art-science split has occurred in other societies, nor how it might seem to observers from other parts of the world.

Back within the western world, I have greatly admired admired contemporary and recent authors, such as Bronowski and Pynchon, who clearly reject the notion that art and science are incompatible. I don't know how conversant those two are in the Classical languages, but when we go further into the past, there's often no longer any doubt: Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche were all very familiar with ancient Greek, and all three published in Latin. And none seemed to have the slightest inclination to separate the arts from the sciences. 

Travel back a bit further in time, to the 17th century, and Galileo wrote sonnets, and Milton wrote treatises in logic. These efforts have not become famous, non-one seems to consider them particularly brilliant, but no one of their contemporaries found it strange that they crossed the art/science divide. It takes a more recent perspective to find it strange. It requires a more recent perspective to see any divide between art and science. 

Back farther in time, to the 16th century, and we have the archetypal "Renaissance Man" -- archetypal from the point of view of some more modern commentators, that is: Leonardo da Vinci. And we are told -- by some recent and contemporary pundits -- that it is no longer possible to be such a brilliant artist, and at the the same time such a brilliant scientist. 

But who exactly is telling us this? And who goes a bit further still, in some cases, and tells us that the decline in the study of Greek and Latin was a necessary outcome of the rise of science brought about by people such as Leonardo?

Was the decline in competence in Greek and Latin necessary? Is it a good thing? 

I'm not saying that no people who are fluent in Greek and Latin have accepted such assertions. Obviously, many have. But I'm asking whether these ideas could have spread and taken hold to begin without mistaken ideas being aggressively spread by people with no knowledge of Latin or Greek, and, therefore, no idea what they were talking about, no idea of where art or science had come from.  

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Why Study Latin?

Today, many people who study Latin describe it as a hobby. For others, it is much more.

As recently as few hundred years ago, anyone in Western Europe considering a career in academia, or diplomacy, or anything else which involved constant contact with an international group of people, had to have a good grasp of Latin. They had to be able to read it, write, and speak it at least a little, and preferably more than just a little.

And therefore, anyone today who wants to read about any of those people, about Elizabeth I of England, or Wallenstein, or John Milton, or Martin Luther, is only going to get so far without needing to be able to read Latin. 

Western philosophy from Lucretius to Decartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, and a not inconsiderable amount even more recently, is in Latin. Catholic theology until 1962, and a great deal of the earliest Protestant theology, is in Latin. Newton Wrote about physics in Latin, Gauss about mathematics, Linnaeus about biology. Francis Bacon, Galileo, Hobbes, all wrote in Latin.

You might object that all of the people I've named so far also wrote in other languages, and you'd be right, although just barely in the case of Spinoza. You can read works in their original form by all of the above without knowing any Latin, although only a very little work in Dutch by Spinoza. 

But go back another few hundred years, and many of the leading minds wrote only in Latin: Roger Bacon, William of Occam, Thomas Aquinas, Gerard of Cremona, Albertus Magnus.

As did the historians Gregory of Tours, Bede, Einhard, Nithard, William of Malmsbury, William of Tyre, Matthew Paris, Henry of Huntington, and many others, including many anonymous chroniclers, many of them good writers, many famously bad, but all of them writing in Latin.

Church records, baptisms, marriages and funerals, inscriptions on tombstones, public buildings and currency. Government archives. Compendiums of laws.

And then there is the ancient Latin which remains, relatively small in quantity but generally very high in quality, which we call the Latin Classics, read, quoted and emulated by all of the above. Especially in the Latin Renaissances of the 9th, 12th, 15th and 19th centuries. 

And I mustn't forget to mention all of the Latin poetry and plays and fiction written since the ancient era.

And is a 21st century Latin Renaissance already underway? Some seem to think so. The number of people going to the trouble of learning to speak Latin, not just to recite it but to engage in spontaneous Latin conversation, seems to be rising. 

As I said, for some, Latin is a wonderful hobby. It does nothing but make them happy. But given all of the above sorts of Latin available today to be read, it seems to me that a writer could make more than a hobby of it. A poet, an historian or a philosopher. Yes, for many different sorts of authors, the above-listed sorts of written Latin could offer more than just a hobby.

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Ancient Manuscripts of Classical Latin

Sir Kenneth Clark, talking about the Italian Renaissance, put the number of surviving ancient manuscripts at no more than 3 or 4, and I naturally jumped right out of my skin, all the more so because Ken generally knew what he was talking about.

No, Texts and Transmission unfortunately does not give a total, although it naturally can be some help here.

If we take AD 500 as the cut-off point, Mynors' edition of Vergil lists 7 or 8 (7 or 8 because one is described as "saec. v/vi"), there are 7 or 8 ancient fragments of Cicero (once again because one is of the 5th or 6th century), the palimpsest of Fronto is of the 5th century, and the palimpsest of Gaius is 5th century, that of Gallus 1st century BC. There's a 4th-century palimpsest of Gellius, a 5th-century palimpsest of Granius, 6 ancient Livian manuscripts, 3 ancient fragments of Lucan, a 5th-century palimpsest of Plautus, 3 ancient fragments of the Elder Pliny and 1 of the Younger Pliny.

We have 7 ancient fragments of Sallust, 1 ancient manuscript of (the Younger) Seneca and 5 of Terence.

That makes a total of 46, or 47 or 48. No doubt I missed some and the actual total is higher.

On the other hand, of course, it is entirely possible that Sir Kenneth knew exactly what he was talking about and I don't -- few things could be less surprising than that. If he was referring to the number of ancient MSS known in the 15th century, the number would be smaller than 46, a number of pailmpsests and papyri having been discovered in the meantime. If he was referring to the number known in Italy in the 15th century, the number would naturally shrink again, and even more if he was referring to the number known to a particular individual 15th-century Italian Classicist.

And of course, it can be that Ken had an earlier cut-off date in mind than AD 500.

And of course, if anyone knows of any MSS that I missed, I'd be delighted to hear about it. 

Buy Civilisation by Kenneth Clark at Amazon: https://amzn.to/3PDhP7j 

The Ongoing Uphill Battle Against Nonsense

The other day I was in an online discussion which had been started by someone who said that we had no primary sources for 7th-century European history. This amounted to asserting that nothing written in Europe during the 7th century has survived to our day -- or, if one were inclined to be especially generous to them, one could understand them as having said that no historical writing had survived from the 7th century.

The assertion was completely wrong either way, of course. They replied to me by moving the goalposts and saying that we had very few primary sources for the 7th century, and that any given century during the Roman Empire was better-known to us today. I replied that I wasn't sure that the 3rd century wasn't even more poorly attested than the 7th. As an example, I mentioned the Augustan Histories, a purported collection of biographies of Emperors by six different authors, focusing mainly on the 3rd century, upon which both Gibbon and Burckhardt had relied heavily for the period, although both of them were utterly exasperated by its many inaccuracies. There simply wasn't much more writing to be consulted for the 3rd century -- and there still isn't, I added, although today almost all scholars agree that the Augustan histories are the work of one author, not six, and a growing number are coming to suspect that the work is not really history at all, but something more like a parody of historical writing. 

 

At this point someone else said that Gibbon and Burckhardt were very antiquated, and that we today had access to many more sources of 3rd century history than they did.

All fake innocence, I replied that I was fascinated to hear this, and asked them to list some of these sources. I was partly convinced that they were talking out of their butt, and partly curious about whether they actually knew of some 3rd-century sources I hadn't yet heard of. 

They did not. Their reply listed a few Latin authors, all of whom are cited by both Gibbon and Burckhardt, and some of whom are much later than 3rd century and therefore not primary sources. They added that we had Greek sources as well! Not to mention an enormous amount of Roman legal writing and court cases.

Gibbon and Burckhardt were both quite fluent in Greek and cited Greek authors very frequently in their works, and Gibbon, at least, consulted sources in still other ancient languages. Whether he read these untranslated, or had someone translate them for him, I'm not certain. Gibbon greatly advanced the practice of adhering to primary sources, and  Burckhardt was a Musterbeispiel of it. 

And the amount of Roman legal writing we have is not enormous. We have the Corpus Juris Civilis, a summary compiled by Justinian in the 6th century in the 6th century, and a few more items. Romans did not preserve records of every single court case that way we do.

And in any case, Gibbon and Burckhardt had access to these legal writings. 

Other than inscriptions and coins (some classify coins as inscriptions, some don't) which have been discovered and catalogued since their time, and the mostly Greek papyri discovered mostly at Oxyrhynchus, there is in fact very little writing about the Roman Empire which we have and Gibbon and Burckhardt didn't.

And this guy didn't know it. They were saying they "couldn't remember at the moment" all the details of Gibbon and Burckhardt, while making it pretty clear to those have have read Gibbon and Burckhardt, that they haven't.

So what? Happens all the time, somebody talking out of their butt on the Internet. What was different about this time?

This time it made me sad. And also a little ashamed, because this person reminded me a little bit of me: half-bright enough to get away with some of his BS.  I try to talk nonsense less than I used to, but I don't know that I've actually stopped yet. It's hard to stop a train.

Of course, BS doesn't fool everybody. Most of the people who know you're full of it just stop talking to you. 

But not all of them. Over the past couple of years another person on the Internet has corrected me over and over on points of Latin and subjects related in one way or another to Latin literature. It's a new experience for me, and very annoying. I don't know whether they're too young to realize how annoying the corrections are, or too autistic, or what.

Annoying or not, I realize that the corrections are good for me. They help me learn -- you know? So I thank them, and do my best to hide my annoyance.

Why Latin Should Revive

I am rather excited by various developments which seem to show that Latin may be making a comeback: the Living Latin movement, for example, and some recent publications of Medieval and Neo-Latin texts. It seems possible to me that some momentum may be accumulating.

"Latin is a language without  a country.  It is not the native language of any country.  That is why it is doomed." 

It was a language without a country when the Western Roman Empire fell in AD 476, and for well over a thousand years after that it remained the international language of western Europe. It was not a global language as English is today, and I don't happen to know whether or not the reach of Latin was greater than that of Arabic or Chinese, but within western Europe, it was universal.

 

In European universities, from Finland to Portugal, to Lima, Peru, where St Mark's University was officially established in 1551, lectures were given, discussions were held, and examinations, oral and written, in Latin. Latin was the language of mathematics and physics, of botany, chemistry, geography, medicine. Newton published his Principia, in 1728, in Latin. Spinoza published a few minor early works in Dutch, and then all of his major works were in Latin. 

Descartes and Leibniz each published about half in Latin and half in French. Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes wrote mostly in Latin. Milton wrote in English, Italian, Latin and Greek, the show-off! But these were all 17th- and 18th-century figures, coming at the end of the period of Latin's dominance in Europe. Before the year 1600, although there certainly was a large amount of vernacular literature, exactly none of it could have been considered academic. Latin had no country of its own, that's true, but it did have communities, including the academic community. Students and professors traveled all over Europe and employed the same language wherever they went. It was expected that a professor would teach in several countries over the course of his career, in part to ensure that ideas circulated internationally. 

Latin was the language of royalty and high aristocracy, and of international diplomacy. It was not always expected that every single king and queen could speak brilliantly and spontaneously in Latin, but the advantages of being able to do so were large and obvious.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, military generals, colonels and majors came from the aristocracy, and they traveled internationally, working sometimes for this country, sometimes for another. Although in this case it had less to do with the spread of ideas than with the mercenary officers seeking the most advantageous positions. And all over Europe, battlefield commands were shouted out in Latin.

Latin was the international European language of shipping and commerce. Christopher Columbus did not attend a university, but he did learn Latin, in order to be a ship's captain traveling internationally, and also in order to read works about the Earth's geography which were all either originally written in Latin or translated into Latin from Greek.

So you see, although Latin did not have a country, for over a thousand years it still had some very important uses. And I didn't even mention the Middle Ages, or theology! It may have been no-one's first language -- or very few people's first language -- but it was very many people's second language. The time in which Latin has declined is still a very short time compared to the time when it flourished.

Anyway, when I said yesterday that I was very excited because I thought Latin might be about to make a very big comeback, I was not thinking about it replacing English as the world language numero uno (see what I did there? never mind). I was merely expressing the hope, shared by some others, that Latin may be reviving somewhat from the low point in popularity it has recently reached. At the very least, perhaps more people will resume studying several thousand years' worth of the history of hundreds of millions of people in the language in which it was written.

Neo-Latin Anthologies

Mark Riley first published his Neo-Latin Reader in 2016. The copy before me is from 2018, and on the copyright page it is noted that corrections were made in 2016, 2017 and 2018. Milena Minkova's Florilegium Recentioris Latinitatis was published in 2018.

Neither volume includes facing-pages translations of the Latin texts, indicating that they are intended for readers who actually intend to read them in Latin. 

Riley divides his book by genres, which range from poetry to fiction to history to science. There is even a section of jokes in Latin. I must confess that I cannot completely explain the division of the texts in Riley: it is not strictly chronological, and texts by one author sometimes appear in more than one section. But in the introductions to the texts, in English, Riley offers much of interest about the cultural backgrounds from which they arose. He also gives a lot of information about editions of the various authors, which I find good, as, presumably, readers intrigued by the selections in the anthology might want to read more by these Neo-Latin writers.

 

Petrarch is mentioned by name on the front cover of this paperback edition, where there is also a picture of his face. However, I couldn't find any works by Petrarch in the table of contents. This left me quite confused, until I saw a letter from Petrarch to Cicero in Riley's introduction to the book. 

Minkova's Florilegium, as you might already have guessed from its title, is written entirely in Latin, from the preface to the entire volume, to to the introductory remarks to each work, to the footnotes. The authors, representing a diversity of genres and subjects comparable to Riley, are presented in chronological order, from Petrarch (14th century) to Pascoli (19th-20th century). The only non-Latin material to be found between these covers, aside from the excerpted Neo-Latin authors' occasional use of phrases in Greek, is to be found in Minkova's lists of recent scholarly work pertaining to each and every author. These lists are most welcome. However, I was not able to find within them any reference to editions of the Neo-Latin authors. That's one point for Riley, imho. Like Riley's prefatory material in English, Minkova's prefaces in Latin contain a wealth of interesting and edifying information, historical, cultural and linguistic.

Reading these two fine volumes, I kept thinking of other Neo-Latin authors who deserve to be anthologized. Riley and Minkova both include much that one would expect in volumes intended to introduce recent Latin: works by Petrarch, More, Erasmus, Landival and others are in both volumes. It is no real reproach to either of these editors that I missed, for example, Ficino, Poliziano, Luther, Calvin, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Milton, Kant, Marx and Nietzsche, to name a few. Rather, it indicates that this is a very wide field, with a very great deal of material suitable for introductory anthologies.

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

Rafael Landivar and his Epic Poem Rusticatio Mexicana

Rafael Landivar was born in Guatemala in 1731, entered the Jesuit order and went to Mexico to study in 1750, and was ordained and returned to Guatemala in 1755. There he taught rhetoric and grammar until 1767, when upon the order of King Charles III of Spain, all Jesuits were expelled from the Western Hemisphere. After several years of wandering and hardship, Landivar found a home in Bologna among a group of exiled Jesuits in 1770. He remained in Italy until his death in 1793.

 

He is remembered above all for his poem Rusticatio Mexicana, first published in Modena in 1781. The poem deals with both Mexico and Guatemala; however, in Europe at the time few people had heard of Guatemala, and the term "Mexico" was often used to refer to a territory including Guatemala and much else of Central and South America.

Rusticatio Mexicana is often compared to Vergil's Georgics. Although both poems deal with rural life, the comparison is problematic. Landivar's poem is much longer than Vergil's. It deals with a much greater range of subjects. And while the Georgics harken back nostalgically to an imagined Roman Golden Age in an attempt to inspire Vergil's contemporaries to greater morality and better citizenship, the Rusticatio Mexicana celebrates the wonders of Guatemala and Mexicana in Landivar's own time.

And while Landivar certainly acknowledges following in Vergil footsteps, there are actually more homages to the Aeneid in his epic than to the Georgics, as well as references to many other authors, ancient, Renaissance and also contemporary with Landivar, including several of his Jesuit colleagues. These many references are the appreciative comments of a very well-read author, not the copying of an unimaginative hack.

Landivar is deservedly well-known in present-day Latin America, -- where, for example, a large university in Guatemala is named after him, and many editions of the Rusticatio Mexicana have appeared -- and undeservedly obscure elsewhere.

In writing this post I have referred to Andrew Laird's volume The Epic of America: An Introduction to Rafael Landivar and the Rusticatio Mexicana. In addition to the text of Rusticatio Mexicana alongside an English translation, the volume texts and translations of several shorter poems by Landivar, several very illuminating essays about the poem, the author and Latin American literature written in Latin.

In my opinion, Laird's volume has only one serious flaw. Sadly, it is a major flow, and utterly inexplicable: the text of the Rusticatio Mexicana and its English translation, presumably the biggest attraction of the entire work, are printed in a much smaller font than the rest of the work. The other way around would've made far more sense. 

Those who can read Spanish may prefer one of the Latin-Spanish editions. Not to mention those few and blessed who can actually read Latin with no help whatsoever from any translations.

Languages and Geography

Languages have been expanded and contracting, moving from one area to another, coming into existence and dying, for thousands of years. It is a mistake to assume that this a recent phenomenon, and the association of a certain language with a certain geographic region is, ultimately, arbitrary, because such associations are never permanent. For example, the majority of people in the United States at present speak English. So, there is a tendency to think that our language "came from" England. But one of the ancestors of modern English, Anglo-Saxon, came to England from Germany in the fifth century AD, replacing the Celtic language which had been predominant for some time in the region which is now England. And Saxon, one of the many dialects of German, has itself moved from place to over the millennia, despite their being one clearly-defined geographical region in Germany today called Saxony. (And two more called Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt.) The movement of Germanic languages in the 4th to 6th centuries AD was so extreme that Germans today often refer to that period of time as the Voelkerwanderung, the wandering of peoples.

Celtic languages are spoken today in Ireland, the Isle of Man, on the island of Great Britain in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, and also in the region of France called Amorica or Brittany. In each of those regions, a Celtic language is the first language of a minority of the population, although recently, after centuries of decline, they all have been making a considerable comeback, being officially protected under law and taught to schoolchildren. These efforts at restoration have been underway for well over a century in Ireland, and  soon, a majority of the Irish population may have at least some ability to understand, speak, read and write Irish. 

2100 years ago, the Celtic language family was one of five major Indo-European Language families, besides the Romance, Germanic, Slavic and Indo-Iranian families. Celtic languages have been predominant at one time or another not only in Great Britain and Ireland but also in present-day France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, northern Italy, southern Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and western Romania. 

The Romance language group at that time consisted mostly of Latin. 2500 years ago, Latin and related languages were confined to a rather tiny region around Rome, which then was more a village than a city. Rome expanded greatly, and the Latin language spread. In the 2nd and 1st centuries BC Rome conquered present-day France, Spain and Portugal, and in those regions Latin quickly replaced the Celtic languages. Then in the 1st century AD Rome conquered present-day England, but the majority of the people there continued to speak one Celtic language or another, until the above-mentioned change to Anglo-Saxon in the 5th century. The Anglo-Saxons conquered Cornwall in the 10th century, and Cornish declined sooner than the Celtic languages in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, which kept their political independence from the English-speakers longer. The Celtic speakers in Brittany in France emigrated from Great Britain in or around the late 5th century. 

To the east of the city of Rome, the Romans established Latin in various regions. In the region known then as Dacia and known now as Romania. Romanian and the closely related Moldovan are the only Romance languages in eastern Europe today. The Romans conquered vast territories to the east which had formerly been under Greek control, all the way to the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, to present-day Israel and Syria and Iraq and including present-day Turkey, but in these areas the Latin language did not take over the existing languages. As before the Romans came, the language of government and the upper classes was Greek, while the majority populations spoke a great variety of other languages. 

I can't begin to explain, yet, why political conquest sometimes means the complete linguistic transformation of a region, and sometimes not. At present the best I can do is point out some examples where the language of a region has completely changed under new political leadership, and some examples where it has not. For example: in the Western Hemisphere, in the United States, the languages of the of the inhabitants before the European invasions have been reduced to a much greater degree than the indigenous languages in Latin America. In the US, the most widely-spoken indigenous language is Navaho, with about 170,000 speakers presently. To the south of the US, by contrast, Nahuatl (Aztec) is spoken by nearly 2 million people presently, the Mayan languages by about 6 million, and the Quechan (Incan) languages by 8 to 10 million people. 

Bill Maher & Reginald Foster

I just found out today that the man on the left in this photo,

talking to Bill Maher just outside of Vatican City in Bill's documentary film Religulous after Bill was thrown out of the Vatican, this Vatican priest whom the Swiss Guard allegedly referred to as il benzinaio (the gas-station attendant) because he chose to wear simple working man's clothes instead of a priest's habit, this priest who in Bill Maher's movie agreed with very much of what Bill had to say about the Vatican and Catholicism -- this guy is Reginald Foster, who for almost 30 years lead the Vatican office which was responsible for writing official Vatican documents in Latin or translating them into Latin, Reginald Foster, whom many regard as the world's foremost living Latinist and teacher of Latin, Reginald Foster, the most prominent exponent of Living Latin, which places as much emphasis on speaking and writing Latin as on reading the language, as opposed to many others who concentrate on teaching reading comprehension and have given up on treating Latin as if it were still alive.

What a shame that all Bill wanted to talk about were his banal objections to the Vatican and Catholicism, so banal that a priest who had worked in the Vatican for decades didn't disagree with anything he said. What a shame that he missed the opportunity to talk to perhaps the world's foremost living Latin scholar about -- Latin, a subject about which Foster has a great deal of interesting things to say.

What a perfect example of the sorts of things which New Atheists could learn if they broadened their horizons just a little bit. What a heartbreaking example of missed opportunities to share wonderful things with their audiences of millions, because they can't stop repeating their mantra of "RELIGION IS WRONG AND STUPID AND RUINS EVERYTHING!" for one goddamned second any time they're within shouting distance of any place of worship, let alone the actual Vatican.

*sigh* So anyway, back to the interview as it actually was. I agree with Bill Maher and Reginald Foster that the grandeur and opulence of the Vatican are at odds with Jesus' message of simplicity and renunciation of worldly things. Unlike both Foster and Maher, however, I don't particularly care what Jesus said or thought, and I think it's a real shame to let something so silly deprive you of enjoying the grandeur and opulence, of, for example, the Vatican, which in my opinion is one of the most beautiful man-made places on Earth.

I also wonder what sort of jackassery Bill Maher perpetrated to get himself thrown out of the Vatican. I don't think that's actually shown in the film. Bill claims that he was well-known to the Vatican as one of their great enemies. I wonder whether that's an example of Bill Maher giving himself way too much credit. Maybe I'll get to ask him about that someday. Maybe I'll be able to talk to him and his audience about Latin some day. I'd be a very poor substitute for Reginald Foster for that, though.

Translations from Greek to Latin

In the Roman Republic and the Western, Latin-speaking Western Roman Empire, many people were bilingual and could speak Greek as well as Latin. How many? I don't know, but I do know that some Classical Latin authors such as Cato the Elder and Juvenal complained that it was too many. Many other ancient Latin authors saw Greek very positively: from its beginnings in the third century BC, Latin literature very often copies Greek literature very directly. Many Roman young men were sent to Athens to be educated; some of them liked Greek culture and literature so much that they became poets, instead of lawyers as their families had intended (some things never change), some of them strew many Greek quotations among the Latin texts of their books. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, although a native of the Latin West, wrote an entire book in Greek.

This all changed very quickly when the Western Empire declined and ceased to be in the 5th century AD.

Jerome's Latin version of the Bible, the Vulgate, dominated Western literature for 1000 years.

Although scholarly types in the West never ceased to read the Latin Classics, the ability to read Greek became very rare. The philosopher Boethius (ca480 -- 524), made some of the first translations of Aristotle into Latin. He had planned to translate all of Aristotle and Plato into Latin, but was imprisoned and executed on suspicion of treason before he could complete this project. Apparently already at this time there was a need, even among those inclined to philosophy, for translations of Greek works.

Another illustration of the lack of reading comprehension of Greek in the West is the popularity of the poem known as the Ilias Latina. PK Marshall (in: LD Reynolds (ed), Tests and Transmission, Oxford: 1983, p 191), with refreshing frankness, refers to the Ilias Latina as an "unatractive compendium." Written probably during the reign of Nero, it reduces the 15,693 verses of Homer's Iliad to just 1070, and those remaining lines often resemble Vergil's style much more than Homer's. Nevertheless, in the absence of either knowledge of Greek or fuller translations of Homer, the Ilias Latina enjoyed great popularity from the 9th century onward.

Many translations from Greek into Latin, most notably of the very numerous works of Aristotle, began to cause a great sensation when they appeared at the University of Paris and in other Western centers of learning in the 12th century, coming from the great school of translation in Muslim-controlled Toledo, Spain.

I suppose that this is as good a time as any to point out that, apparently contrary to widespread beliefs, most of the Latin translations of Aristotle and other Greeks which appeared in 12th-century Europe were not, in fact, first translated from Greek into Arabic, and then from Arabic into Greek. Most have survived in Greek, and in the 12th century in Toledo, most of the Latin translations which were to be so popular among Western scholars were made directly from Greek. Even in the 12th century, people knew the hazards of what we now call the game of Telephone. There have been a few cases in which the original versions of Greek Classics have vanished, and an Arabic or Hebrew version has survived, so that all further translation must come from them, and these few cases make for interesting stories. But they are atypical stories.

In the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, as the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, declined and finally fell, many Greek scholars who fled from that decline and fall chose to migrate to Italy, and they taught Greek to those scholars who re-introduced Greek literature to the West in the Italian Renaissance. Numerous full-length Latin translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey began to circulate in the West, replacing Professor Marshall's "unattractive compendium," along with Latin translations of many other Greek works, as the scholarly Western world, or at least wide swaths of it, became bilingual again, mastering both Latin and Greek, as it had done 1000 years before.

Cassiodorus and the Preservation of the Latin Classics

Not everyone agrees who deserves to be singled out as the person who has done more than anyone else to preserve Classical Latin literature. I've said several times on this blog that that person is Charlemagne, and upon reflection, I stand by that assessment; but others have said that it is Cassiodorus, born ca AD 490, died ca 585, and there is much to be said for him in this regard.

Along with his contemporary Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius, he also surely must be a contender for owning one of the most beautiful of all Roman names. Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator ("Senator" is actually part of his name, not a title. If it seems very strange, it may help to think of an Englishman named John King.) was born into an upper-class family in Scyllacium, a city in in the southern Italian region of Bruttium. He held several high offices under the Ostrogothic kings of Italy: he was quaestor from 507 to 511 (Keep in mind, his birth date is estimated at 490, which would mean that he assumed the office of quaestor at the age of 16 or 17!), consul in 514, and at the time of the death of King Theodoric the Great in 526, he was magister officiorum. Under Theodoric's successor, Athalaric, he became praetorian prefect in 533.

In 540, around the age of 50, Cassiodorus retired. He had attempted to interest Pope Agapetus in the idea of the foundation of a Christian university in Rome, but this project was not realized. Instead, Cassiodorus returned to his native Bruttioum, and founded a monastery which was to be known as Vivarium, after some nearby ponds where fish were bred. I have tried and tried, without success, to find any facts at all about the later history of the monastery Vivarium. The closest I have come is LD Reynolds' passing remark, "His monastery seems to have died with him," in: Reynolds and NG Wilson, Scribes & Scholars, 2nd edition, Oxford, p 73.

In his long, long retirement, besides looking after his monastery, Cassiodorus wrote several works, which can be divided into the historical-political and the theological-grammatical. One of the latter, the Institutiones, is his best-known work, and one of his chief claims for being foremost among the preservers of Classical Latin literature, for it argued that a good education included a thorough study of the Classics.

Besides the Institutiones, which was much-copied and much-used during the Middle Ages, Cassiodorus owned a large library of pagan Latin literature, and copies of these pagan works were spread to other European monasteries along with Cassiodorus' proposals about good education.

It is a sign that knowledge of Greek was dying out in the Catholic West in Cassiodorus' time, that he saw the need to translate the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus, and the ecclesiastical histories of Theodoret, Sozomen and Socrates, into Latin.

One thing which makes Cassiodorus' efforts to preserve ancient literature especially remarkable is the time in which he lived and wrote and oversaw the multiplication of Classical manuscripts: it was a time when Classical literature in general was dying out, partly being destroyed in Dark Age wars, and partly being passed by in favor of Christian literature, as has been dramatically shown in the many palimpsested Classical texts discovered since the late 18th century. It is hard to find anyone prepared to actually praise Cassiodorus as an author; but the combination of his wealth and resources, his organizational skills (perhaps honed by his first career in public office?) and his love of pagan Latin literature, meant that he preserved many ancient authors at the very time when the work of many others was vanishing.

Aulus Gellius

Aulus Gellius, born around AD 125, died after 180, was probably born in Rome, and spent most of his life there. He is one of those ancient Latin authors known as grammarians who each quoted many other authors, and whose works today are of less interest for what they have to say about grammar than for being a source of the texts of those other writers. Gellius is our only source of quotations of some other writers. In many more cases he is valuable for establishing the texts of known authors.

Gellius' family was wealthy, and he was sent to Athens for a part of his education. His family intended him to be a lawyer, and, unlike many people with literary interests whose families have intended them to become lawyers, Gellius actually became one. His only surviving work, the Noctes Atticae (Athenean Nights), is so called because it was begun during the long winter nights in Athens. Gellius continued to compile the work back in Rome, in the spare time he had left over from his job adjudicating civil cases. If its 20 books have some sort of overall plan or organization, it has eluded scholars so far. But Gellius quotes more than 275 authors, most Latin, some Greek, ensuring that Classical scholars will continue to study him with profit and pleasure.

The Noctes Attica was very popular among other ancient authors. Those who cite it include Lactantius, Nonius Marcellus, Ammianus Marcellinus, author of the Historia Augusta, Servius, Augustine, and above all, Macrobius, who, in his Saturnalia, written after AD 400, quotes from Gellius so extensively -- without, however, ever naming him as a source -- that no one who edits the text of Gellius can afford to ignore Macrobius as a source.

In contrast, we have very little evidence of Gellius having been known at all in the early Middle Ages; with one exception, our earliest surviving manuscripts of Gellius are from the 10th century. That one exception is the remarkable manuscript known as Vatican Pal Lat 24. It contains several books of the Old Testament written in the 8th century; however, early in the 19th century, palimpsests, indentations left by older writing on the parchment which had been scraped off, were discovered beneath the 8th-century Old Testament text. It turns out that parchment from several older books had been re-used in order to make the 8th-century volume; one of those older books was a 4th-century manuscript containing parts of books 1-4 of Gellius, now with large gaps. The conspectus siglorum of Hosius' 1903 Teubner edition, besides Pal lat 24 (mistakenly described as saec VII?) and the the 2 10th-century manuscripts, lists 5 from the 12th century, 3 from the 13th, and one each from the 14th and 15th centuries. A recent critical edition is by PK Marshall in Oxford Classical Texts, 1968, 2nd edition 1990.

Propertius

Sextus Propertius (ca 55 BC -- after 16 BC), foremost of ancient Latin elegiasts, was born into a wealthy family in Assisi in Umbria. His father died while he was still a small child, but his mother oversaw his education, which was good even by the standards of wealthy Romans. Part of the family's property was seized in 40 BC and used to pay the soldiers of Octavian, the future emperor Augustus. This reduced their income considerably, although it appears that Propertius never was bothered by having to make a living.

In 34 BC the family moved to the city of Rome, and Propertius took on the dress and habits of adulthood. He showed no interest in the law law, politics or army life. He befriended poets such as Ovid as Bassus.

In 29 BC Propertius published his first book of elegies, known as Cynthia after the woman who was their main subject. It was immediately popular, and remained the most sought-after of his works, and are still the most popular today, despite the fact that his later three books of elegies, less single-minded in the love-struck pursuit of romance, are often regarded as his best work. Propertius published a total of four books of elegies during his lifetime. They were sold together, or the first book, Cynthia, could be bought by itself; therefore, it was sometimes referred to as Monobiblos. Propertius himself seems to have been a little embarrassed to be so often associated only with Monobiblios, and he protested that he could do more than just sigh and moan over a woman. His later works often treat mythological subjects including but not limited to the founding of Rome, which the ancient Romans did not refer to as mythological whether they knew better or not.

The popularity of Propertius' first effort brought him to the attention of the wealthy literary patron Maecenas, which in turn led to his friendship with Vergil and Horace, and to the favour of the Imperial family, and this led to some poems which extravagantly praise Augustus.

The earliest surviving written copies of Propertius' poems are graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, which seem to confirm the impression that he was very popular indeed in his own time. Then in the 2nd century, Apuleius mentions him, and opines that Cynthia's real name was Hostia. But overall, not many mentions of Propertius have been found between his own time and the mid 12th century, when he is his praised and quoted by John of Salisbury. The oldest surviving complete manuscript of his poems, referred to as N because it had spent some time in Naples, was made shortly before AD 1200. The second is known as A and was made around AD 1250. A number of 14th- and 15th-century manuscripts survive, most or all of which seem to derive ultimately from either N or A. After a thousand years in which there apparently was very little interest in his work, Propertius has been one of the most highly-regarded Latin poets from the Renaissance down to our own day. Just another reminder that literary tastes sometimes change considerably.

The Carolingian Renaissance

Apart from the effect Charlemagne had on politics, education and literacy in general, art, architecture -- you must take a look at the Palace of Aachen if you're ever in the area -- and the beginnings of German literature, his impact on Classical studies was immense. Here is a list, given by LD Reynolds in the introduction to Texts and Transmission, 1983, p xxviii, of authors and anonymous works of the Latin Classics for which we possess 9th-century manuscripts:

Agrimensores, Ammianus, Apicius, Apuleius, Aratea, Ausonius, Avianus, Caelius, Aurelianus, Caesar, Celsus, Censorinus, Charisius, Cicero, Claudian, Columella, Curtius Rufus, Donatus, Eutropius, Faventius, Florus, Frontinus, Gellius, Grattius, Historia Augusta, Horace, Hyginus, Justinus, Juvenal, Livy, Lucan, Lucretius, Macrobius, Martial, Martianus Capella, Pomponius Mela, Nemesianus, Nonius Marcellus, Notitia dignitatum, Ovid, Palladius, Julius Paris, Persius, Petronius, Phaedrus, the Elder and Younger Pliny, Publius, Querolus, Quintilian, Rhetores latini minores, Rhetorica ad Herennium, Sallust, the Elder and Younger Seneca, Q Serenus, Servius, Solinus, Statius, Suetonius, Tacitus, Terence, Valerius Flaccus, Valerius Maximus, Vergil, Vibius Sequester and Vitruvius.

And, as Reynolds points out ibid, there were once even more 9th century manuscripts, which the 15th-century Humanists discovered and then lost. And it may be that still more 9th-century manuscripts have come to light since 1983, I'm not sure. Compare this with the 7th century, from which survives (ibid, p xvi) a fragment of Lucan as the solitary Classical artifact.

Some lists of manuscripts have more significance than others. The above list shows how one monarch transformed the study of Classical Latin, because almost all of the 9th-century manuscripts in that list were made in monasteries and school either newly built or rejuvenated, mostly the former, on Charlemagne's orders.

Countless Classical scholars over the past 1200 years have been immensely grateful for the Carolingian minuscule, the form of handwriting developed in Charlemagne's time which has made reading those 9th-century manuscripts so much easier than so many manuscripts written both earlier and later.

All of this makes Charlemagne's own case more poignant: although he was said to have spoken Latin, Arabic and Greek in addition to his native German -- which may seem less farfetched to you when consider that his empire bordered on Arab-controlled Spain to the south-west and Greek Byzantium to the east -- he never quite mastered writing. Einhard describes how, late in his life, he did his writing lessons in bed before going to sleep, but never did quite get the hang of it. Some people don't believe Einhard's description. To me it rings true. I suppose the question must remain unsolved for now.

Another question which can't be answered, in part because it's difficult to quantify, is, which single person has done the most to rescue the literature of ancient Rome. Some have said Cassidorius. Others have said Poggio, but we know that those people are half-educated bozos. Perhaps I'm biased, perhaps I've been taken in by by the lingering effects of some medieval legends, but to me, it's always seemed clear that it was Charlemagne.

Some of the Primary Latin Sources for the Crusades from 1095 to 1187

Eyewitness and contemporary accounts of the Crusades in the period from Pope Urban II's speech at Clermont in 1095 which launched the First Crusade, to the loss of Jerusalem in 1187, were written in many languages including Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Coptic, Hebrew, Persian, Armenian, Georgian and Slavonic. The western European Crusaders themselves, and their compatriots, wrote in several languages besides Latin, most notably French, but also German and others.

In this essay I'm confining myself to a few items written in Latin, and there are many other significant Latin sources which could be named besides the ones I'll mention. To get a sense of the primary sources available for the study of the Crusades, one place to begin would be the bibliographies in the three volumes of Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades, and I repeat, that would be one place to begin. It has now been more than 65 years since Runciman published his account, and scholarship has by no means stood still in the meantime.

The Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum was written by an anonymous soldier serving under Bohemond of Taranto in the First Crusade. It begins with Pope Urban's speech in Clermont and concludes shortly after the Crusaders take Jerusalem in 1099. Some of the author's contemporaries derided him as a commoner and simpleton, which didn't stop them from using his account as a basis for their own, and seldom actually improving upon it factually.

Raymond of Aguilers became the Chaplain of Raymond of Toulouse during the First Crusade, and was also present at the taking of Jerusalem. His account, Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Jerusalem, while filling out some details of the First Crusade, concentrates mostly on Raymond.

Fulcher of Chartres was the chaplain of Baldwin of Boulogne, who entered Jerusalem soon after it fell and became King Baldwin I of Jerusalem. Fulcher published the Gesta Francorum Iherusalem peregrinantium in three parts, in 1101, 1006 and 1127.

Three near-contemporary historians of the First Crusade, Ekkehard of Aura, Rudolph of Caen and Albert of Aix, did not participate in in it. Ekkehard and Rudolph arrived in the East years after Jerusalem was taken, and wrote accounts which did not add much to the record. Albert never was in the in the Holy Land. Around 1130 he published his account of the First Crusade and of the first years of the Kingdom Jerusalem, Liber Christianae expeditionis pro ereptione, emundatione, et restitutione sanctae Hierosolymitanae ecclesiae, which until the modern era was much admired for its prose style and considered authoritative. Modern scholars have found that Albert, although admirably energetic in bringing together numerous sources, was not particularly critical of them.

William of Tyre was born in the East shortly before 1130, and was Archbishop of Tyre from 1175 until his death in 1186. William relies heavily of Fulcher's account for events between 1095 and 1127; from there until it ends in 1184, his Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum is the most important Latin account of the events in the Holy Land, and -- by far -- the finest Latin work written by anyone who lived in the Crusader states. William has a breadth of vision, education and writing skill which rival those of any other Medieval Latin historian.

A brief anonymous account entitled Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum describes how Saladin conquered Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine.

Macrobius and the Saturnalia

Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius is known for writing 2 works in the 5th century: Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio; and the Saturnalia, the work which will primarily concern us here. A third work, De verborum Graeci et Latini differentiis vel societatibus, Differences and Similariites Between Greek and Latin Verbs, has been lost except for fragments.

Macrobius tells his readers that Latin is not his first language. Therefore it is safe to assume that he was not a native of the city of Rome. Where exactly he did come from, which positions he held in the Empire, and his exact dates are matters of considerable controversy. It is safe to assume that he was among the upper class of consuls, prefects and proconsuls. He may have been praetorian prefect of Italy in the year 430, or he may been proconsul of Africa in 410, or he may have been neither. It is fairly safe to assume that his first language was Greek.

The Saturnalia was a week-long Roman holiday celebrated around the winter solstice. In Macrobius' Saturnalia, learned gentlemen gather during the Saturnalia in the year 383 or earlier, and discuss matters of history, literature and philosophy, placing the work in the genre extending back to Plato's Symposium. Just as in the Symposium and other works, the tone of the discussion in the Saturnalia varies greatly, depending to a certain extent on factors such as the time of day, how much the characters have had to drink, whether they're being interrupted by other party guests, and so forth. Those involved in the learned discussion include Praetextatus; Symmachus, famed editor of Livy, who pleaded that pagan altars not be removed by Christian Emperors; Nicomachus Flavianus, who edited Livy alongside Symmachus; someone who is either Avienus the translator of Aratea or Avianus the writer of fables, although called Avienus in either case; and Servius, here a very young man, later famous as the commentator of Vergil.

Vergil is discussed far more than any other topic. Roman history and Roman festivals are discussed with great dignity. An example of some less dignified discussion has to do with the effect of the consumption of food and drink on people's appearance.

Estimates as to when the Saturnalia was written range from ca400 to ca435 or later. The earlier the date, the more likely it is that Macrobius was writing about people he knew personally, and perhaps even describing an actual event in his life. The later the date, the more likely it is that Macrobius is delivering a nostalgic vision of a life before the Christianization of the Empire, a time he knows only by hearsay. It is remarkable that Christianty is mentioned nowhere in the Saturnalia.

For scholars, the Saturnalia is, like Aulus Gellius' Noctes Attica, Quintilian's Rhetores Latini Minores, Severus' commentary on Vergil and Isidore's Etymologiae, an immensely valuable source of passages of ancient literature which are otherwise lost or controversially attested. It also holds a natural interest for those studying the last days of "pagan" Rome.

6 9th-century manuscripts of the Saturnalia survive, and hundreds of manuscripts altogether.

Trogus and Justin

Pompeius Trogus was a Roman of the 1st century BC who wrote a history of the dynasty of Philip of Macedon, and much miscellanaous related material, in 44 books. Some modern readers have made the mistake of thinking that this means Trogus' history would fill 44 of our modern volumes. Instead, think "book" in the sense of "books of the Bible." 2000 years ago, a book was generally a scroll, and scrolls generally didn't hold as much writing as our books, or codices, as the volumes with covers and writing on both sides of the pages are also called. The Bible, Old plus New Testament, contains 63 books in some versions. Of Livy's 142 books of Roman History, we have 35 books today, plus some smaller bits and pieces. Those 35 surviving books containing approximately the same amount of writing as the 63 books of the Bible, and the 44 books of Trogus' history, as he originally wrote it, mostly likely also contained a similar amount of writing.

Except that only a small fraction of Trogus' original history is known to us today. Some time after Trogus, probably in the 4th century, a writer named Justin (not to be confused with Justin Martyr) collected some excerpts from Trogus' history, a little bit from each of the 44 books, and strung them together with a few of his own remarks. The result is one volume which runs to 300 or 400 pages in most editions. Scholars have tried very hard to separate Trogus' words from Justin's, but the most we can say with near certainty is that most of the volume is fairly close to what Trogus said. In any case, these several hundred pages are one of the major ancient sources for the history of Philip II of Macedon, his famous son Alexander the Great, and their predecessors and successors. Did Justin actually do a good job in selecting and preserving the most interesting and/or the most historically valuable portions of Trogus' work? That's very, very hard to know. What an enormous boon it would be to historians if Trogus' entire work were ever to be recovered!

Other than Justin, there are a few passages from Trogus' history, called prologi, in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, a few words of praise from Livy and some other writers, and that's about all we can say for sure. It's very difficult to say how much Livy and other historians may have borrowed from Trogus.

Although Livy admired Trogus and the admiration seems to have been mutual, the two historians make quite a contrast. Livy's history is patriotic and centered around Rome, and many passages clearly have been invented in order to make the work more dramatic and entertaining. Trogus' history is cosmopolitan and centered around Greece, and, according to Justin, he criticized Livy, and also Sallust, for embellishing their historical works with fanciful speeches put into the mouths of historical figures.

It's very unfortunate that the great majority of Trogus' work has been lost. Justin's selections from that work, on the other hand, made for a very popular codex during late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: more than 200 manuscripts of Justin survive, which derive from 4 separate sources.

It seems to me that Justin has been somewhat less popular reading lately, because I have not been able to find an edition printed later then the 19th century.

[PS, 17 December 2019: WHOOPS! Otto Seel's Teubner edition is from 1972. And it includes the prologi. Clearly the way to go. My thanks to evagre at the Classics subreddit at Reddit for pointing this out.]

[PPS, 18 December 2019: Thank goodness some experts read my stuff: Professor Alice Borgna, a member of the Facebook group Classics International, says: "It is not true that in academia he is neglected, and that the last edition is Seel’s one (!!). In the last decade, in fact, studies on Trogus and Justin have flourished, an element which your post seems to miss. More than 30 contributions, books or paper, has been published in recent years, and also new editions: a digital one (https://www.forumromanum.org/literature/justin/index.html) ) and -most of all - the new critical edition of Justin from the prestigious series Les Belles Lettres, with text edited by Bernard Mineo and historical notes by Giuseppe Zecchini, whose first volume (book I-X) was published in 2016. The second volume (books XI–XXIII) appeared in 2018, while the third (and last) is expected in 2020. But a lot of other stuff (translation, commentary) has also been published, as you can easily find." Thank you, Professor, but, obviously, some things are easier for some of us to find than for others. Yesterday, after I was made aware that Seel's edition was from 1972, not from the 19th century as I had thought, I asked myself, Well then why didn't LD Reynolds mention Seel's edition in his piece on Justin (Reynolds writes it "Justinus") in Texts and Tradition? And, of course, Reynolds did, and I had overlooked it: page 197, footnote 1. Actually, Reynolds points out that Seel published two Teubner editions, in 1935 and in 1972, and a further article and book devoted to Justin. About the middle third of the long note 1. And I just completely missed all of that. Reminder to self: You're old. Be more careful reading the fine print. Skimming may not cut it anymore.]

I have a reprint, made by the University of Michigan Libraries, of an 1858 edition by Jacques LeCoffre et cie of Paris, and it's not the Michigan Libaries' finest work. 4 of the pages, pp 24, 26, 30 and 34, are printed at an angle, with their tops at 1 to 1:30 on a clock dial and their bottoms at 7 to 7:30, with a few words squeezed and a handful missing altogether. Not all of the pages are in the proper order. Between page 72 and the end, page 355, the left-hand pages appear on the right and vice-versa. An introduction on page i through iv is inserted between pages 352 and 353. But much more importantly, on all the pages, except for the 4 pages mentioned above, the type is all quite legible. Although definitely below average for Michigan Libraries, it's far from the worst reprint I've ever seen. The reprint by a company which calls itself Forgotten books, of the 1782 edition of Raphael Landivar's Rusticatio Mexicana, is far worse. It's missing letters from the beginning of all of the lines on almost all of the right-hand pages. That may be the worst reprint I've ever seen, and I've seen a great number of them.

Surely, a new edition of Justin will appear this century. I would think.

Ciceronianism

Several years ago, I read a volume from the I Tatti Renaissance Library entitled Ciceronian Controversies (2007, ed Joann Dellaneva), and thought to myself, How odd! that 420 to 530 years ago in Italy, eminent authors of all genres believed that the only way to write Latin correctly was to imitate Cicero! I blogged about this absurd tendency, to treat a single author as if he, and he alone, were worthy of imitation among all of the authors of an entire language which is thousands of years old, and I moved on.

Imagine (if you CAN) how I feel now, having finally noticed (yes, clearly, I am not the sharpest pencil in the drawer, not the quickest to notice things) that Ciceronianism is alive and well today. Latinists, TODAY, may be arguing a point of Latin writing style or usage, and one of them can point out, "Cicero wrote it this way," and, very often, that will end the debate!

People still study Shakespeare in English classes, and I have nothing at all against that. But does anyone, anywhere, teach English as if Shakespeare were the ONLY English-language author worthy of imitation? If someone does, would it even be necessary for me to enumerate the drawbacks of such an approach?

Well, such an approach is taken -- TODAY. AMONG US -- in the study and teaching of the Latin language. How often? I do not know. Oftener than not? I do not know.

I know only that, now that I have finally noticed that Ciceronianism outlived the Renaissance, I can not ignore it. I can not prevent myself wondering about such things as: is it actually unusual, for someone who has devoted their professional life to the study of Latin, that they might read no Latin at all other than Latin written by Cicero for an entire day? A week? A month? A LIFETIME?

Is it unusual for a Latinist to judge a piece of Latin writing, whether written in the 21st, the 16th or the 1st century AD, by the single criterion of how much it resembles what Cicero wrote?

Is it unusual for a Latinist to assume that everything Cicero wrote was above reproach from a linguistic-stylistic point of view?

And how exactly would those percentages change if, the preceeding three paragraphs, "Cicero" were changed to "Cicero and Vergil"?

Whatever the points of view of Latinists on these and other matters, I don't imagine that I will change their minds. I do drastically over-estimate my abilities much of the time, but I don't over-estimate them THAT much. The best I can hope for is to gain a bit more clarity about those who share my enthusiasm for the Latin language. And of course, not ALL of those people are Ciceronianists, or even Cicero-and-Vergilianists. See for example the Ad Lectorum before the novel Capti by Stephen Berard, who, it is entirely clear to me now, will be judged less than an eminent Latinist by the Cicero-and-Vergilianists, but who is appreciated by some others. And there's no need for anybody to fight over anything here. It's just that there is one more thing to debate, about which, I had mistakenly assumed, people had long since ceased to debate. Excelsior. (Yeah, it's also been very recently that I finally figured out that "Excelsior!" had become a common expression because of Stan Lee, and not because of contemporary Latinists in general. Be that as it may, it's still perfectly good Latin.)

Classical Latin Literature Which is (Currently) Lost

When we see an iceberg in the ocean, we know that about 9/10 of it is underwater. When we look at the remains of Classical Latin literature, we don't know how much of it there once was.

In the case of individual literary works we very often do not know whether what we have today is the entire work, or almost all of it, or a small fragment of it or what have you. We have some ancient descriptions of the length and scope of certain literary works, but such helpful descriptions are rare. It's more common that we have the work itself, and must decide whether it seems to us to be a finished work. If it seems unfinished, does that mean that the author never finished it, or that a page or more is missing from the copies we have?

One more thing to think about: did Latin authors 1800 or 2000 years ago have ideas about what constituted a finished literary work which were similar to the ideas we have today?

Sometimes the existing manuscripts have big holes in them, or are nothing but tiny scraps, and so leave no doubt that something is missing. But how much is missing? That is very often a difficult question.

Is the author correctly identified? In many cases scholars have concluded that works are misattributed. In further cases, passages from an ancient work are quoted in an ancient or Medieval collection. Sometimes they are extremely helpful missing pieces from an author's work. In other cases, they are falsely attributed. Yes, it'd be wonderful if that was a passage written by Trogus, but...

Trogus was a Roman historian who lived in the 1st century BC and wrote a history of the Macedonian Empire, founded by Philip, the father of Alexander the Great. Ancient writers praised Trogus' history very highly. All we have of that history today is a condensed version, referred to as an epitome, written by a certain Justinus some time around the 3rd century AD.

Scholars today painfully feel the lack of Trogus, but still, we have that epitome by Justinus. In the case of many other ancient Latin writer who were highly praised by their peers, all we have today is that praise.

And how many more may have been praised in pieces of text which have disappeared? That sort of question is somewhere between extremely difficult and entirely impossibly to answer accurately.

The problem of that ignorance is compounded by other things we don't know, such as our ignorance of how exactly these texts we'd so very much like to have, vanished. In trying to explain a certain disappearance, we face the hazard of assuming that we know things which we do not know. Let's take the example of Tibullus, Propertius and Statius. Tibullus and Propertius were Latin poets who lived in the first century BC. They are both very highly esteemed today, sometimes so highly that they are spoken of as among the handful of the very greatest ever to write in Latin. And only a few dozen pages of each of their work has survived, from so few manuscripts that their work very nearly did not survive at all. Statius, on the other hand, a Latin poet of the 1st century AD whose works are not nearly so highly-esteemed, has works surviving today in many hundreds of manuscripts, which together are many times the length of the surviving works of Tibullus and Propertius together.

A scholar today may look at how many manuscripts of Statius we have, and how few of Propertius and Tibullus, and conclude that this shows have great a role chance plays in the survival of ancient literature. But, never mind the lukewarm readership of Statius today, many Medieval texts survive which praise him very highly indeed. It may seem strange to us, but in the Middle Ages Statius may have had a much higher literary reputation than either Propertius or Tibullus.

My point is that literary tastes, opinions about which writer is better than which, sometimes change enormously from one era to another. We must guard against imposing our own opinions upon people of another time, for this may cloud our understanding of what went on in that other time.

And my point in this essay has been merely to point out a few of the factors which make it difficult for us to know how much Classical Latin literature is currently lost, and why, and therefore to urge caution, if one is ever tempted to estimate the amount of this literature which once existed.