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.

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.

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.

Latin Authors from Spain

Roman conquest of Spain began in 218 BC, as Rome battled with Carthage for dominance in the Western Mediterranean, and continued until -- when? The answer may depend partly upon one's political position. Some would say that the conquest was complete, for all intents and purposes, within a century; others, that it was never complete. From how long and to what extent earlier native languages were spoken in Spain, and in which proportions those languages were Celtic, or Basque, or unclassified Iberian, or others, I do not know.

In the first century AD, quite a number of the most prominent authors in the Latin language happened to come from Spain: Pomponius Mela (died ca AD 45), the earliest known Roman geographer; Columella (AD 4 -- 70), who wrote a lengthy work on agriculture; Lucan (30 -- 65), author of a very popular epic poem about the Roman civil war; Martial (born between 38 and 41 -- died between 102 and 104), who authored many witty epigrams; Quintilian (ca 35 -- ca 100), one of the most prominent of the Roman rhetoricians; and, most prominent of all, the Senecas, father and son. Seneca the Elder wrote memoirs and a history of Rome; Seneca the Younger wrote quite a wide variety of works: philosophy, drama, moralizing letters and satire penned by him survive to this day.

Later Spaniards who wrote and published in Latin include the Christian theologian Priscillian, sometime Bishop of Ávila (died 385); the poet Prudentius (died between ca 405 and 413); and the widely-traveled historian Orosius (c 375 -- died after 418). 4th-century Latin authors from Spain whose works have not survived to the present day, but are praised by contemporaries, include Juvencus, a poet who now cannot be dated more exactly than the 4th century[PS, 23 October 2019: I erred: A poem by Juvencus has survived, a verse rendering of the Gospel narrative about 3200 verses long, composed ca AD 330. Thank you once again, Reddit!] ; and the poet Latronianus (Died 385).

I have written elsewhere on this blog of the prolific Saint Isidore of Seville (ca 560 -- 636), beloved by Christian for many works, and by Classicists for his Etymologie, which, although it fails pretty spectacularly in the goal expressed in its title, to accurately trace the origins of words, none the less success brilliantly as an encyclopedia and as a repository of fragments of ancient works which otherwise are lost to us; and of Pope Sylvester II (ca 946 -- 1003), known earlier as Gerbert, one of the most brilliant scientists of the Middle Ages.

The Toledo School of Translators were responsible for many of the Latin translations from Arabic and ancient Greek which transformed the curricula of the Sorbonne and other Western universities beginning in the 13th century. Perhaps the foremost of these translator at Toledo was Gerard of Cremona, who fashioned Latin versions of many Greek and Arabic scientific works.

Alfonso X of Castile, also known as Alfonso the Wise, took over the leadership of the translation school in the 13th century (he reigned from 1252 to 1284), and, although Latin writing certainly flourished under him and for a long time afterwards in Spain, his cultivation of the Castilian vernacular is so greatly, and understandably, celebrated, that it obscures, from the feeble view of your humble scribe, many of the particulars of this Latin culture, and so, for the nonce, he must pause here.

Searching for Lost Ancient Latin Texts

A great many Classical ancient Latin texts went missing in the middle of the Dark Ages; that is: until the late sixth or early seventh centuries, we have evidence that people still read them, and then we have no more evidence that they were familiar to anyone later than that, and they are still missing. So we need to scour the Dark Ages to learn more about how and when and where the texts disappeared from our present-day view. We must learn all we can about these Dark Age people who mention, or, in more fortunate cases, quote the now-missing texts. If the lost ancient texts are mentioned or quoted in letters, as is very often the case, we must learn all we can about the people to whom the letters were addressed.

Encyclopaediac works (that's our word for them today) written in the ancient world and Dark Ages are tresure-troves of these mentions and quotes: works by Flavius Maximus, Gellius, Octavian, Servius, Isidore. We must know these encyclopaediac works thoroughly for clues about what happened to those texts, when and where and how they went missing, to gain clues about where and how we might find then again.

It's assumed that many Classical Latin texts were lost in Dark Age wars, when Germanic tribes and Huns invaded the late Western Roman Empire and carved it up into empires of their own, Visigoth and Ostrogoth and Frankish and Lombard realms. We must know all we can about those wars, in order to imagine as exactly as possible what happened to those lost texts -- were they hidden from the invaders and their fire? Where would they be hidden? Are some of them still in those hiding places, having been lost track of by those who hid them?

We must shake off a prejudice toward thinking of these Germanic conquerors as illiterate; literacy rates may have decreased compared to those of the Roman Empire, but much scholarship was supported by Dark Age Goths and other tribes. They did not completely despise scholarship, far from it. Benedict, Cassidorius, Isidore, justly celebrated as preservers as ancient Latin literature, as bright lights in the darkness, they all thrived under the rule of these "barbarian" tribes.

We do not know for certain how much ancient literature was lost by the violence of Dark Age wars. We do know that many ancient manuscripts were re-used in the Dark and Middle Ages, the Classical works scraped off and Christian works written where they had been. We know this because we have found the Classical works on those ancient pieces of papyrus, we have found ways in which we can still read then even though they were scraped away so long ago. We can read the indentations left by the ancient pens, they're called palimpsests. We have found many of these ancient Latin palimpsests, we must find the rest!

This is not the only way in which ancient parchment was re-used; it was also made into a material called cartonnage, which resembles cardboard in appearance and hardness, and was used to make book covers and to wrap mummies. By methods which are far over my head, modern wizards have recovered many of the ancient texts preserved in these pieces of cartonnage. We must find the rest.

Vast amounts of of previously-lost ancient Greek texts are being re-discovered in ancient pieces of papyrus, and occasionally of parchment or other materials, in the Mideast, mostly in Egypt. Now and then among these bits and pieces, amongst vast amounts of ancient Greek, an ancient object written in some other language is found. We Latinists get lucky now and then this way.

Medieval Western European archives are full of records written in Latin; Medievalists are hurrying to preserve and record as much of it as they can, and are worried that much of the material, written on parchment, will rot away before they can get to it. They want more students to become Medievalists! Among these Latin records of the business of Medieval communities, here and there, now and then, all sort of others written artifacts turn up.

Ancient inscriptions keep being found. Most of them are not what we would call literature; rather, they are things like brief memorials on tombstones, and brief boasts of long-forgotten statesmen. But now and then they contain more.

And there are public libraries and private collections which contain manuscripts which have been very, very carefully searched through in some cases, and less thoroughly in others.

Please tell me what I've missed and what other places we can look for lost ancient Latin texts!

Reprint Volumes of and pertaining to Valerius Maximus

Valerius Maximus published, around AD 30, a work known as factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri novum (Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Words). A miscellaneous collection drawn from Roman history, it was intended for use in schools of rhetoric. It was immensely popular during the Middle Ages; however, modern scholars have mostly found it to be rather dull and poorly-written. I think it's quite possible that my grasp of Latin is not yet refined enough to be offended by Valerius; however, the crude patriotism of which others have complained is clear even to me. Also, Valerius does not name his sources, which is frustrating for moderns, who often pore through ancient Roman encyclopaediac works chiefly in order to find bits and pieces from the works of other authors whom they find more interesting. I gather from scholars that it can be inferred that Cicero, Trogus and Livy were among Valerius' chief sources.

I have a reprint copy of the Teubner edition of Valerius by Friedrich Kempf, the 2nd edition published in 1888, which in addition to the entirety of Valerius' lengthy work contains late-ancient summaries of it by Julius Paris, Januarius Nepotanius, and another by an unknown author, attribued, Kempf assumes erroneously, to Julius Paris. The original late-19th century Teubner editions such as this one had large, easily-readable type which extended right out to the edges of the pages; this reprint has type of about the same size, but it s much larger than the Teubner because of very large, and, to me, at least, completely unnecessary margins. Who knows, maybe some other people love the huge margins in reprints like these, and write copious notes in them.

The cover of my reprint volume has a picture of a green bicycle on a sidewalk leaning against a nondescript urban wall, which suggests that no-one at the publisher can read a bit of Latin or has the faintest idea what this book is about; on the other hand, they somehow managed to correctly print the authors' names in the nominative Latin and the editor's name in German on the cover, while the authors' names are in the genitive on the title page and the editor's name there is latinized, so who knows. Maybe they had a library card to copy from for the cover, and wouldn't even be able to find the title page.

I have another volume from the same publisher, reprinted from the third volume of an earlier edition of Valerius ("EX EDITIONE JOANNIS KAPPII," the title page says, and I won't pretend that I know whether this means that Johann Kapp prepared this volume in addition to editing Valerius in the previous volumes, or that someone else, unnamed, prepared this volume while referring to Kapp's edition, or something else.) which contains none of the primary text, but notes referring to words and phrases in all nine books, plus some passages from later authors about Valerius' life and work, plus an index, all in Latin, published in London in 1823 by Valpy. The notes on words and phrases from the nine books are sometimes references to alternate readings found in manuscripts other than the readings in Valpy's edition; but mostly they are definitions of the words or explanations of the meaning of the text. The margins in this reprint volume are perhaps a bit less huge. I must confess, I like the various and rambling nature of this thick volume of notes about Valerius. It's not entirely unlike the rambling nature of Valerius' work itself.

Once again, the author's and editor's names are given correctly in the nominative on the cover, while they appear in the genitive on the title page. The cover photograph of this volume shows windows against a black background. Windows which are not ancient, but which open onto a hilly landscape which, I suppose, could possibly be somewhere close to Rome.

Ancient History is Still Almost Completely Unknown to Us

Something is always lost in translation. Always means: even with the very best translation, and greater loss the less good the translation is. I can assert this, but how can I demonstrate it to anyone who is monolingual? And of course everyone else can see it for themselves and doesn't need any explanation from me.

And so, it seems to me, you can only get so far in studying ancient history without learning at least a little bit of ancient languages. And when you study these languages, there's the point at which you realize how little of them from the ancient world is still known to us. We're piecing together a huge jigsaw puzzle with just a handful of pieces. And the pieces are badly damaged.

And this is why we get so excited over every single puny scrap of re-discovered ancient writing, and why students of ancient Greek have been so excited since the late 19th century.

To mention just a single example of the sparsity of the ancient writing which we now know: on the Bryn Mawr Classical Review in 2006, Eric Hamer asserts that "almost seventy-five percent of the extant Latin literature of the period 90-40 BC is written by" Cicero. Peter Knox and J.C. McKeown, in a piece published on the Oxford University Press in 2013, say something similar, namely that "seventy-five percent of what survives in Latin from Cicero’s lifetime was written by Cicero himself [...] There are no extant speeches, forensic or otherwise, by anyone but Cicero till AD 100."

By my count, the Loeb Classical Library currently offers 31 volumes of Cicero, and by my very rough estimate, they average about 500 pages of main text, for a total of a little over 15,000 pages. Divide in half because half of those pages are English translation, and we're left with 7500 pages of Cicero. Which means, if the estimates of Hamer, Knox and McKeown are good ones (and I think they are), that we're left with about 2500 pages of Latin literature, besides Cicero, from the time of the reigns of Sulla, Pompey and Caesar. Not 2500 pages of historical writing, but 2500 surviving pages -- small, Loeb-sized pages -- of writing of every type. Caesar, Lucretius, Catullus, almost all of Sallust, and every one of their Latin-writing contemporaries but Cicero, from one of the most interesting, most intensively-studied eras in Roman history.

This makes it much less surprising that historians and philologists studying this era rely so much on later writers like Suetonius, and non-Latin writers such as Plutarch. What choice do they have? They must take what they can find, wherever they can find it. Studying Roman history or Latin literature, one can only go so far with just Latin, before beginning to keenly feel the lack of Greek.

For that matter, one can only go so far in studying ancient Greek history or literature without a grasp of Arabic. And for that matter, Coptic and Armenian and Syriac and Hebrew and ancient Persian each can fill in significant missing pieces of the puzzle.

And how much more light would be shown upon the ancient Mediterranean if more writing in Phoenician had survived, or if we could read Etruscan. And I've left out many of your favorite languages: Sumerian! you're shouting, or Hittite! and quite rightly so, and still more languages. We have still so very far to go. We haven't yet scratched the surface of the history of the Classical ancient world. We've learned so much, and there's so very far yet to go.

Ancient Classical Authors Recommending One Another's Work

Some time after 1345, Petrarch wrote a letter to his friend Giovanni dell'Incisa which contains this praise of one aspect of Classical literature:

"[...]libris satiari nequeo. Et habeo plures forte quam oportet; sed sicut in ceteris rebus, sic et in libris accidit: querendi successus avaritie calcar est. uinimo, singulare quiddam in libris est: aurum, argentum, gemme, purpurea vestis, marmorea domus, cultus ager, picte tabule, phaleratus sonipes, ceteraque id genus, mutam habent et superficiariam voluptatem; libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt et viva quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate iunguntur, neque solum se se lectoribus quisque suis insinuat, sed et aliorum nomen ingerit et alter alterius desiderium facit. Ac ne res egeat exemplo, Marcum michi Varronem carum et amabilem Ciceronis Achademicus fecit; Ennii nomen in Officiorum libris audivi; primum Terrentii amorem ex Tusculanarum questionum lectione concepi; Catonis Origines et Xenophontis Economicum ex libro De senectute cognovi, eundemque a Cicerone translatum in eisdem officialibus libris edidici. Sic et Platonis Thimeus Solonis michi commendavit ingenium, et Platonicum Phedronem mors Catonis, et Ptholomei regis interdictum cyrenaicum Hegesiam, et de Ciceronis epystolis Senece priusquam oculis meis credidi. Et Senece Contra superstitiones librum ut querere inciperem, Augustinus admonuit, et Apollonii Argonautica Servius ostendit, et Reipublice libros cum multi tum precipue Lactantius optabiles reddidit, et Romanam Plinii Tranquillus Historiam et Agellius eloquentiam Favorini itemque Annei Flori florentissima brevitas ad inquirendas Titi Livii reliquias animavit[...]"

("I will never have as many books as I want. Yes, I have more than I should, but, as in other things, so also with books, success in finding the ones I want just makes me covet more. But there is something unique about books: gold, silver, jewels, purple cloth, a palace of marble, fertile fields, paintings, a finely turned-out horse, and other things in this line, give us only a silent, superficial pleasure; books delight us deeply, ask us interesting questions, and are bound to us by a lively familiarity, and do not merely insinuate themselves upon thier readers, but also name other books, each creating the desire for another. So that examples won't be lacking: Marcus Cicero made me know and love Varro with his Academicus, and I heard the name of Ennius in his De Officiis; the Tusculanae Disputationes made me love Terence; I learned of Cato's Origines and Xenophon's Economicus from Cicero's book De Senectute, and that Cicero had translated the Economicus from the De Officiis. In just the same way, Plato's Timaeus commended Solon's genius to me, as Cato's death did Plato's Phaedo. Ptolomy brought Hegesias of Cyrene to my attention, and I trusted Seneca's judgement about Cicero's letter's before I read them for myself. It was Augustine who urged me to begin my search for Seneca's book Contra superstitiones, and Servius reveleaded to me the Argonautica of Apollonius. There are many others. Lactantius, especially, made me desire Cicero's books De Re Publica, and Suetonius brought Pliny's history alive as did Gellius the eloquence of Favorinus, and the most florid brevity of Annaeus Florus animated me to seek out whatever might remain of Livy.")

Do the best contemporary authors still recommend each other in this manner? I certainly hope that they do, although I couldn't give you many recent examples, because in the late 1980's I began to give up reading all of the latest prize-winning English-language literature in favour of reading material which was older, and then older, and then older than that, and here I am three decades later, still slowly learning to read Latin in my spare time.

Petrarch sure was daffy about Cicero, huh? Nothing remarkable about that. Indeed, I think it's about time that I finally reach the conclusion that the number of people who love Cicero's work is equal to the number who have read it, minus me. And perhaps as many as 3 or 4 others over the course of the past 2000 years.

Which, being the eminently reasonable person that I am, is gradually leading me to an agonizing re-appraisal of the whole situation, and the conclusion that I must give Cicero another try.

But I still don't want to. I still feel, based on the very little amount of his work that I have read, that Cicero is thoroughly pedestrian at best, telling us things every half-wit already knows, and perhaps thoroughly bad at worst. "Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?" Yeah, well, what if Cicero and his pals weren't patient at all, or honest at all, and the portrait we have of Catiline -- which we have from Cicero -- is completely inaccurate? It's not as if I'm the first one who's asked that.

*sigh* I must give Cicero another try. Perhaps he was a thoroughly bad man and at the same time an utterly brilliant writer. That, too, would not be a first.

Recent and Contemporary Latin Prose

Over the course of the past 30-odd years, I have taught myself a small amount of Latin. In 1989 I received a Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in German and English and a minor in French, and I studied more German in graduate school, without obtaining any graduate degree.

Otherwise, all of my language acquisition has occurred outside of classrooms. My method of learning Latin may be unusual -- I don't actually know whether it is -- and perhaps it is not to be recommended: I have read little bits of Latin textbooks, but really not very much at all. Almost all of my attempt to learn Latin has consisted of looking at Latin texts, in editions by Teubner and Oxford Classical Texts and the Rolls Series and MGH, and Loeb, and some editions from the 19th century and earlier from publishers like Weidmann -- just looking at the texts and trying to read them, and occasionally going to a dictionary or textbook for help. And then looking at the Latin texts again, over and over, until I begin to understand them somewhat better. And then looking at them some more.

In the case of recent editions from Teubner and Oxford Classical Texts, in which the editors' prefaces have been in Latin in every case I've seen except one -- in such cases, often I'm much more familiar with the modern prefaces than with the actual ancient texts, which are after all the ostensible point of such endeavors. The modern editors often write in a much more accessible style.

Let me assure my readers that I am in no way accusing these editors of writing Latin in an unsophisticated way. On the contrary, an accessible writing style can the sign of the very greatest skill: look at Bellow in English, for example, or late Sartre in French, transmitting great depths of thought with exceptional clarity. A complex writing style, one which is a little more difficult to read, can also convey deep thinking, but it does not always do so: right now I'm thinking of great 18th century writers in English who wrote grand, long, convoluted sentences -- often because they had read a lot of Classical Latin -- writers such as Berkeley, Hume and Gibbon, and also of other 18th century English writers who wrote long, convoluted sentences which are not grand at all, and who are far too numerous for it to be necessary for me to name any of them.

Right now I'm struggling, not for the first time, with de aquaeductu urbis Romae by Frontinus.

It's not the first time that I've turned the pages of this text, in the 1998 Teubner edition by Kunderewicz, and yet, I could tell you much more about Kunderewicz' preface than about Frontinus' text. At first I had thought to copy here the first sentence of Kunderewicz's preface and of Frontinus' text, but on the copyright page of this edition is an exceptionally long and emphatic warning against using any part of its contents -- and I could hardly claim to be ignorant of this warning's contents just because it's written in German -- and so I will just give you word counts: the first sentence of Frontinus is 75 words long, and then first sentence of Kunderewicz is 12 words long.

I coincidentally also happen to have a copy of the 1990 Teubner edition of stratrgrmata by Frontinus, edited, by R I Ireland. The first sentence of Ireland's preface is 104 words long. It's a wonderful sentence, and I have nothing to say against Ireland as a Latin prose stylist, but, as a whole, I think Kunderewicz's style is closer to the contemporary norm. And I think that is a good thing. I take it as a sign of an authentic and living contemporary Latin (at least as far as writing is concerned). Most of those writing today in Latin do not seem to be trying to imitate the ancient authors whom they edit. (There may be many others writing in Latin today who are doing things other than editing ancient Latin and Greek authors, but I am not aware of the existence of many.)

In the Italian Renaissance, very many of the most prominent Latin authors, who were writing all sorts of things besides prefaces to editions of ancient authors, strove quite consciously to imitate Cicero's writing style in prose and Vergil's in verse -- two very bad ideas, in my opinion, which inadvertently did more to kill the Latin language than to vivify it.

Contemporary Latinists, as far as I can tell, rather than imitating the ancients, seem to be closer to sharing the attitude of Angelo Poliziano, one of the the relatively few non-Ciceronians among the Italian Renaissance authors, who said:

"Non exprimis, aliquis inquit, Ciceronem. Quid tum? Non enim sum Cicero; me tamen, ut opinor, exprimo." ("Some say I don't write like Cicero. So what? I'm not Cicero. But, I believe, I do write like myself.")

That's the only way to write, as far as I'm concerned. Here's to the living Latin language.

Forged Ancient Literary Works

Many of the best-known ancient literary works in Greek and Latin, scholars now agree, have long been presented as the work of authors who did not write them.

Gradually, the findings of scholarship about ancient literature make their way toward the consciousness of the general public in the West. The findings about one ancient compilation, about which the West is particularly obsessed, make their way more quickly than all others to the public, and to wider circles of the public: those having to do with the Greek New Testament. If someone believes that all 13 of the books of the New Testament traditionally attributed to St Paul were actually written by Paul, it may come as a shock to learn that scholars now believe that Ephesians, First and Second Timothy and Titus were written by someone else, and that the authorship of Colossians and Second Thessalonians is debated.

This is less shocking for those who have a broad knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin literature, because, among the ancient "pagan" authors, such forgeries are quite common. Take the case of Homer -- well, Homer is a special case to begin with, because there is absolutely no agreement among scholars about whether a writer named Homer ever existed, or whether, if this writer did exist, he wrote the Iliad or the Odyssey or both -- however, it is almost universally agreed now that, whoever wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, the works known as the Homeric Hymns, and attributed to Homer by the time of Thucydides at the latest, were written by someone else.

No one doubts that Plato existed, or that he wrote many philosophical works centering around Socrates -- but he didn't write all of the dialogues he was once thought to have written. In the collection traditionally thought of as the work of Plato, First Alcibiades, Clitophon, Menexenus and the Epistles are now controversial as to whether or not Plato wrote them, while Second Alcibiades, Epinomis, Hipparchus, Minos, Amatores and Theages are all now generally agreed to have been written by someone else. That's a total ten of the thirty-six works traditionally attributed to Plato, and this does not count nine more works attributed to Plato which were already seen in antiquity to have been spurious: Axiochus, Definitions, Demodocus, Epigrams, Eryxias, Halcyon, On Justice, On Virtue and Sisyphus.

Vergil, on the strength of his works the Aeneid, the Georgics and the Eclogues, is considered by many to be the finest poet ever to have written in Latin. For a long time, an additional collection of poems, the Appendix Vergiliana, were thought to have been poems Vergil wrote in his youth. Now almost no-one believes that Vergil wrote them.

Julius Caesar wrote commentaries about his experiences leading Roman troops in the Gallic and Civil wars. Many editions of Caesar's work have also included commentaries on the Alexandrine, African and Iberian wars, originally presented as works by Caesars, now considered not to have been written by him.

Sallust, an historian and contemporary of Caesar's, is known for works on the Catiline and the Jugurthan War. Editions of his work also contain letters which he ostensibly wrote to Caesar, and a speech against Cicero and one by Cicero against him, which are considered to be forgeries.

An enormous amount of prose survives which was written by Cicero, whom many have called the greatest of all Latin authors. Collections of his works have also included Rhetorica ad Herennium and Commentariolum Petitionis, both almost certainly written by someone other than him.

Ovid is one of the most beloved ancient Latin authors, known for several humorous volumes of what today might be called dating advice, as well as for the Metamorphoses, an extraordinary re-telling of many traditional myths, and the Fasti, a book on Roman holidays which is better than you might think a book on Roman holidays could possibly be, and for other works. Additionally, several works not written by him have circulated along with his works: Consolatio ad Liviam, Halieutica, Nux and Somnium.

There are many, many further examples. Many of these works continue to be of great interest to Classical or biblical scholars, for one reason and another, even after they have been shown to be fakes. One is almost tempted to say that no Classical author can be considered truly great before a spurious work has attached itself to his or her oeuvre.

The authors of such spurious works are often referred to by putting the prefix "pseudo-" in front of the name of the author who is being imitated. More and more, separate editions are dedicated to the work of the forgers, rather than including them in the editions of the forged authors as a sort of afterthought.

Perhaps, as these widespread, and often well-respected forgeries become better-known, the shock of the layman at things like pseudo-Pauline epistles will become somewhat less.

How I Began Reading Latin

From the time I was a small child I'd see a volume here and there of Classical literature in English translation, mostly Homer. Then I became aware of Loeb's Classical Library, Latin in red covers and Greek in Green. I believe the first Latin volume I owned -- or half-Latin, the other half being the facing-page English translation -- was one of the Loeb volumes of Augustine's Confessions. I would've gotten this at a yard sale or a thrift shop. The content bored me. The fact that half of it was in Latin interested me. I can't remember a time before I was fascinated by languages, and by books which promised to open up new vistas for me.

Besides the Augustine, I may have gotten one or two more red Latin Loeb volumes, before I obtained the first volume of Latin I would read all the way through: the OCT (Oxford Classical Texts) Lucretius.

I may have gotten it at a yard sale or thrift shop, or maybe at Karen Wickliff Books in Columbus, Ohio, a great place back then and probably still is, although I see by Google Maps they've moved a mile or so north up High Street from where they were. I'm imagining bright lights and broad clean aisles in their new location and already missing the crowded, dim stacks in the old place.

Wherever I got it, I had it by 1990 at the latest. I was quite struck and intimidated -- that is: intimidated, and thoroughly thrilled at the same time, and committed to mighty labours of scholarship -- by the fact that there was no English anywhere in this book except for the fine printing listing the editions and printings on what would now be the copyright page, and an OCT catalog in the back. Even "OXFORD/AT THE CLARENDON PRESS/LONDON AND NEW YORK" on the title page had been changed to "OXONII/E TYPOGRAPHEO CLARENDONIANO/LONDINI ET NOVI EBORACI." "EBORACI" was my first hint to look out for place-names that might be quite different in Latin than in English.

Also probably before 1990, and definitely before I had been able to read Lucretius all the way through, I got a second OCT volume: Horace.

It's difficult to remember how little I knew about Latin and Latin literature back then. Getting the OCT volume of Lucretius was the first that I had heard of Lucretius. (I had heard of Horace, but not much. I mistakenly thought back then that Horace had authored the line "ars longa vita brevis," an error which persisted with me for a very long time.) It took me a while to figure out that "LVCRETI" was the genitive of "LUCRETIUS." I was starting near zero.

I still have both of those volumes: Bailey's 1900 edition of Lucretius, revised in 1922, my copy from the 1957 printing; Wichham's 1901 Horace, revised by Garrod, the 1957 printing. Sometime before 1957, OCT changed from the orange covers they'd originally had, which from across a room can sometimes be mistaken for the orange of old Teubner editions of Greek Classics, to the dark blue they have now. However, page numbers were added neither to my copy of Lucretius nor to my copy of Horace.

Speaking of Teubner (the world's most prominent publisher of the Greek and Latin Classics, OCT coming in second), the first news I got of their existence was during the 1991-1992 academic year, when I was a graduate assistant in the German Department at Ohio State in Columbus. Outside of the department's office doors was a table where old books were left for anyone who wanted them. Someone left the first volume of the Teubner Dindorf-Hentze Iliad and the Teubner Ludwich Odyssey on that table, with orange covers; and the Teubner Tacitus Historia, the Tacitus minor works, and the Tuebner Cicero De officiis with their light blue covers, and I wanted them all, and a Latin textbook left there.

By the time that I had finished my last year as a grad student in 1992, I still had not finished Lucretius, and some might be asking themselves why I was obtaining all of these books which I couldn't read. It's an unconventional approach, but even then, 15 years before I was diagnosed as autistic, I already suspected that my brain was not typical, and that I could succeed with unusual methods of language acquisition, including the confrontation of texts written for native speakers at an unconventionally early stage. I studied several different Latin textbooks at the same time, reasoning that they might tend to round out each others' shortcomings; I consulted several different Latin dictionaries; and I spent a lot of time staring at pages of incomprehensible type. I would recite passages in Latin without knowing what I was saying. And every now and then I would have one of those wonderful breakthroughs which only those who study foreign languages have, and quite suddenly one of those incomprehensible passages was comprehensible.

But I was doing all of this in my spare time, and it took many years' worth of spare time before I achieved a level of fluency comparable to someone with a Bachelor of Arts and a major in Latin. At some point I had read Lucretious all the way through, and I turned right back to the first page and began again, knowing that I would be able to understand much more the second time through. I haven't kept count; right now, I think I'm on my fifth or sixth time through the volume. The Epicurean philosophy, although appealing, is not entirely convincing to me. But Lucretius' language just keeps getting more and more beautiful, the more fluent I become.

Horace, who also followed Epicurean philosophy for a while before rejecting it, is no slouch, either. It was a great stroke of dumb luck for me that the two first Latin books I read were Lucretius and Horace. I started right up at the top. I can also recommend, with a clear conscience, Sallust, Ovid, and Livy.

It must have been around 2003 when I read Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades, and started to read Orderic Vitalis and William of Tyre because of Runciman's enthusiasm for those authors. This was my introduction to Medieval Latin, which I believe is still somewhat underrated by some Classicists who have read little or none of it. Yes, there is a lot of Medieval Latin prose and verse in print which is mediocre or worse. No doubt, a very great amount of bad Latin was written in ancient times as well. The difference is that less of the bad ancient stuff has survived.

Medieval Latin led me to Renaissance Latin and Latin more recent than that.

The first Latin publication which I awaited with great excitement, and pre-ordered before it was published, is RJ Tarrant's OCT edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

The Latin prefaces to the Latin and Greek texts from OCT, Teubner and the various 19th-century publishers I've learned about, are much easier to read than the main texts themselves, at least for me. And so, very early on in this entire autodidactic process, I became fascinated by the transmission of ancient texts. In my very first OCT volume, right at the start of the preface, Cyril Bailey, states something quite fascinating indeed: "Lvcretiani carminis qui exstant codices ab uno exemplari deducti sunt omnes, quod demonstravit Carolus Lachmann quarto aut quinto saeculo scriptum fuisse et in regno Francico servatum." ("All of the existing manuscripts of Lucretius' poem derive from one copy, which, as Karl Lachmann has demonstrated, was made in the Frankish kingdom in the fourth or fifth century.")

I wondered: how exactly did Lachmann demonstrate such a thing? This is possibly the single most famous demonstration in the history of textual criticism, and I've read much more about it since then, and how Jacob Bernays deserves much of the credit which Lachmann has received, and how some of the details of their model have been corrected. Don't ask me to explain it to you. In a couple of years, maybe. I'm still learning.

Isidore of Seville

Almost all of the works written in Latin which are the subject of Classical Studies were written by non-Christians. As far as I know, all but one were written in the very early 5th century AD or earlier. And then there is the Etymologiae, written more than two centuries later by Saint Isidore, Archbishop of Seville, who is usually depicted in paintings and other artwork holding a book.

Isidore was born ca AD 560, became Archbishop of Seville around 600, died in 636, was made a Catholic saint in 1598. He wrote many things which today are read mostly by theologians and historians of 6th-and 7th-century Spain -- and then there is his best-known work, the Etymologiae, an encyclopaedia in 20 books. Isidore worked on the Etymologiae for decades, was still working on it at the end of his life, and entrusted it to his friend Bishop Braulio of Saragossa, to finish it after his death.

Book 1 has to do with grammar, Book 2 rhetoric and dialectic, Book 3 mathematics, music and astronomy, Book 4 medicine, Book 5 law, Book 6 Christian books and Church offices, Book 7 God, angels and saints, Book 8 various Christian sects -- or, from Isidore's point of view, heresies, Book 9 languages and nations, Book 10 vocabulary, Book 11 the human body, Book 12 animals, Book 13 the cosmos, Book 14 the Earth, Book 15 buildings and fields, Book 16 stones and metals, Book 17 life in rural areas, Book 18 war and sports, Book 19 ships, buildings and tools, and Book 20 with miscellaneous supplies and implements.

It is called the Etymologiae, the Etymologies, after the 10th of these 20 books, and -- as in the cases of earlier authors like Valerius Maximuns, Pliny the Elder, Aulus Gellius, Quintilian, Macrobius and Servius, some of them also greatly prized as authors in their own right, others of them less so -- it is of great interest to Classical scholars because it quotes many pre-Christian authors, and in many cases it preserves passages from these authors which are otherwise lost.

Isidore is a great example of how there are exceptions to rules, and how things aren't always as simple as they seem. Almost all of the Classical Latin literature known to us today was copied at some point by Medieval Christian monks. However, by and large, the Dark Ages -- the earlier part of the Middle Ages, the time between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476 and the coronation as Emperor of Charlemagne in 800 -- were indeed quite dark to anyone interested in the preservation of ancient Latin literature. A very great amount of what we estimate to have been the finest of that literature disappeared during the Dark Ages, and to a great extent, it disappeared because a greater emphasis was given to the preservation of Christian literature. And yet, a significant amount of it has survived because of Isidore, a Christian archbishop living right in the middle of the Dark Ages, a contemporary of Pope Gregory the Great. Isidore, who was by no means a Christian in name only, taking advantage of a cushy Church position in order to pursue Classical Studies. Isidore, who took a very active part in shaping the Christian theology and politics of his time.

It's true that a great deal of what Isidore compiled is taken from earlier compilers. Isidore takes quite a lot, for example, from Servius. (Servius (late 4th century -- early 5th century) called his work, which is thousands of pages long, a commentary on Vergil; others have opined that it is in fact an encyclopaedia which happens to be arranged in the order of passages from Vergil). But it's also true that Isidore took much of his material from manuscripts of individual Classical authors -- for instance, if we are to believe David Butterfield, The Early Textual History of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, Cambridge: 2013, pp 89-91, and I think we ought to, Isidore had a complete manuscript of Lucretius' Epicurean poem, a work which some have alleged was shunned by the entire Christian world between Antiquity and the Renaissance. If the many passages from Lucretius in the Etymologiae don't already make Isidore's high esteem for Lucretius clear, he has given us another big hint in the title of one his other works: De natura rerum. A Dark Age archbishop and future saint made it plain, in a work which was extremely popular throughout the Middle Ages, a work of which more than a thousand Medieval manuscripts survive (a thousand is a lot), that he held Lucretius in very high esteem.

Things are definitely not always so simple and clear-cut as some would have you believe.

The Transmission of the Works of Tibullus

Tibullus, born ?, died 19 BC, was a prominent Roman poet during his lifetime, and many today count him among the very finest writers of Latin, although we have only a small amount of his writing: in the Oxford Classical Texts edition of his works by John Percival Postgate, 2nd edition, 1915, in the printing of 1982, the two books of his elegies cover just 46 small pages; then come 29 more pages of poems, referred to as books three and four, some of which probably were written by Tibullus, some probably by Sulpicia, and some probably by someone else.

This collection by Tibullus and pseudo-Tibullus was found in the 14th century, and then lost again, but not before it was copied. The text of Tibullus as the modern reader knows it depends primarily on one such copy made in the 14th century and two in the 15th; the edition which Scaliger made in 1572, which contains material from another lost manuscript; and excerpts of Tibullus' works in various Medieval florilegia. A florilegium is a type of anthology which was very popular during the Middle Ages, compiled from the works of various authors.

After some mentions by his contemporaries Horace and Ovid, and some very high praise from the rhetorician Quintilian (c35--c100 AD), the first trace we have of Tibullus' poems is in an 8th-century list of books at Charlemagne's court at Aachen: "Albi Tibullus lib II." ("Two books by Albus Tibullus.") There are two traces of texts thought to have been copied, directly or indirectly, from this book recorded in the 8th-century: an 11th-century florilegium from Freising containing excerpts of Tibullus; and a 12th-century catalog from Lobbes which mentions "Albini Tibulli lib III."

Around the middle of the 12th century, at Orleans, a florilegium was made which is now called the Florilegium Gallicum, which quotes Tibullus extensively. There are at least six surviving manuscripts of the Florilegium Gallicum. Parts of it, including quotations of Tibullus, were used by Vincent of Beauvais in his early-13th-century encyclopedia Speculum Maius, which was very widely-read in the Middle Ages. There are now hundreds of manuscripts of the Speculum Maius which have survived to our time. In addition to this, several other florilegia copied material by Tibullus directly from the Florilegium Gallicum.

In the middle of the 13th century, a manuscript of Tibullus is mentioned in another library catalog, this time the library belonging to Richard of Fournival, the Chancellor of the Cathedral of Amiens from 1240 to 1260: "Albii Tibulii liber epygrammaton."

Finally, in the 14th century, the oldest copy of Tibullus' works was made which we still have, now owned by the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan: Ambrosianus R sup 26, called A. All the other surviving manuscripts containing the entirety of Tibullus' works come directly or indirectly from A. (That is: they are copies, or copies of copies, or copies of copies of copies, etc, of A.)

But when I say "the entirety of Tibullus' work," I mean the entirety of what we now have which we know or suspect he wrote, plus some other things most likely mistakenly attributed to him: the 46 small pages, plus 29 more, which I mentioned above. If we take just the 46 pages which we're sure he wrote, it's about one tenth as much writing as we have by Lucretius. About one fiftieth as much as what we have from Livy.

How much more did Tibullus write, which didn't survive all the way to the 8th century? Nobody knows. He is said to have written a great many works, but there's little reason to believe all that has been said about him in that regard. Maybe he did write a great deal, and most of what he wrote disappeared some time before Charlemagne. Or maybe he wrote very little. Maybe the poems by him which we have are so very polished and elegant because he wrote very slowly and painstakingly. We don't know. We also don't know how much time he had to write. He was involved in politics and took part in military campaigns. And he may have been born as late as 48 BC, which would mean he was 29 years old when he died. Maybe he was born as early as 55 BC. That would mean that he lived for 36 years.

The small surviving amount of Tibullus' work which we have puts him the middle of, on the one side, the other ancient Latin writers for whom we have a medium-sized volume's worth of work or more each; and on the other side, those of whose work nothing at all survived except a quote or two in the work of other ancient authors, or in a florilegium or a Medieval work of history or philosophy or elsewhere, as well as those who have been mentioned, but not quoted at all.

And, as far as I can tell, we have no way of knowing how many more authors there may have been who were very well thought-of in ancient Rome, well thought-of enough to be mentioned by other writers, but only in some piece of writing which we don't have anymore. Horace mentions Tibullus. The surviving work of Horace fills one volume which might be called either slim or medium-sized. Probably the latter. Some say it's unlikely that Horace published more than what we have from him today. If that's true, it makes Horace quite unusual among ancient Roman writers. We know that many others wrote many times more than what has survived. We have no way of knowing whom may have been mentioned in all of those lost works. Ancient Roman literary life could have been much more crowded with talent than it is sometimes pictured to have been.

Great amounts of ancient Greek literature which was lost has been found again since the 19th century, in papyri preserved by the dry climate in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East. Recoveries of lost ancient Latin texts have been tiny compared to the finds in Greek. Every now and then, something written in Latin will be found among all those Greek papyri. For a while, from the 18th century onward, many lost works of ancient Latin were found in palimpsests. (Not many compared to the Greek papyri, but still.) Nowadays, it seems that the most promising place to look for lost Latin texts is in cartage: in parchment which was made into book covers. I don't know how they take those book covers back apart in order to read what was on those pieces of parchment, but they're doing it.

When I see an 8th-century library catalog, I see a clue toward finding a manuscript which is 8th-century or older. When I see a mention of a missing text in a 6th-century author, I see a clue toward recovering that lost text. I don't know enough about such things to know whether that makes me refreshingly optimistic, or just foolish. It does seem to make me unusual, and the great sharpness of mind of the many specialists in Classical Studies makes me think that it's realistic to consider such hopes as simply foolish. Still. I see clues.

Was Ovid Actually Exiled?

For centuries, students learned that Ovid, the great Roman poet (the greatest ancient writer of Latin in my personal opinion, and in the opinion of some others, although many or most might rank him below Vergil), spent the last years of his life in exile in Tomis, the present-day Constanța, Romania, a desolate, frozen outpost on the coast of the Black Sea, because of, in his own words, "a poem and a mistake." This punishment has often been seen as excessive. In about 10 years of wretched exile, beginning in AD 8, Ovid wrote several works full of sadness and bitterness and longing for the city of Rome -- so everyone has been led to believe.

On the 14th of December, 2017, Rome's city council unanimously pardoned Ovid.

And then, yesterday, on the 18th of March, 2018, I learned -- I must say: to my great amazement -- that some scholars do not believe that Ovid was actually exiled. In 1911 JJ Hartman raised the possibility that the exile was an invention on Ovid's part. O Janssen, in 1951, accepted the thesis that the exile had not taken place, as did C Verhoeven in 1979, F Brown in 1985, and H Hofmann in 2001. So far, I haven't been able to learn much more about these scholars than their names. Other scholars have come to the conclusion that Ovid was exiled, but not to Tomis; and it seems to be generally agreed upon, by those who have looked into the matter more closely, that Ovid's account of Tomis is unreliable in some significant respects: for example, it seems that the climate was not quite as cold as Ovid describes it; and it also strains credulity when Ovid claims that no-one in the place besides him spoke either Latin or Greek, because Tomis had been a Roman colony for decades before Ovid's arrival, and was under Greek control for centuries after that. Literary, documentary, numismatic and archaeological evidence all undermine the previous status of these late writings of Ovid as realistic depictions of Tomis.

Apart from a couple of brief mentions by later Roman writers, all that we know, or all that we used to think that we knew, about Ovid's exile, came from Ovid's own later works Ibis (the title refers to the bird also known in English as the ibis), an elegant but violent torrent of abuse and threats toward some unknown object, referred to only as Ibis; Tristia (Sadness), and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters From the Sea-Coast, letters in verse addressed to the Imperial family, begging to be allowed to return home). Traditionally, all these works have been regarded as quite wretchedly sad; however, it seems we must re-evaluate them, in one way or another: If Ovid really was exiled to Tomis, then he exaggerated how awful the place was; if he was exiled to some other place, then perhaps he made up a fictional Tomis, perhaps as a metaphorical expression of his sadness.

Or, whether Ovid was exiled to Tomis, or to some other place, or not exiled at all, perhaps it's been all wrong all along to regard the works "from the sea-coast" as being sad at all. Maybe they're meant to be understood to be sarcastic and funny responses to -- who knows what? Maybe to no longer being invited into the presence of the Imperial family. Maybe to a punishment even less severe than that.

Or maybe Ovid really was exiled to Tomis, and maybe he really was very sad there, and maybe he exaggerated some of the aspects of the place in hopes of winning mercy and permission to return home.

Or maybe quite a few other things. In any case, we now have the knowledge these "exile writings," if you no longer believe that Ovid was exiled, or exile writings, with no quotation marks, if you still believe that he was, are much less realistic than had been believed.

I Thought I Was Picking Up S P Oakley's Commentary On Livy Books VI-X

I thought that was what I had ordered via inter-library loan. However, what I picked up from the local branch of the public library was Volume I of that commentary,



published in 1997, containing an introduction to all 5 books, VI-X, and Oakley's commentary on book VI. I had assumed that Oakley's commentary on all 5 books, VI-X, would be contained in one, medium sized, volume. The Preface to volume I begins with Oakley saying that volume II, covering books VII-VIII, was already in the press (it appeared in 1999), and that volume III would cover books IX-X. Actually, volume III, published in 2007, covered book IX, and there was a volume IV, published in 2009, for book X.

The volume before us, volume I, is not medium-sized, it is large, over 800 pages. Over 300 of those pages contain the introduction to all 5 books, VI-X, and less than 350 contain the actual commentary to book VI, which is proceeded by 50 pages of historical introduction to book VI (distinct from those 300 pages of general introduction to books VI-X) and followed by appendices, a bibliography and indices.

I know that my habit of posting about books which I have just gotten and haven't read yet must be maddening to some of my readers, who expect a review of an entire book which I have already read. In my defense I will just say that there are critics who are paid, quite handsomely paid in some cases, to deliver reviews of books which they have read, and who publish things which pretend to be such reviews, but they haven't actually read the books yet, and, quite unlike me, probably never will.

You want me to provide evidence for this bold and slanderous statement? This book,



an heroic act of public service, is an excellent place to start collecting that evidence. (And yes, I've read it cover to cover.)

I'm sure that the dry tone of this post so far has not adequately conveyed it, but I am excited to have before me this vol I of Oakley's commentary. I'm especially looking forward to an exhaustive discussion of the manuscripts of books VI-X, which covers well over half of those 300 pages of general introduction. (I quote from p 153: "There are at least 195 mss of L's first decade.") (Livy's "first decade" is books 1-10, i to X, of the 142 books of his history of Rome.) (Of those 195, "twenty-four predate the thirteenth century." ibid.) To those who share my inclinations, I know I don't have to explain this excitement. To those who don't, I don't know how to explain it. Maybe some lay readers of my blog have gradually come to share my interest in manuscripts of ancient Latin texts, if they've read many or all of my numerous posts on the subject. Maybe not. (The bibliography cites 8 items by Billanovich and 11 by Reeve! Yay!)

It's amazing to me how recent it was that such commentaries held no interest for me, even though I was very interested in Livy. It was simple ignorance: I had no idea, really, what such commentaries are.