Ancient Greek and Latin Novels

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Latin Asclepius

Among the many religious and other cultural syncretisms which resulted from the conquest of Egypt, first by the Greeks in the 4th century BC and then the Romans in the 1st century AD, is the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice blessed Hermes, clearly based on the Egyptian god Thoth. However, while Thoth has an ibis head upon a human body, Hermes Trismegistus is often portrayed with a more typical human appearance.

 

The Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of 16 dialogues in Greek, purported to have been written by Hermes Trismegistus in great antiquity -- some said that Trismegistus had personally advised Moses -- was translated by Marsilio Ficino from Greek to Latin in the 15th century, and has been translated into many other languages since, and occasioned great interest without interruption to the present day, although the scholarly consensus now is that they were written some time in the 2nd or 3rd century AD. 

Another Hermetic dialogue, known as the Latin Asclepius, somewhat longer than those in the Corpus Hermeticum, appears to come from the same time and place, although it is preserved in Latin, in manuscripts also containing philosophical writing by Apuleius, the 2nd-century AD North African Latin poet best known for his epic poem The Golden Ass, sometimes called the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. 

The surviving manuscripts which contain the Latin Asclepius alongside Apuleius' philosophical are as old as the 12th and 13th centuries. Early editions of Apuleius routinely included the Latin Asclepius, under the assumption that Apuleius has translated it from Greek, but comparisons with the striking style of Apuleius' works has for the most part laid that thesis to rest. That the the dialogue was originally Greek seems well-established. Greek versions of passages are cited by Augustus and Lactantius.

The Asclepius who gives this dialogue its title is described within it as a demigod and grandson of the Greek god of medicine of the same name, and not that god himself as is sometimes asserted. The same demigod Asclepius appears in several of the Greek dialogues of the Corpus Hermeticum. In the Latin Asclepius, Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius and the god Tat discuss the relationships between the physical and the metaphysical, between the human and the divine, between the mortal and the eternal and other categories of opposites, with Trismegistus however emphasizing the unity of all things, a principle sometimes referred to in Hermetic philosophy simply as the One. 

As far as I know, there has not been much progress made on the question of who wrote the Corpus Hermeticum, the Latin Asclepius and the other related texts in Greek, Latin, Coptic and Armenian. Many of these Coptic texts are among the artifacts in the famous Nag Hammadi library found in the 1940's. For example, I have not found so much as a guess about whether the author of the Latin Asclepius also authored any of the texts preserved in other languages. However, the Latin Asclepius, whether in Latin or translated, tends these days to published along with other Hermetic texts, and no longer with the works of Apuleius.

The Origins of Philosophy

From the Hellenistic age down to our own, Aristotle and Plato have been very widely studied in "the West." Aristotle studied under Plato; Plato and others sat adoringly at the feet of Socrates; Socrates learned among the last of the pre-Socratics; and the first pre-Socratics, as we all know, sprang, fully-formed and philosophizing away, from the brow of Zeus.

What?! There was no philosophy before the pre-Socratics? Yes, that's exactly what it says here, on p 10 of Wisdom of the West by Bertrand Russell, London, 1959:

"Philosophy and science, as we now know them, are Greek inventions[...]Philosophy and science begin with Thales of Miletus in the early sixth century BC."

Okay then. That's all cleared up. And what exactly is philosophy? Russell covers that too, same book, same page:

"Philosophy begins when someone asks a general question."

Got it!

Seriously, though: although I find Russell to be eminently sensible almost all of the time, what he is saying here is absurd. Even though, as far as I have been able to determine -- I don't know how far that is -- very few "Western" scholars seem to be saying anything different about how philosophy, or at least "Western" philosophy, began.

One of the few exceptions is Arthur Schopenhauer. In his Parerga und Paralipomena, part I, in the chapter "Fragmente zur Geschichte der Philosophie," in the section on the Pre-Socratics (Saemtliche Werke, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt aM, 4th printing, 1996, vol 4, pp 45-56), Schopenhauer points out how some of the positions of the pre-Socratics are anticipated in Egypt and in the Brahmanic philosophy of the Vedas. He even mentions (p 56) Apuleius' assertion that Pythagoras had traveled as far as India, and been personally schooled by Brahmans.

You might say that it's absurd to accept Apuleius' account, written well over half a millennium after Pythagoras' death, as anything more than an amusing anecdote. And you might be right about that. But is it more absurd than assuming that no Brahmanic, or Egyptian, or Phoenician, or Babylonian, or other philosophy found its way to Greece before the career of Thales was over?

I submit that what began with the Greek pre-Socratics is that the individual tidbits of wisdom began to be preserved in connection with the names of individual wise people. A very significant development, and even more so to authors concerned about receiving the proper credit for their work than it may be to the public at large.

But to arbitrarily advance several thousand large steps past that and flatly assert that before Thlaes, no-one, anywhere, had ever stopped and asked what it all means, is, I must say so in all directness, thoroughly absurd.

And I say so even though I have only found one Western philosopher, Schopenhauer, who also says so. I have found many "Eastern" scholars, and laypeople from all parts of the Earth, who agree with me on this point. It's not the only point in which I feel that Schopenhauer and I are a bit lonely. There's also the matter of Hegel. There are so very many perfectly intelligent scholars who admire Hegel so very much. And yet, when I read Hegel, I see what Schopenhauer describes: an empty-headed charlatan, a pseudo-intellectual par excellence, a sheer horse's ass who is shamelessly wasting everybody's time. A Sam Harris of the early 19th century.

There is yet another point where I find myself and many, many other laypeople on one side, and almost every single Western scholar on the other: the scholars almost all state quite flatly that it is quite certain that Jesus existed, and is not merely a fictional character in a myth, a character perhaps cobbled together from the biographies of John the Baptist and some other real people.

I do not take it at all lightly when the academic consensus is so overwhelmingly against me. It troubles me, it truly does. But no academic consensus will persuade me to stop thinking for myself.