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.

Manuscripts

I derive great joy from learning about numbers of extant Classical manuscripts. I don't know why. It doesn't bother me that I don't know why. Perhaps it goes back no further than my figuring out, perhaps as recently as 2010, that certain fundamentalist Christians had made widely-repeated, spectacularly-inaccurate assertions about the numbers of manuscripts of some Classical authors, claiming that there were only 20 manuscripts of Livy, 10 of Caesar and similar nonsense.

A few months ago, I found what I had thought was a mention, somewhere in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, that the manuscripts of Aristotle are literally myriad. I looked up myriad in the OED and discovered that its literal meaning is 10,000.

My memory is not perfect, and for that and other reasons, I should write these sorts of things down more often when I come across them. I realized that what I had seen might not have been what I remembered it to have been. Finally, yesterday, I found it again: the assertion that the manuscripts of Augustine are literally myriad. Augustine. Not Aristotle. Score one for the Christians.

In the process of looking for the reference to Aristotle which was actually a reference to Augustine, I learned a lot of interesting things about Aristotelian manuscripts. Such as that there are very large numbers of manuscripts of Latin translations of his works.

Whether the number of manuscripts of translations of an author's works are conventionally counted in the number of manuscripts of that author -- that I don't know. If it turns out that, between Latin and Arabic and other languages, there actually are myriad manuscripts of translations of Aristotle, would one conventionally say that there are myriad manuscripts of Aristotle? Or would one count only the Greek manuscripts?

Also several months ago, I sent a email to a distinguished scholar, asking him whether he could round out some areas of my knowledge of the Oxyrhynchus papyri project: Are any of the papyri still in the boxes Grenfell and Hunt put them into between 1897 and 1904? Are we approaching the state of things where all that is left are tiny little pieces of papyrus? Questions like that.

He hasn't gotten back to me. That hurts my feelings, but it's entirely his prerogative, of course. Finally today I sent an email to the general guestions-and-suggestions-etc address of the Oxyrhynchus project, which is perhaps where I should've inquired to begin with.

Also a few months ago, I found a reference to a list of manuscripts of Livy compiled by Virginia Brown. I have since learned that Ms Brown compiled all sorts of information about manuscripts which I would find quite interesting. Just today I noticed a remark by Prof Winterbottom in Texts and Transmission, ed LD Reynolds, pp 35-36: "Virgina Brown has listed seventy-five manuscripts [of Caesar --SB] later than the ninth century, and suggested tentative groupings." In the case of the Livy manuscripts, someone in the FB group Classics International kindly gave me a link to the Pontifical publication containing Ms Brown's list -- but, as has so often happened to me, once I've found the website of some sort of Classical catalog or database or publication, I had no idea how to navigate it.

It seems to me that all of these difficulties and many more which I've had are the sort which could be easily handled if I were a Classics student, rubbing elbows with other Classics students and with Classics professors: Say, do you know how to navigate this website? The answer could be: Yes, you just do this and that; or: No, but there's a hard copy of the volume on the shelf right behind you.

I don't think I'll be re-entering grad school. (I'm 56 years old and just as autistic as I ever was. [That's an autism joke, because an autistic person is born autistic and remains so his or her entire life.]) But today I feel slightly more inclined to do so than I have for a while.

Just in case anyone is politely suppressing the urge to ask whether I've ever actually examined any Classical manuscripts -- yes I have, both via photocopies and actually up close in person. But I've spent much more time studying numbers of manuscripts.

[PS, 21 Feb 2018: Speaking of numbers of manuscripts: today I received an inter-library loan copy of M L West's Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad. Some of you may already be familiar with the following figures. They came as quite a surprise to me. On p 86, West says that around the turn of the 20th century, Ludwich cited 33 papyri of the Iliad, that Munro and Allen listed 103 in 1920, Allen raised that number to 122 in 1931, Collart listed 372 in 1948, Pack listed 464 in 1965, in 1990 Sutton said that there were 703, and West says that in his edition of 1998-2000, he made use of 1543, 850 of which were then-unpublished Oxyrhynchus papyri in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. West writes of Homeric papyri: "They will continue to accumulate. There is no end to them." On pp 88-129, West catalogues 1569 papyri. By the term "papryi," West refers to all ancient manuscripts, whether written on papyrus or some other material. On p 139, West doubts that a thorough catalog of the Medieval manuscripts of the Iliad will ever be written. (Because there are simply too many items to be considered? I don't know. West doesn't elaborate.)

West passed away in 2015, his edition of the Odyssey was published in 2017, and De Gruyter's website says that it consults 500 papyri, 250 of them unpublished.]

Yes, That is a Very Great Amount of Aristotelian Manuscripts [PS: No, actually, it is not.]

Someone who struck me as authoritative -- I do not remember who -- wrote -- I do not remember where. I should write these sorts of things down more often. It may have been in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which I read often and recommend heartily -- that the manuscripts of Aristotle are literally myriad. I then consulted the Oxford English Dictionary, and saw that "myriad" literally means "10,000."

[PS, 19 February 2018: My memory was faulty here. I finally tracked down the mention of literally myriad manuscripts. It was a reference to manuscripts, not of Aristotle, but of Augustine. Nevermind.]

Attempting to verify that there really are as many as 10,000 manuscripts of the works of Aristotle, I found that, as of the writing of the article on Aristotle in the 1972 Encyclopaedia Britannica, there were 47 surviving philosophical works attributed to Aristotle, and that he actually wrote many more. Not from the encyclopaedia, I learned that these 47 works were often copied individually, as opposed to huge volumes each containing many of the works. I learned that several of these works survive in Latin translations in several hundred manuscripts each (Aristotle wrote in Greek, and was very popular among Medieval scholars of Western Europe who could read Latin but not Greek.). If several hundred Latin copies is typical for each of those 47 works, then perhaps there really are over 10,000 manuscripts of Aristotle surviving in our time, and the vast majority of them are Latin translations. (Several hundred X 47 = more than 10,000.) I'm assuming that untranslated Greek manuscripts of Aristotle are not nearly so numerous, but perhaps I'm wrong about that.

I have absolutely no ideas how many manuscripts of Aristotle in Arabic translation have survived to our day, or in other languages, for that matter.

Some time ago, I read in Rackham's Loeb edition and translation of Aristotle's Politics



that the manuscripts of that work "are not very good nor very old. The oldest evidence for the text is a translation in barbarous Latin by a Dominican monk of the thirteenth century, William of Moerbeke[...]The five best extant Greek copies are of the fifteenth century[...]" That was the first time that I had read anything about the transmission of Aristotle's texts. And so I mistakenly assumed that there were not many manuscripts of anything written by Aristotle. It turns out that Moerbeke is one of the Latin translators of Aristotle who has been copied into hundreds of surviving manuscripts, per work, having translated other works by Aristorle besides the Politics, and that not everyone has shared Rackham's low opinion of his Latin prose.

So, is Aristotle in 2nd place among ancient authors, behind only the Bible, in terms of numbers of surviving manuscripts? I don't know. One reason I don't know is because the experts on ancient Greek and Latin literature themselves don't know how many surviving manuscripts there are of the authors in which they specialize. And the reason they often don't know is because they don't much care. How can this be? Well, you see, the most important aspect of their jobs is get a version of those ancient texts as close as possible to what the ancient authors originally wrote. And for the purpose of determining those texts, the great majority of the manuscripts can be dismissed, if it has been determined that they are all copies, or copies of copies, or copies of copies of copies, etc, of some other surviving manuscripts. There is often a very great difference between the number of manuscripts which scholars use to determine the text, and all of the surviving manuscripts of that text. Oh, so there are X number of manuscript copies of Moerbeke's translation of the Politics? Hey, that's great. But because I have the actual copy which Moerbeke made (or high-res photos of that copy), I don't need all those hundreds of others. Is how those scholars will often react, if they see their job as editing the text.

There are other reasons for looking at all of the other copies. For example, someone has to determine where they came from, whether manuscript J was a copy of a copy of manuscript R, or what exactly. Or maybe Professor Y thinks that Professor X made a mistake when he or she said that J was a copy of a copy of manuscript R, and wants to check for him- or herself.

Another reason is if we want to get a general idea of how popular that ancient author was in a certain time and place. We can only get a very general idea of this, because we know that a lot of manuscripts have disappeared, and we don't know how many. Just because there are hundreds of manuscripts today of Ovid, and none at all of Pompeius Trogus, doesn't mean that Ovid was read by more people in the 2nd century AD than Trogus. But the great number of 12th-century manuscripts of Ovid (compared to surviving 12th-century manuscripts in general), combined with other things such as frequent mentions of him by 12th-century writers, mean that we're probably pretty safe in saying that Ovid was widely-read in the 12th century. Probably.

It seems to me that typically, there are more 15th-century manuscripts of a given Classical Latin author than manuscripts of any other one century, and sometimes more than all the other centuries put together. It seems that way. But I don't know for sure, because I only have those century-by-century numbers in the case of a few Classical Latin authors. Maybe they're pretty typical of the rest, maybe they're not. After the 15th century, the numbers of manuscripts of Classical Latin authors drops away to almost nothing, because of the invention of the printing press. One notable exception to that is the text of the 1st-century novel Satyricon by Petronius,



the inspiration for Fellini's film of the same name, liked by Fellini fans, less well-liked by Classicists who feel that Fellini missed much of Petronius' message. The text of Satyricon has been patched together like Frankenstein's monster from various manuscripts each containing just a part of the whole. 4 of those manuscripts were written in the late 16th century, and just recently, Maria Salanitro has found what she believes are still more parts of the novel, contained in a 17th-century manuscript.

How much of the preponderance of 15th-century manuscripts -- assuming I'm correct in assuming it exists -- is due to an actual rise in the reading of ancient Latin Classics in the 15th-century, and how much is due to people being suddently much more careful to preserve manuscripts? I have no idea.

It was nice of Martin Wohlrab to list and comment on all 147 of the manuscripts of Plato which he could find, late in the 19th century, and it was also nice of the University of California to re-print his list



in the 21st century. Did Wohlrab include manuscripts of Latin translations of Plato (or translations into still other languages) in his list? I'm going to have to examine this list a little more closely and get back to you on that one. Were there ever very many manuscripts of Latin translations of Plato? Hey, that's another really swell question. I know that Latin translations of Plato were made after the invention of printing.

Are the numbers of manuscripts of Cicero or Vergil comparable to those of Aristotle? Another thing I really wish I knew.

Why do I care so much about it? Am I about to help these professors in their task of sorting out which manuscripts derive from which, by the process they call collation? No. Am I interested in the numbers of readers these authors have had? To be honest: only slightly. I think I care about these numbers of manuscripts because autism. (It would also be great if I could demonstrate that there are more manuscripts of one Classical author or another than of the Bible, but I suspect that the Bible-thumpers out there who're saying that there are only 20 manuscripts of Livy [There are hundreds. How many hundreds? I wish I knew. Hey, there might be thousands for all I know.], and so forth, have also drastically under-counted the total number of Biblical manuscripts.)

Fiktion Wichtig Nehmen Ist Albern, Aber Das Tue Ich Noch

SPOLIER ALERT! LIES ZUERST HESSES SIDDHARTHA, ODER KOENNTE FOLGENDES EINIGES FUER DICH SPOILEN!

Ich erinnere mich nicht mehr, zu welcher Zeit ich anfing, Literatur sehr wichtig zu nehmen. Ich weiss nicht mehr, wann ich begann, selbst Fiktion zu schreiben. Mit 8 Jahren schrieb ich das Drehbuch zu einem kurzen Filme, vielleicht was das mein erster Versuch als Author, vielleicht nicht.

Ich erinnere mich sehr genau, wie mir so um 1987 oder '88, als ich 25 oder 27 Jahre alt war, ganz ploetzlich, in einem Klassenzimmer in der University of Tennessee, Knoxville, wo wir Aenglistik sehr wichtig und gewichtig nahm, von einem Augenblick zum naechsten, das ganze mir komplett albern vorkam: zwei Jahrhunderte frueher hatte ein englischer Dichter ein Gedicht geschrieben, und nun nahmen wir das Gedicht sehr ernst.

Ich gar nicht zuletzt. Es war ein honors course, ein Seminar fuer Fortgeschrittene unter Tennessees Studenten, fuer Studenten, die Gedichte besonders ernst nahmen, und ich hatte sie vielleicht gar ungewoehnlich ernst genommen auch verglichen mit diesen anderen honors students. Es kann sein, ich erinnere mich nicht genau, dass es mir alles ueploetzlich doof vorkam, als ich selbst mitten in einem von den praetentioesen Spontan-Reden war, mit denen ich in solchen Seminaren gar nicht scheu war.

Oder vielleicht sprach zu diesm Augenblck die Professorin, oder ein/e von den anderen honors-Student/innen.

Das Bewusstsein von der peinlichen Eitelkeit und Leerheit des ganzen hat mir seit nun fast 30 Jahren nicht losgelassen. Trotzdem, bliebe ich in diesem Seminar, machte meinen Bachelor of Arts zu Ende, machte einen Anlauf auf graduate school. Ich habe tratzdem noch wir vor Fiktion geschrieben. Ich habe gar zwei Romane zu ende geschrieben, unter wohl mehr als einer Dutzenden, welche ich angefangen habe.

Aber seit diesem einen Augenblick der Eleuchtung und Entzauberung ist der Anteil der Fiktion scharf gesunken unter dem, was ich geschrieben habe, und die der non fiction gestiegen.

Diesen Tag sprach ich privat mit dieser Professorin darueber. Sie schien mich nicht zu verstehen. Ich habe bisher keinen Aenglisten oder Germanisten oder Dichter gefunden, der aehnlicher Meining zu sein scheint.

Ich las also Hermanns Hesses Siddhartha, in der Hoffnung, es wuerde mir helfen, endlich den sehr hoch geschaetzten Romancier auch schaetzen zu koennen, und zuerst ging alles gut. Aber als mir klar wurde, dass die Titelfigur Siddhartha nicht Siddhartha Gautama, aka der Buddha, war, sondern ein Zeitgenosse mit gleichem Vornamen und einigen Aehnlichkeit der beiden Biographien, und dass dieser Roman keine Biographie des Buddhas ist, fing mir an, sauer zu werden.

Leider mag ich Hermann Hessens Screiben immer noch nicht. Vielleicht sollte ich es doch aufgeben, herausfinden zu wollen, was es dann so besonderes on Das Glasperlenspiel ist.

Vielleicht is Hesse einfach nicht fuer mich.

Warum? Vielleicht weil ich nicht noch den Dingern suche, nachdem er und die beiden Siddharthas suchten. Ich suche nicht nach Erleuchtung, sei es, weil ich schon erleuchtet bin oder sei es weil ich gar nicht einmal verstehe was Leute meine wenn sie "Erleuchtung" sagen, oder warum auch immer: ich suche nach anderen Dingern. ("Moechtest Du Erleuchtung bekommen?" "Nein, danke sehr, Magister. Um ganz ehrlich zu sein, wuerde ich sehr viel lieber ganz grosse Mengen von Geld bekommen, als Erleuchtung.")

Vielleicht finde ich den Zugang zu Hesse nicht, weil er Theologe oder etwas Theologenaehnliches ist. Leser dieses Blogs kenne meine Allergie gegen Theologisches sehr gut. Wenn Goethe und Nietzsche ueber Theologie schreiben, verstehe ich sie sehr gut.

Alles, was ich mit Sicherheit ueber die Sache weiss, ist, dass ich Siddhartha ca 30 Seiten Lang mochte and dann stets weniger, und dass ich jetzt gar keine Lust habe, mehr von Hesse zu lesen, und dass ich es lieber mit Aristoteles Πολιτικά versuchen mag, und mit einigen anderen vorchristlichen griechischen Authoren, die hier in Ausgaben von Teubner und Oxford und Loeb und Anderen rumliegen. Eigentlich wurde mir gestern gar prickelnd nach Aristoteles, lange bevor ich Siddhartha zu Ende gelesen hatte. (Wustest Du eigentlich, wie schwach die Handschiften-Ueberlieferung von Aristoteles' Politik ist? Um 1930 schrieb H Rackham: "The oldest evidence for the text is a translation in barbarous Latin by a Dominican monk of the thirteenth century, William of Moerbeke in Flanders [...] The five best extant Greek copies are of the fifteenth century [...]" Seitdem haben Funden von Papyri dies aufgebessert, aber nicht um vieles.)

Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit

I was arguing with someone in the HuffPo readers' comments about Sam Harris,who seems to be the English-speaking world's third-most prominent spokesman for atheism currently, behind Richard Dawkinsand Christopher Hitchens.Dawkins is someone I can proudly call a spokesman of a movement to which I belong, even if I don't choose to call that movement "New Atheism." (PS, 23. September 2015: I really should have read some of Dawkins' writing on religion before I wrote that. I had read some of his work on biology and mistakenly assumed that his work on religion must be just as good. Dawkins really should stick to biology; on the subject on religion he's a dingbat just like Hitch and Harris and all the other New Atheists.) (I just call it atheism. No biggie, but the "New" part seems somewhat silly to me.) (PS, 23. September 2015: I now call THEM New Atheists, and am attempting to show that they by no means represent all atheists.) I have referred to Hitchins as a dingbat, and a drunken dingbat, and similar things, but Lordy -- so to speak -- he's so much more impressive than this guy Harris. Harris is on a kick now about something he calls the moral landscape. Which is just utilitarianism. Which was new in the mid-19th century when John Stuart Millwas presenting it for the first time. New, but unimpressive. Easily batted aside several decades later by Nietzsche'sanalysis of morality, or more accurately, of moralities. Nietzsche pointed out that morality is always a subjective thing, and that was pretty much that for utilitarianism. Or so a sensible person could've been forgiven for supposing. But Lordy -- so to speak -- look at Harris go!

I was arguing with someone about Harris. A couple of others were, too, but, it seemed, fewer than with Harris' previous HuffPo article. Perhaps they found it futile quicker than I. Perhaps they are wiser than I. I really should stop this squabbling on the Internet -- I just get all dirty, and the pigs have all of the fun. I and a couple of others were pleading: read Nietzsche. Read Schopenhauer. Read Sartre.This ground has been covered, and much better than Harris is doing it. At one point, as I gradually gave up on the squabble, someone called Schopenhauer an obscurantist. Schopenhauer?! If anyone at all in the Western canon tells it like it smells, it is Arthur Schopenhauer. He is a model of clarity and frankness. I was about to respond in this vein when it occurred to me that it would be far more enjoyable to read some Schopenhauer than to argue with this person about him. So I did. I have the five-volume Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft edition,st w 661 through 665. A German friend of mine, like me not an academic, but like me someone who reads widely and with great involvement things which are probably mostly read by academics, became very upset when he heard that I had this edition. In his opinion it is a very bad edition. I don't know what he's talking about, but I mention his opinion because I respect it.

Someone else who was arguing in my anti-Harris vein pleaded with HuffPo's readers to read Heidegger. It had been a long time since I'd attempted to read Heidegger, but I decided to finally buy my own copy of Sein Und Zeit.Sein und Zeit is considered to be Martin Heidegger's masterpiece, his Hauptwerk, his chef d'ouvre. A recent poll of philosophers as to the most significant works of philosophy published in the twentieth century placed Sein und Zeit second, sandwiched between works of Ludwig Wittgensteinat first and third. I had tried years ago to read this and several others of Heidegger's works, but quickly gave up, utterly bewildered.

This time, to my surprise, I was only a little bewildered, and seemed to understand some of what Heidegger was saying. It probably helps that my Greek is now weak, as opposed to non-existent back then. Also, in the meantime I had read some Adorno,putting the German-reading part of my brain through some serious calisthenics.

I am enjoying reading Heidegger. This is something I really thought I might never say. And I really very rarely say "never" when it comes to my ability to read anything. Anything.

I wrote down the name of every author mentioned by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit. There are several dozen of them. He included the first initals of some authors who in the meantime -- Sein und Zeit was first published in 1927 -- have become famous enough that they are usually referred to just by their last names, as are Aristotle and Heidegger. For instance, Heidegger made repeated reference to W. Dilthey and K. Jaspers, who these days are usually referred to as Diltheyand Jaspers.On the other hand, Heidegger referred to a scholastic, Suarez, and his work, the disputationes metaphysicae, and I had to look this Suarez up in order to learn that Francisco Suárez was meant, who lived from 1548 to 1617, and that during Suárez' time scholasticism experienced a resurgence. Yikes! I had had no idea.

Most often named are Platoand Aristotle.Named, and quoted in Greek, quotations which Heidegger does not always translate. Heidegger says the question of the nature of being has essentially been dropped since classical Greece. That the concept of being is at once the most universal and the most mysterious. That's within the first couple of pages. I can't tell you much more right now. My mind is reeling, but in a rather pleasant way.

Heidegger was involved with the Nazis. But it seems pretty clear that he saw his relationship to the Nazis as similar to a lion tamer's to his lions, that he did not believe in them or their ideals, but was trying to manipulate them, as opposed to simply emigrating or surrendering his academic post to a party member.

Pretty clear. Not absolutely crystal-clear. After World War II Hannah Arendtspoke up for him, but Karl Jaspers spoke against him. Paul Celanmet with him. I don't have a last word here.

Philosopher-Kings

Alexander the Great, the Emperor Augustus,Charlemagne and Napoleon, besides being great rulers and conquerors, had also each of them a great impact upon the culture of his time. Hard-bitten, practical men, politicians and merchants and so forth, often deride culture -- literature, philosophy, art and so forth -- as being both a waste of time and a refuge for weaklings who cannot deal with real life. These practical types tend to measure one's success in "real" life by one criterium: the amount of one's material possessions. At an opposite extreme, one thinks for instance of Nietzscheand Oscar Wilde,are those who maintain that art alone makes life worthwhile. As with many other instances of extreme differences of opinion, so here I feel that such extremes are rather silly. Art is important, but without food, shelter and other basics which the practical types are constantly, industriously providing, no-one would be able to create it. Both extremes contain kernels of truth: often artists are, in fact, pampered sillies who cannot cope very well with the world at large. And art does certainly make life nicer. The practical types probably have no conception of a world completely without art, and would be just as horrified as anyone else if they ever did get a glimpse of such a world.

Whether or not Alexander's relationship with Aristotlewas more than just an interesting historical coincidence, whether Aristotle ever thought of his pupil or Alexander of himself as a philosopher-king, or not -- he died rather young for a philosopher, and in the dozen years of his reign he was extremely busy with practical and political things -- at the very least, one must regard Alexander as an extraordinary patron of culture. Although his empire collapsed into many separate kingdoms almost immediately after his death, still, everywhere he had been, from the Adriatic to Afghanistan, Greek culture flourished for centuries, because Alexander had consciously planted it there. A philosopher, a rhetorician, a musician could travel all over the vast Hellenistic world and find a market for his services in every city, and that he owed directly to Alexander.

It is a commonplace that in the age of patronage, poets and princes had a relationship that was often self-serving on both sides: the princes wanted praise and so supported those poets who flattered them, and the poets realized that the princes were the best patrons, and so flattered ceaselessly, shamelessly and with no regard for the truth. Like many commonplaces, this one overstates the matter somewhat. Doubtless, many writers throughout the ages of patronage were toadies, just as many are today, and many princes were conceited fools ready to swallow any amount of flattery -- as are many leaders and wealthy people today. But it's a great oversimplification to dismiss every description of every prince by the writers of his court on these grounds.

It may not be such an oversimplification, however, in the case of Augustus. Augustus is justly celebrated as the initiator of the pax romana, the greatest period of peace the Mediterranean world, or indeed perhaps any portion of the world at all, has ever enjoyed. Because of his reforms, his institutions and his example, the peace lasted for centuries after Augustus' death. That is certainly to be praised. When one considers the arts, however, a chillier picture emerges. There seems to have been little room for poetry that did not praise the Emperor and his family, and no room at all for anyone who criticized or made fun of them. The Aeniad is a great poem. Perhaps Vergilcould have done no better if he had not been obligated to praise Augustus in his poem. but who knows how many other poets or would-be poets there were, of whom we have never heard, or who never began at all to compose and declaim, because their talent for flattery was too slight? And Ovid,the greatest of all Augustan poets, was banished to a fort on the Imperial frontier on the Black Sea coast, a particularly cruel punishment for such a thorough urbanite. We don't know exactly what Ovid did, how he gave offense to the Imperial house. We can be pretty sure, however, that the offense was pretty minor, of the sort that many princes would ignore, even if it hadn't come from the greatest poet of the age. We know that Ovid apologized profusely, begged pathetically and in vain to be forgiven, until he died on that frontier post. It is generally agreed that Latin literature declined precipitously after the Augustan age. Surprisingly seldom, in my opinion, does anyone think to blame this directly on Augustus.

Alexander and Augustus lived in a culture -- it was in very many respects one and the same culture -- in which it was taken for granted that a sovereign could read and write. By the time of Charlemagne, the Roman senatorial families, the heirs of the rulers of the western Empire, had faded from the scene, any power they might still have confined mostly to the Catholic Church. Almost all of whatever literacy remained was to be found in the monasteries. The rulers of Western Europe, the heirs of the barbarians who had swept away the remnants of the western Empire, could neither read nor write. They fought ceaselessly among themselves, not the least among their own families. Patricide, matricide, fratricide, filiocide and every other sort of depravity was rife, along with famine and plague. To appreciate how great Charlemagne's achievement was, one has to understand how thoroughly awful things had become before him.

Charlemagne united and for the most part pacified a large portion of Western Europe. It's true, he waged war ceaselessly, but he waged it mostly at the expanding borders of his empire, thus pacifying an ever-growing area within. Within his borders, palaces and monasteries were built on a vast scale, and in these monasteries Charlemagne gave great support to learning -- not only Christian learning, but also the preservation of the ancients. In his main palace at Aachen, centuries before universities began to appear in western Europe, there was a sort of academy, from which officials and clerks went to every corner of the Empire. Einhard,Charlemagne's friend, minister and biographer, says that the Emperor himself spoke excellent and fluent Latin in addition to his native German, and could understand Greek as well. The whole time since the collapse of the western part of the Roman Empire, its legitimate heirs had continued to rule in Constantinople. After Charlemagne was named Emperor of the West by the Pope in AD 800, he was, in his own eyes if not in theirs, the colleague and equal of the Byzantine Emperors. In any case, it was only natural that a dominion as large as Charles' would send and receive embassies to and from Constantinople. Einhard also says that Charlemagne tried very hard to learn to write, and was hampered in this only by the fact that he had begun late in life. Charlemagne's vast contributions to letters are not in doubt. Among other things, the first example of written German come from his time, upon his orders. Perhaps Einhard was flattering Charlemagne's memory in his description of the prince's linguistic abilities. We don't know. To me the description has the ring of truth.

A thousand years after Charlemagne, it was once again taken for granted in Europe that princes could read and write. Many other men, however, the bourgeoise, the businessmen, could also read and write, could build palaces, buy fine paintings, produce plays, maintain orchestras and so forth. Their wives and daughters, presumably, often had their hand in all this artistic enterprise. It was not seemly for middle-class women to be obviously, publicly concerned with business, but still they had their salons which could be as grand as those of any princess. For all that titles were losing their significance, however, it was not taken for granted that a man could rise to the rank of king or emperor on his own initiative. But then Napoleon went ahead and did it anyway, and we are still sorting out the consequences of his reign. And the contradictions, which are glaring: this Emperor came to power under the auspices of a Revolution which, or at least so many of its adherents had thought, was to do away with sovereigns. With all sovereigns, once and for all. Beethovennamed his third symphony after Napoleon, then, when he learned that Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor, almost destroyed the score in his rage. He neded up renaming the symphony "to the memory of an heroic man," to the memory of the younger, not-yet-corrupted Napoleon.

Goethewas less disturbed by titles, and met twice with the self-crowned Emperor. Beethoven accused Goethe of being too subservient to Napoleon, but I don't know if the accusation makes much sense. Their lives were so very different that it may have impeded their communication: Beethoven was the son of a musician in an age when musicians were servants. That Beethoven himself refused to be treated as a servant, to grovel before anyone, was a radical break with the past, and was very brave. Far from living out any such traumatic class struggles himself, Goethe was an aristocrat, although not quite as much of one as he claimed to be when describing the past of the Goethe family in Frankfurt, which he consistently, extravagantly exaggerated. He always had servants, he never was one, apart from the formulas of address required among various ranks of the aristocracy, which could very often include such formulations as "I am your most humble servant" and such. Perhaps Beethoven confused such figures of speech with actual servitude. There is no reason to confuse the two things. And in any case writers began earlier than musicians to free themselves from feudal patronage: pen and paper were cheaper than a musical instrument, much cheaper than an orchestra; the princes, although although they usually sought to control literature through censorship, did not compete with the businessmen, the bourgeoise, when it came to printing; and literature may always have attracted more solitary people, more prone to individual assertion and rebellion, than music, which flourishes in the direct interaction of groups.

Goethe himself was a very powerful man, a minister in the state of Weimar who looked after all sorts of things which were by no means confined to the realm of culture -- for example, mining and irrigation were under his purview -- and the most highly-respected poet in Germany, perhaps in all of Europe. The age of patronage had faded to a large degree, replaced by printing presses and mass readerships, and theatres and art galleries open to the public. Then again, things which are often thought of as belonging strictly to the past, have not, upon closer inspection, completely ceased to be. One visited Weimar and hoped to be received by the great man, very much as if he himself were a prince, and not strictly out of admiration for Goethe's talent, although that was always the stated purpose, but in hopes of furthering one's career, either with a job in Weimar or with a recommendation elsewhere. Among Goethe's local circle of friends was a rich and charming widow named Adele Schopenhauer, whose exceptionally gloomy son Arthurwould go on to be a philosopher, one whose fame, in keeping with his dark mood, was destined to be mostly posthumous. Arthur mostly quarreled with his mother, but got along quite well with the Herrn Geheimrat Goethe. Goethe and the young Schopenhauer collaborated on the study of optics, until such time as it dawned on Schopenhauer that Goethe's ideas on optics were unsound. His integrity would not allow him to lie to his master; but the respect he felt would not allow him to contradict him openly. So instead, Schopenhauer moved to Berlin, published his studies on optics, and left Goethe behind.

A few years later a young and still relatively unknown Jewish dandy named Heinrich Heinecame to Weimar and called upon the great man Goethe. Perhaps Heine had been insulted by an antisemitic remark in Goethe's house, or on the way there; for whatever reason, Heine did not deliver the awed respect usual among Goethe's literary visitors; indeed, he seems to have been relatively monosyllabic and just this side of ostentatiously rude. The old Geheimrat tried to draw him out, asked him: What are you working on now? Heine: A version of Faust. Goethe: Do you plan to stay long in Weimar? Heine: Actually, now that I've met your Excellency, my chores in Weimar are completed. And with that the young smart-ass bowed and took his leave. And it turned out that Heine's career blossomed greatly without the protection of Goethe or any other great man, an example of how things were changing. Unfortunately, other things were staying the same: Heine's big mouth, his fearless pen and, to be sure, his Jewish heritage combined to make him intolerable to the powers which were gradually making one Germany out of hundreds of principalities. Like his friend Karl Marx,Heine had to spend most of his life in exile. He settled in Paris and wrote most of his brilliant poems and essays there.

Antisemitism was widespread in Germany, but by no means universal or unchallenged. I doubt that Goethe personally offended Heine, but it's easy to imagine that Goethe's butler or some other of his servants, or one of his aristocratic friends, might have made some crude remark about how things were going to Hell, if this sort of person, pointing to Heine, could now get in to see that sort of person, pointing in the direction of Goethe's drawing-room. One acquaintance, erstwhile friend and colleague of Goethe's who was, unfortunately, clearly antisemitic, was Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer set himself up at the University of Berlin and quite brazenly announced philosophical lectures to be held at the same time as those of Hegel.Did his failure actually surprise Schopenhauer? Competing as an unknown against one of the most popular philosophers of all time, a thinker who was enjoying rock-star fame, speaking in the largest lecture-halls whose seats were always all taken while many other people crowded into the aisles and entrances, seems like the act of a man who wants to fail, all the better to be able to call all of academia sour grapes.

Whatever his subconscious motivations may have been, Schopenhauer quickly canceled his lectures and settled into a solitary bachelor's life, living comfortably on the income from inherited investments, writing philosophy, not voluminously but very brilliantly, and very biliously. His criticisms of academia in general, and of Hegel in particular, are extreme. Extreme as they are, I admire them, although I wonder if they and I are wrong. To put my cards on the table: I, like Schopenhauer, failed pretty badly in academia and tend to resent it for personal reasons. And I have never begun to understand what Hegel was talking about, and so am perhaps too eager to accept Schopenahuer's analysis: that Hegel wrote nothing but nonsense, that he was an unparalleled charlatan who drastically set back the cause of philosophy. What if Schopenhauer never understood what Hegel was talking about? I'm reminded of the stupid comments against all modern, non-representational or conceptual art, uttered by people who obviously have no conception of any aesthetic ideas from later than 1850 or so, and who probably are just as clueless about earlier art as well. I am troubled by the very many later philosophers who seem to take Hegel very seriously indeed.

In any case, though I tend to nod and agree as I read Schopenhauer's critiques of academia, of Professorenphilosophie fuer Philosophieprofessoren, and of Hegel, I shake my head in dismay when Schopenhauer comments upon the Jews. Still, Schopenhauer had high, rare praise for Heine, whom he discovered late in both their lives. Is it possible that he did not know that Heine was a Jew? (I think he did know.) Or is it possible that Heine's writing caused Schopenahuer to reconsider some of his prejudices? (I think it's quite possible.)

The age of patronage, as it was with Alexander, and still with Charlemagne, and to a large degree still with Napoleon, is now gone -- but completely? I don't know. In earlier ages culture was dependent upon princes. When the prince was enthusiastic and openminded like Alexander or Charlemagne, culture flourished, and therefore life flourished. (I'm closer to the one extreme I criticized at the start of this essay, which states baldly that art alone makes life worthwhile, than I am to its opposite. Maybe I'm wrong when it comes to most people, but in my own particular case I'm right: if I can't be surrounded by, drenched in art, then I'm in a pretty sorry state. I can understand Nietzsche and Wilde pretty well, I can't muster much besides horror when considering a Rockefeller or a Gates.) There are fewer princes around nowadays, the ones who survive have far less power and less to say, in the field of culture as elsewhere; but there still is a type of patronage. Businessmen have to some degree taken the place of princes, and unfortunately they often tend to be somewhere between unsophisticated about and downright hostile to culture. There is large-scale state sponsorship of the arts in many European countries, so large-scale that if they had an inkling of it, many American artists would emigrate. Back here in the home of the brave the most important patrons are the successful artists -- and the philosophers and historians and so forth who have the qualities of artists. Unfortunately we don't have one word which embraces them all, although they are a unity as they always have been, as much now as when Leonardo da Vinci was painting and sculpting and designing buildings and bridges and artillery and dissecting bodies and otherwise embodying the definition of the Renaissance Man -- who recognize and promote and more and more often finance their as-yet unrecognized peers. Ever since Plato, the idea has been to inspire and educate the princes. Well, the princes of the ancien regime are just about gone, and their remnants are more sad than inspiring, let alone inspired, less and less capable of sustaining the old fantasies of good princes. The more successful among the artists, however, have begun over the course of the last few centuries to resemble princes. I'm thinking here more of Coppola than Schwarzenegger, more of Bellow than of Rowling. Clearly, Schwarzenegger has at the moment more political power than Coppola. But one certainly has to hope that Coppola has more power in determining what films will be made, and how and by whom. And that Bellow's appreciative remarks on this or that fellow-writer will still resound when no one any longer remembers Harry Potter.