Latin After the Classics

I'm writing this post for very much the same reason I've written several earlier posts: because I encounter people who equate Latin with ancient Latin and seem unaware of how much Latin literature has survived which was written after the ancient era ended around AD 450, the date of the latest "pagan" Latin texts.

There are some other people, who seem to believe that ancient Latin is the only WORTHWHILE Latin ever written, the only Latin worth reading. On that subject, I would ask you to consider this: only a tiny fraction of what was written by pre-Christian Latin authors has survived to the present. What we have now, to a great extent, is what people considered to be most worth preserving. No doubt much was written in ancient Latin which was of much lower quality. Much more of the writing of lower quality has survived from the Medieval, Renaissance and more recent eras. If you compare ancient Latin to more recent Latin, it's only fair to compare the best to the best.

 

But --  must you compare? I doubt that I will be able to stop anyone who is so disposed from disparaging Latin from post-ancient eras. But perhaps I can encourage others to read what they like, without allowing snobs to ruin things for them.

So: I am not comparing the following Latin works to ancient Latin. Plenty of others do that full-time, and find the newer stuff wanting. Such comparisons don't interest me. 

Boethius wrote in the earliest post-"pagan" period. He lived from ca AD 480 to 524. His magnum opus de consolatione philosophiae is well-known. In addition to that, many of his writings on music and mathematics have survived.

Isidore of Seville, ca AD 560 to 636, is also known for one work above all, his Etymologiae. Many others of his work survive, some on physics, some theological, some historical.

Gregory of Tours, c538-594, wrote an Historia Francorum which is one of our few written sources of information about the Merovingian dynasty down to Gregory's time.

Alcuin of York, born around 735, died 804, was the chief architect of Charlemagne's massive program of educational reform. Like Charlemagne, Alcuin seems to have been very charismatic and persuasive. He would debate with Charlemagne over matters of policy, often daring to chide and contradict the Emperor. Many of his written works survive. His poems, while not always masterpieces, are very expressive and winning.

Matthew Paris, died 1259, an English Benedictine monk, besides being one of the very best of Medieval historians, was also a gifted drawers of pictures, as can be seen in some of the manuscripts of his works which he himself made, as well as in maps which are considered some of the finest of the Middle Ages. I would heartily recommend all of his historical writings, but above all the Chronica majora. 

The examples could be endless. Reading some Medieval or later Latin works will tend to lead you to others.

It seems that often, people these days read translations from the Latin without realizing that they are translations. Bacon and Hobbes wrote about as much in Latin as they did in English. As did John Milton. No, I'm not talking about Paradise Lost, that was written in English, but Milton's Defense of the English People, for example, was originally Defensio pro Populo Anglicano. Kant, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Romain Rolland all published works in Latin. Prefaces to works of classical Greek and Latin are routinely written in Latin to this day. And if you say you are studying Medieval history, and you don't read Latin, then I have to risk sounding like one of the snobs I began this essay by denouncing, and wonder exactly what you are studying.

Boethius

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Taking Other People's Word About Some Linguistic Aspects Of The Middle Ages

As Confucius said, "The more I learn about people, the more I like dogs." People are very often unreliable in the things that they say. It's well known that the more expert a person is in a given area, the more likely he or she is to become infuriated by news coverage or depictions in movies of that particular topic, because the newspeople or moviemakers are getting it all wrong.

The more I learn about history, the more I learn that people tend to talk non-stop mess about it. Very often in this blog I've railed against people *coughcough Paulkovich coughcough* who present themselves as experts on a given subject, and in the process betray an almost complete unfamiliarity with that topic.

If you believe, as I do, that the study of history is important, this is discouraging. If you study history to a certain degree, you will find that the people blithely chattering nonsense about it very often include those academics who are supposed to be the experts about history.

Academic historians tend to be much, much more accurate than some others *coughcough Vridar, Carrier coughcough* who present themselves as experts. But they still leave a lot to be desired.

Take for example some widespread notions, widely spread not by New Atheist bloggers but by history professors, about the Middle Ages: we have been told, for example, that between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance, when many people suddenly started to insist that good Latin meant imitating Cicero's prose, the quality of Latin declined to a miserable state, and that the knowledge of Greek practically disappeared from Western Europe, and that the West became re-acquainted with writers such as Plato and Aristotle when texts which had been translated from Greek to Arabic were in turn translated from Arabic into Latin.

It's easy enough to clear up that last one: BUZZERSOUND, untrue. It's true that a lot of Greek medical knowledge made its way to Western Europe by going from Greek to Arabic to Latin. But there were not a lot of Latin manuscripts of Plato or Aristotle which translated from Arabic translations. I doubt if as much as one entire volume went this double-translation route.

As far as Medieval Latin being miserable in quality: yeah, a lot of it was. I for one am certain that a lot of ancient Latin was also miserable in quality, and that the very bad ancient stuff has for the most part disappeared. For the *coughcough Nepos coughcough* most part. Along with the badly-written Medieval Latin which has been preserved, however, a lot of very well-written Medieval Latin has also survived. For example, the works of Boethius, Isidore, Bede, Alcuin, Einhard, John Scotus, Anastasius, Notker, Orderic, Abelard, William of Tyre, Matthew Paris, Roger Bacon, William of Occam, to name just a few of the brightest highlights, and so many other very good writers that it really makes you wonder just exactly how so very many people who were paid decent salaries to spend their entire careers looking into such things could manage to fit their heads so far up their own asses. Makes you wonder how many of the people who are supposed to be our authorities for Medieval history and culture can actually read Latin. If you're wondering whether reading proficiency in Latin is important in order to be in a position to tell other people what was what in the Middle Ages: stop wondering. It should be the first priority. And if some tenured full professors of Medieval Studies disagree, well then some of those professors are full of shit.

It seems that over the course of the past century, this notion about Medieval Latin having been uniformly very poor in quality has been corrected to a great degree. Whether this is because over the past century a great many professors of Medieval Studies have read great Medieval Latin literature, or because they've just happened to take the word of authorities who are more accurate on this point, I don't know. I certainly hope it's the former.

All of the Medieval Latin writers listed above had at least some interest in ancient Latin literature. And it's difficult to have any interest in ancient Latin literature without becoming quite curious about Greek culture and the Greek language. Indeed, quite a few of the ancient Latin authors quote so much Greek in their works that it's very difficult to understand them without some mastery of Greek.

When it comes to how widespread knowledge of Greek remained in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, I have to take other people's word for it, because my Greek isn't good enough for me to look at the relevant primary sources for myself and see what was up. And the authorities don't all seem to be in complete agreement. And when they are in agreement, their statements are so often so close to word-for-word identical that I have to wonder whether they're all taking the word of one person.

If great hordes of Medieval scholars were completely fluent in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, we wouldn't have these kinds of problems. (I imagine that a great many, these days, are in fact fluent in Latin. But I don't know. I'd bet on it but I don't know.)

I suppose it might reasonably be countered that very few people give a rat's ass about such things. I believe that the study of history is very important, but I realize that not everyone does. It would be even more reasonable to opine that I sound rather odd for a 54-year-old man who didn't begin to study Latin intensively until his 40's, and who knows very little Greek. Yes, given my biography and skills, It might very well be said that I am being quite unreasonable, angrily denouncing people for leaving undone things which I myself have left undone.

Anywho: there's seems to be little if any disagreement with the assertion that Boethius (c. 480 – 525) was highly fluent in Greek. It seems that the opinion that Isidore (c. 560–636) was a master of Greek is much less widely-held than it used to be. (Because more people with great expertise in Greek have looked into the matter lately, or because people are now taking a different authority's word for it? Probably the former. I hope it's the former.)

Bede's level of competence in Greek seems to be somewhat controversial. John Scotus (815-877) and Anastasius (810-878) seem to be acknowledged, at least by some, to have been the greatest Western scholars of Greek of their time, but the level of their skills in the language seems to be under dispute. And it seems -- that is to say: I am taking other people's word for it when I say -- that a great spread of Greek scholarship in the West began, not with the Renaissance in the 15th century, but long before that, with the spread of universities beginning in the 11th century.

And to make all of this just that much more wonderful: measurement of linguistic skill remains, of course, irreducibly subjective. And prejudice, along with evidence, may influence the judgements of even the most authoritative authority, in this as in all human things. For example, a Christian apologist may want to portray the early Middle Ages in a very positive light, and as a part of this he or she may want to portray Isidore as being more learned, or the instruction in the earliest Medieval universities as being more advanced, than the evidence shows; or, an atheist historian may wish to portray the entire Middle Ages as a Christian disaster, and may also highly prize ancient Greek culture, and may therefore want to portray Medieval familiarity with Greek as being more tenuous than the evidence shows. Subjectivity is everywhere in human discourse, distorting away. Everywhere. In this blog too. I try to overcome it, but I hardly believe that I succeed entirely.