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.

Excuses

"How can anyone write an entire novel in today's world, with so many media distractions and so forth, bla bla bla!" People who have never actually finished writing a novel have always come up with a lot of excuses for it. That hasn't changed over the centuries. Writing a novel that's any good is extremely difficult. That has also been the same for centuries. There have always been many distractions. People who have written novels have been dissing the ones who made excuses instead, for centuries, and the novelists have always been right.

And then there are the ones, from Vergil to Vikram Seth, who've written fine novels in verse. I stand in awe of them, my cap doffed.

Cervantes, to choose but one example from the novelists, suffered wounds rendering one of his arms permanently paralyzed at the Battle of Lepanto when he was 25 years old. Then he voluntarily spent 3 more years in the Spanish army. Then he spent 5 years as a prisoner of war. And THEN, with one arm, he wrote a whole huge pile of world-renowned literature including one of the best novels ever written.

He wrote all of that stuff instead of whining and making excuses. Not that it would have been very surprising, or even really all that objectionable, at if a person in his position whined a lot, because, come on.

Most people don't know a lot about how many of their favorite pro athletes accomplished many of their most amazing feats with bruises and contusions and sprains and actual broken bones. That's because sports tends to tear your body up, and top athletes tend not to whine about it too much. Kobe whined about it a lot for some reason, especially when he was so focused for some reason on not getting along with the remarkably-good-tempered Shaq (who played hurt just like Kobe and everybody else), but he was still a great athlete. If you listened a lot to Kobe and didn't investigate the matter much, you might think he was an unusual case as far as the conditions he performed under.

Okay, I need to stop whining about Kobe, I'm getting off track here. Like I say, he was a great athlete.

A lot of great accomplishments in human history have been accompanied by a pronounced tendency not to whine and complain in the face of extraordinary difficulty. I could be wrong, but it seems that most human lives have involved extraordinary difficulty of one kind or another.

It would be interesting to see a list of great novels which were written in prison.

"Hillary Clinton and the DNC rigged the primaries!" No they didn't. And Debbie Wassermann-Schultz did not set out to destroy Bernie Sanders' career. The plain truth is just about exactly the opposite: Bernie Sanders, that non-reality-based paranoid ogre, deliberately ruined Debbie's career -- hopefully only for the moment. Hillary won the nomination, she didn't steal it. But Bernie will always be the Democratic Party's Emperor of Whiny Crybabies.

But of course, in the category of insane, non-reality-based whiny-crybaby excuses, the other party have got us beat hands-down. That orange combover has already been making excuses for a long time for defeats he hasn't even suffered yet: defeats against Hillary in the debates and in November.

I can't imagine anyone with less reason to whine and complain than that whiny crybaby. Except maybe about the size of his penis. That's actually not his own fault.

Alrighty then! Those of us who've been paying attention, let's ramp it up, let's work harder at spreading the news to everybody else, the news that this Presidential campaign is a good, experienced, competent, steady, extremely capable progressive candidate against a whiny orange crybaby who's either an insane bigot or pretending to be one -- and which would be worse?

It's Hillary against a nightmare. Sing it high, sing it low. Go tell it on the mountain. Make the others understand. We have no excuse not to.

Founders Of National Literatures

In some cases it's very easy to spot the first great figure in the literature of a nation -- "great" not in the sense that they were bettter writers than others, that's a subjective call, but in the sense that they formed a reference point for the literature that followed, great in the sense that the writers and readers of that nation looked at each of them as a kind of founder of their culture.

In some cases that figure is very easy to spot: in Greece it's Homer, in post-Roman Italy it's Dante, in Spain it's Cervantes, in England it's Shakespeare, in Russia it's Pushkin.

In ancient Rome, some would say, it's Vergil. Others would say it's Cicero. I, and perhaps a few others, would say that Horace and Sallust and Ovid write rings around those two. (Then again, by my own criteria, that's not the point.)

The situation is quite murky in Amurrka, because after the mediocrity of Irving and the so-so melodramatic novels of Cooper came Melville, the most accomplished writer in our nation's history, but dishonored in his own time, and always an outsider. He even founded an Amurrkin tradition of outsider-writers: Emerson, Faulkner, Gaddis, the Beats. The fucked-upness of our literature is world-famous.

Who's the first great German writer? Luther, Grimmelshausen, and Goethe, the top 3 choices, are about as different from one another as 3 writers can be. Is that bad for Germany, or nice for Germany?

(Or is this all incredibly meaningless and beautiful?)

France just simply doesn't have one. Maybe because the field is more crowded with geniuses that the literature of any other nation.

And when I think that there must be similar sitchy-ashuns in the literature of Portugal and Lithuania and Mexico and hundreds of other nations, discussions including thousands of writers whose names I have never heard, my mind reels at how much bigger the world is than my mind.