Why Study Latin?

Today, many people who study Latin describe it as a hobby. For others, it is much more.

As recently as few hundred years ago, anyone in Western Europe considering a career in academia, or diplomacy, or anything else which involved constant contact with an international group of people, had to have a good grasp of Latin. They had to be able to read it, write, and speak it at least a little, and preferably more than just a little.

And therefore, anyone today who wants to read about any of those people, about Elizabeth I of England, or Wallenstein, or John Milton, or Martin Luther, is only going to get so far without needing to be able to read Latin. 

Western philosophy from Lucretius to Decartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, and a not inconsiderable amount even more recently, is in Latin. Catholic theology until 1962, and a great deal of the earliest Protestant theology, is in Latin. Newton Wrote about physics in Latin, Gauss about mathematics, Linnaeus about biology. Francis Bacon, Galileo, Hobbes, all wrote in Latin.

You might object that all of the people I've named so far also wrote in other languages, and you'd be right, although just barely in the case of Spinoza. You can read works in their original form by all of the above without knowing any Latin, although only a very little work in Dutch by Spinoza. 

But go back another few hundred years, and many of the leading minds wrote only in Latin: Roger Bacon, William of Occam, Thomas Aquinas, Gerard of Cremona, Albertus Magnus.

As did the historians Gregory of Tours, Bede, Einhard, Nithard, William of Malmsbury, William of Tyre, Matthew Paris, Henry of Huntington, and many others, including many anonymous chroniclers, many of them good writers, many famously bad, but all of them writing in Latin.

Church records, baptisms, marriages and funerals, inscriptions on tombstones, public buildings and currency. Government archives. Compendiums of laws.

And then there is the ancient Latin which remains, relatively small in quantity but generally very high in quality, which we call the Latin Classics, read, quoted and emulated by all of the above. Especially in the Latin Renaissances of the 9th, 12th, 15th and 19th centuries. 

And I mustn't forget to mention all of the Latin poetry and plays and fiction written since the ancient era.

And is a 21st century Latin Renaissance already underway? Some seem to think so. The number of people going to the trouble of learning to speak Latin, not just to recite it but to engage in spontaneous Latin conversation, seems to be rising. 

As I said, for some, Latin is a wonderful hobby. It does nothing but make them happy. But given all of the above sorts of Latin available today to be read, it seems to me that a writer could make more than a hobby of it. A poet, an historian or a philosopher. Yes, for many different sorts of authors, the above-listed sorts of written Latin could offer more than just a hobby.

Buy Neo-Latin books on Amazon: https://amzn.to/40gFwqZ

Ancient Manuscripts of Classical Latin

Sir Kenneth Clark, talking about the Italian Renaissance, put the number of surviving ancient manuscripts at no more than 3 or 4, and I naturally jumped right out of my skin, all the more so because Ken generally knew what he was talking about.

No, Texts and Transmission unfortunately does not give a total, although it naturally can be some help here.

If we take AD 500 as the cut-off point, Mynors' edition of Vergil lists 7 or 8 (7 or 8 because one is described as "saec. v/vi"), there are 7 or 8 ancient fragments of Cicero (once again because one is of the 5th or 6th century), the palimpsest of Fronto is of the 5th century, and the palimpsest of Gaius is 5th century, that of Gallus 1st century BC. There's a 4th-century palimpsest of Gellius, a 5th-century palimpsest of Granius, 6 ancient Livian manuscripts, 3 ancient fragments of Lucan, a 5th-century palimpsest of Plautus, 3 ancient fragments of the Elder Pliny and 1 of the Younger Pliny.

We have 7 ancient fragments of Sallust, 1 ancient manuscript of (the Younger) Seneca and 5 of Terence.

That makes a total of 46, or 47 or 48. No doubt I missed some and the actual total is higher.

On the other hand, of course, it is entirely possible that Sir Kenneth knew exactly what he was talking about and I don't -- few things could be less surprising than that. If he was referring to the number of ancient MSS known in the 15th century, the number would be smaller than 46, a number of pailmpsests and papyri having been discovered in the meantime. If he was referring to the number known in Italy in the 15th century, the number would naturally shrink again, and even more if he was referring to the number known to a particular individual 15th-century Italian Classicist.

And of course, it can be that Ken had an earlier cut-off date in mind than AD 500.

And of course, if anyone knows of any MSS that I missed, I'd be delighted to hear about it. 

Buy Civilisation by Kenneth Clark at Amazon: https://amzn.to/3PDhP7j 

Classical and Medieval Latin

I've read a lot of disparaging comments about Medieval Latin lately -- "the average Dark Age scribe" this and "the average Dark Age scribe" that -- and instead of replying directly to one of these stern Ciceronians in some such snarky manner as: "Jeepers, you sure know a lot about Dark Age scribes! Could you cut and paste some especially bad examples of their bad Latin so that we may all together jeer at their ineptitude and utter disregard of vowel quantity?" I thought it might be better to express myself here, to my, hopefully somewhat better-disposed usual readership, and just to mention a few very basic things. 

 

First of all, although it's hard to imagine that any Latinists do not already know this, it may be helpful to remind ourselves that almost every single bit of the Classical Latin corpus which has survived to our time, survived because Medieval monks copied it. Medieval students were taught Latin, not just with the Vulgate (not that that would have been so terrible. Jerome could write), but also with Cicero and Caesar and Vergil, and with all of the other Classical authors. As hard as it seems to be for some to grasp, the Classical authors were copied in order to be taught. Classical Latin rotting on Medieval shelves was the exception, not the rule.

Secondly, something which seems quite obvious to me, but perhaps only because I've brooded upon the subject unusually long: the corpus of Classical Latin is very small. A few million words written by a few hundred authors. The amount of Medieval Latin preserved today is many times greater. The mediocre Classical authors have disappeared, the everyday Medieval schlubs have not. If we're going to compare Classical Latin with Medieval, we should compare like with like: the best Classical authors with the best Medieval authors. Livy with Matthew Paris. Ovid with Alcuin. Cicero with Abelard. But Paris, Alcuin and Abelard, of course, tend not to be read by those who insist that only ancient Latin is Latin at all, let along being the only Latin worth knowing about with the possible exception of a few Renaissance  Italian Ciceronians.

As far the average Medieval scribe is concerned, there is very little average ancient Latin left with which he could be compared: some scraps of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, some graffiti on the walls of Vesuvius, some of the humbler of the ancient Latin inscriptions. Nothing which is conventionally counted in the Classical corpus.

I do hesitate to point this out, I feel I'm being a bit rude, but I feel I have little choice: those who disparage Medieval typically have not just read very little of it, and what little they have read, they have treated very unfairly by condemning it because it is different in style than Cicero. Very few people judge contemporary English, I believe, by firmly insisting that if it doesn't sound just exactly like Shakespeare, it's crap. It's also quite rare, I believe, to insist that that which is called 17th-, 18th-, 19th-, 20th or 21st-century English is not English at all, if it does not very closely resemble Shakespeare, and nevermind that Pope, Fielding, Wordsworth, Joyce and I had all read Shakespeare.

That would be to ignore the fact, if one had ever learned it all, that languages change.

I don't delude myself that I'm going to change the mind of a single Ciceronian, anti-Medievalist Latinist. And I certainly don't dispute that Classical Latin is wonderful and offers more than an entire career's worth of scope for study -- any more than any of those Medieval scribes would have disputed it, who copied it, and are the only reason we still have it. 

But perhaps I've given a smile to a Medieval Latinist or two, who, like me, grows a bit weary now and then of the way their field is denigrated by some.

Poggio, and the Latin Classics in 15th-Century Italy, France and Germany

Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees. One obvious conclusion to be drawn from Poggio's having "rescued" manuscripts including Lucretius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Silius Italicus, Vitruvius, Quintilian, Manilius, parts of Valerius Flaccus, Frontinus on aqueducts and several of Cicero's speeches, which Poggio found in Germany and France, where -- according to Poggio -- they were moldering away, neglected by barbarous German and French monks who did not know what treasures they had, who could barely read Latin -- one obvious conclusion is that, up until Poggio bringing these texts back to Italy, they had gone missing in Italy. 

 

As for there having been no noteworthy Latinists anywhere but in Italy in Poggio's time, that is nonsense obvious enough that I hope I don't need to comment on it. 

As far as the manuscripts of the Classics having been laying neglected and worm-eaten in German and French monasteries before Poggio "rescued" them, perhaps one reason so many of these manuscripts vanished after Poggio had "rescued" them and after they had been copied, is very simply that, had they survived, their physical condition might have given the lie to Poggio's account of the state of German and French libraries. 

Poggio wrote a celebrated treatise denouncing hypocrisy. Who would've known the subject better than an accomplished and ruthless hypocrite?

The relatively few manuscripts which did not disappear after Poggio "rescued" them from France and Germany do not present a worm-eaten, neglected appearance. 

And as far as Poggio's greatest claim to fame today, after Stephen Greenblatt's best-selling collection of errors entitled The Swerve, namely that he and he alone rescued Lucretius from oblivion: besides the northern mauscript which Poggio "discovered" and then lost, there are two other northern manuscripts of Lucretius which have survived to this day, both from the 9th century, and fragments of yet another, also from the 9th century.

I do not wish to make Poggio's nationalistic ravings any worse by adding to them nationalistic ravings of my own. One of the best things about Classical studies is its international character. All I wish to do is to encourage scholars to reflect upon to what extent Poggio's accounts of his manuscript-hunts, and above all, his descriptions of the places where he found manuscripts, make any sense.

100 Hot Books

Open Letter to Melvyn Bragg, re: the Latin Classics in the Middle Ages

Dear Mr Bragg, I'm a big fan of "In Our Time." Lately I've been listening to many episodes, often having to do with subjects in the Middle Ages. I'm writing because I have repeatedly gotten the impression that you, and consequently many of your listeners, are laboring under the impression that the "pagan," pre-Christian Latin Classics were shunned by Christian scholars in the Middle Ages, except in anomalous periods such as the Carolingian Renaissance or the 12th-century Renaissance. I keep waiting for one of your expert guests to clarify this point. And maybe one of them has in the meantime, which would make this open letter superfluous as far as you personally are concerned. But even in that case, perhaps someone else will learn something. And in any case, it's always good when something spurs me to write. 

The fact is that the Latin Classics were always read and discussed during the Middle Ages. The 9th and 12th centuries are referred to as Renaissances in reference to the Latin Classics, because a greater emphasis was put upon studying them than in other periods. Or to be more precise: education in general advanced greatly in 9th-century and again in 12th-century Catholic Europe, and, although this education was clearly Christian in its overall emphasis, Classical Latin was an essential part of the whole, and grew naturally as the whole of education grew.

 

Now, when it comes to the Greek Classics, it is true that knowledge of them was almost completely lost in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. A great part of the population of the ancient city of Rome, and of the ancient Western, Latin-speaking provinces, could read and write Greek. But in the Middle Ages, this familiarity with the Greek language dwindled to just a very few individuals in the West. Plato continued to be studied, but in Latin translation, and little else. Even Latin translations of Homer, apart from a few rather wretched abridgments, had to wait for the 15th century. When it comes to knowledge of the Greek language and the study of a broad array of the Greek Classics, "Renaissance" describes 15th-century Western Europe well.

When it comes to the Latin classics in the West, however, I am reminded of a wonderful remark made by Professor Eugen Weber in his television series from the 1980's, The Western Tradition. Debunking the notion that people were afraid that Columbus would sail off of the edge of the Earth, Weber said, "Some people in Columbus' time believed that the Earth was flat. Some people still do."

Similarly, some Medieval Christians were opposed to any study of the non-Christian Latin Classics, and some Christians still are. Some Medieval Christians were convinced that the Latin classics were evil, and some Christians still are. But at no point in time were such viewpoints prevalent enough to actually prevent the study of those Classics. 

One demonstration of this is the number of manuscripts of the classics which survive today from each of the Medieval centuries. The number swells in the 9th century, and again in the 12th, and especially in the 15th, until printing took over. Even in the 7th century, in the middle of the Dark Ages between the fall of the Western Empire and Charlemagne's new Empire, a few Classical manuscripts were made which still survive today. It's easy to find pronouncements by zealous and/or prudish Medieval Christians condemning this or that ancient Latin author, or condemning everything written in ancient Latin. Nevertheless, Cicero never ceased to be the model of Latin prose followed in the schools, or Vergil the model of Latin verse. Schoolboys have read Caesar from Caesar's time to the present, the only change being the growing number of schoolgirls who have joined them. Horace, Terence, Plautus, Ovid -- yes, Ovid -- and many others were read the whole time. A wide knowledge of the Latin Classics belonged to the well-rounded education a Pope or bishop was expected to possess. Pope Gregory the Great, in office for a long period in the late 6th and early 7th century, was no enthusiastic friend of the Classics, and may have been directly or indirectly responsible for their above-mentioned decline, but if so, he knew what it was which he opposed. And his distaste for the Classics was very unusual among Popes.

There are some Classical manuscripts which were abridged by pious and/or prudish Medieval Christians, but these are very few, very much the exception. Marginal disapproving notes in the margins of the manuscripts are only slightly more common. As with the widely-held notion that people -- a lot of people -- thought Columbus was going to sail off the edge of a flat Earth, the notion that vast areas of Medieval Europe went for long periods of time completely unlettered in the Latin Classics is simply mistaken.

Propertius

Sextus Propertius (ca 55 BC -- after 16 BC), foremost of ancient Latin elegiasts, was born into a wealthy family in Assisi in Umbria. His father died while he was still a small child, but his mother oversaw his education, which was good even by the standards of wealthy Romans. Part of the family's property was seized in 40 BC and used to pay the soldiers of Octavian, the future emperor Augustus. This reduced their income considerably, although it appears that Propertius never was bothered by having to make a living.

In 34 BC the family moved to the city of Rome, and Propertius took on the dress and habits of adulthood. He showed no interest in the law law, politics or army life. He befriended poets such as Ovid as Bassus.

In 29 BC Propertius published his first book of elegies, known as Cynthia after the woman who was their main subject. It was immediately popular, and remained the most sought-after of his works, and are still the most popular today, despite the fact that his later three books of elegies, less single-minded in the love-struck pursuit of romance, are often regarded as his best work. Propertius published a total of four books of elegies during his lifetime. They were sold together, or the first book, Cynthia, could be bought by itself; therefore, it was sometimes referred to as Monobiblos. Propertius himself seems to have been a little embarrassed to be so often associated only with Monobiblios, and he protested that he could do more than just sigh and moan over a woman. His later works often treat mythological subjects including but not limited to the founding of Rome, which the ancient Romans did not refer to as mythological whether they knew better or not.

The popularity of Propertius' first effort brought him to the attention of the wealthy literary patron Maecenas, which in turn led to his friendship with Vergil and Horace, and to the favour of the Imperial family, and this led to some poems which extravagantly praise Augustus.

The earliest surviving written copies of Propertius' poems are graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, which seem to confirm the impression that he was very popular indeed in his own time. Then in the 2nd century, Apuleius mentions him, and opines that Cynthia's real name was Hostia. But overall, not many mentions of Propertius have been found between his own time and the mid 12th century, when he is his praised and quoted by John of Salisbury. The oldest surviving complete manuscript of his poems, referred to as N because it had spent some time in Naples, was made shortly before AD 1200. The second is known as A and was made around AD 1250. A number of 14th- and 15th-century manuscripts survive, most or all of which seem to derive ultimately from either N or A. After a thousand years in which there apparently was very little interest in his work, Propertius has been one of the most highly-regarded Latin poets from the Renaissance down to our own day. Just another reminder that literary tastes sometimes change considerably.

The Carolingian Renaissance

Apart from the effect Charlemagne had on politics, education and literacy in general, art, architecture -- you must take a look at the Palace of Aachen if you're ever in the area -- and the beginnings of German literature, his impact on Classical studies was immense. Here is a list, given by LD Reynolds in the introduction to Texts and Transmission, 1983, p xxviii, of authors and anonymous works of the Latin Classics for which we possess 9th-century manuscripts:

Agrimensores, Ammianus, Apicius, Apuleius, Aratea, Ausonius, Avianus, Caelius, Aurelianus, Caesar, Celsus, Censorinus, Charisius, Cicero, Claudian, Columella, Curtius Rufus, Donatus, Eutropius, Faventius, Florus, Frontinus, Gellius, Grattius, Historia Augusta, Horace, Hyginus, Justinus, Juvenal, Livy, Lucan, Lucretius, Macrobius, Martial, Martianus Capella, Pomponius Mela, Nemesianus, Nonius Marcellus, Notitia dignitatum, Ovid, Palladius, Julius Paris, Persius, Petronius, Phaedrus, the Elder and Younger Pliny, Publius, Querolus, Quintilian, Rhetores latini minores, Rhetorica ad Herennium, Sallust, the Elder and Younger Seneca, Q Serenus, Servius, Solinus, Statius, Suetonius, Tacitus, Terence, Valerius Flaccus, Valerius Maximus, Vergil, Vibius Sequester and Vitruvius.

And, as Reynolds points out ibid, there were once even more 9th century manuscripts, which the 15th-century Humanists discovered and then lost. And it may be that still more 9th-century manuscripts have come to light since 1983, I'm not sure. Compare this with the 7th century, from which survives (ibid, p xvi) a fragment of Lucan as the solitary Classical artifact.

Some lists of manuscripts have more significance than others. The above list shows how one monarch transformed the study of Classical Latin, because almost all of the 9th-century manuscripts in that list were made in monasteries and school either newly built or rejuvenated, mostly the former, on Charlemagne's orders.

Countless Classical scholars over the past 1200 years have been immensely grateful for the Carolingian minuscule, the form of handwriting developed in Charlemagne's time which has made reading those 9th-century manuscripts so much easier than so many manuscripts written both earlier and later.

All of this makes Charlemagne's own case more poignant: although he was said to have spoken Latin, Arabic and Greek in addition to his native German -- which may seem less farfetched to you when consider that his empire bordered on Arab-controlled Spain to the south-west and Greek Byzantium to the east -- he never quite mastered writing. Einhard describes how, late in his life, he did his writing lessons in bed before going to sleep, but never did quite get the hang of it. Some people don't believe Einhard's description. To me it rings true. I suppose the question must remain unsolved for now.

Another question which can't be answered, in part because it's difficult to quantify, is, which single person has done the most to rescue the literature of ancient Rome. Some have said Cassidorius. Others have said Poggio, but we know that those people are half-educated bozos. Perhaps I'm biased, perhaps I've been taken in by by the lingering effects of some medieval legends, but to me, it's always seemed clear that it was Charlemagne.

Gregory the Great and Classical Latin

A number of years ago, when I was even more obviously a layman when it comes to Classical Studies than I am now, I and a prominent Classical scholar exchanged a number of emails. He very generously took the time to answer various questions I had about the transmission of Classical Latin literature. He answered every one of my emails thoroughly and with amazing promptness. I am even more amazed now by his generosity towards me than I was at the time, because now I know somewhat more about the enormous amount of work this man has done in finding, reading, editing and commenting upon manuscripts of ancient Latin. He wasn't just sitting around with nothing to do when I, a nobody, contacted him.

One of my questions I posed to this scholar concerned the authority of the suggestion by Oxford professor Albert C Clark, in his 1921 paper "The Reappearance of the Texts of the Classics," that Gregory the Great, Pope from 590 to 604, had "burnt all manuscripts of Livy which he could find." My correspondent said that he was aware of Prof Clark's assertion and flatly rejected it as being an anecdote without any evidence, and added that he was an atheist, so he wasn't grinding an ax. Which surprised me a little, since I hadn't written a word about Christian belief or atheism or ax-grinding. It surprises me a little less now, since in the intervening years I have experienced a tremendous amount of ax-grinding on the part of apologists and atheists on the subject of how, how much and why Classical Latin declined during the Dark Ages. (By "Dark Ages" I -- and many others -- mean the period between the fall of the Roman Empire in the late fifth century AD, and the rise of Charlemagne's Empire around AD 800.)

The earliest reference I have yet been able to find to Gregory's deliberate destruction of manuscripts of Livy was written by William of Malmesbury, over 500 years after Gregory's death. [PS, 29 Mar 2018: Perhaps eventually I will learn not to trust my memory, but to check and be certain before claiming that So-and-so wrote such-and-such. It seems that William wrote no such thing, and that his contemporary, John of Salisbury, wrote that Gregory burned some pagan books, but with no mention of Livy. See the comments below. My apologies. The search continues for where Prof Clark may have gotten the idea that Gregory burned manuscripts of Livy.] I don't find that length of time, in and of itself, to be a convincing reason to reject William's report: Gregory was a tremendously powerful figure, tremendously well-respected all over the Catholic world long after his death, certainly still in William's time, and it would have been dangerous to publicly say scandalous things about him, but that doesn't mean that things could not have been privately, and accurately, said. More convincing evidence against the burning than those 500 years, it seems to me, is how expensive parchment was in the Dark Ages, and how widespread the practice of palimpsesting: the earlier pagan text was scraped off of the parchment, and a Christian text written in its place. The pagan text was just as thoroughly gone as if it had been burned, or so the palimpsester would've thought at the time. But they were wrong. Since the late 18th century, with the aid of various modern technologies, we have been able to recover some of those palimpsested pagan texts, reading them just from the indentations they left behind.

2 of the 8 manuscripts of Livy written before Gregory's time which are known to still exist survive only as palimpsests. One of these, now preserved as Biblioteca Capitolare XL (38) in Verona,

was overwritten with a text by Gregory. This can be shrugged off as a hilarious coincidence -- but should it be?

The fact is that many Classical Latin texts, including the approximately 3/4 of Livy's huge long history of Rome which we don't have today, began to disappear in the late 6th century. How do we know this? Because those Classical texts were quoted up until the late 6th century, and then not later, ever -- unless they miraculously appeared later, like the other palimpsest of Livy, Palatinus Lat. 24 in the Vatican Library, which was found, in the late 18th century, to contain a palimpsest of a 1000-word-long passage from book 91 of Livy, a passage which no-one had seen in a very, very long time.

Okay, so a lot of ancient Latin literature went missing during the same time that Gregory was rising toward the Papacy -- should we therefore assume that it went missing because of Gregory?

Yes! We shouldn't paint Christians of the period with a broad brush. It is known that some of them supported the preservation of Classical literature and that some of them did not. It is known that Gregory did not -- and that he was by far the most powerful man of his time in Catholic Christendom, the entire area where Latin was the primary written language. He is only one of 3 Popes to have been called "the Great," and I'll bet most of you can't name either of the other 2. It was he who came up with the 7 Deadly Sins. He thought volcanoes were Hell overflowing because it was so full of damned souls, and that the End was Near. He was sainted immediately after his death by popular acclaim. When a man had that much influence and disapproved of the Latin Classics, it's no more than common sense to assume that he had a lot to do with the way that they disappeared en masse on his watch, and to ask that the burden of prove be placed on those attempting to demonstrate that he did not.

Apologists will snort and laugh at my claim that Gregory caused much of the literary legacy of ancient Rome to disappear. They will accuse me of painting with a broad brush, despite my having said that some Dark Age Christians helped to preserve Classical Latin. Benedict of Nursia and Cassiodorus are 2 great examples. They themselves, the apologists, will paint with a broad brush, such as when they claim that every time that non-Christians waged war in the Dark Ages, it meant the wholesale destruction of written material including the Classics, and that every time Christians of the same period waged war, it did not.

As in every case of historical controversy, I advise those who really want to know to turn to the primary sources.

I'm angry, angry at Gregory, and I'm not bothering to try to hide it. Does this mean that I'm grinding an ax, or that I'm considering things which would make any reasonable person angry?

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.

The 6 Most Important Things In Western Civilization

In chronological order:

1. A garbage dump. The garbage dump outside of Oxyrhynchus, which was a city founded in Egypt after Alexander conquered the area in 332 BC and abandoned after the Arabs conquered it in AD 641. For the nearly 1000 years in between, people lived in Oxyrhynchus and threw garbage into big heaps outside of town. This garbage included papyrus with stuff written on it. Most ancient papyrus with stuff written on it has rotted away long ago, but some has survived because it was put into jars as in the cases of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library, or into coffins with dead people, or, in the case of these garbage heaps at Oxyrhyncchus, because the climate just happened to be just exactly right. A huge amount of papyrus was recovered there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A little over 5000 pieces, a small fraction of the total, have been edited and published so far, including many copies of existing and previously-lost Classical Greek texts and a few very important for the study of Classical Latin.

2. Pope Gregory the Great. Important in a bad way: on his watch (he was Pope from 590 to 604) much of Classical literature went missing. In the case one Classical author after another, we have records of their being known, such as quotes or other mentions, up until the late 6th century. Did Gregory intentionally destroy all copies of Livy which came into his grasp? I can't prove that he did, but it doesn't matter. He was far and away the most powerful man of his time. He thought that the End was Near, that Hell was full with the souls of sinners and volcanoes were places were Hell was spilling over, and a lot of Classical literature, and competency in the Greek language, disappeared on his watch. Intent or incompetency, who cares? He's guilty, case closed.

3. Petrarch. Perhaps many of you know him as one of the three first great writers in Italian, along with Dante and Boccaccio, and that's fine and all, but nevermind that because Petrarch, in the 14th century, also started the Renaissance. Many people all along, all through the Dark and Middle Ages, had made heroic efforts to preserve the great literature of ancient Greece and Rome -- mention must be made of Cassadorius, who lived around the same time as Gregory and preserved much of the ancient literature Gregory destroyed either by intent or neglect -- but Petrarch is the greatest of them all. Many of the best manuscripts of ancient Latin literature we have today are copies made by Petrarch.

4. The 19th century. There actually seems to have been an increase, in the 19th century , of the number of people who studied the Classics. Many a 19th-century author writing in a vernacular quoted copiously from the Latin Classics, and didn't bother to translate, assuming that his audience was fluent. A few even assumed the same with Greek.

The recovery of texts in palimpsest, begun in the late 18th century, really got rolling in the 19th, with Cardinal Angelo Mai, librarian of the Vatican, leading the way.

I'm sure many of you have heard of the Oxford Classical Texts, begun late in the 19th century. I wonder how many of my non-German readers realize that the Teubner series, begun in the mid-19th century, is what the Oxford Classical Texts want to be when they grow up. The Oxford series is a wonderful thing, but it was begun in conscious imitation of Teubner, and Teubner continues to be the standard, with the largest numbers of titles in print, in volumes of the highest standards of construction.

They really are nice, you should check them out.

5. The Internet. Do you remember how, in the late 20th century, so many people predicted that technology would accelerate the dying-out of the more obscure languages? It has done the opposite. Remember how, in the early days of the Internet, it was predicted that languages not written in Latin letters, such as Greek, Russian, Arabic and Chinese, would be pushed out by technology? They learned how to format those languages, though, didn't they? No change of browser required any longer.

In the case of the Classics, there are wonderful online resources such as the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, the Rheinisches Museum and What's New in Papyrology, to name just a few.

6. The relentless onward march of technology. Like multi-spectral imaging, with which texts on papyri and parchment which had been considered unreadable because of wear and tear, dirt or overwriting suddenly come forth into clear view.

Scholarly Editing

There's a huge difference, for an historian, between studying events which took place two hundred years ago, and those which transpired two thousand years ago. While there are piles and shelves and entire large libraries' worth of the original copies of documents written or dictated by the American Founding Fathers and the protagonists in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, taking quite a bit of the doubt out of our conceptions of what people like George Washington and Georges Danton really wished to communicate to their contemporaries, we don't have any original copies of the works of Julius Caesar or Livy or Ovid or Vergil, or any other of the Classical Latin authors. We don't have any copies made within three hundred years of the lives of the authors in the cases of Livy or Vergil. In the cases of Caesar and Ovid, enormously popular authors from their own time down to the present, no manuscripts have survived which are older than the 9th century, more than 900 years after the texts were first written, unless some older fragment on papyrus has been found recently in the Middle Eastern desert. Even the 9th century is very impressively old for a copy of an ancient text. For some of the most highly-prized writers of ancient Latin, we have to make do with manuscripts no older than the 15th century, or even more recent than that. But in such cases we still make do gratefully -- why? Because there are very many highly-prized ancient authors whose works we no longer have at all, about whom we know only because other writers have mentioned them. And in the cases of Caesar and Livy and Ovid and Vergil and many, many other ancient authors, we have mentions of other works they wrote, but no copies of those works. Rarely, a copy of one of those lost authors, or of a lost work by some author whom we already know, turns up. And that's also a big occasion, even if all we've found is a few words.

It'd be nice if we had all sorts of original or near-original copies of things written thousands of years ago. But we only have a few, and most of those are either inscriptions, words carved into stone like the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, a self-serving list, written by the Emperor Augustus, of his own achievements, carved into public monuments after his death,



or things like shopping lists and the personal letters of non-famous people on some of those above-mentioned scraps of papyrus, dug up at places like Oxyrhynchus in Egypt -- along with an occasional scrap of a very old manuscript of a text by someone like Homer or Vergil. When it comes to literary texts, Classical scholars attempt to reconstruct the earliest version of the text they can, as best they can. This process is known as scholarly editing, and rather than me clumsily attempting to explain to you step-by-step how it's done (I'm not ready to do it myself just yet), you'd be better off taking courses in Classical Studies, or referring to books like these, written by some of the world's leading Classical scholars:



The world's leading Classical scholars also edit texts for series like the Oxford Classical Texts (OCT) and the Teubner series,



Each volume in those two series begins with a preface in which the editor explains, often at great length and in great detail, which manuscripts and other sources of information he or she has used in the process of editing the text, and just exactly what he or she has done with those sources in order to come up with the present volume.

Of course, most of the prefaces in the OCT and Teubner series are written in Latin, which is 1) one more very good reason on the long list of reasons to learn Latin, and 2) perhaps the best single piece of evidence that, in the 21st century, Latin is still not dead.