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.

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?

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.

Don't Call it my "Grail," it's Much Cooler than That

When it comes to recovering lost texts of Classical Greek and Latin, there are those who are looking everywhere, scouring specialized journals and general news outlets for finds and for clues to possible finds, who are very optimistic and excited about the chances for great recoveries, convinced that the era of great discoveries begun during the "Renaissance" in no way has to be regarded as closed. -- and then there are those who snicker and point at the first group. I'm way over on the optimistic fringe of the first group. I don't mind the snickering. I still get along just fine with the second group, and everyone in the second group agrees that the first group has included experts of the first degree. Still, just know that when I go on about such things, I do not have a broad consensus of experts behind me.

But I personally think it would be absurd to assume that there will be no more major discoveries of Livy.He was THE historian of ancient Rome, the one whom Tacitus, Suetoniusand Ammianusall felt they were following, writing, as it were, only appendices and updates to his work. The work of PaterculusandFlorusand others was in major respects no more than excerpts and paraphrases of Livy's work, everybody from his time through Late Antiquity and the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages and the Renaissance up to today who ever quoted a lot of ancient Roman authors has quoted a lot of him, there are beaucoup 5th-century manuscripts of the surviving 35 books, and you, you snickerers and pointers, you're going to sit and snickeringly opine that the other 107 books are just gone, forever? I'm sorry, but that just makes no sense to me.

They say that it is unproven that Gregory the Greatordered destroyed all copies of Livy's work upon which hands could be laid. They also say that he was convinced that the end of the world was at hand and that volcanos, several of which were active in Italy at the time, were gateways to Hell, which was full to bursting with all of the souls it held.

That sounds like a book-burner to me. I'm not saying I know for sure that Gregory did indeed try to wipe Livy's life work off of the face of the Earth. But I am saying that the time when he reigned as Pope, from 590 to 604, fits well into the timeline of the damned strange state of the known remains of the text of Livy's history, with so many 5th-century manuscripts of books 1 through 10 and 21 through 40 surviving, and the rest gone except for a couple of scraps, and one 5th-century copy of books 41-45 which turned up on the shelf of a monastery in 1527, looking very much like it was originally a copy of books 41-50. You snickerers, you honestly expect us optimists to stop looking for the other half of that volume? You want us to cease looking at the notes written in the margins of that manuscript and others as clues in a glorious treasure-hunt? Who's being absurd here?

Back to Gregory. Look for crypto-pagans of his time (there were no other kinds of pagans left) and ask yourself where they hid books 11-20 and 46-142. (It's not strange at all to picture books 1-10, the partly-mythical tale of Rome's founding and early growth, being hidden before any of the others, as soon as people got word that the Papal troops were coming and looking for heathen books, and books 21-30, the tale of Rome's struggle with Hannibal, being hidden next.) Ask yourself where the cellar or attic or hollow tree was where they would hide books 7-12 of Ovid's Fasti.No, with no disrespect to the abundant genius and deep learning on your side, snickerers, I really don't think I'm the one who's being ridiculous.

We, I should say. We aren't the ones. Yes, Professor Conway, who edited several volumes of Livy for Oxford in the early 20th century, was taken in by perhaps the biggest hoax in classical studies of his time: a young professor in Naples claimed to have found all 142 volumes of Livy written out in one ancient hand. But then he went into hiding, with friends claiming that he was naive in the ways of business and that they were merely trying to guarantee that whatever library or museum purchased the spectacular find from him paid him fairly, and it was front-page news day after day in Naples, with one newspaper backed by the Fascists saying it was all a hoax, and another newspaper aligned with another political party and with the great Benedetto Crocesaying no, no, it was all true! and back in England Professor Conway wrote excitedly and credulously about it, and it happened that someone was digging outside of his apartment, the water department perhaps, and overnight some wag put a big sign on the rope cordoning off the hole which read "DANGER: EXCAVATIONS FOR LOST BOOKS OF LIVY," and yes, that was funny.

But Professor Conway was not a fool for hoping. And those like him and me are much cooler than the searchers for the Grail or for Bigfoot, because however much you may choose to believe that our search is pointless, there is absolutely no doubt that what we seek did once exist.