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.

Latin Authors from Spain

Roman conquest of Spain began in 218 BC, as Rome battled with Carthage for dominance in the Western Mediterranean, and continued until -- when? The answer may depend partly upon one's political position. Some would say that the conquest was complete, for all intents and purposes, within a century; others, that it was never complete. From how long and to what extent earlier native languages were spoken in Spain, and in which proportions those languages were Celtic, or Basque, or unclassified Iberian, or others, I do not know.

In the first century AD, quite a number of the most prominent authors in the Latin language happened to come from Spain: Pomponius Mela (died ca AD 45), the earliest known Roman geographer; Columella (AD 4 -- 70), who wrote a lengthy work on agriculture; Lucan (30 -- 65), author of a very popular epic poem about the Roman civil war; Martial (born between 38 and 41 -- died between 102 and 104), who authored many witty epigrams; Quintilian (ca 35 -- ca 100), one of the most prominent of the Roman rhetoricians; and, most prominent of all, the Senecas, father and son. Seneca the Elder wrote memoirs and a history of Rome; Seneca the Younger wrote quite a wide variety of works: philosophy, drama, moralizing letters and satire penned by him survive to this day.

Later Spaniards who wrote and published in Latin include the Christian theologian Priscillian, sometime Bishop of Ávila (died 385); the poet Prudentius (died between ca 405 and 413); and the widely-traveled historian Orosius (c 375 -- died after 418). 4th-century Latin authors from Spain whose works have not survived to the present day, but are praised by contemporaries, include Juvencus, a poet who now cannot be dated more exactly than the 4th century[PS, 23 October 2019: I erred: A poem by Juvencus has survived, a verse rendering of the Gospel narrative about 3200 verses long, composed ca AD 330. Thank you once again, Reddit!] ; and the poet Latronianus (Died 385).

I have written elsewhere on this blog of the prolific Saint Isidore of Seville (ca 560 -- 636), beloved by Christian for many works, and by Classicists for his Etymologie, which, although it fails pretty spectacularly in the goal expressed in its title, to accurately trace the origins of words, none the less success brilliantly as an encyclopedia and as a repository of fragments of ancient works which otherwise are lost to us; and of Pope Sylvester II (ca 946 -- 1003), known earlier as Gerbert, one of the most brilliant scientists of the Middle Ages.

The Toledo School of Translators were responsible for many of the Latin translations from Arabic and ancient Greek which transformed the curricula of the Sorbonne and other Western universities beginning in the 13th century. Perhaps the foremost of these translator at Toledo was Gerard of Cremona, who fashioned Latin versions of many Greek and Arabic scientific works.

Alfonso X of Castile, also known as Alfonso the Wise, took over the leadership of the translation school in the 13th century (he reigned from 1252 to 1284), and, although Latin writing certainly flourished under him and for a long time afterwards in Spain, his cultivation of the Castilian vernacular is so greatly, and understandably, celebrated, that it obscures, from the feeble view of your humble scribe, many of the particulars of this Latin culture, and so, for the nonce, he must pause here.

Searching for Lost Ancient Latin Texts

A great many Classical ancient Latin texts went missing in the middle of the Dark Ages; that is: until the late sixth or early seventh centuries, we have evidence that people still read them, and then we have no more evidence that they were familiar to anyone later than that, and they are still missing. So we need to scour the Dark Ages to learn more about how and when and where the texts disappeared from our present-day view. We must learn all we can about these Dark Age people who mention, or, in more fortunate cases, quote the now-missing texts. If the lost ancient texts are mentioned or quoted in letters, as is very often the case, we must learn all we can about the people to whom the letters were addressed.

Encyclopaediac works (that's our word for them today) written in the ancient world and Dark Ages are tresure-troves of these mentions and quotes: works by Flavius Maximus, Gellius, Octavian, Servius, Isidore. We must know these encyclopaediac works thoroughly for clues about what happened to those texts, when and where and how they went missing, to gain clues about where and how we might find then again.

It's assumed that many Classical Latin texts were lost in Dark Age wars, when Germanic tribes and Huns invaded the late Western Roman Empire and carved it up into empires of their own, Visigoth and Ostrogoth and Frankish and Lombard realms. We must know all we can about those wars, in order to imagine as exactly as possible what happened to those lost texts -- were they hidden from the invaders and their fire? Where would they be hidden? Are some of them still in those hiding places, having been lost track of by those who hid them?

We must shake off a prejudice toward thinking of these Germanic conquerors as illiterate; literacy rates may have decreased compared to those of the Roman Empire, but much scholarship was supported by Dark Age Goths and other tribes. They did not completely despise scholarship, far from it. Benedict, Cassidorius, Isidore, justly celebrated as preservers as ancient Latin literature, as bright lights in the darkness, they all thrived under the rule of these "barbarian" tribes.

We do not know for certain how much ancient literature was lost by the violence of Dark Age wars. We do know that many ancient manuscripts were re-used in the Dark and Middle Ages, the Classical works scraped off and Christian works written where they had been. We know this because we have found the Classical works on those ancient pieces of papyrus, we have found ways in which we can still read then even though they were scraped away so long ago. We can read the indentations left by the ancient pens, they're called palimpsests. We have found many of these ancient Latin palimpsests, we must find the rest!

This is not the only way in which ancient parchment was re-used; it was also made into a material called cartonnage, which resembles cardboard in appearance and hardness, and was used to make book covers and to wrap mummies. By methods which are far over my head, modern wizards have recovered many of the ancient texts preserved in these pieces of cartonnage. We must find the rest.

Vast amounts of of previously-lost ancient Greek texts are being re-discovered in ancient pieces of papyrus, and occasionally of parchment or other materials, in the Mideast, mostly in Egypt. Now and then among these bits and pieces, amongst vast amounts of ancient Greek, an ancient object written in some other language is found. We Latinists get lucky now and then this way.

Medieval Western European archives are full of records written in Latin; Medievalists are hurrying to preserve and record as much of it as they can, and are worried that much of the material, written on parchment, will rot away before they can get to it. They want more students to become Medievalists! Among these Latin records of the business of Medieval communities, here and there, now and then, all sort of others written artifacts turn up.

Ancient inscriptions keep being found. Most of them are not what we would call literature; rather, they are things like brief memorials on tombstones, and brief boasts of long-forgotten statesmen. But now and then they contain more.

And there are public libraries and private collections which contain manuscripts which have been very, very carefully searched through in some cases, and less thoroughly in others.

Please tell me what I've missed and what other places we can look for lost ancient Latin texts!

The Missing History of Spain

The history of Spain is largely missing from the consciousness of that which we sometimes still call Western civilization. And in many instances, what we "Westerners" do know about Spain is bad: they had the Spanish Inquisition there. The Spanish Armada and the Bartholomew's Day massacre came from there. As if only horror ever came from there, as if horror were never perpetrated elsewhere in Europe. Only rarely has a single towering Spanish genius managed to pierce the veil of our ignorance: Cervantes, Velasquez, Goya, Picasso.

In the Roman Empire, Spaniards such as the authors Seneca the Elder and the Younger, Lucan and Martial are thought of as part and parcel of Roman culture. Spanish Emperors such as Hadrian are thought of as being as thoroughly Roman as anyone else. The separation had not yet begun.

But then in the 5th century AD the sense began to spread that Spain was foreign, as the Vandals came in and ruled the whole peninsula. Germanic tribes ruled most of the rest of western Europe during the Dark Ages too, but what made the Vandals foreign to the rest was above all that they were Arian Christians, not Catholics -- not, that is, the sort of Christians who later, in historical hindsight, would become known as Catholics. In order to keep thinking of some group of people as foreign and horrible and wrong, it is best to know as little about them as possible, and so, while Western history of the Dark Ages conventionally mentions two writers above all, two Gregories, Gregory of Tours and Pope Gregory the Great, their late-6th-century-early-7th-century Spanish contemporary Isidore of Seville, even though he too was thoroughly Catholic and deeply involved in the Catholization of Spain, and even though he is a far, far more learned and interesting writer than either of the Gregories, is not nearly as well known in the West.

After the Vandals, the Muslims came to Spain and began a nearly 800-year-long epoch about which we in the West are just beginning to learn. So, for example, we are just now beginning to hear about Gerbert of Aurillac, even though he spent the last 4 years of his life, from 999 to 1003, as Pope Sylvester II, and even though he was indisputably one of the most brilliant European scholars of his age. We are just now beginning to hear about King Alfonso X of Castile, who reigned from 1252 to 1284, known all along to Spaniards as Alfonso el Sabio, Alfonso the Wise, who developed one of the centres of learning which welcome Christians, Jews and Muslims, which have been so intensely hated by some Christians and others since well before Alfonso's time right down to our own, and which always seem to be so brilliant.

Cultural tolerance leading directly to intellectual breakthroughs. Imagine such a thing.

Alfonso's court was one of those places where we got those translations of ancient Greek authors which had first been translated into Arabic -- translations we've heard a lot about, without usually asking where they came from. Another was the Sicilian court of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor from 1220 to 1250. For his trouble, Frederick spent much of his reign excommunicated by various popes, and when he died Innocent IV offered a hymn of praise on the occasion of "the death of Antichrist." I'm not sure, but I bet that hymn makes no reference to the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10, verses 25-37. I'm just guessing it doesn't.

Anyway: it wasn't just translations from Greek and Arabic into Latin which were produced at Alfonso's court: also, works originally written in Greek, Arabic or Latin were all translated into Castilian. And this may be one more, and a much more ironic reason for the cultural separation of Spain from the rest of western Europe. Alfonso's translations seems to have led to a decline of the use of Latin in Spain. The Latin language didn't disappear from Spain, but compared to academics and clerics in the rest of Western Europe, Spanish academics and clerics after Alfonso's time write surprisingly seldom in Latin. Latin remained the dominant language of academia in western Europe for a long, long time to come, still very lively in pockets of academia as late as the late 19th century. And this predominance of one common international language, quite naturally, fostered and nurtured one international academic community. Alfonso the Wise may have unintentionally, and unwisely, made Spain even more isolated from the rest of Europe than it already had been, because of these translations from Latin to Castilian.

Isidore of Seville

Almost all of the works written in Latin which are the subject of Classical Studies were written by non-Christians. As far as I know, all but one were written in the very early 5th century AD or earlier. And then there is the Etymologiae, written more than two centuries later by Saint Isidore, Archbishop of Seville, who is usually depicted in paintings and other artwork holding a book.

Isidore was born ca AD 560, became Archbishop of Seville around 600, died in 636, was made a Catholic saint in 1598. He wrote many things which today are read mostly by theologians and historians of 6th-and 7th-century Spain -- and then there is his best-known work, the Etymologiae, an encyclopaedia in 20 books. Isidore worked on the Etymologiae for decades, was still working on it at the end of his life, and entrusted it to his friend Bishop Braulio of Saragossa, to finish it after his death.

Book 1 has to do with grammar, Book 2 rhetoric and dialectic, Book 3 mathematics, music and astronomy, Book 4 medicine, Book 5 law, Book 6 Christian books and Church offices, Book 7 God, angels and saints, Book 8 various Christian sects -- or, from Isidore's point of view, heresies, Book 9 languages and nations, Book 10 vocabulary, Book 11 the human body, Book 12 animals, Book 13 the cosmos, Book 14 the Earth, Book 15 buildings and fields, Book 16 stones and metals, Book 17 life in rural areas, Book 18 war and sports, Book 19 ships, buildings and tools, and Book 20 with miscellaneous supplies and implements.

It is called the Etymologiae, the Etymologies, after the 10th of these 20 books, and -- as in the cases of earlier authors like Valerius Maximuns, Pliny the Elder, Aulus Gellius, Quintilian, Macrobius and Servius, some of them also greatly prized as authors in their own right, others of them less so -- it is of great interest to Classical scholars because it quotes many pre-Christian authors, and in many cases it preserves passages from these authors which are otherwise lost.

Isidore is a great example of how there are exceptions to rules, and how things aren't always as simple as they seem. Almost all of the Classical Latin literature known to us today was copied at some point by Medieval Christian monks. However, by and large, the Dark Ages -- the earlier part of the Middle Ages, the time between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476 and the coronation as Emperor of Charlemagne in 800 -- were indeed quite dark to anyone interested in the preservation of ancient Latin literature. A very great amount of what we estimate to have been the finest of that literature disappeared during the Dark Ages, and to a great extent, it disappeared because a greater emphasis was given to the preservation of Christian literature. And yet, a significant amount of it has survived because of Isidore, a Christian archbishop living right in the middle of the Dark Ages, a contemporary of Pope Gregory the Great. Isidore, who was by no means a Christian in name only, taking advantage of a cushy Church position in order to pursue Classical Studies. Isidore, who took a very active part in shaping the Christian theology and politics of his time.

It's true that a great deal of what Isidore compiled is taken from earlier compilers. Isidore takes quite a lot, for example, from Servius. (Servius (late 4th century -- early 5th century) called his work, which is thousands of pages long, a commentary on Vergil; others have opined that it is in fact an encyclopaedia which happens to be arranged in the order of passages from Vergil). But it's also true that Isidore took much of his material from manuscripts of individual Classical authors -- for instance, if we are to believe David Butterfield, The Early Textual History of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, Cambridge: 2013, pp 89-91, and I think we ought to, Isidore had a complete manuscript of Lucretius' Epicurean poem, a work which some have alleged was shunned by the entire Christian world between Antiquity and the Renaissance. If the many passages from Lucretius in the Etymologiae don't already make Isidore's high esteem for Lucretius clear, he has given us another big hint in the title of one his other works: De natura rerum. A Dark Age archbishop and future saint made it plain, in a work which was extremely popular throughout the Middle Ages, a work of which more than a thousand Medieval manuscripts survive (a thousand is a lot), that he held Lucretius in very high esteem.

Things are definitely not always so simple and clear-cut as some would have you believe.

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.