Rafael Landivar and his Epic Poem Rusticatio Mexicana

Rafael Landivar was born in Guatemala in 1731, entered the Jesuit order and went to Mexico to study in 1750, and was ordained and returned to Guatemala in 1755. There he taught rhetoric and grammar until 1767, when upon the order of King Charles III of Spain, all Jesuits were expelled from the Western Hemisphere. After several years of wandering and hardship, Landivar found a home in Bologna among a group of exiled Jesuits in 1770. He remained in Italy until his death in 1793.

 

He is remembered above all for his poem Rusticatio Mexicana, first published in Modena in 1781. The poem deals with both Mexico and Guatemala; however, in Europe at the time few people had heard of Guatemala, and the term "Mexico" was often used to refer to a territory including Guatemala and much else of Central and South America.

Rusticatio Mexicana is often compared to Vergil's Georgics. Although both poems deal with rural life, the comparison is problematic. Landivar's poem is much longer than Vergil's. It deals with a much greater range of subjects. And while the Georgics harken back nostalgically to an imagined Roman Golden Age in an attempt to inspire Vergil's contemporaries to greater morality and better citizenship, the Rusticatio Mexicana celebrates the wonders of Guatemala and Mexicana in Landivar's own time.

And while Landivar certainly acknowledges following in Vergil footsteps, there are actually more homages to the Aeneid in his epic than to the Georgics, as well as references to many other authors, ancient, Renaissance and also contemporary with Landivar, including several of his Jesuit colleagues. These many references are the appreciative comments of a very well-read author, not the copying of an unimaginative hack.

Landivar is deservedly well-known in present-day Latin America, -- where, for example, a large university in Guatemala is named after him, and many editions of the Rusticatio Mexicana have appeared -- and undeservedly obscure elsewhere.

In writing this post I have referred to Andrew Laird's volume The Epic of America: An Introduction to Rafael Landivar and the Rusticatio Mexicana. In addition to the text of Rusticatio Mexicana alongside an English translation, the volume texts and translations of several shorter poems by Landivar, several very illuminating essays about the poem, the author and Latin American literature written in Latin.

In my opinion, Laird's volume has only one serious flaw. Sadly, it is a major flow, and utterly inexplicable: the text of the Rusticatio Mexicana and its English translation, presumably the biggest attraction of the entire work, are printed in a much smaller font than the rest of the work. The other way around would've made far more sense. 

Those who can read Spanish may prefer one of the Latin-Spanish editions. Not to mention those few and blessed who can actually read Latin with no help whatsoever from any translations.

Translations from Greek to Latin

In the Roman Republic and the Western, Latin-speaking Western Roman Empire, many people were bilingual and could speak Greek as well as Latin. How many? I don't know, but I do know that some Classical Latin authors such as Cato the Elder and Juvenal complained that it was too many. Many other ancient Latin authors saw Greek very positively: from its beginnings in the third century BC, Latin literature very often copies Greek literature very directly. Many Roman young men were sent to Athens to be educated; some of them liked Greek culture and literature so much that they became poets, instead of lawyers as their families had intended (some things never change), some of them strew many Greek quotations among the Latin texts of their books. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, although a native of the Latin West, wrote an entire book in Greek.

This all changed very quickly when the Western Empire declined and ceased to be in the 5th century AD.

Jerome's Latin version of the Bible, the Vulgate, dominated Western literature for 1000 years.

Although scholarly types in the West never ceased to read the Latin Classics, the ability to read Greek became very rare. The philosopher Boethius (ca480 -- 524), made some of the first translations of Aristotle into Latin. He had planned to translate all of Aristotle and Plato into Latin, but was imprisoned and executed on suspicion of treason before he could complete this project. Apparently already at this time there was a need, even among those inclined to philosophy, for translations of Greek works.

Another illustration of the lack of reading comprehension of Greek in the West is the popularity of the poem known as the Ilias Latina. PK Marshall (in: LD Reynolds (ed), Tests and Transmission, Oxford: 1983, p 191), with refreshing frankness, refers to the Ilias Latina as an "unatractive compendium." Written probably during the reign of Nero, it reduces the 15,693 verses of Homer's Iliad to just 1070, and those remaining lines often resemble Vergil's style much more than Homer's. Nevertheless, in the absence of either knowledge of Greek or fuller translations of Homer, the Ilias Latina enjoyed great popularity from the 9th century onward.

Many translations from Greek into Latin, most notably of the very numerous works of Aristotle, began to cause a great sensation when they appeared at the University of Paris and in other Western centers of learning in the 12th century, coming from the great school of translation in Muslim-controlled Toledo, Spain.

I suppose that this is as good a time as any to point out that, apparently contrary to widespread beliefs, most of the Latin translations of Aristotle and other Greeks which appeared in 12th-century Europe were not, in fact, first translated from Greek into Arabic, and then from Arabic into Greek. Most have survived in Greek, and in the 12th century in Toledo, most of the Latin translations which were to be so popular among Western scholars were made directly from Greek. Even in the 12th century, people knew the hazards of what we now call the game of Telephone. There have been a few cases in which the original versions of Greek Classics have vanished, and an Arabic or Hebrew version has survived, so that all further translation must come from them, and these few cases make for interesting stories. But they are atypical stories.

In the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, as the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, declined and finally fell, many Greek scholars who fled from that decline and fall chose to migrate to Italy, and they taught Greek to those scholars who re-introduced Greek literature to the West in the Italian Renaissance. Numerous full-length Latin translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey began to circulate in the West, replacing Professor Marshall's "unattractive compendium," along with Latin translations of many other Greek works, as the scholarly Western world, or at least wide swaths of it, became bilingual again, mastering both Latin and Greek, as it had done 1000 years before.

Cassiodorus and the Preservation of the Latin Classics

Not everyone agrees who deserves to be singled out as the person who has done more than anyone else to preserve Classical Latin literature. I've said several times on this blog that that person is Charlemagne, and upon reflection, I stand by that assessment; but others have said that it is Cassiodorus, born ca AD 490, died ca 585, and there is much to be said for him in this regard.

Along with his contemporary Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius, he also surely must be a contender for owning one of the most beautiful of all Roman names. Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator ("Senator" is actually part of his name, not a title. If it seems very strange, it may help to think of an Englishman named John King.) was born into an upper-class family in Scyllacium, a city in in the southern Italian region of Bruttium. He held several high offices under the Ostrogothic kings of Italy: he was quaestor from 507 to 511 (Keep in mind, his birth date is estimated at 490, which would mean that he assumed the office of quaestor at the age of 16 or 17!), consul in 514, and at the time of the death of King Theodoric the Great in 526, he was magister officiorum. Under Theodoric's successor, Athalaric, he became praetorian prefect in 533.

In 540, around the age of 50, Cassiodorus retired. He had attempted to interest Pope Agapetus in the idea of the foundation of a Christian university in Rome, but this project was not realized. Instead, Cassiodorus returned to his native Bruttioum, and founded a monastery which was to be known as Vivarium, after some nearby ponds where fish were bred. I have tried and tried, without success, to find any facts at all about the later history of the monastery Vivarium. The closest I have come is LD Reynolds' passing remark, "His monastery seems to have died with him," in: Reynolds and NG Wilson, Scribes & Scholars, 2nd edition, Oxford, p 73.

In his long, long retirement, besides looking after his monastery, Cassiodorus wrote several works, which can be divided into the historical-political and the theological-grammatical. One of the latter, the Institutiones, is his best-known work, and one of his chief claims for being foremost among the preservers of Classical Latin literature, for it argued that a good education included a thorough study of the Classics.

Besides the Institutiones, which was much-copied and much-used during the Middle Ages, Cassiodorus owned a large library of pagan Latin literature, and copies of these pagan works were spread to other European monasteries along with Cassiodorus' proposals about good education.

It is a sign that knowledge of Greek was dying out in the Catholic West in Cassiodorus' time, that he saw the need to translate the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus, and the ecclesiastical histories of Theodoret, Sozomen and Socrates, into Latin.

One thing which makes Cassiodorus' efforts to preserve ancient literature especially remarkable is the time in which he lived and wrote and oversaw the multiplication of Classical manuscripts: it was a time when Classical literature in general was dying out, partly being destroyed in Dark Age wars, and partly being passed by in favor of Christian literature, as has been dramatically shown in the many palimpsested Classical texts discovered since the late 18th century. It is hard to find anyone prepared to actually praise Cassiodorus as an author; but the combination of his wealth and resources, his organizational skills (perhaps honed by his first career in public office?) and his love of pagan Latin literature, meant that he preserved many ancient authors at the very time when the work of many others was vanishing.

Aulus Gellius

Aulus Gellius, born around AD 125, died after 180, was probably born in Rome, and spent most of his life there. He is one of those ancient Latin authors known as grammarians who each quoted many other authors, and whose works today are of less interest for what they have to say about grammar than for being a source of the texts of those other writers. Gellius is our only source of quotations of some other writers. In many more cases he is valuable for establishing the texts of known authors.

Gellius' family was wealthy, and he was sent to Athens for a part of his education. His family intended him to be a lawyer, and, unlike many people with literary interests whose families have intended them to become lawyers, Gellius actually became one. His only surviving work, the Noctes Atticae (Athenean Nights), is so called because it was begun during the long winter nights in Athens. Gellius continued to compile the work back in Rome, in the spare time he had left over from his job adjudicating civil cases. If its 20 books have some sort of overall plan or organization, it has eluded scholars so far. But Gellius quotes more than 275 authors, most Latin, some Greek, ensuring that Classical scholars will continue to study him with profit and pleasure.

The Noctes Attica was very popular among other ancient authors. Those who cite it include Lactantius, Nonius Marcellus, Ammianus Marcellinus, author of the Historia Augusta, Servius, Augustine, and above all, Macrobius, who, in his Saturnalia, written after AD 400, quotes from Gellius so extensively -- without, however, ever naming him as a source -- that no one who edits the text of Gellius can afford to ignore Macrobius as a source.

In contrast, we have very little evidence of Gellius having been known at all in the early Middle Ages; with one exception, our earliest surviving manuscripts of Gellius are from the 10th century. That one exception is the remarkable manuscript known as Vatican Pal Lat 24. It contains several books of the Old Testament written in the 8th century; however, early in the 19th century, palimpsests, indentations left by older writing on the parchment which had been scraped off, were discovered beneath the 8th-century Old Testament text. It turns out that parchment from several older books had been re-used in order to make the 8th-century volume; one of those older books was a 4th-century manuscript containing parts of books 1-4 of Gellius, now with large gaps. The conspectus siglorum of Hosius' 1903 Teubner edition, besides Pal lat 24 (mistakenly described as saec VII?) and the the 2 10th-century manuscripts, lists 5 from the 12th century, 3 from the 13th, and one each from the 14th and 15th centuries. A recent critical edition is by PK Marshall in Oxford Classical Texts, 1968, 2nd edition 1990.

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.

Macrobius and the Saturnalia

Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius is known for writing 2 works in the 5th century: Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio; and the Saturnalia, the work which will primarily concern us here. A third work, De verborum Graeci et Latini differentiis vel societatibus, Differences and Similariites Between Greek and Latin Verbs, has been lost except for fragments.

Macrobius tells his readers that Latin is not his first language. Therefore it is safe to assume that he was not a native of the city of Rome. Where exactly he did come from, which positions he held in the Empire, and his exact dates are matters of considerable controversy. It is safe to assume that he was among the upper class of consuls, prefects and proconsuls. He may have been praetorian prefect of Italy in the year 430, or he may been proconsul of Africa in 410, or he may have been neither. It is fairly safe to assume that his first language was Greek.

The Saturnalia was a week-long Roman holiday celebrated around the winter solstice. In Macrobius' Saturnalia, learned gentlemen gather during the Saturnalia in the year 383 or earlier, and discuss matters of history, literature and philosophy, placing the work in the genre extending back to Plato's Symposium. Just as in the Symposium and other works, the tone of the discussion in the Saturnalia varies greatly, depending to a certain extent on factors such as the time of day, how much the characters have had to drink, whether they're being interrupted by other party guests, and so forth. Those involved in the learned discussion include Praetextatus; Symmachus, famed editor of Livy, who pleaded that pagan altars not be removed by Christian Emperors; Nicomachus Flavianus, who edited Livy alongside Symmachus; someone who is either Avienus the translator of Aratea or Avianus the writer of fables, although called Avienus in either case; and Servius, here a very young man, later famous as the commentator of Vergil.

Vergil is discussed far more than any other topic. Roman history and Roman festivals are discussed with great dignity. An example of some less dignified discussion has to do with the effect of the consumption of food and drink on people's appearance.

Estimates as to when the Saturnalia was written range from ca400 to ca435 or later. The earlier the date, the more likely it is that Macrobius was writing about people he knew personally, and perhaps even describing an actual event in his life. The later the date, the more likely it is that Macrobius is delivering a nostalgic vision of a life before the Christianization of the Empire, a time he knows only by hearsay. It is remarkable that Christianty is mentioned nowhere in the Saturnalia.

For scholars, the Saturnalia is, like Aulus Gellius' Noctes Attica, Quintilian's Rhetores Latini Minores, Severus' commentary on Vergil and Isidore's Etymologiae, an immensely valuable source of passages of ancient literature which are otherwise lost or controversially attested. It also holds a natural interest for those studying the last days of "pagan" Rome.

6 9th-century manuscripts of the Saturnalia survive, and hundreds of manuscripts altogether.

Trogus and Justin

Pompeius Trogus was a Roman of the 1st century BC who wrote a history of the dynasty of Philip of Macedon, and much miscellanaous related material, in 44 books. Some modern readers have made the mistake of thinking that this means Trogus' history would fill 44 of our modern volumes. Instead, think "book" in the sense of "books of the Bible." 2000 years ago, a book was generally a scroll, and scrolls generally didn't hold as much writing as our books, or codices, as the volumes with covers and writing on both sides of the pages are also called. The Bible, Old plus New Testament, contains 63 books in some versions. Of Livy's 142 books of Roman History, we have 35 books today, plus some smaller bits and pieces. Those 35 surviving books containing approximately the same amount of writing as the 63 books of the Bible, and the 44 books of Trogus' history, as he originally wrote it, mostly likely also contained a similar amount of writing.

Except that only a small fraction of Trogus' original history is known to us today. Some time after Trogus, probably in the 4th century, a writer named Justin (not to be confused with Justin Martyr) collected some excerpts from Trogus' history, a little bit from each of the 44 books, and strung them together with a few of his own remarks. The result is one volume which runs to 300 or 400 pages in most editions. Scholars have tried very hard to separate Trogus' words from Justin's, but the most we can say with near certainty is that most of the volume is fairly close to what Trogus said. In any case, these several hundred pages are one of the major ancient sources for the history of Philip II of Macedon, his famous son Alexander the Great, and their predecessors and successors. Did Justin actually do a good job in selecting and preserving the most interesting and/or the most historically valuable portions of Trogus' work? That's very, very hard to know. What an enormous boon it would be to historians if Trogus' entire work were ever to be recovered!

Other than Justin, there are a few passages from Trogus' history, called prologi, in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, a few words of praise from Livy and some other writers, and that's about all we can say for sure. It's very difficult to say how much Livy and other historians may have borrowed from Trogus.

Although Livy admired Trogus and the admiration seems to have been mutual, the two historians make quite a contrast. Livy's history is patriotic and centered around Rome, and many passages clearly have been invented in order to make the work more dramatic and entertaining. Trogus' history is cosmopolitan and centered around Greece, and, according to Justin, he criticized Livy, and also Sallust, for embellishing their historical works with fanciful speeches put into the mouths of historical figures.

It's very unfortunate that the great majority of Trogus' work has been lost. Justin's selections from that work, on the other hand, made for a very popular codex during late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: more than 200 manuscripts of Justin survive, which derive from 4 separate sources.

It seems to me that Justin has been somewhat less popular reading lately, because I have not been able to find an edition printed later then the 19th century.

[PS, 17 December 2019: WHOOPS! Otto Seel's Teubner edition is from 1972. And it includes the prologi. Clearly the way to go. My thanks to evagre at the Classics subreddit at Reddit for pointing this out.]

[PPS, 18 December 2019: Thank goodness some experts read my stuff: Professor Alice Borgna, a member of the Facebook group Classics International, says: "It is not true that in academia he is neglected, and that the last edition is Seel’s one (!!). In the last decade, in fact, studies on Trogus and Justin have flourished, an element which your post seems to miss. More than 30 contributions, books or paper, has been published in recent years, and also new editions: a digital one (https://www.forumromanum.org/literature/justin/index.html) ) and -most of all - the new critical edition of Justin from the prestigious series Les Belles Lettres, with text edited by Bernard Mineo and historical notes by Giuseppe Zecchini, whose first volume (book I-X) was published in 2016. The second volume (books XI–XXIII) appeared in 2018, while the third (and last) is expected in 2020. But a lot of other stuff (translation, commentary) has also been published, as you can easily find." Thank you, Professor, but, obviously, some things are easier for some of us to find than for others. Yesterday, after I was made aware that Seel's edition was from 1972, not from the 19th century as I had thought, I asked myself, Well then why didn't LD Reynolds mention Seel's edition in his piece on Justin (Reynolds writes it "Justinus") in Texts and Tradition? And, of course, Reynolds did, and I had overlooked it: page 197, footnote 1. Actually, Reynolds points out that Seel published two Teubner editions, in 1935 and in 1972, and a further article and book devoted to Justin. About the middle third of the long note 1. And I just completely missed all of that. Reminder to self: You're old. Be more careful reading the fine print. Skimming may not cut it anymore.]

I have a reprint, made by the University of Michigan Libraries, of an 1858 edition by Jacques LeCoffre et cie of Paris, and it's not the Michigan Libaries' finest work. 4 of the pages, pp 24, 26, 30 and 34, are printed at an angle, with their tops at 1 to 1:30 on a clock dial and their bottoms at 7 to 7:30, with a few words squeezed and a handful missing altogether. Not all of the pages are in the proper order. Between page 72 and the end, page 355, the left-hand pages appear on the right and vice-versa. An introduction on page i through iv is inserted between pages 352 and 353. But much more importantly, on all the pages, except for the 4 pages mentioned above, the type is all quite legible. Although definitely below average for Michigan Libraries, it's far from the worst reprint I've ever seen. The reprint by a company which calls itself Forgotten books, of the 1782 edition of Raphael Landivar's Rusticatio Mexicana, is far worse. It's missing letters from the beginning of all of the lines on almost all of the right-hand pages. That may be the worst reprint I've ever seen, and I've seen a great number of them.

Surely, a new edition of Justin will appear this century. I would think.

Ciceronianism

Several years ago, I read a volume from the I Tatti Renaissance Library entitled Ciceronian Controversies (2007, ed Joann Dellaneva), and thought to myself, How odd! that 420 to 530 years ago in Italy, eminent authors of all genres believed that the only way to write Latin correctly was to imitate Cicero! I blogged about this absurd tendency, to treat a single author as if he, and he alone, were worthy of imitation among all of the authors of an entire language which is thousands of years old, and I moved on.

Imagine (if you CAN) how I feel now, having finally noticed (yes, clearly, I am not the sharpest pencil in the drawer, not the quickest to notice things) that Ciceronianism is alive and well today. Latinists, TODAY, may be arguing a point of Latin writing style or usage, and one of them can point out, "Cicero wrote it this way," and, very often, that will end the debate!

People still study Shakespeare in English classes, and I have nothing at all against that. But does anyone, anywhere, teach English as if Shakespeare were the ONLY English-language author worthy of imitation? If someone does, would it even be necessary for me to enumerate the drawbacks of such an approach?

Well, such an approach is taken -- TODAY. AMONG US -- in the study and teaching of the Latin language. How often? I do not know. Oftener than not? I do not know.

I know only that, now that I have finally noticed that Ciceronianism outlived the Renaissance, I can not ignore it. I can not prevent myself wondering about such things as: is it actually unusual, for someone who has devoted their professional life to the study of Latin, that they might read no Latin at all other than Latin written by Cicero for an entire day? A week? A month? A LIFETIME?

Is it unusual for a Latinist to judge a piece of Latin writing, whether written in the 21st, the 16th or the 1st century AD, by the single criterion of how much it resembles what Cicero wrote?

Is it unusual for a Latinist to assume that everything Cicero wrote was above reproach from a linguistic-stylistic point of view?

And how exactly would those percentages change if, the preceeding three paragraphs, "Cicero" were changed to "Cicero and Vergil"?

Whatever the points of view of Latinists on these and other matters, I don't imagine that I will change their minds. I do drastically over-estimate my abilities much of the time, but I don't over-estimate them THAT much. The best I can hope for is to gain a bit more clarity about those who share my enthusiasm for the Latin language. And of course, not ALL of those people are Ciceronianists, or even Cicero-and-Vergilianists. See for example the Ad Lectorum before the novel Capti by Stephen Berard, who, it is entirely clear to me now, will be judged less than an eminent Latinist by the Cicero-and-Vergilianists, but who is appreciated by some others. And there's no need for anybody to fight over anything here. It's just that there is one more thing to debate, about which, I had mistakenly assumed, people had long since ceased to debate. Excelsior. (Yeah, it's also been very recently that I finally figured out that "Excelsior!" had become a common expression because of Stan Lee, and not because of contemporary Latinists in general. Be that as it may, it's still perfectly good Latin.)

Classical Latin Literature Which is (Currently) Lost

When we see an iceberg in the ocean, we know that about 9/10 of it is underwater. When we look at the remains of Classical Latin literature, we don't know how much of it there once was.

In the case of individual literary works we very often do not know whether what we have today is the entire work, or almost all of it, or a small fragment of it or what have you. We have some ancient descriptions of the length and scope of certain literary works, but such helpful descriptions are rare. It's more common that we have the work itself, and must decide whether it seems to us to be a finished work. If it seems unfinished, does that mean that the author never finished it, or that a page or more is missing from the copies we have?

One more thing to think about: did Latin authors 1800 or 2000 years ago have ideas about what constituted a finished literary work which were similar to the ideas we have today?

Sometimes the existing manuscripts have big holes in them, or are nothing but tiny scraps, and so leave no doubt that something is missing. But how much is missing? That is very often a difficult question.

Is the author correctly identified? In many cases scholars have concluded that works are misattributed. In further cases, passages from an ancient work are quoted in an ancient or Medieval collection. Sometimes they are extremely helpful missing pieces from an author's work. In other cases, they are falsely attributed. Yes, it'd be wonderful if that was a passage written by Trogus, but...

Trogus was a Roman historian who lived in the 1st century BC and wrote a history of the Macedonian Empire, founded by Philip, the father of Alexander the Great. Ancient writers praised Trogus' history very highly. All we have of that history today is a condensed version, referred to as an epitome, written by a certain Justinus some time around the 3rd century AD.

Scholars today painfully feel the lack of Trogus, but still, we have that epitome by Justinus. In the case of many other ancient Latin writer who were highly praised by their peers, all we have today is that praise.

And how many more may have been praised in pieces of text which have disappeared? That sort of question is somewhere between extremely difficult and entirely impossibly to answer accurately.

The problem of that ignorance is compounded by other things we don't know, such as our ignorance of how exactly these texts we'd so very much like to have, vanished. In trying to explain a certain disappearance, we face the hazard of assuming that we know things which we do not know. Let's take the example of Tibullus, Propertius and Statius. Tibullus and Propertius were Latin poets who lived in the first century BC. They are both very highly esteemed today, sometimes so highly that they are spoken of as among the handful of the very greatest ever to write in Latin. And only a few dozen pages of each of their work has survived, from so few manuscripts that their work very nearly did not survive at all. Statius, on the other hand, a Latin poet of the 1st century AD whose works are not nearly so highly-esteemed, has works surviving today in many hundreds of manuscripts, which together are many times the length of the surviving works of Tibullus and Propertius together.

A scholar today may look at how many manuscripts of Statius we have, and how few of Propertius and Tibullus, and conclude that this shows have great a role chance plays in the survival of ancient literature. But, never mind the lukewarm readership of Statius today, many Medieval texts survive which praise him very highly indeed. It may seem strange to us, but in the Middle Ages Statius may have had a much higher literary reputation than either Propertius or Tibullus.

My point is that literary tastes, opinions about which writer is better than which, sometimes change enormously from one era to another. We must guard against imposing our own opinions upon people of another time, for this may cloud our understanding of what went on in that other time.

And my point in this essay has been merely to point out a few of the factors which make it difficult for us to know how much Classical Latin literature is currently lost, and why, and therefore to urge caution, if one is ever tempted to estimate the amount of this literature which once existed.

Renaissances

In Classical Studies, in Western Europe, there has been a 9th-century Renaissance, the Carolingian Renaissance supported with the enormous power and purse of Charlemagne;

a 12th-century Renaissance featuring John of Salisbury, William of Malmesbury, and great bursts of Classicism in cathedral schools in Chartres and Orleans and elsewhere, and a sudden great rise in interest in Ovid, Virgil, Terence, Horace, Seneca, and Cicero;

the Italian Renaissance we've all heard about, which occurred mostly in Italy, from the 13th through the 15th century, with Dante, Petrarch, Bocacccio, Salutati, Bruni, Biondo,

Poliziano, Ficino, Valla, Pico della Mirandola and so many others;

the 19th century Renaissance featuring British and German universities, and the beginnings of the Classical series from publisher such as Oxford and Teubner;

and perhaps eventually people will look back to our time, to things such as the Living Latin movement, and speak of a 21st-century Renaissance.

The number of Renaissances seems to keep increasing. And I'm sure I've left some out -- should I have mentioned an Insular Renaissance in Ireland and England in the 7th century, or earlier? Wow, I haven't even mentioned the 16th century yet, and Erasmus! They're beginning to crowd together so tightly that there's barely any time left between them. Which would mean that...

Perhaps something which has been reborn so many times hasn't ever actually died. Perhaps Classical Latin and interest in ancient Rome have been pronounced dead many times over the centuries, and this isn't remembered so often today because of the natural tendency to select the best literature and most sensible statements from every era, and forget the everyday pronouncements, however persistent the latter may have been. And so we look back upon the best Classical scholars in every era, and tend to forget about those who insisted that there were no such.

How many more Renaissances will there be?

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.

Reprint Volumes of and pertaining to Valerius Maximus

Valerius Maximus published, around AD 30, a work known as factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri novum (Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Words). A miscellaneous collection drawn from Roman history, it was intended for use in schools of rhetoric. It was immensely popular during the Middle Ages; however, modern scholars have mostly found it to be rather dull and poorly-written. I think it's quite possible that my grasp of Latin is not yet refined enough to be offended by Valerius; however, the crude patriotism of which others have complained is clear even to me. Also, Valerius does not name his sources, which is frustrating for moderns, who often pore through ancient Roman encyclopaediac works chiefly in order to find bits and pieces from the works of other authors whom they find more interesting. I gather from scholars that it can be inferred that Cicero, Trogus and Livy were among Valerius' chief sources.

I have a reprint copy of the Teubner edition of Valerius by Friedrich Kempf, the 2nd edition published in 1888, which in addition to the entirety of Valerius' lengthy work contains late-ancient summaries of it by Julius Paris, Januarius Nepotanius, and another by an unknown author, attribued, Kempf assumes erroneously, to Julius Paris. The original late-19th century Teubner editions such as this one had large, easily-readable type which extended right out to the edges of the pages; this reprint has type of about the same size, but it s much larger than the Teubner because of very large, and, to me, at least, completely unnecessary margins. Who knows, maybe some other people love the huge margins in reprints like these, and write copious notes in them.

The cover of my reprint volume has a picture of a green bicycle on a sidewalk leaning against a nondescript urban wall, which suggests that no-one at the publisher can read a bit of Latin or has the faintest idea what this book is about; on the other hand, they somehow managed to correctly print the authors' names in the nominative Latin and the editor's name in German on the cover, while the authors' names are in the genitive on the title page and the editor's name there is latinized, so who knows. Maybe they had a library card to copy from for the cover, and wouldn't even be able to find the title page.

I have another volume from the same publisher, reprinted from the third volume of an earlier edition of Valerius ("EX EDITIONE JOANNIS KAPPII," the title page says, and I won't pretend that I know whether this means that Johann Kapp prepared this volume in addition to editing Valerius in the previous volumes, or that someone else, unnamed, prepared this volume while referring to Kapp's edition, or something else.) which contains none of the primary text, but notes referring to words and phrases in all nine books, plus some passages from later authors about Valerius' life and work, plus an index, all in Latin, published in London in 1823 by Valpy. The notes on words and phrases from the nine books are sometimes references to alternate readings found in manuscripts other than the readings in Valpy's edition; but mostly they are definitions of the words or explanations of the meaning of the text. The margins in this reprint volume are perhaps a bit less huge. I must confess, I like the various and rambling nature of this thick volume of notes about Valerius. It's not entirely unlike the rambling nature of Valerius' work itself.

Once again, the author's and editor's names are given correctly in the nominative on the cover, while they appear in the genitive on the title page. The cover photograph of this volume shows windows against a black background. Windows which are not ancient, but which open onto a hilly landscape which, I suppose, could possibly be somewhere close to Rome.

My Latin Novel

I've completed 2 novels: the first one, short enough that perhaps I should call it a novella instead of a novel, is entitled Salvation and is about Pontius Pilate and Jesus. In my version of the story, Pilate and Jesus are friends, and a lot of other details are different from the traditional story.

My second novel is entitled The Independents. It's about the friendship which develops between a very successful Hollywood movie director, one of Amurrka's most highly-acclaimed poets, who at the beginning of the story is becoming homeless, not for the first time (this is my sarcastic comment on haw badly Amurrka treats its poets. Seriously, in a whole long list of other countries, poets have it better than they do in the US), and a former Mafioso who doesn't want to be a thug anymore, and is on the run from his former associates, and some other people.

I've started quite a few other novels, including 2 which I started writing on this blog: a novel about angels, and a novel about 2 autistic men in London in 1900.

And then, there's my Latin novel, the novel I want to write in Latin, but I'm not sure whether I'll ever be fluent enough in Latin to do it right. I've been thinking about this one since long before I first heard of Capti by Stephen Berard, published in 2011, still the only novel I know written originally in Latin which has been published more recently than the 18th century. (Berard has promised that Capti is just the 1st of 7 novels he will write in Latin -- how long must we wait for the next one?!)

This novel will start with a preface, in Latin, by a member of a Native American tribe from the southwestern US, which is noted for having produced many first-rate Classical scholars. The preface is written by the editor of the text which comprises the bulk of the novel. The editor notes that it's not surprising that his tribe is rather adept at the Latin language, because it has been their native language for 1000 years. Very few academics outside of the tribe believe that they have been reading, writing and speaking Latin for 1000 years, but it is the truth, and the text which comprises the bulk of this volume is further evidence that it is true: it is the text of a recently-re-discovered manuscript which had been lost for a very long time, which contains a copy of the journal of the man who taught the tribe to read, write and speak Latin 1000 years ago. In the late 10th century, the author of this journal was a restless young European nobleman. He was restless in great part because he had read the Latin Classics, which depicted an ancient Roman society in which people could follow any religion they liked, or any combination of religions, or no religion whatsoever; whereas, in 10th-century, the young nobleman and everyone he knew was either a Christian, or pretending to be, because otherwise, they would be tortured and killed quite horribly.

At the beginning of the journal, the nobleman writes about how he has heard that there are non-Christians far to the north in Europe. He packs up a trunk with manuscripts of all of the Latin Classics known to him and heads north. He has many colorful and dangerous adventures. Everywhere he goes, he tries to teach Latin to whomever he meets who isn't already fluent in the language, and he has copies made of the Classical texts and urges his students to make still more copies and spread knowledge of the wonderful literature of ancient Rome.

For the most part, he finds few people who are interested in the training he offers. At times it is very difficult for him to keep possession of his treasure, the trunk full of Classical manuscripts. But he keeps it.

After teaching Latin to a few pagan Vikings and not having much hope of further spreading interest in his cause, he hears about an upcoming voyage. The Vikings have discovered a strange, non-European land, far across the bitterly-cold ocean to the west. He manages to get himself aboard a ship going to those strange lands. When the Vikings abandon their settlement in the strange Western land and sail back to Scandanavia, our narrator stays, and travels west with his trunk full of treasure, full of manuscripts. After many further travels and many more adventures, managing to find an individual or 2 here and there who are interested in the teaching he is offering, finally, in the area which present-day Arizona, he finds an entire tribe who are eager to meet him, who have heard of him, and who want to learn to read and write and speak Latin. And there he spends a long happy time, among a people who copy all of the Classical manuscripts, and master Latin with a joyous eagerness, so much so that, while the European nobleman, although no longer young at all, is still alive, they have adopted Latin as their new first language.

And that's my Latin novel. Or should I swell with hubris and over-ambition at my advanced age and the not-very-advanced stage of my skills in Latin, and nevertheless refer to it as my first Latin novel?

Recent and Contemporary Latin Prose

Over the course of the past 30-odd years, I have taught myself a small amount of Latin. In 1989 I received a Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in German and English and a minor in French, and I studied more German in graduate school, without obtaining any graduate degree.

Otherwise, all of my language acquisition has occurred outside of classrooms. My method of learning Latin may be unusual -- I don't actually know whether it is -- and perhaps it is not to be recommended: I have read little bits of Latin textbooks, but really not very much at all. Almost all of my attempt to learn Latin has consisted of looking at Latin texts, in editions by Teubner and Oxford Classical Texts and the Rolls Series and MGH, and Loeb, and some editions from the 19th century and earlier from publishers like Weidmann -- just looking at the texts and trying to read them, and occasionally going to a dictionary or textbook for help. And then looking at the Latin texts again, over and over, until I begin to understand them somewhat better. And then looking at them some more.

In the case of recent editions from Teubner and Oxford Classical Texts, in which the editors' prefaces have been in Latin in every case I've seen except one -- in such cases, often I'm much more familiar with the modern prefaces than with the actual ancient texts, which are after all the ostensible point of such endeavors. The modern editors often write in a much more accessible style.

Let me assure my readers that I am in no way accusing these editors of writing Latin in an unsophisticated way. On the contrary, an accessible writing style can the sign of the very greatest skill: look at Bellow in English, for example, or late Sartre in French, transmitting great depths of thought with exceptional clarity. A complex writing style, one which is a little more difficult to read, can also convey deep thinking, but it does not always do so: right now I'm thinking of great 18th century writers in English who wrote grand, long, convoluted sentences -- often because they had read a lot of Classical Latin -- writers such as Berkeley, Hume and Gibbon, and also of other 18th century English writers who wrote long, convoluted sentences which are not grand at all, and who are far too numerous for it to be necessary for me to name any of them.

Right now I'm struggling, not for the first time, with de aquaeductu urbis Romae by Frontinus.

It's not the first time that I've turned the pages of this text, in the 1998 Teubner edition by Kunderewicz, and yet, I could tell you much more about Kunderewicz' preface than about Frontinus' text. At first I had thought to copy here the first sentence of Kunderewicz's preface and of Frontinus' text, but on the copyright page of this edition is an exceptionally long and emphatic warning against using any part of its contents -- and I could hardly claim to be ignorant of this warning's contents just because it's written in German -- and so I will just give you word counts: the first sentence of Frontinus is 75 words long, and then first sentence of Kunderewicz is 12 words long.

I coincidentally also happen to have a copy of the 1990 Teubner edition of stratrgrmata by Frontinus, edited, by R I Ireland. The first sentence of Ireland's preface is 104 words long. It's a wonderful sentence, and I have nothing to say against Ireland as a Latin prose stylist, but, as a whole, I think Kunderewicz's style is closer to the contemporary norm. And I think that is a good thing. I take it as a sign of an authentic and living contemporary Latin (at least as far as writing is concerned). Most of those writing today in Latin do not seem to be trying to imitate the ancient authors whom they edit. (There may be many others writing in Latin today who are doing things other than editing ancient Latin and Greek authors, but I am not aware of the existence of many.)

In the Italian Renaissance, very many of the most prominent Latin authors, who were writing all sorts of things besides prefaces to editions of ancient authors, strove quite consciously to imitate Cicero's writing style in prose and Vergil's in verse -- two very bad ideas, in my opinion, which inadvertently did more to kill the Latin language than to vivify it.

Contemporary Latinists, as far as I can tell, rather than imitating the ancients, seem to be closer to sharing the attitude of Angelo Poliziano, one of the the relatively few non-Ciceronians among the Italian Renaissance authors, who said:

"Non exprimis, aliquis inquit, Ciceronem. Quid tum? Non enim sum Cicero; me tamen, ut opinor, exprimo." ("Some say I don't write like Cicero. So what? I'm not Cicero. But, I believe, I do write like myself.")

That's the only way to write, as far as I'm concerned. Here's to the living Latin language.

Wish List of New Discoveries of Ancient Texts

There's nothing at all realistic about this post. It's pure wishful thinking.

Trogus was highly regarded as an historian by his Augustan contemporaries, and yet, except for an epitome and a table of contacts, his work has disappeared. Why did the work of an esteemed historian vanish? Some say that's the wrong question, and perhaps they're right. They say the real question is,how did any ancient literature survive at all, all the way down to our own time?

As regular readers of my blog know, and as others can see by clicking here, I wish the missing books of Livy would be discovered. He wrote his history of Rome in 142 books, 35 survive, plus a few additional odds and ends. Livy's reputation as an historian has often risen and sunk. I believe it's risen recently, as some archaeological finds support his versions of various events. But Livy is still avidly read even by those who put no stock in him as an historian, because he's a good writer, who tells stories in a very engaging manner.

Texts by Livy as well as by many other ancient Latin authors disappeared in the late 6th century. It would be great if we found out that some people of that time had hidden collections of ancient Latin, just as, a fewer centuries earlier, some Gnostics and other Christian heretics had hidden their favorites texts, and if we were to stumble across some of those collections of the ancient Latins, as we've recently stumbled across some of those collections of early Christian writings. Other than stumbling across them, how can we find such collections of Latin texts mentioned and quoted until the late sixth century, and then no more? (How long was Petronius' Satyricon, all together?) You might as well ask me how exactly to go into a forest and find a unicorn.

Time has not been kind to ancient Phoenician manuscripts. We possess very little Phoenician literature today. On p 588 of The East Face of Helicon, Martin L. West fantasizes about coming across a corpus of ancient Phoenician the size of the Old Testament. Why stop there? Imagine a mighty chest, longer than a small canoe and fat as a keg, so well-built by the best and proudest of Phoenician Carthage's craftsmen that it preserved almost immaculately the hoard of the choicest Phoenician literature on papyrus and parchment with which it was stuffed to the brim, then to be hidden from the Roman fires, hidden until our own time... I mean, it'd be nice to get the other side of the story of that conflict, wouldn't it? Round things out a bit, it might. Not to mention the many centuries' worth of an entire civilization's poetry, history, science...

I don't wish so intensely for more and more and still more finds of ancient papyri of the Bible and other Early Christian texts, but that's okay, there are many others fervently wishing that in my stead. It would be nice to have the entire collected works of the Classical Greek tragedians, and more than just fragments of the pre-Socratics, and every lecture Aristotle ever delivered.

I don't know enough yet about the Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians or ancient Persions to even know what more to wish for from them. And as far as the rest of the world, let me put it this way: my first introduction to Lao Tzu and the Tao is about a week old. I'm reeling from that. (In a good way. A very good way.) I'd never, ever before seriously asked myself: can I learn to read Chinese? Anyway, to return to the theme of this post: I don't know enough about any ancient literature other than Latin and Greek to know of any lost writings to specifically long for. The Vedas? I don't know much more than the name. When did the Japanese begin writing? Beats me.

Please feel free to mention your own wishes.

How I Began Reading Latin

From the time I was a small child I'd see a volume here and there of Classical literature in English translation, mostly Homer. Then I became aware of Loeb's Classical Library, Latin in red covers and Greek in Green. I believe the first Latin volume I owned -- or half-Latin, the other half being the facing-page English translation -- was one of the Loeb volumes of Augustine's Confessions. I would've gotten this at a yard sale or a thrift shop. The content bored me. The fact that half of it was in Latin interested me. I can't remember a time before I was fascinated by languages, and by books which promised to open up new vistas for me.

Besides the Augustine, I may have gotten one or two more red Latin Loeb volumes, before I obtained the first volume of Latin I would read all the way through: the OCT (Oxford Classical Texts) Lucretius.

I may have gotten it at a yard sale or thrift shop, or maybe at Karen Wickliff Books in Columbus, Ohio, a great place back then and probably still is, although I see by Google Maps they've moved a mile or so north up High Street from where they were. I'm imagining bright lights and broad clean aisles in their new location and already missing the crowded, dim stacks in the old place.

Wherever I got it, I had it by 1990 at the latest. I was quite struck and intimidated -- that is: intimidated, and thoroughly thrilled at the same time, and committed to mighty labours of scholarship -- by the fact that there was no English anywhere in this book except for the fine printing listing the editions and printings on what would now be the copyright page, and an OCT catalog in the back. Even "OXFORD/AT THE CLARENDON PRESS/LONDON AND NEW YORK" on the title page had been changed to "OXONII/E TYPOGRAPHEO CLARENDONIANO/LONDINI ET NOVI EBORACI." "EBORACI" was my first hint to look out for place-names that might be quite different in Latin than in English.

Also probably before 1990, and definitely before I had been able to read Lucretius all the way through, I got a second OCT volume: Horace.

It's difficult to remember how little I knew about Latin and Latin literature back then. Getting the OCT volume of Lucretius was the first that I had heard of Lucretius. (I had heard of Horace, but not much. I mistakenly thought back then that Horace had authored the line "ars longa vita brevis," an error which persisted with me for a very long time.) It took me a while to figure out that "LVCRETI" was the genitive of "LUCRETIUS." I was starting near zero.

I still have both of those volumes: Bailey's 1900 edition of Lucretius, revised in 1922, my copy from the 1957 printing; Wichham's 1901 Horace, revised by Garrod, the 1957 printing. Sometime before 1957, OCT changed from the orange covers they'd originally had, which from across a room can sometimes be mistaken for the orange of old Teubner editions of Greek Classics, to the dark blue they have now. However, page numbers were added neither to my copy of Lucretius nor to my copy of Horace.

Speaking of Teubner (the world's most prominent publisher of the Greek and Latin Classics, OCT coming in second), the first news I got of their existence was during the 1991-1992 academic year, when I was a graduate assistant in the German Department at Ohio State in Columbus. Outside of the department's office doors was a table where old books were left for anyone who wanted them. Someone left the first volume of the Teubner Dindorf-Hentze Iliad and the Teubner Ludwich Odyssey on that table, with orange covers; and the Teubner Tacitus Historia, the Tacitus minor works, and the Tuebner Cicero De officiis with their light blue covers, and I wanted them all, and a Latin textbook left there.

By the time that I had finished my last year as a grad student in 1992, I still had not finished Lucretius, and some might be asking themselves why I was obtaining all of these books which I couldn't read. It's an unconventional approach, but even then, 15 years before I was diagnosed as autistic, I already suspected that my brain was not typical, and that I could succeed with unusual methods of language acquisition, including the confrontation of texts written for native speakers at an unconventionally early stage. I studied several different Latin textbooks at the same time, reasoning that they might tend to round out each others' shortcomings; I consulted several different Latin dictionaries; and I spent a lot of time staring at pages of incomprehensible type. I would recite passages in Latin without knowing what I was saying. And every now and then I would have one of those wonderful breakthroughs which only those who study foreign languages have, and quite suddenly one of those incomprehensible passages was comprehensible.

But I was doing all of this in my spare time, and it took many years' worth of spare time before I achieved a level of fluency comparable to someone with a Bachelor of Arts and a major in Latin. At some point I had read Lucretious all the way through, and I turned right back to the first page and began again, knowing that I would be able to understand much more the second time through. I haven't kept count; right now, I think I'm on my fifth or sixth time through the volume. The Epicurean philosophy, although appealing, is not entirely convincing to me. But Lucretius' language just keeps getting more and more beautiful, the more fluent I become.

Horace, who also followed Epicurean philosophy for a while before rejecting it, is no slouch, either. It was a great stroke of dumb luck for me that the two first Latin books I read were Lucretius and Horace. I started right up at the top. I can also recommend, with a clear conscience, Sallust, Ovid, and Livy.

It must have been around 2003 when I read Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades, and started to read Orderic Vitalis and William of Tyre because of Runciman's enthusiasm for those authors. This was my introduction to Medieval Latin, which I believe is still somewhat underrated by some Classicists who have read little or none of it. Yes, there is a lot of Medieval Latin prose and verse in print which is mediocre or worse. No doubt, a very great amount of bad Latin was written in ancient times as well. The difference is that less of the bad ancient stuff has survived.

Medieval Latin led me to Renaissance Latin and Latin more recent than that.

The first Latin publication which I awaited with great excitement, and pre-ordered before it was published, is RJ Tarrant's OCT edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

The Latin prefaces to the Latin and Greek texts from OCT, Teubner and the various 19th-century publishers I've learned about, are much easier to read than the main texts themselves, at least for me. And so, very early on in this entire autodidactic process, I became fascinated by the transmission of ancient texts. In my very first OCT volume, right at the start of the preface, Cyril Bailey, states something quite fascinating indeed: "Lvcretiani carminis qui exstant codices ab uno exemplari deducti sunt omnes, quod demonstravit Carolus Lachmann quarto aut quinto saeculo scriptum fuisse et in regno Francico servatum." ("All of the existing manuscripts of Lucretius' poem derive from one copy, which, as Karl Lachmann has demonstrated, was made in the Frankish kingdom in the fourth or fifth century.")

I wondered: how exactly did Lachmann demonstrate such a thing? This is possibly the single most famous demonstration in the history of textual criticism, and I've read much more about it since then, and how Jacob Bernays deserves much of the credit which Lachmann has received, and how some of the details of their model have been corrected. Don't ask me to explain it to you. In a couple of years, maybe. I'm still learning.

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.

The Transmission of the Works of Tibullus

Tibullus, born ?, died 19 BC, was a prominent Roman poet during his lifetime, and many today count him among the very finest writers of Latin, although we have only a small amount of his writing: in the Oxford Classical Texts edition of his works by John Percival Postgate, 2nd edition, 1915, in the printing of 1982, the two books of his elegies cover just 46 small pages; then come 29 more pages of poems, referred to as books three and four, some of which probably were written by Tibullus, some probably by Sulpicia, and some probably by someone else.

This collection by Tibullus and pseudo-Tibullus was found in the 14th century, and then lost again, but not before it was copied. The text of Tibullus as the modern reader knows it depends primarily on one such copy made in the 14th century and two in the 15th; the edition which Scaliger made in 1572, which contains material from another lost manuscript; and excerpts of Tibullus' works in various Medieval florilegia. A florilegium is a type of anthology which was very popular during the Middle Ages, compiled from the works of various authors.

After some mentions by his contemporaries Horace and Ovid, and some very high praise from the rhetorician Quintilian (c35--c100 AD), the first trace we have of Tibullus' poems is in an 8th-century list of books at Charlemagne's court at Aachen: "Albi Tibullus lib II." ("Two books by Albus Tibullus.") There are two traces of texts thought to have been copied, directly or indirectly, from this book recorded in the 8th-century: an 11th-century florilegium from Freising containing excerpts of Tibullus; and a 12th-century catalog from Lobbes which mentions "Albini Tibulli lib III."

Around the middle of the 12th century, at Orleans, a florilegium was made which is now called the Florilegium Gallicum, which quotes Tibullus extensively. There are at least six surviving manuscripts of the Florilegium Gallicum. Parts of it, including quotations of Tibullus, were used by Vincent of Beauvais in his early-13th-century encyclopedia Speculum Maius, which was very widely-read in the Middle Ages. There are now hundreds of manuscripts of the Speculum Maius which have survived to our time. In addition to this, several other florilegia copied material by Tibullus directly from the Florilegium Gallicum.

In the middle of the 13th century, a manuscript of Tibullus is mentioned in another library catalog, this time the library belonging to Richard of Fournival, the Chancellor of the Cathedral of Amiens from 1240 to 1260: "Albii Tibulii liber epygrammaton."

Finally, in the 14th century, the oldest copy of Tibullus' works was made which we still have, now owned by the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan: Ambrosianus R sup 26, called A. All the other surviving manuscripts containing the entirety of Tibullus' works come directly or indirectly from A. (That is: they are copies, or copies of copies, or copies of copies of copies, etc, of A.)

But when I say "the entirety of Tibullus' work," I mean the entirety of what we now have which we know or suspect he wrote, plus some other things most likely mistakenly attributed to him: the 46 small pages, plus 29 more, which I mentioned above. If we take just the 46 pages which we're sure he wrote, it's about one tenth as much writing as we have by Lucretius. About one fiftieth as much as what we have from Livy.

How much more did Tibullus write, which didn't survive all the way to the 8th century? Nobody knows. He is said to have written a great many works, but there's little reason to believe all that has been said about him in that regard. Maybe he did write a great deal, and most of what he wrote disappeared some time before Charlemagne. Or maybe he wrote very little. Maybe the poems by him which we have are so very polished and elegant because he wrote very slowly and painstakingly. We don't know. We also don't know how much time he had to write. He was involved in politics and took part in military campaigns. And he may have been born as late as 48 BC, which would mean he was 29 years old when he died. Maybe he was born as early as 55 BC. That would mean that he lived for 36 years.

The small surviving amount of Tibullus' work which we have puts him the middle of, on the one side, the other ancient Latin writers for whom we have a medium-sized volume's worth of work or more each; and on the other side, those of whose work nothing at all survived except a quote or two in the work of other ancient authors, or in a florilegium or a Medieval work of history or philosophy or elsewhere, as well as those who have been mentioned, but not quoted at all.

And, as far as I can tell, we have no way of knowing how many more authors there may have been who were very well thought-of in ancient Rome, well thought-of enough to be mentioned by other writers, but only in some piece of writing which we don't have anymore. Horace mentions Tibullus. The surviving work of Horace fills one volume which might be called either slim or medium-sized. Probably the latter. Some say it's unlikely that Horace published more than what we have from him today. If that's true, it makes Horace quite unusual among ancient Roman writers. We know that many others wrote many times more than what has survived. We have no way of knowing whom may have been mentioned in all of those lost works. Ancient Roman literary life could have been much more crowded with talent than it is sometimes pictured to have been.

Great amounts of ancient Greek literature which was lost has been found again since the 19th century, in papyri preserved by the dry climate in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East. Recoveries of lost ancient Latin texts have been tiny compared to the finds in Greek. Every now and then, something written in Latin will be found among all those Greek papyri. For a while, from the 18th century onward, many lost works of ancient Latin were found in palimpsests. (Not many compared to the Greek papyri, but still.) Nowadays, it seems that the most promising place to look for lost Latin texts is in cartage: in parchment which was made into book covers. I don't know how they take those book covers back apart in order to read what was on those pieces of parchment, but they're doing it.

When I see an 8th-century library catalog, I see a clue toward finding a manuscript which is 8th-century or older. When I see a mention of a missing text in a 6th-century author, I see a clue toward recovering that lost text. I don't know enough about such things to know whether that makes me refreshingly optimistic, or just foolish. It does seem to make me unusual, and the great sharpness of mind of the many specialists in Classical Studies makes me think that it's realistic to consider such hopes as simply foolish. Still. I see clues.