Classical and Medieval Latin

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forged Ancient Literary Works

Many of the best-known ancient literary works in Greek and Latin, scholars now agree, have long been presented as the work of authors who did not write them.

Gradually, the findings of scholarship about ancient literature make their way toward the consciousness of the general public in the West. The findings about one ancient compilation, about which the West is particularly obsessed, make their way more quickly than all others to the public, and to wider circles of the public: those having to do with the Greek New Testament. If someone believes that all 13 of the books of the New Testament traditionally attributed to St Paul were actually written by Paul, it may come as a shock to learn that scholars now believe that Ephesians, First and Second Timothy and Titus were written by someone else, and that the authorship of Colossians and Second Thessalonians is debated.

This is less shocking for those who have a broad knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin literature, because, among the ancient "pagan" authors, such forgeries are quite common. Take the case of Homer -- well, Homer is a special case to begin with, because there is absolutely no agreement among scholars about whether a writer named Homer ever existed, or whether, if this writer did exist, he wrote the Iliad or the Odyssey or both -- however, it is almost universally agreed now that, whoever wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, the works known as the Homeric Hymns, and attributed to Homer by the time of Thucydides at the latest, were written by someone else.

No one doubts that Plato existed, or that he wrote many philosophical works centering around Socrates -- but he didn't write all of the dialogues he was once thought to have written. In the collection traditionally thought of as the work of Plato, First Alcibiades, Clitophon, Menexenus and the Epistles are now controversial as to whether or not Plato wrote them, while Second Alcibiades, Epinomis, Hipparchus, Minos, Amatores and Theages are all now generally agreed to have been written by someone else. That's a total ten of the thirty-six works traditionally attributed to Plato, and this does not count nine more works attributed to Plato which were already seen in antiquity to have been spurious: Axiochus, Definitions, Demodocus, Epigrams, Eryxias, Halcyon, On Justice, On Virtue and Sisyphus.

Vergil, on the strength of his works the Aeneid, the Georgics and the Eclogues, is considered by many to be the finest poet ever to have written in Latin. For a long time, an additional collection of poems, the Appendix Vergiliana, were thought to have been poems Vergil wrote in his youth. Now almost no-one believes that Vergil wrote them.

Julius Caesar wrote commentaries about his experiences leading Roman troops in the Gallic and Civil wars. Many editions of Caesar's work have also included commentaries on the Alexandrine, African and Iberian wars, originally presented as works by Caesars, now considered not to have been written by him.

Sallust, an historian and contemporary of Caesar's, is known for works on the Catiline and the Jugurthan War. Editions of his work also contain letters which he ostensibly wrote to Caesar, and a speech against Cicero and one by Cicero against him, which are considered to be forgeries.

An enormous amount of prose survives which was written by Cicero, whom many have called the greatest of all Latin authors. Collections of his works have also included Rhetorica ad Herennium and Commentariolum Petitionis, both almost certainly written by someone other than him.

Ovid is one of the most beloved ancient Latin authors, known for several humorous volumes of what today might be called dating advice, as well as for the Metamorphoses, an extraordinary re-telling of many traditional myths, and the Fasti, a book on Roman holidays which is better than you might think a book on Roman holidays could possibly be, and for other works. Additionally, several works not written by him have circulated along with his works: Consolatio ad Liviam, Halieutica, Nux and Somnium.

There are many, many further examples. Many of these works continue to be of great interest to Classical or biblical scholars, for one reason and another, even after they have been shown to be fakes. One is almost tempted to say that no Classical author can be considered truly great before a spurious work has attached itself to his or her oeuvre.

The authors of such spurious works are often referred to by putting the prefix "pseudo-" in front of the name of the author who is being imitated. More and more, separate editions are dedicated to the work of the forgers, rather than including them in the editions of the forged authors as a sort of afterthought.

Perhaps, as these widespread, and often well-respected forgeries become better-known, the shock of the layman at things like pseudo-Pauline epistles will become somewhat less.

Was Ovid Actually Exiled?

For centuries, students learned that Ovid, the great Roman poet (the greatest ancient writer of Latin in my personal opinion, and in the opinion of some others, although many or most might rank him below Vergil), spent the last years of his life in exile in Tomis, the present-day Constanța, Romania, a desolate, frozen outpost on the coast of the Black Sea, because of, in his own words, "a poem and a mistake." This punishment has often been seen as excessive. In about 10 years of wretched exile, beginning in AD 8, Ovid wrote several works full of sadness and bitterness and longing for the city of Rome -- so everyone has been led to believe.

On the 14th of December, 2017, Rome's city council unanimously pardoned Ovid.

And then, yesterday, on the 18th of March, 2018, I learned -- I must say: to my great amazement -- that some scholars do not believe that Ovid was actually exiled. In 1911 JJ Hartman raised the possibility that the exile was an invention on Ovid's part. O Janssen, in 1951, accepted the thesis that the exile had not taken place, as did C Verhoeven in 1979, F Brown in 1985, and H Hofmann in 2001. So far, I haven't been able to learn much more about these scholars than their names. Other scholars have come to the conclusion that Ovid was exiled, but not to Tomis; and it seems to be generally agreed upon, by those who have looked into the matter more closely, that Ovid's account of Tomis is unreliable in some significant respects: for example, it seems that the climate was not quite as cold as Ovid describes it; and it also strains credulity when Ovid claims that no-one in the place besides him spoke either Latin or Greek, because Tomis had been a Roman colony for decades before Ovid's arrival, and was under Greek control for centuries after that. Literary, documentary, numismatic and archaeological evidence all undermine the previous status of these late writings of Ovid as realistic depictions of Tomis.

Apart from a couple of brief mentions by later Roman writers, all that we know, or all that we used to think that we knew, about Ovid's exile, came from Ovid's own later works Ibis (the title refers to the bird also known in English as the ibis), an elegant but violent torrent of abuse and threats toward some unknown object, referred to only as Ibis; Tristia (Sadness), and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters From the Sea-Coast, letters in verse addressed to the Imperial family, begging to be allowed to return home). Traditionally, all these works have been regarded as quite wretchedly sad; however, it seems we must re-evaluate them, in one way or another: If Ovid really was exiled to Tomis, then he exaggerated how awful the place was; if he was exiled to some other place, then perhaps he made up a fictional Tomis, perhaps as a metaphorical expression of his sadness.

Or, whether Ovid was exiled to Tomis, or to some other place, or not exiled at all, perhaps it's been all wrong all along to regard the works "from the sea-coast" as being sad at all. Maybe they're meant to be understood to be sarcastic and funny responses to -- who knows what? Maybe to no longer being invited into the presence of the Imperial family. Maybe to a punishment even less severe than that.

Or maybe Ovid really was exiled to Tomis, and maybe he really was very sad there, and maybe he exaggerated some of the aspects of the place in hopes of winning mercy and permission to return home.

Or maybe quite a few other things. In any case, we now have the knowledge these "exile writings," if you no longer believe that Ovid was exiled, or exile writings, with no quotation marks, if you still believe that he was, are much less realistic than had been believed.

Ovid, Fasti, Book 6, Lines 1-8

The Metamorphoses, a history of the world with an emphasis on the part played by the Greek gods, is generally considered to be Ovid's magnum opus. He's most famous either for that poem or for his love poetry. But some people think very highly of his Fasti, which goes through the Roman calendar of festivals month by month and concentrates, more than does the Metamorphoses, on Rome's home-grown deities, and less on the Greek imports. Ovid completed half of the poem, going half of the way through the year. Here are the first lines of Book 6:

Hic quoque mensis habet dubias in nomine causas:
quae placeat, positis omnibus ipse leges.
facta canam; sed erunt qui me finxisse loquantur,
nullaque mortali numina visa putent.
est deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo;
impetus hic sacrae semina mentis habet:
fas mihi praecipue voltus vidisse deorum,
vel quia sum vates, vel quia sacra cano.

(It's not certain whence came the name of the month of June. I'll list them all, choose the one you like. I'll sing the truth, but some will claim I'm lying and that no-one ever saw any gods. A god is in us. We're warmed when he stirs, and it's his impulse which inspires us. I'm allowed to see the faces of the god, whether it's because I'm a poet or because I sing of the sacred.)

I would not be doing my proper atheist duty if I failed to balance this rather sincere- and literal-seeming expression of theistic belief by mentioning that in Ars Amatoria Ovid wrote the much less literal-sounding

Expedit esse deos, et, ut expedit, esse putemus.

(It's convenient that there are gods, and since it's convenient, let's believe it.)

As for the Metamorphoses and the Fasti: it's more convenient to act as if the gods are real when they're your main subject. Whatever Ovid believed, I believe his poems are smashing.

Numbers Of Manuscripts Of Some Classical Authors

This in no way resembles any sort of comprehensive list of all known Classical manuscripts. I wish such a list had been gathered conveniently between book covers, and I could just refer you to the title and ISBN.

Maybe such a list exists. I haven't found it yet. What I have found is some running totals of the numbers of manuscripts known for this or that author. I've found some of these figures in volumes I've had for a while. They've often been hiding in plain sight in the footnotes, where I only recently thought to look.

In A Companion to Homer, ed by Wace and Stubbings, London: MacMillan, 1962, on p 229, in the footnotes to JA Davison's chapter "The Transmission of the Text," we learn that TW Allen had listed 190 medieval and post-medieval manuscripts of the Iliad in his 1931 edition, including 7 which also include the Odyssey, that Allen had listed 75 manuscripts of the Odyssey in volume V of the Papers of the British School at Rome, including those 7 already mentioned, for a total of 258 medieval and post-medieval manuscripts of Homer. Davison' notes also mention ancient manuscripts of Homer listed in RA Pack, Greek and Latin Litrerary Texts from Graeco-Roman Egypt, published in 1952: 381 manuscripts of the Iliad and 111 for the Odyssey. That adds up to a nice round total of 750 manuscripts of Homer. Davison points out that these figures do not include quotations of Homer in the works of other authors, nor indirect sources.

And remember, this was in 1962. I would imagine that more Homeric manuscripts have come to light since then. How many more? I dunno. Can I provide an example of even one specific discovery made since 1962? Strangely, I cannot. There's a ton of stuff online about Homeric manuscripts in general and Homeric papyri in particular, and from my personal point of view, none of it is user-friendly.



In Die Platonhandschriften Und Ihre Gegenseitigen Beziehungen by Martin Wohlrab, published in 1887 in Leipzig by Teubner, page 643, Wohlrab says that his survey includes 147 manuscripts. (This Teubner volume is a reprint from an academic journal, and begins on page 643.) Also on p 643 Wohlrab said that surely many more manuscripts of Plato would be found. This was before the Oxyrhynchus excavations began. How many papyrii of Plato have been found at Oxyrhynchus? And down the road at Fayum? I dunno. Lots, I would imagine. But Wohlrab was talking about manuscripts laying around in libraries which hadn't yet been catalogued. Was he right, in the 1880, when he predicted that many more manuscripts of Plato would be found in libraries? I dunno. I would guess he was right.



In Texts and Transmission, ed by LD Reynolds, Oxford, 1983, on page xxvii, Reynolds counts up some surviving manuscripts of Sallust: 2 from the 9th century, 4 from the 10th, 33 from the 11th, 58 from the 12th, 39 from the 13th, 46 from the 14th and 330 from the 15th, for a total of 482, and adds in a footnote: "The figures are incomplete, especially for the later period." In addition to these medieval manuscripts of Sallust, there are 4 ancient papyrii. 486, but "the figures are incomplete."

On p 36 of Texts and Transmission, Michael Winterbottom mentions 162 recent and unimportant manuscripts of Caesar. I was unable to find a figure which included both the unimportant and the important manuscripts.

On p 412 of Texts and Transmission, Michael Reeve informs us that we have over 650 manuscripts of Terence and adds, "Published estimates stop at 450. I owe the new figure to Claudia Villa."

On p 394, Reeve mentions "over 160 manuscripts" of Statius' Thebiad. Just of the Thebiad. The total number of manuscripts of Statius is more. How many more? I dunno.



I don't know how many manuscripts there are of Cicero. I don't want to know. I'm not a fan. (There are lots and lots.)

And one more time for Reeve: on p 107 of Studies in Latin Literature and its Tradition: in Honour of C O Brink, Cambridge, 1989, he counts up 154 of the 3rd decade of Livy. That's just for the 3rd decade (books 21-30). The total number of Livy manuscripts is somewhat more. How many more? I dunno.



On p vi of his 2004 Oxford edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, RJ Tarrant informs us that we have over 400 manuscripts of that poem. How many manuscripts do we have of all of Ovid's works? I dunno. Very many, I would imagine.

Don't Be Afraid Of Foreign Languages

I know that fear of the unknown is one of the most basic and primal human fears. And I also know that horrible things can be said in any language. But I also know that paranoia usually doesn't make sense, because most people have other things on their minds most of the time, than you. And whether they speak a language you don't understand or not, if you're nice, you greatly reduce the chances that they'll say nasty things about you. Does it really make much difference if they say something to your face in a language they assume you don't understand, or in your native language when you're out of earshot?

There are many, many perfectly good reasons to study languages, plural. One is that the beauty of the finest language, that of the most skilled writers, is untranslatable. Ovid's verse is so beautiful, line after line, that it gives me goosebumps, the same way that beautiful music does. I wonder, do you really have to understand Latin at all in order to hear and feel a great deal of the sheer beauty in lines like these?

Quae gemitus truncaeque deo Neptunius heros
causa rogat frontis; cui sic Calydonius amnis
coepit inornatos redimitus harundine crines:
"Triste petis munus. quis enim sua proelia victus
commemorare velit? referam tamen ordine, nec tam
turpe fuit vinci, quam contendisse decorum est,
magnaque dat nobis tantus solacia victor."

Those are the first 7 lines of book 9 of Ovid's Metamorphoses.



I realize that I'm undercutting my own point here by choosing the Metamorphoses to illustrate it. I chose Ovid because I've been reading him lately and I really love his work. In fact, right at the moment, Ovid is my very favorite poet in any language. He's just the best. however, the beautifully-written Metamorphoses is chock full of the most hair-raising content. Ovid's masterful verses describe many weird and shocking things. I had to search for a while to come across a handful of verses in a row with such relatively tame and unexotic content as those I quoted. This book does not spend a lot of time on the "then they came into a beautiful town, and the fields were lush, and they were welcomed with great hospitality and dined and drank in comfort as the sun sank peacefully into evening" -- sort of deal. It has much more to do with loving and fighting and deception and revenge and plots and wars and so forth, and, as the title indicates, with magic and transformations. Action-adventure Hollywood doesn't have a lot on Ovid. His beautiful lines deliver a lot of "adult-oriented" material, as it's sometimes called. Don't worry, though, the 6 lines I quoted above could be rated G. Very, very soft PG at most:

The hero who called himself the son of Neptune asked the Calydonian river-god why he sighed and how his forehead had been wounded. The god replied as he bound his unruly hair with reeds: "You ask something painful of me -- who wants to talk about his own defeats? But I'll tell you all about it, because the shame of defeat is mitigated by having fought such a mighty opponent at all."

But my translation of those 6 lines, and, frankly, every single other translation of those lines I've seen, squeeze all of the beauty of the original right out. The original 6 lines, like Ovid's work in general, are exquisitely constructed and balanced and polished like JS Bach's music. Translating Ovid is sort of like describing Bach's music in words instead of playing it or listening to someone play it: it sort of misses the whole point.

Ancient Literary -- No, I Won't Call Them Forgeries. Plenty of Others Will -- Misattributions

Dr Bart Ehrman and some other Biblical scholars have caused a lot of agitation in the general public lately with the news -- news more to the general public than to specialists in New Testament studies -- that some passages in Paul's letters, and some entire letters, some of the shorter books in the New Testament, were not actually written by Paul.

Ehrman is extremely popular in some segments of the "militant" atheist population -- excuse me, but I have to stop the essay for a moment. This use of the word "militant" is really ridiculous. We do not brandish Kalashnikovs. We do not bomb buildings. We do not kidnaps heiresses. We post sharply-worded opinions in Internet social venues. No-one is in danger of physical harm -- and within that segment and the segment of the pious who do the Itchy & Scratchywith us, Ehrman has created quite a ruckus with this news that not all of what we've traditionally thought of as Paul's writings are by Paul. As often happens in these sorts of discussions -- Really. We're discussing things. "Militant." sheesh! -- I feel a bit off to the side, because what interests me in the immediate topic at hand is not the theological implications which are exciting most of the discutants, but the textual transmission.

And just this morning it occurred to me -- aside from the theological implications which, yes, no doubt, are immense. I just can't get excited about it. I find theology to be excruciatingly boring -- that Paul was hardly unique among prominent ancient authors in having spurious works attached to his name. On the contrary. Take Homer. The Homeric Question,that is, whether there really was a poet or singer named Homer who wrote or sang the Iliad and the Odyssey, and if so the details of his biography and the degree of similarity of his creation to the Iliad and Odyssey we know today, is still debated today, but even those, a dwindling minority for the moment, it seems, who are convinced that Homer existed and that he made both poems very much as we know them, tend to agree that he had nothing to do with the creation of the so-called Homeric Hymns, so-called because for a very long time people assumed that he had written them. Take the Appendix Vergiliana, so-called because they were erroneously taken for the juvenalia of Vergil. The poem Halieutica is now generally agreed not to have been written by Ovid, but it's still included in this volumeof Ovid's works, along with a few other bits and pieces, because they were associated with Ovid for so long that this is the natural place to put them. And because they're short. For similar reasons, a lot of fragments probably not of Hesiod's writings, and some surely not by him, are included in this collection of his actual works, while this collection of the works of Sallust include an oration supposedly by Sallust against Cicero which he probably never made, and Cicero's equally-ficticious replay, and short commentaries on Caesar's Alexandrian, African and Spanish Wars, commentaries traditionally attributed to Caesar but now nobody knows for sure who wrote them, are thrown in with this edition of Caesar's account of the Civil War.

And also some of Plato'sdialogues were not really written by Plato. And on and on. And these are not unusual cases. They're typical: if you were a famous ancient author in Latin or Greek, some stories not by you would get attached to your actual work, sometimes by someone deliberately perpetrating a fraud for nefarious or pecuniary purposes, sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately but with no malicious intent, because some admirer of the famous author thought it would be a nice tribute to write something and sign the famous guy's name to it. Yes, some simpletons back then really wouldn't have seen the harm. Or maybe not even such simple guys, which may strain your credulity unless you realize that customs and attitudes change greatly over time, and that was a long time ago. And then typically a century or two or three ago some scholar would say Hey wait a minute and compare style and content and comments by contemporaries of the ancient authors and other considerations and prove, either that this or that piece is not really by who we thought it all was, or that we must now gravely doubt that it is. This is typical. In a way, if it hadn't also happened to Paul, it would've been embarrassing for him, it would've made him stick out like a sore thumb from all the other literary bigshots.

So that's the textual-critical skinny on that. I know, I know, the theological implications of Paul's not actually having written that short letter to Titus are -- yawn Oh, excuse me! -- are huge. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled, excruciately-boring theological uproar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philosopher-Kings

Alexander the Great, the Emperor Augustus,Charlemagne and Napoleon, besides being great rulers and conquerors, had also each of them a great impact upon the culture of his time. Hard-bitten, practical men, politicians and merchants and so forth, often deride culture -- literature, philosophy, art and so forth -- as being both a waste of time and a refuge for weaklings who cannot deal with real life. These practical types tend to measure one's success in "real" life by one criterium: the amount of one's material possessions. At an opposite extreme, one thinks for instance of Nietzscheand Oscar Wilde,are those who maintain that art alone makes life worthwhile. As with many other instances of extreme differences of opinion, so here I feel that such extremes are rather silly. Art is important, but without food, shelter and other basics which the practical types are constantly, industriously providing, no-one would be able to create it. Both extremes contain kernels of truth: often artists are, in fact, pampered sillies who cannot cope very well with the world at large. And art does certainly make life nicer. The practical types probably have no conception of a world completely without art, and would be just as horrified as anyone else if they ever did get a glimpse of such a world.

Whether or not Alexander's relationship with Aristotlewas more than just an interesting historical coincidence, whether Aristotle ever thought of his pupil or Alexander of himself as a philosopher-king, or not -- he died rather young for a philosopher, and in the dozen years of his reign he was extremely busy with practical and political things -- at the very least, one must regard Alexander as an extraordinary patron of culture. Although his empire collapsed into many separate kingdoms almost immediately after his death, still, everywhere he had been, from the Adriatic to Afghanistan, Greek culture flourished for centuries, because Alexander had consciously planted it there. A philosopher, a rhetorician, a musician could travel all over the vast Hellenistic world and find a market for his services in every city, and that he owed directly to Alexander.

It is a commonplace that in the age of patronage, poets and princes had a relationship that was often self-serving on both sides: the princes wanted praise and so supported those poets who flattered them, and the poets realized that the princes were the best patrons, and so flattered ceaselessly, shamelessly and with no regard for the truth. Like many commonplaces, this one overstates the matter somewhat. Doubtless, many writers throughout the ages of patronage were toadies, just as many are today, and many princes were conceited fools ready to swallow any amount of flattery -- as are many leaders and wealthy people today. But it's a great oversimplification to dismiss every description of every prince by the writers of his court on these grounds.

It may not be such an oversimplification, however, in the case of Augustus. Augustus is justly celebrated as the initiator of the pax romana, the greatest period of peace the Mediterranean world, or indeed perhaps any portion of the world at all, has ever enjoyed. Because of his reforms, his institutions and his example, the peace lasted for centuries after Augustus' death. That is certainly to be praised. When one considers the arts, however, a chillier picture emerges. There seems to have been little room for poetry that did not praise the Emperor and his family, and no room at all for anyone who criticized or made fun of them. The Aeniad is a great poem. Perhaps Vergilcould have done no better if he had not been obligated to praise Augustus in his poem. but who knows how many other poets or would-be poets there were, of whom we have never heard, or who never began at all to compose and declaim, because their talent for flattery was too slight? And Ovid,the greatest of all Augustan poets, was banished to a fort on the Imperial frontier on the Black Sea coast, a particularly cruel punishment for such a thorough urbanite. We don't know exactly what Ovid did, how he gave offense to the Imperial house. We can be pretty sure, however, that the offense was pretty minor, of the sort that many princes would ignore, even if it hadn't come from the greatest poet of the age. We know that Ovid apologized profusely, begged pathetically and in vain to be forgiven, until he died on that frontier post. It is generally agreed that Latin literature declined precipitously after the Augustan age. Surprisingly seldom, in my opinion, does anyone think to blame this directly on Augustus.

Alexander and Augustus lived in a culture -- it was in very many respects one and the same culture -- in which it was taken for granted that a sovereign could read and write. By the time of Charlemagne, the Roman senatorial families, the heirs of the rulers of the western Empire, had faded from the scene, any power they might still have confined mostly to the Catholic Church. Almost all of whatever literacy remained was to be found in the monasteries. The rulers of Western Europe, the heirs of the barbarians who had swept away the remnants of the western Empire, could neither read nor write. They fought ceaselessly among themselves, not the least among their own families. Patricide, matricide, fratricide, filiocide and every other sort of depravity was rife, along with famine and plague. To appreciate how great Charlemagne's achievement was, one has to understand how thoroughly awful things had become before him.

Charlemagne united and for the most part pacified a large portion of Western Europe. It's true, he waged war ceaselessly, but he waged it mostly at the expanding borders of his empire, thus pacifying an ever-growing area within. Within his borders, palaces and monasteries were built on a vast scale, and in these monasteries Charlemagne gave great support to learning -- not only Christian learning, but also the preservation of the ancients. In his main palace at Aachen, centuries before universities began to appear in western Europe, there was a sort of academy, from which officials and clerks went to every corner of the Empire. Einhard,Charlemagne's friend, minister and biographer, says that the Emperor himself spoke excellent and fluent Latin in addition to his native German, and could understand Greek as well. The whole time since the collapse of the western part of the Roman Empire, its legitimate heirs had continued to rule in Constantinople. After Charlemagne was named Emperor of the West by the Pope in AD 800, he was, in his own eyes if not in theirs, the colleague and equal of the Byzantine Emperors. In any case, it was only natural that a dominion as large as Charles' would send and receive embassies to and from Constantinople. Einhard also says that Charlemagne tried very hard to learn to write, and was hampered in this only by the fact that he had begun late in life. Charlemagne's vast contributions to letters are not in doubt. Among other things, the first example of written German come from his time, upon his orders. Perhaps Einhard was flattering Charlemagne's memory in his description of the prince's linguistic abilities. We don't know. To me the description has the ring of truth.

A thousand years after Charlemagne, it was once again taken for granted in Europe that princes could read and write. Many other men, however, the bourgeoise, the businessmen, could also read and write, could build palaces, buy fine paintings, produce plays, maintain orchestras and so forth. Their wives and daughters, presumably, often had their hand in all this artistic enterprise. It was not seemly for middle-class women to be obviously, publicly concerned with business, but still they had their salons which could be as grand as those of any princess. For all that titles were losing their significance, however, it was not taken for granted that a man could rise to the rank of king or emperor on his own initiative. But then Napoleon went ahead and did it anyway, and we are still sorting out the consequences of his reign. And the contradictions, which are glaring: this Emperor came to power under the auspices of a Revolution which, or at least so many of its adherents had thought, was to do away with sovereigns. With all sovereigns, once and for all. Beethovennamed his third symphony after Napoleon, then, when he learned that Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor, almost destroyed the score in his rage. He neded up renaming the symphony "to the memory of an heroic man," to the memory of the younger, not-yet-corrupted Napoleon.

Goethewas less disturbed by titles, and met twice with the self-crowned Emperor. Beethoven accused Goethe of being too subservient to Napoleon, but I don't know if the accusation makes much sense. Their lives were so very different that it may have impeded their communication: Beethoven was the son of a musician in an age when musicians were servants. That Beethoven himself refused to be treated as a servant, to grovel before anyone, was a radical break with the past, and was very brave. Far from living out any such traumatic class struggles himself, Goethe was an aristocrat, although not quite as much of one as he claimed to be when describing the past of the Goethe family in Frankfurt, which he consistently, extravagantly exaggerated. He always had servants, he never was one, apart from the formulas of address required among various ranks of the aristocracy, which could very often include such formulations as "I am your most humble servant" and such. Perhaps Beethoven confused such figures of speech with actual servitude. There is no reason to confuse the two things. And in any case writers began earlier than musicians to free themselves from feudal patronage: pen and paper were cheaper than a musical instrument, much cheaper than an orchestra; the princes, although although they usually sought to control literature through censorship, did not compete with the businessmen, the bourgeoise, when it came to printing; and literature may always have attracted more solitary people, more prone to individual assertion and rebellion, than music, which flourishes in the direct interaction of groups.

Goethe himself was a very powerful man, a minister in the state of Weimar who looked after all sorts of things which were by no means confined to the realm of culture -- for example, mining and irrigation were under his purview -- and the most highly-respected poet in Germany, perhaps in all of Europe. The age of patronage had faded to a large degree, replaced by printing presses and mass readerships, and theatres and art galleries open to the public. Then again, things which are often thought of as belonging strictly to the past, have not, upon closer inspection, completely ceased to be. One visited Weimar and hoped to be received by the great man, very much as if he himself were a prince, and not strictly out of admiration for Goethe's talent, although that was always the stated purpose, but in hopes of furthering one's career, either with a job in Weimar or with a recommendation elsewhere. Among Goethe's local circle of friends was a rich and charming widow named Adele Schopenhauer, whose exceptionally gloomy son Arthurwould go on to be a philosopher, one whose fame, in keeping with his dark mood, was destined to be mostly posthumous. Arthur mostly quarreled with his mother, but got along quite well with the Herrn Geheimrat Goethe. Goethe and the young Schopenhauer collaborated on the study of optics, until such time as it dawned on Schopenhauer that Goethe's ideas on optics were unsound. His integrity would not allow him to lie to his master; but the respect he felt would not allow him to contradict him openly. So instead, Schopenhauer moved to Berlin, published his studies on optics, and left Goethe behind.

A few years later a young and still relatively unknown Jewish dandy named Heinrich Heinecame to Weimar and called upon the great man Goethe. Perhaps Heine had been insulted by an antisemitic remark in Goethe's house, or on the way there; for whatever reason, Heine did not deliver the awed respect usual among Goethe's literary visitors; indeed, he seems to have been relatively monosyllabic and just this side of ostentatiously rude. The old Geheimrat tried to draw him out, asked him: What are you working on now? Heine: A version of Faust. Goethe: Do you plan to stay long in Weimar? Heine: Actually, now that I've met your Excellency, my chores in Weimar are completed. And with that the young smart-ass bowed and took his leave. And it turned out that Heine's career blossomed greatly without the protection of Goethe or any other great man, an example of how things were changing. Unfortunately, other things were staying the same: Heine's big mouth, his fearless pen and, to be sure, his Jewish heritage combined to make him intolerable to the powers which were gradually making one Germany out of hundreds of principalities. Like his friend Karl Marx,Heine had to spend most of his life in exile. He settled in Paris and wrote most of his brilliant poems and essays there.

Antisemitism was widespread in Germany, but by no means universal or unchallenged. I doubt that Goethe personally offended Heine, but it's easy to imagine that Goethe's butler or some other of his servants, or one of his aristocratic friends, might have made some crude remark about how things were going to Hell, if this sort of person, pointing to Heine, could now get in to see that sort of person, pointing in the direction of Goethe's drawing-room. One acquaintance, erstwhile friend and colleague of Goethe's who was, unfortunately, clearly antisemitic, was Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer set himself up at the University of Berlin and quite brazenly announced philosophical lectures to be held at the same time as those of Hegel.Did his failure actually surprise Schopenhauer? Competing as an unknown against one of the most popular philosophers of all time, a thinker who was enjoying rock-star fame, speaking in the largest lecture-halls whose seats were always all taken while many other people crowded into the aisles and entrances, seems like the act of a man who wants to fail, all the better to be able to call all of academia sour grapes.

Whatever his subconscious motivations may have been, Schopenhauer quickly canceled his lectures and settled into a solitary bachelor's life, living comfortably on the income from inherited investments, writing philosophy, not voluminously but very brilliantly, and very biliously. His criticisms of academia in general, and of Hegel in particular, are extreme. Extreme as they are, I admire them, although I wonder if they and I are wrong. To put my cards on the table: I, like Schopenhauer, failed pretty badly in academia and tend to resent it for personal reasons. And I have never begun to understand what Hegel was talking about, and so am perhaps too eager to accept Schopenahuer's analysis: that Hegel wrote nothing but nonsense, that he was an unparalleled charlatan who drastically set back the cause of philosophy. What if Schopenhauer never understood what Hegel was talking about? I'm reminded of the stupid comments against all modern, non-representational or conceptual art, uttered by people who obviously have no conception of any aesthetic ideas from later than 1850 or so, and who probably are just as clueless about earlier art as well. I am troubled by the very many later philosophers who seem to take Hegel very seriously indeed.

In any case, though I tend to nod and agree as I read Schopenhauer's critiques of academia, of Professorenphilosophie fuer Philosophieprofessoren, and of Hegel, I shake my head in dismay when Schopenhauer comments upon the Jews. Still, Schopenhauer had high, rare praise for Heine, whom he discovered late in both their lives. Is it possible that he did not know that Heine was a Jew? (I think he did know.) Or is it possible that Heine's writing caused Schopenahuer to reconsider some of his prejudices? (I think it's quite possible.)

The age of patronage, as it was with Alexander, and still with Charlemagne, and to a large degree still with Napoleon, is now gone -- but completely? I don't know. In earlier ages culture was dependent upon princes. When the prince was enthusiastic and openminded like Alexander or Charlemagne, culture flourished, and therefore life flourished. (I'm closer to the one extreme I criticized at the start of this essay, which states baldly that art alone makes life worthwhile, than I am to its opposite. Maybe I'm wrong when it comes to most people, but in my own particular case I'm right: if I can't be surrounded by, drenched in art, then I'm in a pretty sorry state. I can understand Nietzsche and Wilde pretty well, I can't muster much besides horror when considering a Rockefeller or a Gates.) There are fewer princes around nowadays, the ones who survive have far less power and less to say, in the field of culture as elsewhere; but there still is a type of patronage. Businessmen have to some degree taken the place of princes, and unfortunately they often tend to be somewhere between unsophisticated about and downright hostile to culture. There is large-scale state sponsorship of the arts in many European countries, so large-scale that if they had an inkling of it, many American artists would emigrate. Back here in the home of the brave the most important patrons are the successful artists -- and the philosophers and historians and so forth who have the qualities of artists. Unfortunately we don't have one word which embraces them all, although they are a unity as they always have been, as much now as when Leonardo da Vinci was painting and sculpting and designing buildings and bridges and artillery and dissecting bodies and otherwise embodying the definition of the Renaissance Man -- who recognize and promote and more and more often finance their as-yet unrecognized peers. Ever since Plato, the idea has been to inspire and educate the princes. Well, the princes of the ancien regime are just about gone, and their remnants are more sad than inspiring, let alone inspired, less and less capable of sustaining the old fantasies of good princes. The more successful among the artists, however, have begun over the course of the last few centuries to resemble princes. I'm thinking here more of Coppola than Schwarzenegger, more of Bellow than of Rowling. Clearly, Schwarzenegger has at the moment more political power than Coppola. But one certainly has to hope that Coppola has more power in determining what films will be made, and how and by whom. And that Bellow's appreciative remarks on this or that fellow-writer will still resound when no one any longer remembers Harry Potter.