Ancient Classical Authors Recommending One Another's Work

Some time after 1345, Petrarch wrote a letter to his friend Giovanni dell'Incisa which contains this praise of one aspect of Classical literature:

"[...]libris satiari nequeo. Et habeo plures forte quam oportet; sed sicut in ceteris rebus, sic et in libris accidit: querendi successus avaritie calcar est. uinimo, singulare quiddam in libris est: aurum, argentum, gemme, purpurea vestis, marmorea domus, cultus ager, picte tabule, phaleratus sonipes, ceteraque id genus, mutam habent et superficiariam voluptatem; libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt et viva quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate iunguntur, neque solum se se lectoribus quisque suis insinuat, sed et aliorum nomen ingerit et alter alterius desiderium facit. Ac ne res egeat exemplo, Marcum michi Varronem carum et amabilem Ciceronis Achademicus fecit; Ennii nomen in Officiorum libris audivi; primum Terrentii amorem ex Tusculanarum questionum lectione concepi; Catonis Origines et Xenophontis Economicum ex libro De senectute cognovi, eundemque a Cicerone translatum in eisdem officialibus libris edidici. Sic et Platonis Thimeus Solonis michi commendavit ingenium, et Platonicum Phedronem mors Catonis, et Ptholomei regis interdictum cyrenaicum Hegesiam, et de Ciceronis epystolis Senece priusquam oculis meis credidi. Et Senece Contra superstitiones librum ut querere inciperem, Augustinus admonuit, et Apollonii Argonautica Servius ostendit, et Reipublice libros cum multi tum precipue Lactantius optabiles reddidit, et Romanam Plinii Tranquillus Historiam et Agellius eloquentiam Favorini itemque Annei Flori florentissima brevitas ad inquirendas Titi Livii reliquias animavit[...]"

("I will never have as many books as I want. Yes, I have more than I should, but, as in other things, so also with books, success in finding the ones I want just makes me covet more. But there is something unique about books: gold, silver, jewels, purple cloth, a palace of marble, fertile fields, paintings, a finely turned-out horse, and other things in this line, give us only a silent, superficial pleasure; books delight us deeply, ask us interesting questions, and are bound to us by a lively familiarity, and do not merely insinuate themselves upon thier readers, but also name other books, each creating the desire for another. So that examples won't be lacking: Marcus Cicero made me know and love Varro with his Academicus, and I heard the name of Ennius in his De Officiis; the Tusculanae Disputationes made me love Terence; I learned of Cato's Origines and Xenophon's Economicus from Cicero's book De Senectute, and that Cicero had translated the Economicus from the De Officiis. In just the same way, Plato's Timaeus commended Solon's genius to me, as Cato's death did Plato's Phaedo. Ptolomy brought Hegesias of Cyrene to my attention, and I trusted Seneca's judgement about Cicero's letter's before I read them for myself. It was Augustine who urged me to begin my search for Seneca's book Contra superstitiones, and Servius reveleaded to me the Argonautica of Apollonius. There are many others. Lactantius, especially, made me desire Cicero's books De Re Publica, and Suetonius brought Pliny's history alive as did Gellius the eloquence of Favorinus, and the most florid brevity of Annaeus Florus animated me to seek out whatever might remain of Livy.")

Do the best contemporary authors still recommend each other in this manner? I certainly hope that they do, although I couldn't give you many recent examples, because in the late 1980's I began to give up reading all of the latest prize-winning English-language literature in favour of reading material which was older, and then older, and then older than that, and here I am three decades later, still slowly learning to read Latin in my spare time.

Petrarch sure was daffy about Cicero, huh? Nothing remarkable about that. Indeed, I think it's about time that I finally reach the conclusion that the number of people who love Cicero's work is equal to the number who have read it, minus me. And perhaps as many as 3 or 4 others over the course of the past 2000 years.

Which, being the eminently reasonable person that I am, is gradually leading me to an agonizing re-appraisal of the whole situation, and the conclusion that I must give Cicero another try.

But I still don't want to. I still feel, based on the very little amount of his work that I have read, that Cicero is thoroughly pedestrian at best, telling us things every half-wit already knows, and perhaps thoroughly bad at worst. "Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?" Yeah, well, what if Cicero and his pals weren't patient at all, or honest at all, and the portrait we have of Catiline -- which we have from Cicero -- is completely inaccurate? It's not as if I'm the first one who's asked that.

*sigh* I must give Cicero another try. Perhaps he was a thoroughly bad man and at the same time an utterly brilliant writer. That, too, would not be a first.

The 6 Most Important Things In Western Civilization

In chronological order:

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

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

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

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

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

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

They really are nice, you should check them out.

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

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

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

Petrarch

Petrarch, or Francesco Petrarca (1304-74), is famous in at least 2 different worlds. He's definitely most widely famous as a poet. He's the 2nd world-famous Italian poet, chronologically and perhaps 2nd in prestige as well, after Dante.

But he's also quoted and praised effusively in a less densely populated world in which his poems are seldom mentioned. That smaller world is the world of Classical studies, of the preservation and restoration of pre-Christian Greek and Latin literature, especially of Latin authors, and what's being quoted are Petrarch's notes, and his discoveries of manuscripts are exclaimed over. Reading the prefaces and inspecting the critical apparatus of many an ancient author, over and over Petrarch seems to have done more to have preserved and restored the ancient text than any other single person.



Some of the best manuscripts of Livy which we possess today were copied out by Petrarch himself; others have copious notes by Petrarch between the lines or in the margins, comparing their readings to those of other manuscripts, suggesting alternatives when no manuscript seems to have the correct text. The latter is known today as emendation, and it didn't have a name when Petrarch was doing it. The thought of writing something today on a manuscript of a classical text would horrify scholars; nevertheless, Petrarch's single-handed improvements on the ways of re-creating, as far as possible, an ancient text as it originally was, were huge. Although Petrarch wrote between the lines and in the margins of manuscripts which were already old in his time, and we don't do that today, Petrarch didn't destroy any of the manuscripts, or impede anyone's ability to read what was on them, whether he thought that what was on them was a good version of the text, or not. And in his time it was still not uncommon for old manuscripts to be thrown away or used as fuel in ovens. Petrarch, by contrast, scoured the many libraries to which he was allowed access, mostly in monasteries and cathedrals, and built up his own highly-organized library of the Latin Classics. Sometimes he did this by rescuing manuscripts from librarians who had no idea of their worth; other times, when the librarians themselves were competent Classical scholars and cared well for their manuscripts, Petrarch would make his own copies. The Classical library which Petrarch put together was unique in his time apart from the better libraries in monasteries, cathedrals, and those owned by the more literate among princes and bishops. He left instructions for his library to be kept together and well-cared for after his death; nevertheless, it was not. Still, his example, combined with the respect and influence he had gained as an extremely popular poet, was not lost at all, and his methods and innovations were carried forward and improved upon by later Classical scholars.

Some of whom haven't cared much one way or another about his poems.