Ancient Greek and Latin Novels

I hope that not all of the nonsense I was taught in school is still being taught to schoolchildren. I learned that the literary genre of the novel was invented in England in the 18th century. In the Signet Classic edition of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, copyright 1963, the highly-respected critic Frank Kermode asserts that "Tom Jones, published in 1749, was the second great novel. The first, Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, preceeded it only by a year." 

Fielding himself knew better. On the title page of his earlier novel Joseph Andrews Fielding acknowledges that he is imitating Cervantes -- Don Quixote, anyone? And before Cervantes -- and his clear mockery of earlier Spanish novels -- came Rabelais with Gargantua et Pantagreul, which in turn was preceded by Medieval novels in Latin and Greek, and, to cut right to the chase, ancient Greeks wrote novels beginning in the first century BC at the latest, imitated by two Latin authors, Petronius with his Satyricon and Apuleius with the Golden Ass (stop giggling, it means donkey). 

 

Aside from ancient Greek novels which exist only in fragments, there are five entire ones: one each by Chariton in the 1st century AD, Achilles Tatius, Longus, Xenophon of Ephesus in the 2nd century, and Heliodorus of Emesa in the 3rd.

Lucian, a much more skilled writer, lived in the 2nd century AD and wrote in many genres including the novel, although none of his novels has survived entire. Lucian made fun of absolutely everything, including the gods. (Is this why we don't have the complete text of any of his novels?)

Many fragments of previously-lost ancient Greek novels are among the papyri unearthed, primarily at Oxyrhynchus, since the late 19th century. In 1995 Susan Stephens and John Winkler collected all of the known fragments in their volume Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments, which includes texts, translations and commentaries; since 1995, however, still more new fragments have come to light, primarily from Oxyrhynchus.

We know that the ancient novel was more a Greek and a Latin phenomenon; however, the two finest examples of the ancient novel which survive are both Latin. In the first century AD, Petronius, generally believed to have been the official of the same name who served under the Emperor Nero, published a huge novel, the Satyricon, which only survives in fragments; however, the fragments add up to several hundred pages. Petronius relentlessly lampoons the decadence and tastelessness of Rome's newly-rich, a favorite literary pastime of ancient Romans whose families had been rich for a little longer. Although a rich and varied pageant of life is related by the narrator, he himself, distanced from the author's intended audience by a thick layer of irony, cares for little besides his comically unsuccessful attempts to prevent others from making love with his beloved, the young, beautiful, perpetually-available man Giton. 

Perhaps the greatest surviving novel of Greek or Latin antiquity, until the possible unearthing of a complete masterpiece by Lucian, is the 2nd-century Golden Ass by Apuleius. 

Apuleius' novel is beloved, but linguistically, it is strange. Apuleius himself apologizes at the beginning of the work, in case his Latin should offend native speakers. But he says that it is right that his tale should be told in strange speech, for it has to do with the transformation of a man into a donkey and back again, and is itself the transformation of a Greek novel into Latin. 

It was once believed, but no more, that the Greek novel on which Apuleius based his work was written by Lucian. Certainly the world views of the two authors are far, far apart: Lucian mocks everything, even the gods, while Aouleius is a very pious pagan. The protoganist of his novel is turned into a donkey accidentally, because he had too much curiosity and too little awe before supernatural things. And he is rescued and turned back into a man by praying to the Goddess of Heaven -- we generally know her as Isis, but as the pleading donkey says to Her, She is known by many names, and he lists many of them -- and then he becomes a very pious monk of Her cult.

The hilarious, rollicking story (with its very serious pagan religious underpinnings) is full of bad people doing bad things. However, they often interrupt their various bad deeds to tell each other stories, the longest of which, the story of Cupid and Psyche, takes up nearly a quarter of the entire novel, and has often been published separately, and has inspired many, many painters and sculptors.  Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream is based partly on the Golden Ass, which appeared in a very popular English translation by William Adlington in 1566.

Unanswered Questions About Petronius

It's relatively rare that a book is read by as many as a million people. Big-budget movies which aren't seen by millions of people, on the other hand, are flops. Federico Fellini made big-budget movies which definitely weren't flops. Although the novel is almost 2000 years aold, and the film about 40 years old, I think it is fairly safe to say that more people have seen Fellini's movie Satyricon than have read the work by Petronius on which it is based -- loosely based, Fellini has the decency to say right there in the credits.

No, I don't like Fellini's Satyricon. I don't like Fellini's movies in general. Neither did Pauline Kael. Kael made the argument, which I second, that Fellini never bothered much to develop the characters in his movies, because the main character in every Fellini movie is Fellini. If you find Fellini himself to be absolutely fascinating, as he himself clearly did, then there's a chance that you might like some of his movies almost as much as he did -- and oh, what it must be like to love a movie that much! If, on the other hand, you find Fellini to have been a fatuous egomaniac, come on ever here and have a seat by me and Pauline.

In addition to the egomania, there's the grotesquerie. Fellini loved to look at freaks, at deformed people, people who were very fat or very thin, people with huge scars or boils, etc, etc. I don't, so much. I really appreciate how, in most movies and TV shows, most of the people are ridiculously good-looking and impossibly perfect, in many cases much more perfect-looking than the actors who are skillfully altered to look that way. I get more than my fill of grotesque reality away from the screen.

So, first I saw Fellini's Satyricon, and was greatly disappointed, because I assumed that my disgust meant that I would also find Petronius' Satyricon to be disgusting. Then I read Kael's review of Fellini's Satyricon, which gave me hope that there was much in Petronius' version which I might like, which Fellini had missed. Then I began to perceive that many, perhaps most film critics disagreed with Kael, about Fellini and about a lot of other things. A while after that, I ceased to care very much what most film critics think, about Kael or about anything else. Later, I noticed that the Latin and Greek passage quoted at the beginning of TS Eliot's "Waste Land" is a quote of Trimalchio. By that time, I had begun to think somewhat less of Eliot than I once had, but diciphering that passage both made me think a little more of him again, and made me want to read Petronius. (Is the passage in Fellini's film? If so, I slept through it.) So I read Petronius.

That is to say, of course: I read what remains of Petronius. 195 pages in Konrad Mueller's corrected fourth Teubner edition of 2003.

Which brings us to some unanswered questions about Petronius and his poem. Unanswered as far as I know. As always, if you want to be sure, ask experts, and I'm not one. How long was the Satyricon when it was whole? I believe the best guesses there are: at least several times as long as those 195 pages, perhaps ten times as long, perhaps more. Which would make the Satyricon longer than War and Peace but not quite as long as the Old and New Testament together.

Who was this Petronius who wrote this novel? Yes, boys and girls, it's a novel. The novel wasn't invented by Fielding. Or by Cervantes. Or by Rabelais. Or, for that matter, by the ancient Romans. They got the idea from the Greeks. Was it the Petronius Arbiter who was the style advisor to the Emperor and would-be artist Nero, who was obliged to commit suicide in AD 66, when Nero suspected him of plotting against him? (Did Nero suspect correctly?) That Petronius was not yet 40 years old when he died -- assuming that he is our author, what more might he have written, if the rotten Nero had been wiped out first?

Oh, and by the way, just in case this wasn't already completely clear: read it, by all means read it, it's staggeringly good.

What would our author think of Fellini's film? Did Fellini understand Petronius better than Pauline and I, after all? Has my squeamishness blinded me to vast realms of aesthetic and artistic edification? Has it lead me to read a version of the novel which is pale and anemic and quite unlike the author's intent?

And by the way, here's a question which stopped me dead in my tracks over 30 years ago, and which has bothered me ever since, a question I have not been able to even begin to answer: Why do so many of us grown-ups expend so much time and energy discussing made-up stories with such fearful earnestness? How serious a question was it for me at the time? Well, it struck me as an undergraduate right in the middle of an honors English class,right in the middle of something particularly pretentious which I was saying to the professor and the class, and English was one of my double majors. So, it was, and remains, what you might call a rather dramatic existential crisis.

Onward: more questions: would we have more of the novel today, had Poggio never lived, or never learned to read? Yes, him again: Poggio discovered part of what we know of Petrobius today, in 1420. The manuscript he found was copied, and then, of course, Poggio lost it. Additional manuscript discoveries in the 16th and 17th centuries brought the text to the length it has today. Scholars continue to work on the text, and the condition of the manuscripts continues to give them plenty to do.

Are the manuscripts so scanty because Petronius wrote for a small, private audience? Did so much of the text come to light so late because there's so much gay sex in it? Yes, there's also quite a bit of hetero sex, and violence, in the story, but Christian authorities have always objected more strongly to sex in literature athan to violence, and more strong to gay sex than to heterosexuality.

And, of course, there remains that favorite question of mine: Will still more of the text come to light?

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.