There's a huge difference, for an historian, between studying events which took place two hundred years ago, and those which transpired two thousand years ago. While there are piles and shelves and entire large libraries' worth of the original copies of documents written or dictated by the American Founding Fathers and the protagonists in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, taking quite a bit of the doubt out of our conceptions of what people like George Washington and Georges Danton really wished to communicate to their contemporaries, we don't have any original copies of the works of Julius Caesar or Livy or Ovid or Vergil, or any other of the Classical Latin authors. We don't have any copies made within three hundred years of the lives of the authors in the cases of Livy or Vergil. In the cases of Caesar and Ovid, enormously popular authors from their own time down to the present, no manuscripts have survived which are older than the 9th century, more than 900 years after the texts were first written, unless some older fragment on papyrus has been found recently in the Middle Eastern desert. Even the 9th century is very impressively old for a copy of an ancient text. For some of the most highly-prized writers of ancient Latin, we have to make do with manuscripts no older than the 15th century, or even more recent than that. But in such cases we still make do gratefully -- why? Because there are very many highly-prized ancient authors whose works we no longer have at all, about whom we know only because other writers have mentioned them. And in the cases of Caesar and Livy and Ovid and Vergil and many, many other ancient authors, we have mentions of other works they wrote, but no copies of those works. Rarely, a copy of one of those lost authors, or of a lost work by some author whom we already know, turns up. And that's also a big occasion, even if all we've found is a few words.
It'd be nice if we had all sorts of original or near-original copies of things written thousands of years ago. But we only have a few, and most of those are either inscriptions, words carved into stone like the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, a self-serving list, written by the Emperor Augustus, of his own achievements, carved into public monuments after his death,
or things like shopping lists and the personal letters of non-famous people on some of those above-mentioned scraps of papyrus, dug up at places like Oxyrhynchus in Egypt -- along with an occasional scrap of a very old manuscript of a text by someone like Homer or Vergil. When it comes to literary texts, Classical scholars attempt to reconstruct the earliest version of the text they can, as best they can. This process is known as scholarly editing, and rather than me clumsily attempting to explain to you step-by-step how it's done (I'm not ready to do it myself just yet), you'd be better off taking courses in Classical Studies, or referring to books like these, written by some of the world's leading Classical scholars:
The world's leading Classical scholars also edit texts for series like the Oxford Classical Texts (OCT) and the Teubner series,
Each volume in those two series begins with a preface in which the editor explains, often at great length and in great detail, which manuscripts and other sources of information he or she has used in the process of editing the text, and just exactly what he or she has done with those sources in order to come up with the present volume.
Of course, most of the prefaces in the OCT and Teubner series are written in Latin, which is 1) one more very good reason on the long list of reasons to learn Latin, and 2) perhaps the best single piece of evidence that, in the 21st century, Latin is still not dead.
Showing posts with label preservation of classical texts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label preservation of classical texts. Show all posts
Monday, May 18, 2015
Sunday, August 18, 2013
My Search For The Lost Books Of Livy
[Edited 25. February 2015]
Some scholars of the Classics reading the title of this post, assuming that any such scholar ever will, might well laugh and wonder whether I'm joking or simpleminded. I hope I'm neither, but I myself smiled as I chose that title, and I know that the Classical scholars who would hear of such a search with anything other than derision might be few or non-existent. That's okay. I'm quite used to being sneered at and made fun of by Biblical scholars because they haven't convinced me yet that Jesus existed, and so being made fun of because I'm not convinced that those 107 lost books of Livy don't still exist somewhere wouldn't be an entirely new experience for me. In fact, in a way I can understand such derision, because how are academics supposed to be able to tell me apart at first glance from a fan of popular contemporary mythicists (as those who are unconvinced that Jesus existed are called) like Carrier, Price, Doherty and/or of the "History Channel"? I feel that I'm pretty unique among the non-mainstream, that I resemble an academic in many ways and that my lack of an academic career is due to my autism and not because I can't keep up with what the pros are talking about. It seems that way to me, but have I done anything so far to prove to the pros that I'm someone to be taken seriously in the field of ancient history? I have not. On the contrary, the autism, the lack of credentials, the complete lack of peer-reviewed papers, the eccentric views on Jesus and Livy's lost books are all red flags. I know this, and it's okay.
I think I respect the academic mainstream more than do most of the most popular contemporary mythicists. I don't know if there's a term corresponding to "mythicist" to describe someone looking for Livy's lost books. In fact, I don't know of anyone else at all besides me who's currently looking. And the less-than-admiring opinion of such an undertaking on the part of the academic mainstream does give me pause. I would just say to the deriders and head-shakers: a searcher doesn't have to find what he's looking for in order for his search to have been worthwhile. Successful or not, if he searches well, he will find all sorts of things he wasn't looking for.
But I must make clear, and this isn't false modesty, it's accurate, that my search for the lost books so far has been feeble and entirely amateurish. I hope that may change eventually.
The trail of the lost books goes cold in the late 6th century. There is fragmentary evidence of them up until that time:
A condensed version of the entire work, all 142 books, known as the periochae. A volume edited by Otto Jahn in the 19th century contains the periochae, 106 pages in this edition, probably about 1% as many words as the original, and then, 29 pages long, the so-called prodigies of Julius Obsequens: mentions of comets, earthquakes, famines, swarms of bees and other unusual things occuring in Livy's work. Obsequens' work itself does not survive whole: we have only his descriptions of the prodigies in Livy's books 56 through 132. Both the author of the periochae and Obsequens are thought to have worked in the 4th century.
Then there is Florus, whose history of Rome, about as long as the periochae, focusing mainly on military matters, is drawn mostly from Livy, and rarely studied today for any other reason than to learn about Livy.
11 pages of fragments from the lost books were collected and included in an out-of-print edition of books 41-45, edited by William Weissenborn and Moritz Mueller, published by Teubner.
Those 5 books, 41-45, are now known to us from a single manuscript, which was written in the 5th century, circulated for a while and then was discovered collecting dust on a shelf in a monastery in Switzerland in the 16th century. It seems that this manuscript was originally only half of a manuscript containing books 41-50. 46-50 are currently at large.
In a very famous letter from the year 401, on p 239 of the MGH edition of his works, ISBN 3-921575-19-2, the Roman patrician Quintus Aurelius Symmachus informs his friend Valerian that his entire household is engaged in an edition of Livy's works.
These are some of the clues we have to the possible whereabouts of those missing 107 books. Symmachus owned quite a number of villas in Italy. Recently an ancient villa thought possibly to be the one where that edition of Livy was made has been excavated along with its surroundings, leading to some speculation about the possibility of coming across interesting texts.
An enormous amount of writing on ancient papyrus, as well as some on parchment, has been found in Egypt since the 19th century, and some continues to be found, mostly in Egypt but some to the east. Finds like the Dead Sea Scrolls and Gnostic Gospels make a lot of headlines, but they're a tiny fraction of all of the ancient texts found. Most of the texts are in Greek, the dominant language of the eastern Roman Empire, but some are Latin. A couple of the finds were a few dozen words each of Livy, 1 from book 1 (known) and 1 from book 11 (lost!) and a third was a condensed version of books 37-40 (known) and 48-55 (lost!).
So you see, we actually are finding parts of the lost books. There's that codex containing books 41-45 recovered in the 16th century. The most spectacular find since then is a palimpsest of about 1000 words from book 91, contained among those fragments in Weissenborn and Mueller's volume mentioned above. The most spectacular find since then was that parchment containing several dozen words of book 11. That was found in the 1980's. The deriders would say that I, along with anyone else like me, in case there is anyone else like me on this subject, am ignoring a pattern of drastically diminishing returns. I would respond that they're displaying a can't-do attitude.
What can we do? We can take all of the things I have listed above and use them as clues as to where to look for more. We can think about the time when the trail went cold, the late 6th century. The darkest part of the Dark Ages in Western Europe. The reign of Pope Gregory the Great -- not so great from the point of view of Classical scholars. Did he order the destruction of the works of Livy? If so, what we possess is what survived a deliberate destruction, and we need to think about where the books currently lost may have been hidden to escape Gregory's troops. If Gregory had nothing to do with the loss, if the books disappeared from view in the general random chaos of the wars of the time, where would they have been most well-protected from all that chaos? (Just as in the hypothetical case of an anti-Livy campaign by Gregory, so too in the general-chaos hypothesis, the lost books could have been hidden by design, or merely happened to be in the right place, away from danger.) The authors who included fragments of Livy in their works, the last people we know to have possessed the lost books -- what can we learn about their lives, about their surroundings, about what could have happened to their possessions including the books they owned? What can that palimpsest of those 1000 words from book 91 tell us about where to look for similar palimpsests? Weissenborn and Mueller included another palimpsest text, which they say comes from book 136. Most scholars today say it's not from Livy at all but a passage written by Sallust. Who's right? How many libraries and monasteries and attics and studies remain in a state sufficiently disorganized to warrant their being combed through for what we're looking for?
So. If you see me with a look on my face like I'm a million miles away, chances are good that this is the sort of thing I'm turning over in my mind. This is actually much more interesting to me than whether or not Jesus existed.
Some scholars of the Classics reading the title of this post, assuming that any such scholar ever will, might well laugh and wonder whether I'm joking or simpleminded. I hope I'm neither, but I myself smiled as I chose that title, and I know that the Classical scholars who would hear of such a search with anything other than derision might be few or non-existent. That's okay. I'm quite used to being sneered at and made fun of by Biblical scholars because they haven't convinced me yet that Jesus existed, and so being made fun of because I'm not convinced that those 107 lost books of Livy don't still exist somewhere wouldn't be an entirely new experience for me. In fact, in a way I can understand such derision, because how are academics supposed to be able to tell me apart at first glance from a fan of popular contemporary mythicists (as those who are unconvinced that Jesus existed are called) like Carrier, Price, Doherty and/or of the "History Channel"? I feel that I'm pretty unique among the non-mainstream, that I resemble an academic in many ways and that my lack of an academic career is due to my autism and not because I can't keep up with what the pros are talking about. It seems that way to me, but have I done anything so far to prove to the pros that I'm someone to be taken seriously in the field of ancient history? I have not. On the contrary, the autism, the lack of credentials, the complete lack of peer-reviewed papers, the eccentric views on Jesus and Livy's lost books are all red flags. I know this, and it's okay.
I think I respect the academic mainstream more than do most of the most popular contemporary mythicists. I don't know if there's a term corresponding to "mythicist" to describe someone looking for Livy's lost books. In fact, I don't know of anyone else at all besides me who's currently looking. And the less-than-admiring opinion of such an undertaking on the part of the academic mainstream does give me pause. I would just say to the deriders and head-shakers: a searcher doesn't have to find what he's looking for in order for his search to have been worthwhile. Successful or not, if he searches well, he will find all sorts of things he wasn't looking for.
But I must make clear, and this isn't false modesty, it's accurate, that my search for the lost books so far has been feeble and entirely amateurish. I hope that may change eventually.
The trail of the lost books goes cold in the late 6th century. There is fragmentary evidence of them up until that time:
A condensed version of the entire work, all 142 books, known as the periochae. A volume edited by Otto Jahn in the 19th century contains the periochae, 106 pages in this edition, probably about 1% as many words as the original, and then, 29 pages long, the so-called prodigies of Julius Obsequens: mentions of comets, earthquakes, famines, swarms of bees and other unusual things occuring in Livy's work. Obsequens' work itself does not survive whole: we have only his descriptions of the prodigies in Livy's books 56 through 132. Both the author of the periochae and Obsequens are thought to have worked in the 4th century.
Then there is Florus, whose history of Rome, about as long as the periochae, focusing mainly on military matters, is drawn mostly from Livy, and rarely studied today for any other reason than to learn about Livy.
11 pages of fragments from the lost books were collected and included in an out-of-print edition of books 41-45, edited by William Weissenborn and Moritz Mueller, published by Teubner.
Those 5 books, 41-45, are now known to us from a single manuscript, which was written in the 5th century, circulated for a while and then was discovered collecting dust on a shelf in a monastery in Switzerland in the 16th century. It seems that this manuscript was originally only half of a manuscript containing books 41-50. 46-50 are currently at large.
In a very famous letter from the year 401, on p 239 of the MGH edition of his works, ISBN 3-921575-19-2, the Roman patrician Quintus Aurelius Symmachus informs his friend Valerian that his entire household is engaged in an edition of Livy's works.
These are some of the clues we have to the possible whereabouts of those missing 107 books. Symmachus owned quite a number of villas in Italy. Recently an ancient villa thought possibly to be the one where that edition of Livy was made has been excavated along with its surroundings, leading to some speculation about the possibility of coming across interesting texts.
An enormous amount of writing on ancient papyrus, as well as some on parchment, has been found in Egypt since the 19th century, and some continues to be found, mostly in Egypt but some to the east. Finds like the Dead Sea Scrolls and Gnostic Gospels make a lot of headlines, but they're a tiny fraction of all of the ancient texts found. Most of the texts are in Greek, the dominant language of the eastern Roman Empire, but some are Latin. A couple of the finds were a few dozen words each of Livy, 1 from book 1 (known) and 1 from book 11 (lost!) and a third was a condensed version of books 37-40 (known) and 48-55 (lost!).
So you see, we actually are finding parts of the lost books. There's that codex containing books 41-45 recovered in the 16th century. The most spectacular find since then is a palimpsest of about 1000 words from book 91, contained among those fragments in Weissenborn and Mueller's volume mentioned above. The most spectacular find since then was that parchment containing several dozen words of book 11. That was found in the 1980's. The deriders would say that I, along with anyone else like me, in case there is anyone else like me on this subject, am ignoring a pattern of drastically diminishing returns. I would respond that they're displaying a can't-do attitude.
What can we do? We can take all of the things I have listed above and use them as clues as to where to look for more. We can think about the time when the trail went cold, the late 6th century. The darkest part of the Dark Ages in Western Europe. The reign of Pope Gregory the Great -- not so great from the point of view of Classical scholars. Did he order the destruction of the works of Livy? If so, what we possess is what survived a deliberate destruction, and we need to think about where the books currently lost may have been hidden to escape Gregory's troops. If Gregory had nothing to do with the loss, if the books disappeared from view in the general random chaos of the wars of the time, where would they have been most well-protected from all that chaos? (Just as in the hypothetical case of an anti-Livy campaign by Gregory, so too in the general-chaos hypothesis, the lost books could have been hidden by design, or merely happened to be in the right place, away from danger.) The authors who included fragments of Livy in their works, the last people we know to have possessed the lost books -- what can we learn about their lives, about their surroundings, about what could have happened to their possessions including the books they owned? What can that palimpsest of those 1000 words from book 91 tell us about where to look for similar palimpsests? Weissenborn and Mueller included another palimpsest text, which they say comes from book 136. Most scholars today say it's not from Livy at all but a passage written by Sallust. Who's right? How many libraries and monasteries and attics and studies remain in a state sufficiently disorganized to warrant their being combed through for what we're looking for?
So. If you see me with a look on my face like I'm a million miles away, chances are good that this is the sort of thing I'm turning over in my mind. This is actually much more interesting to me than whether or not Jesus existed.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
This Business About Thanking The Monks
A somewhat confused and silly person accused me of not knowing what an analogy is, because I objected to the analogy: "The printing press was the Internet of the 16th century." He concluded a report on the dissemination via printing press of the Bible in the 16th century with the non-sequitor, "If you can read, thank a monk."
I have nothing at all against the individual monks who copied, for instance, Ovid's "Metamorphoses," an ancient Latin poem I like quite a lot. On the contrary, I suspect that some of those monks may have stuck their necks out a bit, or possibly even risked punishment, by disobeying orders in order to make manuscripts of the "Metamorphoses" instead of something more strictly Christian. Or the copyists may have been reluctant in certain cases, and it may have been their superiors, abbots or bishops, who were the enthusiastic Classicists and ordered the copies of Ovid's great poem to be made. Either way, as an enthusiastic (amateur) Classicist myself, I naturally appreciate the efforts of Western Medieval Classicists. All of whom were clergypeople.
But to thank a monk for the survival of classical literature -- let alone for my ability to read at all -- that is, to thank any monk for it -- every monk -- is beyond the beyond, as Pete Townshend would say. That would be, in effect, to thank Christianity for having preserved civilization. I already told Sir Kenneth Clark in a previous Wrong Monkey blog post what he could do with that notion. Apart from my objection to the extremely narrow and xenophobic definition of culture put forward by Clark, and also by some Catholic apologists who really seem to believe that the Middle Ages were a glorious time, when I am thankful to those individual Medieval Classicists who made copies of the works of Ovid and Sallust and Horace and the other pre-Christian writers I love, I do not feel that I am thanking them for doing something inherently Christian. On the contrary, I think I'm thanking them for having gone against the grain of Christianity, and having prevented Christianity from completely destroying all traces of Classical Greek and Rome, instead of only destroying most traces as it did.
I'm going to make an analogy here, to demonstrate that I do too know what an analogy is, and also to refute this absurd notion that if you can read, you should thank a monk. On the one hand, part of me thinks that the notion is much, much too absurd to need refuting; on the other hand, such notions have been advanced by people like Sir Kenneth Clark, who besides his cushy day job advising the British royal family on matters of art was allowed to make a public-television series whose format was comparable to the series of Carl Sagan and Dr Bleedin' Bronowski, as if his ideas were on a par with theirs, and by other people who often can not only, so it seems, dress themselves and walk about more or less upright on their hind limbs, but are also full professors and successful authors, in short: it seems to need refuting.
Imagine if between 1741 and 1993, in all of the lands of the British Commonwealth and in the US, only WASP's had been allowed to operate printing presses or websites or own bookstores or otherwise sell or distribute printed works. In this imaginary analogous past, other ethnicities were allowed to write, but if they were going to write for a public, all of the stages of publishing and dissemination of their works were going to be controlled by WASP's. Imagine if someone today in that alternate universe told you that if you can read you should thank a WASP, because of those 252 years when WASP's had a tight monopoly upon the printed word in certain countries. Thanking a monk for being able to read is no less ridiculous, no less insulting to the world outside of the party which for a certain time and in a certain area was allowed to tightly, rigidly control literacy. Literacy began long before there were Christian monks, it thrived all over the world in regions which until recently had never heard of Jesus. It's hard to know for sure about such things, but it seems clear that literacy rates within the Roman Empire declined sharply after the Christian takeover. Apologists blame the illiterate hordes from Northern Europe and Asia; I blame the Christians, who demonized all non-Christian writing and discouraged the masses from reading even the Bible. I think it's quite obvious where the blame belongs, if people will inform themselves about what happened, and if they are able to consider events without absolutely qrotesque levels of prejudice.
I have nothing at all against the individual monks who copied, for instance, Ovid's "Metamorphoses," an ancient Latin poem I like quite a lot. On the contrary, I suspect that some of those monks may have stuck their necks out a bit, or possibly even risked punishment, by disobeying orders in order to make manuscripts of the "Metamorphoses" instead of something more strictly Christian. Or the copyists may have been reluctant in certain cases, and it may have been their superiors, abbots or bishops, who were the enthusiastic Classicists and ordered the copies of Ovid's great poem to be made. Either way, as an enthusiastic (amateur) Classicist myself, I naturally appreciate the efforts of Western Medieval Classicists. All of whom were clergypeople.
But to thank a monk for the survival of classical literature -- let alone for my ability to read at all -- that is, to thank any monk for it -- every monk -- is beyond the beyond, as Pete Townshend would say. That would be, in effect, to thank Christianity for having preserved civilization. I already told Sir Kenneth Clark in a previous Wrong Monkey blog post what he could do with that notion. Apart from my objection to the extremely narrow and xenophobic definition of culture put forward by Clark, and also by some Catholic apologists who really seem to believe that the Middle Ages were a glorious time, when I am thankful to those individual Medieval Classicists who made copies of the works of Ovid and Sallust and Horace and the other pre-Christian writers I love, I do not feel that I am thanking them for doing something inherently Christian. On the contrary, I think I'm thanking them for having gone against the grain of Christianity, and having prevented Christianity from completely destroying all traces of Classical Greek and Rome, instead of only destroying most traces as it did.
I'm going to make an analogy here, to demonstrate that I do too know what an analogy is, and also to refute this absurd notion that if you can read, you should thank a monk. On the one hand, part of me thinks that the notion is much, much too absurd to need refuting; on the other hand, such notions have been advanced by people like Sir Kenneth Clark, who besides his cushy day job advising the British royal family on matters of art was allowed to make a public-television series whose format was comparable to the series of Carl Sagan and Dr Bleedin' Bronowski, as if his ideas were on a par with theirs, and by other people who often can not only, so it seems, dress themselves and walk about more or less upright on their hind limbs, but are also full professors and successful authors, in short: it seems to need refuting.
Imagine if between 1741 and 1993, in all of the lands of the British Commonwealth and in the US, only WASP's had been allowed to operate printing presses or websites or own bookstores or otherwise sell or distribute printed works. In this imaginary analogous past, other ethnicities were allowed to write, but if they were going to write for a public, all of the stages of publishing and dissemination of their works were going to be controlled by WASP's. Imagine if someone today in that alternate universe told you that if you can read you should thank a WASP, because of those 252 years when WASP's had a tight monopoly upon the printed word in certain countries. Thanking a monk for being able to read is no less ridiculous, no less insulting to the world outside of the party which for a certain time and in a certain area was allowed to tightly, rigidly control literacy. Literacy began long before there were Christian monks, it thrived all over the world in regions which until recently had never heard of Jesus. It's hard to know for sure about such things, but it seems clear that literacy rates within the Roman Empire declined sharply after the Christian takeover. Apologists blame the illiterate hordes from Northern Europe and Asia; I blame the Christians, who demonized all non-Christian writing and discouraged the masses from reading even the Bible. I think it's quite obvious where the blame belongs, if people will inform themselves about what happened, and if they are able to consider events without absolutely qrotesque levels of prejudice.
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