Latin Authors from Spain

Roman conquest of Spain began in 218 BC, as Rome battled with Carthage for dominance in the Western Mediterranean, and continued until -- when? The answer may depend partly upon one's political position. Some would say that the conquest was complete, for all intents and purposes, within a century; others, that it was never complete. From how long and to what extent earlier native languages were spoken in Spain, and in which proportions those languages were Celtic, or Basque, or unclassified Iberian, or others, I do not know.

In the first century AD, quite a number of the most prominent authors in the Latin language happened to come from Spain: Pomponius Mela (died ca AD 45), the earliest known Roman geographer; Columella (AD 4 -- 70), who wrote a lengthy work on agriculture; Lucan (30 -- 65), author of a very popular epic poem about the Roman civil war; Martial (born between 38 and 41 -- died between 102 and 104), who authored many witty epigrams; Quintilian (ca 35 -- ca 100), one of the most prominent of the Roman rhetoricians; and, most prominent of all, the Senecas, father and son. Seneca the Elder wrote memoirs and a history of Rome; Seneca the Younger wrote quite a wide variety of works: philosophy, drama, moralizing letters and satire penned by him survive to this day.

Later Spaniards who wrote and published in Latin include the Christian theologian Priscillian, sometime Bishop of Ávila (died 385); the poet Prudentius (died between ca 405 and 413); and the widely-traveled historian Orosius (c 375 -- died after 418). 4th-century Latin authors from Spain whose works have not survived to the present day, but are praised by contemporaries, include Juvencus, a poet who now cannot be dated more exactly than the 4th century[PS, 23 October 2019: I erred: A poem by Juvencus has survived, a verse rendering of the Gospel narrative about 3200 verses long, composed ca AD 330. Thank you once again, Reddit!] ; and the poet Latronianus (Died 385).

I have written elsewhere on this blog of the prolific Saint Isidore of Seville (ca 560 -- 636), beloved by Christian for many works, and by Classicists for his Etymologie, which, although it fails pretty spectacularly in the goal expressed in its title, to accurately trace the origins of words, none the less success brilliantly as an encyclopedia and as a repository of fragments of ancient works which otherwise are lost to us; and of Pope Sylvester II (ca 946 -- 1003), known earlier as Gerbert, one of the most brilliant scientists of the Middle Ages.

The Toledo School of Translators were responsible for many of the Latin translations from Arabic and ancient Greek which transformed the curricula of the Sorbonne and other Western universities beginning in the 13th century. Perhaps the foremost of these translator at Toledo was Gerard of Cremona, who fashioned Latin versions of many Greek and Arabic scientific works.

Alfonso X of Castile, also known as Alfonso the Wise, took over the leadership of the translation school in the 13th century (he reigned from 1252 to 1284), and, although Latin writing certainly flourished under him and for a long time afterwards in Spain, his cultivation of the Castilian vernacular is so greatly, and understandably, celebrated, that it obscures, from the feeble view of your humble scribe, many of the particulars of this Latin culture, and so, for the nonce, he must pause here.

The Missing History of Spain

The history of Spain is largely missing from the consciousness of that which we sometimes still call Western civilization. And in many instances, what we "Westerners" do know about Spain is bad: they had the Spanish Inquisition there. The Spanish Armada and the Bartholomew's Day massacre came from there. As if only horror ever came from there, as if horror were never perpetrated elsewhere in Europe. Only rarely has a single towering Spanish genius managed to pierce the veil of our ignorance: Cervantes, Velasquez, Goya, Picasso.

In the Roman Empire, Spaniards such as the authors Seneca the Elder and the Younger, Lucan and Martial are thought of as part and parcel of Roman culture. Spanish Emperors such as Hadrian are thought of as being as thoroughly Roman as anyone else. The separation had not yet begun.

But then in the 5th century AD the sense began to spread that Spain was foreign, as the Vandals came in and ruled the whole peninsula. Germanic tribes ruled most of the rest of western Europe during the Dark Ages too, but what made the Vandals foreign to the rest was above all that they were Arian Christians, not Catholics -- not, that is, the sort of Christians who later, in historical hindsight, would become known as Catholics. In order to keep thinking of some group of people as foreign and horrible and wrong, it is best to know as little about them as possible, and so, while Western history of the Dark Ages conventionally mentions two writers above all, two Gregories, Gregory of Tours and Pope Gregory the Great, their late-6th-century-early-7th-century Spanish contemporary Isidore of Seville, even though he too was thoroughly Catholic and deeply involved in the Catholization of Spain, and even though he is a far, far more learned and interesting writer than either of the Gregories, is not nearly as well known in the West.

After the Vandals, the Muslims came to Spain and began a nearly 800-year-long epoch about which we in the West are just beginning to learn. So, for example, we are just now beginning to hear about Gerbert of Aurillac, even though he spent the last 4 years of his life, from 999 to 1003, as Pope Sylvester II, and even though he was indisputably one of the most brilliant European scholars of his age. We are just now beginning to hear about King Alfonso X of Castile, who reigned from 1252 to 1284, known all along to Spaniards as Alfonso el Sabio, Alfonso the Wise, who developed one of the centres of learning which welcome Christians, Jews and Muslims, which have been so intensely hated by some Christians and others since well before Alfonso's time right down to our own, and which always seem to be so brilliant.

Cultural tolerance leading directly to intellectual breakthroughs. Imagine such a thing.

Alfonso's court was one of those places where we got those translations of ancient Greek authors which had first been translated into Arabic -- translations we've heard a lot about, without usually asking where they came from. Another was the Sicilian court of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor from 1220 to 1250. For his trouble, Frederick spent much of his reign excommunicated by various popes, and when he died Innocent IV offered a hymn of praise on the occasion of "the death of Antichrist." I'm not sure, but I bet that hymn makes no reference to the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10, verses 25-37. I'm just guessing it doesn't.

Anyway: it wasn't just translations from Greek and Arabic into Latin which were produced at Alfonso's court: also, works originally written in Greek, Arabic or Latin were all translated into Castilian. And this may be one more, and a much more ironic reason for the cultural separation of Spain from the rest of western Europe. Alfonso's translations seems to have led to a decline of the use of Latin in Spain. The Latin language didn't disappear from Spain, but compared to academics and clerics in the rest of Western Europe, Spanish academics and clerics after Alfonso's time write surprisingly seldom in Latin. Latin remained the dominant language of academia in western Europe for a long, long time to come, still very lively in pockets of academia as late as the late 19th century. And this predominance of one common international language, quite naturally, fostered and nurtured one international academic community. Alfonso the Wise may have unintentionally, and unwisely, made Spain even more isolated from the rest of Europe than it already had been, because of these translations from Latin to Castilian.