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.

Medieval Learning

Nancy Marie Brown has written a book about Pope Sylvester II.

"In the popular mind today," Brown writes, "the Dark Ages are wrongly considered a time of superstiti­on and hysteria, when the Christian church suppressed all scientific investigat­ion.

"Just the opposite is true."

No. The opposite of the Church suppressin­g ALL scientific inquiry would be the Church suppressin­g NO scientific inquiry. The Church most certainly did suppress some inquiry, and most certainly did foment some hysteria and superstiti­on -- even if one doesn't put Christiani­ty under the category of superstiti­on. I do, but for the sake of argument I'll accept Brown's definition -- and on the other hand it supported and encouraged some scientific work. So many people, on one side or another, seem to want to make black-and-­white statements about this or that historical period, in order to score this or that political point -- one reader of HuffPo, for example, responded to Brown's article with the flat statement "the Pope was never a scientist" -- as opposed to really trying to find out what happened, which in my humble opinion is difficult enough under the best of circumstan­ced with no preconceiv­ed notions clouding one's view. (Well... SOME preconceiv­ed notions will probably always cloud the view to some extent.)

Brown writes:

"Gerbert devised an abacus, or counting board, that mimics the algorithms we use today for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. It has been called the first computer."

(Called the first computer by whom?) I was worried that someone might think that Brown had said that Gerbert invented THE abacus, as opposed to AN abacus -- the first known abacus was made in Sumeria somewhere around 2500 BC -- but luckily that doesn't seem to have happened so far.

"In a chronology of computer history, Gerbert's abacus is one of only four innovation­s mentioned between 3000 B.C. and the invention of the slide rule in 1622."

That just makes me think: Wow, that's a pretty weak chronology. Where did you get it -- from a placemat in a diner on the Interstate somewhere?

Gerbert of Aurillac, who became Sylvester II in the last 4 years of his life, really was a very interesting man, and Brown lists off some of the high points from his resume, but she betrays the spirit of careful scientific inquiry exemplified by Gerbert, by Sylvester, with absurd statements like "A thousand years ago [...] our modern tension between faith and science did not exist."

As a corrective to such sweeping statements, I would like to recommend once again, as I did in another blog post recently, Lynn Thorndike's superb Chapter XXII: "Magic, Witchcraft, Astrology, and Alchemy," in The Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. VIII: The Close of the Middle Ages. In the bibliography to this chapter ones sees that Thorndike consulted an extraordinary number of primary documents. Thorndike tries neither to exalt medieval thinkers nor to condemn them but to show them and their situation as they were: surprisingly advanced in some ways to modern eyes, and surprisingly limited, primitive and superstitious in others.