Claudian

Claudius Claudianus (c 370-c 404) belongs, along with Symmachus, Ausonius and Macrobius, to the last generation of "pagan" men of letters who resisted, in vain, the victory of Christianity in the dissolving western Roman Empire. (I've taken to writing "pagan" in quotation marks more and more often since I discovered that it originally was a disparaging adjective meaning something like "rustic" or "bumpkin," which, agree with them or not, was just about the last thing the four above-listed "pagans" were. Nor is it at all accurate in describing non-Christians of the period generally. Insult people if you must, but please, try to do it with at least some relation to reality.) 

 Born in Alexandria, Claudian abandoned his native language Greek in favor of Latin. Arriving in the West in the early 390's, he quickly made a name for himself with panegyrics, speeches praising powerful men. He soon won a high position at the court of the western Emperor Honorius, where he is assumed to lived until his death. 

The works of Claudius which survive to our time are mostly panegyrics favoring Honorius and Stilicho, who was the commander in chief of the armed forces and the effective ruler of the west in the stead of the feckless Emperor, and their allies, and invectives against their enemies. In addition we have some poems of his on mythological themes. One of the latter, the unfinished Raptus Proserpinae in three books, is by far the most well-known of his works, and won him a wide readership all throughout the Middle Ages. 

All agree that Claudian's verse is elegant and polished to a very high degree. Perhaps his most-praised quality as a poet is the intensity and unreserved expression of hatred and contempt in his invective, which has greatly entertained readers from his own time to ours.

John B Hall, in his 1985 Teubner edition of Claudian, lists 23 previous editions, from 1482 to 1933.

He also lists around 300 manuscripts of Claudian in that same 1985 edition, or, I believe, every single manuscript he was able to study. And he seems to have them all, or at the very least very, very many of them, in the apparatus criticus. This puzzles me. Does Hall completely reject stemmatics?

Stemmatics is the determination of which manuscripts were copied from which others. If it can be proven that manuscript B was copied from manuscript A, then, according to stemmatics, B may be disregard when making an edition of the text, unless A has been damaged and therefore lacks portions of the text which survive in B, or for some other extraordinary reason, such as B containing extremely good conjectures. There are some other ancient Latin authors of whose works hundreds of manuscripts survive, but typically, and editions of their works relies on a couple dozen or less, because of stemmatics.

I'll just cut right to the chase here: I don't know why Hall based his edition on all of the manuscripts. Maybe he doesn't believe that stemmatics is valid. Perhaps he doesn't believe that it can proven that one manuscript was copied from another. I don't know why someone would not believe that. If Hall or someone similarly-minded tried to explain it to me, I don't know whether I would understand. 

I do like big long comprehensive lists of manuscripts though, even if I don't not share the compiler's views on what the list is good for.

Macrobius and the Saturnalia

Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius is known for writing 2 works in the 5th century: Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio; and the Saturnalia, the work which will primarily concern us here. A third work, De verborum Graeci et Latini differentiis vel societatibus, Differences and Similariites Between Greek and Latin Verbs, has been lost except for fragments.

Macrobius tells his readers that Latin is not his first language. Therefore it is safe to assume that he was not a native of the city of Rome. Where exactly he did come from, which positions he held in the Empire, and his exact dates are matters of considerable controversy. It is safe to assume that he was among the upper class of consuls, prefects and proconsuls. He may have been praetorian prefect of Italy in the year 430, or he may been proconsul of Africa in 410, or he may have been neither. It is fairly safe to assume that his first language was Greek.

The Saturnalia was a week-long Roman holiday celebrated around the winter solstice. In Macrobius' Saturnalia, learned gentlemen gather during the Saturnalia in the year 383 or earlier, and discuss matters of history, literature and philosophy, placing the work in the genre extending back to Plato's Symposium. Just as in the Symposium and other works, the tone of the discussion in the Saturnalia varies greatly, depending to a certain extent on factors such as the time of day, how much the characters have had to drink, whether they're being interrupted by other party guests, and so forth. Those involved in the learned discussion include Praetextatus; Symmachus, famed editor of Livy, who pleaded that pagan altars not be removed by Christian Emperors; Nicomachus Flavianus, who edited Livy alongside Symmachus; someone who is either Avienus the translator of Aratea or Avianus the writer of fables, although called Avienus in either case; and Servius, here a very young man, later famous as the commentator of Vergil.

Vergil is discussed far more than any other topic. Roman history and Roman festivals are discussed with great dignity. An example of some less dignified discussion has to do with the effect of the consumption of food and drink on people's appearance.

Estimates as to when the Saturnalia was written range from ca400 to ca435 or later. The earlier the date, the more likely it is that Macrobius was writing about people he knew personally, and perhaps even describing an actual event in his life. The later the date, the more likely it is that Macrobius is delivering a nostalgic vision of a life before the Christianization of the Empire, a time he knows only by hearsay. It is remarkable that Christianty is mentioned nowhere in the Saturnalia.

For scholars, the Saturnalia is, like Aulus Gellius' Noctes Attica, Quintilian's Rhetores Latini Minores, Severus' commentary on Vergil and Isidore's Etymologiae, an immensely valuable source of passages of ancient literature which are otherwise lost or controversially attested. It also holds a natural interest for those studying the last days of "pagan" Rome.

6 9th-century manuscripts of the Saturnalia survive, and hundreds of manuscripts altogether.

Codices latini antiquiores --

-- also known as CLA, edited by E A Lowe, is a description of Latin literary manuscripts made before the ninth century. It excludes "-- with certain exceptions -- all business or official acts and documents, graffiti or other casual scribblings." (vol. 1, vii.)

I'd been eagerly searching high and low for reasonably-priced copies of the CLA. Finally, yesterday, I got Vol I: The Vatican Cityvia inter-library loan.

It's not what I expected. I had gathered from library catalogue descriptions and such that the volumes were 45 centimeters tall. Somehow I had managed to overlook in the same descriptions the number of pages per volume. I was expecting huge heavy tombstones full of fine print, probably all in Latin, of tens of thousands of manuscripts per volume.

But no, there are xii+44 pages in this first volume, plus 35 pages of illustrations, and the other volumes seem to be of a comparable size, and several pages of these 44 are taken up by bibliographies, and the print isn't particularly fine, and it's mostly in English. A total of 34 pages of this first volume are devoted to the sort of description I had imagined. Facing each of these 34 pages are full-sized photographic reproductions of parts of the manuscripts being described. 4 reproductions to a big page, sometimes more than one reproduction of the same manuscript. 117 in all in the first volume. Counting palimspests as 2, the primary and the secondary. There are a lot of palimspsests in this volume.

Of the 117 manuscripts described and photographed here, I counted 24 from pagan authors: Terrence, Cicero, Sallust, Vergil, Livy, Probus Seneca, Lucan, Juvenal, Gellius, Fronto, Symmachus. These manuscripts account for 20 and one-half percent of the total. Besides these 24, I'm not sure how to categorize a few others. Irony being what it is, I would not be at all surprised if the percentage of pagan authors described by the CLA in collections outside the Vatican were much lower. I would not be surprised, because, in the period before AD 800, there was an especially fervent effort in Western Europe to spread the learning of the Bible and of Christian authors, and an especially widespread -- although by no means universal -- condemnation of pagan Classical antiquity, including all of the writing of all of the individual authors I listed above. Books were burned. (Others were written over and then later rediscovered in palimpsest form.) It has been asserted, although it is controversial and remains unproven, that Gregory the Great, Pope from 590 to 604, ordered all copies of Livy, listed above, which could be found to be destroyed. It's unproven, but it seems to me that if someone, Gregory or not, had been busily engaged in such destruction, it would help to explain why only 35 books, plus a few fragments, of such a popular author as Livy survive today, when as late as AD 401 the pagan patrician Symmachus, listed above, was busily engaged in making an edition of all 142 books. Symmachus appears in CLA, vol 1, in palimpsest form, as does a long palimpsest fragment of Livy's book 91 which had been gone from view for a long, long, long, long time. Whether or not it was the active destruction of Gregory the Great, and/or some other churchmen, which accounts for the disappearance of almost 107 books of Livy, which seems likely to me, there is no doubt that many Classical texts have been restored to the world through the effort of churchmen like the great 19th-century paleograher and specialist in palimpsest, Cardinal Angelo Mai, who worked under the instructions of and with the direct blessing of the Vatican, and that many Popes, and countless among their followers, have been great friends to and supporters of Classical scholarship. The Church giveth in this regard, it doth not only take away. Its ways are mysterious sometimes.

As I said, I was surprised to get a general idea of how many Latin literary manuscripts from before AD 800 survive, that is to say: I'm surprised by how few there are. I was also surprised when I found out that only 31 classical Greek tragedies survive, by only three authors. In that case also I had assumed that the number was much higher. It is naturally disappointing in each case to find that the numbers are lower than one had thought, but there is an ironic upside, as well: it emphasizes the significance of each new find. And new finds are made occasionally, papyrii in the Middle Eastern desert, palimpsests in existing texts.

Foolishly, I dream of finding the missing books of Livy in some place like a garage sale. Yes, these are the kinds of daydreams I have. Many experts snicker good-naturedly at dreams of finding any more significant amounts of Classical texts anywhere -- say, an entire lost book or 10 of Livy, or an entire lost play by Sophocles. (It is said that Sophocles wrote over 100 plays. We have 7 today, plus fragments of others.) They're the experts, I'm not one of them. Still, to my inexpert mind it seems irrational to dismiss the possibility of some really huge find, someday, somewhere: in a papyrus in Egypt or Israel, in a palimpsest in a library, among the possessions of an eccentric recluse. As recently as the 1980's they found a previously-unknown fragment of Livy's book 11, dating from the 5th century, while excavating the site of the monastery of Naqlun in Egypt. Yeah, so the fragment was only 40 words long, that doesn't mean that the next find won't be 40,000 words long.

So, yeah, the experts, some of them, think I'm daft. Other experts are as daft as I am when it comes to hoping for new discoveries. Maybe we are quite mad, who's to say.

I cannot emphasize enough how inexpert I am in such things. I've never been near an archaeological dig. I probably never will be, as I intensely dislike dirt and strong sunlight. I also have never had any inclination to study old manuscripts after someone else has gone to the trouble of finding them, cleaning them up, restoring a palimpsest if they contain one, etc. I have always been content to wait until they are transcribed into editions with contemporary typefaces and punctuation and so forth. And I had seen pictures of manuscripts similar to the one reproduced in this volume of CLA -- in some cases, pictures of the same manuscripts. For some, reason, when I saw the pictures of manuscripts in the CLA, I became interested in them in a way I had not been before. They're illegible to me at the moment. Look at this:



Can YOU read that? I can't. It's not one of the Vatican manuscripts, but it's similar. It's in the collection of the Library of Congress, which describes it as a page from a manuscript of Vergil's Georgics and Bucolics, written in the 5th or 6th century. Sorry, I was looking for a linkable image of one of the manuscripts from the book I'm talking about, but it was slim pickings and I didn't feel like looking all day. My reaction to this sort of manuscript before yesterday was, It's purty, but I'll stick to my Oxford Classical Texts editionwith its modern typefaces and punctuation, thanks just the same. (Punctuation as we know it evolved slowly during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.) Now, when I'm old enough to need glasses to read lots of things, now suddenly these strange, exotic old things catch my interest.