Marginality, Canonicity, Passion (Classical Presences) 9780198818489, 0198818483

Table of contents :
Cover
Marginality, Canonicity, Passion
Copyright
Editors’ Preface
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Note on Abbreviations
List of Contributors
1: Introduction
I. Marginality and the Classics: Exemplary Extraneousness
II. Overview of this Volume
Acknowledgements
2: Before Discipline: Philology and the Horizon of Sense in Quignard’s Sur le jadis
3: Hyperinclusivity, Hypercanonicity, and the Future of the Field
4: The Elusive Middle: Vitruvius’ Mediocracy of Virtue
1. Status Quo
2. Reading through Reception
3. Alberti’s ‘Erasure’: Vitruvius anceps
4. Educating the Halfwit
5. Mediocritas aurea et obscura
6. The Hand of Cicero?
5: Theodor Mommsen, Louis Duchesne, and the Liber pontificalis: Classical Philology and Medieval Latin Texts
1. Introduction: Classical Canonicity and Medieval Marginality
2. The Liber pontificalis as a Canonical and Authoritative Text
3. Two Approaches
4. Editorial Choices
5. The Mise-en-Page
6. Engagement
6: Bulls and Deer, Women and Warriors: Aristotle’s Physics of Morals
1. Gendered Politics
2. Enmattered Politics
3. Manly Men
4. Blood Is Thicker than Water
5. Manly Bodies
6. Thumōeideis
7. Athumoteroi
8. Cooler and Clever
9. Women and Females
10. Like a Homeric King
11. Like a Scythian King
12. Hopeless and Desperate
7: On the Alleged Bastardy of Rhesus: Errant Orphan of Unknown Paternity or Child of Many Genres?
8: The Greek Canon: A Few Data, Observations, Limits
1. The Canon: A First Impression
2. Trust in Numbers?
3. The Papyri in a Mediterranean Context
4. Interim Summary: What was Canonized, and When?
5. The View from the Bottom
6. Limits of the Canon: Being in and out of the Ancient Greek Canon
9: Homer in the Gutter: From Samuel Butler to the Second Sophistic and Back Again
1. Homer: Marginal or Canonical?
2. Samuel Butler and The Authoress of the Odyssey
3. Dio’s Trojan Oration
4. Conclusion
Acknowledgements
10: Minus opus moveo: Verse Summaries of Virgil in the Anthologia Latina
1. Making Literary History
2. Reading for the Plot?
3. Authorship and Authority, Margin and Centre
4. Summarizing the Aeneid, Remaking the Aeneid, Interpreting the Aeneid
5. Conclusion
11: Minor Roman Poetry in the Discipline and in the Profession of Classics
1. Distinction between Discipline and Profession
2. Examples of the Profession at Work
3. The Textual Edition: The Example of Manilius
4. Philology Today
5. Limits
6. Canons
7. X in ‘Philology + X’
8. Conclusion
12: Epilogue: The Space between Subjects
1. The Space
2. The Space Between
3. The Space between Subjects
4. Conclusion
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors LORNA HARDWICK

JAMES I. PORTER

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

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Marginality, Canonicity, Passion EDITED BY

Marco Formisano and Christina Shuttleworth Kraus

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2018 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959736 ISBN 978–0–19–881848–9 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Editors’ Preface This volume began life as a conference at Yale in the spring of 2012. The three-day event was a collaboration between Christina Kraus (Yale) and Marco Formisano (at that point Humboldt University, Berlin), generously funded by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund of Yale University and by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung Cologne. It brought together international scholars as speakers and responders, to reopen discussion about the inner processes of the discipline and to investigate the specificity of the study of Greek and Latin as opposed to other world literatures. Since that conference, questions of marginality and canonicity inside and outside the profession have continued to exert fascination in the field, which has seen the publication of volumes such as Deep Classics (ed. Shane Butler), Classics, the Culture Wars, and Beyond (Eric Adler), and Liquid Antiquity (ed. Brooke Holmes and Karen Marta). The scholars involved in the original meeting of Marginality, Canonicity, Passion have also continued to discuss their work among themselves, in the process of putting together this collection via intense debate and engagement with peer review. We hope that the papers gathered here— which include heavily revised versions of some of the papers presented at the original conference as well as some additional contributions—will help advance the dialogue. We would like to consider this book a laboratory of ideas, research insights, and propositions, rather than a set of definitive statements. We invite our readers to consider the fact that on various issues the editors and the contributors do not always agree and sometimes even conflict with one another as a productive rather than problematic aspect for the cohesion of the whole. The editors would like to thank the volume contributors for their patience with a lengthy process, and especially the speakers and responders of the 2012 conference for their hard work then and since: apart from the scholars with chapters in the present volume, we heard papers and responses from Pavlos Avlamis, Alessandro Barchiesi, Shadi Bartsch, Thomas Beasley, Joshua Billings, Emma Buckley, Serafina Cuomo, Emily Greenwood, Emily Hauser, Ralph Hexter, Lidia Klara,

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David Konstan, Pauline LeVen, Glenn Most, Irene Peirano Garrison, and Mark Vessey. We would especially like to thank Hindy Najman, who stepped in at short notice as keynote speaker after Barbara Herrnstein Smith had to withdraw. We would also like to note that, because of the lengthy process (for which we, as editors, take full responsibility!), some of the contributors were not able to take account of every item of very recent bibliography. We also extend our thanks to the editors of the series Classical Presences and to the team at Oxford University Press, particularly to the precise and good-spirited copyediting of Manuela Tecusan. We are grateful to our anonymous press readers, to Olivia Stewart Lester for her patient editing, to Harrison Troyano for assisting with the index, and to Marta Ricci, who provided the cover image. We dedicate this volume to Froma Zeitlin, who did us the honour of presenting a paper, ‘Romancing the Classics’, at the conference. Her powerful presence in our discipline has been a rich source of inspiration. New Haven—Ghent January 2018

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Contents List of Illustrations List of Tables Note on Abbreviations List of Contributors 1. Introduction I. Marginality and the Classics: Exemplary Extraneousness

ix xi xiii xv 1 1

Marco Formisano II. Overview of this Volume

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Christina Shuttleworth Kraus 2. Before Discipline: Philology and the Horizon of Sense in Quignard’s Sur le jadis John T. Hamilton

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3. Hyperinclusivity, Hypercanonicity, and the Future of the Field Constanze Güthenke and Brooke Holmes

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4. The Elusive Middle: Vitruvius’ Mediocracy of Virtue John Oksanish 5. Theodor Mommsen, Louis Duchesne, and the Liber pontificalis: Classical Philology and Medieval Latin Texts Carmela Vircillo Franklin

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6. Bulls and Deer, Women and Warriors: Aristotle’s Physics of Morals Giulia Sissa

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7. On the Alleged Bastardy of Rhesus: Errant Orphan of Unknown Paternity or Child of Many Genres? Marco Fantuzzi

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8. The Greek Canon: A Few Data, Observations, Limits Reviel Netz

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CONTENTS

9. Homer in the Gutter: From Samuel Butler to the Second Sophistic and Back Again James I. Porter

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10. Minus opus moveo: Verse Summaries of Virgil in the Anthologia Latina Scott McGill

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11. Minor Roman Poetry in the Discipline and in the Profession of Classics Lowell Edmunds

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12. Epilogue: The Space between Subjects Joy Connolly

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Works Cited Index

329 363

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List of Illustrations 5.1 T. Mommsen, ed., Liber Pontificalis (1898), pp. 22–3.

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5.2 L. Duchesne, ed., Liber Pontificalis (1886), pp. 143–4.

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5.3 L. Duchesne, ed., Liber Pontificalis (1886), pp. 62–3.

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8.1 Correlation of archaic poets attested in papyri (Egypt only) with TLG citations down to the fourth century BC.

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8.2 Becoming canonical from the fourth century BC to the fourth century AD.

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9.1 Frontispiece to Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey. From St John’s College Library, Samuel Butler Collection. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge.

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List of Tables 8.1

Number of papyri for the more frequently identified authors (Egypt only).

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Comparison of the different tiers of authors by frequency of papyri (Egypt only).

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Estimates of relative frequencies of works (Egypt only).

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8.4

Survival of papyri (Egypt only) from first books.

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8.5

Comparison of TLG citations/authors with the surviving papyri (Egypt only).

214

8.6

Portraits of figures of Greek culture in marble.

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8.7

Percentage of authors attested in papyri (Egypt only) extant through the literary manuscript tradition.

218

Survival of codex-only authors by comparison with prose authors from before late antiquity.

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Percentage of archaic poets attested in papyri (Egypt only) by comparison with TLG citations down to the fourth century BC.

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8.2 8.3

8.8 8.9

11.1 Martial and Manilius on US graduate reading lists.

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Note on Abbreviations Abbreviations for classical authors and works follow the practice of the Oxford Latin Dictionary and of Liddell, Scott, and Jones’ Greek English Lexicon (with the exception of 8.3, which uses abbreviations customized for the format of this table). Big corpora of fragments generally follow the Oxford Classical Dictionary but are usually explained at the first occurrence in a chapter. Journals and standard reference works are abbreviated according to L’Année Philologique.

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List of Contributors J OY C ONNOLLY is professor of classics and provost of the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her work includes The State of Speech (2007), which argues that communication is the core of Roman ideals of citizenship, and The Life of Roman Republicanism (2014), which analyses key themes in Roman thought: freedom, recognition, antagonism, self-knowledge, irony, and imagination. L OWELL E DMUNDS is professor emeritus of classics at Rutgers University. His most recent books are Approaches to Greek Myth (revised second edition 2014) and Stealing Helen: The Myth of the Abducted Wife in Comparative Perspective (2016). M ARCO F ANTUZZI is professor of classics at the University of Roehampton. He is a member of the boards of Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Materiali e Discussioni, and Seminari Romani di Cultura Greca and the author of Bionis Smyrnaei Adonidis epitaphium (1986), Ricerche su Apollonio Rodio (1988), Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry (2004, with R. Hunter), and Achilles in Love (2012). His full-scale commentary on the Rhesus and an introduction to the same tragedy are due to be published in 2018. M ARCO F ORMISANO is professor of Latin literature at Ghent University. In his research he focuses on the literature of late antiquity (both poetry and prose), ancient literature of knowledge and its tradition (in particular the art of war), martyr acts, Latin panegyric, masochism and literature. He is currently working on two monographs: Unlearning the Classics: Studies on Late Latin Textuality and The Furred Venus: Masochism and Latin Literature. He is the editor of the series The Library of the Other Antiquity (Heidelberg), devoted to the literature of late antiquity and its reception. C ARMELA V IRCILLO F RANKLIN is professor of classics at Columbia University. She specializes in medieval Latin texts and their material manuscript context. She served as director of the American Academy in Rome

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from 2005 to 2010 and has recently served as president of the Medieval Academy of America. She is now engaged in a project entitled ‘The Liber pontificalis of Pandulphus Romanus: From Schismatic Document to Renaissance Exemplar’, which will also include preparing a critical edition of the text for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. C ONSTANZE G ÜTHENKE is associate professor of Greek literature and E. P. Warren Praelector at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. She works on the cultural and literary history of studying and knowing antiquity, especially in the long nineteenth century. She is the author of Placing Modern Greece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism 1770–1840 (2008) and is completing a book on German classical scholarship, its rhetorical strategies and affective imagery. J OHN T. H AMILTON is William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Harvard. His research interests include hermeneutics and poetics of the classical tradition, music and language, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German and French literature, and new comparative philology. He is the author of Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition (2003), Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language (2008), and Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care (2013). B ROOKE H OLMES is Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities and professor of classics at Princeton University, where she also directs the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities and serves as the PI for the Postclassicisms Initiative. She is the author of The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece (2010) and Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy (2012), as well as the co-editor of four volumes. She has published articles on the history of the body, Greek literature, ancient medicine and science, ancient philosophy, and the reception of classical antiquity. C HRISTINA S HUTTLEWORTH K RAUS is Thomas A. Thacher Professor of Latin at Yale. She has research interests in commentaries and the commentary tradition, Latin historiography and biography, and Latin prose style. She serves on the advisory boards of Brill’s Historiography of Rome and Its Empire and of de Gruyter’s Trends in Classics, and was a cofounder of the Yale Initiative for the Study of Antiquity and the Premodern

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World (now ARCHAIA). She has recently published (with C. A. Stray) Classical Commentaries: Explorations in a Scholarly Genre (2016). S COTT M C G ILL is professor of classics at Rice University, where he is chair of the Classical and European Studies Department. He is the author of three books, including most recently a verse translation, with introduction and notes, of Juvencus’ Four Books of the Gospels (2016). In addition, he is the co-editor of three volumes, including Wiley Blackwell’s forthcoming Companion to Late Antique Literature. R EVIEL N ETZ is the Patrick Suppes Professor of Greek Mathematics and Astronomy at Stanford. His main field is the history of premodern mathematics, particularly the wider issues of the history of cognitive practices (visual culture, the history of the book, and literacy and numeracy). His books include The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics (1999), The Transformation of Early Mediterranean Mathematics (2004), and Ludic Proof: Greek Mathematics and the Alexandrian Aesthetic (2009). His popular book on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, The Archimedes Codex (2007, co-authored with William Noel) is translated into twenty languages. J OHN O KSANISH is assistant professor of classical languages at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. His book, currently under contract with Oxford University Press, considers Vitruvius’ De architectura and its ethos of commemorative expertise within the context of Augustan literature and culture. He has research interests in Latin prose (especially rhetoric and oratory), intellectual history, knowledge systematization, and reception theory. J AMES I. P ORTER is Chancellor’s Professor of Classics and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the Postclassicisms collective. His teaching and research cover a variety of topics in philosophy, aesthetics, and cultural criticism. Recent books include The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (2010), and The Sublime in Antiquity (2016). He is currently working on a project called ‘Homer: The Very Idea’. G IULIA S ISSA is professor of classics and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her interest in the past is always connected to major contemporary issues, such as feminism, sexuality, addiction,

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democratic theory, utopian thinking, and political emotions. Her publications include Le corps virginal (1987; translated as Greek Virginity, 1989), Le Plaisir et le Mal: Philosophie de la drogue (1997), L’âme est un corps de femme (2000), The Daily Life of the Greek Gods (2000), and Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World (2008). She is currently working on ancient democracy and imperialism, on politics and the passions, and on the political pursuit of pleasure from Athens to Utopia.

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1 Introduction I. Marginality and the Classics: Exemplary Extraneousness Marco Formisano In recent years the discipline of classics has been experiencing a profound transformation, which affects not only methodologies and hermeneutic practices, that is, how classicists read and interpret ancient literature, but also—and more importantly—the objects of study themselves, in other words what they read and interpret. One of the most important factors has been the launch and gradual establishment, both in research and in teaching, of reception studies, now widely acknowledged and welcomed as a particularly apt instrument for the renewal of the study of Greek and Roman literature, for one reason in particular: the study of the reception of classical literature and culture in later ages and in non-western cultures considerably expands the field by including a virtually infinite array of texts, artefacts, and other materials to be studied and taught about. This temporal and cultural expansion of the borders of classics generates many important and salutary effects, both pragmatically and theoretically. On the one hand, it opens up the field—traditionally considered to consist of a limited corpus, a hortus conclusus within specific temporal and cultural coordinates—to broader influences that derive from a fertile contact with other literary disciplines and cultural studies and with their various hermeneutical practices. On the other hand, classics can thereby regain a more prominent academic position, in some ways comparable to the leading role it once played within the humanities. Yet, like any introduction of a theoretical and critical trend, this renewal of the field brings with it certain consequences that can be

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seen as unintended side effects. One of these side effects is an increased level of canonicity of those texts from the corpus of Greek and Roman literature that are the subject of inquiry. Reception studies has focused almost exclusively on the most canonical Greek and Latin texts, not only because they are appreciated per se but also because they have been received, rewritten, adapted, discussed, and alluded to on such a scale as to discourage discussion of other ancient texts, which were rarely or never the objects of significant reception.¹ To generalize, then: by definition, reception studies is uninterested in texts that have had no ‘success’ and, by implicitly adopting canonicity as an unspoken criterion, it de facto marginalizes those ancient texts that were not blessed with a significant Nachleben. As Michael Silk, Ingo Gildenhard, and Rosemary Barrow (2014) observe even as they emphasize the radical difference between reception and tradition, the classical tradition, just like reception, is unavoidably canonical. ‘It is’, they write, ‘not just any aspect of the Graeco-Roman world that inspires and influences, but, overwhelmingly, the special and the privileged.’² On closer inspection, however, the tension between the canonicity of certain texts and the consequent marginality of certain others has marked the field of classics since its very origins as Altertumswissenschaft in the late eighteenth century. This tension was at first taken for granted as an indisputable fact, then gradually became truly invisible. This invisibility, I would argue, has been endorsed by certain characteristics of various academic systems in the western world. The discussion that the present volume seeks to generate begins by simply acknowledging the fact that to consider the conceptual tension between canonical and marginal texts within classics means opening up a Pandora’s box of the discipline. If one looks at it this way, it becomes urgent to unveil a criterion that could be so enormously influential precisely because it was tacitly accepted and rarely discussed. For the reasons mentioned above, the salutary contribution made by reception studies makes this process of unveiling particularly timely.

¹ For instance, see Martindale 2013: 170, who recalls the initial policy adopted by the Cambridge Companions series on classical authors: ‘Only those authors and topics were to be chosen where there was a significant reception history to be recounted.’ ² Silk, Gildenhard, and Barrow 2014: 4.

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A clarification is needed at this point. Reception studies represents a significant methodological turn not only because it expands the discipline in terms of quantity (number of texts). At the very core of a discipline whose practitioners have traditionally sought to reconstruct the original meaning of texts in a specific historical context lies the principle that ‘meaning is realized always at the point of reception’—as reception studies reminds us.³ In other words, reception studies teaches classicists that they cannot read Virgil, for instance, without consciously— or, more often, unconsciously and with greater effect—resorting to Lucan, Statius, Dante, Milton, and other poets, novelists, critics, and translators who have produced ineradicable textual layers that will always contribute to the meaning we receive and construct while reading Virgil’s text itself. But—although this consideration, while widely acknowledged at a theoretical level, is equally neglected in daily hermeneutical practice both in research and in teaching⁴—this chapter and the volume as a whole are not devoted to the discussion of reception studies and canonicity as such, that is, to their specific intellectual contributions. Rather, perhaps more modestly, the present volume seeks to explore the effects, implicit more than explicit, that reception studies has on the discourse of classics as an academic discipline. I should therefore emphasize straightaway that is not my intention to discuss how a certain text becomes canonical or marginal, for what reasons, in what historical and cultural contexts, or for what communities—for instance by looking at the original contexts of production, at the relevant ancient literary systems, or at the various paths of their transmission. This would not be a discussion of what is central, what is marginal, and why it is so.⁵ Nor am I interested here in exploring the powerful and complex connections between canonicity and areas such as religion, politics, and power more generally. While some contributions to this volume (for instance chapters 3 and 11) respond to the anxieties aroused by a perceived dichotomy between canon and margins within classics, in this introduction I am more intent on bringing to light the subtle implications of canonicity. In a more

³ Martindale 1993: 3. ⁴ Goldhill 2012 (esp. 249–63) confronts this kind of hermeneutical dichotomy head on. ⁵ For these aspects see, for instance, Edmunds 2010a and 2010c on minor Roman literature and Colesanti and Giordano 2014 (and note that two more volumes of Colesanti and Giordano appeared in subsequent years).

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limited way, I consider the functioning of canonicity and marginality within the practice of the discipline without trying either to reconstruct their geneaologies and long histories or to dismantle them as abstract categories. I offer an example immediately related to the field of my own research. Whether explicitly or, more importantly for our discussion, implicitly, the relatively recent critical discovery of the literature of late antiquity tends to be heavily influenced by the hermeneutical practices de rigueur with classical texts—in particular poetic texts, which are celebrated as canonical in the literary and scholarly tradition and thus are considered central to the discipline and its politics. One effect is that poetic genres are generally considered to be more significant than prose ones. Another even more important effect is that the study of allusion and intertextuality is uncritically accepted as the criterion according to which late antique poetry must be read and interpreted—just like classical poetry. Scholars of late antique literature generally proceed on the unquestioned assumption that the search for classical models is a priority in their critical activity, so that there is an implicit tendency to discuss the literariness of late antique texts as a result of their relationship with classical texts (which, in turn, are most often taken to represent the aesthetic and literary standard). Another important factor consists of expectations of the job market, especially in Anglo-American academia, where classicists must show competence primarily, if not exclusively, in canonical texts from the classical periods. All these factors converge and, together, heavily influence the study of late antique textuality, its establishment, and its appreciation within classics; yet they are never discussed. This chapter and the entire volume are intended to unveil and critically discuss these kinds of mechanisms, which are so powerful precisely because they usually are accepted and reproduced—and sometimes dogmatically so. This volume is not intended to be yet another occasion to talk about grand texts or great books, but rather an opportunity to consider whether and to what extent the study of marginal texts in the current academic practice of classicists might be capable of stimulating an interesting renewal of the discipline, in parallel with the trend of reception studies. More fundamentally still, we suggest that, on the wave of current discussions about the variety of methods and approaches in classics, it is time for scholars to take on the responsibility of defining what they

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mean by ‘marginal’ in Greco-Roman literature and of framing its study theoretically. In the following pages, current discussion of the tensions between literary canons and margins (as inspired for instance by Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Pascale Casanova, and Franco Moretti) stays in the background rather than being directly engaged— and, repetita iuvant, this is for one reason above all. The main concern here is by no means to discuss or contest the idea of canon and its various cultural, ideological, and political implications (as studied for instance in postcolonial studies),⁶ but rather to explore canonicity as an invisible, yet nonetheless ruling principle within the disciplinary discourse and scholarly practice of classics. One of our main arguments in this book is that marginality operates as a fundamental criterion at many levels, both inside and outside the field. Within the humanities, as is well known, classics no longer plays the prominent role it did in the past; but among scholars of other fields there is a widespread expectation that classics should deal with canonical authors and texts, because classical antiquity is the canon par excellence and the discipline devoted to classical antiquity has the task of preserving what constitutes this canon. Outside its own disciplinary boundaries, classics continues to be associated with big names, an association repeatedly brought home in countless ways, for example when (to give one out of many possible examples) innumerable passers-by see the names of Greek and Latin authors prominently adorning the frieze on the façade of the Butler Library of Columbia University: Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, Virgil.⁷ Interestingly, this process of canonization of classics has run in parallel with a disempowerment of Greek and Roman classical authors and texts as active ethical and aesthetic models for contemporary literature. Although the rewriting, reworking, and adaptation of ancient texts have never stopped and indeed form a conspicuous strand in contemporary literatures all over the world, for a variety of reasons these texts no longer function as the revered educational standard they were in the past. Might it be that canonicity within the discipline of classics is, among

⁶ A good introduction to these aspects is given by Mukherjee 2014. ⁷ Schein 1999: 293 notes some of the implications of the choice of authors on the frieze of Butler Library.

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other things, a self-protective reaction to loss of prominence, both inside and outside academia? Insofar as scholars’ biographies and personal experiences play a major role in the shaping of their intellectual production and thereby of the field within which these scholars operate, I would like to enrich this discussion by citing the example of my own experience. I came to the United States for the first time as a visiting student during the second year of my PhD program in classical literatures. I was an Italian student who had spent significant periods of study abroad (France and Germany in particular) and was working on a dissertation devoted to technical and scientific texts written in Latin between the fourth and the sixth centuries AD. As soon as I entered into contact with American fellow classicists, both PhD students and professors, my attention was drawn to something I had never even noticed before: I was writing on marginal texts produced in a marginal age. Although in recent years both ancient technical and scientific writings and late antique literature have enjoyed an enthusiastic critical rediscovery, this was decidedly not the case in the late 1990s. Besides the fact that, among my otherwise welcoming and generous hosts, I could not find a single interlocutor on matters related to my project, one encounter in particular was revealing. During the first week of my study period in New York City I had the honour and the pleasure of meeting the late Elaine Fantham, one of the most productive and enthusiastic Latinists and also one of the AngloAmerican classicists best known and most appreciated in Europe. Professor Fantham had a supreme command of Italian (among other foreign languages), so that the conversation we had took place in my native language: this is by no means a secondary detail, since it enhanced the alienating effect of the conversation. Among the things we discussed, two points in our conversation illustrate particularly well some of the fundamental ideas underlying this volume. Fantham was clearly surprised by the topic of my dissertation. She immediately declared that she knew nothing about the texts I was writing about but, intellectually voracious as she was, she asked a great deal of questions that were of great help to me, perhaps above all because they taught me how to present a somewhat obscure topic to other classicists, and more generally to a broader audience. Her main question was: How and why are these texts relevant today? For ‘relevant’ she used the Italian word rilevanti. As it happens, ‘relevant’ is an English word that I must confess I still find

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difficult to use correctly because of a false correspondence with the Italian rilevante, which generally translates the English ‘important’, while in most cases English ‘relevant’ pairs up with Italian pertinente, ‘directly connected to a given topic’. What is relevant in English, then, is to my Italian ears important, and something can be generally important without necessarily being immediately relevant. For me, the question posed then by the late revered Latinist to an unknown late Latinist at the beginning of his career is still charged with ambiguities that disclose the gap between two different scholarly attitudes and approaches to ancient texts and to classics as a discipline. The second point that is both relevant to and important for the topic of this volume is that Fantham expressed a passionately negative judgement on the early imperial poet Valerius Flaccus, whom she described as assolutamente privo di qualsiasi spirito poetico, ‘totally lacking in poetic spirit’, adding that, although she regularly taught classes on Latin epic poetry, only in this iteration (her final year before retirement) had she included Valerius Flaccus in her syllabus. This conversation inspired in me a great deal of enthusiasm and discouragement at the same time. On the one hand, I was refreshed at the thought that an obscure late ancient technical text might possibly be relevant today, and indeed at the very idea that this is the question to ask at the beginning of a research project. It was equally refreshing to find a classicist freely expressing her passionate judgement on ancient texts in a way that I could not even imagine hearing from my Italian and German advisers and mentors. On the other hand, the conversation had an unequivocally sad effect on me: I had to acknowledge—in my native Italian at that!—that the topic of my current research was both irrelevant and unimportant, let alone irremediably boring. If Valerius Flaccus was ‘totally lacking in poetic spirit’, what about late Latin treatises on veterinary medicine? Exaggeration aside, during the long periods that I subsequently spent as a visitor at various North American universities I regularly encountered this kind of response to my work. Certainly not meant to be offensive, it came as a sincere expression of surprise about my choice of topic, along with a slight embarrassment, concealed by well-meaning remarks on possible connections with other, more popular canonical topics. Soon it became clear to me that, if I wanted to ‘sell’ my marginal topic within the North American academic world, I would need at least to make connections with more canonical texts and topics. Within such

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an academic culture, the discussion of texts considered to be marginal, I discovered, could not stand by itself—unless I were a historian interested in a certain strand of knowledge because I attempted to reconstruct some specific historical, cultural, or material context; in other words, unless I were to use my ‘marginal’ treatises as sources rather than as texts to be studied in their own right. If you want to study literature, the implicit logic goes, you must study those texts that are literary (according to today’s standards); otherwise you are a historian of knowledge, science, technology, culture, religion, philosophy, mentality, textual transmission, and even literature; or you are a philologist. But you are not primarily a literary scholar. I would argue that most classicists have a tendency to conceive of the tension between central and marginal texts almost as an ontological difference between two fields: the study of literature, which implicitly justifies the canon, and the study of culture, which needs all sorts of texts and documents (and indeed, the more aesthetically or literarily mediocre a text is thought to be, the better suited it seems to the goal of historical reconstruction). But is it possible to conceive of a third way, namely of reading those ‘mediocre’ sources primarily as texts, on their own terms: texts that bear their own individual meaning just as much as (or even more than) they constitute a piece of historical evidence?⁸ Very rarely have I found such an approach in the scholarship I have been consulting for my own research purposes, for instance on ancient technical texts, late antique literature, or early Christian martyr acts. The principal tendency still is to use these texts primarily in order to reconstruct all sorts of facts and contexts (politics, science and technology, religion) rather than to read them as texts. All this has interesting implications for transatlantic differences in the conditions of an academic career as a classicist and in the perception of the role of ancient literature, both in and outside of the field of classics itself. In continental Europe it is highly unlikely (though perhaps things are beginning to change) that, as a matter of principle, a classical scholar would raise the question whether and to what extent a given text is relevant today, or would express a passionate dislike, especially in aesthetic terms, for a text written more than 2,000 years ago. And, even if some scholars might express themselves in this way, such attitudes would ⁸ Elsewhere I have discussed this point in relation to ancient technical and scientific texts (see Formisano 2017a).

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certainly not furnish criteria either for choosing a dissertation topic or for getting an academic job, whereas the relevance of one’s dissertation topic and the element of passion for one’s work are commonly (if not always openly) applied criteria in Anglo-American contexts. These considerations must of course be understood in connection with the various academic systems and intellectual styles of each country, and such a generalization, like any other, invites any number of qualifications. This is not the place to enter into a detailed sociological discussion, which would benefit a great deal from Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) famous Homo academicus (among other studies). Still, it is safe to say that, while in Anglo-American academia the research topic itself is as a rule a significant factor in the evaluation of applications for a position, this is not the case in continental European universities, where other criteria, such as the number of publications, or seniority, might play a stronger role. Michèle Lamont in her How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgement (Lamont 2009) discusses the concept of ‘homophily’ in academic contexts, especially when scholars function as members of a panel or committee that has the task of selecting research projects. Her research is based exclusively on the observation of panels in North American universities, and the outcome is not surprising: panel members generally tend to select proposals that have basic affinities with their own research. Apart from the psychosocial and academic implications of this homophily, one other aspect deserves particular attention: the fact that the kind of scholarly work generally supported by these decision-making bodies is implicitly ‘canonical’ with regard to the topic itself, the methodology, or both. An observable outcome—with exceptions, of course, but the overall tendency is noticeable, especially from a European perspective—is that a young scholar working exclusively on texts, authors, or genres considered ‘lesser’, ‘minor’, or ‘obscure’ is generally disadvantaged in terms of securing research grants and even positions in North American classics departments. Certainly anecdotal evidence suggests that those graduate students who decide to write a dissertation on ‘minor’ or ‘marginal’ topics are regularly advised to include at least one chapter on a more ‘central’ or ‘major’ author. Dedicating an entire project solely to lesser-known, obscure, or marginal texts is frequently seen as a luxury that established scholars can permit themselves once they have achieved tenure. In continental Europe, by contrast,

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PhD students are generally encouraged by their advisers to work precisely on texts that have been less studied—and this for a number of reasons, including the manageability of the bibliography, a higher probability that something new and original can be said, and the benefit of bringing neglected texts to the attention of other scholars and possibly of a broader audience. This is not to say that canonicity plays no role, but its significance and influence are limited to the discussion of matters of literary history and aesthetics; its influence on hiring practices is minimal to nil. More fundamentally still, the basic structure of the educational system can be seen as one factor in establishing the importance of the canonical, both in classics and in literary studies in general. Many undergraduate students in North America are offered (and in some cases required to take) classes on ‘great books’ that, in many cases today, may well include texts from non-western cultures; nonetheless such classes remain programmatically oriented towards canonical masterpieces. At the graduate level, PhD candidates in classics are examined on the basis of departmental ‘reading lists’ of Greek and Latin texts considered fundamental for one’s future (academic) career in classics. Even if these lists are not identical and change over time in accordance with trends in research (for instance by being expanded to include some late antique texts, a selection of scientific texts such as treatises from the Hippocratic Corpus or Galen, or the so-called ‘ancient novel’), there is a basic ‘core’. This core remains and, more fundamentally still, the very existence of reading lists inevitably places a stamp of canonicity—and thus also of marginality—on the discipline: everything on the list is fundamental, everything else is not. Neither ‘great books’ classes nor reading lists are found in European classics departments, with the consequence that European students are less directly confronted with the idea of a canon. Veritable ‘canon wars’ were waged decades ago in North America; but, no matter how one assesses the outcome of these wars, even the most innovative forms of teaching and research, theoretical approaches, and methodologies are still significantly informed by the very concept of canonicity. This is widely perceived by continental European scholars as a characteristic mark of Anglo-American classics.⁹ ⁹ Briggs 2007 discusses the influence of the classical tradition on American culture and academia from the seventeenth century until today but, surprisingly enough, never raises the issue of canonicity—perhaps precisely because it is a fait accompli.

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This is certainly not the place to enter into a detailed comparative discussion of the educational systems, the politics of hiring, and the various practices of selection and funding in continental Europe, Great Britain, and North America, and of course there are many internal differences within these systems. My goal here is simply to offer one suggestive glimpse into how the distinction between canonical and marginal texts can work, often invisibly. What I wish to emphasize here is how easily canonicity and marginality can be taken for granted, as factors that require no further discussion. Indeed, as I have suggested on a few occasions (including at the conference that generated the present volume), this topic has a tendency to provoke passionate argument, perhaps because it touches upon preconceptions or prejudices that may be so firmly rooted that it is impossible to approach them in an ‘objective’ manner. But I would suggest, with all due modesty, that scholars who have moved between different academic cultures and university systems are likely to be more sensitive to differences in approach and in the rules of our profession because they have the experience of having modified their own practice, questioned their own academic traditions, and perhaps even adopted those of others. The discourse of canonicity is nourished and supported by several factors. I have already mentioned the indirect effect of the tendency, prevalent in studies of classical reception, to concentrate on the survival and transformation of the most influential and widely read texts. A related issue is the consideration of many Greek and Roman texts as ‘world literature’. Karl Galinsky describes two Latin texts in these terms: Among the many poetic accomplishments of the Augustan age, two stand out and tower over the rest: Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The reason is not just their epic length . . . but their richness and scope of defining the human experience. It is for that reason they have become, deservedly, world literature, a dimension that is fully borne out by their reception in later literature, art, and music, a reception that has lasted to our days . . . As all works of world literature, then, the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses are both products of their own culturespecific time and transcend it.¹⁰

In my view, this formulation, taken apart from the specific details of Galinsky’s article, is exemplary in many ways, and especially through the

¹⁰ Galinsky 2005a: 340.

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tautological quality of ‘thinking big’: the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses count as ‘world literature’ because they are ‘world literature’, grand works that both reflect and transcend the time in which they were conceived and massively succeed in ‘defining the human experience’— a formulation that does not do precisely that: define ‘the’ human experience, here implicitly singular and universal.¹¹ As argued by John Guillory: ‘How does the defender of the canon know that a work is great, if no criteria of greatness can be established beyond dispute? Here the defender must affirm by a bold tautology that the canonical work must be great whether or not any particular reader recognizes its greatness.’¹² The concept of world literature, as is well known, derives from Goethe, in whose view Weltliteratur was the future of literature. Goethe coined this term in the first half of the nineteenth century, especially in order to challenge the rise of national literatures all over Europe by looking forward to a global modernity. Without entering into a discussion about the complexity and elusiveness of this highly influential Goethian concept (see Damrosch 2003 and Prendergast 2004), it is important to emphasize that it was precisely this concept of ‘world literature’— generally understood today as a generous nod of acknowledgment and appreciation towards non-western literatures and towards what might be considered marginal from a western perspective—that actually ended up confirming and supporting the basic notion of canonicity, since of course only a finite number of texts can be included, and these texts are in turn regularly marked as the ‘best’ or most ‘central’ of their own traditions. In a recent book titled In the Shadow of World Literature, the comparativist Michael Allan discusses modern Egyptian literary culture and more generally literature written in Arabic, showing that ‘world literature’, far from being a neutral and comprehensive term, bears a specific conception of both literature and the world—a conception that imposes, for instance, the western obsession with canonicity (Allan 2016). In a discussion of the reception of Homer in the twentieth century, Barbara Graziosi and Emily Greenwood, building on the work of Prendergast, observe that the oral aspects of the textuality of the Homeric poems, aspects usually considered marginal because not written, that is, ¹¹ In similar vein, see Zetzel 1983 on the canonicity of Virgil. ¹² Guillory 1995: 236.

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not literary, actually play a fundamental role in Homeric reception precisely because these aspects become a vehicle for the ‘shift of focus from the western literary canon to world literature’.¹³ In other words, this movement towards previously marginal ‘others’ takes place via a reception of the least traditionally ‘literary’ aspects of the most canonical of western authorial figures, Homer. A comparable attitude can be detected on many other occasions, when classicists wish to emphasize the role of Greek and Roman antiquity as a term of comparison with other cultures. The editors of a monumental guide to the classical tradition observe in their preface that ‘the GraecoRoman classical tradition is only one of the limited number of classical traditions that define the history of world culture’ and express the wish that their work be profitably read not only by ‘the direct beneficiaries of the Graeco-Roman classical tradition’ but also by ‘interested members of other cultures’. They hope that scholars who understand those other, non-European cultures better than we do will be stimulated by work like ours to explore, together with us and with those who we hope will follow us, the similarities and differences between all these traditions, so that we will someday be in a position to understand better what it is that makes a classical tradition classic . . . What if anything differentiates the classical tradition in the West from the histories of other canons?¹⁴

This elegant declaration of modesty takes it for granted that every culture has a ‘canon’ comparable in significant ways to that of the classical tradition of the West, that the comparison can happen only via the canon(s), and that these canons have a history, which means a genealogy in which one text follows another, in linear, chronological development.¹⁵ Yet Salvatore Settis himself argues elsewhere that other civilizations such as the Indian, the Chinese, and the Japanese do not have a concept of the ‘classical’ of their own, but borrowed it and the corresponding word from European cultures and their languages.¹⁶ On that basis it would seem simply incorrect to assume that non-western cultures have their own classical periods and classical traditions, or a

¹³ Graziosi and Greenwood 2007: 3–4. ¹⁴ Grafton, Most, and Settis 2010: x, emphases added. ¹⁵ Graziosi and Greenwood 2007: 12 argue for the importance of differentiated notions of temporality and a comparative rather than a historically linear approach. ¹⁶ Settis 2004: 19.

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relationship with their own past that resembles that of western cultures, or that they even share with them a similar concept of temporality. But, more importantly for my discussion, the very concept of canon, and consequently of margins and of their conceptualization in western literature, may well not have any direct correspondent in other cultures. The discussion of Homeric receptions by Graziosi and Greenwood seems to reach a similar conclusion.¹⁷ The relationship between postcolonial studies and classics is significant in this regard. Obviously this relationship is vital from many perspectives, for example because it puts classics at the table of a much more global discussion and because it acknowledges and sheds light on the reception of classical texts in what were considered in the past, from a Eurocentric perspective, ‘marginal areas’.¹⁸ But if we ask which texts have been received and productively transformed in non-western cultures, the answer, again and again, turns out to be the same: some of the most widely read of Greek tragedies (Sophocles’ Antigone and Euripides’ Medea among them), and the epics of Homer and Virgil. In the same way, although feminist literary theories are programmatically devoted to making visible and giving voice to marginal aspects silenced through the centuries by a distinctively patriarchal culture, feminist studies of Greek and Latin literature generally concentrate on canonical texts.¹⁹ Literary theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith made an important point some years ago that is still worth making: Recent moves in the direction of opening the question of value and evaluation in the literary academy have come primarily from those who have sought to subject its canon to dramatic revaluation, notably feminist critics. Although their efforts have been significant to that end, they have not amounted as yet to the articulation of a well-developed noncanonical theory of value and evaluation.²⁰

In other words, challenges to the canon have in most cases not led to a subversion of canonicity itself, but rather to changes in the canon, for example by making it more inclusive of a variety of perspectives, cultures, or tastes. The inescapability of the canon has after all been acknowledged

¹⁷ See also Allan 2016 for a discussion of world literature, marginality, and canonicity in modern Egyptian culture. ¹⁸ E.g. Hardwick and Gillespie 2007; Graziosi and Greenwood 2007; Bradley 2010. ¹⁹ See e.g. Rabinowitz and Richlin 1993; Keith 2000. ²⁰ Herrnstein Smith 1988: 24.

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even by one of the most provocative of contemporary theorists, Gayatri Spivak, who reminds us that ‘a full undoing of the canon-apocrypha opposition, is impossible . . . When we feminist Marxists are ourselves moved by a desire for alternative canon formations, we work with varieties of and variations upon the old standards.’²¹ Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (1987), together with their contributors, have argued for an intimate interconnection between the rise of canonicity and institutional practices. In particular they have drawn attention to three types of institutions: Zensur (censorship), Textpflege (care for the text), and Sinnpflege (care for sense). I would add an item to this list, as it relates to the specific situation of classics; this item is scholarly care. It is precisely classical scholars who are traditionally given the role of keepers of the flame of a canonized ‘classical antiquity’. We, as readers and consumers of ancient Greek and Roman texts, are not novelists, essayists, or journalists: we are scholars and teachers, and hence integral parts of the academic institution. In our contemporary world, the reception of classical texts most often takes place in academic contexts: it is a preoccupation of scholars much more than of poets, novelists, dramatists, artists, or public intellectuals. Thus scholarship itself, especially (but not only) classical scholarship, must also be considered from the perspective of reception studies.²² If this is true, then the question arises of what makes scholarship different from other fields in which ancient texts such as a poem, a speech, or a novel are received. The interrelated questions of canonicity and marginality can thus be seen as a direct emanation of scholarship itself rather than as the ontological and aesthetic categories they are often taken to be—for instance by Harold Bloom in his bestseller The Western Canon (Bloom 1994). Classical scholarship, much more than other literary disciplines, stands in a privileged relationship with historical methodology; canonicity ²¹ Spivak 1996: 110. ²² Cf. Graziosi and Greenwood 2007: 7 (‘We wish to show that scholarship itself is itself part of reception and engaged in a wider cultural dialogue’); Martindale 2007: 303 (‘We tend to exclude our own receptions from these strictures, particularly if we are scholars’); Porter 2008: 469 (‘One of the greatest ironies of classical studies is that they are themselves a form of reception studies’); Matzner 2016: 192 (‘They [sc. Deep Classics] squarely locate scholars and scholarly voices as active agents inside the “classical tradition” ’). Silk, Gildenhard, and Barrow 2014 seem to imply that scholars are not involved in reception but may be representatives of the classical tradition (see e.g. 5, on T. S. Eliot as an author of essays on Virgil).

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is based on literary history, that is, on a genealogical continuity established by scholars between various ages and the texts belonging to them. The consequence is that, in scholarly and teaching practice, knowledge of the models of a given text is considered the indisputably necessary starting point of any discussion. How to read Virgil without considering Homer, Euripides, Apollonius, and Ennius? It is precisely because of the urge to create historical continuities even between ages far remote from one another (take the case of late antiquity: as the very name suggests, it is always conceived of as a consequence of and as something related to classical antiquity, and very rarely as a cultural entity in its own right)²³— it is precisely because of this urge that canonicity almost necessarily arises and establishes itself as a seemingly unavoidable category. Within given sequences of authors and texts, generally classified by genre, some stand out and illuminate the entire sequence, so that the other authors and texts are perhaps not at the same level but are still entitled to share some of their grandeur. The systematization and organization of genres and discourses are also functional to canonicity because, under the appearance of the neutrality of critical judgement, they have the effect of supporting a classification into ‘better’ and ‘worse’.²⁴ Another implicit factor of canonicity is the insistence on the intentions of the author as fundamental to, and perhaps even sufficient for, a correct interpretation of the texts. Authorial intentions seem to be a compelling, indeed unimpeachable factor if they appear explicitly in the text itself; but they can also be deduced from other texts written by the same author or from the reconstruction of historical, cultural, or psychosocial contexts. They are functional to the classification of texts into genres and discourses, a factor that implicitly produces canonicity. But what exactly counts as a marginal text in classics? A univocal answer is not possible but, generally speaking, marginal texts are texts that are not included in the canon or in reading lists and texts that cannot be easily assigned to any specific genre, period, or author. A threevolume Italian collection of studies, titled Submerged Literature in Ancient Greek Culture and published in 2014 and 2016, builds on the

²³ See Formisano 2014 and 2017b. ²⁴ Edmunds 2010c (esp. 34–6) reminds us that the label ‘minor’, so commonly applied to authors, texts, and genres in literary histories, does not necessarily imply either non-canonical status or a derogatory aesthetic judgement.

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recommendation made by the late Hellenist Luigi Enrico Rossi, that we study ancient Greek texts ‘which were mistreated from the very beginning of their transmission, and even texts which were not transmitted at all’.²⁵ The intent of this anthology is thus eminently reconstructive (for vols 1 and 3, see Colesanti and Giordano 2014 and Ercolani and Giordano 2016; volume 2, edited by Giulio Colesanti and Laura Lulli, is concerned with case studies). The project is devoted to ‘provid[ing] a more precise contextualization of the texts in the ancient Greek system of communication and performance’,²⁶ above all by insisting on the fact that the very term ‘literature’ is historically inappropriate: not only because there is no equivalent comprehensive Greek term but, more importantly, because of the fact of oral/aural transmission and of the specificities of the occasions on which the performances took place.²⁷ In the last volume of the set, which expands the previous discussion by taking a comparative approach, the volume editors, Andrea Ercolani and Manuela Giordano, challenge what they appropriately regard as a ‘tipof-the-iceberg taxonomy’—namely the common intellectual attitude and scholarly practice of considering only those texts that have been safely handed down to us—in order to reconstruct an entire context. This kind of approach should be revisited for two reasons in particular: one is the obvious partiality of the data on the basis of which ancient Greek literary culture has been reconstructed; the other (which is more relevant to the present book) is that, ‘if we accept a priori the categories used to construct a cultural or textual canon, we inadvertently and unknowingly foster and adhere to the tenets and to the agenda that led to canonization’.²⁸ The already cited study on minor Roman poetry by Lowell Edmunds, who is also a contributor to this volume, on the one hand carefully reconstructs the genealogy of the definition, by considering various editions of ‘minor’ Roman poetry, and on the other hand establishes possible connections with twentieth-century theory. In particular,

²⁵ Ercolani and Giordano 2016: 7. ²⁶ Colesanti and Giordano 2014: 3. ²⁷ Although volume 3 of this book (Ercolani and Giordano 2016) declares that it develops a ‘comparative perspective’, the various chapters are entirely devoted to reconstructing specific historical and cultural contexts and not to conceptualizing the role of marginality within classical studies (see also the criticism expressed by Stephen Halliwell in his review of the project: http://www.sehepunkte.de/2016/11/28692.html#fn1). ²⁸ Ercolani and Giordano 2016: 6.

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Edmunds considers the opportunity of adopting the perspective on minor literature formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1975) in their well-known Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure. Edmunds points out that, unlike both Franz Kafka and Pascale Casanova, who discuss minor literature in relation to minor languages (i.e. languages spoken only by small communities), Deleuze and Guattari endorse a concept of minor literature as a phenomenon that originates in a major language when a minority enters into cultural and ideological conflict with it. The major language is then ‘deterritorialized’ by the minority, which uses it in order to subvert it.²⁹ I will return to this important point at the end of my discussion. But what makes a text marginal (or, in Edmunds’ terms, minor) remains—in most cases, if not always—an aesthetic judgement. As has been recently shown by Irene Peirano Garrison, the question of authenticity of ancient texts is always tied up, both for ancient and modern critics, with an aesthetic judgement about those texts: ‘The project of the Echtheitskritik has been intimately involved from its earliest beginnings with the process of creating and defending a canon of works deemed superior.’³⁰ A spurious text or a text that cannot be assigned to a precise period or genre is a priori condemned to being considered inferior; it cannot enter the canon and thus it is marginal. Although at a theoretical level the majority of classicists would agree with the ‘death of the author’, that is, with the only partial relevance of authorial intentions for the interpretation of texts, nonetheless most scholarly discussions continue to be based on the implicit dogma that the interpreter must appeal to, or attempt to reconstruct, precisely those intentions. The consequence is natural: a good interpretation is one that follows authorial intentions and/or is sympathetic with them. It is very common indeed to read, even in pieces of scholarship considered magisterial by most, that a given Greek or Roman author would never have thought in a certain way and that this presupposition, which in most cases is nothing but a guess, is authoritative for producing a correct interpretation. This kind of reasoning is rarely made explicit, but it is frequently perceptible between the lines.

²⁹ Edmunds 2010c: 78.

³⁰ Peirano 2012a: 217.

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The most pertinent points in Peirano Garrison’s discussion of Echtheitskritik are not only the intimate connection it establishes between authenticity and the canon, but also the further insight that the canon is a preoccupation of scholarship rather than of literature itself. Furthermore, it is worth emphasizing that there are ancient texts that today are considered marginal but were once highly influential, while some others (for example, Christian texts of late antiquity) are not canonical for classicists but are of central importance in other fields. As argued above, this volume is not concerned with the re-evaluation of undeservedly neglected texts, nor does it have the goal of modifying the canon or enlarging reading lists by including more texts. More fundamentally and radically, I question as a matter of principle the importance of canon and reading lists for classics, both as an academic discipline within the humanities and at a more theoretical level. Salvatore Settis opens his book The Future of the ‘Classical’ by recalling a fundamental distinction between two general approaches to the study of classics, both taken by his teacher Arnaldo Momigliano. One approach is to consider Greek and Roman history, art, and literature as a part of human experience that deserves our attention simply by virtue of being that, and just like the history, art, and literature of any other culture. The other approach considers Greece and Rome fundamental to our understanding of our own cultural heritage and identity, an instrument for the comprehension not only of the past but, more importantly, of the present.³¹ Settis returns to this point at the end of his book, offering an answer that is worth quoting at length: It is worth studying Graeco-Roman ‘classical’ culture because of the manner in which it continuously shifts between identity and otherness, and in which it feels like ‘ours’ even though we acknowledge its ‘diversity’ from us. It is worth studying because it is intrinsic to Western culture and indispensable if we want to understand Western culture, but also because it encourages us to study and understand ‘other’ cultures. It is worth studying because it is a depository of values which we can still recognize as our own, but also because of what is irredeemably alien [estraneo] about those values.³²

The sense of the ‘alien’ invoked by Settis has been developed in certain fields of classical studies, mostly thanks to the contribution made by

³¹ Settis 2004: 3.

³² Settis 2006: 105–6.

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anthropological studies in France, where scholars such as Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Nicole Loraux, and Marcel Detienne (to name only the best known) have been combining anthropology with the study of ancient (in particular Greek) culture, politics, and religion. Marcel Detienne has argued for a kind of cultural comparison that juxtaposes cultures that are thought to be incomparable, in contrast to the normal scholarly practice of comparing comparables. ‘The incomparable’, he writes, ‘disturbs the initial comparatist’s approach, facing him with a first resistance, forcing him to ask himself how and why this category doesn’t exist or doesn’t seem to make sense in one of the societies studied.’³³ The anthropological approach to Greek and Roman cultures has had the indisputable merit of presenting, for the first time and in a systematic way, a methodology for exploring precisely how those worlds, traditionally believed to be our inescapable models, are actually alien to us. For the purposes of this volume, however, it is worth noting that, when an anthropological approach is taken to the ancient world, the result is that the text, whether canonical or not, is not read with an eye on its literary status or with attention to authorial intentions. Ultimately, no matter how sharp and sophisticated the interpretation, texts are treated as documents or sources for the reconstruction of the culture in which they were conceived. On the one hand, in its continuous struggle for existence and visibility, the discipline of classics has opened up its temporal and methodological borders by combining approaches derived from other disciplines and has created and successfully launched its own model of reception—one that, as James Porter has observed,³⁴ is quite different from the Rezeptionsästhetik of the Constance School. On the other hand, many classicists continue to practice a kind of literary criticism that is neither influenced by the new avenues of research just mentioned nor sympathetic to the numerous modi operandi typical of other literary disciplines. The sense of alienness or otherness (estraneità) thematized by Settis is thus inherent not only in ancient culture itself but also in the very methodology of its study. Reconsidering the tension between marginality and canonicity—which, despite the recent and inspiring innovations in the

³³ Detienne 2008: 24.

³⁴ Porter 2008: 474.

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field, still massively influences classical literary studies (in my opinion, as I have suggested above, rather more in Anglo-American academia than on the continent)—invites us to take stock of the influence of most recent theoretical insights on the philological, textual, and literary core of classics. Basically there is a sort of double vision in connection with two very different approaches, which can coexist even within one and the same scholar: a theoretical openness, promoted in particular by reception studies, which postulates the impossibility of reconstructing any original meaning of the (ancient) text and makes this impossibility productive by opening up the field to the infinite chain of various receptions; and the practice—still considered fundamental and widely applied and propagated in the classroom—of reconstructing the historical meaning of the text as it really was. For many scholars and teachers, this tension is not a conflict; the approach promoted by reception studies represents an optional, interesting development that does not affect the hard core of the disciplinary methods of classics, oriented as that is to a reconstructable, historically determined original ‘meaning’. As I mentioned above in passing, Simon Goldhill (2012) has been one of the very few critics to explicitly combine the two tendencies. In a programmatic coda, after having pondered the tension between the value of a text and its inescapable historical situatedness (or, as he puts it, ‘between the drive towards historical self-consciousness’ given by a reading that is conscious of reception theory and ‘the drive towards the value invested in particular works of the past’), Goldhill introduces a term that, in his view, may be able to overcome that tension and possibly to substitute the very term text.³⁵ ‘A script’, he suggests, ‘is a written or oral template which has the strange ability of maintaining itself through innumerable re-incarnations—and which only comes into voice in and through performance.’ The ‘script’ is an exciting concept, in particular since it ‘may have a physical existence but it has no original’. But, since the script exists only in its performances and ‘the more the script is performed, the greater its influence, value, and power to speak to audiences’,³⁶ the concept seems to reassert the main implication of reception studies, as mentioned in the opening of this chapter, by suggesting that a script that has little or no performance is not really relevant, maybe not

³⁵ Goldhill 2012: 259.

³⁶ Ibid., 262.

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even important, since a script owes its life to performances, its meaning being re-enacted in reception. While ‘script’ is a very apt term to describe the situation of drama and other genres (Goldhill also refers to Thucydides), its application to ancient texts that are less or very little read may be less satisfactory. Again, a sense of canonicity, implicitly but equally powerfully, seems to shape the perception of classical literature even in a highly refined theorization. In what follows in this part of my essay I would like to describe my own perspective, while emphasizing that it does not necessarily reflect that of the majority of the contributions to this volume. I propose expanding the kind of theoretical pluralism that characterizes the most intellectually engaging strands of classical scholarship to the more traditional textual and literary core of the discipline. In the epilogue to this volume, Joy Connolly recalls Tino Sehgal’s This Progress, staged at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2010. I happened to be a visitor to This Progress, and one with no previous knowledge about the kind of experience I was about to have. I entered the museum, to find it completely empty; I could only see people walking around the white spaces of the iconic rotunda. I was immediately approached by a young girl who asked me the question: ‘What is progress?’ Amused and puzzled at once, I gave an answer and was then left by the girl and met by an adolescent who asked other questions. At the end of the second ramp an adult man joined the conversation, asking yet more questions. On the last ramp I was left with an older woman, who told me a story and asked further questions. In the end I was left alone, to reflect on the conversations I had just had with those unknown persons. Joy Connolly, who had the fortune of serving as one of the walking discussants at that event, treats some of the complex implications of Tino Sehgal’s work in her chapter at the end of this volume. As a visitor who entered with no clue as to Tino Sehgal’s previous work and concepts, I was and still am struck by two things in particular. First is the extreme difficulty of giving a definition to this event. It was neither an exhibition nor a performance in the usual sense of those words. It was not based on any specific material objects other than the building itself; the discussants were not dressed in any particular way established by the artist; the individual discussions were not to be recorded or reproduced. The only media were individuals of different ages, who were invited, on the basis of a minimal script, to interact with visitors. In my case, the fact that I am not a native speaker of English was

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not a secondary element in the experience and, while I like to think of myself as capable of expressing my thoughts in an academic context at a satisfactory level, I can have difficulties in more colloquial situations, as was the case in this particular event. Another key factor in this experience was the perception of the museum space itself, which was familiar to me from numerous previous visits for different exhibitions. As Connolly reminds us, a museum (and especially that museum) is a canonical space par excellence, and Sehgal’s work had the merit not only of reflecting the circularity of the architecture in the conversations between discussants and visitors, but also of challenging the canonicity of that space by temporarily cancelling its iconicity as a museum and its function as container of art works. It is no coincidence that both Joy Connolly and myself, independently of each other, consider Sehgal’s work in this volume. Of course, it would deserve a much longer and nuanced discussion, but the two aspects I have briefly mentioned here offer a good parallel to my perspective on the goals of our discussion on marginality and canonicity: to enter the textual space of classical literature by opening its borders, traditionally defined according to authorial intentions, periods, genres, discourses, and other kinds of classifications endorsed and sanctioned by more than two centuries of classical scholarship. The question raised by Momigliano fifty years ago, as observed by Settis, is still urgent, still needs to be carefully articulated. If we limit ourselves to considering classical texts as important and relevant to us—either because they reveal the deep origins of western culture or because they show how irremediably ‘other’ and alien ‘our’ cultural predecessors are, or for both reasons, taken together— we risk missing the specificity of what has become the characteristic way of reading and interpreting ancient Greek and Roman texts. What I am proposing is to reserve for those texts a sort of metaspace, analogous but not identical with the global literary space proposed by Pascale Casanova in 1999, in La république mondiale des lettres—independent from, yet at the same time connected to, reality. To be sure, ancient literature and textuality are obviously comparable to other literatures and therefore can be read in various ways; but there is nonetheless a specific mode of reading, which pertains only to ancient texts and has been nurtured by classical scholarship over the last two centuries. The practice of close reading, which literary scholars in other fields treat as an option, is in fact the practice consistently adopted by classicists. Their approach to their

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texts is mediated through the intrinsic difficulty of the language, through cultural distance, and through the cognitive dissonance that is unavoidably produced by reading ancient textuality. This sense of otherness (Settis: estraneità) is arguably inscribed for us in the texts themselves: it is not only a cultural otherness that can be negotiated at different levels and to which anthropology on the one hand and reception studies on the other have given us significant access, but it is also a textual otherness. This textual otherness necessarily, almost ontologically, is in balance between the distance produced by the ancient languages themselves and the impossibility of entirely accessing their worlds and recognizing them as ours. It is the practice of most classicists to tenaciously attempt to reconstruct both the literal meaning of the text and its context, even if the same classicists salute the contributions to the field made by reception studies. At the same time, however, many are reluctant to recognize that the aesthetic criteria followed and shaped by ancient authors cannot simply be adopted in our own hermeneutical work. Even if scholars recognize enormous cultural distances that separate us from ancient texts as soon as the latter begin to talk about women, slavery, science, politics, religion, or sexuality, for example, in their interpretive work they tend to implicitly accept ancient aesthetic and textual values without questioning them radically. As I was arguing above, there is a sort of cognitive gap between theory (in its various articulations) and the classicist’s characteristic techniques of reading an ancient text. Posing the question of marginality implies, among other things, reconsidering this gap by making it a conscious and productive instrument of research. Making a productive category out of marginality also implies a reevaluation of the kind of knowledge promoted by philology, which has itself been progressively marginalized within the humanities. Sheldon Pollock, for example, advocates a ‘world philology’ as the ‘theory of textuality as well as the history of textualized meaning’.³⁷ Every text, whether highly canonical or the most marginal, comes with a ‘surprise factor’, that is, with certain aspects that cannot be described through appeals to authorial intention, genre, or discourse but emerge only from a close reading of the text, one that pays attention to its language. It has been argued many times that canonical texts are not

³⁷ Pollock 2015: 22.

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produced as such; on the contrary, the most canonical texts were originally subversive—they intended to subvert certain practices of the genre or discourse within which they were operating. Arguably, then, the process of canonization has had the effect of making invisible and unrecognizable the subversive quality of texts that have been ‘normalized’—and, paradoxically, normalized through readers’ appreciation. John Guillory, for instance, pleads for a way of reading that is resistant to the tendency to homogenize canonical texts as if they had always been destined—even designed—to be canonical. And, because situating a work historically is independent of canonization, which always takes place in later phases, Guillory proposes a historicizing reading.³⁸ In this case, then, the surprise factor has nearly been silenced by the expectations of readers, which in most cases are shaped by scholarly preoccupations such as the rules of the genre and the reconstruction of authorial intentions. Approaching the surprise factor of an ancient text is like entering one of the most canonical buildings of our age, for instance the Guggenheim Museum, and discovering in it something completely new, which not only does not correspond to a museum space but in fact subverts its foundations as a museum. In a recent article Sebastian Matzner argues for the relevance of ‘queer unhistoricism’ (as theorized by Valerie Traub) to the disciplinary discourse of classics, in relation to the insights given by reception studies, which he interprets as a disturbing ‘queer’ factor for ‘straight’ classics (i.e. the traditional way of studying Greco-Roman antiquity, which considers reception an interesting complement rather than something essential to understanding the classical past). As Matzner puts it, ‘the inherently oppositional dimension of queerness . . . underscores how important it is, especially in diachronic criticism, to perpetually challenge both the consensus of knowingness about a consolidated present and reductive representations of incommensurable strands of the past’.³⁹ The fact that we can reconstruct the original meaning of an ancient text and its context only partially and up to a certain degree can thus be seen not as an obstacle, but rather as an enrichment to interpretation. For it compels us as readers to perceive ancient authors, texts, and literatures as abstract objects, as an ideal textual world detached from its historical reality (I here use the adjective ‘ideal’ neither in an ethical nor in an

³⁸ Guillory 1995: 244.

³⁹ Matzner 2016: 192.

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aesthetic sense). In some sense, ancient textuality must be seen as pure literature, not because it was produced as such, but because of the way we receive it and work with it as scholars. Of course the fact that we cannot grasp an original meaning does not imply that we cannot grasp any meaning. Instead, the meaning we actively produce by reading the ancient text is paradigmatically located between the gap caused by the distance in language and culture and the meaning that, despite—or perhaps precisely because of—that gap, we construct and make our own. Returning to Momigliano’s question as repeated by Settis—whether classical culture should be studied because any past is interesting or because this past is a model for our present—I would argue that ancient texts can function as an example for current readers and at the same time be viewed as alien—a mode of reading that produces what I propose to call an ‘exemplary extraneousness’. This exemplary extraneousness emerges from the fact that the alienating aspect does not reside merely in the fact that the content details derive from a culture that we cannot entirely understand or identify with (slavery, sexuality, politics, ethics, religion, science and technology, etc.); it resides in the very languages—ancient Greek and Latin— and in a textuality that speaks to us from a remote and unreconstructable past, yet nonetheless produces meanings that still fundamentally influence our own culture. Charles Martindale emphasizes that ‘[c]lassics registers in its very title a claim that the products of antiquity are in some sense exemplary for Western culture’⁴⁰ and cites Hans-Georg Gadamer: The classical preserves itself precisely because it is significant in itself and interprets itself; i.e., it speaks in such a way that it is not a statement about what is past . . . rather, it says something to the present as if it were said specifically to it. What we call ‘classical’ does not first require the overcoming of historical distance, for in its own constant mediation it overcomes this distance by itself.⁴¹

A recent collection of papers edited by Shane Butler explores how classics as a discipline thematizes its very distance from the classical past. ‘Deep classics’, as Butler describes this hermeneutical enterprise, makes us aware that the attention of classical scholars ‘is directed towards time, as an obstacle to knowing that is forever on the verge of becoming itself the object of inquiry and contemplation’.⁴² In this sense, if I rightly

⁴⁰ Martindale 2007: 310 (emphasis added). ⁴² Butler 2016: 15.

⁴¹ Gadamer 1989: 289.

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understand Butler’s vision, classics is not only the study of a Greek and Roman antiquity but a more important, in fact a fundamental approach: ‘the very pose by which the human present turns its attention to the distant human past’.⁴³ Within what I call the exemplary extraneousness implicitly practised and propagated by classics, marginal texts, although generally ignored even in the most innovative discussions of classical literature and its receptions, play a pragmatic as well as a theoretical role. An awareness of this extraneousness urges us to reconsider ancient textuality from a perspective that I would label ‘post-reception’—not in the sense that reception studies has been surpassed or is outdated, but rather in the sense that the fundamental concern of this discipline can now be applied to ancient texts themselves, through our fully acknowledging and making productive the impossibility of reaching their remote, original ‘meaning’. In this sense, a marginal text—that is, a text that is not central to us anymore, be it because it is aesthetically unsatisfying, because it cannot be classified according to genre or discourse definitions, or because its content is not relevant to us anymore—offers better than any other the possibility of observing the temporal and cultural abyss at which, for instance, Butler’s (2016) Deep Classics invites us to look. Deleuze and Guattari plead for a minor literature within a major language. They find their hero in Kafka, the author who writes in his own native German like a foreigner, comme un étranger.⁴⁴ In opposition to all styles, genres, and literary movements that seek to ‘assume a major function in language’, Kafka and other authors have created ‘a becoming minor’ (un devenir mineur).⁴⁵ Deleuze and Guattari identify in the ‘deterritorialization’ of a major language the driving concept of a minor literature, a literature both politically and aesthetically contrary to the canon.⁴⁶ Ralph Hexter has proposed applying this concept to the study of medieval Latin literature. In particular, he is interested in emphasizing the interdependence of major and minor literature, classical Latin texts representing canonicity and medieval Latin texts resisting it. Given that ⁴³ Butler 2016: 14. ⁴⁴ Deleuze and Guattari 1975: 48. ⁴⁵ Deleuze and Guattari 1975: 50 and 1986: 27. ⁴⁶ Edmunds 2010b argues that Deleuze and Guattari push their interpretation of Kafka too far when they insist on the politically revolutionary potential of Kafka’s concept of minor literature. On the basis of the passages from Kafka’s Diaries discussed by the French theorists, Edmunds argues that Kafka himself did not establish this connection.

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Deleuze and Guattari conceive of deterritorialization as a term apt for describing not only a language without a territory but, more importantly, ‘a language becoming untethered, alienated—even exiled—from its own identity, hollowed out’, Hexter uses this term in order to appreciate the particular situation of medieval Latin literary history, which lacks a canon of its own: ‘It turns on its head the very canonicity Latin has regularly claimed for itself, indeed as its very own alone.’⁴⁷ This approach brilliantly illuminates the specificity of medieval Latin and its complex relationship with its alter ego—classical Latin as the canon. Here I would like to expand upon the concept of deterritorialization with the following suggestion. Reading any ancient text today, regardless of its political or aesthetic qualities in its original context, always implies a simple, though profound act of deterritorialization: this happens for many reasons, but in particular for one, which classicists tend systematically to evade— namely the very languages of the texts, which we can reach and understand only up to a certain point. From this perspective, all classical literature, usually considered the standard bearer of canonicity, may, by means of a radical change of perspective, be profitably seen as a huge corpus of ‘minor literature’ itself, deterritorialized and always irremediably against. As noted above, a text may be marginal because it was marginal already for ancient readers, or because it has become marginal for us (as general readers and/or as classicists), or because it thematizes its own marginality, whether to literature in general or to any specific ancient genre. But in all three cases, why should the marginality of the subject be a criterion for academic and hiring procedures? Why should this very choice influence a career one way or another? To return to the question raised some years ago by Elaine Fantham, whether late Latin technical treatises might be ‘relevant’ for us today: asking about the relevance of studying certain texts rather than others and searching for the connection between ancient texts and ourselves are acts that implicitly emphasize a concept of canonicity to the extent that it directs research towards a selection of texts whose content still matters to us. But beside the canon, which, by definition, is always relevant, the value of the important needs to be re-established.

⁴⁷ Hexter 2012: 40.

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II. Overview of this Volume Christina Shuttleworth Kraus The chapters of which this volume is comprised approach our theme in various ways. We left it up to individual contributors to follow their own passions in writing; as a result—and as befits a collected volume—there is no single line of argument to be traced through the book. Instead, we have an appropriately ranging set of papers that appraise, interrogate, and challenge the ideas of marginality and canonicity. Dedicated to exploring the application and theory of these concepts, the present chapters form a whole larger than the sum of its parts. They invite readers to engage with the history of reading and using classical texts. While each contributor pays heed to the practices of reading and reception that lie behind the labels ‘margin’ and ‘canon’, in the volume’s editorial arrangement we begin with explicit theory and end with explicit practice. John Hamilton opens the discussion by exploring the ways in which philology alerts us ‘to language’s formal conditions, by indicating how meaning is produced without bearing any meaning itself ’ (p. 41). The notion of disciplinarity, so intrinsic to the canon and to the complex of centre and periphery, depends on the erotic energy brought to bear on a text by philology. Hamilton’s test case is the French classicist Pascal Quignard: not his philological studies of the ancient novel or of philosophy, but his own novels, especially the 2007 Sur le jadis: Dernier royaume II. As Quignard uses philology as a mode both of study and of creative writing, so Hamilton investigates philologically the shifts of tense and aspect in Sur le jadis (a title itself incorporating a kind of archaic time), in order to see how interactions, in particular between the present tense and the aorist, overwhelm distance and how pulling the past into the present ‘does not merely encounter this horizon [between times and spaces], but also decisively creates it’. The limits of past and present are both grammatical and experiential, of course. Hamilton’s study sheds light from the margins (the contemporary novelist) onto philology’s central game of definition and shows how both centre and margin are always in play, the marginal constantly retreating before the present, which in turn creates it. We have paired Hamilton’s provocative piece with Constanze Güthenke and Brooke Holmes’ joint assessment of one consequence of that unending play on borders: the tension between the canon and the

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overabundance that always threatens to weaken its definition, a ‘tension between expansion and limitation’ that they see as ‘constitutive of classics as a modern discipline, by which we mean an increasingly institutionalized and professionalized set of practices and forms of tacit knowledge that has been taking shape since the late eighteenth century’ (pp. 57–8). Whether one sees the margins as threatening the canon (considered here as representative of the urtext) or as offering a way of opening up discourse, and the profession as well, to formerly excluded texts, the tension between the two has been essential not only to defining each (no canon without margin, no margin without canon), but also to defining the discipline—however much that definition may shift as the canon itself grows and shrinks. As for Hamilton, for Güthenke and Holmes it is the dynamic between the two that makes a persistent object of study. Coming out of their discussion of the interplay between competence and community, in which ‘disciplinarity becomes one way of maintaining functioning lines of communication in a world where, as we face a proliferation of what there is to know, we also face choices, both individual and collective, about what should be known’ (pp. 63–4), is the ideal of a ‘nodal’ classics, in which it is recognized that the comprehensive knowledge and training of students is impossible but we can continue our critical engagement with the objects of our enquiry, while at the same time we allow a fluidity around the study of a limited node, which in turn generates its own web of connections. They emphasize the importance of allowing reception to take a greater role in the ways we train students and do our own work, paying attention to the historiography of scholarship and respecting the active nature of making sense of evidence from the ancient world. John Oksanish, Carmela Vircillo Franklin, and Giulia Sissa address the moving targets of textual meaning and the canon through a historiographical lens. Oksanish looks closely at the reception of one of Renaissance’s most central ancient texts and, until very recently, one of modernity’s most marginal: Vitruvius’ De architectura. Exploring this unique survival of Augustan prose through the lenses of education (graduate reading lists, the cataloguing of books as ‘technical’ or ‘literary’) and of Vitruvius’ reception in the discipline of art history, Oksanish situates the De architectura betwixt and between, as it were, before examining what the text itself and its reception tradition can tell us about how Vitruvius arrived where he is now. Reading Vitruvius through

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Alberti, Barth, and Ussing, Mackail, Oder, and Brown, Oksanish traces a rich trail of passionate readings that have all but obscured any ‘real’ Vitruvius. At the same time he stresses that there is no ‘real’ Vitruvius behind his reception: partly because Vitruvius himself puts himself always in context/contest with other writers, leaving himself (deliberately?) on the literary margins. Franklin continues this look at ‘marginal’ texts through a historiographical lens in her comparison of two modern critical editions of the Liber pontificalis (LP), one by the historian Theodor Mommsen and one by the medievalist Louis Duchesne. Through engagement not only with the edited text and its mise-en-page, but also with the training and approach of these two editors, she ‘illustrate[s] the themes of marginality and canonicity as they relate to literary genre and historical period, to religious commitment and national sentiment, and to the tension between classical methodology and medieval texts’ (p. 103). Mommsen, who undertook this editing as much in the service of his discipline as for any personal commitment, treated the LP as he did the other texts he edited, prioritizing a restoration of the ‘original’ text—though he thought little of the content and value of these ‘late’ documents. Duchesne, on the other hand, like Mommsen trained as a historian and philologist, saw his role as editor to be one of providing an understanding of the continuing life of a text, especially one as fluid and accretive as the LP, which was used constantly after its ‘original’ incarnation—used as part of the Catholic church, to whose history it contributes and of whose history Duchesne, an ordained priest, was a living part. Disciplinary, national, and personal considerations combine here to produce two very different editions of the same text, which remains marginal for ancient history but becomes central to the study of the church. With these studies of what constitutes appropriate philological reading, we have joined Giulia Sissa’s rich investigation of the scholarship on dēmokratia and ‘democracy’, both by classicists and by political scientists. She pleads for a more inclusive consideration of ancient texts, in this case opening up what we read in order to more appropriately contextualize the ancient world. Her case study, a detailed reading of Aristotle’s theorizing of ‘the male’ and of its place at the roots of political life, demands a fundamental shift in our view of Athenian democracy, namely one of focus ‘from an allegedly “incidental” lack of women to an essential need of men, and only men’ (p. 144). Many of the

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texts she puts into play have been studied before, of course, but her insistence that we change not the means of answering (by bringing what, from some angles, might be described as marginal texts to bear on the canon of Demosthenes, Thucydides, etc.) but the question itself (by asking not ‘why are woman marginal?’ but ‘why are men central?’) offers a fresh view on the question, especially in relation to contemporary reception of ancient political thought. We shift at this point to show in detail what the kind of inclusive readings advocated for by Sissa can do for a ‘marginal’ text. Marco Fantuzzi offers a practical class on the reading and analysis of a work that has for centuries challenged the idea of centre and periphery in the Greek tragic canon. Long ascribed to the canonical Euripides, but of disputed authorship in antiquity, the tragedy Rhesus poses problems of style, genre, and quality. Fantuzzi does not set out to solve the mystery of the Rhesus (though he does propose a fourth-century context for it, seeing in its author ‘a fellow traveller of Menander’, p. 201). Instead, he traces historiographically the story of its analysis, before performing a dynamic comparison between this play and its model in the Homeric corpus, Iliad 10. It is particularly in the synchronic question of the play’s themes and in the diachronic question of its intertextual relationships that Fantuzzi touches closely on the themes of this volume: how are we to read a ‘marginal’ text in comparison with other texts, and what does our reception of that text tell us about how to read? With this piece we have grouped Reviel Netz’s tour de force: the investigation of the Hellenistic canon. What were the readers in Egypt reading? How can we reconstruct their reading from what they did not (any longer) read—that is, from the books they threw away, either because they were worn out or because, for whatever reasons, they no longer served any pressing need—be that intellectual, educational, or social? Netz’s suggested model of a ‘biglibrary/small-library balance’ (p. 211) can account for the distribution of ‘major’ and ‘minor’ authors and texts—and also leads us back to the ways in which circulation of books went ‘hand in hand with reputation (as reflected in the persistence of circulation across the social strata)’ (p. 213). Ultimately Netz sees a bifurcated system, in which works that derive from, or suggest, performance become canonized, and works that do not—the specialized, debated scholarly works—remain outside. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is the former group of ‘major’ works that (as the evidence shows) ‘became the frozen cultural presupposition’

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of society by the beginning of the third century BC (p. 229), while the ‘minor’ status of the second group—primarily non-performative prose—assured its dynamism. Turning from analytical readings to more personal studies of reception, the last three chapters tackle the question of the major and the minor from the point of view of individual readers and paedagogical practices. James Porter wittily uses Homer as his example of the ‘marginal’ in an investigation of the epic poet’s reception in ancient lives and scholarship. Homer, Porter reminds us, ‘spawned not only the origins of ancient criticism (even before Theagenes in the sixth century), but also the origins of ancient critique, rebuff, parody, subversion, and revision that kept his image alive down through the centuries’ (p. 232). This does not, by itself, make him a minor figure, of course. But, as Porter reminds us, the critique, parody, and subversion often took place in minor, marginal, and paraliterary forms of writing, from scholarship to burlesque. The distinction between canon and margin, in Porter’s hands, collapses into what he calls ‘margicanon’—or, as he describes it, a ‘process of indistinction’ (p. 238) for which reception is another name. Porter’s test cases are Samuel Butler’s Authoress of the Odyssey and Dio of Prusa’s Trojan Oration (Or. 11)—two acts of reception that blur ‘the fine line between scholarship and fantasy and between canons and margins’ (p. 261), and in both cases he elaborates on the author’s pleasure in subverting the canon. Scott McGill explores the ancient ‘cliff notes’ appended to the Aeneid, the brief hexameter summaries now edited as part of the Anthologia Latina but found in their earliest form in the Codex Romanus (Vat. lat. 3827) of Virgil. As adjunct texts, these are, at one level, obviously subordinate to the ‘original’ Aeneid—but McGill is interested instead in their agonistic, playful, parodic nature. Somewhere between Monty Python’s ‘All-England Summarize Proust Competition’ and the virtuosic attempts to miniaturize the Iliad in a nutshell, these summaries are in fact tools of reception, even allowing the reader to access the Aeneid by bypassing the original poem. In fact, as McGill shows, summarizing the Aeneid entails creating another Aeneid. Different audiences of these summaries will take away different things, from sophisticated imitatio to simple condensation. By asking us to focus on the summaries as reception texts, McGill puts their audiences on the margins, reading a canonical central text from the periphery.

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Finally, Lowell Edmunds looks closely at these audiences and their judgements about what is worth studying in a detailed investigation of the position of minor texts in the discipline and profession of classics. He returns us to the point from which Güthenke and Holmes started— the need for selectivity in scholarship—but addresses now the history of the profession, which ‘makes the final decision on the rewards that research on minor literature receives and thus, in effect, on what is minor’ (p. 290). Like Netz, Edmunds appeals to the discourse of a group of readers—a discourse proper to a social or professional stratum. His dense account of the ways in which the canon and the margin—not necessarily opposites—have been adjusted to reflect the needs of the profession brings us full circle to the question of the academy and the world. His account of how the discipline of classical philology (which ‘remains pious towards the method; at the same time it is indifferent to the object of the method’, p. 305) has found a way to maintain itself inside itself while also surpassing its own limits brings us squarely to reception. ‘Philology + X’—a disciplinary model in which the profession’s traditional identity is extended—has proved particularly fruitful in recent years, where x = reception studies. In her epilogue, Joy Connolly takes us from written text to modern performance. She explores the physical relationship between the margin and the centre from the standpoint of passion in her own personal experience, namely in an account of her participation in Tino Sehgal’s This Progress, which she finds ‘exemplary for thinking about how classicists might productively disrupt our canonical spaces’—classrooms, talks, conferences, publications, and the canon(s) itself (p. 317). She then moves to engage us in a consideration of Hannah Arendt’s model of ‘thinking with’ in order to make us conscious of our dependence on others and of how that awareness can change the way we read and contextualize classical texts. Her aim is to encourage us to question how the profession works, what do we research, what do we include and what exclude, in a final exploration of the relationship of the original to its reception. She advocates for ‘not so much a literary hermeneutic or a theory of reception as . . . a model of creative, purposive conservation’ (p. 319) that engages repetitious reading as a way of keeping tradition alive in contexts of new thinking. If Sehgal and Arendt are on the margins of the canons of our classical world, they can nevertheless

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show us ways of enriching both our discipline and our profession: in short, they can engage our passions.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Simon Goldhill, Craig Williams, and Michael Allan for reading and offering valuable comments on earlier versions of this Introduction.

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2 Before Discipline Philology and the Horizon of Sense in Quignard’s Sur le jadis John T. Hamilton

Jadis, si je me souviens bien . . . Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer

Were a philologist to consider the word philology itself, he or she might point out the peculiarity of its morphemic construction. At first sight, the term may be assumed to name a scholarly field or a scientific discipline, given the fact that its latter half (-logy) is generally taken to be a suffix denoting ‘the study of ’ the object indicated by the first half—thus for example anthropology, biology, and cosmology designate the disciplinary study of ‘mankind’, ‘life’, and the ‘cosmos’ respectively. Yet common usage already informs us that philology hardly deals with the study of ‘familiar love’ or ‘friendship’ (φιλία); the implicit verb of loving and affectionate regard (φιλεῖν) does not constitute an object of research or analysis. Certainly, it would be absurd to suggest that the philologist is an expert or an authority on the meaning, structure, or essence of personal attachments, inclinations, or relationships. Rather the designated role of the philologist bears only a nominal resemblance to that of the zoologist, oncologist, or physiologist. The development of institutional histories notwithstanding, philology cannot be reduced to logology. As every philologist should know, the name of his or her discipline—if it is in fact one—is not modelled on that of the sciences, but rather on the term philosophy. Just as philosophia expresses the ‘love’ (φιλία) for ‘wisdom’ (σοφία), so philologia denotes the ‘love’ for ‘discourse’, ‘argument’,

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or the ‘word’ (λόγος). The disciplinarity of both is therefore put into question, precisely because sophia and logos do not occupy the position of an object known or possessed, but rather that of one that is desired. Within the familiar horizon of Platonic discourse, philology’s link to philosophy reveals this decidedly ‘erotic’ character: τίνες οὖν, ἔφην ἐγώ, ὦ Διοτίμα, οἱ φιλοσοφοῦντες, εἰ μήτε οἱ σοφοὶ μήτε οἱ ἀμαθεῖς; δῆλον δή, ἔφη, τοῦτό γε ἤδη καὶ παιδί, ὅτι οἱ μεταξὺ τούτων ἀμφοτέρων, ὧν ἂν εἴη καὶ ὁ Ἔρως. ἔστιν γὰρ δὴ τῶν καλλίστων ἡ σοφία, Ἔρως δ᾽ ἐστὶν ἔρως περὶ τὸ καλόν, ὥστε ἀναγκαῖον ἔρωτα φιλόσοφον εἶναι, φιλόσοφον δὲ ὄντα μεταξὺ εἶναι σοφοῦ καὶ ἀμαθοῦς. (Pl. Smp. 204a–b) ‘Who then, Diotima’, I said, ‘are the philosophers, if they are neither the wise nor the ignorant?’ ‘Well, that is already clear enough’, she said, ‘even to a child, that they are between both of them, and Eros would be one. For one of the most beautiful things is wisdom, and Eros is love for the beautiful; thus, necessarily, Eros is a philosopher, and being a philosopher, he is between the wise and the ignorant’.¹

What is ‘already clear’ is that the philosopher—and, by extension, the philologist—is caught between the same resourcefulness and penury that motivate and frustrate erotic behaviour: he is precariously poised between ignorance and knowledge, lacking understanding (ἀμαθής) but at least wise (σοφός) to the lack. Although he does not possess what he desires— wisdom or logos—he still realizes the fact of his poverty. We could imagine that Socrates, the self-styled ‘philological man’ (ἀνὴρ φιλόλογος, Phd. 236e), listened well, knowing (ironically or not) that he did not know. Like the philosopher, every philologist should know that his or her knowledge encompasses a kernel of non-knowledge that inflames desire and motivates persistent inquiry. Correspondingly, in the Theaetetus philologia simply refers to a willing disposition or an affective inclination for engaging in conversation, discussion, or debate without assuming cognitive proprietorship of the topics broached, yet all the while aware of what is or is not topical (Tht. 146a). If a discipline entails a body of knowledge or a canon of works to be learned, understood, and mastered, if it marks out some intellectual territory that has been acquired, some space that has been delineated by a particular horizon, then philology and, by extension, philosophy are perhaps to be found more at the

¹ All translations, unless noted otherwise, are my own.

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margins of these disciplinary sites. Perhaps it would be more correct to regard both philology and philosophy as pre-disciplines, as modes of free but rational questioning that, analogous to the university’s ‘lower faculty’ described later by Kant, comprise the conditions of possibility for authorized, regulated, disciplinary work.² More or less in alignment with Kant’s exposition, the pre-disciplinary quality of philology and philosophy would underscore not only their traditionally ancillary role in relation to the sciences but also their moral freedom from every determined horizon of sense. To be sure, philology is not philosophy, despite the close relationship between them, which is often stressed throughout antiquity.³ Although both are grounded in the loving motivation of philia, philosophy clearly differs from philology, insofar as it reaches out towards wisdom, while the latter inclines towards the word. Whereas philosophy finds its end in knowledge, philology finds its end in logos. In addressing the employment of multiple languages, in pursuing their grammatical, morphological, and lexical components, in tracing how these verbal and syntactic elements developed historically and cross-culturally, philology ceaselessly poses questions concerning human words, including of course the word philology itself. Indeed, philological research inevitably arrives at self-questioning, raising and formulating questions about its own functions and operations, about its relation to other disciplines, and about its own status as a discipline. As Werner Hamacher points out, philology is always also a philo-philology. Consequently, already beneath the aspect of its questionability, philology is neither a science nor is it a theoretical discipline with well-defined procedures that lead to the acquisition of knowledge. The question concerning itself can thus at best make use of the right [Recht] of a propaedeutic and therefore protophilological enquiry. It is not a question of philology as science, but rather—sit venia verbo—of philo-philology, which stays at the edge, in the fore-court or at the gate of philology, but whose interior it does not enter and whose law [Gesetz] it does not know.⁴ ² See Immanuel Kant’s last published essay, ‘Der Streit der Fakultäten’ (Kant 1798: 17–21). The question of philology’s and philosophy’s relation to other scholarly fields— that is, the relationship between Erkenntnis and Wissenschaft—is explored by Szondi (1978: 263). For an engaging analysis of Szondi’s essay, see Schestag 2007: 28–44. ³ For a general overview of usage, see Horstmann 1971–2007: 552–72. ⁴ Philologie ist mithin schon unter dem Aspekt ihrer Fraglichkeit weder eine Wissenschaft, noch ist sie eine theoretische Disziplin mit wohldefinierten Verfahren, die zum Erwerb von

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Because philology approaches every aspect of language or logos as a loving question, it invariably comes to question itself—and, at least according to Hamacher, to such an extent that it undermines its own disciplinary stability. As philo-philology, it marginalizes itself, staying ‘at the edge’. The notion of philo-philology, provided that we allow Hamacher the use of this term (sit venia verbo), reveals the non- or pre-disciplinarity of every philological enterprise. Indulgence (venia) is called for and readily granted, insofar as every word, once the questionability of philology is broached, emerges as something propaedeutic, and therefore provisional. Philology has the right (das Recht), but is unfamiliar with the instituted law (das Gesetz), standing necessarily at the margin of any discipline, ‘before the law’—vor dem Gesetz. The light allusion to Kafka is not unimportant: philology falls to the side of every disciplinary Gesetz, but it also stands by before the law closes the gates, before meaning is locked within its institutional, canonical limits. In reaching towards words, towards language itself, philology remains at the edge of every discipline, before every meaningful horizon. In one of Friedrich Schlegel’s aphorisms, cited by Hamacher, we read: Es bleibt ewig wahr; als Affect und als Kunst ist die φλ [Philologie] Fundament und Propädeutik und Alles für die Historie (‘It remains eternally true; as affect and as art, φλ [philology] is the foundation and propaedeutic and everything for historical science’).⁵ Here the eternal or timeless truth—das Ewig-Wahre—pronounces a philological predisposition informed by affect-laden distance and removal. If the objects of intuition appear through the categories of understanding, within the temporal and spatial horizons of sense, then philology is again situated before every horizon, before every beginning, and therefore at the very foundation. Paradoxically, its horizon is without horizon. Radically outside or before every discipline, philology nourishes its desire, indulges in affect, and motivates its art, infinitely. Thus Hamacher insists on philology’s pre-semantic position, on its status as a preliminary mode, as a propaedeutic to study, as the non-disciplinary ground for every Wissen führen. die Frage nach ihr kann deshalb allenfalls das Recht einer propädeutischen und darum einer proto-philologischen Erkundung in Anspruch nehmen. Sie ist keine Frage der Philologie als Wissenschaft, sondern—sit venia verbo—der Philo-Philologie, die sich am Saum, im Vorhof oder am Tor der Philologie aufhält, aber deren Inneres nicht betritt und ihr Gesetz nicht kennt (Hamacher 2009: 28). ⁵ Schlegel, as cited in Hamacher 2009: 33.

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discipline. Philology is the ancilla theologiae et iurisprudentiae that serves the other disciplines by directing attention to language itself, by alerting us to language’s formal conditions, by indicating how meaning is produced without bearing any meaning itself. Whereas scientific disciplines organize themselves within a meaningful horizon, philology suspends the moment of every stabilizing definition and thereby keeps the question of language open. As Hamacher concludes: ‘Invading horizons and fusions of horizons [Horizontverschmelzungen] are the death of language, not its beginning.’⁶ Rather than construe philology as an epistemic discipline that fixes definitions or halts the flux of polysemy, Paul de Man appreciated its capacity to reinvigorate reading. For this reason, he deeply appreciated philology’s erotic energy, ‘the bafflement that such singular turns of tone, phrase and figure [are] bound to produce in readers attentive enough to notice them and honest enough not to hide their non-understanding behind the screen of received ideas’.⁷ For de Man, this philosophical wonder before the word itself, this astonishment that keeps definitive understanding in abeyance, should herald a ‘return to philology’, namely a return ‘to an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces’.⁸ The investigator of words thus grapples with ‘the structure of language’ and essentially removes texts from the horizons of authorial intention, hermeneutic engagement, and canonical definitions. For de Man, the return to philology reminds us that language is a rhetorical machine, one that operates beyond subjective control, and thus withdraws from the horizons that establish signification. If we accept that philology is a not a discipline but rather a mode of work that attends to the pre- or proto-semantic production of meaning, then the writings of Pascal Quignard (b. 1948, in Verneuil-sur-Avre) are philological in an exemplary way. Over nearly four decades, he has turned insistently towards themes and topics that conventionally belong to the sphere of classical philology, yet he did so by means of an approach that would be barely recognizable to the profession of academic philology. His prolific output occupies instead the margins of classical studies, taking on forms that resemble the experimental novel, the fable, the treatise, and the essay. All the same, this marginality has always

⁶ Ibid., 27.

⁷ De Man 1986: 23.

⁸ Ibid., 24.*

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been contiguous with a more standard or central understanding of academic discourse. Having studied philosophy at Nanterre with Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas, he went on to teach medieval literature at the Université de Vincennes and, later, a seminar on the ancient Roman novel at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. At the Bibliothèque nationale he applied textual criticism to establish texts by Maurice Scève, Dom Deschamps, and the sixteenth-century scholar of Syriac and Aramaic, Guy Le Fèvre de La Boderie. He regularly published articles on classical philological topics—on Heraclitus, Aeschylus, Aristotle, and others—and his work includes a critical edition and translation of Lycophron’s Alexandra. Quignard’s ostensibly more creative work began in 1976, with the appearance of Le lecteur (The Reader), a sustained meditation that stems directly from his position as reader for the renowned publisher Gallimard. From that point forward, he embarked on a writing career devoted increasingly to original and idiosyncratic reflections; these include two volumes titled Petits traités (Short Treatises), first published in 1984. His engagement with philological matters was subsequently transposed into a piece of historical fiction, Les tablettes de buis d’Apronenia Avitia (The Boxtree Tablets of Apronenia Avitia, published in 1984), which purports to be based on notes inscribed on wooden tablets by a woman of late Roman nobility, on the eve of Christianity’s rise and the empire’s decline. In Albucius (published in 1990), Quignard focused on an earlier but no less crucial moment of Roman history by presenting the rather lascivious work of Caius Albucius Silus (b. 69 BC), whose collection of Controversiae was produced during the last days of the republic. Here Quignard’s translations provide a springboard for a series of literary musings, generally on individual words—for example, amicus and satura—or on Albucius’ concept of the ‘fifth season’, which altogether result again in a kind of novelistic essay or essayistic novel. The recent five volumes that make up Quignard’s Dernier royaume (Final Realm, published in 2002–5), clearly continue this trend. They rehearse, elaborate upon, and modify themes and motifs long familiar from the author’s considerable œuvre. Irretrievable loss and transience; silence and the human voice; uterine existence and birth; rhetoric, reading, and musical resonance; horror, nakedness, and the constitutive secret—all surge forth over the course of these books, formulated in Quignard’s usual kaleidoscopic and aphoristic style. As expected, deeply

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personal reflections and autobiographical details commingle with obscure allusions, provocative etymologies, and peculiar anecdotes drawn from the full range of the world’s nearly forgotten cultural legacies. The accumulated material is presented in verbal mosaics that closely reflect Quignard’s creative, wandering abandonment, his renunciation of mastery, and his attentive submission to texts, history, and memory. In other words, at least for Quignard’s devoted readers, both the form and the content of Dernier royaume amount to a return to the same, a restitution of the similar, something at once new and not without a haunting sense of déjà lu. This is not to say, however, that this pentalogy has simply succumbed to a flat, stylistic homogeneity or that the work has fallen into self-scripted routine. Although the terrain may be familiar, it is in no way comforting or reassuring. On the contrary, it affords the recognition of the disruptive power of the same. As Quignard has persistently demonstrated, the return to the same hardly offers respite, for the familiar is often the harbour for that which at any moment may surge forth with frightening force. Like Freud’s Heimliche, the ‘familiar’ may be the ‘secret’ (heimliche, geheime) container of das Unheimliche, ‘the uncanny’—l’inquiétante étrangeté. With Quignard, as in the Freudian model, the return to the same may always be but a cover for the return of the repressed. Indeed, Freud’s well-known ‘repetition compulsion’, which unconsciously drives him again and again to the same sordid neighbourhood of Rome, shares many analogous traits with Quignard’s sordidissimes, those pieces abjected, or rejected from, the literary–philosophical canon that ceaselessly attract the author’s concern.⁹ Yet, where Freud sees a symptom, Quignard discovers a method; where psychoanalysis works towards a cure, Quignard works on registering the incurable. While Freud approaches the unconscious in order to master it and thereby to put life back into working order, Quignard attends to what has almost been obliterated in order to rescue it and thereby bring his writing back to life.¹⁰ Quignard’s salvific programme, performed from the margins of the discipline, explicitly entails an interrogation of the discipline’s canon,

⁹ Freud 1999: 225–68. ¹⁰ On Quignard’s indebtedness and reconfiguration of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, see Lapeyre-Desmaison 2004.

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as it is expressed in a note the author appended to the back cover of his Petits traités: [The Short Treatises] consisted of brief arguments torn apart, of contradictions left opened, of hand stencils, of aporias, of fragments of tales, of vestiges. I retained only that which over time was rejected by History when it claimed to write its misleading grand narrative. From the books of the Ancients I retained only that which the Norm expelled from the literature of the past in order to establish its collective and academic authority.¹¹

Referring to this text, Jean-Louis Pautrot comments: ‘The gesture announced for the Petits traités informs the work. Those who have been excluded from History, whose works have not made “a wrinkle on the surface of time”, those guilty of singularity in their epoch, are innocent of doxa’.¹² Needless to say, in order for these rejected, paradoxical pieces to have an effect, it is necessary to present and maintain the frame of doxa, which serves as the horizon for the resurgence of the expelled.¹³ The abnormal can be defined as such only in relation to the norm. Countercurrents require something to counter. Could one, then, argue that the typical form and content of Quignard’s later work, particularly in Dernier royaume, constitutes a familiar, more or less expected setting for staging the reappearance of the unexpected? Or is it not rather the case that the return to the same, the realm of the similar, is coincident with the return of the suppressed? That the unexpected is nothing but the expected, viewed from a new perspective? Does not Quignard’s stated distinctness from collective and academic authorities—his insistence on his own marginality—already suggest that he simply sees or strives to see ‘the same’ in a truly different way? An adequate response to these questions would have to rest on how we read this simplicity. A particularly rich example, which might address the problem, comes straightaway on the very first page of Sur le jadis (On the Long Ago), the ¹¹ C’étaient des courts arguments déchirés, des contradictions laissées ouvertes, des mains négatives, des apories, des fragments de contes, des vestiges. Je ne retenais que ce qui du temps était rejeté par l’Histoire tandis qu’elle prétendait écrire sa grande narration mensongère. Je ne retenais des livres des Anciens que ce que la Norme expulsait des littératures du passé pour asseoir son autorité collective et académique’ (Quignard 1999, back cover). ¹² Ce geste annoncé pour les Petits traités informe l’œuvre. Les exclus de l’Histoire, dont les travaux ne firent ‘pas une ride sur la surface du temps’, coupables de singularité pour leur époque, sont innocents de la doxa (Pautrot 2007: 9). ¹³ Cette œuvre se bâtit à contre-courant de ce que son auteur perçoit comme la doxa de notre époque: paradoxale, donc, au sens que lui conférait Barthes’ (Pautrot 2007: 8).

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second volume of the Dernier royaume series (Quignard 2002). With the opening sentence, Quignard describes a very recent walk through the mountainous regions of Périgord: Hier je suis descendu au fond du vallon sous le causse qui prolonge le lac de Garet (‘Yesterday I climbed down to the base of a valley beneath the limestone ridge that extends Lake Garet’). Cela faisait vingt-deux ans que j’évitais cet amas de pierres en ruine qui étaient entourées d’herbes folles et de mousses. De ronciers. [ . . . ] Je ne pus m’empêcher de me dérouter de mon chemin. J’avais encore envie de voir. Je voulus y jeter les yeux un instant. J’entrai sans le pouvoir tout à fait. Ma gorge se serre. J’ai un léger vertige. Je ressors presque aussitôt.¹⁴ It was twenty-two years since I avoided this ruinous heap of rocks which were surrounded by weeds and mosses. With brambles. [ . . . ] I could not stop myself from changing course. Once again I felt like seeing. I wanted to cast my eyes there for a moment. I started out, without being able to do so completely. My throat tightens up. I am slightly dizzy. I leave almost immediately.

As the epigraph of this chapter reminds us, where Rimbaud opens his descent by evoking a jadis, Quignard begins his reflections ‘on the jadis’ with a descent.¹⁵ Analogous to Rimbaud’s hesitant—hellish, damning— qualification (si je me souviens bien, ‘if I recall correctly’), Quignard’s experience is fraught with ambivalence: the return to the same, to a place visited over twenty years before, is in fact a return to an old evasion, to something once suppressed; the will to self-prevention or self-preservation is weakened, yet the desire to carry on is checked by some fundamental incapacity. The repeated confrontation suddenly causes vertigo, which goads him to leave ‘almost immediately’. The fact that this scene confronts an old avoidance and presents a vague but powerful resurgence only partially explains the force of this brief, opening narration. A far greater effect comes from the shifting verb tenses, which allow this incipit or recommencement to be taken as

¹⁴ Quignard 2002: 7. ¹⁵ Across the Dernier Royaume series, Quignard suggests his artistic kinship with Rimbaud, for example in Sordidissimes, where he cites directly from Une saison en enfer (Délires II: Alchimie du verbe): ‘Liste d’Arthur Rimbaud: La littérature démodée, latin d’église, livres érotiques sans orthographe, romans de nos aïeules, contes de fées, petits livres de l’enfance’ (Quignard 2004b: 257). On Quignard’s indebtedness to Rimbaud’s style, see Turin 2009.

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programmatic for the present reading of Sur le jadis. The text quickly runs through an entire range of tenses—the perfect (passé composé): Je suis descendu; the imperfect (imparfait): Cela faisait, j’évitais; and the preterite (passé simple): Je ne pus, Je voulus, J’entrai—before moving directly into the present (présent): Ma gorge se serre. J’ai un léger vertige. Je ressors presque aussitôt. How should we account for this confusion des temps? Tense shifting, especially from the past to the present, is generally understood as a deictic gesture, one that achieves an effect of vividness, referred to in Greek poetics as enargeia and in Latin variously as illustratio, evidentia, or demonstratio.¹⁶ With the sudden intrusion of the present tense, the story is no longer felt to be a story but becomes rather an event unfolding in the here and now. Distance is overwhelmed. The scene demands alertness. What this vividness entails, it should be specified, is nothing less than language’s readiness to disappear, to allow its words and voice to yield its place to the vision it evokes. The medium hides its mediating role. The listener or reader becomes a spectator, a participant in the scene, an engaged witness; and the statement thereby acquires greater force, more urgency. To employ the terms famously defined by Émile Benveniste, the histoire—the story given without indication to the context of its telling—abruptly turns into a discours, marked by personal pronouns and verbal tenses that allude to the narrating act.¹⁷ The technique is discernible throughout classical literature, for example in the following passage from Virgil’s Aeneid: vix prima inceperat aestas et pater Anchises dare fatis vela iubebat. litora cum patriae lacrimans portusque relinquo (Virg. Aen. 3.8–10) The onset of summer hardly had begun and father Anchises ordered to set sails to the fates, when I leave my country’s shores and harbours, crying

My literal translation of the verb tenses should emphasize the effect. From a purely grammatical point of view, we would expect the ¹⁶ The term enargeia is first found in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, at Commentaries on the Attic Orators: Lysias 7. See also Longinus, On the Sublime 15, and Quintilian’s remarks at Institutio oratoria 6.2.29–32. ¹⁷ Benveniste 1966: 238–42.

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coordination of the pluperfect (inceperat) and the imperfect (iubebat), where the former supplies information that situates the narration in the past. The pluperfect and the imperfect work together to give the impression that this is an histoire that has taken place sometime beforehand. The subsequent intrusion of the present tense (relinquo) appears to pull the narration out of the past, effacing the distance that separates the temps de l’énoncé and the temps de l’énonciation. Traditionally, philologists would classify this use as a ‘historical present’ (praesens historicum), which appears to heighten the dramatic tension.¹⁸ In considering modern usage, some linguists explain that the contrast distinguishes background from foreground material.¹⁹ In this brief example from the Aeneid, the shift from past tenses to the present would simply mark the summer’s onset and Anchises’ command as non-events that provide background for the event of Aeneas’ lachrymose departure. Other language scholars would regard Virgil’s tense shifting as a progression from a more static, depictive narration towards an increased dynamism.²⁰ All these interpretations of the role of the present in past narration are compelling and have at least some bearing on the opening sequence in Sur le jadis. The non-event of a hike through Périgord, the background experience of returning to the same, could indeed be read as preparation for the impingement of a powerful event. Yet, as we continue to read, we see that Quignard complicates any straightforward account by imposing even further shifts in tense: Ma gorge se serre. J’ai un léger vertige. Je ressors presque aussitôt. Mes yeux se portèrent d’eux-mêmes près de l’autel des Romains. Je ne vis rien. Rien ne se leva, venant d’autrefois. (Jadis 7) My throat tightens up. I am slightly dizzy. I leave almost immediately. On their own, My eyes fell near the Roman altar. I saw nothing. Nothing rose up, coming back from times gone by.

¹⁸ Richard Heinze writes: ‘The more vividly [Virgil] produces the illusion in us that we are facing immediately [unmittelbar] the events themselves, the more perfectly he believes that he has reached his goal. An external feature of his narrative, but a very characteristic one, is the overwhelming use of the historical present . . . intended to paint the events for us as truly present’ (Heinze 1982: 374, emphasis added). For a comparative account of the narrative implications of the historical present in Caesar’s Gallic Wars and in Charles de Gaulle’s Mémoires de guerre, see Mellet 1980: 6–11. ¹⁹ See Hopper 1979. ²⁰ Longacre 1981.

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The reintroduction of the passé simple (se portèrent, vis, se leva) would appear to expel the scene back to a prior time, reducing the vertiginous discours back to a mere histoire. The foreground seems to dissolve into the background. As the passage continues, however, it becomes quite clear that the move back to the past tense hardly diminishes the effect of vividness or dramatic tension: Dans l’ombre de la branche je vis surgir soudain le visage d’une femme (‘In the shadow of the branch I saw the face of a woman suddenly appear’, Jadis 8). The suddenness that accompanies the passé simple disproves the claim that the present tense alone can communicate intensity. In fact, restricting vivid effects exclusively to the present tense and denying the past tense this power would be valid only if we read the verbs as expressing time alone and thus ignored their aspectual qualities. Like all Indo-European languages, modern French verbs exhibit aspect (continuous, completed, or aorist), even if these assignations are no longer unequivocal. Rather than take the shift from the present to the past as a conversion of discours to histoire, it would be better to understand it as a modulation from continuous to simple or aorist aspect, from an ongoing situation to one that occurs forcefully at once. A reading of Sur le jadis should reveal that aspectual difference plays a central role not only in the book’s stylistic presentation but also in its thematic organization. As the title already suggests, the volume is not only a study of time but, more precisely, a study of temporal aspects. In brief, to approach Sur le jadis critically is to witness and assess what happens when a particular species of time, the ongoing now of writing and reading, intersects or collides with another kind of time, the completeness of a past conceived of as space. To employ Latin terms, Sur le jadis performs the dynamic encounter between the infectum of the now and perfectum of the historical past. Moreover, and even more crucially, the book grapples with expressing the ground or foundation of this temporal confrontation. It attempts to evoke that which makes this concurrence possible. In reaching for this empowering origin, this potent source of temporal experience, we need to have recourse to the third verbal aspect—the one that attracts Quignard’s attention above all— namely the already or iam that characterizes the simple aspect discernible in the Greek aorist. Early on in Sur le jadis, Quignard confirms the completed, spatial quality of ‘History’ (Histoire) by reconnecting the (French) word page

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(pagina) with pagus (‘country’, pays), la demeure la plus vaste où l’âme puisse se mouvoir, voyager, comparer, revenir (‘the largest dwelling where the soul could move, travel, compare, return’, Jadis 14). By means of the written word, temporal experience is transformed into a landscape open to repeated visits and return engagements. The page, and this would of course include Quignard’s pages, invites exploration or, better, investigation; it is the past, as a ‘new space’ (nouvel espace) where vestiges of absent presence are accessible to the present eye: Le passé est un immense corps dont le présent est l’œil (‘The past is an immense body whose eye is the present’, Jadis 17).²¹ A broad horizon stretches out before the journeying spectator. History is there as that which has taken place. It is complete. The present—the present time of writing, the now of reading—penetrates the surrounding space of complete, perfected history; it springs forth and takes from this horizon, hence the eminently Quignardian aphoristic style, which literally arrives at its observations by marking itself off, by creating a boundary (horos), aphorizein. One could readily claim, then, that the horizon or boundary is there only because there is an eye to see it. That is to say, the present does not merely encounter this horizon, but also decisively creates it. The present itself has constituted the horos, which suggests that the past is already contained or lodged in the now. Conversely, the spectacle of the past could be understood as giving birth to the now that arrives to greet it. Quignard’s zoomorphic metaphor—the present as the eye of the body that is the past—proposes that the two aspects, the infectum and the perfectum, are organically conjoined, distinct but inseparable, held together by the horizon that gives both sides their definition, their contour. If it is true that the past is already in the present, then it also holds that the present is already in the past. Within the vast frame of the horizon, the two aspects of time are bound together. What permits this boundary, this horizon, to be recognized as such? What is the constitutive exterior that allows the bounded area to be thus identified? What is the ground or the foundation of both the present and the perfected past? It can only be that which is already there, the iam that is beyond the bounded scene, or beyond boundedness itself. The term for the boundlessness that allows the horizon to take shape is the aorist, ²¹ For Quignard’s reflections on the relation between vestigium and investigatio, see Quignard 2002: 62.

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literally that which negates the horos: what is aoristos, ‘without horizon, without boundary, without limit’. Quignard offers a very concise series of definitions: To horizon définit ce qui limite ou délimite le site au sein de l’espace. To aoriston, ce qui est sans limites. Ce mot définit ce qui ne connaît pas de frontière et qui ne connaît plus d’horizon. To ek-statikon définit ce qui se tient en dehors de sa place. Ce qui est hors de soi. Le site en extension de toute situation. Le mot ek-statique définit le temps même. (Jadis 129) To horizon defines that which limits or delimits the site at the heart of space. To aoriston, that which is without limits. This word defines that which recognizes no frontier and which no longer knows any horizon. To ek-statikon defines that which keeps itself outside of its place. That which is out of itself. The site in extension of every situation. The word ek-static defines time itself.

The aorist is the ‘already’ (déjà) that defines both the progressive present, which already contains the past, and the completed past, which already contains the present. It is ‘ecstatic’; it is ‘time itself ’. Quignard’s philology, performed at the margins, brings the horizon of each discipline into view—the horizon that defines each discipline as what it is and one, moreover, that the aorist quality of philology itself invariably evades. This evasive force of the aorist is consolidated in the key term jadis: La forme française ‘jadis’ se décompose comme Ja-a-dis qui peut elle-même se traduire comme Déjà/il y a/des jours. Source qui renvoie à une source qui antécède. C’est ainsi que le Jadis structure le temps comme avant. (Jadis 139) The French form jadis breaks down as Ja-a-dis, which itself can be translated as Déjà/il y a/des jours [‘Already/there are/days’]. A source that refers back to a source that precedes it. That is how the Jadis structures time as before.

As the ‘fount of time’ (fons temporis, Jadis 138), le jadis can be neither located nor dated. All the same, le jadis is everywhere, coursing through the paginae of Dernier royaume, living on or surviving precisely as the non-localizable, as the interminable—Le Jadis erre sur tout l’espace de la terre (‘The jadis wanders along the entire space of the earth’).²² For JeanLuc Nancy, this errancy specifies the meaning of Quignard’s provocative neologism, the verb jadir: Le jadis jadit—c’est-à-dire qu’il survient dans sa perte, en tant que perdu, un paradis perdu . . . ainsi toutefois survenant, faisant encontre et rencontre dont au moins il peut trouver, lui, attestation elle-même archaïque.²³

²² Quignard 2004a: 18.

²³ Nancy 2005: 384.

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The jadis jadit—that is to say it arises in its loss, as lost, a paradise lost . . . thus however occurring, causing an encounter and a meeting [encontre et rencontre] of that which at least it is able to find, itself an archaic attestation.

Nancy’s allusion to ‘a paradise lost’ is relevant, insofar as Quignard eventually turns to theological language, albeit in a thoroughly nondeist fashion. Specifically, he borrows terms from negative theology and the Plotinian method of apophasis, an utterance that reverently refuses to express anything in positive and therefore reductive terms. In an analogous way, affirming only by means of negating, Quignard elaborates the force of jadis, which is distinguished from the past: Le jadis par rapport au passé a pour premier trait de ne pas avoir nécessairement été. Le jadis ne figure ni au nombre des étants ni au nombre des ayant été car il n’a pas encore fini de surgir. Le jadis est un puits plus vaste que tout le passé. (Jadis 140) The jadis in relation to the past has the primary trait of not necessarily having been. The jadis figures neither among the number of beings nor among the number of what has been, for it has not yet finished appearing. The jadis is a well vaster than the entire past.

As the most profound source, the jadis participates in the origin that antedates all that is originated. It is prior—already there before the beginning (Ce qui précède le début, tel est le jadis: Jadis 55). That is to say, the jadis precedes the language and the borders and the limits that define experience through polarization, discrimination and disciplinary definition. Accordingly, it is linked to the apophatic, to all the alphaprivative terms that Plotinus employs to point (negatively) to the origin: ‘Alogos, aoristos, apeiros, tels sont les mots de Plotin’ (Jadis 129). In contrast, the past is riveted to the boundaries imposed by language. The key distinction between the jadis and the past is therefore best understood in light of aspectual rather than temporal difference. Here, for Quignard, the past is replete with that which has been, with actions completed or perfected from the perspective of the present. For this reason, it is grammatically represented by the present perfect (passé composé), whose aspect explicitly diverges from the aoristic force of the preterite (passé simple). The acts that comprise the perfected past do so by being taken from the horizon of lived experience. They are aphoristic. The contents of the jadis, however, are aoristic, simple. They are associated with a prior, liquid source that does not suffer the cuts, divisions, or contours—the horoi—featured in language’s sculpted accomplishments (Il y a un pressentiment de la préxistence, substantielle, liquide, obscure,

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ontologique, inconnaissable à la vision, au langage, à la conscience, ‘There is a presentiment of pre-existence: substantial, liquid, obscure, ontological, unknowable to vision, to language, to consciousness’, Jadis 236). In other words, the aoristic surge of the jadis is without the temporal or spatial boundaries that compose the verbal sense of present perfect: L’aoriste est lié à l’achronie. On dit aussi: le passé simple . . . . Les simples n’opposent pas comme les mots du langage se discriminent et se polarisent. Face à la simplicitas du passé simple, si simple, presque aoristique, il y a un passé composé, si complexe, si composé qu’on peut presque le dire décomposant. C’est le passé du langage. (Jadis 120) The aorist is bound to timelessness. One also says: the simple past . . . . What is simple does not come into opposition, unlike the words of language, which discriminate and polarize. Facing the simplicity of the simple past, so simple, nearly aoristic, there is a compound past [the present perfect], so complex, so composed that one can nearly call it decomposing. It is the past of language.

Therefore, guided by aspectual difference, we discover that two contrasting types of the past have been operative throughout (il y a deux sources du temps, ‘There are two sources of time’, Jadis 28): there is the past as ‘irreversibility’ (irréversibilité)—‘the past-evermore’ (le passé-à-jamais), which Quignard identifies as ‘mourned loss’ (deuil), and the past as ‘reversibility’ (réversibilité), which is characterized as a théophanie, as the limitless, and therefore ever resurgent past—Le passé de ce monde comme printemps à faire sans cesse revenir (‘The past of this world as a springtime to come without ever ceasing to return’, Jadis 29). This latter past is what ‘has not yet finished appearing [surgir]’. Quite explicitly, Quignard grounds the simple aspect of the aorist in the ‘already’ (déjà), which resounds in le jadis, and promises an encore: Il n’y a aucun Jamais-plus dans le Jadis. Il y a un jour. Un jour déjà. Un jour encore (‘There is no Nevermore in the Jadis. There is a day. A day already. A day again,’ Jadis 141). Whereas the simple ontology of the jadis must be differentiated from the completed, ontic phenomena of the past, it is important to see some deeper relation between the jadis and the present, whose radical transience should also be defined or affirmed negatively—that is, as passing constantly between the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’. As Laurence David notes, ‘[i]n the cycle of the Dernier Royaume, Pascal Quignard says that the present does not exist. . . . The present would at most be a passage

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between two intervals.’²⁴ In order to distinguish, then, the constitutive negativity of le jadis from that of le présent (understood as the momentary threshold between the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’), it again appears necessary to stress a difference in verbal aspect. The negative force of the present is, through and through, durative or continuous, fluctuating ceaselessly between what has been and what is yet to come, between mourning and theophany. As cited above, ‘[t]he past is an immense body whose eye is the present’ (Jadis 17); but this past should now be understood in its two, distinct aspects: the irreversible past of the perfect; and the reversible past of the aorist. By means of its continuous movement, the present, consistently associated with the eyes, can train its gaze either on the limited, visible past or on the unlimited, invisible past. In a much earlier text, his Preface to Colette Lazam’s translation of Apuleius’ De deo Socratis, Quignard privileges the latter option: Aimer, dormir, lire c’est ce ‘voir l’aphantos’. Lire, c’est suivre des yeux la présence invisible (‘To love, to sleep, to read is to “see the aphantos”. Reading, is to train one’s eyes on the invisible presence’).²⁵ It would appear that the negative constitution of the present’s durative aspect (no longer, not yet) is precisely what attracts it to the privative substance or invisible presence (alogos, aoristos, apeiros) of the jadis. Quignard’s philology at the margins—his attentiveness to the boundlessness that serves as the ground for all that is bounded—stands to offer new insights into how one might read canonical texts. To illustrate, one may turn to Quignard’s reading of the famous Gyges episode in Herodotus. In the first book of his Histories, Herodotus relates how the Lydian king Candaules, eager to confirm that his wife was the most beautiful of women, turned to his trusty bodyguard, Gyges. With some difficulty, Candaules tried to persuade Gyges to spy on her as she undressed for bed, so that in beholding her nakedness he would agree that there was indeed no one fairer. Yet Gyges wisely protested: ἅμα δὲ κιθῶνι ἐκδυομένῳ συνεκδύεται καὶ τὴν αἰδῶ γυνή (‘As soon as she took of her chiton, the woman also removed her shame’, Hdt. 1.8)—in Quignard’s translation: En même temps qu’elle se dépouille de sa chemise, reine ou non, la femme quitte sa gêne (Jadis 57). Apart from the interpolation (reine ou non, ‘queen or not’), which does not appear in Herodotus’

²⁴ David 2007: 508.

²⁵ Quignard 1993: 28.

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Greek, the translation is perfectly accurate and literal. For Quignard, the crucial term in the passage is aidōs, which he renders as gêne, ‘discomfort, shameful embarrassment’, while employing the etymological force of aidōs, which he takes to be an alpha-privative noun derived from an adjective related to the verb ‘to see’: Shame is that which should ‘not be seen’ (a-idēs). Herodotus himself appears to envisage some such etymology further in the episode, in a passage not cited by Quignard, when the queen rebukes Gyges for ‘seeing what he should not’ (ἴδῃς τὰ μή σε δεῖ, Hdt. 1.11). In Quignard’s own elaboration, the Gyges story yields a series of observations that pursue the path of key negative conceptions, beginning with the Greek word ‘truth’, alētheia, which he, like many others, understands as the eradication of forgetfulness (lēthē): La vérité se disait en grec alētheia. Est vrai ce qui ne parvient pas à s’oublier. . . . A-lètheia est le Non-oublié comme A-oriston est le Non-fini et comme A-idès est le Non-visible (‘In Greek truth is called alētheia. True is that which does not get to be forgotten. . . . A-lētheia is the Not-forgotten just as A-oriston is the Not-finished and just as A-idēs is the Not-visible’, Jadis 57). Continuing along these lines, alētheia gets connected with the Latin revelatio, literally a lifting of the veil, which explicitly corresponds to the undressing scene in Herodotus. For Quignard, it is within the logic of revelation that we recognize how the eye of the present relates to the body of the past: Non-oubli qui arrache le voile (le velum) sur le passé. La souche du vrai est le nu. C’est encore le mot de Gygès: quand elle se dénude, reine ou non, la femme arrache la vélation sur la zoomorphie (‘Not-forgotten is that which tears the veil (the velum) over the past. The stem of the truth is the nude. It is once again the word of Gyges: when she denudes, queen or not, the woman tears the veiling over her zoomorphy’, Jadis 58). Shame (aidōs) occurs when the human reveals the animal nature that lies beneath humanness. In respecting no boundaries—such as the line that divides what should and should not be seen, or the border that separates humans from beasts or predators from prey—the aorist aspect is revealed in the present’s encounter with the past; not with the past of what has been but rather with the past of what is already there, le jour déjà: le jadis. The continuous aspect of the present is interrupted and disrupted by the simplicity of this past that invisibly surges into view. As Simon Saint-Onge expresses it, the jadis is ‘a process of figuration that causes the continuum of

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temporality to explode [éclater]’.²⁶ To follow this invisible presence with one’s eyes is to read the page, the pagina, as a scene of the past that is simultaneous, something all at once, en même temps, and decidedly not as the repository of that which has been completed in the past and will never come again. To refer again to the Gyges story, even though Quignard does not call attention to it, Herodotus’s adverb, hama, ‘at the same time’, is in fact cognate with the Latin iam, which yields the French déjà—dès et jà, de iam; and ‘at the same time’ concisely recalls the effect of returning to the same. It broaches the profound relation between simultaneity and similarity, simul and similis; as well as the simultaneity and similarity evoked by the simple (semel plex) aspect of the aorist (see Jadis 120). To return to the same is to wrest the past and set it free from its stable location in canonical history. It is to dissolve its delimitations and thereby return it to time itself. Les formes sont des limites. Dans la métamorphose les formes ne connaissent plus de limites. Elles sont devenues aorista. Leur horizon est sans forme: c’est le temps (‘Forms are delimited. In metamorphosis, forms no longer recognize these limits. They have become aorista. Their horizon is without form: it is time’, Jadis 131). To return to the same is to remove the veil that consigns the past to a chain of accomplishments, to a series of perfected acts that will never return, acts that have been expelled from living time. Hence to return to the same is to enjoy the simultaneity and simplicity of the past, the past in its aoristic aspect, which overwhelms every limit, unveils itself as the all-at-once, and radiates in its invisibility. In a word, it is to throw an eye onto that which is already there before the beginning, to witness the vivid splendour of the now, to place the present sur le jadis—before discipline and before meaning, upon the ever-retreating margins of philology.

²⁶ Saint-Onge 2008: 160.

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3 Hyperinclusivity, Hypercanonicity, and the Future of the Field Constanze Güthenke and Brooke Holmes

In The Phenomenology of Spirit (published in 1807), Hegel declared the Antigone to be ‘among the fine creations of the ancient and modern world . . . the most excellent and satisfying work of art’. Hegel’s judgement of Sophocles’ play is well known. Less familiar is the self-positioning that enabled him to pronounce judgement: ‘and I am acquainted with nearly everything in such a class, and one ought to know it and it is quite possible’.¹ Hegel is here sweepingly confident about his acquaintance with the class of ‘fine creations’ from both the ancient and the modern world. His confidence lies in canonicity, the canon indicating not only what is agreed upon in terms of quality but also what is containable in terms of quantity. Here, in short, the canon has, as its opposite, not marginality but overabundance. Hidden in Hegel’s own margins lurks an anxiety about the expectation of knowing more than can be achieved, of having to master an immense and growing range of materials, texts, and artefacts from which the ‘fine’ is to be distilled. The suppression of that anxiety enables the critic’s assessment. The tension between expansion and limitation—and the anxiety it produces—were, and still are, constitutive of classics as a modern discipline, by which we mean an increasingly institutionalized and professionalized set of practices and forms of tacit knowledge that has been taking shape

¹ As quoted and translated in Leonard 2012: 95.

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since the late eighteenth century. In this chapter we offer a critical examination of the discipline’s long-standing investments in inclusiveness and strategies of delimitation, as they have shaped and continue to shape the formation and self-understanding of its practitioners. These investments have come under increasing strain with the ongoing broadening of the field. The rise of reception studies, the welcome broadening of the geographical scope of the ancient Greco-Roman world, and the interest in authors, works, genres, and areas of knowledge that fall outside the traditional parameters of the canon all contribute to a situation where the prospect of ‘full coverage’ of classical antiquity and its afterlife is more remote than ever. The time-honoured strategy of navigating such a mass of material, at least within classical philology, has been the canon. The recent pressures on the canon from the margins, whereby formerly excluded material finds its way inside, have, however, exposed some of the limitations of such a strategy. Our aim here is therefore to suggest another model of imagining the work of the individual classicist, as well as the common ground of the community of classicists. In challenging the commitment to mastering a single, predetermined body of material that tacitly functions as a metonym for the whole of antiquity or as the distillation of its essence, we are not rejecting the value of expertise and its claims on those practising both within and between disciplines. We are arguing instead for forms of expertise that are at once local and translocal and, thus, place individual scholars at nodal points within a vast and open field, a field whose boundaries can never be set in advance.² In short, we are advocating for a rethinking of the very idea of the ‘field’ of classical scholarship and of the self-understanding of those who move within it. We begin with a few more thoughts on the canon-versus-margins model. We then turn to consider (a) the historical roots of the concern with mastering antiquity and (b) the spectrum of such concern between the poles of hyperinclusivity and hypercanonicity, drawing analogies with current debates over the category of ‘world literature’.³ In the last section we sketch out the alternative model of a ‘nodal’ classics.

² In this movement between the local and the translocal, Emily Greenwood’s (2016) concept of the ‘omni-local’ (43–4) is particularly relevant. ³ We adopt the two terms ‘hypercanonicity’ and ‘hyperinclusivity’ from Pollock, Elman, and Chang 2015.

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The terms of this volume set the canon in opposition to the margin (albeit complicating the opposition with the wild card ‘passion’). The opposition casts the canon in the familiar language of exclusivity and quality. The canon is the main body of text, the text that occupies the centre of the page, turning all else into marginalia, supplementary and subordinate parts. By valorizing the margins, we can upend this familiar hierarchy. One strategy here is to disturb the walls of the canon, allowing once excluded texts to enter the hallowed ground of canonicity. A more radical route undercuts the argument from quality altogether, setting in play a drama of challenge and displacement: the margins rise up and overwhelm the urtext so as to instill a new regime of value or judgement. If the language of revolution comes easily to mind in this context, it is in part because the canon has long been seen as an instrument of conservative politics, worldly and academic alike. The canon’s traditional affiliations have turned the erstwhile margins into staging grounds for projects self-consciously fashioned as progressive or subversive. One can point to Page duBois’ recent call, in Out of Athens, for classics to embrace ‘a politics of globalization’ as exemplary in its pairing of ‘a resistance to conventional or hegemonic ideas’ with the embrace of a ‘global’ Mediterranean—messy, diasporic, multiethnic—and with a correspondingly heterogeneous body of texts and artefacts.⁴ One could point, too, to the relatively recent revalorization of postclassical engagements with texts and authors already taken to be canonical in antiquity. The trend is seen especially clearly in the investment of scholarly attention in the Second Sophistic, where marginality can be construed both as a parasitic relationship with ‘classic’ and classical texts and as the secondary status of a belated tradition. Here the line between critique of the canon and confirmation of its power shows itself to be especially fine. Tim Whitmarsh has offered a powerful critique of the ways in which representations of the Second Sophistic perpetuate nineteenth-century attachments to a romanticized Hellenocentrism and to anachronistic nationalisms; he argues instead for an approach to Greek literature, especially later Greek literature, as a ‘plural cultural system’.⁵ Whitmarsh is in effect recuperating the margins of the once marginal Second Sophistic—what gets left out in narratives about the continuities of

⁴ DuBois 2010: 5, 3.

⁵ Whitmarsh 2013: 2.

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Hellenism and elite literary production—in the service of unseating the tyranny that the canon, with its attendant notions of value and ‘the classical’, has exercised over the heroic rescue of postclassical Greek literature from the confines of the margins.⁶ The recent conflation of the canon with a conservative, backwardlooking agenda has not gone uncontested. The rise of reception studies has put front and centre the question of why some works from antiquity, namely those that later generations saw fit to copy and recopy, have the power to transcend the immediate historical circumstances of their production—in other words, the question of transhistorical value. Charles Martindale, reviewing duBois’ book, vigorously disputes, with an eye to Milton’s ‘revolutionary art’, that a traditional classics is ‘inherently conservative’;⁷ the canon, similarly, need not be read as ‘undeniably coercive’ (here Martindale points to the persistent allure of a handful of texts for postmodern theory).⁸ In rejecting the globalized vision of Out of Athens, Martindale sees the canon as sustaining a conversation across centuries. While such a vision of the canon has been voiced by others,⁹ he goes further, by locating its power to sustain conversation in the transhistorical value it represents and by predicating the future survival of classics as a field on the commitment of its practitioners to the ‘special value of their objects of study’.¹⁰ The call for classicists to be (re)enchanted by the canon has been sounded elsewhere as well. Christopher Wood, speaking as an art historian and comparatist from outside the disciplinary parameters of classics, rejects the dilution of literariness within the unbounded textuality of cultural studies. But Wood also rejects Martindale’s appeal to timeless value as the appropriate protective armour of the classical canon, in order to advocate instead a revalorization of classical authors on the grounds of their proximity to the gods, their compelling uncertainty about the fictionality of their ⁶ See esp. ibid., 3–4 on what gets marginalized through fixation on idealized visions of the Greek past: Jewish and Christian literature, paraliterary works such as the Alexander Romance, and the vast amount of technical literature, especially of the later period. Compare also the introduction to this volume, which suggests both the period of late antiquity and the large genre of technical literature as exemplary containers of tenaciously ‘marginal’ texts. ⁷ Martindale 2010: 139. ⁸ Ibid. 141. ⁹ See e.g. Berman 2001: 327: ‘canonicity maintains, cultivates, and develops community over time and across generations’. ¹⁰ Martindale 2010: 139.

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referents, the ultimate purity of their poetry.¹¹ Not aesthetic value, but something like magical power becomes the hallmark of the classical. Yet, despite Wood’s self-conscious distance from Martindale, their visions of the field’s future hold much in common. These defences of the canon can easily, and probably unintentionally, run the risk of looking conservative and reactionary, motivated by anxieties about the field’s precipitous loss of prestige and by a palpable impatience with historicizing and politicizing critiques of the canon and its exclusions. Despite the appeals of beauty and mystification, such defences are nevertheless limited by the old boundaries they shore up (the ‘greats’ versus the epigones, the literary versus the paraliterary and the nonliterary, poetry versus prose, centre versus margins). But the very idea of limits brings us back to the problem with which we began: the spectre of an unbounded, unruly expanse in the absence of constraints on what counts as worthy of the classicist’s attention, and hence on what is constitutive of her claim to expertise. At stake here are concerns about competence and rigour. The notion of the canon as the ground of a transhistorical conversation suggests further worries that, in its absence, we lose contact with the past. No doubt there is a fear, too, that, set adrift, we will lose contact with one another. From this perspective, the process by which claims from the margins have eroded the canon’s parameters, however welcome, is troubling to the extent that it undermines the canon’s limiting function. The strain on that function is less evident in cases where the aim is to move marginal texts and authors into the canon (e.g. (neglected) text x was important in antiquity, or text y counters the elite male perspective, therefore we should make x and y a priority). The process feels especially manageable when it works on a principle of substitution (take text x off the reading list and replace it with text y). The strategy of proposing new canons (e.g. in reception studies) also downplays the fundamental expansion of the field of competence at work. But when the call is to trade canons of value for the whole of the ancient literary production—or, more dangerously, for the extant remains of all antiquity—the ground suddenly begins to feel most unstable. The boundaries seem to disappear altogether and the rubric of canons versus margins loses its force. What

¹¹ Wood 2012: 169–70.

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happens to competence and community within such an open field? In order to pursue the more radical implications of calls to open ourselves up to a more heterogeneous, pluralistic, unfamiliar, and perhaps unexpectedly generative ancient world, we need to think more about the implications of removing the canon as the limit for our understanding of what it means to work as a classicist. It is important to stress here that the question on the table is not simply about the expansion of classics as a field. The push towards interdisciplinarity has renewed enthusiasm for an expansive ‘ancient studies’ model at the level of institutions (departments, programmes, societies). That is to say, ‘interdisciplinarity’ has gained currency as a property of communities. But there is no immediately obvious corresponding model for the individual. In current discussions of the future of the field, collaboration, sometimes with explicit references to the sciences, is often put forward as a strategy for combating our ever more limited grasp on what is deemed important to know. The collaborative project has indeed played a significant role in the synthesis of knowledge about the ancient world. It holds a venerable place in the history of the discipline’s nineteenth-century professionalization, though usually with a view to exhaustiveness and the accumulation of labour (we might think of the encyclopaedic ‘corpora’ projects of the nineteenth century, or of the arrival of grand-scale archaeological excavation). But its potential at the more local level of interpretation remains largely unexplored. This more local collaboration holds much promise. Nevertheless, collaboration alone is a limited model for imagining a truly open field, insofar as it can be understood simply as the conjoining of two specializations. What would it mean to imagine each of the partners as an interpretive community unto herself, at once multiple and engaged in forms of synthesis that are contingent, nimble, and creative? It is only by rethinking the very idea of the individual scholar, we want to argue, that we can unleash the full potential of larger interpretive communities. Here the language of canonicity slides into the language of disciplinarity—unsurprisingly, if we think that what disciplines do is, essentially, draw boundaries and create meaning through delimitation. Such meaning is generated not only by the subject matter itself, but also by those who constitute the discipline, by the scholarly community. In James Redfield’s words, apropos of his reflections on the differences and similarities between classicists and anthropologists,

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‘[a] discipline may therefore be defined as a group of people who sustain one another by certifying each other’s work as competent and important . . . A discipline, then, is not defined by its subject matter . . . but by the characteristic interests of its practitioners.’¹² If canonicity and disciplinarity stand in a relationship of analogy, small wonder that there is such tight correspondence between the literary canon and the scholarly canon, the value of scholarship being measured by its relation to the centrality of texts and the recognition of each other’s work and the validation of expertise relying in turn on those canons (as was brought up for consideration in the introduction to this volume). Does this in turn, then, make discipline itself a byword for rigidity? For an exclusivity that at best enables communication and the collective sharpening of techniques to engage our ancient sources more critically and more productively? There may be better ways—especially for classicists, given the mutually reinforcing power of the canon and ‘the classical’—of thinking about disciplines that uncouple them from canons of texts without necessarily dispensing with the idea of canons altogether. David Wellbery has argued that disciplines, while they get punched about and need to adapt, usually retain shape, more so than we fear and for better and less threatening reasons than we might want to give them credit for.¹³ Wellbery approaches the shape-shifting and continuing presence of disciplines with the help of systems theory (as it had been applied to science and institutionalized knowledge by the theoretical sociologist Niklas Luhmann), which itself emphasizes communication as the basic parameter that necessitates and enables disciplinarity. To maintain communication, disciplines are equally obliged to evolve by necessity, to absorb changes, and to reduce complexity while avoiding banality. In other words, disciplines are balancing acts, animated by a dynamic that moves between tradition and contingency. By going along this route, Wellbery manages to establish a counterpoint to a Foucauldian evocation of discipline as malevolent order and the corollary of romanticizing the transgressive and the marginal. On his analysis, disciplinarity becomes one way of maintaining functioning lines of communication in a world where, as we face a proliferation of what there is to know, we also face choices, both individual and collective, about what

¹² Redfield 1991: 8–9.

¹³ Wellbery 2009.

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should be known. We inevitably make choices about what we don’t need to know and what we need not to know, in José Medina’s incisive formulation of epistemic injustice.¹⁴ What does this mean for classics? Perhaps most importantly, the ways in which the canon has helped to shape the parameters of the discipline, at least within classical philology in the Anglo-American world, have limited the field’s adaptability in responding to knowledge proliferation. Part of the issue here arguably has to do with deeply entrenched concerns about competence. It is true that, for any discipline, finding the right balance between common knowledge and specialization raises problems about how to define expertise (and the corresponding problem of how to train students). All the disciplines, too, have to deal with the challenge of ‘information overload’, which, as Ann Blair has shown, has been a familiar problem for scholars since at least the early modern period, awash in a new flood of printed books.¹⁵ But perhaps the history of modern classics, more than of any other discipline, is a history of anxiety over competence. Friedrich August Wolf, in his otherwise confident ‘Darstellung der Alterthums-Wissenschaft’ (Wolf 1869), points out that, quite aside from the potentially wide, though ancillary, knowledge of other ancient and modern languages, even the proper territory of Altertumswissenschaft ‘has already become impossible to traverse in every direction even for the most diligent and optimistic’.¹⁶ The philological scholar, he concedes, will have to negotiate constantly between ‘drawing modest boundaries’ and being able to engage extraneous materials fully when they present themselves, even if he has reduced the scope considerably.¹⁷ Anthony Grafton has commented on the changeable balance between the antiquarian, compendious polyhistor of the early modern period, and the philologus of the shrinking world of professionalizing scholarship as in fact two ends of a spectrum.¹⁸ Wolf, likewise, seems to suggest that the task of the modern scholar is to be the philologist who knows enough about polyhistory to control it with his new found skills, when needed.

¹⁴ Medina 2013, cited in Rizvi 2015: 158. ¹⁵ Blair 2010. ¹⁶ Wolf 1869: 835. For a more complete historical treatment of those constitutive tensions within classical philology, see Güthenke 2015b. ¹⁷ Wolf 1869: 835–6. ¹⁸ Grafton 1983.

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In the ‘Darstellung’, Wolf introduces a whole range of strategies for coping with the vast expanses of Altertumswissenschaft. Although Wolf exudes a confidence not that dissimilar from Hegel’s, he at the same time also shows how much work has to be expended on shoring up the boundaries of disciplined knowledge. He estimates, for example, the current number of available and known classical texts in the range of 1,600 texts, adding in a footnote that he has deliberately excluded all Christian postclassical writing and conceding that the number is bound to increase.¹⁹ He acknowledges that the ancient world reaches well beyond Greece and Rome. But by introducing a distinction between Zivilisation and Geisteskultur, he pre-empts the question of how broadly to conceive of antiquity by claiming that, while oriental civilizations may have existed earlier, true ‘spiritual culture’ only began with the Greeks.²⁰ More practically, he builds his case on the fact that we have simply more and better sources for the classical world, in number and in their ability to trace the rise and fall of such complete intellectual cultures. Wolf was and is not alone in his quandary. Sheldon Pollock has described the constitutive paradox of philology, or the ‘discipline of making sense of texts’, as the tension between the poles of hyperinclusiveness and hypercanonicity, of maximal extension and maximal specialization.²¹ In the case of classics, this is the opposition between a tendency to open up towards all of the ancient world, with widely conceived temporal and spatial boundaries, and a tendency to focus on the ‘classical’ and canonical. Wolf himself is already concerned about a form of overspecialization within classical scholarship that loses sight of the larger picture. By suggesting his notion of Altertumswissenschaft as a comprehensive science that treats Greek and Roman antiquity as a whole, as a totality whose development and character can be studied on the basis of textual (and, to an extent, non-textual) sources, he raises Greco-Roman antiquity to canonical status, ostensibly creating a middle ground where maximal specialization and maximal inclusiveness are meant to coexist in the same exclusive field. However, once the object

¹⁹ Wolf 1869: 823–4. ²⁰ On the narrowing down and the exclusion of oriental (and Jewish) cultures, see Grafton 1999. Harloe 2013: 197–8 suggests that this limitation was not introduced in 1807 but was already visible in earlier comments. ²¹ Pollock 2009: 934; Pollock, Elman, and Chang 2015.

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of a science of antiquity is imagined as a totality, an organic whole the unity of which is itself the outcome of applying scholarly method, the pronounced anxiety over competence, and the identity or conflation of canon and method, may not be so surprising. As we have suggested, this oscillation between the poles of a centrifugal hyperinclusiveness and a centripetal hypercanonicity is not exclusive to classics, though the projection of a Greco-Roman unity, reinforced through reference to the quantity and quality of its material sources, has done a particularly efficient job at keeping that balance stable for the most part. In other words, a certain exceptionalist attitude towards the ancient Greek and Roman world and its paradigmatic status has helped greatly to make that oscillation manageable. Perhaps contributing further to the persistence of these ideals is the long-standing force exercised by the fragment or the ruin on the imagination of classical scholars. The acute awareness of how much of classical antiquity has been lost to us conditions an understanding of one’s own work as the labour of mending the whole, restoring the original, filling the lacunae, and so on. It is as if the individual scholar is not simply re-creating the integrity of the whole, but instantiating that whole through the thoroughness of her training and the resulting compass of her expertise. The scholar not only guards the tradition but embodies its cohesion. Before addressing the tension between limitations and openness in the work of the classicist head on, it is worth taking a brief sideways look at the current discussion over the status and the potential of world literature.²² World literature, of course, is an ambiguous term. Does it denote an unmanageably large field of inquiry or a canon of works singled out for their value, excellence, or paradigmatic status? Like comparative literature, the discipline in which the notion of world literature is and has been most vigorously discussed, we are back with the polarity between hyperinclusivity and hypercanonicity. In a subtle piece on the origins sought by contemporary inquiries into world literature in J. W. Goethe’s references to ‘world literature’, Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig has carefully examined Goethe’s phrasings and their context and argues that, for Goethe, world literature is not about the range of actual works that one can read, but rather about a new cognitive stance in response to

²² E.g. Damrosch 2003; Apter 2013; Dimock 2006; Prendergast 2004.

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change: in Goethe’s case, the upheavals of revolutions and wars across Europe, as well as the personal experience of having his work read and reviewed across national boundaries. World literature is thus, Hoesel-Uhlig argues, about ‘envisioning transnational circuits of intellectual advance’, a new way of being conscious of knowledge passing across borders and cultures rather than an object-directed account of a new field.²³ What would this mean for classics? What would it mean to ‘include the philologist’s own meaning as an object of philology’?²⁴ Lest this project sound impossibly daunting or hopeless, let us consider more bluntly the alternatives. The first is to cast the figure of the classicist as the one who knows all there is to know about classical antiquity and its later reception. If hyperinclusivity still exercises a hold on classics, it is in part because the very designation of antiquity as classical assumes that the wheat has already been separated from the chaff, leaving the two great civilizations of Greece and Rome to be comprehended in their integrity. There is, too, the fact that, against the vastness of modern archives, the material remains from antiquity look deceptively manageable. Nevertheless, comprehensive expertise is clearly impossible. The idea that the individual scholar could gain mastery over the whole of antiquity was, as we have seen, already a fiction at the dawn of Altertumswissenschaft. After centuries of professional specialization and the energetic proliferation of knowledge about the ancient world, the gap between fiction and reality has only grown. The bid for hyperinclusivity simply is not a viable model. If it appears to be viable, it is only because of a tacit edit performed in advance by the logic of ‘the classical’—a kind of stealth canonicity. The second strategy, which we have already seen, uses the canon to delimit what one is ‘supposed to know’. The canon’s instrumental value for this end is especially evident in the United States in graduate reading lists and surveys, which set out, at least within individual universities, a body of texts to be mastered as a condition of the advanced degree (at least where the degree is usually focused on philology or on languages and literatures). The tight relationship between the canon and the ‘school text’ persists here through a model of hypercanonicity. The canon has its benefits, and it undoubtedly continues a tradition of delimitation and

²³ Hoesel-Uhlig 2004: 39.

²⁴ Pollock 2009: 956.

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value judgement that dates from at least the fifth century BC.²⁵ But recent critiques of the canon have also shown its serious costs: it excludes too much; it produces idealized and sometimes distorting pictures of classical antiquity. The canon undeniably enables conversations. It has done so among elite and learned communities for centuries; it continues to do so, albeit within an ever-shrinking population of elites that nevertheless shows tentative signs of increasing diversity; and it facilitates transhistorical communities, as we saw above. But the canon also constrains conversations. This is particularly true within literary classics, where the canon’s very promise of shared expertise creates anxieties about engaging with work outside the common zone of competence. Finally, a strong attachment to the canon always risks mistaking the content of what must be known for an end in itself. It can keep us from seeing the ways in which knowing is always active and creative. For we are always, to a critical extent, constructing what is known rather than simply plugging gaps or moving across a terrain whose limits are known in advance. The problem with models of hyperinclusivity and hypercanonicity is not just that they aren’t viable (in the case of hyperinclusivity) or that they come at high cost (in the case of hypercanonicity). The problem is that they do not reflect how classics is in many quarters being practised in response to, among other things, ongoing interdisciplinary trends in the humanities, crossover with the social sciences, a growing zone of contact between the humanities and the sciences, or the perennial search for fresh topics. The model of an interdisciplinary ‘ancient studies’ is, in part, a product of these trends. But these scholarly orientations and practices have not been translated into a discussion about what we are doing, individually, qua classicists. In trying to understand our own claims to expertise and to reproduce them in new generations of students, we still rely heavily, whether implicitly or explicitly, on the poles of hyperinclusivity and hypercanonicity, which have, after all, deep historical roots in the discipline’s formation. What is needed, rather, is a more self-conscious attempt to conceptualize the practice of our discipline other than as an aspiration to master an imagined whole or unity. We need to disentangle the cherished ideal of rigour from an investment in totalizing forms of mastery. Disaggregation is possible, and contingency

²⁵ See Netz in this volume.

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and change need not compromise the possibility of meaning, either at the level of the field or at that of the individual scholar. A first step here is to rethink the collective commitment to a delimited body of texts or artefacts seen as classical or canonical as the proper ground of the field of classics; which is another way of saying that we need to confront our fears about the loss of disciplinary unity (and the violence that this loss may be imagined to do to the integrity of antiquity). In its place, we can imagine the very idea of a field differently, as an open plane lacking in clear boundaries. The canon in its ideal state is like the well-constructed plot in Aristotle’s Poetics, which, like a living organism, is not only ordered properly but also of such a magnitude that it can be compassed by a single field of vision and thereby appreciated in its unity (the repudiated alternative is the animal a thousand miles long).²⁶ By contrast, the open field looks more like how the Romantic philosopher-poet-philologist Friedrich Schlegel imagined Homeric epic, one of the most canonical and debated elements of classical knowledge in his time (or now, for that matter). The epic poem, for Schlegel, is a growth like a poetic polyp, where every limb, whether large or small (which can be separated from the grown whole without maiming and without dissolution into simple and no longer poetic or epic parts), has its own life and just as much harmony as the whole.²⁷

Not the appropriately proportioned animal of Aristotle’s Poetics, then, but the coral reef (incidentally, an organism that, in its own right, can suffer aggregate damage, too). Such a vision of disaggregation also implies that rigour does not need to depend on exhaustiveness and that the standards of our scholarship need not be conflated with the status of the works and materials we study as canonical. As Schlegel’s fascination with the creaturely world of the shape-shifting and shape-dividing polyps shows, wholeness and openness can be imagined together and in different ways. The relationship of parts and wholes and parts as wholes, too, is changeable and situational. Likewise, responsible and lively scholarly communities should not have to equate their own cohesion with that of the materials they study.

²⁶ Aristotle, Poetics 7, 1450b34–6 (see also 23, 1459a17–21). ²⁷ From his early essay ‘On Homeric Poetry, with Reference to Wolf ’s Studies’ (published in 1796), as quoted and translated in Güthenke 2015a: 313.

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Of course, even in Schlegel’s polyp-like epic, the idea persists of an innate harmony in the object, to be recognized and appreciated by the viewer. But shifting to an idea of the open field requires the further step of foregoing the bird’s eye perspective entirely. We might imagine instead the idea of a field within which individuals—but also collaborators and groups—stand as nodes, connecting up texts, genres, artefacts, authors, cultural milieux, intellectual traditions, historical periods, and so on. That is, rather than imagine the individual as encompassing a body of material, either within a field of vision or by means of her own self as the frame by which the fragments are restored to wholeness, we could imagine her as situated within a potential web of connections.²⁸ The creative work of scholarship here lies in bringing different points within the web into productive contact. The model of a nodal classics embraces the idea of scholarly knowledge as tactical, contingent, and fluid at any given point in time or place. It sees scholars as actively constituting objects of study rather than finding them within a wellordered system of self-constituting wholes. None of this is to say we should abandon the idea of competence altogether, be it with regard to a range of texts, histories, artefacts, or methods. Rather, we need to re-examine what we mean by competence or rigour. Instead of imagining forms of mastery we might instead think of practices (e.g. philological, epigraphic, philosophical) that we hone mindfully with the aim of appreciating distant texts or foreign concepts in their dense specificity. Such knowing goes hand in hand with reflecting critically on our self-knowledge as scholars, exercising a kind of negative capability, an ability to sustain uncertainty. This involves an ability to know and to accommodate, even appreciate canons (plural) in their functionality, yet to be sensitive to their evolutions, to their provisional and relative character. By exercising our awareness of the contingencies and tactical changes of both a canon and our own situation as points within a dynamic web of relationships, might we not

²⁸ Donna Haraway’s work on ‘situated knowledges’ and the allure of the ‘god trick’ remains useful in this context. Haraway argues, in short, that there is no ‘view from nowhere’: a history of science needs to take seriously the idea that the practice of knowing, from epistemology to authorization to methodology, is informed by the embodied, politically located, and perspectival nature of the producers and regulators of knowledge. See Haraway 1988.

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be able to steer a course between the vilification of the canon and its potential remystification, in our own practice and in our learning? Here we could imagine the classicist simply as one who is trained to make sense of certain kinds of evidence available from the ancient Mediterranean (where both ‘ancient’ and ‘Mediterranean’ are terms open to negotiation), and evidence about the ancient Mediterranean with the recognition that there are no absolute boundaries, only lines that we draw on the basis of what we hope are persuasive arguments about the nature of the stories we are telling about the past. The idea of training here does not prescribe in advance the nature of that training but emphasizes instead the acquisition of skills that enable the classicist to step outside the assumptions, categories, and beliefs of her own culture and upbringing in order to become receptive to the otherness of the ancient world, as well as to view critically the routes by which ancient texts, artefacts, and ideas have come to shape how later readers, viewers, and thinkers thought of themselves and of the worlds around them—and indeed how we imagine ourselves and our worlds.²⁹ These skills include traditional skills, such as language training (not only in Greek and Latin or the modern European languages but also in Arabic or Hebrew or Classical Chinese or Syriac), stylistic analysis, epigraphy, and palaeography; but they also include methods of interpretation (literary, philosophical, historiographical, and so on). Rather than see these skills strictly as instrumental goods, tools that help us to access truths about the past, we can see them instead as forms of constraint that enrich our engagement with the ancient material by decentring us in relation to our familiar, habitual selves. Disciplinarity and creativity are not in opposition here, but work together. But just as important as skill acquisition is a greater self-consciousness about the histories of these methods, a sense of where our disciplinary categories come from, the major debates that have prescribed familiar paths, the abiding visions of classical antiquity that have informed its study over the centuries. The point here is not to paralyse ourselves as interpreters by historicizing every practice of interpretation in such a way that it comes to have meaning only in relation to its context, and not in dynamic engagement with the object of interpretation. It is rather to ²⁹ These two points of focus—otherness and continuity—are often set in opposition to each other: see esp. Holmes 2012: 104–10, on debates within the history of sexuality and on the risks of polarizing these two modes of analysis.

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be self-conscious about what it means and has meant to seek to know an antiquity defined as classical, the ways in which that search has been caught up in the values of the cultures within which it flourished and in the values at stake in its perpetuation today, in cultures that are less certain of the allegedly intrinsic value of classical antiquity.³⁰ After all, the myth of the intrinsic value of antiquity flourishes only in the absence of an examination—and indeed ownership—of our own investments in the past. Just as important as the idea of training is the designation of the ancient Mediterranean as a significant part of the open field. What this does not require is a perfect alignment of the parameters of the field of classics with the parameters of the ancient Mediterranean. The point of an open field is precisely that the classicist may function as a connector between an ancient text—say, a Sophoclean tragedy—and a point far removed in space and time—say, South Africa under Apartheid; or, say, between the Hippocratic medical writers and premodern medical texts from ancient China or India. These kinds of projects will require different forms of training from ones that traverse more limited historical periods or geographical spaces or generic traditions, and they open onto different kinds of scholarly communities from those constituted by traditional disciplines. Yet, even for projects located within apparently narrower confines, the researcher continues to function as a node, making decisions about what kinds of methodological sources to bring to bear on ancient material, and thus what kinds of comparanda are relevant (for someone working, say, on Lucretius, do you read the fragments of Empedocles or Virgil or Epicurus or Henri Bergson or Richard Dawkins? Even if you read all of them, they will not all matter to the story you tell in the same way). The only common denominator here is a practice of specialization in some area(s) of the ancient Mediterranean. The emphasis on choice brings us to the last part of the definition offered here: the classicist is tasked with making sense of evidence from the ancient Mediterranean. We want to emphasize the active nature of this work. The aim is not so much to reconstitute, reconstruct, or resurrect the past from ruins and fragments—all practices that presuppose ³⁰ For a recent exploration of such forms of engagement across the longue durée of classical engagement, see the programmatic introduction and the contributions in Butler 2016.

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a whole to be restored—but rather to create through strategies of drawing connections. The classicist here is the necessary node without which meaning does not exist: the classicist, as it were, completes the circuit. The completed circuit creates a meaning that is proper both to the individual and to the field. What we are suggesting, in short, is the need to develop new ways of imagining the work of the discipline, ways that channel and celebrate its increasingly centrifugal tendencies, rather than continuing to use models of the field that can only figure these tendencies as threats to containment and so seek either to recuperate them into a canon or to marginalize them. Even those of us who have advocated a retreat from the canon more generally need to recognize that the wild proliferation of knowledge that has a reasonable claim to being considered the province of classicists (e.g. through reception studies, or through the rise of comparative antiquities) requires new ways of thinking about our practices, new strategies of self-definition, and new approaches to scholarly formation and training. What we offer here is a still preliminary and provisional sketch of some ways of conceptualizing the field beyond the parameters of hyperinclusivity and hypercanonicity.

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4 The Elusive Middle Vitruvius’ Mediocracy of Virtue John Oksanish

nos enim ita philologi sumus ut vel cum fabris habitare possimus. Cic. Q. Fr. 2.9(8).3

Hodie nationes omnes classicorum studiosae suum habent Vitruvium. Poleni and Stratico 1825: iii (= ‘Editorum praefatio’)

1. Status Quo To approach Vitruvius’ De architectura (written in the last quarter of the first century BC, published around the year 27) in a study of marginality and canon is to invite numerous paradoxes.¹ De architectura significantly directed the formation of the western architectural canon, and it remains the only complete work of Latin prose to survive from the early Augustan period. It is, in addition, the only systematic text on architecture that remains from antiquity.² Yet neither its later cultural impact nor its uniqueness as a specimen of Augustan prose has forestalled the apathy and often antipathy it has endured from classicists—in literary and in material culture alike. Filed as ‘technical’ literature in a discipline that is chiefly concerned with literary texts, De architectura is often viewed as an overly ambitious interloper to the classical tradition—full stop.³ ¹ All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. ² Except for Faventinus’ epitome of De architectura (third or fourth century AD). ³ Other labels include ‘technical prose’, ‘technical literature’, Fachliteratur, and the like. Several recent treatments discuss the problem. Fögen’s most recent work (especially Fögen

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That not all texts are literary in the same ways is a truism, and distinctions between technical and non-technical literature in classics are less rigidly upheld now than in prior decades. Indeed, De architectura currently enjoys an unprecedented degree of serious attention from anglophone classicists, a group that has been particularly slow to make the Vitruvian turn. Several chapter-length and book-length studies in English now complement the already substantial body of continental European scholarship on Vitruvius, and there is more on the immediate horizon.⁴ Two principal factors may account for this sea change. First, the lack of a modern, critical commentary on De architectura has now been redressed through the completion of the Budé series of commentaries.⁵ Second, New Historicism, with its equal regard for ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ texts and its relative disregard for canons, has made its presence felt in classics under the guise of ‘culturalism’ or ‘ideology critique’.⁶ With this textual ecumenism, however, comes a new problem for De architectura and its ilk. Such texts are now read, perhaps, but are they treated as literature? By at least one measure, the answer is ‘no’. Graduate reading lists do not define the classical canon, but they are sufficiently canonizing to warrant being discussed as representations of the discipline’s priorities, as these are embodied by its scholars and teachers.⁷ At Princeton, for instance, the criteria for the classics reading list are stated outright: its texts ‘are representative of the works that constitute classics as a field of literary study’. One rejects De architectura, presumably, as insufficiently literary, either on an objective or on a traditional basis, just as one elides the distinction between ‘Classics’ and ‘Classics as a field of literary 2009) is essential, but see also Asper 2007, Formisano 2001 (with a focus on later antiquity), Horster and Reitz 2003, Taub and Doody 2009, Hutchinson 2009. ⁴ Most recently in a special issue (volume 49) of Arethusa titled Vitruvius in the Round (Cuomo and Formisano 2016). Recent integration of Vitruvius into broader monographs include Green 2014: 109–17, Rimell 2015: 214–23. Milnor 2005 includes a chapter on Vitruvius, as does Andrew Wallace-Hadrill 2008. New work on Vitruvius includes Roby 2016, Sanvito 2016, Nichols 2017. ⁵ A two-volume edition with commentary, edited by Pierre Gros, appeared in 1997. ⁶ Martindale 2005 regrets this ideological turn, making Habinek 1998 its chief representative. ⁷ To my knowledge no doctoral programme in philology or literature requires reading Vitruvius, be it in Latin or in translation, although some programmes in archaeology require reading parts of Vitruvius in Latin (and, occasionally, the entirety in English); see the following note.

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study’ (emphasis added).⁸ De architectura’s status as a literary text (or not) in the eyes of the discipline thus provides something of a bellwether for texts on the margin (or off the page) and for the status of classics itself. The consequences of a general reluctance to treat De architectura as literature are evident in scholarly reactions to Vitruvius’ several apologies for his style. Early in the treatise, for example, Vitruvius asks the reader’s indulgence ‘if anything is explained with minimal attention to the rule of the grammarian’s standard’, claiming not to have written his books ‘as a great philosopher or eloquent rhetorician, nor as a grammaticus trained in the pinnacle of that art, but as an architect who has simply dipped into these things’ (1.1.18). Later, in the preface to book 5, Vitruvius remarks that one may not write about architecture in the same ways as one writes poetry or history. History ‘grabs readers without any help, because it involves a variety of expectations for strange events’, whereas ‘the meter and rhythm of the songs of poetry, with their elegant arrangement of the words of individual voices . . . lead the readers’ senses all the way to the end of the work without displeasure’ (historiae per se tenent lectores; habent enim novarum rerum varias expectationes. poematorum vero carminum metra et pedes ac verborum elegans dispositio et sententiarum inter personas distinctas . . . sensus legentium perducit sine offensa ad summam scriptorum terminationem, 5, Praef. 1). The same cannot be done in architectural writings, since ‘terms derived from the peculiar needs of the art cast a shadow over the senses, thanks to their unusual register’ (vocabula ex artis propria necessitate concepta inconsueto sermone obiciunt sensibus obscuritatem, 5, Praef. 2). Critics have long tended to view these apologies not as literary topoi invoked to gain the reader’s trust (i.e. not as a captatio benevolentiae), but as Vitruvius’ honest admissions of his shortcomings as a writer. To take two relatively recent examples, J. C. Bramble, in discussing ⁸ Visit e.g. http://www.princeton.edu/classics/graduate/reading/classics, accessed March 2017. Vitruvius likewise does not appear on the list associated with Princeton’s Program of the Ancient World, which would seem otherwise to have a wider purview. Harvard does not include Vitruvius on the list for degrees in classical philology, but puts De architectura 1 (interestingly, the book that is probably least concerned with material culture) on the list for classical archaeology, allowing substitutions of works ‘roughly of the same length and parallel in genre’ in either of its these programs. Visit http://classics.fas.harvard. edu/philology-reading-list and http://classics.fas.harvard.edu/archaeology-reading-list (accessed in March 2017). Has Vitruvius any parallel?

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‘minor figures’ of the late republic in the Cambridge History of Classical Literature, remarks that Vitruvius ‘left style to the experts and schools’; here Bramble apparently paraphrases Vitruvius’ own remarks at De architectura 1.1.18. Presuming that Vitruvius was ‘a practical fellow’, he adds, perhaps with dubious subtext, that Vitruvius ‘did not find it easy to write, and tells us as much’.⁹ Roland Mayer cites both Vitruvian passages given above (1.1.18 and 5, Praef. 1–2) to argue for the impracticability of a Latin Kunstprosa, suggesting by comparison that, when Mela and Pliny apologize, the result is ‘not [unlike Vitruvius] for lack of style, only for the dryness of their material’.¹⁰ Recalling Horsfall’s remarks on Cornelius Nepos, Marden Nichols has elucidated the essential problem: ‘[Nepos’] graceless language augments our sense of his essential honesty.’¹¹ Yet it is precisely because these authors seem to disarm us with their simplicity that we should vigorously resist any conceit of artlessness: ars adeo latet arte sua—‘so much does art hide behind its own artifice’, as Ovid famously observed (Met. 10.252). Besides, it is not at all clear that Vitruvius’ Latin lacks either literary properties or literary ambition. The Vitruvian attitude in the preface to book 5, for example, strongly recalls Lucretius’ lament over the limitations of Latin to convey his message, the ‘poverty of our ancestral speech’, patrii sermonis egestas (Lucr. 1.139 ff.). The stances are different, but mutatis mutandis each author points to the special difficulty of finding the ‘right words’ to make his lesson accurate and accessible, and labours to accommodate the reader whenever possible.¹² There are other interesting literary turns in the same preface.¹³ Vitruvius, for instance, commits himself to quasi-Callimachaean brevitas, asserting a negative correlation between the size and the auctoritas of architectural

⁹ For a different critic’s paraphrasing of Vitruvius’ text in his analysis of it, see pp. 90–1 here on Mackail. Bramble 1982: 493–4 continues, ‘Often obscure, his pages are full of Grecisms, most of them necessitated by his subject matter, but he maintains an admirable objectivity’. ¹⁰ Mayer 2005: 196. In fact Vitruvius also blames his material, which lacks the vicissitudes of history qua subject and whose terms (vocabula) derive from his subject’s exigencies (ex artis propria necessitate concepta, 5, Praef. 1 and 2). Cf. Pinkster 2005 (on Pliny the Elder) in the same volume. ¹¹ Horsfall, as cited in Nichols 2009b: 16. ¹² Wallace-Hadrill 2008 makes a similar comparison. For related arguments with respect to Lucretius, see Farrell 2001: 28–51 and Fögen 2000: 61–76. ¹³ In addition to the recent commentaries, Kessissoglu 1993 provides a detailed study of Vitruvius’ fifth preface.

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texts.¹⁴ Substantial portions of the same passage, moreover, emulate Isocrates’ ‘Evagoras’ 8–10, while Vitruvius’ views on history evoke contemporary discussions of rhetorical historiography.¹⁵ Perhaps surprisingly, a tendency to diminish De architectura is not peculiar to classics as a field of literary study, but extends also to classical art historians. Here especially do we encounter the caricaturized, conservative Vitruvius, who says too little about newer architectural forms (such as barrel vaults) and too much about the moral turpitude of surrealistic wall paintings, as he does at 7.5.4: ‘People who see these [surrealistic] delusions don’t criticize them; in fact, they enjoy them, apparently unaware of what is and is not real. As a result, new tastes have gained such sway that a corrupt jury of wrongdoers has managed to convict real art on the charge of artlessness.’¹⁶ To some, such piquant moralizing has seemed all too appropriate for a man often assumed, on the basis of a self-portrait in the preface of book 2 of De architectura, to be quite old.¹⁷ In his landmark Principles of Roman Architecture, for example, Mark Wilson Jones suggests that ‘reactionary pose[s]’ (as those expressed at Vitr. 7.5.3–4) are not uncommon among ‘frustrated professionals . . . in the face of the new trends which pass them by’. Albeit cautioning readers against an ‘orgy of recrimination’, Wilson Jones connects Vitruvius’ invective with a ‘recurrent tone of resignation— almost an inferiority complex—that characterizes Vitruvius’ personal reflections’.¹⁸ Biographical and psychological conclusions such as these are remarkably widespread in treatments of Vitruvius. Art historian John Clarke, for example, dismisses Vitruvius’ diatribe in terms that seem to evince classics’ subtle classism: for Clarke, Vitruvius’ tastes are

¹⁴ For discussion of Vitruvian brevitas as a rhetorical stance, see Oksanish 2016; also Rimell 2015: 218. ¹⁵ I discuss Vitruvius’ interest in variety as a rhetorical and historiographical phenomenon in forthcoming work. ¹⁶ At haec falsa videntes homines non reprehendunt sed delectantur, neque animadvertunt, si quid eorum fieri potest necne. ergo ita novi mores coegerunt, uti inertiae mali iudices convincerent atrium virtutes. Cf. a similar dichotomy at Cic. Part. or. 35. ¹⁷ 2, Praef. 4, with McEwen 2003: 102–3. Romano 1987: 43ff. adds that Vitruvius exploits his old age and appearance as a metaphor for the difficulty with which he and his discipline have been integrated into Augustan Rome. See also Traina 1988. ¹⁸ Wilson Jones 2000: 35–6 (emphasis added). See Elisa Romano’s more thorough discussion of Vitruvius’ complesso d’inferiorità in her monograph La Capanna e il tempio (Romano 1987: 81–7).

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‘reactionary’, his ‘naïve’ taste attributable to a pursuit of ‘a commonsense art that looks “real” ’.¹⁹ None of these assessments, to invert the final third of this collection’s remit, is especially dispassionate. Vitruvius may well appear reactionary and admit adopting a resigned tone. Whether he is actually naïve and frustrated, however, is an altogether different question.²⁰ To answer it, we are obliged to return both to the text and its reception tradition.²¹

2. Reading through Reception In Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception, Charles Martindale suggested that attention to an author’s reception tradition allows a return to any given text’s immanent qualities. Martindale rightly asserts that reading through—and, to some extent, seeing past—an author’s reception tradition makes it possible ‘to relativize current reactions and to free ourselves for a more positive approach’ to authors less fashionable in our own time. A testament to the changeability of taste and, perhaps, to the power of critical influence, Martindale declared in 1993 that scholars gave Ovid and Lucan a ‘rather thin and unrewarding treatment’, when earlier centuries had treated them with urgency and commitment.²² Twenty-five years later, Ovid and Lucan suffer no such lack of attention.²³ Achieving ‘escape velocity’ from tradition and history—to which even calls to historicize are subject—must always remain unattainable. Yet a ¹⁹ Clarke 2005: 266. ²⁰ Jaś Elsner, in welcome contrast to Clarke, emphasizes the rhetorical and political context of late first-century Rome, while Nichols similarly offers a sustained, literary reading of the passage. Like Elsner and Nichols, I do not intend simply to rebut charges of Vitruvius’ conservatism, but to interrogate the notion of Vitruvius’ alleged naïveté by asserting clear distinctions between Vitruvius the human being and Vitruvius the represented author of the text. For similar views, see Elsner 1995: 49–63; Nichols 2009b: 78–105. Edwards 1993: 141 reminds us that we should not ‘edit out [the polemical tone] in an attempt to recover how Romans “really” responded to what they saw’, since that very tone was ‘a fundamental part of those responses’. See also now Platt 2009. ²¹ The study in the section to follow is by no means comprehensive and differs from other studies in its emphasis on De architectura’s literary reception. For more traditional accounts of Vitruvian reception, see e.g. Koch 1951 and Germann 1991 and the studies cited by Verbaal 2016. ²² Martindale 1993: 55. ²³ The extent to which Martindale’s own historicization of Ovidian reception catalysed the last two decades of Ovidian scholarship, for example, is of course debatable.

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study of reception tradition in the manner Martindale imagined remains crucial in the case of Vitruvius, over whom the classicizing literati of the Renaissance and their notional descendants continue to cast long shadows. Vitruvius’ reception, however, is twofold, perhaps uniquely so. For, despite the stylistic and other misgivings of later classical scholars, Vitruvius’ name did become—and in many ways remains—a virtual byword for architect and for architectural canons and theory, if not for architecture itself.²⁴ It generally bears strong associations with architecture that is specifically ‘classical’, even when the latter-day treatises that bear his name are only loosely ‘classical’ and emulate De architectura in a very vague way. For example, the eighteenth-century Vitruvius Britannicus, or the British Architect (3 folios, published in 1715–25) of Colen Campbell is more of a catalogue of impressive blueprints than a treatise, and a paean to the sixteenth-century Venetian Andrea Palladio as much as to Vitruvius himself. Other subsequent and similar renditions include William Adam’s Vitruvius Scoticus (published in 1750), Den danske Vitruvius (Lauritz de Thurah, 2 volumes, published in 1746 and 1749), and the early twentieth-century The American Vitruvius: An Architect’s Handbook of Civic Art (Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets, published in 1922). As the editors of the 1825 edition of Vitruvius that features in the epigraph to this chapter succinctly put it at the beginning of their own preface: ‘Today every nation that studies the classics has its own Vitruvius.’²⁵ Apart from a strong sense of nationalism, these later eponymic works share an attachment to Vitruvius that is primarily associative rather than precise. That is, they evoke some sense of ‘the classical’ (from which the purity of classical literature is surely inextricable) simply by invoking Vitruvius, rather than by engaging his text qua text. As Robert Kaster suggests in his study of Cicero’s canonization, the process is one of ‘kitschification’, by which the iconic abstraction of an author that ‘bears only a partial and inconstant resemblance to the human being whom it represents’ essentially (and, to some extent, irrevocably) supplants the ²⁴ As Wallace-Hadrill (2008: 44) recently remarked, Vitruvius was ‘elevated to canonical status in the Renaissance (despite Alberti’s criticisms) . . . and by the Neo-classical movement, [and] fell from favor in the twentieth century’. See Most 2011 for other important aspects of Vitruvius’ canonization. ²⁵ Hodie nationes omnes classicorum studiosae suum habent Vitruvium (Poleni and Stratico 1825: iii).

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latter. Overshadowed by his abstraction, Cicero becomes CICERO.²⁶ An analogous reductive process evidently took place in the reception of Vitruvius, but with paradoxical results: the name ‘Vitruvius’—but not De architectura—became a conduit to an elite, canonical classicism that both the historical Vitruvius and De architectura as a text are now partly denied. When and by what means, then, did Vitruvius become VITRUVIUS? The traditional view has been that Vitruvius’ influence in antiquity, both architectural and textual, was negligible.²⁷ He is seldom mentioned by other ancient writers, and relatively few extant structures seem to reflect his prescriptions in any sustained way. Vitruvius himself claims responsibility for only one building, and only obliquely.²⁸ Moreover, we know little about his life and career, apart from a few tantalizing snippets in De architectura itself: Vitruvius notes that he served his dedicatee Augustus by outfitting the artillery and being responsible for its upkeep; for this experience he received commoda—that is, some kind of return.²⁹ As we will see, this association with ‘work’ and, perhaps, payment for it has had an outsized influence on classicists’ judgement of Vitruvius’ literary capabilities. Notices from Frontinus (who calls him Vitruvius architectus, with reference to his definitions for pipe sizing) and from the Elder Pliny are the last mentions for a century or two.³⁰ But the notion that Vitruvius’ name languished in obscurity until the ‘rediscovery’ of De architectura in the Renaissance is misleading. In the third or fourth century, Cetius Faventinus attests to the influence of Vitruvius, at least as an idea, by abridging his work. The epitome, often transmitted with De architectura ²⁶ Kaster 1998: 248–9. The process also sheds some light on the nature of canonization; canons, like the kitschified CICERO, are inherently reductive. Kaster suggests that Cicero had become CICERO as early as during the first two decades of Augustus’ reign. See Sen. Contr. 7.2 and Suas. 6 and 7; also Roller 1997. ²⁷ E.g. Koch 1951; cf. Plommer 1973: 33. For a summary of arguments for and against, see Baldwin 1990: 428–9 n. 3. ²⁸ He ‘arranged and oversaw the construction of ’ a basilica at the veteran’s colony of Julia Fanestris (earlier Fanum Fortunae; modern Fano) on the Adriatic coast, midway between Rimini and Ancona; Vitr. 5.1.6. See Rowland 2010. ²⁹ Possibly monetary, but commodum is multifarious in meaning; see Morgan 1909a for a still helpful discussion. ³⁰ Front. Aquaed. 25; Pliny includes Vitruvius among his sources for HN, books 16 (on trees), 35 (on painting), and 36 (stones and sculpture). Granger (1934, 1: xiv n. 5) further suggests Vitruvius’ influence on Pliny (HN 31.8).

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itself, begins with a nod to Vitruvius and other unspecified writers on architecture.³¹ Servius on Virgil, Aeneid 6.43 refers to Vitruvius qui de architectonica scripsit.³² In a striking anticipation of the virtual apotheosis of Vitruvius in later centuries, the fifth-century Gaul Sidonius Apollinaris imagines him as the architectural analogue to Orpheus and Aesculapius.³³ His text circulated at the court of Charlemagne, and both Petrarch (1304–74) and Boccaccio (1313–75) read it with interest.³⁴ Remarkably, a Vitruvian manuscript in the Bodleian (Bodl. Auct. F.5.7) bearing Petrarch’s annotations vindicates Vitruvius’ style on the very passage thought by later scholars to indicate Vitruvius’ real ineptitude.³⁵ Where Vitruvius begs indulgence should his explanations fail to meet the strict rule of the grammatici (Vitr. 1.1.18), Petrarch notes in the margin: ‘an apology for style, but one that I find unnecessary’ (stili excusatio, que tamen michi videtur non necessaria).³⁶ The urgency with which these readers responded to Vitruvius should give us pause. Not only did interest in Vitruvius as an embodiment of architecture obtain early, but Petrarch had particularly affirmed Vitruvius’ authority as a stylist (i.e. not simply as architectus or faber). Vitruvius, it seems, could stand alongside Cicero in the movement towards studia humanitatis.

³¹ Commonly known as Liber artis architectonicae, transmitted with De architectura itself. For the text, Plommer 1973. The notion that Pollio was Vitruvius’ cognomen may well derive from Faventinus; see e.g. Granger 1934, 2: xvii–xviii and Baldwin 1990: 430. ³² Epithetic phrases such as Servius’ ‘Vitruvius, who wrote on [the] architectonic [art]’ (Vitruvius qui de architectonica scripsit) and ‘Vitruvius the architect’ (Vitruvium architectum, Front. Aquaed. 25) are not required, say, in order to avoid confusion with other Vitruvii but rather in order to demonstrate the architect’s canonical association with architectura. Compare Augustine (CD 14.8.61), invoking ‘Cicero the orator’ (Cicero orator) in association with ‘I desire, conscript fathers, that I be lenient’ (see Cic. Cat. 1.4.15–16, cupio, patres conscripti, me esse clementem). ³³ Sidonius Apollinaris (b. Lyon c.431) praises De statu animae, dedicated to Sidonius by Claudianus Mamertus, for its breadth. See Sid. Ep. 4.3.5; and cf. Ep. 8.6.10 to Namatius, whom he imagines reading Vitruvius or Columella (or both), depending on what aspects of household management occupy him at the time: sive Columella, seu alterutrum ambosve sectere, decentissime facis (‘you do quite well whether you follow Columella or the other one or both’). ³⁴ Einhard (d. 840) refers to a list of Vitruvian nomina obscura (including the Grecism scaenographia) in a letter to Vussin (= Epistola 30), suggesting that the Vitruvian term is clarified through comparison with Virgil, Georgics 3.23–5. Boccaccio possessed a Vitruvius manuscript, which he cites extensively in his De geneaologia deorum gentilium. Verbaal 2016 traces patterns in the reception of Vitruvius in the medieval period and supplies further recent bibliography. ³⁵ Kruft 1994: 39; Ciapponi 1960. ³⁶ Ciapponi 1960: 69.

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3. Alberti’s ‘Erasure’: Vitruvius anceps Vitruvius’ fortunes would soon be altered dramatically with Poggio Bracciolini’s ‘rediscovery’ of De architectura in the early fifteenth century at St Gallen, though the point has been made that this was not so much the unearthing of the text of Vitruvius as a critical mass of interested humanists.³⁷ Among Vitruvius’ new readers was Leon Battista Alberti, rightly viewed as a pivotal character in the reception of De architectura and in the application of its ideas to architecture. Alberti himself was a practising architect whose buildings and writings alike influenced followers such as Palladio, Inigo Jones, and the neo-Palladians. Through Alberti especially Vitruvius—or rather VITRUVIUS—came to life in modern Europe and its colonies. Yet Alberti’s impact on the reception of Vitruvius as an author and stylist seems also to have been dramatic, albeit in a negative way. His own ten-book architectural work, De re aedificatoria (published in 1486), infamously critiques Vitruvius’ Latin in a diatribe that has had a long life as a captatio benevolentiae in scholarly studies of De architectura.³⁸ Ostensibly inuring readers to the difficulties of Vitruvius’ esoteric text and scholarship, the resuscitation of Alberti’s ad hominem critique (see sic enim loquebatur ‘in fact, he spoke in such a way’) has propagated a suspicion that there is something fundamentally unclassical about Vitruvius and his text, and it ultimately does little to inure us to any difficulties that await. For in fact I grieved that so many and such eminently brilliant monuments of writers had perished through the unjust damage of time and man that we hardly even possessed our one survivor from that great shipwreck, Vitruvius, a writer who was undoubtedly well trained [Rykwert et al. translate ‘experienced’], but who has been so broken and mangled by the storm that in many places there is much missing, and you would wish there was more in most places. The result, in any case, was not refined. In fact, he spoke in such a way that the Latins may imagine he wanted to seem Greek, the Greeks that he spoke Latin, whereas the thing itself makes clear that he was neither Greek nor Latin—to the point that it

³⁷ Noted by Kruft 1994: 39 among others. See also Grafton 2000: 269–76 for Vitruvius’ reception in the early fifteenth century. ³⁸ E.g. Wilson Jones 2000: 35; cf. Pellecchia 1992: 379, for whom it provides a starting point in a further inquiry into architectural interpretations of Vitruvius in the Renaissance. Other examples include Rowland, Howe, and Dewar 1999: xiii, Milnor 2005: 94, and Rowland 2011: 285. For the date of Alberti’s treatise, see Rykwert et al. 1988: xviii.

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is practically the same for us as if he, who wrote in a way that we cannot understand, had not written at all.³⁹

To be sure, the text that confronted Alberti was not pretty. Ingrid Rowland, an authority on Vitruvius’ Renaissance reception, has noted the near illegibility of the texts from which Alberti worked.⁴⁰ Yet the ‘rhetorical exaggeration’ (so Rowland 2005: 29) of Alberti remains remarkable. It is one thing to suggest that the text of De architectura is lacunose and quite another to suggest that Vitruvius spoke neither Greek nor Latin. Alberti’s stance reflects his adoption of two ancient literary doctrines. First is the view that good (Latin) style was a mirror of the self (commonly expressed in the formula talis oratio, qualis vita). Second is the doctrine of literary aemulatio, according to which one sought to surpass one’s models and predecessors.⁴¹ Indeed Alberti’s De re aedificatoria was not simply ‘modeled on’ De architectura, rather it sought in large measure to replace it.⁴² Hence Alberti’s insistence, later down the page, that he—unlike the ancient model he sought to replace—wrote ‘so that you know it is Latin— and can actually understand it’.⁴³ Alberti’s fantasy of Vitruvius’ erasure—‘it is practically the same for us as if he, who wrote in a way that we cannot understand, had not written at all’ (De re aedificatoria 6.1)—therefore plays a more reckless version of a game in which we have all indulged: would you trade, say, Cornelius Nepos for Cornelius Gallus? For Alberti, the stakes of that game were perhaps more pressing, if no less self-serving.⁴⁴ ³⁹ Namque dolebam quidem tam multa, tamque praeclarissima scriptorum monimenta interisse temporum, hominumque iniuria, ut vix unum ex tanto naufragio Vitruvium superstitem haberemus, scriptorem procul dubio instructissimum, sed ita affectum tempestate atque lacerum, ut multis locis multa desint, et multis plurima desideres. Accedebat quod ista tradidisset non culta. Sic enim loquebatur ut Latini Graecum videri voluisse, Graeci locutum Latine vaticinentur, res autem ipsa in sese porrigenda, neque Latinum neque Graecum fuisse testetur, ut par sit, non scripsisse hunc nobis qui ita scripserit ut non intelligamus (Alberti, De re aedificatoria 6.1). ⁴⁰ ‘Miscopied Greek words, like little pockets of infection, begin to corrupt the words around them; Roman numerals that no longer hold any interest for the builders of Christian churches drop a digit or two, and the result bears Alberti out’ (Rowland 2005: 29). ⁴¹ Grafton 2000: 286 ff. Alberti seems to have extended these doctrines to building as well. For his literary aemulatio of Vitruvius, see Wulfram 2001, especially 344–62. ⁴² Grafton 2000: 274. ⁴³ See Alberti, De re aedificatoria 6.1 (Et ni fallor, quae scripsimus ita scripsimus ut esse Latina non neges et satis intelligantur), with Grafton 2000: 283 and n. 64. ⁴⁴ The publisher’s preface to the 1874 edition of Joseph Gwilt’s translation of De architectura does not name Alberti, but refers indignantly to an ‘eccentric being’ who opined ‘that it might have been better for the art had the work been buried in oblivion’

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As it happens, Alberti’s conflation of Vitruvius ‘the man’ with Vitruvius ‘the text’ appropriates De architectura’s programmatic metaphor of the corpus. Body–text metaphors are now conventional (e.g. ‘the Shakespearean corpus’), but Vitruvius was among the first extant Latin writers to use it with reference to a synoptic text explicitly intended to replace (or augment) his own physical body.⁴⁵ For Alberti, the ravages of time have left Vitruvius ‘mangled’ (lacerum), a Latin adjective that, along with its verbal counterpart, lacero, is strongly associated with the state of physical human bodies.⁴⁶ The radical outcome of Alberti’s indifference to Vitruvius’ textual obliteration is an indifference to Vitruvius’ ‘death’ as the price of Alberti’s own success. The fundamental failure of Vitruvius’ corpus is ironic perhaps, but it also thematizes Alberti’s evident longing for a complete and unfragmented view of antiquity.⁴⁷ A lacuna in a maelstrom, Vitruvius is ‘so weakened and torn by tempest that he is lacking in many places, and you would desire much more in others’ (ita affectum tempestate atque lacerum, ut multis locis multa desint, et multis plurima desideres). Insofar as antiquity itself is a ‘great shipwreck’ (tanto naufragio) from which ‘we hardly even possessed Vitruvius . . . our one survivor’ (ut vix unum . . . Vitruvium superstitem haberemus), the ‘fragmentary’ Vitruvius represents its fundamental incompleteness. As it happens, ships and shipwrecks of antiquity seem to have held intense interest for Alberti. He had written a small book on shipbuilding, Navis (known to Leonardo but now lost), and oversaw a failed attempt to raise the ships from Lake Nemi in 1447. Fragments were recovered, but the vessel began to break apart when moved.⁴⁸ One is tempted to

(Gwilt 1874: vii). Gwilt’s translation, which first appeared in 1826, was only the second of Vitruvius in English. The first, by William Newton, appeared in 1774. ⁴⁵ In general, see McEwen 2003, but with Taylor 2005. For the relevance of counterparts in Greek universal history, see Oksanish 2016 and p. 94 here for Vitruvius’ bodily substitution. ⁴⁶ Cf. Ennius, fr. 73 Vahlen and Lucr. 3.402. ⁴⁷ See Alberti on the same page: Quibus ex rebus futurum negabat nemo quin brevi haec pars, ut ita loquar, vitae et cogitationibus penitus esset interitura (‘Nobody would deny that as a result of [our inattention to the ancients] a whole section of our life and learning could disappear altogether’, trans. Rykwert et al.). ⁴⁸ Alberti attributed the durability of the ships in part to their materials: Ex navi Traiani, per hos dies, dum, quae scripsimus, commentaret, ex lacu Nemorensi eruta, quo loci annos plus mille ccc demersa, et destitute iacuerat, adverti pinum, materiam, et cupressum egregie durasse (‘Recently, during the preparation of this book, fragments of one of Trajan’s ships were raised from the bottom of Lake Nemi, where they had lain submerged for more than 1,300 years: I noticed that the pine and cypress had lasted extremely well’, Alberti, De re

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draw a connection between the Lake Nemi experience and Alberti’s representation of Vitruvius, though the theme of naufragia was also ancient. Yet, where the even-keeled Lucretius found suavitas while observing the sufferings of those struggling at sea, Alberti blames the victim of an unforgiving textual transmission.⁴⁹ Desire for what was lost becomes anger, made manifest in a fantasy of Vitruvius’ erasure. Moreover, as with Alberti’s navis Traiani (which turned out to be Caligula’s), what Alberti imagined as lost in Vitruvius may never really have been there in the first place. Alberti came to De architectura as a humanist, but also as an architect who hoped to restore classical aesthetics in his own day. Any expectation that the treatise could provide the means to reproduce a definitively ‘classical’ architecture was an anachronistic imposition that contravened the very handbook genre in which Vitruvius was writing.⁵⁰

4. Educating the Halfwit Despite Vitruvius’ swelling reputation as antiquity’s authoritative architect, his prose continued to suffer criticism, and it is striking how often these later stylistic critiques seem to bear the Albertian stamp.⁵¹ Guillaume Budé (1467–1540), for example, described De architectura as in need of a ‘Delian swimmer’; in other words, only a seasoned diver could plumb its depths.⁵² Albeit conceding that there was undoubtedly aedificatoria 5.12 (trans. Rykwert et al.); see also Rykwert et al. 1988: 384 n. 43 and Grafton 2000: 225–7, 248–52). The ships remained submerged until Mussolini drained the lake in the early twentieth century. ⁴⁹ Lucr. 2.1.1–4 Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis | e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem; | non quia vexari quemquamst iucunda voluptas, | sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suavest (‘It is pleasant to watch from land the great struggle of the other man on the great sea when the winds are whipping up the waves—not because anyone’s troubles delight and amuse, but because it is pleasant to recognize what troubles you are without’). ⁵⁰ On the anachronism, see the introduction to the text in Rowland, Howe, and Dewar 1999; also Pellecchia 1992. Vitruvius frequently reminds us that real-world contingencies will often disrupt these ideal principles. Other Renaissance readers recognized this flexibility in Vitruvius’ text; Daniele Barbaro, a sixteenth-century translator and commentator of Vitruvius, even condemned the ‘arrogance’ of those who (like Alberti, perhaps) had mistaken the broad guidelines of De architectura for ferma regola. ⁵¹ See also Callebat 1982: 697–8. ⁵² In deciphering De architectura, Budé had sought the help of Fra Giovanni Giocondo, whose 1511 printing greatly improved Vitruvius’ text. For Giocondo’s edition, see Rowland 2011 and Ciapponi 1984.

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talent in the murky depths, Budé likened the relationship between Vitruvius’ talent and subject to ‘a swimmer overwhelmed and sinking on a stormy sea’—perhaps evoking Alberti’s metaphor (see p. 84 here) of Vitruvius as vix unus e tanto naufragio superstes.⁵³ The German philologist Kaspar Von Barth (1587–1658) also found Vitruvius useful (utilem) but agreed with Budé’s assessment that he was a difficult writer.⁵⁴ In particular, Barth acknowledged the unjust invidia reserved for Vitruvius, Manilius and a few others, but not for near-contemporaries Velleius Paterculus and Valerius Maximus.⁵⁵ Even so, Vitruvius displayed too much Greek learning for Barth, who had detected in De architectura ‘a whiff of the workman’s hand, not the talent of a writer’ (Barth, Adversariorum commentariorum, 1.10). Olere and sapere had long been standard terms for stylistic appraisal in Latin, but Barth’s use of olens (with manum opificis as object) is remarkable in light of both De architectura’s subject matter and ancient elite prejudices against ‘banausic’ work.⁵⁶ Barth’s philological commitments clarify this puzzling picture of Vitruvius the Hellenophile handyman: he would prefer to have Vitruvius in a different century, ‘if firm evidence [certa fides] would not prevent it’. ⁵³ Guillaume Budé, Adnotationes in Pandectas 167B (in Opera omnia, 3.167; see Budé 1557 and 1966). The reference is to an anecdote, preserved at DL 2.11, in which Euripides asks Socrates what he thinks of Heraclitus. Socrates is reported there to have replied: ‘The part I understand is excellent, and so too is, I dare say, the part I do not understand; but it needs a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it’ (trans. Hicks). Whether Budé had Alberti’s passage in mind is impossible to say, though, if Juřen 1974: 105 is correct that the glossator of De architectura in codex Rés. V.318 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France was Budé himself, then it is all but certain that he had read Alberti. See also Mattei and Salatin 2015. ⁵⁴ Barth, Adversariorum commentariorum, 1.10: difficilem scriptorem; cf. Budé, Adn. in Pand. 167B (alioquin etiam intellectu perdifficilis). ⁵⁵ Barth, Adversariorum commentariorum, 1.10: Et est alioqui stili genus in hoc auctore quod alii aevo cuilibet potius des si certa fides absit; coactim nimirum eruditionem Graecam sapiens et manum opificis non ingenium scriptoris olens. Eodem pene aevo Velleius Paterculus et Valerius Maximus etiam minime ex seculi genio locuti sunt; qui invidiam Vitruvio leviorem facere possint, ut Manilium et unum alterumque alios taceam (‘There is, moreover, a kind of style in this author that you would rather put in any other period if certainty [about his first-century date] were lacking: briefly, he smacks of Greek learning and has a whiff of the workman’s hand, not the talent of a writer. In approximately the same period, Velleius Paterculus and Valerius Maximus also expressed themselves in a way quite out of step with the generation’s taste; these might be able to lessen the ill-will felt towards Vitruvius, not to mention Manilius and one or two others’). Barth was familiar with the works of Guillaume Philandrier (1505–63), Daniele Barbaro (1514–70), and Bernardino Baldi (1553–1617)—all of whom had published editions, translations, or commentaries of De architectura and who will probably have relied in some measure on Alberti. My thanks to Robert Ulery for rendering certain nuances of Barth’s Latin into English. ⁵⁶ He is, in a sense, an ‘unwash’d artificer’ (Shakespeare, King John IV.2).

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Insofar as their testimonials question Vitruvius’ style and intellect while conceding him a probable skill as an architect, Barth and Budé amplify the patterns of Vitruvian reception exemplified by Alberti. Yet Barth takes us one step further towards later suspicions that Vitruvius was not a classical author by imagining (albeit ultimately rejecting) his exile from the age of Cicero and Augustus on the basis of Latinity. He was hardly the last one to do this. The German council of state C. F. L. Schultz wrote to Goethe on 6 May 1829 and suggested making Vitruvius a successor to Pliny the Elder rather than the reverse. Goethe admits that he could never really get into Vitruvius, and he seems comparatively uninterested in Schultz’s theories. Yet Schultz’s conclusion that the author of De architectura was the archbishop Gerbert (who became Pope Sylvester II in 999) demonstrates the extremes to which remarkably many scholars have gone in their effort to keep Vitruvius out of the ‘golden’ era of Rome’s late republican and early Augustan period.⁵⁷ In the later nineteenth century, the Danish scholar J. L. Ussing, an admirer of Schultz’s theories, concocted a less temporally extreme but still radical attempt to displace the first-century Vitruvius from the Augustan era.⁵⁸ Ussing calls Vitruvius an ‘ignorant humbug’ and his language ‘barbarous’, but admits that he is not sure when to place Vitruvius.⁵⁹ Settling on the outer limits of the traditional classical world (third or fourth century AD), Ussing throws Barth’s cautionary certa fides to the wind. There will be no gaudy colours, so to speak, sullying Ussing’s dream of classical purity.⁶⁰ ⁵⁷ Schultz 1836. ⁵⁸ Ussing 1898: 2 characterizes Schultz’s results as follows: ‘[Schultz] for one thing proves clearly that Frontinus has drawn no information from Vitruvius, the latter being full of nonsense and mistakes—in fact an ignorant humbug, while the former is a competent professional authority. ⁵⁹ ‘The time of Augustus was the golden age of Roman literature. The public was highly educated, and the authors had the gift of giving a peculiar stamp of beauty to their writings. In literature as in art we constantly feel ourselves standing at one of the culminating points of ancient civilization. Now, when we take into our hands the ten books De architectura by Vitruvius, and learn that they pretend to be written at that period, we feel struck and cannot refrain from doubting whether this is really so’ (ibid., 4). ⁶⁰ Compare Morgan 1906: 469, in an extended response to Ussing: ‘Why should we think that there were no such men living and writing in the classical period of Latin literature?’ De architectura could be marginalized from the classical in other ways as well. In 1888 Philipp Eberhard had concluded that, although Vitruvius was among the best writers of oratio soluta (generally prose, but also the so-called ‘epistolary style’; see Lausberg 1998: §§916–20), his Latin was marred by ‘the stuff of corrupt Latinity’ (depravatae latinitatis), Eberhard 1888: 3. There were (now discredited) suggestions of Vitruvius’

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Within a decade of Ussing, the Scottish classicist John William Mackail’s Latin Literature appeared, and with it a vehement criticism of Vitruvius’ style. Mackail’s often arbitrary views earned recrimination from J. P. Sullivan in Arion upon the republication of Latin Literature in 1962, yet their arbitrariness exemplify the place of scholarly passions in Vitruvian reception.⁶¹ After a perfunctory nod to Vitruvius’ putative ability as an architect, Mackail inverts two of De architectura’s most salient claims, namely that Vitruvius wrote reasonably comprehensible prose despite a necessarily technical vocabulary (1.1.18, 5, Praef. 1–2, etc.; see p. 77 in this chapter) and that the Vitruvian architectus possesses a broad education in various areas, including literature (1.1.1, architecti est scientia pluribus disciplinis et variis eruditionibus ornata). Deriding Vitruvius’ ‘literary merit’ and the architect’s skill in diverse disciplines, Mackail suggests that, when Vitruvius ‘ventures beyond his strict province, his writing is that of a half-educated man who has lost simplicity without acquiring skill’.⁶² The Vitruvian notion that an architect is ‘competent with a pen’ ([architectus] sit peritus graphidos, Vitr. 1.1.1) is repurposed to show that Vitruvius is ‘a man of little general knowledge and far from handy with his pen’. Finally, whereas in the preface to book 5 (2–3) Vitruvius claimed to have mitigated the obscurity (obscuritas) of architecture’s technicalities through brevity (brevitas),

Africitas, which sought to place Vitruvius’ origins on the geographical and cultural fringes, in northern Africa, where later epigraphical evidence for Vitruvii Polliones had been found, perhaps descendants of the Formian gens. Granger (1934: 1.xv) hints at Vitruvian influence in the architecture of Rome’s African colonies. CIL 8.18913 led Thielscher to the suggestion (now generally rejected) that Vitruvius the architect was the same person as Mamurra (of Catull. 29, for example). For a list of inscriptions, see Thielscher 1961: 420–5 and, more recently with argument against identifying the author of De architectura with any of the African Vitruvii, Zucca 2009. Ruffel and Soubiran 1962 offer discussion of the Mamurra– Vitruvius question. See Palmer 1983 and, most clearly, Baldwin 1990: 428–9 n. 30 and Nichols 2009b. ⁶¹ Sullivan 1963. For a generalized account of Mackail as a literary critic, see Pinkney 2002. ⁶² ‘[Vitruvius’] ten books De Architectura . . . are the single important work on classical architecture which has come down from the ancient world . . . [b]ut their reputation is not due to any literary merit. Vitruvius, however able as an architect, was a man of little general knowledge, and far from handy with his pen. His style varies between immoderate diffuseness and obscure brevity; sometimes he is barely intelligible, and he never writes with grace. Where in his introductory chapters or elsewhere he ventures beyond his strict province, his writing is that of a half-educated man who has lost simplicity without acquiring skill’ (Mackail 1895: 166–7). See rebuttals from Morgan 1909a, 1909b and from Sontheimer 1908: 61.

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Mackail condemns Vitruvius’ style as ‘vary[ing] between immoderate diffuseness and obscure brevity’, thus undercutting the latter’s definitive claim to have organized the ‘wandering tidbits’ (particulae errabundae) of architecture into a well-ordered corpus (4, Praef. 1). Mackail’s stylistic evaluation is rhetorically loaded and its capricious criteria and verdicts are easily problematized: Jan Felix Gaertner’s recent study of the Bellum Hispaniense—with which German scholars of the nineteenth century compared De architectura—demonstrates how an implicit commitment to Ciceronianism risks mischaracterizing other prose styles as ‘colloquial’, unliterary, and so on.⁶³ The real problem for Mackail, however, seems to be that Vitruvius does not know his place. By ‘ventur[ing] beyond his strict province’ and by requiring a wide-ranging curriculum for his architectus, Vitruvius, the ‘half-educated man who has lost simplicity without acquiring skill’, evidently presented Mackail with a problem of classics and class. The recurrent tendency to pit the Vitruvian text against itself calls to mind Porter’s suggestion that, as a field of literary study, classics tends to legitimate its own pursuits by repressing the banausic. Vitruvius’ ‘perceived proximity to handiwork rather than to high scholarship’ allows Mackail (and others) to deny his work any ‘literary merit’ and confirms Vitruvius’ place on literary and social margins, his substantial architectural influence notwithstanding.⁶⁴ Indeed Mackail’s contemporary Eugen Oder would more closely associate Vitruvius’ social standing and his literary ambition, in a study of Democritean fragments. In terms that improbably duplicate Mackail’s treatment, Oder likewise demonstrates the power of patterns in Vitruvian reception: Vitruvius is a kind of half-educated proletarian, whose head is filled with disparate elements that form a colorful muddle. He seeks every opportunity to boast of his ‘general education’ and to don the cloak of a shabby erudition. His only problem is that he walks with a club foot. The part of the work under discussion further supplies evidence of this contrast between his desire and ability, as we shall see later . . . He was clearly aware of only one deficit: his lack of grammatical and stylistic training which he asks Augustus and his readers to

⁶³ Gaertner 2010: 254, though the discussion is generally limited to the late republic. Nylander 1992: 42 suggests that Vitruvian clausulae demonstrate a strong preference throughout the work for rhythms ‘actively sought by Cicero’, whom Vitruvius mentions as one of his models; see Vitr. 9, Praef. 17. ⁶⁴ Porter 2003: 64.

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excuse at the beginning of his work [Vitr. 1.1.18]. It would be better with regard to understanding his sources, if he had revealed his relationship to them with the same honesty.⁶⁵

Making concerns of class explicit, Oder combines an Albertian frustration with De architectura’s basic insufficiency with Mackail’s literary dissatisfaction. He upbraids Vitruvius the ‘half-educated proletarian’ as an intellectual poseur, again appropriating what is evidently a topical captatio benevolentiae as evidence that the author was in fact intellectually dishonest (except on the point of acknowledging his own failure), unintelligent, and incapable as a writer. Mackail’s and Oder’s shared emphasis on the architect’s wide-ranging education as a particularly ironic point of failure points up another distinctive strain in Vitruvian criticism, namely the tendency to read Vitruvius’ description of the ideal architectus (and in particular his wellrounded education) as autobiography. The ideal architect’s training, as we have seen, is a central aspect of Vitruvius’ program, while its aim, to guarantee against architectural swindlers, heightens the irony of Oder’s view that Vitruvius was himself a fraud (‘I do not think it is right if architects just come out and claim that title unless they have reached the highest temple of architecture by climbing up the steps of these disciplines from childhood, reared on the knowledge of most literature and arts’, Vitr. 1.1.11).⁶⁶ And yet the habit of reading as autobiography Vitruvius’ prescriptive passages on the ideal architect’s education is not limited to those with an axe to grind. Since the mid-twentieth century critics have tended read this Vitruvian ‘curriculum statement’ as evidence of Vitruvius’ ambition to elevate the intellectual status of ⁶⁵ Vitruv ist der Typus eines halbgebildeten Proletariers, in dessen Kopfe die heterogensten Bildungselemente bunt durcheinanderwirbeln. Er zieht jede Gelegenheit herbei, um mit seiner ‘allgemeinen Bildung’ zu prahlen und sich das Mäntelchen einer fadenscheinigen Gelehrsamkeit umzuhängen. Nur schade, dass der Pferdefuss überall hervorguckt. . . . Nur einer Blösse war er sich klar bewusst: seines Mangels an grammatisch-stilistischer Schulung, weswegen er am Amfang seines Werkes den Augustus und seine Leser um Entschuldigung bittet. Es stände besser um die Erkenntnis seiner Quellen, wenn er sein Verhältnis zu diesen mit der gleichen Ehrlichkeit aufgedeckt hätte (Oder 1899: 340). Cf. Oder 1899: 365, where he condemns Vitruvius for his ‘thoughtlessness and ignorance’ when dealing with his sources—itself a point of pride for Vitruvius, as Volk 2010 and Fögen 2009 have recently remarked. ⁶⁶ Non puto posse iuste repente profiteri architectos, nisi qui ab aetate puerili his gradibus disciplinarum scandendo scientia plerarumque litterarum et artium nutriti pervenerint ad summum templum architecturae.

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architecture, the social status of the architect, or the status of Vitruvius himself, by appealing to some version of the liberal arts model.⁶⁷ In 1963, for example, Frank Brown suggested that Vitruvius aimed in large part ‘to demonstrate that Architecture was on the same footing as the other Liberal Arts, to show that Architecture had its own consistent principles and laws and that these rested on the same, common, scientific ground that all shared’.⁶⁸ Whereas Mackail and Oder balked at the idea of a ‘half-educated’ prole pursuing a well-rounded education, Brown seems to suggest that Vitruvius made a compelling connection between architecture, oratory, and the ‘liberal’ arts—even though the last two were realms dominated by literary and social elites. What seems at first like an enlightened step away from anti-Vitruvian prejudices, however, merely duplicates them in a different form. Albeit liberating classicists from the view that Vitruvius wrote ‘a builder’s handbook’, ‘a survey of architecture’, or ‘a treatise on aesthetics’, Brown yields both to the traditional inevitability of mining Vitruvius as if he were an archaeological site and to the attendant prospects of a Vitruvian failure: ‘one must go to him with his discoveries and his hypotheses, hoping for explanation, or for confirmation or refutation’, just as one must approach De architectura ‘prepared for disappointment, aware of what he wishes to tell us and what he does not’.⁶⁹ In the end, Brown’s Vitruvius remains a site of excavation—now of social, cultural, and intellectual history—not for deeper reading.

5. Mediocritas aurea et obscura Since Brown admirably hoped that we might read De architectura according to its own limits, let us do so by examining another passage in Vitruvius’ text, the ‘autobiographical’ anecdote at the end of the preface to the second book of the treatise (2, Praef. 4): To me, commander, nature has not given great stature, age has marred my appearance, and my state of health has removed my strength. And so, since I am bereft

⁶⁷ E.g. Brown 1963, Masterson 2004. ⁶⁸ Brown 1963: 103. Also, ‘Vitruvius’ business was not only to reduce these visual and verbal data [i.e. of architecture] to systematic and intelligible order’ (ibid.). ⁶⁹ Brown 1963: 102 (emphasis added).

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of such supports, I shall earn praise, or so I hope, with the help of my knowledge and through my writings.⁷⁰

This passage caps a narrative anecdote that adumbrates Vitruvius’ architectural (and, to some extent, civic) ethics. Although the message is partly that knowledge and experience are worthy of praise, the total effect of the passage and of its self-portrait is more complicated.⁷¹ Ancient rhetorical theory held that bodily appearances mattered not only as suggestions of intellectual worth, but as natural evidence of character.⁷² Also important is that, by claiming to rely on his writings (scripta) rather than on his physique, Vitruvius shrewdly overlays his deteriorating physical body (corpus) with his well-ordered textual corpus, De architectura.⁷³ Yet, in order to glimpse this clever device, we must distinguish carefully between Vitruvius scriptor on the one hand and Vitruvius scriptus on the other. In a 2004 volume of the American Journal of Philology appeared the first article entirely devoted to Vitruvius in more than a century since that journal’s founding. The piece therefore marks an important moment in the way in which classicists have begun to accommodate texts that have not always been taken as serious objects of study. Already its title, ‘Status, Pleasure, and Pay in the De architectura of Vitruvius’, suggests a commitment to historical and cultural questions as much as to literary or ‘philological’ ones, as the author, Mark Masterson, confirms in a footnote: ‘The scholar can approach the De architectura in at least two ways. [It] can be seen as evidence for actual Roman architectural practice, or it can be placed in the context of the late first-century BC political, intellectual, and social milieus.’⁷⁴ In fact there is much in

⁷⁰ Mihi autem, imperator, staturam non tribuit natura, faciem deformavit aetas, valetudo detraxit vires. itaque quoniam ab his praesidiis sum desertus, per auxilia scientiae scriptaque, ut spero, perveniam ad commendationem. ⁷¹ For a range of views, see König 2009, Nichols 2009b: 86–7, Novara 2005: 126–8, Callebat and Gros 1999 (on 2, Praef. 1), and Romano 1987. Any reading of the self-portrait must take into account the whole preface (2, Praef.), in which we encounter the flawed architectural plans of the good-looking Dinocrates, who was Alexander’s architect and who serves as Vitruvius’ comparandum. ⁷² E.g. Cic. Inv. 1.34; for Vitruvius’ reliance on Cicero, see Vitr. 9, Praef. 17. ⁷³ For the notion that Vitruvius overlays his physical body with his textual corpus, see Oksanish 2011 and forthcoming. For a crucial Ciceronian precedent for this bodily substitution, see Dugan 2005. ⁷⁴ Masterson 2004: 390 n. 6.

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Masterson’s treatment that suggests sensitivity to De architectura as literature. However, accepting the increasingly common view that Vitruvius counted among the apparitores—a group of professionals of relatively ‘lower status’ who ‘took a wage’—and using that alleged status as a cue to investigate how social reality ‘inflects the contents of De architectura’ and how Vitruvius ‘negotiate[s] . . . problems of pay and status through the education he requires of the architect’ demonstrates serious methodological problems.⁷⁵ In the first place, the ‘marginality’ of the apparitores, a heterogeneous group that undertook administrative duties for magistrates, is both relative and ambiguous. Many of the posts were extremely lucrative, some of them sinecures, and the positions frequently led to further rewards, such as equestrian status or the praefectura fabrum. That the offices themselves could be purchased by equestrians, as Horace seems to have done, underlines just how much the ordo cut through other different ranks.⁷⁶ The second problem, arguably more urgent, is that the identification of Vitruvius with the apparitores (‘marginal’ or not) relies almost entirely on Vitruvius’ own rhetorical self-portraits, which renders any study that attributes Vitruvius’ language to his status liable to circularity.⁷⁷ Addressing Augustus in the preface to De architectura 6, for instance, Vitruvius claims to have favoured ‘poverty with a good reputation rather than riches with disgrace’, a ‘seemingly factual statement’ cited by Masterson as evidence for Vitruvius’ social rank.⁷⁸ Yet any claim to tenuitas is as

⁷⁵ For the quotations, see Masterson 2004: 389 n. 5; 392; 412–13. See also ibid. 393: ‘the architect consolidates his claim to being an estimable personage’ by possessing ‘the education whose authorizing power both makes him impressive intellectually and assimilates him to his social betters’. ⁷⁶ Purcell 1983: 129 and 137. On Horace’s purchase of the apparitorial office of scriba quaestorius after Philippi and its possible relation to his equestrian status, see Armstrong 1986: 256; cf. Nichols 2009b and Gowers 2009. Purcell 1983: 143 suggests that Horace may have used his scribal status to reach the equestrian order, but other scholars concur that Horace had purchased the office of scriba as an eques already. ⁷⁷ The initial suggestion is that of Purcell 1983: 156, who notes that Vitruvius, like many apparitores, was ‘a man from an Italian town’ who won a distinguished appointment through patronage’ and that ‘[t]he cultural overtones of the scribal profession suit Vitruvius’ literary manner well’. ⁷⁸ Masterson 2004: 396. That Masterson uses such testimony to demonstrate that Vitruvius’ apparitorial status influenced his attitudes towards pay is also problematic.

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likely to address an author’s character or literary style, as it is to provide a tangible index of his poverty.⁷⁹ Thus, whereas Mackail’s and Oder’s Vitruvius was a half-educated workman, Masterson demonstrates how a presumptively marginal Vitruvius used his education to climb the social ladder. Betraying the other side of Mackail’s prejudice, Masterson requires that Vitruvius was a man of appreciably ‘lower status’ for De architectura to provide the evidence that Vitruvius used his education as a means to ‘elevate’ himself; thus he problematically elides ‘Vitruvius’ (qua author? narrated self? ‘real’ human being?) into his ideal architectus.⁸⁰ Undoubtedly Vitruvius encourages just such a collapse, but to accept it is to abandon essential distinctions between Vitruvius’ two bodies, between a truly unknown historical fact on the one hand and a calculated literary fiction on the other. Thus the problem of interpreting Vitruvius in particular indicates the danger of leaving any text presumed to be unliterary at the margins of literary study.

6. The Hand of Cicero? At 1.1.11 Vitruvius invokes the inperiti—those familiar straw men of philosophical and rhetorical literature—to challenge the reader to consider whether it seems possible that the architectus could achieve the wide-ranging learning that Vitruvius prescribes: Ac fortasse mirum videbitur inperitis, hominis posse naturam tantum numerum doctrinarum perdiscere et memoria continere (‘But perhaps it will seem strange to the inexperienced that human nature can learn thoroughly and remember such a great number of disciplines’). Rhetorical though Vitruvius’ statement may be, we have seen how seriously it was taken by subsequent readers, from Alberti to Oder and beyond. One begins to wonder, therefore, whether Vitruvius’ marginality as a literary text is ⁷⁹ Potius tenuitatem cum bona fama quam abundantiam cum infamia sequendam probavi (6, Praef. 1). Cf. the simultaneously poetic and ethical resonances of Horace’s ‘slender table’, mensa tenuis (Hor. C. 2.16.13–16). For excellent studies of Horace and Vitruvius, see Nichols 2009a and 2009b. ⁸⁰ It is true that, later in the text, Vitruvius thanks his parents for an education that included litteratura encycliosque doctrinarum omnium disciplina (6, Praef. 4), but there is some ambivalence about how this relates to the curriculum of the ideal architect: the term encyclios disciplina has often been taken to indicate something fixed and concrete, when it may have simply meant ‘well-rounded study’.

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not due in large part to a pernicious combination of his subject matter and his own mode of self-presentation, which actively pursues comparison with Cicero. As Callebat and Courrént have emphasized, the theoretical, ethical, and aesthetic vocabulary of De architectura draws specifically on Ciceronian treatises for inspiration, while the ‘well-rounded’ curriculum of De architectura and the ideal architectus discussed above competes directly with the sweeping assertions of knowledge that Cicero advocated for his ideal practitioner, the ideal orator.⁸¹ Such a combination would seem to have proven fatal, if for slightly different reasons, in the intellectual climates of both Alberti’s Italy and the last 500 years of classical scholarship. The game of aemulatio that Vitruvius plays with Cicero is one that he is bound to lose, which results in the myriad accusations of inadequacy among other Vitruvian failures, ‘disappointments’, and weaknesses that so many readers continue to express in various forms. ‘Objective’ arguments that address the Ciceronian nature of Vitruvius’ clausulae will assuredly fail, in part because his banausic subject matter is far too concrete for the world of verba that Cicero established and that flourished with renewed, perhaps even blinkered, vigour in the Renaissance. At De officiis 1.150–1, for example, Cicero established that the architectural artes were appropriate only for men of more marginal social standing. Although the lowliest of the low are clearly not meant— architecti and medici are on one footing, while fishmongers and the like are classed below—the social and stylistic ceilings of ‘technical’ works have, by one measure, already been set. Under the weight of a tradition in which Ciceronian oratio above all is vita, Vitruvius will always find himself on the literary margins. By the same token, the perennial literary ‘failure’ of De architectura entails an unexpected variety of textual success and, accordingly, an appropriately paradoxical conclusion to this chapter. Placing himself on the margins allows Vitruvius to remain on the page and, as he hopes, a persistent part of the conversation. His suggestion, for instance, that his claims about the architect’s broad education will seem outlandish

⁸¹ Callebat 1989, Courrént 1998; see Vitr. 9, Praef. 17, where Vitruvius cites Cicero’s De arte rhetorica as one of his Latin literary and (as has been argued) spiritual models. See also Romano 2003.

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to the unsophisticated is a provocation ‘baked into’ De architectura to catalyse and amplify the sorts of polemics in which so many critics have indulged. For as long as classics remains classical (and, to be sure, classicizing), those baked-in provocations will continue to elicit reactions. To a large extent, the vitriol of Vitruvius’ critics, far from killing him, has made him stronger.

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5 Theodor Mommsen, Louis Duchesne, and the Liber pontificalis Classical Philology and Medieval Latin Texts Carmela Vircillo Franklin

1. Introduction: Classical Canonicity and Medieval Marginality While a curriculum centred on now canonical classical texts has been the basis of education in western societies since antiquity, the study of the Middle Ages is a relatively new discipline in American institutions of higher learning and plays no role in the education of younger pupils. The formal study of the Middle Ages in this country was introduced at the very end of the nineteenth century, when a few institutions, mostly on the East Coast and in Chicago, began to offer courses on the history and the literatures of medieval Europe, long after Europeans had rediscovered, in the early Middle Ages, the roots of their vernacular languages and the beginnings of their nationhood.¹ These pioneer American practitioners of medieval scholarship included, most famously, Henry Adams (1838–1918), the first professor of medieval history at Harvard (1870–77), whose Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (published in 1904)

¹ Geary 1994: 47; Leersen 2004: 221–43.

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betrayed Romantic longings for a medieval civilization idealized in the aesthetics of the Gothic Revival and considered to counterbalance the fragmentation of the industrial age. In 1925, the study of the Middle Ages in America was further institutionalized when the Medieval Academy of America² and its journal Speculum were founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a group of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, mostly Harvard scholars. One of their aims was to correct the general view of the Middle Ages as mired in religion and obscurantism by emphasizing, for example, that the origins of modern institutions and even of modern science were to be found in medieval times. The best known among this group of Harvard dons is Charles Homer Haskins, a charter member of the Medieval Academy whose apologetic scholarly discourse is suggested both by the title of his still influential 1927 book, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, and by his founding of the history of science journal Isis.³ A similarly apologetic stance towards the Middle Ages continues to our own day, as medievalists still feel the need to repudiate caricatures of their period of study as an ‘“Age of Faith”, uniformly Christian and dominated by a hegemonic institution’.⁴ Medieval Latin was once the cornerstone of medieval studies in the United States. Indeed, a principal reason for the founding of the Medieval Academy in 1925 was to secure the study of medieval Latin and its literature. Medieval Latinists such as Charles H. Beeson (1870–1949), E. K. Rand (1871–1945), and Charles U. Clark (1875–1960) separated themselves from both classicists and the Modern Language Association, for they felt that these groups were not supporting their discipline, which existed as if in a limbo between ancients and moderns. Their interest in promoting the study of medieval Latin is formulated in Beeson’s (1925) A Primer of Medieval Latin: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry, whose preface states that the publication of the book is ‘offered as a contribution to the promotion of the study of medieval Latin’.⁵ Beeson’s Primer thus ² The Medieval Academy of America includes Canada. ³ For a discussion of the social background of these early founders, see Van Engen 1994a: 402–31. ⁴ Emmerson 2002: 19. ⁵ Beeson 1925: 1. Beeson was a professor at the University of Chicago. See also, after the preface, the note by George R. Coffman, Secretary of the Committee on Medieval Latin Studies at the American Council of Learned Societies. Some of these scholars of medieval culture—such as E. K. Rand, a professor of classics at Harvard who wrote the classic Founders of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA, 1928)—were Anglo-Catholics or high church Episcopalians.

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aimed to provide an anthology of selections from medieval Latin texts that could be used in the classroom. Perhaps as a result of this history, medieval Latin has never had a clear, fixed institutional base in American universities. There are few universities or colleges today that employ a medieval Latinist, and such a person might be found in a department of classics. But a scholar who, in addition to a ‘major’ field, also teaches a course in medieval Latin may just as commonly be located in a department of English, of philosophy, or of one of the vernacular languages. Here, some have pointed out, medieval Latinists can be made more welcome than in departments of classics, where medieval Latin literature is seen, at best, as a poor continuation of classical literature. Closer interaction between medieval Latinists and their colleagues involved in study of the same period has had a positive impact on medieval studies, but the field of medieval Latin has been marginalized from the larger discipline of Latin literature in classics departments. Its unstable institutional setting has thus contributed to the definition of medieval Latin literature as marginal.⁶ Medieval Latin literature’s marginality is also the result of its reception—again, following the categories enunciated by the editors of this volume. Modern definitions militate against the inclusion of the vast corpus of medieval Latin texts—sermons, hagiography, liturgy, exegesis, theology. These textual genres are not universally considered ‘literary’; some are even viewed as peculiar products of a dark, unenlightened, ‘inbetween’ period and are routinely excluded from the literary canon taught to undergraduates in core curricula.⁷ The canonical ideal of the recoverability of a text with clear attribution, an ideal that continues to dominate classical philology, is impossible to achieve for much of medieval Latin works, even if medieval Latinists have used, or tried to use, traditional philological methodology in reconstructing and editing their own texts. Hagiographic texts, for example,

⁶ This situation could be compared to that of some European countries. At Università Sapienza in Rome, for example, the subjects covered in the Dipartimento di scienze dell’antichità include Latin and Greek philology of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. ⁷ At Columbia College, the core curriculum course that bears the title ‘Literature Humanities’, a course taken by all freshmen on the literary classics of western civilization, begins with the Bible and the Greek classics and reaches all the way to the twentieth century, but skips the Latin Middle Ages completely, moving from Augustine’s Confessions to Dante’s Commedia.

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even those ascribed to a known author, were constantly changed and even rewritten as they were copied into collections, in order to serve changing liturgical needs, or because their Latin was adapted to new, generally classicizing standards. The Carolingian rewriting of Merovingian hagiography, or the early medieval revisions of earlier Latin translations from Greek, in Rome and in southern Italy, are only the best-known examples of a widespread practice. Much of medieval Latin literature is anonymous. Poems have come down to us often precariously, written in the margins, over blank spaces, on paste-downs and pages extraneous to the original quires, added by scribes and by readers, the manifestations of a writing culture in which the habit to gloss and note and add was ingrained. Textual change and instability cannot be accommodated within the concept of canonicity. The tension between the canonicity of the classical age and the marginality of the Middle Ages also surfaced in the theory and practice of philology after the introduction, in the early nineteenth century, of the critical method that attached to the German scholar Karl Lachmann (1793–1853) and was applied most especially in the weighty editions of sources to antiquity and the Middle Ages.⁸ Scholars of medieval vernacular texts separated themselves early on from classicists in their rejection of the ‘German’ method of genealogical and stemmatic Lachmannian recension, which dominated the practice of philology in both Latin and vernacular languages; by contrast, they adopted the ‘best manuscript’ approach to texts—a method favoured by the French medievalist Joseph Bédier (1864–1938).⁹ Recently the influence of literary theory has renewed the interest in textual scholarship.¹⁰ Paul Zumthor’s emphasis on the mouvance of anonymous vernacular poetic texts¹¹ and Bernard Cerquiglini’s embrace of the ‘variant’¹² are only the best known challenges to ‘old philology’ by scholars of vernacular languages. In contrast, medieval Latinists, according to some, have remained firmly attached to the ‘“old philology” of editorial practice, source study, codicological analysis, and

⁸ For a survey of continental editorial theory, see Lernout 2013: 61–78. Timpanaro 2005 (first published in 1963) remains significant. ⁹ The approach was first formulated in Bédier 1928: 321–56. ¹⁰ Fraistat and Flanders 2013 contains several pieces that relate closely to medieval texts. ¹¹ Zumthor’s (1992) Toward a Medieval Poetics has been particularly influential. ¹² Cerquiglini 1989.

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traditional literary history’, a practice imported by medieval Latinists from classical studies.¹³ In reality, long before Bédier and the French challenge to German Lachmannian domination, editors of medieval Latin texts had to negotiate the requirements of a philological method devised for classical canonical texts, but ill-suited to the nature of the majority of the ‘living’, variable Latin texts of medieval Europe. The qualities of mouvance (‘movement’) and ‘variation’, so closely identified with early vernacular European literature, are also found in medieval Latin texts, as mentioned above. While medieval Latinists did not articulate a theoretical response to Lachmannian orthodoxy so as to parallel the efforts of vernacular specialists, much of their practice reveals strategies designed to adapt to the editing and study of their own texts a classical recensionist methodology based on the elimination of errors. In this chapter I use the example of two contemporary editions of the Liber pontificalis, a text both canonical and variable, to illustrate the themes of marginality and canonicity as they relate to literary genre and historical period, to religious commitment and national sentiment, and to the tension between classical methodology and medieval texts.

2. The Liber pontificalis as a Canonical and Authoritative Text The Liber pontificalis (LP)¹⁴ is a chronicle of the popes composed in papal circles and updated at the end of each pontificate; it begins with Peter and continues down to the ninth century, ending with Pope Stephen V (d. 891).¹⁵ These serial papal biographies constitute the most complete source for the history of Rome and its church; they contain crucial information on each pope and his activities, on the development of ecclesiastical institutions, especially the liturgy and canon law, and on the topography and architecture of the city itself, creating a crucial context for the accurate interpretation of Rome’s ¹³ Townsend 2012: 6–7. ¹⁴ The bibliography on the LP is enormous. A basic bibliography on the text is found at http://www.geschichtsquellen.de/repOpus_03286.html. A very recent introduction to its historiography is found in Gantner 2014: 16–26. ¹⁵ A new redaction was undertaken in the twelfth century. I am preparing a critical edition of it for the series Monumenta Germaniae Historica.

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abundant archaeological patrimony and its transformation from a pagan into a Christian capital. The title, invented in the modern age,¹⁶ embodies the work’s scholarly status as the oldest record of the deeds of the Roman pontiffs. Its historical importance has garnered significant scholarly attention to it. The distinction of its scholars—including its modern editors Theodor Mommsen and Louis Duchesne, who are the subject of this chapter—marks it as one of the canonical texts in the historiography of the early Middle Ages and of the church. During much of its reception, the papal chronicle was believed to have been initiated as an official record of the Roman church by Pope Damasus I (366–84), with the authorial assistance of Jerome. This prestigious authorship was suggested in the forged letters attributed to these two figures and affixed to most of the manuscripts of the text; and it mirrored their collaboration in creating the authoritative Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate. Extracts from the Lives of the early martyred popes, as contained in the Liber pontificalis, were included in the liturgy to commemorate their feast. The work served as a model, inspiring the creation of official chronicles designed to document the activities of great bishops and abbots, chronicles that could then be preserved in the archives of their institutions. Because of its subject matter, its antiquity, and the authority conveyed by its presumed authorship, the LP ‘was reckoned as a source of unimpeachable veracity and as one of the indisputable proofs’ of the Petrine doctrine, the special power attached to the popes as successors of the Apostle Peter.¹⁷ In the nineteenth century, for a Vatican embattled by secular and national movements, it represented sacred history to such an extent that the church hierarchy, worried that modern scholarship might further challenge papal claims to spiritual and temporal power, had a vested interest in the scholarly projects to provide critical editions of the LP, spurred by new philological and historical methodologies. Yet there is a fundamental contradiction between the authority and the canonicity of the LP, which derive from its historiographical and doctrinal significance, and its character as a constantly variable and ¹⁶ The title, Liber pontificalis, was already in use in the late seventeenth century; it would be formalized in the edition of Vignoli (1724–55), then would become standard. In the oldest manuscripts there is frequently no title (which is not unusual for medieval texts), or a generic ‘Episcopale/Liber episcopalis in quo continentur acta beatorum pontificum urbis Romae’ (Vogel 1975: 99–100, n. 4). ¹⁷ Davis 1992: ix–x.

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‘living’ text, updated at the election of each new pontiff by continuators who took advantage of the opportunity to revise earlier biographies.¹⁸ Further interpolations and manipulations took place far from Rome, where local events were inserted into the larger topography of the papal chronicle.¹⁹ The LP shares many characteristics of the chronicle format, but its authority and its large diffusion beyond the normally provincial and local confines of the typical episcopal or monastic chronicle of the early Middle Ages or of the city chronicle of the later Middle Ages mark it as fundamentally different.

3. Two Approaches Two projects to produce a modern critical edition of the LP were initiated in the nineteenth century.²⁰ Both reflect the application of a critical philology that is based on the recension of the surviving manuscripts. The resulting editions, however, are fundamentally different.²¹ They showcase the editors’ divergent aims in the application of recensionist criticism, but also their national, religious, and personal loyalties. In both areas issues of canonicity, marginality, and personal commitment played a significant role. One project was developed as part of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH), a monumental series established in the 1820s under the influence of Romantic nationalism, with the aim of recovering and publishing the Latin sources of the history, literature, and art of Germany from 500 to 1500, to the critical standards of German philology.²² The

¹⁸ These textual qualities might be considered a manifestation of mouvance, as applied by Paul Zumthor to anonymous vernacular texts. ¹⁹ See pp. 120–1 in this chapter for the example of the ‘Lombard redaction’. ²⁰ The editio princeps was prepared by the Jesuit Jean Busée (Johannes Busaeus) and appeared in 1602 in Mainz. See Waché 1992: 68. For the history of the printed editions of the LP, see Duchesne 1892: lv–lxxii. ²¹ A detailed comparison between the historical conclusions of the two editions is found in Vogel 1975: 111–15. ²² The philological standards of the MGH are often characterized in this way. See for example Croke 1990: 160, when commenting on Mommsen’s editions in the Auctores Antiquissimi section of the Scriptores in MGH. The links between scholarship and nationalism in the early Monumenta go back to the efforts of Karl Freiherr vom Stein (d. 1831), a leading German statesman and reformer, who in 1819 founded in Frankfurt the Gesellschaft für Deutschlands Ältere Geschichtskunde (Society for the Study of Early German

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documents of German history—its monuments, edited for the first time and according to the same principles that had been applied to the classical texts of antiquity—were to contribute to the creation of national consciousness. A grand theme of medieval German history was the new empire’s fraught relationship with the church, and the gesta of the Roman pontiffs were therefore a crucial source. Central to the Monumenta’s editorial mission was the exhaustive census and evaluation of the text’s manuscript witnesses, scattered over the libraries of Europe; this task was supposed to satisfy the high requirements of critical philology. Not only the subject matter of the Monumenta, but also its methodology were to reflect German achievements in modernizing philological scholarship. The application of this methodology supported ‘the scientific legitimacy of the new field’ of medieval scholarship and the allocation of the financial resources invested in the editorial institutes established to carry it out.²³ From 1822, the Monumenta had published in its journal²⁴ and in its volumes texts and materials related to the manuscripts of the LP, in preparation for its planned publication of a critical edition of the papal chronicle.²⁵ Georg Heinrich Pertz (1795–1876), the first president of the Monumenta, and, even more, his successor, Georg Waitz (1813–86), a professor at Göttingen before moving in 1875 to the Monumenta then in Berlin, were the major contributors to this undertaking.²⁶ After Waitz’s death in 1886, the Monumenta project to publish a scholarly edition of the LP fell finally to the most eminent Roman historian of the nineteenth century, Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), who was revered also as a German patriot and political leader. His multivolume Römische

History), out of which emerged the editorial programme for the Monumenta and the motto that expresses its formidable aims, Amor sanctus patriae dat animum (‘The holy love of the fatherland inspires courage’). On the Monumenta and Mommsen, see most recently Führmann and Wesche 1996; Knowles 1963: 63–97; Townsend 1993: 107–30; and Gooch 1952: 64–71, 454–65. On the MGH’s plans for the LP, see Berschin 1964. ²³ Lernout 2013: 66. See also Leersen 2004 for the rediscovery, during the period 1780–1840, of the early medieval vernacular roots of European countries. ²⁴ Archiv, and later Neues Archiv. ²⁵ Berschin 1964: 33–9. ²⁶ Duchesne 1892: lxii. Johann Matthias Watterich (1826–1904), a Roman Catholic priest, theologian, and historian, published in 1862 (hence well before Duchesne and Mommsen) a collection of papal Lives from John VIII (872) to Celestine III. But his work, published in Leipzig, was little discussed by Mommsen and Duchesne. It did not meet their high critical standards. See Vogel 1975: 99 and n. 2.

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Geschichte achieved astonishing international success and would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902. Mommsen’s unequalled contribution to Roman studies, through his many influential publications and his leadership in creating large-scale research institutes and editorial projects, was recognized during his lifetime and continues to be appreciated. Less well known are Mommsen’s works in the field of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, neglected even by his most exhaustive biographer.²⁷ It was a field that attracted Mommsen late in his life, as a result of new opportunities for critical publications. In the mid-1870s, while Waitz, with whom he shared both political and scholarly views,²⁸ was president and the Monumenta was reorganized as an imperial enterprise under the Second Reich, Mommsen became a member of its directorate (Zentraldirektion) as secretary of the Berlin Academy of Arts and Sciences. Thus, at the first meeting of the directorate of the new Monumenta in April 1875, he received approval for his project to publish critical editions of the sources relating to the transitional period from Roman to medieval Germany.²⁹ These would form the Auctores Antiquissimi, a subset in the Monumenta’s section Scriptores.³⁰ By 1890, thirteen volumes of the Auctores Antiquissimi were published under Mommsen’s supervision, including the three of the Chronica minora, which he edited directly—a ‘masterful and lasting achievement’ that reflected a ‘confident German philology’.³¹ Among the texts edited in these volumes is the Chronograph of 354, whose problematic sources provided an opening into one of the most vexed questions concerning the papal chronicle, that of its dating, which will hold a central position

²⁷ Wickert (1959–80). Mommsen’s scholarship on late antiquity is now thoroughly investigated in Croke 1990. ²⁸ See Iggers 1968: 90–173, esp. 91, 122–3, and 131 for the relationship between the study of history and the political commitment of Waitz and Mommsen, both members of the Prussian School early in their career, and for the disillusion and adjustments that followed the failure of liberalism after unification. ²⁹ Rebenich 2002 discusses Mommsen’s involvement with the Monumenta very briefly, in the context of his philological work (124), but provides a good bibliography on both (249). Gooch 1952: 454–65, and especially Croke 1990: 166–74, cover Mommsen’s involvement with the MGH. ³⁰ The MGH originally comprised five sections: Scriptores, Leges, Diplomata, Epistolae, Antiquitates. ³¹ Croke 1990: 174. ‘The Auctores Antiquissimi simply illustrate the confident philological profession of imperial Germany in full swing’ (ibid.). But the hurried nature of the editions is now recognized, and new ones are being prepared.

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in Mommsen’s edition of the LP.³² Mommsen realized during his work on these annalistic chronicles that the stemmatic method, in which certain manuscripts hold primary position because of their ultimate relationship to the archetype, is inapplicable to this literary genre, for every single manuscript presents insertions and deletions, as each scribe updated and revised his model in order to manufacture a local version of the annalistic chronicle. Every manuscript had therefore to be examined. As he travelled even abroad to consult many manuscripts in the 1880s, already advanced in years and nearly blind in one eye, Mommsen expressed his philologist’s frustration in his letters to his son-in-law, the renowned Hellenist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who wondered whether these late chronicles were worth such troubles.³³ Mommsen’s editions are complemented by a ‘daunting conspectus codicum’ and a full apparatus of sources.³⁴ The visual presentation of these chronicles, where the sources are also printed on the page in some cases, makes the text very difficult to read.³⁵ But it also illustrates that Mommsen was not interested in the uniqueness of each manuscript, its peculiar qualities as witness to the historical context in which it was created; it rather suggests Mommsen’s attempts to retrieve the original text, distinct from all additions and interpolations. The visual presentation of these chronicles is a model that Mommsen’s edition of the LP will also follow. In 1898, Mommsen’s Libri pontificalis pars prior, covering the period up to 715, appeared, as the first (and, thus far, only) volume of the Gesta episcoporum romanorum, another subset of the Scriptores series of the Monumenta. Mommsen himself, however, felt obliged to offer a justification for his edition: he paid homage, in the elegant Latin of his ‘Introduction’, to an edition of the LP in two volumes that had come out already in 1886 and 1892, stating: Haec mea editio Duchesnianam ³² The Chronograph for the year 354 (Mommsen 1981 [1892]: 13–148) preserves three important catalogues that are sources for the LP, as shown by Duchesne: the Catalogus Liberianus (so-called because it ends with Pope Liberius, 352–66), the ‘Depositio martyrum’, and the ‘Depositio episcoporum’. For Mommsen’s admiration of Duchesne’s work on these sources, see Saint-Roch 1995: pp. 424–6, n. 335. ³³ Croke 1990: 173. ³⁴ Ibid., 172. Croke himself betrays a negative view of the medieval scribe or editor of the chronicles, who ‘w[as] not averse to inserting portions of one within another, or supplementing them in places’. ³⁵ As Croke points out (ibid., 173).

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non reformat, sed comprobat et confirmat.³⁶ Mommsen, the secular son of a Protestant minister, was referring to the edition of the LP by Louis Duchesne (1843–1922), a French priest from Bretagne whose career cut across both ecclesiastical and secular institutions, culminating in twenty-seven years tenure, from 1895 to his death, as director of the École française de Rome, and who was one of the representatives of the renewal of Catholic historiography encouraged by Pope Leo XIII (1878–1903).³⁷ Mommsen recognizes in his ‘Introduction’ that whoever might take up the work of editing the papal chronicle after the appearance of Duchesne’s volumes would by necessity be labouring on a task already done (quodammodo acta agat necesse sit). His edition is presented as a work of necessity, an obligation to fulfil the promise to carry out the project that the Monumenta had announced fifty years earlier, a task on which much work had already been expended, a burden that the significance of the work demanded and Mommsen accepts. Mommsen, a supremely effective manager of large-scale projects, could not allow disruptions in the design and coherence of any of them, as if the volumes of the Monumenta series were indeed physical monuments that could not stand if a brick were missing.³⁸ Mommsen also adds that in one way his edition marks progress over Duchesne’s, namely in the use and evaluation of manuscripts. Mommsen ³⁶ ‘My edition does not correct, but supports and confirms Duchesne’s edition’ (Mommsen 1898: cx). Later in the Introduction, Mommsen refers to discussions that had led to his agreement to publish the first part, even while other scholars could not be found to prepare the rest: post editam egregiam Duchesnii recensionem iuvenibus ab aemulatione deterritis, re per plures sessiones deliberata prima pars operis mihi demandata est (‘as young scholars were deterred from emulation after Duchesne’s excellent edition had been published, the matter was discussed during several meetings, and I was assigned the first part of the work’, ibid., cxxxvi). ³⁷ See Duchesne 1886, 1892 and Vogel 1957, which incorporates the notes and additions that Duchesne had made in his own hand, on sheets of paper intercalated on his printed copy: Vogel 1957: 1–2. The 1957 edition was reprinted in 1981 with an updated bibliography; and this is the edition I use here. For the genesis and fortune of Duchesne’s magisterial work, see Waché 1992: 65–93; 277–89, on which much of what follows is based. For Pope Leo XIII’s brief ‘Saepe numero considerantes’, see Waché 1992: 234 and Gooch 1952: 569–72. For Duchesne’s contribution to the renewal of Catholic culture in Rome under the influence of historical criticism, see Scoppola 1975: 395–400. ³⁸ Croke 1990: 183–4; see esp. 160: ‘What Germany had to teach other nations in the late nineteenth century was not merely the methodology of historical research but also the importance of its structure and organization. Mommsen’s involvement in late Roman studies exemplifies what a commitment to scholarship as a planned co-operative enterprise could achieve’.

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specifically points out that his publication makes full use of two manuscripts not completely utilized by Duchesne. One is the famous Neapolitanus, the oldest but incomplete manuscript of the LP, a palimpsest from Bobbio from the late eighth century (B¹), which Duchesne had not been able to read fully because it had been damaged by acid treatment in 1819, when Cardinal Angelo Mai attempted to read the older lower text, in uncial script.³⁹ Mommsen was able to add the readings of the Neapolitanus because the archives of the Monumenta preserved Pertz’s collation of the Neapolitanus, carried out before the damage inflicted by Cardinal Mai could have its full effect.⁴⁰ The Neapolitanus palimpsest occupied a special position in the Monumenta. It had been ‘discovered’ by Pertz, who, while in Naples in the summer of 1822, collated it against the edition of the LP by Ludovico Muratori.⁴¹ The other manuscript fully used by Mommsen is the Laurentianus (Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana Plut. LXVI, cod. 35=E⁶), a fifteenth-century paper codex that Duchesne had eliminated from consideration on account of its age and because the text had been reworked. Mommsen recognized that the marginal notes in this witness uniquely preserved readings of the archetype of a group (E) of contaminated manuscripts.⁴² Although Mommsen notes that he made use of fewer manuscripts than Duchesne, he claims to have selected them ‘more diligently and examined them with care’, diligentius et cum cura recognitos.⁴³ Mommsen’s emphasis on the diligent selection of manuscripts and on the quality of their treatment in the Monumenta edition reflects the arguments that Waitz and other Monumenta scholars had already raised against Duchesne’s publications: that the French scholar was guilty of ‘careless philology’. Bruno Krusch, who had been enlisted by Mommsen to execute the edition of Merovingian saints’ Lives, ³⁹ The lower text was Quintus Gargilius Martialis. The text of the LP in the Neapolitanus occupies only seven leaves (ff. 40–47), reaching up to the middle of the papacy of Anastasius II (496–8). As I will discuss further in this chapter, Duchesne did not think that the Neapolitanus was the oldest ms or had the best text; in his view, that was the common text of the LP’s two epitomes, the Felician and the Cononian. ⁴⁰ Vogel 1957: 62. ⁴¹ Mommsen 1898: lxxiv. At first the acid makes the text underneath more legible by clearing or effacing the upper script, but eventually it makes its way through the parchment, eating out the lower script, too. ⁴² Mommsen 1898: xcvi; cx; Duchesne 1886: cc; ccii. ⁴³ In his review of Mommsen’s edition, Duchesne acknowledges some progress in Mommsen’s apparatus criticus but blunts the compliment by pointing out that fifteen years have passed since the publication of his first volume in 1886.

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for example, had reviewed negatively the edition of the pseudo-Jerome Martyrologium, which Duchesne had published in 1894 with his old friend and mentor, Giovanni Battista De Rossi. Duchesne’s edition did not provide the original text, but rather the redactions of the three principal manuscripts, printed in parallel columns.⁴⁴ Krusch criticized most fiercely the philological approach, which he claimed made the edition useless: its main faults were the failure to reconstitute the original text and the mistakes in the transcription of the manuscripts themselves.⁴⁵ Louis Duchesne had trained first as a priest at the local seminary in his native Bretagne, and then (1863–5) at the Jesuits’ Roman College, where he eschewed the study of theology in favour of church history.⁴⁶ In Rome he was profoundly excited by the new field of Christian archaeology as embodied in the work of Giovanni Battista De Rossi (1822–94), the ‘discoverer of the catacombs’, who would play a significant role as mentor and colleague to the younger scholar.⁴⁷ De Rossi’s Roma sotterranea and the Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae reflected contemporary archaeological excavations and the new field of Christian archaeology, which would provide much material for Duchesne’s historical work. The first volume of the Inscriptiones christianae appeared in 1861, and the first volume of Mommsen’s Corpus inscriptionum latinarum in 1863.⁴⁸ But, unlike De Rossi’s publication, the early volumes of Mommsen’s great epigraphic project could more accurately be described as a work of compilation and philological accuracy: already published documents were checked against the originals, if these still survived, or, if not, against all extant copies, in order to establish the best text, in accordance with recensionist textual criticism. Mommsen had experienced the excitement of archaeology much earlier in his life, and had been deeply affected by his 1843–7 study trip ⁴⁴ In Acta sanctorum, Novembris, 2, pars prior (in the 1894 edition). ⁴⁵ See Waché 1992: 303–6, with the relevant bibliography. ⁴⁶ Much of my material relating to Mons. Duchesne’s life is taken from the comprehensive biography in Waché 1992. ⁴⁷ Recalling these years, Duchesne would write later that he ‘would leave his learned professors in the middle of their expositions and run to the ruins, the catacombs, and the museums’ (Plus d’une fois, il m’arriva de laisser disserter les savants professeurs pour courir les ruines, les catacombs et le musées, as quoted in Waché 1992: 27). His close personal and professional relationship with De Rossi is illustrated by their large correspondence; see Saint-Roch 1995. ⁴⁸ The first volume of Roma sotterranea appeared in 1863.

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to Italy on a scholarship from the king of Denmark, then his sovereign. The young Mommsen spent much time at the German Archaeological Institute in Rome and also undertook actual fieldwork, surveying the Latin inscriptions in southern Italy. The result of these investigations, the Inscriptiones regni neapolitani latinae, was published in 1852 and dedicated to Bartolomeo Borghesi of San Marino, who had inspired in the young Mommsen the pursuit of epigraphic material in situ.⁴⁹ Many years later, when reflecting on that experience of his Wanderjahre, and its significance for his scholarly formation, Mommsen declared: Der Jurist ging nach Italien—der Historiker kam zurück (‘A jurist went to Italy—a historian returned’).⁵⁰ Yet neither Mommsen nor the other Monumenta scholars involved in the LP project took much notice of the vast trove of ‘Christian’ archaeological evidence; they limited their perspective on the papal chronicle to its manuscripts and its sources, treating it as a disembodied text, separated from its material context. While a student at the Sorbonne and at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Duchesne returned to Rome (1873–76) as part of the first cohort of students at the École française de Rome.⁵¹ The École française had been established, at least in part, in order to deny Germany dominance over archaeological study in Rome,⁵² as a manifestation of both religious and nationalist chauvinism.⁵³ As a dissertation topic, Duchesne chose the early redactions of the LP, which he intended to study in relation to the evidence of the archaeological monuments in order to determine the historical value of the papal chronicle. His time at the École Pratique had

⁴⁹ See Rebenich 2002: 47–52; 57–60 for Mommsen’s trip to Italy and his archaeological work. Rebenich includes an amusing drawing of 1846, ‘The Epigrapher at Work’, which shows Mommsen (?) at Castel di Sangro, sitting on a horse or a donkey in the river Sangro and stretching up to decipher an inscription on the bridge, while a lot of people who stand on the banks (local informants?) are pointing out the inscription to him. ⁵⁰ As quoted in Rebenich 2002: 51. ⁵¹ Waché 1992: 44. ⁵² The German Archaeological Institute had been established by Prussians in 1829 and transformed into a national German institute in 1871. ⁵³ As argued in the proposal to establish an independent French archaeological institute in Rome—a proposal presented to the French Ministry of Public Instruction in 1872, in the wake of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Such initiative, it was argued, would help to develop the study of antiquity in France, and add to scientific progress qualities that are particularly French, such as clarity and excellence of method and humanistic sentiment, ‘all qualities that are ignored and even despised by German science, which is so invasive in Italy and Greece’ (toutes qualités qui sont ignorées et même dédaignées par la science allemande si envahissante en Italie et en Grèce; quoted in Waché 1992: 49).

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provided him with the necessary philological tools to study and evaluate the textual cruces of a work that was not yet available in a modern critical edition. The École Pratique had been established in 1868 by the then minister of public instruction, Victor Duruy, on the model of the German research seminar; its aims were to teach the practice of the principal branches of history and philology, whose teaching was not included in the universities.⁵⁴ The noted medievalist Gaston Paris popularized Lachmann’s methodology when he began teaching it at the École Pratique. Duchesne studied Latin and Greek palaeography and epigraphy, comparative philology, and other subjects whose purpose was to give students the skills for research on the original texts. Among his teachers were several who had been formed in Germany, including Gabriel Monod, who had studied at Göttingen under Waitz. These scholarly exchanges illustrate how strong German educational influences were in Duchesne’s formation; in fact Duchesne’s preparation and scholarly abilities were seen by some as a means ‘to ensure the independence of French historical science in Rome, in the face of the German effort’, whose instrument was the German Archaeological Institute—as Léon Renier, one of Duchesne’s teachers at the École Pratique, wrote to secure Duchesne’s admission to the Vatican Library.⁵⁵ Duchesne’s dissertation on the LP would be quickly published in 1877 under the title Étude sur le Liber pontificalis,⁵⁶ the first in a series of important publications on the papal chronicle that would span like an arc over Duchesne’s entire life—some in response to scholars who disagreed with his conclusions, most significantly Georg Waitz.⁵⁷ The

⁵⁴ Waché 1992: 43–6. For the adoption, in French universities, of a German model of scientific research, see Lernout 2013: 69–70. ⁵⁵ Renier, as quoted in Waché 1992: 48. For the political and nationalist context of French and German archaeological work in Rome and generally in Italy, see Foro and Rey 2008: 95–108 and Jansen 2008: 151–81. ⁵⁶ The first volume in the series Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome. ⁵⁷ The speed with which these nineteenth-century scholars responded to one another in print is still shocking today, for all our much faster methods of communications. Here is a summary of the principal publications of Duchesne, Waitz, and Mommsen: in 1877 Duchesne publishes Étude sur le Liber pontificalis; two years later Waitz publishes a response to the Étude under the title ‘Ueber die vershiedenen Texte des Liber pontificalis’ (Waitz 1879); Duchesne responds in October of the same year with ‘La date et les récensions du Liber pontificalis’ (Duchesne 1879); in the following year Waitz publishes a review article of Duchesne’s article (and other of his works) in Historische Zeitschrift (Waitz 1880); one year after that, Duchesne publishes ‘Le premier Liber pontificalis’ (Duchesne

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Étude’s preface sets out its purpose: ‘To judge with certainty the value of a historical document, there are three things that must be determined: its text, its date, its sources. Determining the text means reconstituting as much as possible the primitive redaction, such as it came out of the hands of the writer. Determining the date means placing the work within the exact time and literary milieu in which it was produced. Determining the sources means indicating the value of the information and the authority of its witness.’⁵⁸ The first two ‘things’ were the matters debated at the time most especially by the Monumenta scholars, to which Duchesne had to present his own conclusions. Yet even here, in this very ‘German’ approach, one finds indications of Duchesne’s different, other than German understanding of the papal chronicle, for instance when he indicates his interest in its value as an authoritative source—authoritative not only from the perspective of archaeological, scientific truth but also when it came to evaluating the development of the church and its institutions. Already here, in this preface, he alludes for example to his view that the LP continued until Martin V (d. 1431), being stopped only by ‘the Italian humanists’ disgust with its style’,⁵⁹ and thus he foreshadows his future edition, which will go up to Martin V. He also mentions here the ‘interesting facts’ of the LP’s diffusion and its different redactions throughout the Middle Ages, facts that will shape his editorial decisions. And he claims for himself both (1) ‘the spirit of exactitude and the desire to clarify the origins of a document important for Christian history and archaeology’ and (2) a great concern for the ‘honour of the Roman church and of its pontiffs’; in particular, this cause ‘must not be confused with the bad arguments used to defend it’.⁶⁰ As we shall see, both his scientific objectivity and his faithfulness to the Catholic Church will be impugned. Duchesne’s Étude sur le Liber pontificalis fundamentally altered the scholarly discussion of the ancient papal chronicle, which had centred almost exclusively on its date of original composition as indicated by its 1881), which opposes Lipsius’ theory that the LP was written at the time of Leo I and also responds, in a postscript, to Waitz’s 1880 review, which had particularly offended him (Duchesne felt that Waitz had questioned his scientific objectivity). Finally, in 1886 and 1892 Duchesne publishes his edition (Duchesne 1981 [1886, 1892, 1955]), while in 1898 Mommsen publishes his own edition (Mommsen 1898) and Duchesne publishes a review of it under the title ‘La nouvelle édition du Liber pontificalis’ (Duchesne 1898). ⁵⁸ Duchesne 1877: i.

⁵⁹ Ibid., iii.

⁶⁰ Ibid., iv.

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sources and manuscripts. While various dates had been proposed, including those of the pontificate of Pope Damasus (366–84),⁶¹ Waitz’s conclusions held sway. They came to represent the position of the MGH and would be largely adhered to also in Mommsen’s edition. Waitz had argued that the LP had been first composed in the seventh century, by an anonymous writer who had used as his principal sources two papal catalogues, one ending with Pope Felix IV (526–30) and hence known as the Felician Catalogue, and the other, the Cononian Catalogue, executed under Pope Conon (686–7). As the Felician and the Cononian documents were seen as sources for the LP, it followed that the LP could not have been composed until the late seventh century, after the pontificate of Conon. This dating fit well the age of the oldest manuscript of the LP, the Neapolitanus (= T), the late seventh-century manuscript at the head of one class of manuscripts (known as ‘Class B’). This class, according to the German scholars, preserved the oldest and best text and was innocent of the topographical information (considered to have been interpolated) that the manuscripts in the other class (Class A) contained. The oldest representative of Class A is the Luccensis (A¹), a manuscript preserved in Lucca and probably copied there, dated to the eighth century. These conclusions were based exclusively on evidence drawn from the genealogical relationship of the surviving manuscripts and of reputed sources of the LP; they paid no heed to archaeological or other historical data, which might have suggested a different dating and a different relationship between the LP and the two catalogues reputed to be its main sources. Duchesne subverted these conclusions not only by analysing the evidence provided by the recension and collation of the manuscripts of the LP and of other written documents such as the papal catalogues, but also by evaluating their content in the broader context provided by historical and archaeological evidence.⁶² Duchesne criticized Waitz’s ⁶¹ Or the dates of the pontificate of Leo I (d. 461), as was claimed by the Protestant church historian Richard Lipsius (1830–92; well known today for his work on the Apocrypha). ⁶² My discussion simplifies and compresses the complicated arguments on both sides, but especially those of Duchesne, who refined them over many years and several publications. The clearest argument concerning the date of the early redactions of the LP, which includes the relationship of the oldest manuscripts to the epitomes, is in Duchesne 1879. For a listing of the publications in which the controversial points were debated, see n. 57 in this chapter.

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methodology, which first sought to determine the best text according to the manuscripts’ evidence, and then asked by whom or at what date the work was composed. Duchesne concentrated instead on discriminating the various recensions of the annalistic chronicle and saw ‘an advantage to following an inverse order. From the moment, in effect, when one must pronounce on the relative date and the succession of several redactions, it cannot be indifferent to know in which historical circumstances the first [of the redactions] has appeared, and how the preoccupations which led to its later modifications are tied to history.’⁶³ Thus Duchesne could evaluate the relationship of the writer to his narrative, and determine, for example, whether he was an eyewitness, or was writing at a distance. The lens of the redactions, understood within the political, social, and cultural contexts in which they were created—and not just of the manuscripts—was fundamental for Duchesne’s lasting contribution to the history of the text of the LP.⁶⁴ Duchesne first argues that the papal catalogues (F and C), which had been considered sources for the LP, were not sources but epitomes of a redaction of the LP that no longer survives in full—the first redaction. Duchesne showed that the text common to the catalogues F and C (FC) is more detailed and more accurate in its content than the text of the two groups of complete manuscripts (AB), when compared to archaeological and historical evidence. This is shown, for example, by the use of consular dating in FC, which corresponds exactly to contemporary archaeological evidence as found on funerary epitaphs, and not to later consular lists, as is the case for AB;⁶⁵ or by the ritual language for the burial of the pope’s body, which follows the older phrasing apud corpus beati Petri in FC, but in basilica beati Petri for later popes and is found in AB;⁶⁶ or the detailed discussion—included in FC, but missing in AB—of the important negotiations, under Pope Hormisdas (514–23), for reunification with the Greek ⁶³ [I]l y a, je crois, avantage à suivre l’ordre inverse. Du moment, en effet, où il s’agit de se prononcer sur l’âge relatif et la succession de plusieurs recensions, il ne peut être indifférent de savoir dans quelles circomstances historiques la première d’entre elles a paru, et comment se relient à l’histoire les préoccupations qui ont conduit à la modifier plus tard (Duchesne 1879: 496). ⁶⁴ In his edition Duchesne would devote great attention to all the redactions of the LP. He included in his volumes not only the so-called continuations of the ninth century, but also those begun anew in the twelfth century and continued up to Martin V (d. 1430). I will discuss this later. ⁶⁵ Ibid., 497. ⁶⁶ Ibid., 517.

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churches. Furthermore, Duchesne’s realization that Gregory of Tours (d. 17 November 594) made use of F, the Felician epitome, offered him a testimonial to both the date of the LP and the nature of the Felician epitome. While Waitz had dismissed the ‘catalogues’ by reason of their incompleteness and on the grounds that their manuscripts were more recent than the earliest manuscripts of the LP (the oldest manuscripts of F and C go back only to the ninth century, much later than the Neapolitanus or the Luccensis), Duchesne was able to surmise their real nature through comparisons with the historical and archaeological evidence. He concluded that F and C are our main evidence for the first, lost redaction of the LP.⁶⁷ Duchesne’s argumentation also assigned an important role to ideology. He set the original redaction of the LP (now lost) within the historical context of the troubled double papal elections at the beginning of the sixth century, during the Laurentian schism. It was the struggle between Pope Symmachus (498–514, supported by the Gothic king at first) and (anti)-Pope Laurentius (498–501, supported by the Byzantine emperor) that gave rise to the LP.⁶⁸ A partisan of (anti)-Pope Laurentius wrote a papal chronicle to insert his candidate into the list of popes from St Peter and thereby give him legitimacy. Only a small piece of this ‘schismatic’ text survives.⁶⁹ A partisan of Symmachus was led to do the same and created the LP properly called, which survived principally as epitomized in FC and through its contamination of the second redaction AB. This double initiative reflected the conviction that, to be legitimate, the pope had to be inserted into the continuous line of apostolic succession going back to Peter. This same anxiety about the legitimacy of papal succession, Duchesne pointed out, was expressed in contemporaneous documents as well as in the medallions of popes at the Basilica of St Paul-Outside-theWalls, where one finds the portrait of (anti)-Pope Laurentius. ‘The Liber pontificalis’, Duchesne wrote,

⁶⁷ Some additional evidence is provided by a few of the manuscripts of the second redaction that are contaminated by the first redaction. ⁶⁸ On the schism’s deep religious and political roots and on the beginnings of the LP, see Capo 2009: 14–19. ⁶⁹ This piece is called ‘The Laurentian Fragment’; it consists of a Life of Symmachus (who is portrayed in scurrilously negative language) and is published in Duchesne 1981 [1886, 1892, 1955]: 43–6).

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is not a simple book of history, disengaged from any polemical preoccupation. The care with which its author has collected all the examples of contested, accused, justified popes, the importance which he assigns to true or false accounts relating to the competitions of the antipopes, would be sufficient to instruct us on the circumstances in the middle of which he was writing. His book must have been produced at a time when the Roman church was agitated by the memory or even by the spectacle of a competition.⁷⁰

In a similar fashion, Duchesne argues for the date of the second redaction, what we generally call the Liber pontificalis, transmitted by the manuscript groups AB. He attributes this redaction to a reviser who reworked the first redaction (as it had already been continued up to the year 530) and added new entries. These show that he was writing between 530 and 538/9 and was preoccupied with contemporary affairs, in particular with the Gothic Wars and with clerical division over another controversial papal election, that of Pope Silverius, imposed by Theodatus, the Ostrogothic king: ‘If one studies the notices of Boniface II [530–2], John II [533–5], Agapetus [535–6], of Silverius [536–7] and Vigilius [537–55], it is impossible not to recognize the accent, the preoccupations, even the passions of a contemporary author.’⁷¹ Among the many examples of this presence of ‘the accent, the preoccupations, even the passions’ of the author, Duchesne points out his corrections as he copied and transformed the first redaction to make it reflect the growth of papal authority. For example, the author of the second redaction changed the first redaction’s role of Pope Sylvester in the Council of Nicea by correcting the statement that the council met ‘with his consent’, cum eius consensu (as transmitted in FC), to the statement that it met ‘under his command’, cum eius praecepto (as transmitted by AB).⁷² While Duchesne supports his dating of both the first and the second redaction of the LP by proposing a historical context in which the text could have been written, Mommsen accedes ‘to the very serious and baffling matter’ (ad quaestionem et gravissimam et perplexam) of the dating by expanding the genealogical argument provided by earlier scholars.⁷³ It is the central issue discussed in his introductory discussion, ⁷⁰ Duchesne 1879: 499. ⁷¹ En étudiant les notices de Boniface II, de Jean II, d’Agapit, de Silvêre et de Vigile, il est impossible de méconnaître l’accent, les préoccupations, les passions mêmes d’un auteur contemporain (ibid., 524). ⁷² Ibid., 512. ⁷³ Mommsen 1898: xiii–xviii.

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even while Mommsen accepts Duchesne’s conclusions on the nature of F and C as epitomes of a lost first redaction. Mommsen appeals primarily to an argument based, again, on source criticism carried out through the manuscripts evidence, in order to support Waitz’s dating of the LP. The Life of Peter in the LP reports the Apostle’s service in Antioch, a fact that is mentioned in a letter written by Gregory I to the bishop of Alexandria. Concluding that Gregory is the source for the LP, Waitz argues that the LP cannot be dated any earlier than the seventh century.⁷⁴ Arguments from source use are inherently weak, especially when our evidence is only partial.⁷⁵ Duchesne rebutted this argument by pointing out that the similarity could be explained by a common lost source, especially since there is no other evidence of any relationship between the early LP and the large correspondence of Pope Gregory. The failure of Mommsen and others to provide a scenario for the creation of the LP that might counter Duchesne’s has resulted in the general acceptance of Duchesne’s dating of the LP.

4. Editorial Choices A comparison of the actual editions reveals how these differences in editorial aim and scholarly approach are manifested in the actual volumes. There is, first of all, the difference in chronological span between the two editions. Mommsen’s covers only the period up to the year 715— the end of the pontificate of Constantinus, the ninetieth pope—and is all comprised in one volume of 130 pages of introductory material and 300 pages of text.⁷⁶ Mommsen concedes that the surviving redaction of the LP ends properly with Hadrian I (+ 795),⁷⁷ and he provides justification for not taking his edition to that date. The end of the original part of the Luccensis, the oldest non-fragmentary manuscript, in 715 provided a good stopping point, quoniam rerum saeculi octavi tractatio a meis studiis aliena

⁷⁴ Sedit primum cathedram episcopatus in Antiochia annos VII (‘He first sat on the chair of the bishopric in Antioch for seven years’). See Vogel 1975: 112. ⁷⁵ Waitz had made the same mistake in the use of sources when he established the relation of F and C as sources of the LP. On the central role of Quellenkritik for the Monumenta, see Kaminsky 1998. ⁷⁶ There are also four significant indices (‘Episcopi Ecclesiae Romanae’; ‘Personae’; ‘Loci’; and ‘Vocabula’)—in total taking up forty pages. ⁷⁷ But continuators brought the text up to Stephen V (d. 891) in some manuscripts.

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est. Ipsam quodam partem suscepi invitus et quodammodo necessitate coactus.⁷⁸ The great popularity of the LP in Carolingian times, when every monastery and episcopal court had at least one copy and several revised redactions were created, would have required an approach different from the one used by the German scholar in the earlier section, where the focus could remain on the ‘original text’. The manipulations to which the text was now subjected created such enormous divergences in the manuscripts that the signalling of ‘simply palaeographical differences’ was in fact irrelevant in Duchesne’s estimation.⁷⁹ Practical considerations guided the decision to publish the first part of the papal chronicle without waiting for the second part, which had been planned but would never be published in the MGH series.⁸⁰ The decision to publish only the oldest part of the text, however, conveys a view of the LP that is at variance with its true nature as a living chronicle, inexorably updated and reworked in new historical circumstances.⁸¹ It de-historicizes the reader’s experience of the text, whose full sweep and metamorphic reception are instead completely conveyed by Duchesne’s edition. Duchesne’s edition in two volumes (1,096 pages of text and 351 of introduction) presents the LP in all its permutations over the document’s lifetime. It begins with the surviving second redaction, which is made to carry on without interruption through the pontificate of Stephen V (891) and thus to include the ninth-century continuations contained in several manuscripts. Duchesne identifies the various recensions of the eighth and ninth centuries (not included in the MGH), exploring the motivations for their creation. In some cases he publishes the different recensions side by side,⁸² as he would do for his 1894 edition of pseudo-Jerome’s Martyrology. In this editorial presentation, Duchesne anticipates practices advocated by the new philology.⁸³ His discussion of the Lombard redaction, for example, highlights the verbal manipulations intended to make the text less hostile ⁷⁸ ‘[B]ecause the treatment of the eighth century is extraneous to my studies. Even this portion I undertook unwillingly and forced by necessity’ (Mommsen 1898: cxxxv–cxxxvi). ⁷⁹ Duchesne 1886: ccxx. ⁸⁰ A continuation was planned by Brackmann, who published the results of some of his manuscripts survey (Brackmann 1900–1: 299–347); see Billanovich 1958: 107–8 n. 2. ⁸¹ The editorial dismemberment of another text in the MGH, namely Alcuin’s Life of St Willibrord—an opus geminatum whose verse section was published in 1881 and prose part in 1919—is discussed in Townsend 1993. ⁸² As is the case for the Life of Gregory II (715–31). See Duchesne 1892: 396–410. ⁸³ McGann 2013: 274–88. On the Lombard redaction, see Mores 2013.

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to the Lombards. In the official version of the text, composed at the papal court, the Lombards are portrayed as the enemies of the Pope Stephen II, who is defended by the Franks. In this redaction the Lombard king, Astulphus, is no longer blasphemus, nequissimus, nefandissimus, malignus (‘blasphemous, most depraved, most impious, wicked’), and his policy is not guided by astutia (‘cunning’) but by ingenio (‘talent’). King Pepin the Short loses the qualifications christianissimus, benignissimus, excellentissimus (‘most Christian, most benign, most excellent’), and the phrase Christi gratia (‘by the grace of Christ’) is eliminated from the narrative of his coronation as king of the Franks.⁸⁴ In addition, Duchesne includes in his two volumes complete editions of further continuations, some of which can be attributed to known authors and were written as self-conscious revivals of the ancient chronicle. Thus, for example, the twelfth-century redaction of the Liber pontificalis—written largely by Cardinal Pandulphus Romanus in the 1130s and rewritten in the 1140s by Petrus Gulielmus, a monk of Saint-Gilles in Provence—is fully included, as are the papal biographies composed by Cardinal Boso and others, from the third quarter of the twelfth century up until the pontificate of Martin V (d. 1431).⁸⁵ Thus the entire span of the Gesta pontificum romanorum, from the age of manuscripts until just short of the age of printing and the blockbuster histories of the popes that will follow, such as Bartolomeo Platina’s Lives of the Popes, is covered. Duchesne’s decision to present an edition of the entire group of texts that fall under the generous rubric of ‘Lives of the Roman pontiffs’ reflects a significant change from his original study on the LP, which had concentrated on the chronicle’s origins and early development— matters that preoccupied contemporary scholars (including those involved in the MGH). But, as we saw above, even in the preface of his early Étude sur le Liber pontificalis (Duchesne 1877), he had mentioned approvingly the long tradition of serial papal biographies and blamed, for its cessation, the humanistic distaste for its Latinity. We may wonder whether Duchesne’s own religious commitments and the debates during his lifetime about the relationship of the French church to the papacy, between Ultramontanes and Gallicans, also contributed to this decision,

⁸⁴ Duchesne 1886: ccxxv.

⁸⁵ Duchesne 1892: 199–328; 351–446.

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which emphasizes the continuity of the papal institution from Peter onwards—a fundamental theme of the papal chronicle.⁸⁶ As a historian, he may not have believed in the divine institution of the church of Rome (as I will discuss at p. 138), but that belief was enshrined in the book on which he had laboured for so much of his life, and in the religious tradition to which he belonged. His conviction that the study of the early church is relevant to the ‘perpetuity of Catholic faith’ was expressed clearly in 1878, at the new Catholic University in Paris, where he argued for the importance of archaeological study, a scientific field created by Catholic scholars, on the grounds that it served a Catholic apologetics: Nous autres catholiques, qui sommes avant tout des hommes de tradition, nous avons bien plus que les autres le droit et le devoir de nous intéresser aux monuments de l’antiquité ecclésiastique. Chercher dans les vieux âges les documents de la perpétuité de notre foi, c’est l’oeuvre par excellence de notre apologétique . . . C’est entre des mains catholiques qu’elle s’est constituée à l’état de science.⁸⁷ As we shall see, Mommsen similarly (though not as benignly or uncritically) believed that the study of ecclesiastical history was particularly suited to churchmen. The paratextual material surrounding the text of the LP further illustrates the differences between the two editions. Mommsen’s volume contains no commentary to the text, but only an extensive apparatus criticus and an apparatus fontium (i.e. an index of sources). His introduction is concerned exclusively with a discussion of the manuscripts, sources, and the date of composition of the LP, challenging Duchesne’s conclusions. In the concluding sections of his Introduction, Mommsen betrays his frustrations about confronting a text where the standards of classical philology cannot be applied to the restoration of the urtext. He confirms in philological language Duchesne’s thesis that both the ⁸⁶ The ultramontane position, which emphasizes the unity of the church vested in the pope, was triumphant at the first Vatican Council (1868–70), where papal infallibility was declared. Gallicanism in the nineteenth century affirmed the autonomy of the political domain from any religious hierarchy and aimed at limiting papal primacy in the church. ⁸⁷ ‘We Catholics, who are above all men of tradition, we, more than others, have well the right and the duty to interest ourselves in the monuments of ecclesiastical antiquity. To search in the ancient ages the documents of the perpetuity of our faith, that is the work par excellence of our apologetic . . . It is in Catholic hands that [sc. Christian archaeology] has been constituted to the status of science’ (Duchesne, as quoted in Waché 1992: 113, n. 59). One wonders whether Duchesne was making here a comparison to the ‘Protestant’ Corpus inscriptionum latinarum (CIL), which Mommsen had established.

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epitomes of the first, lost redaction and the manuscripts of the second redaction indicate, through their common errors, that they go back to a common archetype. But he regrets that he is unable to reconstruct the lost source—the first, original redaction, the common archetype from which the two epitomes and all the manuscripts of the second redaction of the LP derive. Instead, he is forced to publish the second redaction with all its additions and interpolations, as we will see more clearly later on. The inadequacy of the author of the surviving LP is almost a consolation for the failure of philology, as if that science would have been wasted on such a text: Non hoc secutus sum, ut formam primitivam quae esset vel videretur fuisse, solam in textum admitterem, sed textus immutationes quoque posteriores, auctoritate in margine adnotata, item in textu legerentur. Neque enim edimus commentarios Caesaris nec Sallustii, sed scriptorem in suo genere et ipsum principem, scilicet in barbarismis ineptiis mendaciis a nullo superatum, in quo nihil laudes, nisi quo iusta modestia curam egit, ne nomen posteris innotesceret. Sui causa hunc nemo leget; propter rerum notitiam qui eum adhibent, iis tam genuinorum quam interpolatiorum pariter ratio habenda est.⁸⁸

Mommsen will declare similar distaste for other writers of late Latin. Duchesne’s edition is firmly concerned with the text as a historical document and aims to highlight its value as a historical source. He had debunked completely the old belief that it was a genuine witness to apostolic, or even patristic Christianity; no one could doubt that the prefatory letters of Damasus and Jerome were fabrications. But Duchesne emphasized the abundance of information it provided from the fifth century on, especially its eyewitness evidence on the city and its monuments as they had been before the severe damage caused by the Gothic Wars, and then on until the end of the ninth century. His extensive historical commentary ‘made the material contained in these biographies fully usable for the first time to students of Christian archaeology and art, ⁸⁸ ‘I did not follow this [sc. procedure] so that I might admit into the text what the primitive form was or might appear to have been, but so that even later changes to the text, noted in the margin by authority [sc. of the manuscript], similarly might be read in the text. For indeed we are not editing the commentaries of Caesar or Sallust, but a writer who is a prince of his own genre, that is surpassed by no one in barbarisms, ineptitudes, lies, in whom you would praise nothing except that with correct modesty he took care that his name would not be known to posterity. Nobody reads him for his sake; those who use him for the sake of the historical notices must be careful to discriminate between the genuine and the interpolated’ (Mommsen 1898: cxxxv).

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Roman topography, and the social and economic history of Italy and the papacy’.⁸⁹ While Mommsen stresses the author’s inadequacies and grudgingly concedes some value to the content, Duchesne’s exhaustive commentary is a testimony to the importance he assigned to the work, and not only for any ‘facts’ it may have transmitted.

5. The Mise-en-Page Mommsen’s desire for the lost archetypum that he could not reconstruct and Duchesne’s faith in the historical value of his text are reflected in the mise-en-page of their text. Mommsen presents his edition as a genealogical palimpsest of the lost archetype. Since he cannot reconstruct that archetype and disdains the inadequate text he is dutifully editing, he does the next best thing, which is to reconstruct all the various sources of the text and to make them visible.⁹⁰ Duchesne’s presentation provides instead a text as it might have been actually experienced by a medieval reader.⁹¹ Mommsen’s page (Figure 5.1) looks like a chart with a complex system of signs and symbols. The top of the printed page contains the surviving (i.e. second) redaction of the LP (Urbanus, natione Romaus, ex patre Pontianus, sedit); where there is disagreement, as on the matter of the duration of the pontificate that follows, the text of the two abridgements, the Felician (F: here, ann. IIII m. X d. XII) and the Cononian (K: here, ann. VIIII m. I d. II), and that of the first edition, as reconstructed (P: here, ann. IIII m. X. d. XII—which, as one can see, agrees with F in this particular example), are also provided.⁹² At the bottom of the page two apparatuses appear. One is the apparatus for the sources used to reconstitute the Felician, the Cononian, and the first edition; the other is dedicated to the collation (1) of the manuscripts of the second edition and (2) of the other texts included on the page. The visual presentation distracts the reader from the actual content, the story

⁸⁹ Davis 1992: ix. ⁹⁰ Capo 2009: 56–7 makes similar points. ⁹¹ I compare the Life of Urban (XVIII) in Duchesne 1886: 143–4 and in Mommsen 1898: 22–3. In Mommsen the two epitomes are printed fully, side by side, at the end of the text of the LP. ⁹² All these texts, in their varied recensions, are printed not in the space dedicated to the apparatus at the bottom of the page, but in the portion of the page dedicated to the text itself, above the paratextual material.

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that the text is narrating,⁹³ while emphasizing the genealogical relations among the texts. Most of the commentary is concerned with the manuscripts and the sources, as are the remarks on the Passio s. Caeciliae in Figure 5.1. The complex visual presentation is aimed at the scholar who will read it as a philological construct. Duchesne presents instead a text that reads like an actual text; for all he does here is print the text of the second recension, as it can be reconstructed through its surviving manuscripts (Figure 5.2). Duchesne does not include a reconstruction of the first edition or of the epitomes, which are useful primarily for the reconstruction of the first edition of the LP. He has already printed both of these and the first edition separately, in an earlier part of the volume.⁹⁴ There he has printed the two epitomes side by side, on one page, and the ‘restitution’ of the first redaction on the facing page (Figure 5.3). Duchesne prints an imperfect first redaction, visually illustrated by the blanks on the page. Through his separation of the two redactions, he frees the second to be seen independently of its source, as those who wrote it and those who read it saw it. At the bottom of the page of the second redaction only one apparatus is needed; for the ones for F, C, and P are with their texts. In contrast to Mommsen’s page, Duchesne’s adds a substantial historical commentary,⁹⁵ with a strong dose of archaeological discussion.⁹⁶ Both editors comment on the relative clause describing Pope Urban: Qui etiam clare confessor temporibus Diocletiani. Mommsen cleverly (and convincingly in my judgement) conjectures that the original reading for clare was claruit and emends the text. Duchesne fails to correct the text, noting in his commentary that the verb (predicate) is missing from this relative clause—a mistake if we accept Mommsen’s elegant emendation. ⁹³ Duchesne comments (ironically?) on the typographical advancements that allow one to represent in the text itself the diversity of recensions; and he notes that the reader is at first étonné de tant de crochets, de colonnes, de lettres marginales (‘astonished by so many brackets, columns, marginal letters’; 1898: 381). Vogel (1975: 111) notes that Mommsen’s edition makes for very difficult reading. Davis 1992: li sees the complicated mise-en-page as an impediment to understanding the text (‘but the printed text is marred by a thoroughly confusing use of diacritical marks to distinguish textual history’). ⁹⁴ On pp. 47–113 (‘Ch. IV: Liber pontificalis: Première édition restituée’). ⁹⁵ See, for example, the explanation of the provision of twenty-five patens by reference to the stational liturgy (n. 2). ⁹⁶ See n. 5, where the confusion between Pope Urban and a homonymous martyr is explained—and also the location of the tomb of Pope Urban, revealed by archaeological evidence. Duchesne’s reference here to the work of De Rossi should also be noted.

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Figure 5.1 T. Mommsen, ed., Liber Pontificalis (1898), pp. 22–3.

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Figure 5.1 Continued

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Figure 5.2 L. Duchesne, ed., Liber Pontificalis (1886), pp. 143–4.

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Figure 5.2 Continued

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Figure 5.3 L. Duchesne, ed., Liber Pontificalis (1886), pp. 62–3.

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Figure 5.3 Continued

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Duchesne does not appear to care about the grammatical problem, or the poor Latin. But the anachronism that places Pope Urban’s martyrdom under Diocletian he deems worthy of a long note.

6. Engagement Theodor Mommsen and Louis Duchesne shared many scholarly interests and embraced the same scholarly standards. Their correspondence and other documents illustrate the mutual respect they held for each other’s scholarship. While Duchesne could be ironic in his criticism of Mommsen’s edition of the LP, as we saw above, perhaps because of the competitive history of the two editions, there is no question about his admiration for the older scholar. His excitement about Mommsen’s visit to him in Paris is reflected in the account he gives in a letter to De Rossi: Mommsen est ici. Vendredi soir j’entendis sonner à ma porte, à une heure où il vient souvent du monde. Je dis: c’est Mommsen et j’allai le recevoir. J’avais deviné. Il m’a enchanté.⁹⁷ But each came to his work from a different path and carried out his scholarly labours in a very different context, in which the relevance of scholarship and its repercussions were differently felt. Mommsen had trained as a scholar of Roman law and Roman institutions, as a classicist. He was also a secularist, and opposition to any interference from the Roman Catholic bishops was part of his political liberal and reformist commitment.⁹⁸ Mommsen came to late antiquity as a historian of the Roman and Byzantine Empire who realized that ‘the dark transition between antiquity and modern history must be illustrated from both sides’. He would be contributing to this effort from the antiquity side of the tunnel, by providing good editions of the surviving sources, which he considered the major desideratum.⁹⁹ His publications on late antiquity still play a small role in his biography and in his oeuvre. When an old ⁹⁷ ‘Mommsen is here. Friday night I heard the doorbell, at an hour when people often come. I said: It’s Mommsen and I went to receive him. I had guessed right. He charmed me’ (Saint-Roch 1995: 450 = no. 350). ⁹⁸ He had supported Bismarck’s goal to restrain the power of the Roman Catholic Church in a unified, modern Germany, and saw the Roman Catholic bishops as a foreign power (Waché 2002: 182). ⁹⁹ Croke 1990: 163–4 (quotation at 164); Gooch 1952: 463. The engineering metaphor is further continued: science stands before this tunnel of transition ‘as engineers before a mountain tunnel’.

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man, he declared both to Sir William Ramsay (1851–1939), a British scholar of early Christianity, and to Duchesne that if he had another lifetime he would dedicate himself to the transformations of the Roman into the medieval world. But, as he also confessed, in his younger years he had discounted the significance of the philosophical and religious aspects of Roman culture, and he had had even greater disdain for the influence of Christianity, whose role he had not considered in his own historical work. On his own admission, he had never read Fustel de Coulanges (1830–89), for example.¹⁰⁰ Mommsen’s work on later periods was largely undertaken late in life and derived from the opportunity to publish critical editions of sources. His publication of the Chronicles and of the LP was the result of his engagement with the Monumenta, whose patriotic mission and appeal to his entrepreneurial disposition might have outweighed a classicist’s disdain for what he and many contemporaries saw as a period of decline. His passion for putting out editions was so strong that he managed to include authors who had nothing to do with German history among the Auctores Antiquissimi series of the MGH—for example, the sixth-century African poet Corippus.¹⁰¹ In a similar way, despite his lack of interest in theology, he saw the potential of applying critical methodology to patristic texts and supported the project to publish, under the sponsorship of the Berlin Academy, a collection of Greek ante-Nicene church fathers that was a parallel to Vienna’s Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL). Thus Mommsen played a significant role in the ‘new path’ of classicism, which applied the standards of classics’ critical philology to the texts of ancient religion and Christianity. But he still viewed most of these late texts as inferior to those of classical antiquity, and also not pleasant or interesting as subjects of study. When trying to convince Friedrich Leo (1851–1914) to undertake the MGH edition of the poems of Venantius Fortunatus, he admitted that it would be an unpleasant task for a student of Terence and Seneca.¹⁰² Still, he persevered as an entrepreneur of modern critical scholarship.

¹⁰⁰ See Croke 1990: 159, 176. ¹⁰¹ Mommsen, as a member of its governing board, was so determined and goal-oriented that he had acquired a reputation as a schemer, also for the role he played in choosing Waitz’s successor. ¹⁰² Croke 1990: 168–85.

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Duchesne and his friends were surprised that Mommsen, the great classicist, had become interested in late antiquity and was willing to edit late antique and even early medieval chronicles. They noted that he no longer suffered with the ‘classical fastidium which he used to affect for these late eras’ and that ‘he had confessed to understand all the value of these epochs of transformation of the ancient world, and that he would like to be younger to throw himself into this headlong’. But Mommsen had also noted to De Rossi that, to understand these epochs, bisogna essere un poco monsignore (‘one had to be a bit of a monsignor’), suggesting that he saw the study of church history as more suited to clerics, who could better understand material relating to the church—a view that Duchesne agreed with.¹⁰³ A self-described ‘Saul among the prophets’ (Saul being the warrior king who caused consternation when he came to join a community of divinely inspired prophets),¹⁰⁴ Mommsen was suggesting, whether positively or negatively, that work in church history required a different scholarly temperament, but also personal commitment.¹⁰⁵ Duchesne must have agreed with this position. While he applauded Mommsen’s foray into ecclesiastical history, his writings convey his belief that Catholic scholars have a personal involvement in this subject. Duchesne saw the church of which he was a member as the direct descendant of the ancient institution he studied. While the founders of the Monumenta could justify the series’ extraordinarily important work on the grounds that it applied critical German methodology to the proper understanding of the origins and early history of their nation, Duchesne could appeal to Catholic chauvinism in defending his own historical work. In a letter to the Bollandist Albert Poncelet¹⁰⁶ composed during his controversy with Bruno Krusch over Merovingian saints’ Lives, Duchesne states: ‘Believe that we who have the sense of ecclesiastical

¹⁰³ [I]l est tout entier en ce moment dans les Chroniques du IVe et Ve siècles. Il est très loin du fastidium classique de ces basses époques qu’il affectait jadis. All this comes from a conversation between De Rossi and Mommsen, as reported in De Rossi’s letter to Duchesne, 5 May 1885 (Saint-Roch 1995: 424–5 = no. 334). ¹⁰⁴ I Samuel 10:11; 19:24. ¹⁰⁵ Mommsen may also have been distinguishing between secular works, such as the letters of Cassiodorus or the Historia Augusta, and ecclesiastical ones, such as the Liber pontificalis—an artificial distinction to some. ¹⁰⁶ The Bollandists (Jesuits) of Belgium were established by Jean Bolland in the early seventeenth century to apply critical methods to the study of hagiography. They are best known for the multivolume edition of the Acta sanctorum.

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matters and the habit of the tradition, that we are better placed than these lay Protestants and free thinkers to distinguish in our old hagiographic documents the tares from the good grain.’¹⁰⁷ At the same time, Duchesne was cognizant that his clerical status aroused suspicions of confessional bias and that the field of his research might seem particularly suited to clerical scholars not because these had a better understanding of the tradition but because they were expected to adapt their conclusions to doctrinal constraints. He was aware of the prejudice that his ‘black habit’ might cause him in the secular scholarly world.¹⁰⁸ In his public response to Georg Waitz’s disagreement about the date of the LP in 1879, Duchesne demolished the scholarly arguments one by one, showing himself to be even a sharply ironic critic. When Waitz corrects the Life of Pope Damasus, as reported in the manuscripts, in order to eliminate a phrase referring to the basilica on the Via Ardeatina, where Damasus would be buried, because he believed it was a later interpolation, Duchesne corrects him with great satisfaction. He points out that the phrase’s authenticity is supported by an inscription, and exclaims that Waitz is attempting to correct not the text of the LP, but the history of the monuments of Rome.¹⁰⁹ But the more fundamental question was ignored in this spirited public defence—that of Duchesne’s objectivity as a Catholic priest, which Duchesne saw as driving Waitz’s scholarly critique. This point was addressed by Duchesne in a private letter to Waitz in 1884, in which he pointed out that a Protestant scholar is not burdened by suspicions about his freedom of intellect, but a Catholic scholar must bear ‘both anticlerical disdain and hate, but also the defiance and deaf opposition of those who should be his protectors’.¹¹⁰ Indeed, the ‘opposition of those who should be his protectors’ would have far more serious consequences for Duchesne’s life than the prejudice of anticlerical scholars. Duchesne came to the papal chronicle as a scholar of the church—and already a priest. The LP served as an arch over his entire career, which began with his dissertation and developed and matured as he continued ¹⁰⁷ Quoted in Waché 1992: 310. ¹⁰⁸ Gaston Paris, for example, when president of the IVe Section at the École Pratique, told Duchesne in 1886 that his black garb was a great obstacle to his election as member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres: Letter of Duchesne to De Rossi, 3 August 1886, in Saint-Roch 1995: 482 (= no. 379); see also Waché 1992: 266. ¹⁰⁹ Duchesne 1879: 528. ¹¹⁰ Quoted in Waché 1992: 281. Cf. Duchesne 1881: 262–3.

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to refine and strengthen his original conclusions, in response to both scholarly criticisms and Catholic censure. The LP remained at the centre of his scholarly output, and his edition of the papal chronicle is the most significant product of his long career. At his death, Duchesne was working on a second edition of the LP.¹¹¹ This work was an integral part of a scholarly production completely dedicated to the history of the church, a choice dictated only partially by personal taste. On numerous occasions he expressed his belief that Catholics had a special stake in this subject, that it behoved them to submit the church’s ancient texts and traditions to scientific investigation, in the spirit of critical inquiry and reform championed by Pope Leo XIII. Indeed, throughout his life, Duchesne identified with the liberal wing of the church and, while in Rome, frequented liberal salons concerned with the reform of the church and its reconciliation with modern science and thought.¹¹² But, at the same time as he saw the study of the church as a duty for a Catholic scholar, he also expressed the confessional view that Catholics could bring a special understanding to these subjects, which (as we have seen) were denied to Protestants and unbelievers. In both attitudes, he was responding to the liberal movement for the renewal of Catholic culture, which included the application of modern critical methods to its sources. But such critical approach in his scholarship was not universally supported and had grave implications for his standing as a Catholic scholar, teacher, and priest and, in his own words, as a devout son of the church.¹¹³ Criticism of Duchesne’s ‘critical view’ of the history of the church was already voiced while he was a student. Cardinal Jean-Baptiste Pitra (1812–89), a Benedictine monk of Solesmes, archaeologist and theologian, who as cardinal librarian (Bibliothecarius Romanae Ecclesiae) since 1869 had been overseeing the Vatican Library, criticized Duchesne’s choice of a dissertation topic too polemical for a beginner and that ‘presented for examination to a lay tribunal subjects which put into play the credulity of theologians or the vulnerable side of Catholic ¹¹¹ See n. 37 in this chapter. ¹¹² For Duchesne’s role in the efforts to renew Christian thought, especially as it concerned religious history, see Waché 1992: 526–37 and Duchesne’s correspondence with Augustine Bulteau, a liberal femme de lettres who held a famous salon in Paris and was his close friend and personal confidante (Callu 2009). ¹¹³ See n. 128 in this chapter.

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science’. He would have preferred a ‘dogmatic thesis’, which would have provided an opportunity ‘to profess his faith in front of such an areopagus’, setting no less than the Apostle Paul as a model. In sum, Duchesne’s dissertation was more German than French. C’est plus allemand que français.¹¹⁴ Duchesne’s dissertation, the Étude of 1877, was denounced to the Congregation of the Index, where his ‘tone’ and the absence of a spiritual attitude were criticized more than any implicit scholarly conclusions, such as the denial of papal primacy, as argued by its denouncers.¹¹⁵ Yet Duchesne’s brilliant scholarship was seen as France’s, and Catholicism’s, best hope against the Germans, during the years after the Franco-Prussian War. Despite his ‘German tendencies’, he was allowed by his superiors to continue his studies. Cardinal Pitra, an avowed Ultramontane, was now particularly intent on convincing Duchesne to prepare for publication an edition of the LP, following up on his Étude. Otherwise, he wrote to him on 27 December 1877, just a few months after he had criticized his dissertation topic, all his work would be pour les éditeurs de Berlin, qui useront et abuseront de votre thèse. C’est pour moi une inquiétude et un chagrin. Vos doutes seront en Allemagne des positions décidées et vos 50 conjectures passeront outre-Rhin pour des assertions démontrées. C’est autant de gagné pour le Kulturkampf.¹¹⁶ Pitra was clearly referring to the laws of the 1870s, which were designed to limit the activities of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany and to submit it to state control. After he began his career as a teacher, Duchesne experienced more seriously the limitations that his ecclesiastical status imposed on him. He thought it safer to refuse the invitation to write for the newly founded Revue de l’histoire des religions, because he considered it a journal where Christianity was to be treated as any religion, and not as the true religion. In his courses on the ancient history of the church at the Institut Catholique de Paris, the Roman Catholic university where Duchesne ¹¹⁴ All the quotations in this paragraph are from Waché 1992: 76. Duchesne had worked with Cardinal Pitra on his Master’s thesis on Makarios Magnes. ¹¹⁵ Duchesne had learned about the accusations and pre-empted a response by stating his ‘respect and obedience to the Holy Roman Church . . . [and] the most rigorous orthodoxy’ and his willingness to conform to what the Holy See might require of him (Maccarrone 1975: 405–8; see also Waché 1992: 77–89). ¹¹⁶ ‘[F]or the Berlin editors who will use and abuse your thesis. This is for me a worry and a chagrin. Your doubts will be in Germany decided positions, and your fifty conjectures will pass across the Rhine as demonstrated assertions’ (quoted in Waché 1992: 84).

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was recruited to teach since its establishment in 1877, he was careful to begin his lessons with the period when the church was already visible as a historical institution, thus avoiding the questions of its divine or human origins.¹¹⁷ Still, attacks in the right-wing Catholic press and ecclesiastical circles against his excessive critical approach to the early history of the church led many bishops to prohibit their seminarians from taking his courses.¹¹⁸ When he was appointed a faculty member at the École Pratique in 1887, he preferred a position in the IVe Section, which covered philology and history, rather than in the Ve Section, which covered religious sciences and where his teaching might be more easily subject to criticism.¹¹⁹ The second half of his career, spent in Rome as director of the École française, freed Duchesne from the constraints he had experienced as a teacher both at the École Pratique and at the Institut Catholique de Paris, but his scholarship continued to attract condemnation even as he enjoyed important papal appointments.¹²⁰ In his letters to De Rossi, Duchesne frequently bemoans the limitations and negotiations that his ecclesiastical status imposed on his scholarship and on that of other clerical scholars. Mommsen, on the other hand, had (in Duchesne’s words) ‘the freedom of a rhinoceros in the vineyard of ecclesiastical history, crashing right and left without worrying about the consequences’.¹²¹ Duchesne recognized and envied Mommsen’s utter freedom to follow wherever his research might lead, unencumbered by other loyalties and considerations.

¹¹⁷ Waché 1992: 95–105. For Duchesne’s role in developing a curriculum at the Catholic university that combined traditional subjects with modern criticism, see Maccarrone 1975: 406–11. ¹¹⁸ Poulat 1975: 356–7; see Waché 1992: 163–240, where this section is entitled ‘Un enseignement controversé’. This decade engaged Duchesne in one controversy after another over a variety of subjects, such as the apostolic origins of several French dioceses, which Duchesne showed were completely legendary. ¹¹⁹ Waché 1992: 249–52. ¹²⁰ For example, he was appointed member of the papal commission that discussed the validity of Anglican orders in 1896 (Maccarrone 1975: 414–18). ¹²¹ In his letter of 13 November 1892, from Paris, to De Rossi, which is the source of this quotation, Duchesne contrasts the fate of A. Loisy, accused of modernism by Rome, and as a result dismissed from his chair at the Institut Catholique in Paris (where Duchesne also taught), to Mommsen’s freedom (Saint-Roch 1995: 687–8 = no. 559). See also Duchesne’s letter to Georg Waitz of 1884, discussed here at p. 135.

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Duchesne’s identity as a Catholic and as a priest resulted in a deep personal engagement with the subject matter of his research, engendering greater conviction about its significance and a more enthusiastic and immediate presentation. But it also imposed serious personal burdens. Indeed, Duchesne as an old man would pay the gravest personal cost for his scholarship: that of official censure by the church—a fate his early work on the LP had escaped. His Histoire ancienne de l’Église, a reprise of his lectures at the Institut Catholique, had been published between 1906 and 1910, with the encouragement of Duchesne’s liberal friends.¹²² The French edition of the book had received the imprimatur and was presented to the pope, even though it was criticized in France both from the right and from the left.¹²³ No criticism, however, came from the Roman curia, perhaps because nobody there had understood its true import.¹²⁴ But its translation into Italian attracted severe criticism within the antimodernist purge, which had been shaking the church after the accession of Pius X in August 1903.¹²⁵ In addition to specific points that could be open to discussion and interpretation, Duchesne was accused of presenting the history of the church ‘almost completely unendowed of those supernatural charisms on which it is based, and without which it cannot be understood’.¹²⁶ A press campaign by the Jesuit journal L’Unità cattolica of Florence led to the banning of the book from all seminaries and eventually to its condemnation by the Sacred Congregation of the Index in January 1912.¹²⁷ Duchesne responded with a brief letter to the prefect of the Congregation on 5 February 1912, stating his submission

¹²² Particularly instrumental in convincing Duchesne to publish his course lectures was Augustine Bulteau, who was interested in creating an educated Catholic laity. ¹²³ For the publication history of the Histoire, see Waché 1992: 541. ¹²⁴ Maccarrone 1975: 420–3 suggests that there was no critical understanding of this book in Italy and emphasizes its originality, erudition, and ‘vivacity’ of presentation, concluding: Non c’era nulla di simile nel campo cattolico che reggesse al confronto (‘There was nothing similar in the Catholic field which could be comparable’). ¹²⁵ Modernism was defined in Pius X’s encyclical ‘Pascendi’ (8 September 1907) as the subjection of dogmas to modern critical enquiry. ¹²⁶ This was the primary criticism of the Histoire, here expressed by Cardinal Gaetano de Lai, Secretary to the Congregation of Bishops and Clergy, as quoted in Maccarrone 1975: 465. For a discussion of these events, see Maccarrone 1975; Poulat 1975 and, most thoroughly, Waché 1992: 525–613. Mores 2015 adds a more recent perspective. ¹²⁷ For the letter of 1 September 1911 sent by the Holy See to all bishops of Italy, see Maccarrone 1975: 465–6. The letter contains a rejection of the critical method in the study of church history, for this subject is guided by divine charisma.

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to the decision: Fidèle enfant de l’Église, je dois me soumetttre à ses decisions. Je viens donc declarer à Votre Eminence que je m’incline respectueusement devant le décret de la S.C. de l’Index relatif à mon livre.¹²⁸ Duchesne lived ten more years in Rome, continuing his work as director of the École française and serving as adviser both to the French government and to the Vatican during the difficult years of the war. Despite various attempts during the pontificate of Pope Benedict XV (1914–22), the condemnation of the Congregation of the Index was not lifted, a fact that deeply grieved the aging scholar. He continued to work on the next volume of his history of the early church. This would finally be published posthumously, in 1925, with the support of Pope Pius XI, former prefect of the Vatican Library.¹²⁹ ¹²⁸ ‘[A]s a faithful child of the Church I must submit to its decision. Hence I declare to your Excellency that I bow respectfully before the Decree of the Holy Congregation of the Index in relation to my book’ (quoted in Waché 1992: 603). In a letter written to Madame Bulteau on that same day, Duchesne stated that in his letter of assent he was careful not to retract anything specific he had said in his book (Callu 2009: 429–31). ¹²⁹ Duchesne died on 21 April 1922, just a few days after meeting the newly elected Pius XI, who encouraged him in his work. See Waché 1992: 691–701 for this final episode.

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6 Bulls and Deer, Women and Warriors Aristotle’s Physics of Morals Giulia Sissa

Disciplinary canons are not set in stone. On the contrary, fields and subfields undergo a constant process of canonization and re-canonization. This is especially true when an object of scholarly interest calls for multiple approaches: then the changes are a matter not only of expansion, reduction, or theoretical renewal, but also of endless re-mapping. Different languages compete dynamically, in order to capture the various aspects of a multifaceted domain of knowledge. The study of ancient democracy is one of those hybrids, which fall under the categories of intellectual history, political theory, sociology, anthropology, literature, rhetoric, and, I will argue, the life sciences. Short of applying all of these frames (and the list is open), we risk partiality and misconstructions. Equality ‘modifies what it does not create’, Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote about American democracy, but we can apply these words to dēmokratia. It was a form of government, but also an economy, a social experience, a legal system, a set of values, a lifestyle, and a moral and aesthetic outlook onto the world. The practice and theory of democracy was made up of a variety of ideas, incorporated in institutions, rules, regulations, procedures, manners, discourses. It was, in sum, a political culture. One essential feature of this political culture was gender. To understand the rule of the many, we must bring their masculinity to the fore.

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The self-governing many were not just human beings, but men, andres. To do justice to their masculinity, we must look at their body. And we must do so because the body is never a thing. It is a situation of embodiment. It is an experience of the world, and of the self. It is an apparatus endowed with powers to act in a certain way and to feel the very possibility, or the impossibility, of action as trust, resolve, consistency. To be truly anēr, a Greek man had to meet the demands of ‘manliness’, andreia. The selfgoverning many were not just men, but manly men. There are cultural reasons why manly men were thought to have invented popular rule and were considered both capable and worthy of ruling themselves by themselves. The full appreciation of the gendered nature of democratic culture, I will argue, challenges our canonical vision of ancient politics. First, we have to place gender not at the margin, but at the heart of Athenian political culture. Second, we have to expand our primary ‘must-read’ sources by including discourses that deal with the embodiment of a political identity: the Hippocratic corpus and, above all, the biological works of Aristotle.

1. Gendered Politics My first point is that to treat gender as a mere accident of ancient democracy would be an oversight. If we think that sexual difference is relevant to politics only insofar as women are concerned, we can easily overlook the importance of such difference. Although we know that the political exclusion of women (and slaves) calls for an assessment, although we may wonder whether these forms of marginalization are sufficiently significant to threaten the very meaning of democracy, we might come to the conclusion that they are just a minor glitch in a rudimentary, initial, imperfect popular rule. Eric Robinson ponders over this dilemma and draws this conclusion. These exclusions, Robinson argues, were not features of demokratia per se, but of Greek civilization as a whole, and indeed of most civilizations until very recent times. If one refuses the name democracy to any state that tolerated slavery or limited participation on the basis of gender, one eliminates from historical consideration almost all popular governments prior to the very latest versions—and even many of these, if continuously evolving views of social justice are to be the criteria, might well be eliminated on one ground or another. In sum, when viewed strictly as a political

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order and considered in the light of contemporary alternatives, demokratia’s essential similarity to modern democracy is inescapable.¹

The contextual logic of this argument is reasonable, but too much so, perhaps. By exculpating the ancients—as Robinson does—for failing to invent modern democracy, we try to rationalize their shortcomings ex post facto, but we underestimate the coherence and novelty of their democratic project. The government of the many was meant to be special, innovative, and radically different from monarchy or oligarchy—because it was egalitarian and inclusive. Exclusion and domination bore a unique significance in a government that had to be exceptional precisely on account of isonomia and isēgoria. And yet this all-important isotēs left out half of the freeborn indigenous population: women. The non-inclusion of women into democratic activity ought to strike us much more than the exclusion of slaves. In Athens, after Solon, slaves had to be foreigners, but women were natives. To be born on Athenian soil was the basic condition of non-slavery, citizenship, and equality. The Athenians were, first of all, equally non-slave, equally free. In this ‘city of reason’, following Oswyn Murray’s felicitous expression, barring such a large section of the autochthonous population from the self-government of the people could not possibly be an irrelevant misstep, a collateral damage, or an unintended consequence of dēmokratia.² There had to be a compelling, positive reason for keeping women out of the active dēmos. I suggest that we suspend our belief about the ‘essential similarity’ of ancient and modern democracy and that, for a moment, we stop discounting the absence of women from the political arena as a marginal flaw. We ought to do so not because we, piously or enthusiastically, do gender with a dutiful nod to a modern concern, but, on the contrary, because Greek dēmokratia required gender qualifications.³ Masculinity was its condition of possibility. Manliness was its virtue. Popular rule demanded anthropological prerequisites: only human beings of a certain

¹ Robinson 2001: 594. Josiah Ober (2000), while acknowledging that the citizen body was indeed homogeneous in terms of gender, argues that the Athenians allowed women to enjoy what he calls ‘quasi-rights’. Although I generally share Ober’s approach to ancient democracy, I am arguing here for a more robust emphasis to be placed on the exclusion of women and on the affirmative reasons for such exclusion. ² Murray and Price 1990. ³ Emily Kearns rightly points out that ‘polis and population were not the same’ (Kearns 1990: 343). This is correct, but fails to address the rationale for this discrepancy.

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kind were endowed with the faculty to command, the drive to compete, the ability to fight in war and to debate in peace—therefore with the intent and the capability to govern themselves by themselves instead of being governed by others, be it a king or an elite. Those human beings were males. They had to be. To take this standpoint means that, in order to understand how distinctly gender defines ancient democracy, we have to shift our focus from an allegedly ‘incidental’ lack of women to an essential need of men, and only men. And we have to rethink, as I mentioned, our canonical approach to political theory and political practices. We have to open up the corpus of discourses about politics and include domains of knowledge about ethics, the emotions, and the body. We come across gender whenever we describe the criteria for political participation and the sanctions of political indignity for citizens ‘in general’, which means for men. We see gender at work, as a basic frame of politics, not when we read Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae, therefore, but when we read Aeschines’ ‘Against Timarchus’. This speech is all about how much of a man a citizen-soldier could be: to throw away the shield, that is, to behave in a cowardly way on the battlefield, appears to be correlated with prostitution, which, for the speaker, involves using one’s male body to do feminine things.⁴ Both deserve atimia, the dishonouring loss of the right to participate actively in politics. Furthermore, we see the relevance of gender independently of that of sexuality: not when we look for passages on women and sexual intercourse in Herodotus or Aristotle, as we will see in a moment, but when the former connects the democratic practice of public speaking, isēgoria, with the ‘proactive spiritedness’ (prothumia) of each soldier to fight for his individual liberty and with the consequent improvement of this kind of motivated warriors, who then become the very best (prōtoi); or when the latter places a group of hoplites, wary of being ruled, at the origin of self-government. These are the men who invent democracy and its Aristotelian variant, polity, by taking up the responsibility of ruling: to decide about their own life is up to them. Our first encounter with gender, in ancient political theory, is one with andreia.⁵ ⁴ Aeschines, ‘Against Timarchus’, 185. ⁵ Recent scholarly contributions on andreia include Rosen and Sluiter 2003; Pritchard 2010; Balot 2014.

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2. Enmattered Politics We have to read Aristotle; this is my second point. Aristotle’s systematic thought establishes a precise causal connection between nature and society, sexual difference, gender roles, and gendered abilities. Claims about female and male bodies (in the History of Animals, the Parts of Animals, the Generation of Animals) are consistent with Aristotle’s theory of andreia as both an emotion and a form of excellence (in the Nicomachean Ethics), namely an excellence that plays a foundational role in the process of democratization (in the Politics). For Aristotle, Athenian popular rule was an erroneously egalitarian (and therefore a deeply flawed) political order, but the self-government of the many, when they deserved to be citizens, was the best political form.⁶ It was what he called a politeia, a proper polity; literally, a ‘city of the citizens’. Now manliness is, for Aristotle, nothing less than the excellence (aretē) of the many. It is the only virtue they, in the plural, can truly share. But this virtue is moral as well as physical. Its condition of possibility is a material cause: vital heat. The emotions are ‘enmattered’, for Aristotle. A dialectician might define anger, for instance, differently from a physiologist: the former would mention the social interaction (slight and revenge), the latter would describe the corporeal phenomenon—blood getting overheated around the heart. But those who want to comprehend what anger is ought to know both definitions.⁷ They are compatible. They complement and complete each other. The same ‘overdetermination’ is true for andreia, a form of excellence that involves intent, as we will see, and material conditions. Although different criteria of relevance are appropriate for different domains of inquiry—and one does not say everything at the same time in the same text—the Aristotelian philosopher is capable of distinguishing, and yet of integrating, causes and languages. This is why we must place Aristotle’s biology not merely in the canon of political theory, but firmly in the background of the ideological assumptions that made possible, and even optimal, the self-rule of the many. To single them out as men, andres, on account of their body, but also as manly, andreioi, thanks to the moral and emotional experience of

⁶ On Aristotle’s normative contribution to ancient democratic theory, see Ober 2005. ⁷ Aristotle, De anima 1.1, 403a29. On the multiple, compatible, and complementary definitions of anger, see Viano 2014.

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that particular body was, for Aristotle, both to perceive a social reality and to make sense of it. Aristotle rationalizes the hylomorphic logic at work in ancient democratic culture. The major premise is that, in ancient Greece, there was a foundational correlation between politics and war. The minor premise is that war was suited to male bodies and male characters. The conclusion is that politics was—exactly like war, and because it was like war—a manly thing. It is not by accident but by definition that ancient democracy was gendered, in theory and in practice. It had to be built upon the qualities that separated men from women. It had to be protected from the threat of the embodied cowardice (deilia) that was femininity. Females were not weak, but craven. They were superfluous, unhelpful, and dangerous. They were a liability, in combat and in the political arena. Aristotle’s arguments fill the dotted lines of ancient ideology. His complex connections bring those lines into full light. The body dictates character, behaviour, and agency. Norms meet nature. Citizens are embodied.

3. Manly Men To remind us of a few basic propositions, let me recall that, as a form of government, western democracy was founded on the principles of equality and freedom, but more exactly of equal freedom for all the members of the civic body. We know that democracy was not exclusively Athenian, but it is in Athens that its justification and historical establishment have been consciously and normatively thought.⁸ In Athens, since Solon’s reforms at the beginning of the sixth century (594 BC), freedom had become shared and inalienable—which means that the citizens were first of all non-slaves; they were instead owners of foreign slaves. As a group, they were free as a matter of birthright. Thanks to Cleisthenes’ reforms, at the end of the same century (508 BC) the native citizens of Athens, as a group, came to rule themselves. Self-government created a privileged membership, implemented through the randomization and rotation of ordinary, non-elite individuals in short-tenured offices, and thus through swift alternations between obedience and command. Citizens, and only citizens, were

⁸ Robinson 2011.

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entirely free and immune from enslavement. Citizens, and only citizens, were all entitled to be selected by lot, or elected, as magistrates, in order to be actively in charge of their own government. These citizens were also, and necessarily, virile. They were not just Athenians, but ‘Athenian men’ (andres athēnaioi).⁹ The hypergendered character of ancient democracy was no accident. The political power that the many had over themselves was grounded upon a highly valorized, respected, and legitimizing activity: war. If we want to catch a glimpse of the most primitive forms of collective deliberation represented in Greek fiction, we have to rely on the Iliad. It would take disproportionately long to discuss Homeric politics. The distribution of the booty by lot, among commanders and soldiers, appears to have been a ‘factor of cohesion’.¹⁰ Such distribution, however, was not necessarily egalitarian. The assemblies of the people, in peace and in war, in Ithaca, at Troy, or on the Hellenic camp, were always divided: the ordinary men convened but did not make decisions, while ‘it was always the noblemen who spoke and acted’.¹¹ In Homer, there is a dēmos without kratos. There are ‘practices of assembly’ that occur most of the time in military circumstances, exclusively among men engaged in an activity that is alien to all females, except a virgin goddess equipped with the petrifying head of the Gorgon. The Athenian dēmos was first the infantry, then a navy. The people were an army. In ancient accounts of the process of democratization, the aspiration of the many to govern themselves emanates not from a rising bourgeoisie, not from a tiers état, not from exploited peasants, not from a political party leading the masses, but from the hoplite infantry. This was a landed middle class, not an aristocracy, whose wealth allowed the men to afford weapons and equipment. Two major observers of Athenian culture bear witness to this line of thought: Herodotus and Aristotle. In Herodotus’ narrative, as soon as the Athenians overthrew their tyrants, they implemented equality in public speaking (isēgoria). And this political practice enhanced their military ability. Because they now had liberty to defend themselves and every one felt the passionate desire to do so (prothumeomai), they became first-class warriors. ⁹ On the Athenians, systematically addressed as andres in public rhetoric and when they are involved in public life, see Roisman 2003; Bassi 2003; Sissa 2009. ¹⁰ Scheid-Tissinier 2002: 17. ¹¹ Ibid., 20.

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It is clear that democracy [isēgoriē] is an excellent thing not just in one aspect but in every way . . . For the Athenians, when ruled by tyrants, were not better than any of their neighbours in war, but when they had gotten rid of the tyrants, they became first by far. This shows, therefore, that when they were held down, they were cowardly, on the grounds that they were working for a master, but when they had been liberated each man was eager to work for himself [ἐλευθερωθέντων δὲ αὐτὸς ἕκαστος ἑωυτῷ προεθυμέετό κατεργάζεσθαι].¹²

A ruling dēmos is first of all a motivated, energetic, and self-reliant people, capable of fighting for its ‘way of life’. Such a people is also inclined to initiate invasions: this is why the Athenian assembly, not the prudent Spartan kings, deliberated to send a fleet and an army into Lydia in order to help Aristagoras of Miletus—and those galleys, Herodotus drily comments, started the ‘evils’ of the Persian Wars.¹³ Aristotle offers a characteristically explanatory narrative of the process of democratization: When the multitude governs the state with a view to what is useful to all, it is called by the name common to all the political orders, that is, politeia, a polity. And this comes about reasonably, since although it is possible for one man or a few to excel in virtue, when the number is larger it becomes difficult for them to possess perfect excellence in respect of every form of virtue, but they can best excel in military valour, for this is found in a multitude [plēthos]; and therefore with this form of constitution the class that fights for the state in war is the most powerful, and it is those who possess arms who are admitted to the government.¹⁴

Later on—Aristotle tells us in the Athenaion Politeia—a wide range of non-elite citizens, including sailors and rowers of the galleys, came to benefit from their military service.¹⁵ Beyond the factual accuracy of this account, what matters is the argument: the rule of the many, in its better version (which Aristotle calls politeia, a ‘city of citizens’, in contrast with dēmokratia, its degraded deviation), is correlated with a particular kind of excellence: courage—or, more precisely, ‘manliness’ (andreia). One of the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata raises this explicit question: ‘Why do cities honour most highly courage/manliness, which

¹² Herodotus 5.78. ¹³ Herodotus 5.97. On the military effects of democracy, see Forsdyke 2001; Sissa 2012. ¹⁴ Aristotle, Politics 3, 1279a37–b4 (trans. Rackham, slightly modified). Cf. Politics 2, 1265b27–33. ¹⁵ Aristotle, Constitution of Athens 24.

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is not the best form of excellence?’ The Aristotelian writer’s response is that cities are constantly at war; therefore they reward what is most useful. ‘They honour not what is best, but what is best for them.’¹⁶ Athenian public eloquence, especially funerary oratory, displays the most famous example of that attribution of honour. To say all this is not blindly to espouse ‘military determinism’ or naïvely to endorse the myth of the hoplitic polis, an ideological selfpraise, born in the aftermath of the Greco-Persian Wars.¹⁷ It is instead to understand the logic of a political culture. It is to give credit to the representations voiced by internal observers such as Herodotus and Aristotle. Democracy, the original one, was a military regime. It was warlike, aggressive, hegemonic, imperialistic, and, notwithstanding its social basis, it was fascinated with an aristocratic past. The body politic was a circle of warriors, naturally male and ideally manly, who would not let anyone else rule them or rule on their behalf. Just to outline ‘democratic bellicosity’, as David Pritchard calls the Athenian connection between war and democracy,¹⁸ let me mention a few well-known facts: in the seemingly acephalous executive branch of a democratic polis, in which kings, consuls, or presidents were non-existent, the highest responsibility was that of ten stratēgoi, ten generals. Pericles was one of them. Indeed, Pericles’ unconditional praise of Athens that, according to Thucydides, was delivered in 431 BC to commemorate the men fallen on the battlefield, diverges from the paradoxical blame to be found in the anonymous pamphlet of the so-called Old Oligarch, but both epideictic pieces set popular rule against the background of war. The official ceremony in honour of Athens, the Panathenaea, was a sequence of parades, religious (in honour of goddess Athena, the divine virgin warrior), and military. The festivities included the recitation of the Homeric poems, and thus the celebration of the Trojan War. During Dionysos’ festivals, on a regular basis, the performance of tragic plays entertained the Athenian people with the adventures of kings, warlords, princes, and queens who all belonged in that same heroic universe.

¹⁶ Pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata 27.5. ¹⁷ For a criticism of the idealization of the citizen/soldier, see Van Wees 2004; the essays collected in Pritchard 2010; Payen 2012. ¹⁸ Pritchard 2010: 29.

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As Aristotle points out, the ideological and moral components of the culture of war coalesce in the valorization of one particular virtue: courage—or, more precisely, ‘manliness’ (andreia). This occurred in the theatre, in visual representations, and in public speaking. Now ‘courage’, as Ryan Balot points out, is the ‘best approximation to the Greek ideal of andreia’, that is, ‘manliness’ or ‘machismo’. The term, Balot reminds us, is an abstraction derived from aner, or ‘man’ as opposed to woman. Ancient Greek norms made war the sole prerogative and obligation of men. Therefore, the prototypical meaning of andreia was that virtue which enabled men, especially hoplite citizens, to overcome the fear of death on the battlefield.¹⁹

Along these lines, we should applaud Paul Cartledge’s acknowledgement that, when we look at modern democratic societies from the perspective of ancient popular rule, gender introduces a further dimension of comparison and contrast. In no Greek city, Cartledge argues, ‘were women of the citizen estate—that is, the mothers, wives and daughters of (adult, male) citizens—accorded the full public political status equal to that of the citizens themselves, and the societies of Classical Greece were both largely sex-segregated and fundamentally gendered’. War offers an example of a ‘unique masculine prerogative’ that requires ‘pugnacious courage’, a virtue ‘tellingly labelled andreia’.²⁰ This kind of contemporary scholarship is a far cry from the allusive treatment of gender as a marginal by-product of ancient political culture, as well as from the panegyric of manliness as a virtue to rediscover.²¹

4. Blood Is Thicker than Water Woman, Plato tells us in the Timaeus, came into existence through a metamorphosis of the first generation of men, when some of those original males, because of their cowardice (deilia), were reborn as females: from the outset, woman is the very embodiment of a character flaw that is the opposite of andreia.²² ¹⁹ Balot 2004: 407. ²⁰ Cartledge 2000: 13. ²¹ ‘And incidentally’ the fact that modern republics are modelled upon the Roman res publica is ‘one factor that has made it difficult to grant full equality to women’ (Lummis 1996: 131). For the praise of manliness, see Mansfield 2006: 204–21. ²² Plato, Timaeus 94b. On andreia in Plato’s thought, see Laws 633d: ‘You speak well, you, Lacedemonian guest: but go on, what do we posit as “courage”? Shall we say that it is

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For the medical writers of the Hippocratic corpus, the female body is lax and watery, because it is made of spongy tissues. ‘I say that a woman’s flesh is more sponge-like and softer than a man’s’, writes the author of Diseases of Women. ‘Since this is so’, he goes on explaining, ‘the woman’s body draws moisture both with more speed and in greater quantity from the belly than does the body of a man.’ Female tissues are analogous to wool: porous and soft, they absorb humidity. By contrast, a male ‘draws whatever quantity of blood is needed for his body nourishment; since his body is not soft, it does not become overstrained nor is it heated up by fullness, as in the case of a woman. The fact that a man works harder than a woman contributes greatly to this; for hard work draws off some of the fluid.’²³ Whereas the Hippocratic writers claim that the female body is squashy, plethoric, and naturally warmer because it remains idle, Aristotle argues that it is softer and weaker because of its congenital coldness. Whereas medical writers establish a series of binary oppositions, Aristotle builds a system of tightly interrelated analogies. Males are endowed with superior ‘natural heat’, a vital and incorporeal, yet material, quality or thing that physically exists in the body. Heat (to thermon) transforms the food we ingest into blood, the fluid that nourishes the entire living body. The same heat allows male bodies to ‘concoct’ semen out of blood and makes that frothy fluid fecund.²⁴ Heat affects the blood in an essential way, for the blood may well get cold, but it is hot and moist by nature simply the struggle against fears and pains only [πρὸς φόβους καὶ λύπας διαμάχην μόνον], or also against desires and pleasures [ἢ καὶ πρὸς πόθους τε καὶ ἡδονάς] and also some terrible flattering flatteries, which make the spirit soft like wax [τοὺς θυμοὺς ποιοῦσιν κηρίνους] even of those who deem themselves to be highly honourable?’ The crucial point of this definition is the idea that courage is a constant struggle [διαμάχη]. For an examination of courage in Plato’s dialogues, see Hobbs 2000. For a discussion focused on the Laches and the Republic, see Rabieh 2006. For a problematization of the male model of spiritedness, see Koziak 2000. ²³ Hippocrates, Diseases of Women 1, in Ann Ellis Hanson’s translation (Hanson 1975: 572). ²⁴ Aristotle, Generation of Animals 736b29–7a6: ‘All have in their semen that which causes it to be productive; I mean what is called vital heat [θερμόν]. This is not fire nor any such force, but it is the breath [πνεῦμα] included in the semen [σπέρματι] and the foamlike, and the natural principle in the breath [πνεύματι φύσις], which is analogous to the element of the stars [τῷ τῶν ἂστρων στοιχείῳ]. Hence, whereas fire generates no animal and we do not find any living thing forming in either solids or liquids under the influence of fire, the heat of the sun [τοῦ ἡλίου θερμότης] and that of animals does generate them. Not only is this true of the heat that works through the semen [διὰ τοῦ σπέρματος], but whatever other residue of the animal nature there may be, this also has still a vital principle [ζωτικὴν ἀρχήν]

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‘insofar as it is what it is for blood to be blood’.²⁵ Blood’s thermic state is crucial for the very function of blood. For Aristotle, [t]he character of the blood affects both the temperament and the sensory faculties of animals in many ways. This is indeed what might reasonably be expected, seeing that the blood is the material of which the whole body is made. For food supplies the material and the blood is the ultimate food. It makes then a considerable difference whether the blood be hot or cold, thin or thick, turbid or clear.²⁶

Starting from this premise, in Parts of Animals Aristotle articulates a complex theory of predisposition, causality, and emotional response.²⁷ What emerges is an interaction between bodies, characters, and events and between essential features and accidental circumstances. Dense, ‘fibrous’ blood makes animals irascible and valiant in the presence of danger. Blood is more or less dense, ‘earthy’, or ‘watery’ in different species: this is a naturally mixed condition (krasis) that explains their predictable behaviour. Dense blood makes animals ‘spirited in their character’ (θυμώδη τὸ ἦθος) and ‘excitable on account of their spiritedness’ (ἐκστατικὰ διὰ τὸν θυμόν). All ‘bulls and rams are spirited and excitable’ (οἱ ταῦροι καὶ οἱ κάπροι θυμώδεις καὶ ἐκστατικοί). All deer are timid. The former’s blood is thick; the latter’s, thin. What makes blood viscous is the prevalence of its ‘earthy’ (geōdēs) component, which can be described as ‘fibres’ (ina). ‘The fibres therefore, being earthy and solid, become sparks in the blood and cause ebullition in the fits of spiritedness’ (ὥστε γίνονται οἷον πυρίαι ἐν τῷ αἵματι καὶ ζέσιν ποιοῦσιν ἐν τοῖς θυμοῖς). The key to this causal chain is thumos as the active, productive cause of heating (θερμότητος γὰρ ποιητικὸν ὁ θυμός).²⁸ In order to understand the materialistic intricacy of this argument better, we must supplement a missing link, to be found in Meteorology: it is heat that causes thickness or earthiness in the first in it. From such considerations it is clear that the heat [θερμότης] in animals neither is fire nor derives its origin from fire.’ See Freudenthal 1995; Trott 2017. ²⁵ Aristotle, Parts of Animals 649b22–36. ²⁶ Ibid., 651a13–17. On the coherence of this argument, see Lennox 2001: 198–206. ²⁷ Aristotle, Parts of Animals 650b30; 667a11–23; 692a20–5. I share Sophia Connell’s misgivings about the instrumental appeal to Aristotle’s biological works in order to solve problems raised by other texts. I argue, however, for a fundamental attention to embodiment, which places all the discussion of the body at the heart of Aristotle’s thought. See Connell 2001. ²⁸ Aristotle, Parts of Animals 650b–1a.

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place.²⁹ Heat makes blood dense, in other words fibrous. This kind of stringy, gluey, heavy fluid in turn tends to light up in provocative situations. Hot, fibrous blood is such that it can boil, literally. By contrast, a feeble vital heat makes watered-down blood. This kind of blood causes a propensity to fear, an emotion that is felt as cold and, in turn, chills the blood itself. This state of the body predisposes to cowardice. When dangerous situations occur, fright happens. This is perfectly reasonable, but what matters is how one behaves. Due to the runny composition of their blood, coldblooded animals, such as deer, will be unable to react courageously. This causality is interactive, I have said, because the emotions themselves trigger changes in the thermic condition of the body. Terror makes your blood run cold. Anger brings it to boiling point. But the reaction to an objectively chilling situation will be radically different for a bull and for a deer: the former will have enough heat, stored in the earthy texture of his blood, to counteract an attack of dread or cold with a surge of spiritedness; the latter will have no internal defence against the sudden frost of fear. His natural coldness will be intensified. He will ‘freeze’. The same difference, as we shall see in a moment, distinguishes a northern bellicose warrior from an Asian subject. An analogous correlation exists between a large heart and cowardice, on the one hand, a small heart and courage, on the other. The reason is that the passion that normally occurs, fear, intrinsically preexists (prohuparchei) in animals with large hearts, because the heat contained in the heart is not proportionate to that ample space. The blood that fills a vast heart remains therefore colder. In a smaller heart the blood heats up more easily. The heart’s size predisposes living beings such as hyenas, mice, hares, deer, ass, leopards, and martens to be always underheated, thus physiologically timid whenever a danger occurs. Like the qualities of the blood, the qualities of the organ that is its source (and its main vessel) ²⁹ Aristotle, Meteorology 4.11, 389a25–8 . . . 389b8–13: ‘Bodies consisting of water are commonly cold, unless (like lye, urine, wine) they contain foreign heat. Bodies consisting of earth, on the other hand, are commonly hot because heat was active in forming them: for instance lime and ashes . . . Bodies made up of earth and water are hot, for most of them derive their existence from concoction and heat, though some, like the waste products of the body, are products of putrefaction. Thus blood, semen, marrow, fig juice, and all things of the kinds are hot as long as they are in their natural state, but when they perish and fall away from that state they are so no longer. For what is left of them is their matter, and that is earth and water.’ On vital heat, see Freudenthal 1995.

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tend to modify animals’ characters (ēthē). Cowardice is either visible outright or betrayed by their bad behaviours in situations of fear.³⁰ The combination of innate propensity and circumstantial responses appears in a particularly eloquent example: the chameleon. This is a fearful animal, Aristotle claims, so much so that it constantly changes its appearance. Nature has equipped it with a clever system of self-defence. Its natural timidity depends upon the scarcity of blood. This is the cause (aition) of the character of its soul (tou tēs psuchēs ēthous), and thus of its polymorphic behaviour. Fear is a process of cooling due to (dia), the extreme paucity of blood and the lack of heat.³¹ In question after question, the Problemata insists on the coherence of this theory. ‘Why do those who are afraid tremble?’ Because fear is chilling. More precisely, the heat moves down from the upper body. The intestine is thus loosened.³² People urinate.³³ Since the heat also moves towards the inner parts, away from the skin, people become pale; they shiver, have erections and ejaculate.³⁴ They remain speechless.³⁵ Now, courage is nothing but the faculty of overcoming fear.

5. Manly Bodies In text after text we are confronted with the corporeal circumstances of masculinity and with the experience of a virtue that is shared by human and non-human beings: courage or manliness. It is not only the case that only male bodies, being well endowed with thermon, are able to produce seminal fluid. It is also the case that this thermic equipment inclines male living beings, across species, to be inflammable. It prompts them to behave audaciously. Their interactions with others, their social life, and their agency depend upon their embodiment. Their body sets them up and affords them particular ways of being in the world. The body is a dispositif, as I mentioned earlier. It is an apparatus of powers and possibilities. The body is a situation of embodiment. This means anger. The material cause of anger, Aristotle argues in De anima, is precisely the boiling of blood around the heart.³⁶ This is a physical alteration that accompanies what Aristotle also describes, in the ³⁰ Aristotle, Parts of Animals 667a11–23. ³¹ Ibid., 692a20–5. ³² Pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata 27.1; 27.3; 27.6. ³³ Ibid., 27.10. ³⁴ Ibid., 27.3; 27.11. ³⁵ Ibid., 27.9. ³⁶ Aristotle, De anima 403a29.

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Rhetoric and the Nicomachean Ethics, as a passion (pathēma), which is aroused when it appears to us that we have been undeservedly slighted. We feel the pain of an unfair offence and the pleasure of planning an act of revenge. The awareness of a complex situation, the assessment of what is not right, and the experience of suffering and wishing to rebound go together, automatically, with a surge in the temperature of our blood. Anger is a synergy of knowledge, deliberation, desire, pain–pleasure, to be sure, but it is also a bodily event. Anger happens in the world and in our chest. Now, anger is intrinsically connected with manliness (andreia). People who get angry in the right circumstances and to the right degree—which is a good thing, for insensitivity to slights is stupid and slavish—are worthy of praise. We even commend those who exaggerate a little bit and we call them ‘manly, and capable of ruling’ (ἀνδρώδεις ὡς δυναμένους ἄρχειν).³⁷ We do not blame them: quite the opposite, we praise them on account of their andreia. Andreia itself is, by definition, nothing but the willingness to overcome fear and to take risks in the pursuit of what is ‘beautiful’, to kalon. The thoughtful intent to be courageous, however, is fundamentally emotional: it is a matter of fear, hope, and confidence. A courageous man is one who endures and fears (ὑπομένων καὶ φοβούμενος) ‘the right things and for the right purpose and in the right manner and at the right time, and who shows confidence in a similar way’. Whereas the coward is frightened when confronted with pain (ἐν ταῖς λύπαις), and is therefore ‘despondent, being afraid of everything’ (δύσελπις . . . ὁ δειλός· πάντα γὰρ φοβεῖται), the courageous man is confident and hopeful.³⁸ Furthermore, andreia must be accompanied by some passionate energy, thumos. ‘Brave men act because of the beautiful, but thumos helps them [sunergei].’³⁹ Manly action requires the ‘synergy’ of a manifold intentionality: the deliberate aspiration to the beautiful, hope, confidence, and the impetus of thumos. Contemplating how magnificent it is to die for one’s homeland is not enough to make one spring into action and endanger one’s life. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle therefore insists upon the moral decision to take risks for the sake of ‘the beautiful’—this is andreia as a form of excellence, especially at war. But the ³⁷ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1126b1–2. ³⁸ Ibid., 1115b–16a. ³⁹ Ibid., 1116b 30–1: οἱ μὲν οὖν ἀνδρεῖοι διὰ τὸ καλὸν πράττουσιν, ὁ δὲ θυμὸς συνεργεῖ αὐτοῖς

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body has to be involved, as we said, in ‘synergy’ with the soul.⁴⁰ Thumos versus phobos implies heat versus cold. The Problemata thematizes the mechanics of this synergy. ‘Why is it that under the influence of anger men become heated and bold?’ Because the blood ‘is collected in the region of the heart, hence they become courageous, and red in the face and full of breath’. Courage cannot possibly be a mere act of the will but requires a flush of warmth, a redirecting of blood and heat to the upper body. This is why physical self-help can be literally encouraging. When valiant soldiers feel affected by fear, they beat their limbs with a cane or with their hands in order to warm up. They are not mad, the Aristotelian text explains: they are brave.⁴¹ Manly men are also fond of wine: because they are hot in the chest, they feel thirsty and, like those whose lungs are filled with wine, they do not get cold at the representation of what is frightening.⁴² The image of these seemingly mad men captures the logic of Aristotelian embodiment. They are frozen in terror. The well meaning thought of ‘the beautiful’ is not going to change their state of mind, which is also a state of their bodies. They have to recondition their psychosomatic self. By beating themselves or drinking wine, they come to feel the push of andreia. Being manly, they bring themselves to do it. Being men, they can do it at all.

6. Thumōeideis The basic line of reasoning that emerges in Parts of Animals runs deep through the Aristotelian corpus. In the Politics, Aristotle makes clear that peoples enjoy different levels of andreia on account of their thumos, which depends on the climate in which they live. Bodies become hot or cold in response to the environment. Internal heat, which obviously means hot blood, makes people thumoeideis (‘high-spirited’), therefore more irascible and more belligerent. In History of Animals, Aristotle establishes the same correlation among non-human beings. Gender intersects with these differences. Females are more humid, which means colder than males, therefore athumoteroi and cowardly. Ethological and ethnographic taxonomies rely on the same logical links and ⁴⁰ Ibid., 1115b17–24. ⁴² Ibid., 23.4.

⁴¹ Pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata 27.3.

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physical explanations. Andreia requires thumos. Thumos is a matter of thermon. Thermic physical states affect the political actions of different dispositions in various ways. People (ethnē) who live in colder climates in the north react to external low temperatures by becoming internally hotter, therefore more spirited, thumoeideis; people who live in a clement climate, on the contrary, respond to the environment by becoming colder inside, thus diminishing their thumos.⁴³ The former, hot-blooded northerners, are ‘full of thumos, but lacking in intelligence and technical skills’ (θυμοῦ μέν ἐστι πλήρη, διανοίας δὲ ἐνδεέστερα καὶ τέχνης); for the same reason they are exceedingly daring and fearless, therefore keen on freedom to the point of proving unable to be citizens (ἀπολίτευτα), or unable to govern their neighbours. The latter, tepid Asians, are ‘intelligent and technically skilled in their soul’ (διανοητικὰ μὲν καὶ τεχνικὰ τὴν ψυχήν), but comply with authoritarian rule, act slavishly, and make suitable servants. The Hellenes enjoy the right equilibrium between hot and cold, inside and outside, spiritedness and intelligence. Being endowed with thumos as well as with dianoia (ἔνθυμον καὶ διανοητικόν), the Greek ethnos is able to govern in the best possible manner (βέλτιστα πολιτευόμενον), so much so that it could rule the entire world, if only there were one politeia. The Greeks, in conclusion, know well how to rule and how to be ruled, according to the very definition of a citizen.⁴⁴ It is the automatic regulation of natural heat—which means more or less hot blood, which means variable thumos—that adapts a body to a given meteorological milieu, thus predisposing an individual to acquiring a certain character, as a situated political animal. In the section of the Problemata dedicated to temperaments, the author insists on the dynamic causality that connects environment, body temperature, and political agency. ‘Why are the inhabitants of warm places cowardly, and those who dwell in cold places courageous?’ The answer is not that external temperature extends to the body so that one would become colder wherever the air is cold and vice versa, but the opposite: ‘nature acts contrary to the seasons and the places, because of the necessary and swift destruction of the things that act in the same way’. People who grow up and live in wintry regions heat up, whereas people who dwell in

⁴³ On thumos, see Viano 2003.

⁴⁴ Aristotle, Politics 7, 1327b24–34.

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torrid climates cool down. As a result, people become either warmer, and thus potentially brave, or colder, and therefore pusillanimous. This occurs by nature, but nature means thermic determinism (cold causes cowardice; heat causes courage) as well as the interaction of a body with its environment. In warm atmospheric conditions the body becomes porous, and thus lets natural heat escape; icy air, on the contrary, hardens the flesh and thus maintains heat inside the body. External frigidity ‘preserves by reaction’ internal hotness.⁴⁵ Whereas the response to emotions is homeopathic (the cold of fear intensifies the preexisting coldness of the blood), physical habituation to a particular habitat produces an antithetical state, lest one would be destroyed by extreme cold or heat.

7. Athumoteroi Gender lies at the core of this network of coordinated differences. All animals, Aristotle observes, are more or less clever, gregarious, organized, cooperative, or warlike. Across surroundings, bodies, and species that present sexual dimorphism, females are systematically colder than males; this is why they are incapable of concocting blood into sperm. Their character will be, predictably, consistent with the watery, cooler quality of their blood. Human females ought to be included in this general taxonomy, for they show an extreme version of femaleness, on account of the higher complexity of our species. Women evacuate the residual blood they are unable to cook, through menstruation. Female animals are softer (malakotera). They are teachable, good learners, and can be cleverer than the males, as in the case of Laconian hounds (μαθητικώτερον, οἷον καὶ αἱ Λάκαιναι κύνες αἱ θήλειαι εὐφυέστεραι τῶν ἀρρένων εἰσίν). They are more deceptive, and of more effective memory (εὐαπατητότερον δὲ καὶ μνημονικώτερον). They are more mindful of the nurture of the offspring (περὶ τῶν τέκνων τροφὴν φροντιστικώτερα). Their learning skills are superior. Their intellect is astute. In contrast, males are always more spirited and brutish, simpler and less cunning (τὰ δ’ ἄρρενα ἐναντίως θυμωδέστερα καὶ ἀγριώτερα καὶ ἁπλούστερα καὶ ἧττον ἐπίβουλα); the females, with the exception of the

⁴⁵ Pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata 14.3; 14.8; 14.16.

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she-bear and the panther, are less endowed with thumos, and are all athumotera. And because they are less spirited, females are cowardly: ‘the male is more helpful and, as already said, more courageous that the female’ (βοηθητικώτερον δὲ καί, ὥσπερ ἐλέχθη, ἀνδρειότερον τὸ ἄρρεν τοῦ θήλεός ἐστιν).⁴⁶ Courage is a matter of aggression, defence, and solidarity. It allows living beings to take up the challenge of conflict both for themselves and on behalf of others. Male molluscs run to the rescue of their females, but females fail to return the courtesy. Courage has also to do with the ability to sustain discomfort with assurance, confidence, and steady resolve. ‘The female is more prone to discouragement and despair than the male’ (ἐστὶ δὲ καὶ δύσθυμον μᾶλλον τὸ θῆλυ τοῦ ἄρρενος καὶ δύσελπι). And yet all female animals, and above all human females, tend to cause offence and to punch, in a futile bellicosity. They are deceitful but gullible, and also envious and resentful, whiny, shameful, and idle.⁴⁷ In this Aristotelian logic there is not much that women could possibly do to surmount fear and embolden themselves, when this is needed. We could hardly imagine female soldiers slapping and whipping their thighs, as manly warriors do. In the face of danger, be it on the battlefield or in other challenging situations, women do not have the option of redistributing hot blood into their bodies, wilfully overcoming a moment of panic. There is just not enough heat in their system. Of course, in a

⁴⁶ Aristotle, History of Animals 9.1, 608a21–b15. Harold Levy rightly noticed this line of reasoning: ‘In History of Animals 9.1, 608a21–b15, Aristotle finds women to be superior in any intellectual characteristic worth noting.’ Levy makes a refreshing argument on the positive characterization of females in Aristotle’s corpus, in view of his general conclusion that Aristotle did not promote the exclusion of women from deliberative responsibilities in the household, and not even from political life. I disagree with this overarching claim, for all the textual reasons I am arguing for in this chapter. In particular, courage cannot be discounted as an ‘irrational’, low-key virtue, and placed in opposition with rational, cognitive, prudential skills taken as a whole. Courage itself entails the proper identification of to kalon, the beautiful end of courageous acts, as well as the indispensable energy that makes individuals leap into action. Manly men are capable of both. Women lack the oomph (Levy 1990). Richard Mulgan offers a thorough, measured critique of this revisionist position in his classical essay ‘Aristotle and the political role of women’ (Mulgan 1994). Mulgan acknowledges that, in Aristotle’s ethology, males are not systematically praised, especially with regard to their intellectual skills. However, he objects that females’ intelligence appears to be qualified as attention to offspring, memory, and cunning. My point is that a materialistic logic runs deep through Aristotle’s texts: cool females end up on the side of cleverness, minus the resolve that helps men carry a decision forward. ⁴⁷ Aristotle, History of Animals 9, 608b11–9a30.

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piece of Aristotelian science fiction, Greek women could be regularly exposed to some kind of cryotherapy, or sent to the deep north so that their pint-sized internal heat would be protected, provoked, and optimized. But, as it is, unlike she-bears and panthers but like cuttlefish and all the other craven females—and even more so, given the maximum polarity of human genders—women are stuck with pusillanimity and low spirits. They tend to be unhelpful, despondent, downhearted, and incapable of withstanding purposeful fights and real danger. This is why, as Aristotle claims in the Politics, the best a woman has to offer, in terms of andreia, would be disgraceful for a man.⁴⁸ The courage of a man is appropriate for command; that of a woman, for obedience, subordination, and subservience.⁴⁹ Females are incurably disabled by their poor thermic endowment.⁵⁰

⁴⁸ ‘A man would be reputed a coward if he were courageous in the manner of a courageous woman’ (Aristotle, Politics 1277b22–6). Aristotle adds that a woman would appear to be ‘too talkative if she were decorous in the manner of a good man, since the management of the household also is different in the case of a man and a woman, for it is the man’s work to acquire and the woman’s to keep a vigilant watch’. This latter consideration connects the female ethical disability with the management of the household, but courage remains a matter of physical endowment. Compare Politics 1259b1–3: ‘The male is more fit for leadership [hēgemonikōteron] than the female, at least if their union is not constituted contrary to nature’. For various interpretations of Aristotle’s theory of gender as if it were grounded in a harmonious, complementary division of tasks, see Levy 1990; Dobbs 1996; contra Mulgan 1994; Stauffer 2008. ⁴⁹ Aristotle, Politics 1260b31–4. ⁵⁰ I will not engage in a discussion of Aristotle’s ‘misogyny’. I have written on Aristotle’s theory of gender and generation many years ago, in Campese, Manuli, and Sissa 1983, and in Sissa 1991. What interests me here is to highlight the arguments about maleness and manliness, in order to expose their coherence. That coherence undermines the efforts of those who want an Aristotle intent on taming male thumos by having men control themselves in the public sphere (Dobbs 1996); those who extol an Aristotle who makes of thumos a highly moral, disembodied form of excellence (Mansfield 2006; Lindsay 2000); and those who speak of a welcome ‘demasculinization’ of Aristotle, and of ‘the sources of resistance to dominant gender roles’ to be discovered in his works (Koziak 2000: 154). The reader of this chapter and, above all, of Aristotle’s own words will easily understand that Mayhew 2004 offers a very useful overview of Aristotle’s biology, inspired by the admirable, and yet utterly vain, wish to redeem the philosopher from ‘ideology’, which means from his own culture. On the rudimentary assumptions at work in Mayhew’s book, see Catherine McKeene’s balanced review (McKeene 2007). For an anti-materialistic interpretation of sexual difference in Aristotle, see Deslauriers 1998 and 2009. For an approach that acknowledges the normative and qualitative inspiration of Aristotle’s view of nature (as infused with values, ends, and functions), and therefore the easy association between his hylomorphism, sexual difference, and contemporary ideas about gender asymmetry, see Witt 1998.

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8. Cooler and Clever The physicality of female and male characters deserves a number of comments. The first comment concerns Aristotle’s opposition between thumos and andreia on the one hand, and dianoia and technē on the other. Females are smarter than males. Males are braver than females. Let us remember that courage, not intelligence, is for Aristotle the quality of those Greek infantrymen who tend to rebel against monarchies and establish polities, thus inventing the egalitarian self-government of the best citizens. Andreia, more precisely manliness, is the kind of excellence (aretē) that is best not absolutely, to be sure, but for a polis. Intelligence, for Aristotle, goes together with an inclination to submit and to learn. Individuals who are filled with thumos and whose character is audacious, impulsive, and irascible do not take time to exercise inquiry and wisdom. They even fail to be angry as one ought to be, by calculating how much, how long, against whom they should feel their emotion. Mindless spiritedness is what impairs the impossible citizens in northern societies: they are only keen on their freedom. They cannot endure any temporary rule. On the contrary, people who live in warm climates may well be less intrepid, but they are better equipped intellectually, in dianoia and technē. The Hellenes, of course, are perfectly balanced.⁵¹ This taxonomy of peoples fits the hematic categorization of nonhuman living beings, to be found in Parts of Animals. Blood is crucial. It can be more or less dense or hot, more or less thin, watery, or cold. ‘Thicker and hotter blood is more productive of strength, while thinner and cooler blood is more perceptive and intelligent.’⁵² Notice the correlation of hotness and thickness, coldness and liquidity. Among living beings, differences in strength and practical reason depend upon these fundamental variables. Cold-blooded beings, on account not only of the low temperature, but also of the purity of their blood, are more intelligent than hot- or thick-blooded ones. They are smart and cool. The best blood of all is indeed hot, but not too hot: it is also light and pure. Only in this condition can one combine manliness (andreia) and practical reason (phronēsis).⁵³ Gender pertains to this system of oppositions. The male is superior to the female, just as the right side of the body is superior to the

⁵¹ Aristotle, Politics 7, 1327b24–7. ⁵² Aristotle, Parts of Animals 648a1–2. b a ⁵³ Ibid., 647 29–8 11. See the excellent remarks of Lennox 2001 ad loc.

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left side and the upper body to the lower body.⁵⁴ But beyond this simple binary opposition the Aristotelian text produces a counterintuitive side effect. Females are generally colder and more humid, which entails their having cooler and more watery blood. Now the watery component of blood is responsible for intelligence. This is why cold-blooded/thinblooded animals ‘have quicker perceptions’.⁵⁵ As a consequence, women too must be cleverer. We could discard this argument as a piece of ethnocentric sophistry, but its internal logic ought to surprise us. As Aristotle argues, ‘phronēsis alone is the virtue peculiar to a ruler’.⁵⁶ And, as he also argues in a famous passage of the Politics, to govern means to pull cognitive resources. Collective decision-making is analogous to a meal to which each participant would bring a contribution. Individual input cannot be absolutely optimal per se, but aggregation results in superior competence.⁵⁷ This is the first philosophical praise of the wisdom of the crowd. How does epistemic success agree with the energetic rather than the intellectual excellence that characterizes a politeia? By choosing andreia instead of dianoia, phronesis, proairesis, or sophia as the foundational, motivational trigger of a polity, Aristotle seems to show partiality towards a virtue that has nothing to do with vision, judgement, or practical intelligence. These two claims do not clash, but only if we pay attention to the intersection of gender and age. The self-governing citizens of a politeia share andreia simply because they are male. They are warm enough to wish to be independent and govern themselves: this has to be the starting point. Military training will tap a natural resource, vital heat, which is especially abundant in young, manly bodies. Wisdom, on the contrary, requires education. And education, as the unruly Europeans demonstrate, is made difficult by hot blood. It demands time and patience. This is why, in the perfect politeia described in Politics 7 and 8, impetuous youths fight for their homeland, but it is mature adults, over thirty, who are at the helm. They will be able to rotate in ruling and being ruled. The excellence of ebullient boys creates a polity; the prudence of colder men takes care of government; the terminal dryness and frigidity of the elders is only good for religious responsibilities. Age is a crucial ⁵⁴ Aristotle, Parts of Animals 648a1–11. ⁵⁵ Ibid., 650b18–25. b ⁵⁷ Ibid., Book 3, ch. 11. ⁵⁶ Aristotle, Politics 1277 25–6.

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variable in the life of a male political animal: it reconciles virility and intelligence. Women remain out of this transformation. They are smart, but unmanly, and thus forever incapacitated for politics. They are domestic animals.⁵⁸

9. Women and Females The second comment has to do with the analogy that Aristotle builds in Politics 1 between the partnerships that compose a household, on the one hand, and forms of government, on the other. The relationship that distinguishes husband and wife is ‘political’, politikos, by contrast with the despotic interaction of master and slave and the regal authority of a father over his children. In this tripartite classification, conjugal koinōnia is, ideally, egalitarian and reciprocal: the spouse of a citizen is described as someone who could alternate between ruling and being ruled. This alternation is what occurs in most political governments: ἐν μὲν οὖν ταῖς πολιτικαῖς ἀρχαῖς ταῖς πλείσταις μεταβάλλει τὸ ἄρχον καὶ τὸ ἀρχόμενον. But in a marriage, Aristotle adds, a man always, ἀεὶ, holds a superior position vis-à-vis woman. More precisely, ‘the male deals with the female always in this manner (monopoly of rule and honour)’: τὸ δ᾽ ἄρρεν ἀεὶ πρὸς τὸ θῆλυ τοῦτον ἔχει τὸν τρόπον. Metaballein never happens. Why? Because two kinds of description are involved in the argument: one is political, the other zoological. The specific quality of a ‘political’ archē, a rule that requires the turnover of leadership and obedience, is equality (ison). Now, in terms of age and birth, an adult, freeborn woman is equal to her husband: she is neither a child nor a slave (ἐξ ἴσου γὰρ εἶναι βούλεται τὴν φύσιν καὶ διαφέρειν μηδέν). But a woman is also female. Sexual difference does not allow full enjoyment of her condition. ‘By nature, the male is more disposed to command than the female’: τό τε γὰρ ἄρρεν φύσει τοῦ θήλεος ἡγεμονικώτερον. The language is precise. Aristotle attributes a certain quality to the relation of husband and wife, namely the potential for political rotation (as this kind of political relation operates in most cases, though not always: ἐν μὲν οὖν ταῖς

⁵⁸ In Book 7 of Politics, Aristotle makes clear that soldiers, magistrates, and priests are all males who dedicate their best skills to the polis, in different phases of their lives. This massive textual fact contradicts Harold Levy’s overall interpretation of Aristotle’s thinking about women. See n. 46 in this chapter.

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πολιτικαῖς ἀρχαῖς ταῖς πλείσταις); but then he denies that the actual rotation ever occurs, and this ‘by nature’, φύσει—simply because husband and wife are, first of all, ‘male’ and ‘female’. Phusis prevents all females from enjoying the equality that is built into the political idea of ‘ruling and being ruled’. Phusis places males in a stable commanding role.⁵⁹ This twist of the argument is the source of endless discussion.⁶⁰ But, once again, we can better understand Aristotle’s train of thought if we pay attention to the vocabulary: how the text moves from man/woman (anēr/gunē) to ‘the male’/‘the female’ (to arren/to thēlu). Once we hear the language of sexual difference as it is shared among so many living beings, we are invited to supplement this passage with the general presuppositions that characterize that difference: the theory of vital heat. The male is more ‘hegemonic’ than the female because any male body (not just the body of a human male) is full of warmer blood. The vocation to take charge, to protect one’s family, and to give orders is a matter of spiritedness, thumos, and manliness, andreia. This is not just bravery on the battlefield in the face of mortal danger, but a drive to exert power. Bulls, and even molluscs, do it spontaneously. Among humans, there are variations due to the environment: the volcanic, hyperspirited, northern machos become so saturated with thumos that they cannot rule their neighbours. They are so obsessed with freedom that, presumably, they cannot be ruled either. This is too much. Eastern men, on the contrary, comply with domination to the point of accepting slavery. This is too little. The Greeks are special because they are capable of moving from one position to the other, thus implementing the kind of dynamic equality that characterizes a polity: to rule and to be ruled. They know how to be politai. In the ‘government’ of their home, Greek husbands might very well play the political game of rotation and flexibility, on the basis of equality, ἐξ ἴσου—but they do not. They just monopolize authority and respect. Not out of despotism, however, since they are not fiery ‘Europeans’, but because the metaballein that is virtually inherent in the political rapport between equals is forestalled. The climate grants them the ability to act as balanced political animals, that is, citizens, but sexual difference, in its physical reality, interferes with this disposition. Greek wives, in turn, let them behave that way. ⁵⁹ Aristotle, Politics 1, 1259a38–b10. ⁶⁰ For an overview of this discussion, see Dobbs 1996; Deslauriers 2003.

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They are not sufficiently hegemonic, self-possessed, and combative to compete. In a post-Hegelian philosophical language, we could say that women fail to struggle for recognition. In Aristotle’s logic, we say that, like all females, they are too cold to be manly. In sum, Aristotle outlines a taxonomy of political forms that places husbands and wives in a political category, but then he describes what actually happens: how they act, in conformity with the characters of ‘the female’ and ‘the male’. A different classification prevails. Physiology takes over. Confronted with their own unspirited females, human males are just too ‘hegemonic’ to yield, even for a short time. Reciprocally, wives may have the opportunity of taking turns at ruling the household, but they simply cannot perform. The best they can do falls short of expectations. In Politics 1, Aristotle fails to expand on heat, blood, and thumos, as he will do in Politics 7, but there is no doubt that the crucial point is andreia. The courage of a courageous woman matches that of a cowardly man, as we have seen. In the context of his criticism of Plato’s Republic, and against the claim that women allegedly share the same virtues as men, Aristotle repeats that the manliness of someone who is physically predisposed to command is far superior to the manliness of someone who was born to obey and is just not equipped to fight, even temporarily, for supremacy.⁶¹ There is a gender gap. For a reader of Aristotle’s biological corpus, this comes as no surprise: females are not sufficiently hot to afford true excellence. Prone to discouragement, they fail to rise to the occasion. They do not care to conquer their timē.⁶² It is a matter of thermic endowment.

⁶¹ Aristotle, Politics 2, 1260a23–4. ⁶² The best people quarrel about honour, in contrast with hoi polloi, who squabble for material possessions (Politics 2, 1267a1–2). T. Smith argues that Aristotle rejects a ‘Homeric’ ethics grounded on honour (Smith 2001: 63–93), but Aristotle constantly attributes value to the pursuit of the beautiful and fully acknowledges the legitimate praise and the timē that rewards such endeavour. This kind of courage, of which Diomedes and Hector offer a dramatic paradigm, is ‘most like true courage’, because it is due to excellence. Aristotle qualifies this virtue as politikē andreia, ‘political’ courage. But qualification is not disapproval. There is simply a new context, the polis. Now those who face danger for the sake of honour are not just warriors on the battlefield, but citizens, politai. Among brave people, individual prowess is sustained by a system of incentives: honour is the proper prize for actual courage. This andreia is therefore triggered by aversion to shame and by aspiration to the beautiful. Honour, in sum, is the political reward of the beautiful (Nicomachean Ethics 1516a16–b4). On the complexity of andreia, to be negotiated between the principle of to kalon and the politics of honour in a city, see Ward 2001.

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10. Like a Homeric King Once again, the problem is not cognitive impairment. And here we have to comment on an even more controversial Aristotelian claim: a female’s βουλευτικόν (deliberative faculty) is ‘without authority’ (ἄκυρον).⁶³ In contrast with slaves, who are entirely deprived of this faculty, and with children, who possess it in an incomplete form, women are endowed with it, but in an impotent version. They are perfectly capable of deliberation but lack the ability to carry out their decisions. In an influential article published in 1975, William Fortenbaugh had argued that, for Aristotle, women are ethically challenged by the strength of their passions. In a dualistic theory of the soul, reason and affectivity conflict: females tend to be carried away by their affects, hence the feebleness of their deliberative faculty.⁶⁴ Think of Euripides’ Medea. Pierre Vidal-Naquet opted for a radically different interpretation: women lack authority vis-à-vis other people. They cannot give ‘the force of law’ to their decisions.⁶⁵ Very wisely, Arlene Saxonhouse doubted both these readings. ‘Whether this want of “authority” in the woman’s deliberative capacity inheres in the soul itself or becomes manifest in groups of men who would scorn it coming from a woman is unclear in the text.’⁶⁶ Later contributions to this debate stand on either side of the fence.⁶⁷

⁶³ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1260a7–24. ⁶⁴ ‘In stating this lack of authority Aristotle is not referring to interpersonal relationships but rather to an intrapersonal relationship. Her deliberative capacity lacks authority, because it is often overruled by her emotions or alogical side. Her decisions and actions are too often guided by pleasures and pains so that she is unfitted for leadership and very much in need of temperance’ (Fortenbaugh 1977: 138). Fred Miller cautiously shares this position (Miller 1995: 243). A persuasive criticism of Fortenbaugh’s approach to Aristotle’s connection between psychology, metaphysics, and politics can be found in Spelman 1983. ⁶⁵ Austin and Vidal-Naquet, 1972: 183–4. ⁶⁶ Saxonhouse 1982: 208. ⁶⁷ ‘[T]he male being stronger, as a rule, with respect to that capacity, males should rule over females’, and this rule is friendly and pedagogical (Salkever 1986: 241–2). For Modrak (1994), women are unable to master their passions, hence their akuron bouleutikon. See also Dobbs 1996 and Deslauriers 2003: 208–10. Nagle (2006: 166–70) argues that women were insufficiently educated, hence their inferior bouleutikon. See also Eikeland 2008: 434. For Trott (2013: 197–201), women’s advice was not taken seriously: this is the meaning of their having an akuron bouleutikon. As we can see in Sophocles’ Ajax, ‘it is the failure of men to listen that leads women to lack authority’ (Ibid., 201). Parker (2012: 96) writes: ‘As for women, they have the bouleutikon, but it is a-kur-on, “without authority, without mastery”. Again, the terms chosen imply the result sought. Women’s minds are a-kur-on, they have no control over their emotions, and therefore need a master, a husband, a kurios.’ Along these lines, see also Riesbeck 2016.

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The solution is to connect the ‘authority’ contained in the semantic field of the words kurios, kuriotes, and akuros with an individual’s executive capability to implement a decision. In the Nicomachean Ethics, deliberation enables choice (proairesis). More precisely, proairesis is defined as ‘deliberate desire’ (βουλευτικὴ ὄρεξις) for things that are in our own power (τῶν ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν). We deliberate, we make a judgement, and we wish to implement what we have decided (ἐκ τοῦ βουλεύσασθαι γὰρ κρίναντες ὀρεγόμεθα κατὰ τὴν βούλευσιν).⁶⁸ This intentional process involves judgement, therefore intellectual ability—ἡ γὰρ προαίρεσις μετὰ λόγου καὶ διανοίας.⁶⁹ It also requires, however, awareness that our projects are feasible for us—more precisely, that we are able to bring them to fruition. Aristotle insists heavy-handedly on this point. We only decide about things that are ‘up to us’ and within the reach of possibility: βουλευόμεθα δὲ περὶ τῶν ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν καὶ πρακτῶν. This is, for all human beings, the wish to do what they can actually do, all by themselves: τῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἕκαστοι βουλεύονται περὶ τῶν δι᾽αὑτῶν πρακτῶν.⁷⁰ Therefore a decision-making process requires pragmatism and realism, but also self-confidence: first of all we need to trust our own ability to come to a decision. Only if a given undertaking appears to be doable do we go on deliberating. As soon as an endeavour looks impossible, Aristotle claims, people ‘give up’ (ἀφίστανται).⁷¹ Should we ‘distrust ourselves’ (ἀπιστοῦντες ἡμῖν αὐτοῖς), ‘as not being sufficiently apt to discern’ (οὐχ ἱκανοῖς διαγνῶναι), we ask for help from other people.⁷² Second, we engage in a deliberation about choices that lie within reach. According to Aristotle, when we finally make our decisions, it is our ‘ruling faculty’ (ἡγούμενον) that determines what to do, and makes others do it. At that point, Aristotle claims, each of us is in the position of a Homeric king, a political leader, and a military commander who first chooses a plan of action, then announces to the people what he has decided—which is what they have now to do. Everyone stops searching how to act, when he brings back the principle to himself, and his ruling faculty [ἡγούμενον]: this is what makes the decision

⁶⁸ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1113a9–11; cf. Eudemian Ethics 1226b8–9, 15–17. ⁷⁰ Ibid., 1112a31–4. ⁶⁹ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1112a15. b b ⁷² Ibid., 1112 12. ⁷¹ Ibid., 1112 25.

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[τοῦτο γὰρ τὸ προαιρούμενον]. This is clear from the archaic governments that Homer represented: the kings announced to the people what they had decided [ἃ προείλοντο].⁷³

Now, although the word kurios does not figure in this passage, its meaning—‘authority’—is crucial to the argument about ‘deliberate desire’. The language of ‘hegemony’ (hēgeomai) replaces that of ‘authority’ (kuriotēs).⁷⁴ This account of βουλευτικὴ ὄρεξις fits the discussion on bouleusis that we find in De anima. Our movements towards objects, or away from them, depend not on our thinking, argues Aristotle, but on our wishful ‘reaching out’ towards them: orexis. We think, we know, and we calculate, but knowledge (epistēmē) is not enough, as we can see if we consider the example of a doctor: he may well be hypercompetent, but his expertise alone is not sufficient to do the healing. In order to spring into action, we need ‘something else’. We need, precisely, the purposeful momentum of orexis. In synergy with thought, this moving intent does the trick. ‘That which moves is a single faculty: the faculty of desire . . . thought is never found producing movement without desire.’ Thought is not imperious: it often fails to issue any command (keleuein) to move in a certain direction or to feel a certain emotion. And sometimes, even if it does enjoin us to do these things, we fail to obey because we may experience a dissonant orexis, and thus we act accordingly and against our better judgement, as in the case of lack of self-mastery (akrasia). Aristotle uses the language of kuriotēs here. It is always ‘something else’ than pure knowledge that is kurios—in charge of, responsible for— our actual actions; for there is no motion without desire. This ‘something else’, namely orexis, may, however, fail to be entirely responsible (kuria) for a given act. If we are self-controlled, a particular desire might be there, but we abstain from acting on it because we think better, and therefore we will desire something different.⁷⁵ Now, bouleusis is precisely a kind of orexis. When we speak about bouleusis, we speak about orexis. Aristotle argues that we can wish or decide thanks to this ‘bouleutic’, intentional faculty that may cooperate with, or prevail upon, or be disabled by, practical reason. But the essential point is that agency hinges on deliberation, more precisely on

⁷³ Ibid., 1113a3–6.

⁷⁴ Mulgan 1970.

⁷⁵ Aristotle, De anima 433a4–7.

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the executive impetus of the process. It is not our logistikon that, while contemplating fearful prospects, gives us the order to be afraid. ‘It is the heart that is moved’. It is the thumos that, because of the heat and the swiftness of its nature (διὰ θερμότητα καὶ ταχυτῆτα τῆς φύσεως), jumps at retaliation when an individual feels anger. Thumos listens to the order (ἐπίταγμα) of logos and immediately plunges (ὁρμᾷ) into action.⁷⁶ This is the ‘something else’ that has the power to move us.

11. Like a Scythian King Now, for Aristotle, this language applies precisely to gender roles. As we have seen, the male is more ‘hegemonic’ than the female. ‘By nature, the male is more disposed to rule than the female’ (τό τε γὰρ ἄρρεν φύσει τοῦ θήλεος ἡγεμονικώτερον). The male is, literally, better endowed with the ruling faculty (ἡγούμενον), the internal leader that makes decisions on our behalf. Manliness is itself hegemonic, as demonstrated by properly irascible people, who are ‘manly and capable of command’.⁷⁷ A woman, Aristotle argues, is comparable with a different breed of kings: those who reign over a notorious eastern population, the Scythians. This particular royal family is afflicted by a disease: softness (malakia). Softness is highly significant in Aristotle’s ethics. It is the inability to resist pain.⁷⁸ Analogous to lack of self-mastery (akrasia), which is the failed attempt to conquer pleasure, malakia implies that one may well know what is best but then fail to follow up on one’s deliberations. Malakia is, literally, moral impotence. In situations in which most individuals would ‘be able to hold their ground’ (δύνανται ἀντέχειν), a soft man ‘is defeated and is incapable of resisting’ (ἡττᾶται καὶ μὴ δύναται ἀντιτείνειν). ‘A man who gives up before what the many can do and can resist, this man is soft and enjoys luxury—since luxury is a form of softness’ (ὁ δ᾽ ἐλλείπων πρὸς ἃ οἱ πολλοὶ καὶ ἀντιτείνουσι καὶ δύνανται, οὗτος μαλακὸς καὶ τρυφῶν: καὶ γὰρ ἡ τρυφὴ μαλακία τίς ἐστιν). Such a man may go so far in his slackness as to let his cloak trail on the ground, just to spare himself the effort of lifting it. ⁷⁶ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1149a. ⁷⁷ Ibid., 1126b 1–2; Politics 1, 1259a38–b10. ⁷⁸ Ibid., 1150a14. Softness versus endurance is related to pain; continence versus incontinence involves ways of dealing with pleasure. Someone who is always having fun, however, is soft, and this is explained by the nature of pleasure, which is ‘relaxation’, anesis and ‘rest’, anapausis. The quest for constant amusement is actually an avoidance of all possible efforts and sufferings (1150b17–19).

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More to the point for our argument on the decision-making process, if a human being happens to be soft, that individual will be incapable of holding fast in front of pain for a sufficient period of time. Consistently, that individual, once s/he has made a decision, will prove unable to stick to it. Soft people either ‘once they have deliberated do not stand by their deliberations’ (οἳ μὲν γὰρ βουλευσάμενοι οὐκ ἐμμένουμμένουσιν οἷς ἐβουλεύσαντο), or fail to deliberate altogether.⁷⁹ The cause for both their indecisiveness and their fickleness is pathos. Pathos cannot designate any old emotion in this context, but a particular weakness that affects the capacity to determine what to do and to hold good to one’s own intent. Some people behave that way, claims Aristotle, ‘because of the nature of their genos or because of illness’ (διὰ φύσιν τοῦ γένους ἢ διὰ νόσον). Scythians, for instance, are soft because of a pathological condition. Scythia is chilly, but, as we learn from the Hippocratic corpus, the best of the Scythians spend their lives on horseback, whence their sexual ailments: impotence and subsequent feminization.⁸⁰ Aristotle specifies that the kings become soft. Women are also soft, Aristotle adds, but ‘on account of their genos, and of how the female differs from the male’ (διὰ τὸ γένος, καὶ ὡς τὸ θῆλυ πρὸς τὸ ἄρρεν διέστηκεν).⁸¹ The difference between the sexes—female versus male—is sufficient to cause the moral unfitness of women. This is neither a vice nor a passing failing, but a ‘genetic’ disposition. This point is crucial. Pierre Destrée has renewed the interpretation of akrasia by drawing attention to its physical dimension.⁸² Sarah Francis has made a persuasive case for the medical subtext of Aristotle’s entire argument. Francis does not discuss malakia, but her approach shows exactly how we should re-canonize the Aristotelian corpus. For a proper understanding of Aristotle’s views on akrasia we have to consider Aristotle’s own physiological views as well as the medical and scientific tradition

⁷⁹ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1150b. ⁸⁰ On the disease that strikes the aristocracy in Scythia, see Ballabriga 1986. This is an exemplary study, which reconstructs the ‘logic of the concrete’—as the French anthropologist Françoise Héritier put it, in the wake of Claude Lévi-Strauss—at work in Hippocratic and Aristotelian texts. The body is shaped by the climate and by lifestyle. ⁸¹ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1150a9–b18. On akrasia and malakia, see Brandner 2002; Tieleman 2009. ⁸² Destrée 2007.

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to which he is indebted . . . Such an investigation is important because Aristotle’s ethical works are often treated separately from his works on physiology, yet his frequent references to medicine and natural science within his ethical works as a whole (including the Politics) show that areas that may seem to exist independently for the purpose of theoretical classification can in matters of practical application be closely connected.⁸³

This is precisely the way to go in order to extricate ourselves from the quandary of Aristotle’s views on gender and, more to the point, in order to understand both the spousal rule and women’s consilium invalidum. An intertextual and transdisciplinary reading of Aristotle’s encyclopaedia shows that the binary opposition ‘reason’ versus ‘passion’ is utterly inadequate. If we go back to William Fortenbaugh’s groundbreaking Aristotle on Emotion (Fortenbaugh 2003 [1975]), we can now see that this profound reader of the Aristotelian corpus framed Politics 1 in the right terms: Aristotle’s concern for women’s distinctive capacities. This is indeed what matters for Aristotle in this argument about forms of excellence, and not the success of women’s attempts to persuade men, as subsequent interpreters have argued. Fortenbaugh’s approach becomes misleading, however, when he explains akuron in the language of ‘emotion’ and irrationality.⁸⁴ Aristotle does not argue that women are more emotional and passionate than males, quite the opposite! All females are cool and clever, as we have seen. This is the premise. And this is their problem. Like all females, women are soft, to be sure, but softness is not an irrational passion: it is a pathological sensitivity to pain. Whenever a proper deliberation has to result in a course of action, whereas a good man can count on his ‘ruling faculty’, like a decisive Homeric king, women will emulate an impotent Scythian king. This is the point of their ‘unauthoritative’ deliberative faculty, akuron bouleutikon. The first challenge, for women, is to deliberate confidently, in the conviction that success is ‘up to them’. And, should they come to that point, they have firmly to abide by their own resolutions. In these critical moments, what is needed is ‘something else’, something other than knowledge. It is a certain kind of desire: the right emotional energy, adjusted to the right end. The problem, for an Aristotelian woman, is

⁸³ Francis 2011. For an equally inspiring approach to Aristotle, see Bianchi 2014. ⁸⁴ Fortenbaugh 1975. This dualistic reading concurs with Thomas Aquinas’ comment on Aristotle’s Politics 1 (Sententia libri Politicorum 1, 10). See Köhler 2008: 527–34.

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how to find that resource. The ultimate test is to come to a decision, to bring that decision to fruition, not to give up, not to fall prey to despair. The hurdle is to be able to do so—notwithstanding the congenital malakia. All this is a matter of manliness. Andreia is, once again, the proper experience of an emotion. It is the art of being afraid, but of getting into action for the sake of ‘the beautiful’ and with the necessary oomph of thumos. It is thumos that responds to fear, due to natural heat. ‘It is the heart that is moved’. Andreia is a feisty, heartfelt, full-bloodied, go-getting virtue. Like all females (with the exception of she-bears and panthers), women are strong in prudence and cunning, but specifically subpar in thumos and andreia. The sybarite who cannot be bothered to pick up his cloak is the very opposite of a warrior ready to throw himself into combat. The former shirks the slightest feeling of discomfort; the latter undertakes a gruesome training, and then takes the risk of being wounded, mangled, crushed, and killed. Gender matches this binary opposition.

12. Hopeless and Desperate We have connected Aristotle’s discussion on the bouleutikon in Politics to the discussion on bouleusis in De anima and to the passages of the Nicomachean Ethics on proairesis, bouleutikē orexis, and malakia. Let us now enrich this semantic constellation with another crucial term, which belongs to the Aristotelian language of agency: exousia.⁸⁵ Exousia means ‘ability’, ‘right’, or ‘privilege’.⁸⁶ It is the ‘entitlement’ that defines a citizen: ‘the man who has the ability/right/privilege of partaking in deliberate and judicial rule, we call him a citizen of that city’ (ᾧ γὰρ ἐξουσία κοινωνεῖν ἀρχῆς βουλευτικῆς ἢ κριτικῆς, πολίτην ἤδη λέγομεν εἶναι ταύτης τῆς πόλεως).⁸⁷ To be a politēs means to be ‘entitled’ to political deliberation. But this ‘entitlement’ reflects a belief in competence and capability. As we might expect, exousia has to do with andreia: the powerful are more ambitious and ‘more courageous/manly’ (andrōdesteroi) than the rich, because they strive to accomplish things that ‘their power gives them the ability/right/privilege (exousia) of carrying out’.⁸⁸

⁸⁵ Aristotle, Rhetoric 1, 1369a. ⁸⁷ Aristotle, Politics 1275b18–20.

⁸⁶ See Miller 1995. ⁸⁸ Aristotle, Politics 1391a.

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I can be courageous or manly only if my power enables me to accomplish what I want to. Powerless, I just cannot be as courageous. Power fosters a sense of possibility, exousia. Exousia generates trust in oneself, thus more andreia. But andreia itself is made of this kind of trust: it is the right state, intermediate between permanent fear—that is, cowardice—and excessive audacity (tharrein, tharsos). Properly experienced, this is a virtuous combination of confidence and hope. ‘The coward is someone in despair: he fears everything. The courageous/ manly person is the opposite: to be confident is typical of the hopeful’ (δύσελπις δή τις ὁ δειλός: πάντα γὰρ φοβεῖται. ὁ δ᾽ ἀνδρεῖος ἐναντίως: τὸ γὰρ θαρρεῖν εὐέλπιδος).⁸⁹ This emotional complexity brings us full circle to the importance of thumos. For Aristotle, andreia entails the choice to act for the sake of the beautiful; but it requires an affective energy that can be described as boiling blood, thumos.⁹⁰ No courage without thumos, because I can very well contemplate the beauty of an act and go on forever thinking how beautiful it would be, but at some point, if I want to leap into action, I need to shift gears from thought to desire (orexis), from meditation to spiritedness and buoyancy (thumos). And, to have thumos, I need hot blood. Am I freezing, in an attack of panic? Let me hit my thighs, so that my vital heat can spread to the right places. Reliance on one’s power to succeed (exousia), confidence (tharrein), hopefulness (elpis), and spiritedness (thumos), in conclusion, are all correlated with courage or manliness. Women are off limits. Women lack both assurance and fortitude: in the course of a decision-making process, they do not trust themselves; should they decide, they cannot stick to their decisions. Their particular kind of akrasia—softness—makes them ineffectual. Whenever pain challenges them, be it effort, struggle, or danger, they flee, they give up, they yield. A woman is doomed to having an inferior virtue. Why? Because she is female. Her femaleness, thus the watery, colder texture of her blood, correlates with an inferior thumos. This enters, as a material cause, in the composition of her character. A man has the physiological chance of choosing his level of excellence and, therefore, of feeling self-assured, ⁸⁹ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1116a2–3. On confidence, hope, and fear, see Curzer 2012: 29–33. Curzer tends to distinguish confidence from hope, whereas I emphasize the combination of trust in oneself and trust in what might happen. ⁹⁰ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1116b 29–31: ‘The blood boiled (ἔζεσεν αἷμα) . . . courageous men act for the sake of the beautiful, but spiritedness helps them’ (ὁ δὲ θυμὸς συνεργεῖ αὐτοῖς).

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hopeful, and courageous, which means manly. A woman’s agency is undermined and undone, from the inside—from the stuff that determines her personality. Aristotle makes explicit the hylomorphic articulation of behaviour and corporeal matter, but he does so in his works on life and the body. As we have read in History of Animals, the female is physiologically ‘dispirited’ and in a condition of greater ‘despair’ than the male. Ἔστι δὲ καὶ δύσθυμον μᾶλλον τὸ θῆλυ τοῦ ἄρρενος καὶ δύσελπι. Females are softer in character than males, μαλακώτερον γὰρ τὸ ἦθός ἐστι τῶν θηλειῶν. Females are less endowed with spirit than males, ἀθυμότερα δὲ τὰ θήλεα πάντα τῶν ἀρρένων. Woman is more inclined to pity and more tearful than man, and she is more envious, more prone to complaining, insulting and punching, γυνὴ ἀνδρὸς ἐλεημονέστερον καὶ ἀρίδακρυ μᾶλλον, ἔτι δὲ φθονερώτερον καὶ μεμψιμοιρότερον, καὶ φιλολοίδορον μᾶλλον καὶ πληκτικώτερον. This catalogue of gendered features acquires ethical significance in light of the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics; vice versa, the intricate analysis of deliberation, choice, courage, confidence, and softness comes to life thanks to these cameos of human and non-human life. The meaning of akuron bouleutikon also becomes clearer. Let us imagine: a wife can very well predict that a certain project might be a good idea, but will she trust her ability to make a good decision, to take the initiative, to enter in a competition, to negotiate successfully, to hold the ground, to surmount a setback—without being discouraged? Resolve, self-confidence, and hope are needed at every step. Confronted with an obstacle, she will have to stay strong. In the face of opposition, she will have to put her foot down. Disappointed, she will have to endure frustration, or even humiliation. All this is painful. And she is not equipped. A disabled thumos and an impaired hopefulness result in a deficiency of andreia. Her malakia is physiological. Cold blood gets colder. Tears just flow. Futile aggressiveness erupts. A woman may well try to make a sound decision, but she will lack faith in her capacity to act and will prove too spineless and faint-hearted to withstand suffering. Her ruling principle (ἡγούμενον) is defective. She will never behave like a Homeric king. She is a coward. It is not her fault; it is her nature. From insufficient vital heat derives watery and tepid blood, hence the defective thumos, the chronic timidity and the systematic hopelessness—in sum, the opposite of andreia: cowardice. This condition entails poor selfreliance, which deprives her deliberative faculty of ‘authority’ and

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explains the inability to command. The permanent subjection of a wife to her husband is physiological. The Politics is crystal clear, but we need Parts of Animals and History of Animals, not only the Nicomachean Ethics, to appreciate this. Let us now try to envision concrete situations through an Aristotelian lens. Take a bouleutēs, a member of the council of the Five Hundred in Athens. Let us call him Strepsiades. That ordinary citizen is now in the position of boulesthai. This is his political mission. He has even taken an oath, that of doing so as well as he possibly can. Today, for instance, he has to decide what items are to be included in the agenda for the next assembly. Strepsiades reflects about ends and means, weighs different options, assesses his own capabilities to finalize his decision, listens to his fellow bouleutai and takes their advice, but, at some point, he has to stop pondering. He has to vote. At that point he has to bring the question back to himself and to his ruling faculty. He, or, more precisely, that faculty—the ἡγούμενον—has to select in advance (proairein) the hopefully right thing to do. That man is able to take that step, Aristotle argues, because he believes that he can do so. ‘We decide about things that are up to us, and within the reach of possibility’ (βουλευόμεθα δὲ περὶ τῶν ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν καὶ πρακτῶν). The point is not merely realism, let me insist, but selfconfidence. A man trusts (pisteuei) his own ability to pick the right course of action and to accomplish what is doable for him. Now, imagine a human being who cannot count on a ‘ruling faculty’! That individual would be impaired, incapacitated, disabled, precisely at that critical juncture, in the decision-making process. This is woman. By nature, according to Aristotle, a woman—say, Myrrhina—does not have the means to shift from the intellectual, advisory phase of proairesis to the internal executive order: ‘This is what I will do!’ Women always need the help of a man, both physically and juridically. A woman lacks the trust (pistis)—and the hope (elpis), as we have seen in the History of Animals—that success is up to her. If we combine the meaning of kurios and that of hēgeomai, therefore, we can conclude that akuron bouleutikon is ‘a deliberative faculty without authority’, because there is something missing in the progression of female agency: the ‘hegemonic’ part is not hegemonic enough. Myrrhina’s bouleutikon allows her to engage in reasonable, prudent, astute planning (which a slave could not even begin to do), but it fails to sustain her intent with the regal self-reliance of a leader who finally declares: ‘yes, we can!’

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If Greek men were thought to be able to rise over fear—and that was the meaning of andreia—it is for a reason: they were considered physically capable. That virtue was, to start, in their body. This is what I mean when I say that we ought to place masculinity at the forefront of Athenian political culture, not at its margins, and that we should take our attention to the ‘democratic body’ one step further. The scholarly step consists of bringing into the picture texts such as the Hippocratic corpus and Aristotle’s biology, or the multiple ‘domains of knowledge’ (as Michel Foucault would say) concerned with the male body. This step takes us further, because it expands the picture by including ideas that, through physicians and other health practitioners, were most probably well known among ordinary people. This kind of knowledge was not esoteric, elitist, or scholastic but circulated in society at large. This expansion of the canon does not go without saying. In his pioneering study ‘Representing the Body Politics: The Theater of Manhood in Ancient Athens’, Jack Winkler posited that ‘the citizenry of Athens . . . was essentially a corporation of men, ready to defend their territory and households’.⁹¹ He then described ‘manly excellence’ in opposition to ‘bad physique’ and the moral character that goes with it. Winkler insisted upon a ‘strategy of interpretation’ that preferred a resolutely social representation of the body to one that would be ‘putatively natural and timeless’. To view representations of the body ‘in terms of biology and anatomy’, he argued, meant to lose ‘the historical dimension of their meaning’. And he concluded his methodological statement with the words: ‘Anatomy, we may even say, is politics.’⁹² I could not agree more on this felicitous allusion. But this is why I contend that anatomy— ancient anatomy, that is, the normative, paradigmatic knowledge of the gendered body the ancients pursued—should be granted a place of honour in our study of ancient politics. Anatomy, to recapture the Freudian twist, is political destiny.

⁹¹ Winkler 1990b: 217.

⁹² Ibid., 221.

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7 On the Alleged Bastardy of Rhesus Errant Orphan of Unknown Paternity or Child of Many Genres? Marco Fantuzzi

Euripides’ authorship of the Rhesus (henceforth Rh.) has been questioned since antiquity, and consequently often discussed; and the same is true of the date of this play. However, its literary agenda and ambitions have not always received as much consideration as its authorship, and I believe the time has come to take its artistic aspirations seriously again. In the first part of this chapter I will revisit past evaluations of Rh.’s authorship and quality, in order to ascertain when and how the condemnation of its artistic achievements joined and justified doubts about its authenticity. In the second part I will show how, if we take the play seriously, we can see it engaging in sophisticated intertextual and generic games, which give ample testimony to the skilfulness of its composition. Rh. has come down to us as part of the corpus of Euripides’ tragedies, but already one of the ancient hypotheseis, (‘summaries’) that preface the text in some manuscripts—namely hypothesis b Diggle—records that some supposed that this drama is inauthentic, believing it is not by Euripides, and that it ‘shows more the stamp of Sophocles’ (τὸν Σοφόκλειον μᾶλλον ὑποφαίνειν χαρακτῆρα). According to the hypothesis, however, these doubts about Rh. were misplaced, because ‘in the didaskaliai the play is recorded as authentic’. In Σ Rh. 528, we find the additional note that Crates forgave what he considered an astronomical

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mistake at Rh. 528 by observing that Euripides would have been young and therefore no expert in ἡ περὶ τὰ μετέωρα θεωρία (‘the study of stars’) when he wrote the tragedy. Apparently the ancient doubters who pondered about the authenticity of Rh. did not go so far as to consider the play the work of a lesser poet; rather they deemed it worthy even of ‘Sophocles’ stamp’. Crates, in turn, preferred to adduce Euripides’ young age as the reason for the astronomical mistake he was focusing on, and not immaturity or a lack of dramatic or stylistic skill on the part of an assumed anonymous author. We have no evidence that the ancients considered Rh. an inferior work, which could not have been written by Euripides because it failed to live up to Euripides’ standard—or to any of the standards of fifth-century tragedy, for that matter. The history of modern scholarly research on Rh. also starts out with a few scholars who doubted the authenticity of the tragedy, but not because they assumed it to be inferior in artistic quality; rather they thought, in tune with one ancient opinion, that it seemed more the work of Sophocles (or, alternatively, of Aeschylus). Joseph Justus Scaliger¹ was the first modern scholar to express doubts about Euripidean authorship, but at the same time he also stated that Rh. pursues a verbal sublimity ‘more grandiloquent’ (grandiloquentior) than that of Euripides. He thus hesitantly suggested, perhaps in the wake of hypothesis b, which he, however, did not quote, that the tragedy might have been by Sophocles.² Sophoclean or Aeschylean authorship was also endorsed by some authoritative scholars of the eighteenth³ and early nineteenth centuries. Karl Lachmann, for instance, tried to argue from the lyric structures of the choruses of Rh. that it could have been by Aeschylus rather than by Sophocles,⁴ and August Heinrich Matthiae suggested that Rh. was authored either by a contemporary of Euripides or by an older tragic poet.⁵ As a matter of fact, scholarly accusations of ‘inferiority’ became explicit only at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They did not appear out of nowhere. At the end of the sixteenth century, Martin ¹ Scaliger 1600: 6–8. ² There is a substantial difference, however, between the certainty with which he denies Euripidean authorship and the way he speaks of ‘Sophocles or another writer’ as its author. ³ According to Valckenaer 1767: 93, Florens Christianus and Daniel Heinsius favoured Aeschylean authorship. ⁴ Lachmann 1819: 116–17. ⁵ Matthiae 1824: 2–5.

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Antonio Del Rio had cursorily conjectured that Rh. was composed by Euripides junior, a nephew of the tragedian and his namesake, or by Euripides senior, who was a generation older than the famous tragedian.⁶ Del Rio did not, however, connect his suggestion on the non-Euripidean paternity of Rh. to any negative or critical evaluation of the play’s aesthetic qualities. Such a different evaluation was, however, already clear in the work of Samuel Petit, who in 1630 started to collect cahiers de doléance on the supposed weakness of Rh.’s plot and surmised that it was by Aristarchus, a tragedian contemporary to Euripides.⁷ A century later, Jacques Hardion shared with Petit the same contestation of Euripidean authorship and the same inclination to argue against it, especially by criticizing the plot’s lack of verisimilitude, although he did not make fanciful attempts at identifying an alternative author.⁸ These two scholars probably are the prototypes of the thesis that Rh. cannot be by Euripides, and also cannot be by Sophocles, and therefore has to be by a lesser author, because it is not up to the level of either of the two great tragedians. It is significant for what we are about to argue that Hardion in particular based his speculations on anomalies in terms of tragic quality. He explicitly maintained that ‘the aim of tragedy, in Aristotle’s opinion, must be to provoke terror and pity, and to purge us from them by letting

⁶ Del Rio 1593, Prolegomena, Book I, ch. 22: Euripides, vel Iunior eius quem habemus nepos, vel secundum alios Senior eiusdem avus: huic tribuuntur Medea, Orestes, Polyxena; ego et Rhesum illi tribuerim (‘Euripides, either the junior, the nephew of the author whose plays we have, or according to others the senior, the grandfather of the junior, to whom Medea, Orestes, Polyxena are ascribed, and I would also add Rhesus’). Boeckh 1808: 225–31 suggested Euripides Junior (the son of the great tragedian) as the author of Rh. He was followed by Porter 1929: lii–liii, who also agreed with Boeckh in ascribing to this younger Euripides both Rh. and the anapaestic prologue of Iphigenia in Aulis, which was staged posthumously. ⁷ Petit 1630: i.186. The hypothesis was wrongly based on the improbable assumption that the Aristarchus quoted in Σ D Hom. Il.10.282 was the tragedian, and not—as would be usual for Homeric Σ—the Hellenistic philologist. ⁸ Most of these objections are banal or infelicitous. For instance, both Petit 1630: 195–6 and (more clearly) Hardion 1736: 331–3 insist that the chorus of watchmen in Rh. does not behave plausibly. Their criticism is that in this play Odysseus and Diomedes seem to move around with great freedom in the camps of the Trojans and their allies, whereas Homer had more credibly distinguished between Trojans taking care to watch and allies who did not pay attention (see also the criticism of the charioteer at Rh. 763–9). This distinction more believably explained why Odysseus and Diomedes could reach the camp of Rhesus. But in Rh. Hector emphasizes precisely the dangerousness of the sentinels leaving their post and, more importantly, the guards do finally intercept Odysseus and Diomedes.

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them come to us. But, there is nothing in the tragedy Rh. which is aimed in this direction’.⁹ More than a century later, Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer (1767) sympathized with Del Rio’s suggestions about Euripides the younger.¹⁰ He also adopted and lavishly re-elaborated Petit’s and Hardion’s assumption¹¹ that Rh. cannot be by Euripides or Sophocles, not only because it is different from their productions but also because it is inferior to them (or falls below their standards). In fact Valckenaer’s criticism of the authenticity of Rh. makes other points too, such as the observation that the play uses more uncommon and recherché words than all other surviving tragedies of Euripides combined.¹² But the complaint he articulates at greatest length concerns, again, the inadequacy of Rh. as a tragedy and highlights the boastfulness and ineffectiveness of the protagonists, Hector and Rhesus, as unproficient tragic characters.¹³ It is from similar arguments that the first thorough, impassioned, and authoritative attack on the Euripidean authorship of Rh. derives. It stems from the pen of Gottfried Hermann. Hermann also endorses the idea that Rh. would have been produced by an enthusiastic but incompetent writer and describes his psychology with a verve that may seem humorously mean-spirited to us. He thus deserves, in a way, copyright on the idea that this author was a lesser artist—a most untalented though most ambitious hack. Hermann admits that this lesser tragedian knew well the formal structural elements that are typical of tragedy,¹⁴ but argues that he nonetheless failed to produce a good tragedy, and for five reasons. The last reason on Hermann’s list is one that Valckenaer had also highlighted in his briefer cahiers de doléances: the excessive use of rare ⁹ Hardion 1736: 329–30. Hardion remarks that the action narrated in Rh. is not really tragic, because it demonstrates again and again the superiority of the Greeks over the Asiatic Trojans; it therefore communicates an agreeable and reassuring message, which does not trigger the audience’s fear (this remark is, again, in tune with Aristotle’s observation that contemplating the pains of an enemy in war cannot arouse much compassion). ¹⁰ Valckenaer 1767: 95. ¹¹ It is clear that Valckenaer has both in mind; see ibid., 98 and 95. ¹² Ibid., 96. ¹³ Ibid., 98–107 (almost the whole chapter ‘De Rheso incerti dramate’). ¹⁴ Namely descriptio actionis, distributio partium, officia personarum, ratio diverbiorum, dispositio divisioque chori, munerumque inter cantores alternatio, eqs (‘description of the action, distribution of roles, duties of the characters, structure of dialogues, position and division of the chorus, division and alternation of tasks among the chorus’ singers’, Hermann 1828: 282).

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words ‘gathered from anywhere’ (undique collecta).¹⁵ Hermann’s first reason is familiar from Valckenaer as well: imperitia inventionis (‘lack of skill of the plot’)—the design of plotting or characterization details that Hermann deemed inadequate for a tragedy. The main examples of such inadequacy that Hermann provides are the two entrances of the chorus, parodos and epiparodos. In the first, the Trojan watchmen (who make up the chorus in Rh.) walk into the orchestra in hectic anxiety and have a series of anxious exchanges with Hector (1–33). In the second, they encounter the two Greek spies and commandos Odysseus and Diomedes (Rh. 675–91). As regards the chorus’ unusually physical run-in with Odysseus, who pretends to be a Trojan, Hermann adduces the single parallel of the nocturnal encounters of Sosia and Amphitruo with their respective doubles in Plautus’ Amphitryon and comments, not unreasonably: comoediae plura licita sunt quam tragoediae (‘comedy can get away with more than tragedy’).¹⁶ I will return to these passages later on. In keeping with these observations, Hermann characterizes the author of what he believes to be an incongruous tragedy as an overambitious dilettante, utterly unaware of his shortcomings. Had that author just abandoned the project, Hermann would have forgiven him; but instead the author sedulo perfecit expolivitque (‘accomplished and polished it diligently’), with the typical stubbornness of a man who, sitting in the isolation of his house, studia sua umbratica tranquillo animo tractat (‘deals in quietude of mind with his retired studies’). In Hermann’s eyes, this author hopes to find admirers who are similar to him and does not care for people who, unlike him, applaud poets who stir their emotions.¹⁷ This supposed lack of attention to the arousal of emotional responses in large audiences and the related preference for the approval of a few sympathetic scholarly colleagues explains Hermann’s dating of the play to the Hellenistic age (independently of, but in tune with, Morstadt 1827). After Hermann, the hypothesis that the author of Rh.

¹⁵ Hermann provides the first full list of rare words in Rh.: ibid., 289–96. ¹⁶ Ibid., 283–4. ¹⁷ Ibid., 283. Hermann’s emphasis on the absolute isolation of the incapable dabbler in tragedy who works only for his friends and colleagues and does not care about a larger popular audience should not surprise, if we consider the strong Kantian background to his aesthetic thought. Universality is one of the crucial requisites of beauty for Kant, and in 1794 Hermann had written an essay titled ‘De poeseos generibus’, which consisted of a detailed application and specification of Kant’s aesthetic principles: see Schramm 2010.

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was a tragedian of the Hellenistic Pleiad has been picked up only by Otto Menzer (1867).¹⁸ Although the idea that Rh. must be the work of a lesser talent largely held the field in later nineteenth-century scholarship,¹⁹ the author was commonly thought to have lived not in the Hellenistic age, but in the fourth century (more specifically in its first half).²⁰ The twentieth century saw at least two major attempts at reasserting Euripidean authorship. One was made by Roger Goossens and Henry Grégoire in the 1930s, who suggested that Rh. reflects on the relations between Athens and its Thracian allies in the 420s BC.²¹ The other attempt was William Ritchie’s. Ritchie (1964) provides the most recent detailed stylistic and metrical analysis of the tragedy and lists formidable evidence in favour of the thesis that Rh. could be by Euripides, suggesting, in accordance with Crates, that this was the earliest of Euripides’ extant works and hypothesizing that it was composed between 455 and 440 BC. Invaluable for all sorts of stylistic or linguistic analyses, Ritchie’s book has been the almost unique reference work on this tragedy for forty years, but its main conclusions on the authenticity of the play never met with great favour: immediately after the appearance of the book, Edward Fraenkel’s (1965) review expressed the greatest appreciation for the scholarly acumen of its contributions to textual, metrical, and exegetical aspects of the tragedy but reaffirmed the idea that the play’s composition by a lesser, fourth-century author was most probable. Neither the team of ancient and modern supporters of Rh.’s Euripidean authorship nor the opposing team has so far scored enough points to win the game, and no certainty seems to have surfaced about the chronology of the play after more than two thousand years of debate. This is not surprising, since slight differences or analogies between Euripides’ plays and Rh. in vocabulary, metrics, dramatic technique, and so on can hardly prove that Rh. is or is not by Euripides: an author does not necessarily have to write in exactly the same way for ¹⁸ After Menzer, this dating appears to have been approved only by Fabbri 1920: 194, with no new arguments. ¹⁹ See e.g. Bernhardy 1845: 2, 434–8 and Hagenbach 1863: 61–4. ²⁰ The same chronology had already been suggested by Hardion 1736: 336–7. After Bernhardy and Hagenbach (in this order, pace Liapis 2012: lxxi), the standard dating adopted by all the scholars who do not believe that Rh. is not by Euripides (among them Pearson, Wilamowitz, Rolfe, Macurdy, Porter, Geffcken, Schmid, Pohlenz, Lucas, Björck, Lesky) places this tragedy in the fourth century. ²¹ See e.g. Fantuzzi 2011.

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his whole life.²² Euripides in particular certainly changed his stylistic and metrical preferences. On the narrative front, a lack of consistent tragic pathos and the presence of some (actually not that uncommon in Euripides as well) comic elements in Rh. were often used in the nineteenth century to demonstrate non-Euripidean authorship; but they could be reinterpreted by Burnett (1985) as suited to the work of a young Euripides who has not yet found his own mode; he loves but distrusts the conventional forms, and so he raids and ridicules the work of others without a qualm. In Rh. he writes a play against war, but he makes it also an attack on the traditions of tragedy by systematically reducing its familiar structures and material to the level of the absurd.

However, as Burnett herself conclusively admits, there is a structural wit to be observed, and also a knowing experimentation with dramatic forms, and these are qualities that are found elsewhere only in the mature plays of Euripides. The interest in exotic religion, and the balancing dry, demythologized, but serious glance given to the Hellenic gods, are exactly what we should expect from the poet of Helen, Iphigenia among the Taurians, and the Bacchae.²³

Burnett’s is perhaps the best way to interpret some features of Rh.’s poetics within the confines of fifth-century tragic poetics. It is very hard to subscribe to Burnett’s simple equation of Rh. with a satyr drama or a tragedy of reversed catastrophe, however, since our play does not have a happy ending at all, and the charioteer’s description of the stealthy massacre of Rhesus and his Thracians and the Muse’s mourning scene are not the proper way to conclude a burlesque or a ‘happy ending’ play.²⁴ How can such results cause anything but despair? Analysed in terms of the intrusion of comic elements, Rh. has been deemed the work of an incapable minor author or a still too young and disoriented Euripides, though not one without the ‘qualities that are found elsewhere only in the mature plays of Euripides’.²⁵ If we think that Rh. is from the

²² As restated e.g. by Tuilier 1983. ²³ Burnett 1985: 51. ²⁴ As observed by Kitto 1977: 344. As Burnett 1985: 49 admits, the poetic intention of its author ‘was not one that could be conveyed by the joyous cruelty or the fantastic quality of the satyr genre. Instead he has made a piece that is neither tragic nor satyresque, one that is cruel without much jollity.’ ²⁵ Burnett 1985: 51.

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fifth century and, in order to evaluate its literary ambitions and achievements, we limit ourselves to comparing it to the tragic canon (including Euripides’ ‘melodramatic’ plays, the result seems to be a perennial wavering between different forms of minority for Rh.’s author as compared to the authenticated works of Euripides’ maturity: a minor nonEuripidean imitator of Euripides, a young Euripides experimenting with literary forms because he has not yet found his way, or an older Euripides who took the literary experiments familiar from his later plays to a new level, in order to refrain from routine. Every option, I suspect, is doomed to appear a conjectural act of faith. A much less damning evaluation of the Rh.’s author can be reached if we change the parameters according to which we evaluate the play and simply move away from the standard of fifth-century tragedy in general and Euripides in particular. The tragedy may in fact seem incongruously experimental even when it is compared to the rest of Euripides’ late oeuvre. But this is no longer the case, and the tragedy actually may find a not-so-anomalous niche in literary history, if it is considered as an imitation not (only) of Euripides, but also of certain literary features of what is its obvious non-tragic model, Iliad 10. The key to an adequate appreciation of the relationship between the two texts lies in a fuller examination of Rh.’s comic elements. Hermann (1828) had already pointed, correctly, to the incongruously comic nature of Rh.’s parodos and epiparodos; the epiparodos in particular had reminded him of Plautus.²⁶ The parodos, too, featuring as it does panic-stricken watchmen who are so anxious to make Hector aware of fires unexpectedly flaring in the Greek camp as to be suspected of paranoia, finds its best parallels either in comedy (Ar. Ach. 564–71) or in the Hilferuf (cry-for-help) scenes of satyr drama.²⁷ Later on in the tragedy, after leaving the stage (l. 564), the chorus re-enters the scene (this is the epiparodos). Just before they left, the Trojan watchmen had missed Odysseus and Diomedes by a hair’s breadth (ll. 527–64). As the two Greeks and the watchmen run into each other again (ll. 675ff.), the first part of the epiparodos turns into a messy comedy of errors: instead of leading to what we would consider the natural result of such an encounter, namely the defeat and capture of Odysseus and Diomedes,

²⁶ See p. 181 in this chapter.

²⁷ Burnett 1985: 18.

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Odysseus’ trickery (he pretends to be a Trojan) turns this scene into another potentially comic encounter—like the earlier one between Paris and Athena at Rh. 642–74, where Athena had successfully pretended to be Aphrodite. Examples of physical aggression between chorus and actor(s) are not common in tragedy—the closest parallels are in Aeschylus (Supp. 836–910) and Sophocles (OC 856–7)—and there certainly is nothing in all of fifth-century tragedy or satyr play like the blind turmoil and remarkable physicality of Rh.’s chase scene.²⁸ In fact the chorus’ calls at its opening—ἔα ἔα· βάλε βάλε βάλε· θένε θένε . / τίς ἁνήρ; / λεῦσσε· τοῦτον αὐδῶ. / δεῦρο δεῦρο πᾶς (‘What is this? Shoot shoot shoot: smite smite smite. Who is the man? Look, here is the one I mean. Here, everyone!’, ll. 675–80)—find a close parallel in a comic brief astrophic song, which includes a similar series of imperatives and likewise has the chorus rushing out from a hiding place: οὗτος αὐτός ἐστιν, οὗτος· / βάλλε, βάλλε, βάλλε, βάλλε, / παῖε παῖε τὸν μιαρόν. / οὐ βαλεῖς, οὐ βαλεῖς; (‘There he is, the very man. Shoot shoot shoot; hit hit the bastard. Will you not shoot? Will you not shoot?’, Ar. Ach. 280–3). This Aristophanic passage has more than once been suspected of being a parody of Rh., and thus was used to demonstrate the Euripidean authorship of the tragedy.²⁹ But instead of providing a target for Aristophanes’ parody, Rh.’s author may well have imitated a typical comic scene³⁰ (see also Ar. Eq. 247–54), as he also does, apparently, in the parodos. In addition to Rh.’s parodos and epiparodos, whose intrinsically comic nature attracted Hermann’s attention, we can note the presence of another comic scene immediately preceding the epiparodos. At Rh. 642–64, Athena, disguised as Aphrodite, makes fun of Paris. Gods in disguise are otherwise attested in comedy (e.g. Dionysus dressed as Heracles in Aristophanes’ Frogs,³¹ or disguised as Paris and as a ram in Cratinus’ Dionysalexandros;³² or Zeus disguising himself as Artemis and thus entering Callisto’s bed in a comedy of unknown title by Amphis³³); or in satyr drama (e.g. Silenus pretending to be Ganymedes and seducing the Cyclops in Euripides’ Cyclops).³⁴ ²⁸ As Burnett comments: ‘at this point the drama’s latent absurdity and bestiality take over the stage’ (ibid., 41). ²⁹ See Morstadt 1827: vi; Bates 1916: 5–8. ³⁰ I agree with Liapis 2012: 256 and with Fries 2014: 363, 371, 375. ³¹ See Ar. Ra. 495–6. ³² Poetae comici Graeci (PCG) 39–51. ³³ PCG 46. ³⁴ See Burnett 1985: 39–40 and 185.

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Then there is the ‘guessing game’ scene at 164–83, a sort of dialogue of the deaf that ridicules both Hector’s monomaniacal focus on heroic values and Dolon’s venality. The episode is completely irrelevant to the dynamics of the dramatic action, and its comic nature has so far escaped scholarly attention. The introductory distich of the stichomythia (164–5), where Hector asks Dolon to choose his reward for the spy mission, and the concluding one (182–3), where Dolon finally states that he wants Achilles’ horses, could perfectly stand alone without 166–81, and we can thus surmise that the author chooses to add these lines with purposeful deliberation. Hector suggests several different prizes and Dolon rejects them one after another, until Hector apparently has no more ideas: only at this point does Hector ask an explicit question (l. 181) and thus occasions Dolon’s final answer, which exhausts the rationale of the stichomythia. The theme of the dialogue between Hector and Dolon is easily understandable as a piece of ‘political tragedy’ that exemplifies the assembly’s debates on the honours designed to reward the city’s ‘benefactors’, euergetai.³⁵ But its form, the guessing game, has no direct precedent in the short dialogue between Hector and Dolon in Iliad 10³⁶ and is formally paralleled only by some briefer comic scenes of riddle repartees (e.g. Ar. Ach. 418–31, V. 74–85, Ra. 55–67; Men. Per. 276–92). The passage from Menander may also be a case of ‘paratragedy’ (paratragoedia), as it follows the model of Rh. (a semi-comic model from tragedy!), but is also in the stream of the Aristophanic precedents.³⁷ It turns out, then, that Rh. includes at least four scenes that the audience could probably understand as comic, or at least as displaying a tone that was paralleled in comedy rather than in tragedy. Besides, that comic tone was firmly integrated into the parodos and the epiparodos and thus might bear some structural significance (the epiparodos marks out a real new beginning for the second part of the tragedy, which deals with the slaughter of Rhesus and its consequences, whereas the first part was a

³⁵ See Fantuzzi 2016a. ³⁶ For a diligent assessment and review of Iliad 10 as a multifaceted model for Rh., see Fries 2014: 8–11. ³⁷ Moschion wants to send Daos as a ‘spy’, κατάσκοπος (295; compare Rh. 150 κατόπτης), to spy on his mother and his beloved Glykera, and lists two possible ways of life with which Daos might be rewarded if he accomplishes his mission. Daos turns down two of them in succession, until he himself suggests the prize of the profession he desires. See Fantuzzi and Konstan 2013.

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most substantial variation on the theme of the Homeric Doloneia). These comic influences seem too numerous, too recognizable, and too structurally emphatic to constitute random slips on the part of an author who would like to write a tragedy but does not accomplish it, as Hermann suggested. We have then to assume that Rh.’s author wanted to write a tragedy where ‘smiles are occasionally allowed’.³⁸ But, again, is this contamination the fruit of some hack’s lack of dramaturgic talent and a sort of pre-Hellenistic isolated and failed experiment? Or, alternatively, is Rh.’s ‘contaminated’ character part of the systematic imitation of a model? Could there have been a system of literary genres within which Rh. would find its precise historical legitimacy, so that it may not need to bring disgrace to its author? I think that the answer to the last two questions should be positive. Therefore I will first investigate the diachronic intertextuality of Rh. in connection with the Homeric model. Then I will point to a synchronic system within which Rh. may have operated—and thus within which some of the play’s supposed ‘anomalies’ find a new legitimacy. The errant comic quality of Rh. may well have been the product of an author—be it Euripides or (most probably) not—who decided to ‘expand upon’ the poetics underlying Iliad 10. In doing so, Rh.’s author would have been capable enough to understand the peculiar, anomalous position that, according to some of the ancients, Book 10 enjoyed in the frame of the Iliad, or in the epic genre in general. Accordingly, he would have mimicked in his play most of the peculiarities that he understood to be part and parcel of this unique model. According to Σ 10.1, φασὶ τὴν ῥαψωιδίαν ὑφ’ Ὁμήρου ἰδίαι τετάχθαι καὶ μὴ εἶναι μέρος τῆς Ἰλιάδος, ὑπὸ δὲ Πεισιστράτου τετάχθαι εἰς τὴν ποίησιν (‘people say that this song was arranged by Homer individually and was not a part of the Iliad, but was settled into the poem by Peisistratus’). The compositional ‘individual separation’ from the rest of the Iliad, of which the ancients speak in the case of Book 10, has led some modern scholars to assume that this book is not part of the same oral tradition that produced the Iliad.³⁹ Of course, the phrasing of Σ does

³⁸ To paraphrase the title of Burnett 1985. ³⁹ See for instance, most recently, West 2001: 110: ‘it is a lively, exciting episode, certainly composed to stand where it does now in the poem, but structural and stylistic considerations combine to show that it was no part of the original poet’s design, nor from his

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not necessarily mean what it has often been assumed to mean—that the book is not Homeric.⁴⁰ The scholiast in fact appears to suggest only that, for some of the ancients, Iliad 10 may presuppose the rest of the Iliad as the frame for its narrative niche and for some details of plotting,⁴¹ but includes un-Iliadic features, while the Iliad, on the other hand, does not presuppose Iliad 10.⁴² In any case, my reconstruction of the authorial intentions of Rh. is not concerned with the problem of whether or not Iliad 10 actually belongs within the same oral tradition as the rest of the Iliad. It is enough, for my purposes, to assert that Iliad 10 seemed external to some of the ancients, and thus maybe also to the author of Rh. Regardless of whether Rh. is by Euripides or not, the peculiarity of Iliad 10 may have been the model inspiring the peculiarity of Rh. If we assume that Euripides wrote this play in a fashion that was peculiar and deviated both from his own standards and from those of fifth-century tragedy precisely because he wanted to imitate Iliad 10, this can yield fascinating insights. Alternatively (and, I believe, more probably), a nonEuripidean author, for instance an actor—or several actors, such as the ones who wrote entire pseudonymous sections of the Iphigenia in Aulis and many lines in other tragedies⁴³—may have accepted anonymity and deliberately inserted his/their text into the Euripidean corpus. As a result, workshop’. The same conclusions are found in the most recent extensive treatment of the book, Danek 1988. ⁴⁰ See Dué and Ebbott 2010: 5–6. ⁴¹ An analysis of these details can be found in Thornton 1984: 164–9. ⁴² Petegorsky 1982: 177–8 has noted that, after remarking that the wall is not going to be enough to hold Hector back (Il. 9.346–55), Achilles maintains that the Greeks are going to need a ‘better ruse’, μῆτιν ἀμείνω (9.421–6). The spy mission of Odysseus and Diomedes would involve and enact exactly the Odyssean (= non-Iliadic) skills evoked by μῆτις ἀμείνων. This correct remark has recently been reargued by Dué and Ebbott (2010: 103), who suggest that Odysseus’ and Diomedes’ spy mission and night-time ambush show how Odysseus’ μῆτις succeeds when the force used in the Iliadic day-time ‘battle’ (πόλεμος) does not. If the contrast is deliberate, then Book 10 might actually fit quite well into the poem. Furthermore, Martin (2000: 62) has highlighted that Nestor remembers his own nocturnal raid at Il. 11.683–5, after conceiving the plan of the spy mission at 10.207–14 and welcoming back Odysseus and Diomedes at 10.532–3, so that the two night raids seem ‘mutually reinforcing, shared attempts to vary the texture of the poem’. However, the fact that Iliad 10 is interpretable as an actualization of Achilles’ idea of a μῆτις ἀμείνων, along with the presence of the night-raid theme also in Book 11, might also be adduced to prove, not that Iliad 10 develops Achilles’ idea or that Nestor presupposes Iliad 10, but simply that skilful later bards composed the book’s spy missions separately and inserted them where they fitted best into the existing architecture. ⁴³ The standard reference remains Page 1934.

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he would have intentionally re-created the impression of ‘separateness’ and of apocryphal interpolation, which at least some readers, ancient and modern, have also noticed in the model, Iliad 10.⁴⁴ Or it may have been an editor of the Euripidean corpus who—for instance in order to replace an original eponymous play by Euripides that was possibly lost⁴⁵— inserted into it a text written by an unknown author and was pleased by the result that, in developing Iliad 10, this tragedy re-created in that corpus precisely the effect that Book 10 produced within the Iliad (regardless of whether or not this book was ‘composed separately’ from the rest of the Iliad). The idea of Iliad 10 as a possible model for a narrative that sets itself apart from the stylistic and ideological standards of the work (or set of works) to which it belongs (‘a piece of poetry that doesn’t quite “fit” ’)⁴⁶ is not paralleled, according to my knowledge.⁴⁷ Rh.’s unique position in the body of Euripidean drama might thus come to be considered the result of an author’s or editor’s deliberate choice to mimic the peculiarity of Book 10 within the Iliad. This suggestion cannot be more than a hypothesis, however, as it tries to ascribe to ‘planning’ a result that may have been a sheer coincidence. But it can hardly be a coincidence that Rh. turns out to be ‘peculiar’ in the same fashion in which Iliad 10 was probably felt by the ancients to be ‘peculiar’. The main reason why modern scholars doubt that Book 10 was part of the Iliad’s original structure—and this reason may also have oriented ancient commentators in the same direction—is that this book clearly reflects an idea of epic style and epic warfare whose features are frequently at odds with the style and poetics of the Iliad at large as well as with the idea of warfare that prevails in it. Among these aspects are elements of diction: in particular, the frequency of archaisms or words that are exotic in some way, or the almost banal reuse of formulae that, in the rest of the Iliad, are often connected to specific characters or ⁴⁴ The Teubner edition by West (1998–2000) has athetized the whole book. ⁴⁵ A fortunate hypothesis on the genesis of the Euripidean ascription, most recently re-proposed by Kovacs 2002: 352 and Liapis 2009. ⁴⁶ Lavigne 2008: 119. ⁴⁷ It has, however, been put forward for the long episode of Nisus and Euryalus in Aeneid 9—a night raid like the one of Odysseus and Diomedes, whose atmosphere, style, and ethical values are by widespread consent at variance with the standard of Virgil’s Iliadic section of the Aeneid (Books 7–12): cf. Fowler 2000: 91; Casali 2004: 322; Fantuzzi 2012: 246–8, 255–6.

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situations. Then there are elements of style: direct speeches occur rarely in pairs, as they do almost everywhere else in the Iliad, and thus seem more realistically lively. Last but not least, there is significant incongruence among the realia of military life by comparison with the rest of the Iliad. Book 10 features odd, archaizing arming scenes with recurring references to the donning of animal skins, which are probably symbolic (a primitive or primitivistic detail?);⁴⁸ besides, it describes intelligence gathering, raiding in the night, or the practice of ambush, which are not at all common in the Iliad, whose main fighting practice is the single combat in daylight; the task of winning kudos presupposes that the duels take place under the eyes of many witnesses, and thus, quite understandably, the night is a time of military inaction in the rest of the Iliad.⁴⁹ The comic drift of Iliad 10 should also be read in the context of this book’s deviation from the poetics of its Iliadic frame. First of all, there is the comic braggartism of the burlesque Dolon and his comic cowardice during Odysseus’ interrogation, which reduces the pathos of his death. Then there are other hints at incongruous or unconventional behaviours; they are scattered throughout the whole book and involve not only the Trojans but also the Greeks, and even the gods: they range from the way Diomedes comments on Nestor’s indefatigable old age (l. 164) when he is awoken by Nestor’s kick (‘a kick!’, l. 158) to Agamemnon’s concern for the survival of his weak brother Menelaus (l. 240). Among the divinities, Apollo can strike the reader as surprisingly ineffectual, considering that he is said to ‘have done no blind watch’ (l. 515), yet intervenes only after Athena’s and Diomedes’ scheming has led to the slaughter of Rhesus. As a result, he merely manages to wake and incite Rhesus’ cousin Hippocoon to mourn for the slaughtered.⁵⁰ Furthermore, Iliad 10 has been correctly seen to develop certain iambic resonances that are relevant to this book and concentrated in it as nowhere else in the Iliad. Prominent among them is the figure of the trickster, often emblematized by the wolf in archaic poetry, especially ⁴⁸ On all these elements of variance, see Danek 1988. ⁴⁹ Williams 2000. The themes of ambush and nocturnal raid certainly are traditional in archaic epic, as they occur again and again in the Epic Cycle and are occasionally alluded to in the Iliad: see Dué and Ebbott 2010: 32–87. But these two themes seem to be avoided in the branch of oral tradition from which the Iliad itself originated. ⁵⁰ See Henry 1905; Shewan 1911: 199–24.

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iambic.⁵¹ At the beginning it is Dolon (‘the trickster’), who wears a wolf pelt and (at least at Rh. 205) tries to imitate the ‘thievish steps’ of the wolf; in fact he seems destined to play this role, although later on his cowardice— perhaps to be connected to his being raised among five sisters (Il. 10.317)— and his ugliness (l. 316) make him the equal of the disreputable iambic Thersites of Iliad 2, and he soon dies dishonoured, at the hands of Odysseus (who had already beaten Thersites in Iliad 2).⁵² It is precisely Odysseus who then turns out to play the role of the really victorious trickster-wolf of the book: quite fittingly, Odysseus is presented (ll. 266–70) as bearing a most peculiar helmet decorated with boar tusks, which had been stolen by his thievish grandfather Autolycus—‘the wolf himself ’ by name and a master thief by reputation. Iambic mockery of the Trojans is also implicit in the Trojans’ stupidly haphazard joy and feasting at the beginning of the book, which is based on an ungrounded assumption of victory (ll. 11–13). Accordingly, Nestor decides to call the assembly, because he fears ‘that we may become a cause of rejoicing to our foes’ (μὴ χάρμα γενώμεθα δυσμενέεσσιν, l. 193).⁵³ These Trojan feelings of joy are radically overturned by the intense joy of Odysseus and of the other Greeks when he and Diomedes return victorious to the Greek camp—a joy (χαίροντες, ll. 541, 565b) and a laugh (καγχαλόων, l. 565a) of both satisfaction and scorn for the enemies. In fact Iliad 10 establishes from the very beginning a sort of germination of the plot, according to which Greeks and Trojans behave and think in similar ways and their actions often mirror each other punctually. The leaders of both camps are awake and call a council; in each camp a leader asks for a volunteer, after conceiving of the same plan for a spy mission; in both cases the volunteers arm themselves in an uncommon way, wearing animal pelts or unusual hats; and in both cases the spies are either promised the enemy’s best horses (as the Trojans are, ll. 305–8) or receive them (as the Greeks do). In the frame of this gemination, Iliad 10 pursues a common sort of iambic strategy, which compares and reverses the roles of Greeks and Trojans over the course of

⁵¹ On the hints, in Iliad 10, at the complex symbolism of the wolf, see Steiner 2015: 348–54. ⁵² Lavigne 2008: 132–3. ⁵³ On the iambic relevance of laugh to the enemy’s defeat or scorn, see for instance Nagy 1979: 257–9 and Lavigne 2008: 121–30.

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the narrative. In the beginning the Greeks fear they might become an object of iambic χάρμα for the Trojans, whereas at the end the Trojans do become such an object for the Greeks. The roles and behaviours of φίλοι (‘allies’) and ἐχθροί (‘enemies’) thereby become almost indistinguishable and cannot be hierarchized.⁵⁴ Invective certainly is a traditional motif of epic, and mocking is not absent from the Iliad (Book 2, Thersites; Book 3, Paris), but their concentration in Iliad 10 makes this book amount to a peculiar variety of epic narrative that focuses primarily on blame and ridicule. In the process, the Trojan ἐχθροί come to occupy the structural position of, say, Lycambes, the target of Archilochus’ poetry. The Greek φίλοι of the ‘philhellene’ Homer do not walk away unscathed either (at the very least, they seem greedy for horses and bloodthirsty). In this manner, they come to parallel the author of iambic poetry, whose invectives often backfire and taint his own reputation.⁵⁵ It turns out, then, that—intertextually or diachronically speaking—an attempt at imitating what looks like distinctively non-epic features of Iliad 10 may have led the author of the Rh. to include comic elements in his tragedy. This hybridization, motivated or motivatable, as it seems to be, by allusion to Iliad 10, could easily find its place also within the synchronic system of literary genres of the fourth-century. Then Rh. would not be a failed tragedy but an example of subtle exchanges that both distinguished and united the two major dramatic genres of tragedy and comedy and that went on in some tragedies of the late fifth century and especially of the fourth. Undoubtedly Euripides’ plays of reversed catastrophe evidence a trend towards partial overlapping, and in the second half of the fourth century New Comedy so successfully reshaped and internalized tragic scenes and myths that they could hardly be perceived as extraneous.⁵⁶ Parody may still have been the prime channel, inherited from the fifth century, whereby tragic structures and plot elements were initially transfused into comedy.⁵⁷ But during the ⁵⁴ See Steiner 2015: 349–51. ⁵⁵ For the relevance of iambic features in Iliad 10, see the now fundamental Lavigne 2008 and Steiner 2015. ⁵⁶ On the overlap between tragedy and comedy in the fifth century, see most recently Medda, Mirto, and Pattoni 2006; for the fourth century, see Xanthaki-Karamanou 1991. On Menander and tragedy, see now Petrides 2014. ⁵⁷ Nesselrath 1993.

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fourth century—and, as far as we can tell from our limited textual evidence, especially with Menander—tragedy became a genetic component of a sort of hybrid comedy, which ‘largely urbanises and secularises narratives shaped by tragic μῦθος, overlaying an urban “superstratum” onto a mythical “substratum”, often with the crust being rather thin’.⁵⁸ Seen from this perspective, Rh. may be supposed to develop a literary strategy opposite but symmetrical to that of New Comedy, and therefore fully in tune with the rules of the contemporary system of literary genres; it would represent the only extant, but perhaps not surprising, comicotragic pendant to the tragicomic hybrid of Menander’s comedy. In perfect symbiosis, the paracomic scenes of Rh. discussed above would appear to reshape in a scoptic drift the Trojans’ tragic misunderstanding of reality. This scoptic drift would, in a way, replace the usual tragic irony of fifth-century tragedy and perfectly match the iambic– comic treatment of the Trojans and of their unmotivated joy at the beginning of Iliad 10. To conclude, the identity of Rh.’s author is perhaps destined to remain untraceable. But, if we can reconstruct the literary intentions of the play as an imitation of Iliad 10 that is perhaps more consistent than usually assumed and thus justifies most of Rh.’s supposed oddities and clumsiness in terms of this poetics of tragedy, then we can abandon the idea that this author was an inferior pseudo-Euripides or an inexperienced young Euripides, as yet incapable of handling the sublimity of a tragedy. Of course, understanding the literary ambitions of Rh. will not enable us to make a definitive statement about the author’s position on the chronological map of classical drama. But, if we accept that these ambitions are compatible with the peaceful exchange of ideas between tragedy and comedy typical of the second half of the fourth century, then we can examine that period’s historical evidence for further hints at the play’s likely chronology. This is what I wish to undertake in the following pages. The fourth century turns out to be the cultural context most likely to have produced those features of Rh. that otherwise seem anomalous or eccentric. Rh., like any fifth-century tragedy, devotes ample attention to the issue of decision-making; but, unlike fifth-century tragedy, it does

⁵⁸ Petrides 2014: 82.

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not deal with the issue of the proper exercise of power in the polis. Instead, Rh. is a Soldatenstück,⁵⁹ a ‘soldiers’ piece’ where the problem of what constitutes ‘good counsel’, εὐβουλία,⁶⁰ is analysed with regard to its military dimension and with a keen eye on military details and technical military jargon. The long discussions between Hector, the watchmen of the chorus, and Aeneas on the function of the fires lit in the Greek camp (and on how to respond to them), or the later debate between Hector and Rhesus on whether or not to accept the alliance with Rhesus⁶¹ form the background for an exploration of the contradictions and troubles involved in military leadership and in interstate military relations. Tellingly, these scenes constitute Rh.’s two longest additions to the narrative provided by Iliad 10 in the first part of the play. If Rh. is concerned with military power, then the specific practices that seem to be of special interest are those of Macedonian commanders. Many hints interspersed in the text converge to present Hector in terms that evoke the Macedonian ‘king’. The first scenario that the audience is asked to contemplate is set in front of Hector’s tent. Hector is called βασιλεύς (‘king’, l. 2—a not unheard-of anachronism for him in tragedy)⁶² and is surrounded by ‘ὑπασπισταί of the king’. The Greek nouns ὑπασπιστής (‘shield bearer’) and τευχοφόρος (‘arms bearer’, ll. 2–3) originally defined the ‘squire’, that is, the attendant who carries a hoplite’s shield, arms, and additional equipment. Ὑπασπιστής is not on record before the fifth century, and its most basic meaning—‘squire’—is the only one attested outside the Macedonian army.⁶³ In principle, the term may have the same meaning in our passage. But in Macedony the king’s ὑπασπισταί were also the royal bodyguards who had to protect the king’s safety (the royal guard’s companion cavalry squadron had a similar task). While on campaign, this corps may be supposed to have guarded the king’s tent at night, with weapons at the ready in case of danger, precisely as the ὑπασπισταὶ βασιλέως do in Rh.:⁶⁴ they clearly mediate between Hector’s tent and the

⁵⁹ Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1926: 286. ⁶⁰ See Hesk 2011: 136–43. ⁶¹ See Fantuzzi 2011. ⁶² Polyxena, Hector’s sister, is also called ‘queen’, βασιλίς, at E. Hec. 552; cf. Hesione βασίλεια ‘woman of royal blood’ at S. Aj. 1302. ⁶³ Ὑπασπίζειν ‘be a squire’ is first found at P. N. 9.34 and later at E. Heracl. 216; ὑπασπιστής, before Xenophon, is already in Herodotus (Hdt. 5.111) and Euripides (E. Ph. 1213). ⁶⁴ See Curtius Rufus: cohors quoque quae excubabat ad tabernaculum regis, verita ne maioris motus principium esset, armare se coeperat (‘the cohort also which was on guard at

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space outside it, which is clear from the arriving watchmen’s belief that they have to get in touch with these ὑπασπισταὶ before they can communicate with Hector (ll. 4–6). This concrete protective function in which the royal ὑπασπισταί are presented in Rh., the use of the plural,⁶⁵ and the specification βασιλέως (‘of the king’) lead one to think not of ‘squires’ or ‘shield bearers’ in the original Greek sense, but specifically of the élite corps of the Macedonian army.⁶⁶ Immediately after the ὑπασπισταί, the play introduces the king’s φίλοι, also called ἑταῖροι, that is, the royal retinue, which permanently accompanied Philip II and Alexander at war, in hunting, and in feasting.⁶⁷ At line 26, the watchmen ask Hector to order these φίλοι to summon σὸς λόχος. In light of the task this λόχος is supposed to perform—ἁρμόσατε ψαλίοις ἵππους (‘fit bridles to the horses’, l. 27)—the word should be understood as designating a unity of cavalry.⁶⁸ The equestrian ἴλη βασιλική (‘royal squadron’) is one of the best known institutions of the Macedonian army from the age of Alexander onward (there is no evidence for it during the reign of Philip II), but λόχος, the term used in Rh., is a rather peculiar term to describe it—never used for sure to qualify a Greek cavalry unit.⁶⁹ the king’s tent, fearing lest it might be the beginning of a greater commotion, had begun to arm itself ’, Curt. 3.12.3). ⁶⁵ As noted by Braswell 1998: 113. ⁶⁶ An Athenian inscription (IG II/III.1.2³ 443.9) recording the reaffirmation, in 336 BC, of the alliance of 338 BC between Athens and Alexander the Great already includes a stipulation about wages for the ὑπασπισταί, thus suggesting that the application of the term, in this sense, to members of the Macedonian army was acknowledged in Athens as early as the 430s BC. This inscription was pointed out to me by S. D. Lambert and is discussed in Heisserer 1980: 3–26. ⁶⁷ The Macedonian relevance of Rh.’s references to ὑπασπισταί and φίλοι has been learnedly argued by Liapis 2009. More uncertain in my opinion is Liapis’ suggestion that the πέλται of Rh. 409–10 and 485–7 or the ἰσηγορία (equality of speech) of the chorus of watchmen in dialogue with the leaders Aeneas and Hector could also be recognized by the audience as distinctly Macedonian. ⁶⁸ There is no doubt, in my opinion, that the command to fit the bridles in line 27 is addressed not to the φίλοι but to the λόχος. In fact the strophe (ll. 23–33), which lists army units that have to be alerted for battle, includes two additional explicit orders, one early at l. 25, and another at l. 33. In both cases we find the same sequence (first, a mention of the unit to be alerted, then the order to mobilize, which focuses on the unit’s specific equipment) that would be involved in ll. 26–7 if the command to equip the horses concerns the λόχος. ⁶⁹ For λόχος ‘cavalry company’, Liapis (2012: 80) adduces the parallel of A. Th. 56. But it is more probable that chariots rather than horsemen belong to the troupes of the Seven, as is standard in Homeric epic (see in fact Rh. 50, 151–4; see also E. Ph. 175–8, where the plural πῶλοι ‘foals’ refers to the single Amphiaraus). In any case λόχος at A. Th. 42, 56, or 460 should be more probably taken in an extended sense of ‘contingent’, including infantry

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Two passages from Arrian, both concerned with the Macedonian army or presupposing its terminology, are the only exceptions: Alexander’s Expedition 3.16.11 and Order of Battle against the Alans 20.⁷⁰ In Alexander’s Expedition Arrian informs us that Alexander, after receiving reinforcements from Macedon in Susa, κατέστησε δὲ καὶ λόχους δύο ἐν ἑκάστηι ἴληι, οὐ πρόσθεν ὄντας λόχους ἱππικούς, καὶ λοχαγοὺς ἐπέστησε τοὺς κατ’ ἀρετὴν προκριθέντας ἐκ τῶν ἑταίρων (‘formed two companies in each squadron of cavalry, as there had formerly been no cavalry companies; and he appointed as captains those of the companions distinguished for valour’).⁷¹ Arrian’s categorical statement that there were no equestrian λόχοι before Alexander’s initiative of 331/330 BC does not necessarily establish a terminus post quem for Rh., as the term may have been used for horsemen in the Macedonian army before Alexander made it the official designation of a cavalry unit; but at least it proves that Rh.’s author purposefully used an unequivocally Macedonian technicality. The intentional adoption of that military Macedonian word after mentioning the ὑπασπισταὶ βασιλέως and the kingly φίλοι may have had implications in terms of poetics. The innovative sense of λόχος as ‘equestrian unit’ at line 26 is thrown into sharper relief by the fact that λόχος also occurs a few lines earlier (l. 17) in the more common sense of soldiers, chariots, and, perhaps, cavalry: see E. Ph. 107–8 and 112–13, ‘the Pelasgian army is now stirring, and they are separating the λόχοι one from another . . . Polynices has come to this land in no mean style: what a din he makes with his many horses and his myriad men-at-arms’. Compare the further generalized λόχος ‘group of people’ at A. Eu. 46, 1026, and Th. 114. ⁷⁰ Arrian’s work on the expedition against the Alans concerns the structure of the Roman army but employs a terminology that is often modelled on the army of Alexander: Bosworth 1977: 249–50. ⁷¹ Arrian is the only historian who speaks about this reorganization of the cavalry by Alexander, which seems to parallel the better attested reorganization of the ὑπασπισταί (see Curt. 5.2.2–5). Both initiatives were in all probability ‘a first step towards breaking the ties between the original commanders and their men. There was now an intermediate level of command in which the officers had no necessary connection with their men but owed their appointment solely to royal favour’ (Bosworth 1988: 268; see also Bosworth 1980: 149, 320). Curtius confirms the military initiatives taken by Alexander at Susa described by Arrian, though he speaks only of the hypaspists, without mentioning the subdivision of the equestrian ἴλαι, and stresses that the new commanders appointed by Alexander did not have territorial affiliations (Curt. 5.2.6). A hint at Alexander’s initiative of ‘scrutinizing closely the reports of good conduct’ can also be found, however, at DS 17.65.3; this may suggest that Diodorus Siculus read the same source as Arrian. Yet modern historians do not appear to have doubts about Arrian’s information: see Tarn 1948: i.160–1; Bosworth 1988: 262, 268; Hatzopoulos 1996: 447–52; Sekunda 2007: 333.

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‘ambush’—the only sense documented in Homer, where the meaning ‘body of troops’ does not yet seem to apply.⁷² The ambiguity created by two occurrences of the same term with different meanings in the space of a few lines can be a sort of proleptic mise en abyme of the complex linguistic/thematic atmosphere that Rh. offers its audience. On the one hand, the tragedy is going to re-enact the ‘poetics of ambush’ that had characterized Iliad 10; on the other, it will present the audience with an up-to-date modernization of military language and topics⁷³ as it recasts the identity of the military ‘others’—that is, the non-Greek protagonists of the play. In other words, just after the connection to the epic model is emphasized through mention of the keyword λόχος in the traditional and common sense ‘ambush’, the appearance of non-epic ὑπασπισταί highlights and watermarks the fact that Rh.’s Trojans are both Homer’s Trojans and the new ‘others’ that Greek culture was now confronting— the Macedonians with their formidable army. The ‘Macedonization’ of Hector and of the Trojans matches the shift from tragedy’s fifth-century focus on ‘power in the polis’ to Rh.’s focus on the problems of military power. Both seem to be ‘modernizations’ of a more general issue (more philosophical, as Aristotle would probably have called it), which had often been addressed in earlier tragedies. Fifth-century plays described the ‘others’ with whom their own times were concerned. In this respect, the Persians in Aeschylus resemble the Trojans who, in Euripides’ Trojan tragedies, are consistently depicted with features of oriental or Phrygian barbarians (effeminate, cowardly, and prone to luxuriousness and excessive emotions),⁷⁴ even though they do sometimes rise to the level of ‘noble barbarians’ and serve as a foil that highlights the degeneration of bad Greeks.⁷⁵ If Rh. is of the fourth century, then the Trojans’ Macedonian flavour adapts this fifth-century idea to a new context.⁷⁶ Instead of singling out the ‘oriental’ enemies of the Persian Wars or the ‘epic’ adversaries of the Greeks in the Homeric ⁷² See Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos, quoting Björck 1950: 292. ⁷³ See in particular the non-Iliadic debate about what a good ally should be at ll. 380–491, on which see Fantuzzi 2011. ⁷⁴ See Hall 1989: 26–32, 68–74. ⁷⁵ See ibid., 211–22; Saïd 2002; Mattison 2009: 68–75. ⁷⁶ If we see the Trojans as ‘Macedonians’, this might also help to understand the prominent role ascribed in Rh. to Aeneas, who had been a rather shadowy character in the Iliad. This shift in relevance is usually interpreted as a result of the more important role that Aeneas had already played in the Epic Cycle; but he also had a role in Macedonian

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poems, Rh. would be focusing on Macedonians, who were not only the Greeks’ closest and most aggressive neighbours but also the ones who strove most actively to be acknowledged as a fully fledged part of Greek culture.⁷⁷ Later in the play, Rhesus’ mother mourns for her son (ll. 938–49). She is a Muse characterized most emphatically as Thracian, since we learn that she conceived Rhesus from the River Strymon, during a visit to Mount Pangaeon (ll. 915–25); Homer had ignored (or perhaps not known) this fluvial paternity. She is then at the acme of her fury against Athena, who had been the principal instigator of Rhesus’s killing at the hands of Odysseus and Diomedes. This Muse presents one of Athens’ oldest sources of poetical pride, Musaeus, as her pupil, and she credits Orpheus, who is Rhesus’ cousin, with introducing the mysteries to Athens. By reinterpreting Athens’ cultural success as the fruit of what we might call the ‘wisdom of northern Greece’, I think that she practically mirrors and reverses the approach of the Macedonians’, who—as outsiders—tried to have a Greek cultural identity bestowed upon them. The Muse’s different approach is to lay claim on a sort of aetiological primacy: she argues that northern Greece provided the roots of Athenian culture rather than the other way around. It befits this observation that Rh.’s ‘Macedonian’ Trojans are seen with some sympathy in the play. The Trojans of fifth-century tragedy are usually considered cowards, but Rh. portrays Hector at least as a fighter of valour and as a thoughtful military leader. Furthermore, in Rh. the epithet ‘barbarian’ seems to be freer from derogatory associations than even in Euripides’ Trojan tragedies.⁷⁸ And, through the Trojan and the Thracian ‘lens’, Rh. does betray an unprecedented interest in the Macedonian army, Thracians, and—more generally—northern Greek culture and religion. To date, the Thracians had quite often been presented (in tragedy and in the visual arts) notably as violent or stupid boors.⁷⁹ By contrast, Rhesus seems to have the potential to turn into a good fighter, though his and his army’s mythology, as the founder of various Macedonian cities during his trip away from Troy to Italy; and he featured in Macedonian coins: see Liapis 2009: 81–2. ⁷⁷ Revermann 1999–2000: 454–67. ⁷⁸ As maintained by Liapis 2009: 83. However, most modern scholars agree that in many cases Euripides already undermines the opposition between barbarian Trojans and civilized Greeks: see nn. 74 and 75 in this chapter. ⁷⁹ Hall 1989: 105–10, 122–3, 134–5; Tsiafakis 2000.

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display of richness, along with his inclination toward despotic arrogance, do resemble features most commonly ascribed to oriental people in tragedy⁸⁰ (he certainly makes the faux pas of not arranging for a service of night watchmen in the Thracian camp: Rh. 763–9). I do not think, however, that the frequent focusing on northern Greece proves that Rh. was composed for a Macedonian audience;⁸¹ it only proves that, in the age in which Rh. was composed, the audiences that its author envisaged were interested in the cultural, military, or religious reality of northern Greece. After all, Rh.’s ‘Macedonian’ Trojans, its Hector, its Rhesus, and its Thracians do remain the ‘others’ and the foes of the Greeks. Apart from being the losers in the match of opposed spy missions (and in the whole war), they do from time to time slip into stupidity, buffoonery (in Dolon’s case), or (in Hector’s case) megalomania. The court of Archelaus at the end of the fifth century was undoubtedly a very plausible place of performance for Euripides’ Archelaus, and in principle a Rh. by a late Euripides or by an imitator of Euripides might have targeted that audience. If, on the other hand, Rh.’s author belongs in the second half of the fourth century, the play might still be written for Macedonian viewers and readers, as Alexander’s successors tried to exercise a strong ‘control’ over theatrical activity. They may also have appreciated the play’s apocryphal attribution to Euripides, since they liked to place a retrospective emphasis on the Macedonian phase in the life of the late Euripides. They seem, in fact, to have encouraged the biographers under their patronage to adopt the same trend. But, in light of the role of the defeated ‘others’ that the ‘Macedonian’ Trojans and the Thracians definitely play in Rh., I prefer to think that the complex ambiguity of these cultural and national identities in our tragedy rather resembles the ambiguity operative in a play like Euripides’ Bacchae. That tragedy, as has been proposed again in recent years,⁸² could have been staged not only at the great Dionysia in Athens but also at the court of Archelaus, as it includes elements that, when read in the proper ways, might appeal to both audiences (Macedonian recipients will have looked for different connotations from the Athenians; for instance they will have felt more sympathy for Dionysus as an aggressive, vengeful outsider).

⁸⁰ See Mattison 2009: 71–5. ⁸¹ As suggested by Liapis 2009. ⁸² Revermann 1999–2000; Duncan 2011: 80–2.

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I like to think that Rh.’s allusions to Macedonian or northern Greek culture and life may have ‘spoken double’ and intrigued at least two different audiences. A Macedonian audience must have found in these references reflections of their cultural ambitions. The Athenians must have appreciated insights and hints at the still relatively unfamiliar culture of the warlords of their time, who, from what we read in the orators, seemed to have attracted political debate very frequently from Demosthenes’ First Philippic (350) onwards. But at the same time they could identify, at least in the reassuring fiction of theatre, with commandos like Odysseus and Diomedes, who won the day. In conclusion, Rh.’s author could have been a non-Athenian who envisaged a specifically Macedonian audience. But he may also have been an Athenian who envisaged a primarily Athenian audience, was keen to know about the new warlords, and also possibly considered the perspective of reperformances in places under Macedonian control. Either way, the poetics of Rh. turns out to be perfectly understandable as an update of the poetics of fifth-century tragedies featuring Trojan (or, in Aeschylus’ case, Persian) ‘others’. This shift from ‘orientals’ or ‘oriental Trojans’ to ‘northern Greek’ Trojans would then mean that Rh. reacted to a different geopolitical scenario and, accordingly, to changing ideas about ‘the others’. Likewise, if we locate our tragedy in the years following the death of Philip II (which appears to be parallel to the divinization and immediate death of Rhesus in the hymn to Rhesus at Rh. 342–87)⁸³ or—if we ascribe any relevance to the use of λόχος in the sense of a cavalry unit⁸⁴—in the decade 330–320 BC in particular, then the poetics of Rh. would fit in well with the interplay of literary genres during the years when Menander’s tragic comedy was also blossoming. Metrical or stylometric features turned out to provide no satisfactory evidence for the dating of Rh. in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Neither the play’s keen interest in northern Greece nor its fondness for the short circuit of tragic and comic can be considered definitive chronological evidence (in principle, Menander’s taste may have had older predecessors, and Euripides’ stay at the court of Archelaus may have prompted the frequent hints at a northern ambience). But if we adopt this chronological perspective, which seems very probable, then we no longer have

⁸³ See Fantuzzi 2016b.

⁸⁴ See pp. 195–6 in this chapter.

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to see Rh. as a dysfunctional play that tries to live up to the standard of fifth-century tragedians through ahistorical and experimental contaminations of genres and strange non-Athenian and non-Theban geographic landscapes; its author will rather seem to us a fellow traveller of Menander, and one with a strong concern for the shifts in interest of his concrete historical audience(s).

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8 The Greek Canon A Few Data, Observations, Limits Reviel Netz

The humanities have questioned the canon for a long while now. It is the canon’s turn to offer its response. In this chapter I speak briefly for the canon, delineate it, and discuss the various significances, in antiquity, of lying outside it.¹

1. The Canon: A First Impression The most natural starting point is papyri counts. Now, papyrologists routinely warn us not to rely on papyri counts as statistics. I will discuss this directly in the following sections. Here I note immediately that I believe this caution to be misplaced: it may blind us to the realities of ancient literary distribution. And so, as a first step, we may count how many papyri are identified for each author (I limited my analysis to Egypt: as a source of papyri, Herculaneum is a statistical monstrosity). I’ve arranged the results by tiers, of which I now present the top two. Papyri counts are followed by a ¹ The ideas presented in this chapter were developed in the course of writing a monograph—still in preparation—tentatively titled Scale, Space, Canon: Parameters of Ancient Literary Practice. Its goal is to understand the ancient system of genres in its historical and geographical evolution. My interest in this matter emerges from a simple question: why was Alexandria so important for ancient science? A question whose answer, I find, has to take in the ancient literary practice in its totality (to put it very briefly, the point is ultimately to understand Alexandria as non-Athens). The original chapter was a paper that circulated for the conference in the form of theses, boldly stated and minimally argued. In preparing it for publication I have added a handful of arguments but have kept to the bold theses: this is no more than a down payment on a promised monograph.

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Table 8.1 Number of papyri for the more frequently identified authors (Egypt only). Tier 1: Homer Demosthenes Euripides Hesiodus Isocrates Menander Thucydides Plato Callimachus Aristophanes Apollonius Aeschines Herodotus Pindarus Xenophon Sophocles Aeschylus Tier 2: Alcaeus Hippocrates Theocritus Sappho Archilochus Alcman Aesopus Aratus Bacchylides Aristoteles Astrampsychus Lysias Euphorion Plutarch Stesichorus

1861 186 170 158 118 117 96 90 83 57 52 50 47 46 42 36 32 28 24 24 23 18 15 14 14 14 12 10 10 10 9 9

poetry: ep. prose: rhet. poetry: trag. poetry: ep. prose: rhet. poetry: com. prose: hist. prose: phil. poetry: ep. poetry: com. poetry: ep. prose: rhet. prose: hist. poetry: lyr. prose: hist. poetry: trag. poetry: trag.

archaic –350 –400 archaic –350 –300 –400 –350 –250 –400 –250 –350 –450 –450 –350 –450 –450

poetry: lyr. prose: med. poetry: ep. poetry: lyr. poetry: lyr. poetry: lyr. prose: varia poetry: ep. poetry: lyr. prose: phil. prose: varia prose: rhet. poetry: ep. prose: phil. poetry: lyr.

–600 –400 –250 –600 –650 –600 –450 –250 –450 –350 +300 –400 –250 +100 –550

reference to genre and by approximate dates, which immediately bring up some obvious generalizations (Table 8.1).² ² The various counts offered in this paper were made over the period 2009–11, through the website http://www2.ulg.ac.be/facphl/services/cedopal/index.htm or CEDOPAL, an

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We may go like this for five tiers (Tier 3: 5–8 fragments; Tier 4: 2–4 fragments, Tier 5: single fragments). The results can be used to generate the following statistics (Table 8.2):³ Table 8.2 Comparison of the different tiers of authors by frequency of papyri (Egypt only).

Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Tier 4 Tier 5

Poetry % (authors)

Prose % (authors)

59 60 56 48 20

41 40 44 52 80

Average date 410 380 230 140 90

Thus we find that the dominance of early poetry in Egyptian papyri is confined to the ‘high’ range. As one goes down the range of tiers, one finds more and more prose of later dates. Undoubtedly we are allowed to extrapolate still further from this sequence; and if we do so we reach the following important conclusion: (Observation 1) The bulk of the author types circulating in Roman Egypt would have been Roman-era prose, each author represented by a small number of copies. The key question concerns the relative distribution of copy counts: how many more copies per work did some authors have vis-à-vis others? Hence we need to look at individual works, not at authors, so that we may control for length: a longer work, with more square feet of papyrus, online version of Mertens–Pack. A more comprehensive database is http://papyri.info/ search, or APIS, but CEDOPAL is satisfactory for Greek literary papyri, and I personally find that its navigation is more intuitive than that of other databases. Since my counts were made over a long time, they present an outdated and miscalibrated set of numbers (papyri are edited and reassigned all the time, so that the counts in 2009 are not the same as those of 2011). This is of little significance, however, for the kind of broad-brush statistical observations made in this chapter. As is obvious, I round up dates to the fifty-year node around which most of an author’s activity took place. ³ A point about the use of statistics: it would of course be a basic mathematical error to use the fact that author X has six fragments while author Y has three fragments, and to argue from there that author X was twice as frequent as author Y. And yet it is mathematically meaningful to take the group of authors with 5–8 fragments and contrast it with the group of authors with 2–4 fragments; and indeed we do find some meaningful patterns at this level.

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has a higher chance of leaving a footprint on the papyrus record. Since poetry is written in a somewhat more ample layout, it too has a higher relative incidence, which needs to be adjusted for.⁴ The calculation is made for all ancient works preserved in six or more fragments. I arrange this material in layers (Table 8.3). Table 8.3 Estimates of relative frequencies of works (Egypt only). Pap. count Word count Pap/Word*1000 (including prose adjustment) Tier 1: The Iliad (24 rolls) Homer Iliad

1421

115477

12.5

Tier 2: Odyssey/Hesiod level; roughly 20–30 per cent of the Iliad (32 rolls) [Isocrates Nicocl. 30 3119 12] [Isocrates Demon. 23 3000 9.5⁵] Hesiod Theogony 40 6969 5.75 Hesiod Works & Days 32 5900 5.5 Demosthenes Olynth. 28 6350 5.5 Tier 3: The Menander/Hellenistic range; roughly 10–20 per cent of the Iliad (17 rolls) Homer Odyssey 283 87765 3.25 Demosthenes Chers. 10 4291 3 Hesiod Shield 9 3336 2.75 Euripides Phoe. 28 10477 2.75 Isocrates Peace 17 8278 2.5 Callimachus Hymni 17 7443 2.25 Hesiod Catalogue 58 27800? 2? [Astrampsychus Sort. 10 5666 2⁶] Aratus Phaen. 14 7867 2 Menander Epitrepontes 14 7000? 2? Menander Misumenus 14 7000? 2? Demosthenes Philip. 21 14300 2 Aeschines Ctesiph. 27 19171 2

⁴ I explain how I calculate my poetry–prose coefficient in the monograph in preparation. I also add there notes explaining how to estimate the lengths of non-extant works. ⁵ The numbers for these two speeches are wildly misleading, as those fragments come from an educational context and hence are not precisely ‘literary’ at all. As will be explained in what follows, educational papyri would have been discarded at a much higher rate, and for this reason are over-represented in our samples. ⁶ Certainly a misleading number: as will be explained, Astrampsychus’ Sortes must have had a very fast discard cycle.

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Euripides Isocrates Callimachus Euripides Euripides

Orestes Paneg. Hecale Androm. Medea

19 16 13 12 12

10753 11249 9000? 7763 8394

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1.75 1.5 1.5? 1.5 1.5

Tier 4: The normal Demosthenes/Aristophanes range; roughly 5–10 per cent of the Iliad (42 rolls) Euripides Hecuba 9 7676 1.25 Apollonius Argon. 52 39090 1.25 Theocritus Idyllia 24 20501 1.25 Demosthenes Falsa leg. 25 23576 1.25 Demosthenes Crown 24 22893 1.25 Aeschines Timarch. 14 13961 1.25 Demosthenes Lept. 10 11543 1.25 Demosthenes Midias 14 16013 1.25 Hippocrates Aphor. 6 7374 1.25 Euripides Bacchae 8 8207 1 Aristophanes Nubes 8 10463 1 Menander Dysc. 7 6693 1 Demosthenes Timocr. 11 14896 1 Callimachus Aetia 33 30000? 1? Menander Pericir. 6 7000? 1? Archilochus 18 21000? (4 r?) 1? Pindar 57 90000? (17 r.) 0.75? Aristophanes Achar. 6 7818 0.75 Euripides Hippo. 6 8647 0.75 Aristophanes Equites 7 9764 0.75 Aristophanes Plutus 7 8864 0.75 Aristophanes Pax 7 8796 0.75 Aeschines Falsa leg. 8 12758 0.75 Thucydides 96 153260 0.75 Lycophron Alex. 6 7527 0.75 Anubion 6 ? 0.75? Tier 5: Lyric, Philosophy and History; less than 5 per cent of the Iliad (more than 100 rolls) Plato Phaedo 11 22633 0.5 Plato Phaedrus 8 17221 0.5 Isocrates Antid. 7 18731 0.5 Alcaeus 28 53000? (10 r.) 0.5? Sappho 23 47500? (9 r.) 0.5? Alcman 15 26500? (6 r.) 0.5? Ptolemy Handy Tables 6 (n/a) 0.5? (continued)

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Table 8.3 Continued Pap. count Word count Pap/Word*1000 (including prose adjustment) Aesop Herodotus Achilles Tat. Plato Xenophon Xenophon Bacchylides Euclid Xenophon Plato

Leuc. Republic Mem. Cyr.

Hell. Laws

14 47 6 12 6 13 14 6 7 9

46077 189489 43440 89358 36426 80684 90000? (n/a) 67924 106297

0.25 0.25 0.2 0.15 0.15 0.15 0.15? 0.1? 0.1 0.1

It is useful to remember that Greek works come in very different lengths. There is the typical range of a single normal ‘performance’ (a play, a small epic, a speech, a single book). However, the Homeric epics, for one, as well as many non-performative prose works, tend to be much longer. Hence the sheer papyrus count for a single author is misleading. Homer did not control the landscape as totally as his sheer numbers imply (it does remain correct to observe that Greeks regularly collected not merely a certain work by Homer; they regularly collected a very big work). No collection with even the most minimal pretension to cultural standing could omit the Iliad. But a library with just the Iliad was the exception: the typical small library had a smattering of a few other books, such as Hesiod, the Odyssey, and top works by Demosthenes and Euripides. Slightly larger libraries would expand to include Menander, perhaps the key Hellenistic works, and a few more speeches. The truly big libraries would be very different—and that’s the significance of the gap between layers 1–4 and 5. This is my next observation: (Observation 2) Big libraries would have the central canon but would also cross into a completely different set of genres: above all, non-performative prose (history, philosophy, and to some extent the various sciences), but also lyric poetry.

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2. Trust in Numbers? But why do I trust the papyri? Should we not be concerned about such statistical applications of the papyrus record? This last question can mean one of two things. It can be a question about (i) the papyrus record as representative of book circulation in ancient Upper Egypt; or it can be a question about (ii) book circulation in ancient Upper Egypt as representative of the ancient Mediterranean as a whole. Concerning (i), it should be observed first of all that the evidence is very ample and incredibly consistent. We have some 5,000 papyrus fragments of a strictly literary character: this is a huge sample size. The effectiveness of a sample is driven by combinatorial considerations where the size of the total population is of surprisingly little importance (which is why one needs about the same number of respondents for a political poll in Rhode Island as for one in the entire United States).⁷ One reaches diminishing returns for sample sizes at about N = 1,000: the rough number of papyrus fragments available during the first decades of the twentieth century. And indeed, the overall statistics of papyrus distributions have remained very robust since: Oldfather (1923) has largely the same statistics as I do. But this would not be enough, since such abstract statistical considerations depend on specific assumptions concerning the population (homogeneous) and its sample (random). Here is what we can add in this regard. If we cut the data by places of origin (where verifiable) or by dates (with an exception to be noted later), we get very similar distributions, the small discrepancies being at a level that we normally associate with luck.⁸ This means primarily that our numbers are not driven by any ⁷ To be persuaded of this, consider for instance Smith 2004: ‘Unless the sample encompasses a substantial portion of the population, the standard error of an estimator depends on the size of the sample, but not the size of the population. This is a crucial statistical insight that students find very counterintuitive’ (quoted from the abstract). ⁸ There are qualifications to be made to this observation, one chronological and the other spatial. In what follows I will return to the chronological qualification; so here I mention briefly the spatial one, noted by Morgan 2003 (but only for tragedy, although her observations can be generalized): roughly speaking, the farther we go upriver, the more ‘provincial’ or small-library our papyri become; upriver we find more of the usual suspects. This does not suggest, however, that our evidence is somehow skewed by big caches, since the findings upriver are, if anything, more isolated (our more sophisticated evidence is dominated by Oxyrhynchus, where findings are massive). Atypical caches, then, would have

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large caches—there is no Herculaneum villa somehow hidden among the Egyptian literary papyri (which would have tended to make individual places and times stick out).⁹ Indeed, we understand fairly well the formation of the record: it appears to be for the most part the result of isolated acts of discarding, whereby libraries were being culled—not the result of some catastrophic loss of entire libraries. (This process contrasts with the formation of the documentary papyri record, of which perhaps the majority comes from archives—because archives were sufficiently often put away intentionally and hence stood a much greater chance of surviving as a totality into the archaeological record.) Thus the granularity of the sample is very fine, which accounts for the sample’s remarkable consistency. But it is not just the statistics that are stable: for, indeed, once we begin to put our trust in the statistics, the result is that the population as a whole—and not just our sample—appears to be stable. The record of the literary papyri, then, is a fine-grained, large sample of a homogenous population. What more can we ask for? There is one important exception to the homogeneity of the population (apart from the predictable spatial distinction between downriver metropolitans and upriver provincials, on which see n. 8 in this chapter). The exception consists of a chronological transition, broadly speaking from the Ptolemaic to the Roman era. This transition takes two major forms. (1) Tragedy is even more dominant in the Ptolemaic era, while rhetoric becomes more dominant only in the Roman era (it looks as if the genre of rhetoric as a whole made a transition from a big-library to a small-library context in the Roman era).¹⁰ (2) Across the board, the most presented themselves in the finding of fewer usual suspects upriver—not more. No: all we see is that, in the population as a whole, and not just in the sample, upriver communities indeed hosted smaller libraries. ⁹ Indeed, it is very hard to identify caches among our literary papyri, and not just because of shortcomings in our excavation documentation; see Houston 2009: 247–61. ¹⁰ I document both claims in detail in the monograph in preparation; it is interesting to note that already Oldfather (1923) was struck by there being not a single Demosthenes among the Ptolemaic papyri then known. There are now potentially four such papyri. In the standard estimates, two of these are dated as ‘late 1st century BC’ (BKT 9.190 (P.Berol. inv. 21284) + P.Berol. inv. 16895, and P.Oxy. 11.1377 (P.Princ. inv. AM 9051)), one is dated as ‘1st century BC/1st century AD’ (P.Oxy. 78.5148), and only one is dated simply as ‘1 century BC’ (P.Lit.Lond. 130). In the papyri record, Demosthenes was a late bloomer. As for the evidence for a somewhat wider selection of authors among Ptolemaic papyri, this is something more subtle and difficult. It is possible that a certain number of caches has an

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central canon is even more dominant in the Roman era; Ptolemaic papyri are somewhat more diverse and have more ‘minor authors’. I believe the best way to account for this feature is to see it in terms of a big-library/small-library balance. My hypothesis is that the Roman era has a larger proportion of small libraries that essentially represent local elites. The scenario I envisage is this: as local elites expand and become Hellenized, the specialized big libraries become less dominant. This would predict a less diverse distribution, and one focused even more on the strictly ‘central’ canonical authors.¹¹ The evidence for this transition is uncertain (see n. 10 here), and therefore one should treat such a scenario with caution; still, its merit is that it is inherently plausible. Even so, the main lesson to be taken from the evidence of the papyri is one of stability and homogeneity: (Observation 3) The same relative ranking seems to hold throughout antiquity, the main difference being that, as the reach of culture expands, it becomes, perhaps, somewhat diluted. There does remain a question concerning the possible biases of the surviving material. Would the discarded papyri be representative of owned papyri? There are good reasons to think that our papyri do in fact over-represent certain categories of papyri, given their higher tendency to get discarded. Above all, this means that we have a higher representation of categories that require more intensive handling. This accounts for various handbooks (astrology, medicine, divination) that are surprisingly common in the papyrological record.¹² Probably a related phenomenon is that of the first-book effect, whereby the first

impact on our evidence for Ptolemaic papyri (which emerge mostly from cartonnage, a process that preserves original assemblies more closely than the Roman-era rubbish heaps). ¹¹ For the general relation between library size and the corresponding library’s emphasis on the central canon, see Moretti 1998: 146–8. ¹² Astrampsychus, with ten papyrus fragments, is the most obvious example: this Greek I-Ching type of text yielded its fortune telling by being constantly manipulated as a piece of papyrus. This fortune cookie must have been consumed very fast. If we find a roughly similar presence, among discarded pieces of papyri, for Aratus’ Phaenomena (surely, lovingly curated) and for Astrampsychus’ Sortes, this implies that, in ancient libraries unlike in ancient rubbish heaps, Aratus was much more common than Astrampsychus.

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book of a given work tends to be better represented in the record: was it read and therefore handled more?¹³ (see Table 8.4): Table 8.4 Survival of papyri (Egypt only) from first books. Total

Homer’s Iliad Homer’s Iliad Homer’s Iliad Homer’s Odyssey Thucydides Apollonius Herodotus Callimachus’ Aetia

1421 second book: third book: 252 97 56 47 33

First Book

Survival Factor for First Book

201 150 92 18 23 25 20 13

3.8 2.8 1.6 1.8 2.2 2.4 5.2 2.0

Above all, this accounts for the relatively large fraction of items in the papyrological record that clearly derive from an elementary education context. Thanks to the work of Cribiore (2001) and Morgan (1998), we are now much more familiar with this body of evidence; and it tends to make us think of papyri as primarily educational. Indeed, there are probably more than 1,000 papyri deriving from education (strictly defined)—so perhaps 20 per cent of the record, or even more. But a classroom papyrus would get discarded much more quickly than a library papyrus. In Herculaneum we can see curation for a century or two, which seems typical whenever we can establish by other means the duration over which a literary papyrus was in use. But classroom documents seem to have been discarded quickly; for example, they appear not to accumulate secondary documentary uses after they have been used educationally. Documentary use typically precedes educational use: thus scrap paper from a recycled document pile is used in the classroom, then discarded. If library papyrus ends up being curated for ten times longer than educational papyrus—which seems of the right order of ¹³ The observation concerning the relative frequency of first books was made by Stephens 1994; it is explained there in terms of small libraries’ choice to collect just the first books of canonical works, which certainly accounts for some of the effect. I also suggest that readers would have a bias towards reading from the beginning and, to the extent that not all readers read through to the end, there is a resulting tendency for first books to be handled more frequently and hence to be replaced faster.

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magnitude—then the ‘correct’ fraction of the classroom was not 20 per cent or more, but rather 2 per cent or more. What we do see—and this is a fundamental observation made repeatedly by Cribiore and Morgan—is that the basic educational process, down to the level of elementary literacy, relied on the very same central, canonical authors one could find everywhere in the libraries themselves. There were exceptions: thus Isocrates’ Cyprian orations were used primarily in an elementary education context (but, even there, we are dealing with the selection of an elementary and memorable text from the corpus of an author who was otherwise canonical). Perhaps Aesop is the only case of a true ‘education-only’ author.¹⁴ In conclusion, then, this is worth emphasizing: (Observation 4) Educational and other occasional uses of literature are likely considerably over-represented in the papyrological records. In their original library setting, literary papyri would contain mostly the standard, well-produced book types (that is, those studied by Johnson 2004).

3. The Papyri in a Mediterranean Context And so we return to my second question: how do we know that the elite collected and appreciated the very same authors whose works we find in the sands of Upper Egypt? How do we know that Egypt is representative of the Mediterranean? This is a question about Egypt against the Mediterranean as much as one about the small library against the big library. I argue in effect that the big library had the small library as a subset—that big libraries would always carry the same Iliad, Hesiod, Euripides, Menander . . . How do I know this? That is, why do I believe that, in antiquity, circulation (as reflected in the sheer numbers of books) went hand in hand with reputation (as reflected in the persistence of circulation across the social strata)? Why do I believe, in fact, that the same canon was shared across ¹⁴ None of the fourteen fragments is clearly a ‘text’ manuscript; seven are dictations, typically of the homicide fable; two are Latin–Greek bilingual texts; the rest seem to come from prose compilations for schoolroom use. Aesop was certainly not written as a school reader, but it seems possible that his ancient readers conceived of him that way.

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the strata, libraries of different sizes reflecting, essentially, no more than different points at which we can slice the very same ranking? This amounts to a fundamental claim: (Observation 5) There is a modern structure (discussed most famously by Bourdieu 1993) to a cultural capital that is constructed through contrasts with other forms of capital, so that works can sometimes aspire to high status precisely through their low circulation. This structure is a response to the pressure of mass literacy and did not exist in antiquity. Thus the ‘non-canonical’—in the sense in which, say, the modern detective novel is ‘non-canonical’—could not exist in antiquity. Let us look at some evidence for this claim.¹⁵ The most basic comparison is with the extant references to authors by name, gathered through TLG searches of those names (as lemmata) up to AD 500. I have studied this issue for several central ancient authors (not only the top canon, but also a few more, in order to offer some semblance of a ‘control group’; see Table 8.5): Table 8.5 Comparison of TLG citations/authors with the surviving papyri (Egypt only). Author

TLG citations

Aristotle Hippocrates Plato Sophocles Aratus Aristophanes Xenophon Aeschylus Demosthenes Herodotus

[4180] 3950 [3516] 3400 [9771] 9350 [1505] 1400 [988] 500 [1952] 1600 [1100] 1050 [791] 750 [3399] 3300 [1145] 1000

papyri

citations/ papyri

TLG authors

authors/ papyri

12 24 90 36 14 57 42 32 186 47

330 140 105 40 35 30 25 25 20 20

270 118 311 158 91 140 132 133 162 174

22.5 4.9 3.5 4.4 6.5 2.5 3.1 4.2 0.9 3.7

¹⁵ This claim fundamentally depends upon Stephens 1994: the now no longer controversial observation that the ancient novel—unlike (to a certain extent) its modern counterpart—was an elite medium. Indeed, the reason why scholars in the past thought otherwise seems to be precisely that they were casting for an appropriately low-status, highcirculation genre in antiquity.

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Archilochus Sappho Euripides Aeschines Alcman Hesiod Thucydides Menander Pindar Alcaeus Homer Isocrates Callimachus Theocritus Bacchylides Apollonius

[430] 400 [402] 400 [2211] 2200 [932] 800 [280] 250 [1369] 1250 [1158] 1150 [1058] 1030 [738] 650 [296] 300 [5733] 5500 [641] 600 [602] 500 [171] 150 [99] 100 [1369] 100

18 23 170 50 15 158 96 117 57 28 1815 118 83 24 14 52

20 20 15 15 15 10 10 10 10 10 5 5 5 5 5 0

100 85 226 96 62 217 132 114 146 72 332 103 127 50 37 161

 5.6 3.7 1.3 1.8 4.1 1.4 1.5 1 2.6 2.6 0.2 0.9 1.5 2.1 2.6 3.1

This comparison is in fact harder to make than it appears at first glance. One needs to control for various mechanisms of double counting in the current TLG software (and also, of course, for homonyms, which I did through a sampling of the counts; unsurprisingly, the ‘Apollonius’ in our sources is in most cases someone other than the poet, while ‘Thucydides’ is invariably the historian). Raw numbers appear inside square brackets; following are the adjusted numbers for sheer mentions. Numbers of citing authors are unadjusted and largely inflated. (It should be clear that the adjusted numbers carry a certain error bar.) And then there is the question of the context of mentioning a name: as we know well, the ancients often refer to one another obliquely, so that there are specific contexts in which names are mentioned explicitly.¹⁶ It would be obvious from Table 8.5 that explicit mentions by name are typical of the late scientific–philosophical commentary tradition (hence big numbers for Aristotle, Plato, Aratus—that is, big for an author of this era); and they are quite typical in the context of Atticism. This second part is important but not decisive: from sampling, it appears that about ¹⁶ This is obviously difficult to quantify: it should be emphasized, then, that in another, better quantifiable context, we find that the ancients were less ‘loose’ in their citation techniques than is usually assumed: within certain parameters, Roman-era citations of the canon appear to have been reasonably accurate (Stanley 1990).

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20 per cent of all extant citations of canonical authors by name come from the context of Atticizing scholarship. The fundamental result is the high degree to which the central canon’s survival on papyrus can be used to predict the occurrence of the names on it as TLG mentions: roughly, 20–30 TLG mentions per (today’s) papyrus fragment. In other words, book ownership in Oxyrhynchus makes reliable predictions on book culture in the places where the TLG literature was produced: Alexandria, Rome, Asia Minor, Athens, Constantinople. The metropolitan centres are not different from the more provincial Egyptian cities. It could be that Egypt paid somewhat greater attention to its local tradition of Hellenistic poetry, hence the higher numbers of papyrus fragments in proportion to the numbers of TLG mentions (Apollonius of Rhodes, in particular, is strikingly absent from ancient literary discussions). But then, again, perhaps this shows a different manner of admission into the canon; after all, we take it as a matter of course that Roman poetry relied heavily on the Hellenistic legacy, which implies the existence of a pan-Mediterranean canonicity by the first century BC. And, finally, however much we control for this feature via the different mechanisms of mentionability, it does appear possible that, in the metropolitan centres, philosophical and scientific conversations had had a more central role: in particular, the number of authors who mention Plato by name (311: almost the same as for Homer)— is remarkably high. We get another look at the metropolitan centres through a consideration (based on Richter 1965) of the evidence of the portraits: I count all the portraits of the figures of Greek culture, reading the evidence closely, so as to remove spurious cases. The results are once again arranged into tiers, in this case in two separate orders (Table 8.6). This is fundamentally the same ranking, but with an added, parallel system of philosophy. What we see here primarily is the use of the Greek canon as part of the symbolism of the Roman villa, and it may be that the connotations of philosophy (a ‘way of life’) are relevant to this particular use. But the latter also chimes well with the comparison with the TLG, and I may set this now as an explicit observation: (Observation 6) The metropolitan centres follow the same ranking of canon authors as do the papyri, but it appears that they emphasize philosophy more (and, by implication, science).

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Table 8.6 Portraits of figures of Greek culture in marble. Tier 1: the literary leaders Literary Sophocles 54 trag. Menander 54 com. Demosthenes 47 rhet. Homer 43 ep. Hesiod 38 ep. Tier 2: the philosophical leaders (with Euripides) Literary Philosophical Socrates 37 Euripides 30 trag. Epicurus 29 Plato 23 Hermarchus 23 Metrodorus 19 Aristotle 18 Chrysippus 18 Tier 3: less dominant figures (5 to 11) Literary Philosophical Anacreon 11 lyr. Aeschines 10 rhet. Zeno Aeschylus 9 trag. Carneades Herodotus 8 hist. Antisthenes Colotes Hyperides 6 rhet. Cleanthes Thucydides 5 hist. Diogenes Tier 4: More sporadic survival Literary Moschion 4 trag. Pindar 3 lyr. Alcaeus 3 lyr. Panyassis 3 ep. Isocrates 3 rhet. Aristophanes 3 com. Philemon 2 com. Xenophon 2 hist. Thespis 2 trag. Lysias 2 rhet. Corinna 1 lyr. Posidippus 1 lyr.

10 9 8 8 5 5

(above the schools) Garden Academy Garden Garden Lyceum Stoa

Stoa Academy Cynic Garden Stoa Cynic also: Hippocrates 5 med.

Philosophical Theophrastus

4

Lyceum

Heraclitus

2

pre-Socratic

Aristippus Archytas

1 1

Cyrenaic Pythagorean (continued)

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Table 8.6 Continued Timotheus Bacchylides Ibycus Aratus Stesichorus Protagoras

1 1 1 1 1 1

lyr. lyr. lyr. ep. lyr. rhet.

Posidonius Thales

1 1

Stoa pre-Socratic also: Eudoxus 1 math.

Finally, compare this situation with the Byzantine survival. I provide the percentage of authors of the various tiers that are extant through the literary manuscript tradition (Table 8.7).¹⁷ There is a sharp drop between tiers 1 and 2; tiers 3 and 4 are not significantly different; and even tier 5 does not yet get into free fall. But this is misleading: the chances of survival do correlate with the numbers of papyrus fragments. The reason why Byzantine survival does not drop more sharply is that, further down the tiers, the generic content changes and becomes more acceptable to Byzantine tastes. Put simply, there is less Table 8.7 Percentage of authors attested in papyri (Egypt only) extant through the literary manuscript tradition. Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Tier 4 Tier 5

94% 60% 62% 57% 42%

¹⁷ An obvious concern regarding this comparison is its potential circularity: after all, we are able to identify the authors of ancient papyri most readily when their works are extant via parchment, hence a tendency for the two sources of parchment and papyrus to diverge. I discuss this in detail in my monograph; this worry does not materialize in practice. The pool of papyri adespota is not massive (roughly 20 per cent of the entire literary papyri), and substantial chunks of it are either unrecognized works by the canonical authors (especially Attic drama) or isolated Roman-era pieces of prose. There is exactly one case of a substantial number of papyri cohering around a single, otherwise lost work—the Acta Alexandrinorum, which is a nearly subliterary phenomenon and clearly a special case of a genre whose popularity is local, namely related to Egypt (for more on this subject, see Harker 2008).

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poetry down the tiers. Tier 4 loses thirteen out of twenty-two poets, tier 5 loses thirteen of its fifteen poets—keeping, that is, only the late ancient poets Pamprepius and Nonnus. Put starkly, Byzantium preserved the papyrus it could, going down the ranking. It preferred prose to poetry; and so each and every prose author with at least five papyrus fragments got copied in Byzantium. Poetry was preserved only if it was from the very top of the canon. And then, again, there was much less emphasis on keeping the complete works in the case of poetry: the only poetic ‘author’ preserved completely—from Byzantium’s perspective—was Homer, while in prose it is likely that Byzantium preserved everything it had from the top tier prose authors. All the way down to Xenophon and beyond—even as far as Plutarch—it appears as if Byzantium attempted to copy everything it had. Only beginning with prose authors whose papyrus counts are in the single digits, such as Theophrastus, does it seem likely that, while a substantial body of work was still in circulation in late antiquity, Byzantium already made a much smaller selection.¹⁸ We can go farther down the tiers. After all, that we have roughly 180 authors identified among Egyptian papyri is an accident: we would have had more, had we had 50,000 extant papyri; fewer, if we had 500. We also have—completely by accident—about 180 authors that are extant on codex but not identified on papyrus. It makes sense to ask, then: had we had access to a larger pool of Egyptian papyri, would we find more of those authors who are now extant on codex only? Or would we find a different canon, papyrus and parchment diverging at long last? We can approach this question via the generic breakdown of the survival. In what follows I compare the codex-only authors with prose authors from before late antiquity,¹⁹ from tiers 4 and 5 (Table 8.8): ¹⁸ For Theophrastus in particular—a six-fragment author (in terms of fragments on papyrus)—see Schmitt 1972, supplemented by Sharples 1984. The fundamental observation is that only six fragments are known via Byzantine sources; all the remaining Byzantine citations come from extant works (Schmitt 1972: 253 n. 5). Indeed, it is possible enough that some of those six fragments are mediated and do not represent the survival, in Byzantium, of Theophrastean works now lost to us. Consider, on the other hand, the text of Hyperides, where once scepticism was in order as to its being copied in Byzantium at all (Wilson 1983: 95; if that were so, it would have been an exception to our rule that authors with five or more papyrus fragments were still circulating in Byzantium): the recent and spectacular find of Hyperides in the Archimedes Palimpsest has put such scepticism to rest (Netz et al. 2011, 1: 7; the original discovery is Tchernetska 2005). ¹⁹ It is at least possible that late ancient prose authors survived on parchment to some extent, not because Byzantium had an intrinsic interest in them but because they were lucky

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Table 8.8 Survival of codex-only authors by comparison with prose authors from before late antiquity. Tier 4 N = 22

Tier 5 N = 54

Codex-only N = 127

Gram 23% Tech 5% Math 0% Phil 14% Med 5%

Rhet 23% Hist 18% Novel 14%

Gram 19% Tech 9% Math 4% Phil 28% Med 6%

Rhet 13% Hist 20% Novel 2%

Gram 20% Tech 18% Math 16% Phil 14% Med 7%

Rhet 16% Hist 7% Novel 1%

Total 45%

Total 55%

Total 65%

Total 35%

Total 76%

Total 24%

The Table speaks for itself: (Observation 7) Authors who survive through the Byzantine manuscript tradition alone are of the same kind as one would extrapolate on the basis of the lower tiers of papyrus transmission. In Table 8.8 genres are divided into ‘typically codex’ (grammar, technical, mathematical, philosophy, medicine) and ‘typically papyrus’ (rhetoric, history, novel). It is obvious that the broad division into the two categories works very well as an extrapolation from tier 4 and 5 to the codex. Indeed the only surprise, on the basis of this comparison, is the high incidence of mathematics among the Greek treatises surviving through the manuscript tradition—which works out just fine for me as a historian of Greek mathematics. I study for a living something that was very important to the later transmission of ancient culture but also very rare in antiquity itself, at least in Upper Egypt. One possibility is that metropolitan centres, specifically, had more mathematics than Upper Egypt did; another is that the Byzantine transmission specifically favoured mathematics (as is true of its Arabic by-product). I think that there is something to be said for both possibilities. The lesson to take home, then? First, Byzantine choices were informed above all by the canon whose ranking we may see in the papyrus record. This once again serves to underline the enormous homogeneity of the ancient canon: we see Oxyrhynchus slaves disposing of discarded papyrus in the first centuries AD—and the relative rate at which they in their recentness (would Libanius be so massively preserved, for instance, had he been a first-century rhetor?). It is thus safer to exclude late ancient authors from this study.

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discarded various authors ends up dictating which authors will get copied roughly five hundred years later and roughly a thousand kilometres to the north. I suspect it is sometimes believed that the ‘canon’ was in some sense produced in Byzantium, as if antiquity had a much wider and more fluid set of authors, among which Byzantium made a rigid selection. So it must be emphasized: Byzantium’s literary selection was entirely unoriginal, no more than an automatic reflex of a ranking that preceded Byzantium by many centuries. In this discussion we have consistently come across two themes: the stability of the ancient system of genres and of the rankings within the canon; and a basic bifurcation between ‘small-library’ and ‘big-library’, between ‘classical’ and ‘Roman era’, between ‘typically papyrus’ and ‘typically codex’. This bifurcation suggests a qualification to the result discussed so far.

4. Interim Summary: What was Canonized, and When? Let us stop to reconsider the meaning of the comparison between ‘codexonly’ authors and the papyri. First, there is a substantial body of adespota on papyrus, many of which should belong to tiers 4 or 5 of the papyri distribution—that is, they represent authors from whom we have no more than one to four papyrus fragments, but who are not entered as such on my list of tiered authors because they have not been identified. Second, there are plenty of works surviving on codex alone and, I now find, having roughly the same generic distribution as the works of tiers 4–5 authors (though even more so, in other words even more specialized and tending away from the performative). Thus, in principle, we could have expected a significant overlap between the codex survival of tiers 4–5 and the papyrus survival. This overlap is quite significant, I found, at the level of genres. However, it is very modest at the level of authors. Thus we have plenty of papyrus adespota in the novel, in medicine, in history, in grammar, and only a handful of such papyrus-attested authors that also survive on parchment. This means the following: (Observation 8) In the specialized, non-performative genres, even though the overall tendency to preserve this or that genre remained

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fairly stable throughout antiquity, the specific authors chosen could vary by time and place. I have emphasized throughout the stability of the canon, but this stability is in fact limited to the papyrus-typical, performative genres of epic and of Athenian performance. In the specialized genres we do not observe a similar stabilization of the canon, but rather a continuous debate concerning the ‘correct’ ranking. This observation should be familiar, after all, from the ‘normal’ evidence of cultural history. Throughout antiquity, medical authority was disputed, different schools rising, competing, and disappearing: the eventual winner, Galen, eclipsed all those who preceded him, so that ancient medicine is now essentially lost—with the exception of Galen and of treatises in the Hippocratic corpus. Remember the evidence of the philosophical portraits: what we saw there was the coexistence of several parallel rankings (possibly syncretized in the Italian villa). In other words, there were Hellenistic schools of philosophy competing for hegemony, all eventually subsiding in the face of a Roman-era emerging Platonism (which came to encompass Aristotelianism), so that we have now ‘all’ of Aristotle (in a way), but effectively no Hellenistic philosophy. We have Ptolemy, but not Hipparchus. And just when did Euclid become ‘canonical’?²⁰ To this we may add Cavallo’s (1996) observation, familiar by now, about the role of fashion in the distribution of the ancient novels whose papyrus record—for each individual novel—tends to cluster them closely together in time and that, as a genre taken as a whole, appear together in the high Roman era and then largely disappear from view during late antiquity. This, however, contrasts with the pattern of the medieval reception of the classical legacy. Late antiquity has made a series of choices: Oribasius canonizing Galen, Neoplatonists canonizing a particular Platonic– Aristotelian amalgam, a specific selection of authors in the exact sciences and in grammar being promulgated, the genre of the novel being dropped as a whole, along with the great bulk of postclassical historical writing. And those decisions then stuck. Aristotle, Galen, Euclid,

²⁰ A difficult question: while early authors seem to assume Euclid’s results, it is not clear that they also approached him as an author to be emulated and referred to explicitly. In general, however, we may discern a qualitative difference between the mathematical works still available to late ancient authors (dominated by a more ‘ludic’ Hellenistic tradition) and those transmitted to Byzantium (of a more ‘pedagogic’ character); see Netz 2009: 111–12.

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Ptolemy, all remain as staple, canonical authors of the medieval Greek and Arabic traditions, and indeed remain established, in our image of the classical world, as canonical in an unqualified sense.²¹ We see, then, a basic asymmetry: (Observation 9) In the performative genres, the Greeks developed an extraordinarily stable and homogeneous system of ranking authors but, in the non-performative prose, authors were not ranked in a stable way before late antiquity. This asymmetry lasted for about 700 years, between the formation of the literary canon (mostly complete in the fourth century BC) and the universalization of the principle of a canonical ranking, in late antiquity (mostly in the fourth century AD). Now you may wonder about the cavalier fashion in which I argue that the literary canon was mostly complete in the fourth century BC. I do discuss this in detail in my forthcoming monograph, but I do not think the issue should be controversial. It is sometimes suggested in the literature that the canon was somehow made in Alexandria. This may perhaps have some validity for the explicit concept of a canon: it is conceivable that it was only in the third century that Greeks came to reflect explicitly on the fact that they possessed a very powerful ranking of their literary system. But the ranking was surely in place well before that and is in fact documented even as an explicit concept, in the most obvious case of drama, in the fourth century BC.²² At that point lyric poetry was making a transition to its later, minor status; but it is remarkable to see how far the relative ranking of lyrical poets was already achieved in the classical period. We may consult Table 8.9:

²¹ Take for example Thomas Laqueur’s 1990 Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. It is a splendid book, and one that I keep returning to. It should also be clarified that the word ‘Greeks’ in the subtitle refers exclusively to Galen and Aristotle (the subject of ch. 2). This narrowing down of antiquity is quite valid when speaking of its medieval and Renaissance reception (the subject of Laqueur’s ch. 3), but it is entirely misleading as a reading of antiquity itself. ²² I discuss this in detail in my monograph, but this claim about the near-immediate Mediterranean impact of Attic drama is already well established and is indeed the main theme of Csapo 2010. The Lycurgan programme of Athenian cultural conservatism, including the explicit canonization of the three tragedians, is familiar (see e.g. Scodel 2007) and, I would argue, represents the recognition of an already established ranking.

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Table 8.9 Percentage of archaic poets attested in papyri (Egypt only) by comparison with TLG citations down to the fourth century BC. Poet

Papyrus fragments

TLG mentions down to the fourth century²³

46 28 23 18 15 14 9 5 1

102 43 65 53 33 7 35 33 8

Pindar Alcaeus Sappho Archilochus Alcman Bacchylides Stesichorus Anacreon Ibycus

The correlation is real enough (coefficient 0.86). It actually makes for a nice picture (Figure 8.1): 120

TLG citations

100 80 60 40 20 0

0

5

10

15

20 25 30 Papyrus Fragments

35

40

45

50

Figure 8.1 Correlation of archaic poets attested in papyri (Egypt only) with TLG citations down to the fourth century BC.

²³ Those citations have to be culled by hand, in order to remove spurious occurrences of homonyms and artefacts related to the way in which TLG arranges fragments.

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What this means in English is that authors such as Plato cite Pindar or Sappho at about the same relative frequency at which such authors’ fragments are retrieved from the sands of Egypt. Now, we may debate the order of causation (perhaps authors became central in later reception to the extent that they were enshrined in such canonical works as those of Plato), but this underlines the fundamental observation: (Observation 10) The performative, literary canon was established for good in the fourth century BC (Menander and the Hellenistic poets joining in at the beginning of the third). Let us finally take a look at this canon. We can now set it out explicitly. The small-library permanent must-haves: (1) Homer, but also— representing the key poetic forms of performance—(2) Menander, (3) Euripides, (4) Hesiod, and, in a more qualified sense, Hellenistic elaborations of ‘epic’, variously understood: (5) Callimachus, (6) Apollonius, (7) Theocritus, (8) Aratus. So far, this is the permanent canon of the small library. Three authors joined this canon in Roman times (having been, before that, big-library canonical authors). Roman-era additions to the small-library must-haves (prose performance—rhetoric—joins poetic performance): (9) Demosthenes, (10) Isocrates, (11) Aeschines. All small libraries were similar to one another, but each big library was big in a different way. However, the later could not be imagined without the big-library canonical authors, who were as follows. The permanent big-library canon (arranged by genre): history, as long as it reflected on the performative traditions of democratic Athens: (12) Thucydides, (13) Herodotus, (14) Xenophon. A fuller tragic canon: (15) Sophocles, (16) Aeschylus. The special case of Socratic performance (compare also Xenophon): (17) Plato. A fuller comic canon: (18) Aristophanes. Though the once central form of performance, lyric poetry, had lost its music and became much less significant, one author did remain central in the big library context: (1) Pindar.

5. The View from the Bottom I have sought in vain for ancient graphomaniacs. Frustrated, I begin to wonder whether graphomania could not perhaps be a specifically modern affliction.

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There is a unique case of an author’s ‘private notebooks’, as it were, preserved among the Egyptian papyri. This is a cache of poetry by Dioscurus of Aphrodito (sixth century AD): about forty pieces preserved among some 600 other documents: as is typical of large findings of papyri, this is fundamentally an archive of documents. And the key observation is that the poems in fact are—as argued by Fournet (1999)—a kind of document. In the modern workplace we may have the colleague who knows how to raise a toast, who knows how to compose a farewell note. This is roughly what Dioscurus was. As part of his career, he would put his relatively good culture to use in composing poems to celebrate his superiors on various occasions, such as promotions. Did he daydream of future glory? Perhaps, but we can be sure of one thing: his poetic production had a more immediate goal, functioning in local occasions, in a low-level game of patronage. Or take another set of (two) poems, found in another documentary cache, from the other chronological extreme: among the Zenon papyri (third century BC) are two versions of an epitaph for a dog (P.Cair.Zen. IV 59532: see Pepper 2010). A poet trying his hand in Hellenistic irony? Perhaps: those poems are more accomplished than Dioscurus’. But they are also quite likely to have been made for the sake of a particular commission by a relatively low-level patron (in this case, the estate manager, albeit of a magnificent estate). We may consider in a more general way the field of autography: pieces on papyrus that seem to be composed (not merely copied) by the writer. The following list is derived from Dorandi’s (2007) study (with my own arrangement into types): 1. Four fragments. Ambitious prose: medical doxography (Anonymus Londinensis), a history of the siege of Rhodes by Demetrius Poliorcetes (P.Berol. Inv. 11632); a mythological compendium (P.Oxy. 3702); Vita of Socrates (P. Hibeh 182). 2. Two fragments. Ambitious poetry: erotic elegy (P.Oxy. 3723); a cosmogony in hexameter (P.Oxy. 2816). 3. Fifteen fragments. Works (mostly poetry) with obvious local functions: speech notes (PSI 1399: the contents are local); three performance notes: an iambic trimeter—drama—on Odysseus (P.Köln VI 245) as well as two pieces of poetry with musical notation

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(P.Oxy. 3539, P.Berol. Inv. 6870 + Inv. 14097 verso); two drafts for epitaphs (PSI I 17, P.Cair.Zen. IV 59532: while not autography, I believe the Zenon epitaphs fit here); four encomia (P.Giss. 3, P.Oxy. 1015, P.Oxy. 3537; P.LitLond. 62). One should probably add two hymns (PSI Carlini, P.Ross. Georg. I 11), and also an epigram (P.Köln III 128). 4. Two fragments: Private exercises? A rhetorical exercise (P.Yale II 105); poetic notes (P.Wash. Univ. II 70). What is immediately striking about the evidence is that, while the literature by less frequent authors on the papyrological record is primarily prose, autograph papyri are primarily poetry. Big libraries collected the central canon as well as various prose treatises; and yet there was a constant production of poetry, but not with a view to its future collection. This was occasional poetry in the strict sense—produced for particular occasions (a celebration, an inscription). Poetry did not die as the canon got formed; it just ceased, for the most part, from being collected, and in consequence its function changed. (Observation 11) Following the establishment of the performative canon, the production of new poetry was mostly occasional. However shocking this claim might be, it would be useful to put it alongside the corollaries of the establishment of a canon in the specialized genres: as is well known, from late antiquity onwards, writing in the specialized genres was mostly limited to commentary writing.²⁴ Authorship that could have been understood as explicitly striving for a status equal to that of the already established canon was ruled out in principle. So it was in the sciences, in the Middle Ages. Greek poetry was mostly like this, through most of antiquity. And hence no ancient graphomania: there was no point in even trying. There were certain prescribed routes to literary success, and they were defined by the social practices that sustained them (an Alexandrian court, Roman patronage). There was no alternative route (because, of course, there was no market).

²⁴ I discuss in Netz 1998 the phenomenon of the domination, in late antiquity, of the exact sciences by what I call ‘deuteronomic’ texts—that is, works that essentially depend on the reproduction of other, established texts.

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This is not about lower levels of ancient literacy. The point is precisely about the contrast between the many owned papyri and the few authored ones—and about the ephemeral character of the very few authored ones we can identify. Literary production was very rare among the most literate elite of the Egyptian chōra. What I offer can be called a demand-side theory of graphomania: modernity knows many graphomaniacs because it is not entirely absurd for would-be authors to believe in the existence of potential demand for their work. Just get a little more exposure—and you might get in there. In the ancient Egyptian chōra, however, it would have been simply lunatic for a person to dream him-/herself as a Homer, a Demosthenes, a Euripides. Literature depended on becoming eminent in a socially defined role, which was not defined for the Egyptian chōra but for the metropolitan centres and which, indeed, for the central genres, had been already defined out of existence. You really must move to Alexandria— or you’d be forever stuck writing epitaphs for dogs.

6. Limits of the Canon: Being in and out of the Ancient Greek Canon Here are, briefly and dogmatically, my final observations on the formation of the ancient Greek canon. The central model of ancient literature was performance, even as works came to circulate primarily in rolls designed for silent, solitary reading. Works, then, could survive to the extent that they managed to suggest the vividness of the act of performance—to the extent that one could read them as supreme specimens of a performative genre. In the archaic model, this was mediated directly through acts of performance in symposia. In the classical model, this was mediated through the sheer imaginability of a site of performance. The more a site of performance was culturally shared, the more the works associated with it could suggest the vividness of the act of performance, and so would circulate more; and this would tend to make that site of performance more culturally shared. This self-reinforcing loop made Athens, already in the fourth century BC, the unique site of canonization.

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Why was Athens enshrined, and then also frozen? Because a canon determines a poetics of reception. The poetics of the reception of Athens came to be associated with a certain type of performance, associated with Athenian democracy. The end of democracy, while the canon was still active and asserting its poetics, made sure that no other works could make an unqualified entry into the canon, creating a void that, in turn, served to mark even further the singularity of the Athenian canon, which at that stage became unshakeable. The paradox, then: the dynamic canon of democracy became the frozen cultural presupposition of an undemocratic society. And in its very form, shaped by the democratic performances and competitions that gave rise to it, it preserved the agonistic spirit of the early Greek polis well into the era of Mediterranean monarchies and beyond, into modern Europe. This, then, is the general theory of being in the canon. We can now also classify the ways of being out of the canon. The basic question is this: are you a performative author at all? If not, then your work, by definition, cannot obtain canonicity. In the ancient system, non-performative genres were specialized, circulating in a few big specialized libraries; their reception would fluctuate and be in constant debate, so that it was in fact within those specialized genres that the agonistic spirit of the canon thrived for the seven centuries of Hellenistic and Roman monarchy. Next, if your genre is performative, we need to ask whether its site of performance is widely shared as a vivid presence. If not, then your work cannot be canonical and is instead occasional. Finally, even performative authors in the widely shared sites of performance could not all become canonical: the culturally shared mental space allotted to each given genre was confined to three authors at most. Scholarly attention could encompass more authors, but such authors would carry a different meaning from the canonical authors. They would be minor authors: appreciated alongside the canonical authors, but only in the specialized context of scholarly collections. So Hyperides, Eupolis, and the like. Should we also count Aeschylus and Sophocles in this category? The most important group of authors in this group are all the lyric poets other than Pindar. We may visualize all this in the form of a tree (Figure 8.2):

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PERFORMATIVE?

NO

YES

SPECIALIZED

WIDELY SHARED CONTEXT?

NO

YES

OCCASIONAL

AMONG THE VERY TOP AUTHORS?

NO

YES

MINOR

CANONICAL

Figure 8.2 Becoming canonical from the fourth century century AD.

BC

to the fourth

The specialized is at the opposite pole from the canonical; it is also where actual literary life thrived in the age of the classical canon, from the fourth century BC to the fourth century AD.

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9 Homer in the Gutter From Samuel Butler to the Second Sophistic and Back Again James I. Porter

1. Homer: Marginal or Canonical? Few authors have the experience of having been dragged in the mud, made fools of by children, unfairly defeated in competition, accused of immorality, gluttony, or cultural primitivism, ostracized, labelled plagiarists or liars (indeed, of having seen their name made into a synonym for lying)— and generally of having been maligned, pilfered, plagiarized, corrected, rewritten, divested of their titles, deracinated at birth, and made to wander homeless and destitute, then to serve the whims of their own protagonists (whether out of infatuation or as their dupe), and finally to die covered in ignominy. I am of course speaking of Homer, who had to suffer all of this and more, almost uniquely among the poets from antiquity.¹

¹ Virgil suffers mild criticisms in the Life ascribed to Suetonius and to Aelius Donatus, which is chiefly of a literary–critical cast. But, to my knowledge, he never suffered posthumously the way Homer did—despite the claim made in the same Life: ‘Virgil never wanted for detractors. And no wonder, for neither, in fact, did Homer’ (Vita Suetonii vulgo Donatiana §43 (194; trans. Ziolkowski and Putnam 2008)). See Vita Suetonii §8 (ibid., 190) for a few unsavoury biographical ‘facts’; §44 (194) for stylistic failings; and §46 (194) for the alleged plagiarism of Homer (similarly, Book 5 in Macrobius’ Saturnalia, where, however, Virgil is fully vindicated). Later Lives of Virgil take their cue from this document. This is not to deny that Virgil’s poetry underwent criticism and parody in antiquity and later (see Hardie 2014, ch. 8 for a recent synthesis).

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Some of these incidents come from the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, which in all probability was included in Alcidamas’ now lost repertoire of literary criticism and history from around 400 BC, the Museum, though the Contest may well reflect earlier lore. The Contest ends with Homer not only disgraced at the hands of the better poet Hesiod, his rival (wrongly, in the eyes of the onlooking public, though this was the verdict of the institutor and arbiter of the contest, King Panedes), but also outwitted by fisher boys who trick him with a mere riddle (a detail gleefully mentioned by Heraclitus a century earlier);² and then, in a magnificently inglorious decrescendo, the narrative shows Homer, the icon of poetic memory, forgetting and suddenly recalling a prophecy that he was about to die, resolving to compose his own burial inscription (which he quickly does), and finally, on the way back from the sea shore, slipping in the mud, falling on his side, and dying three days later. The rest of this catalogue of wrongs appears in the farrago of biographical literature and other writings in both prose and verse that attached themselves to Homer, whose example spawned not only the origins of ancient criticism (even before Theagenes in the sixth century), but also the origins of ancient critique, rebuff, parody, subversion, and revision that kept his image alive down through the centuries, albeit in mangled and barely recognizable form.³ Lucian, Dio Chrysostom, and Philostratus—all three from the so-called Second Sophistic, when Greece flourished under Rome—are only the best known later practitioners of Homeric revisionism,⁴ which is perhaps best classified as paraliterature (‘literature in the second degree’, as Gérard Genette would say).⁵ Earlier representatives include philosophers from Xenophanes and Heraclitus to Plato and Zoilus (aka Homeromastix, ‘The Scourge of Homer’), in addition to poets like Stesichorus and Pindar (the former denied that Helen went to Troy—only her phantom did, and so the Greeks fought and died literally for nothing).⁶ But why stop here? The earliest apparent comment on Homer is nearly as old as Homer’s poems themselves in their recorded form, and one of the

² Fr. 56 Diels–Kranz. ³ The most recent study of Homer’s motley lives is Graziosi 2002. ⁴ See Zeitlin 2001, which remains the richest account of Second Sophistic revisions of Homer in different media; and Kim 2010, a superb literary account. ⁵ Genette 1997. ⁶ See Mehmel 1955; Bowie 1993; Kelly 2007. Lanata 1963 collects most of the significant early texts before Plato.

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oldest preserved examples of Greek literacy at that: Nestor’s cup, found in a necropolis on Ischia and dated to around 740–725 BC. The cup is so called because it proclaims its ownership on the inscription preserved in its inner bowl: ‘I am the cup of Nestor, a cup good to drink from [εὔποτ[ον] ποτέριον]. Whoever drinks from this cup the desire of fair-crowned Aphrodite will seize immediately.’⁷ Is the object making an allusion to Nestor’s cup in Iliad 11, as most scholars believe, or, less probably, simply to myth?⁸ Either way, a contrast is intended. The cup is modest and diminutive. The hero’s cup, golden and ornate (indeed, baroque), was legendary for its enormous size and weight: ‘only that great hero [Nestor] could lift full with ease [ἀμογητὶ ἄειρεν]’, while others struggled just to lift it off the table (Iliad 11.632–7). The cup from Ischia, made of humble earthenware, is inviting, not resisting; it is ‘good’ to drink from, and may even be ‘easy’ to lift and to obtain pleasure from, if that is one of the connotations of eupoton.⁹ Whether or not the object is the incarnation of a joke,¹⁰ at the very least it is light-hearted and playful and activates a cascade of incongruities— incongruities of scale (a larger-than-life cup is being compared to its dwarflike alter-ego from everyday life), of temporality (the mythical past is being brought rudely into the domestic present), and of genre (martial epic intrudes into the world of erotic and sympotic poetry), though to be sure the cup is in a sense simply reverse-engineering the mechanisms of epic, which made similar importations of its own (Nestor, after all, drinks on the battlefield, and Homer was sung in convivial settings, for the pleasure of mere mortals). The Italian cup is also very much self-aware, remarkably so for such an early a date. The object knowingly places itself at the margins of the still (or newly) nascent Homeric tradition. Looking ahead, there are the Alexandrian and post-Alexandrian grammatical spin-offs, of the sort that would make Nestor’s cup one of the most talked about puzzles in Homer.¹¹ But no puzzle was greater, or more insoluble, than that of Homer himself. Venturing guesses as to the ⁷ Carmina epigraphica Graeca (CEG) 1: 454. ⁸ In favour of the Homeric allusion, which seems credible enough, are Hansen 1976; Watkins 1976; Murray 1994; and Powell 2002: 167 (‘Europe’s first literary allusion’). ⁹ LSJ s.v. εὖ, VI. ¹⁰ Hansen 1976 was the first to notice this possibility. Not everyone agrees (see e.g. West 1994), but the sceptics are in the minority. ‘Humble earthenware’ is from Hansen 1976: 42. ¹¹ Problems about the cup were posed and answered by Stesimbrotus (FGrH 107 F 23), Glaucon (‘Glaucus’), Antisthenes (fr. 55 Caizzi), and Aristotle (all four are mentioned by Porphyry, Homeric Questions, Iliad 11.637) and by later critics of Homer: Aristarchus (Σ T Il. 11.636c ex.) and his followers Aristonicus and Herodian (Σ A Il. 11.636a–b), the

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identity of the poet was one of antiquity’s favourite parlour games. Here, every new guess entailed, by definition, a re-invention and revision of Homer. In this class of fictive reimaginings, two items . . . stand out at opposite ends of the spectrum: the many competing biographical accounts or Lives of Homer above all (these are mostly hagiographic), and a remarkable clutch of verses from Hermesianax of Colophon’s poem Leontion (300 BC?) that show Homer falling in love with Penelope, moving to Ithaca, and then writing her into his poetry, all for the sake of his passion.¹² ‘The divine Homer’ (as his tomb marker in the final line of the Contest reads, and as the poet was widely called) was simultaneously the most revered and the most reviled poet of antiquity.¹³ He lived on not only as the archetypal apotheosized poet—in Greek, the description ho poiētēs (‘the Poet’) sufficed to conjure up his memory and his glory—but also as the archetypal whipping boy who licensed all manner of criticism. In other words, he lived on both in the gutter and at the top tier of the literary and cultural canons of Greco-Roman antiquity. Nor did the literary tradition of slumming with Homer end in later antiquity. It continued well into the modern age, the two most colourful instances being François Hédelin, abbé of Aubignac, who sometime between 1664 and 1670 declared, in a lengthy set of Conjectures, that ‘Homer was not a good poet, and . . . he never even existed’ (a paradox in itself ),¹⁴ and then Samuel Butler, the British prankster and classicist

Pergamene critics Crates of Mallos and Asclepiades of Myrlea (Ath. 11.489c–94b), and others recorded in Athenaeus (see, in this order, Ath. 11.781d and 10.433b–c). ¹² Homer’s reputation as a womanizer survived into the early imperial period (see Kim 2010: 98). In his Heroicus, Philostratus has Homer in effect plagiarize Odysseus (Her. 43.12–16). The Sibylline oracles and Ptolemaeus Chennos offer a different version of things, about which more will be said later. ¹³ The pseudo-Herodotean Life of Homer (201.194–202.218 Allen) has a certain Thestorides copy Homer’s poems by dictation and sing them as though they were his own. According to Pindar, fr. 265 Snell–Maehler (= Ael. VH 9.15), Homer had to give away the Cypria as a dowry for his daughter—to whom and under what conditions is not said. The list is almost endless. ¹⁴ On peut soûtenir qu’Homere n’étoit pas un bon poëte, & que même il n’a jamais été, sans se render suspect d’être mal affectionné à la couronne, ni de mal penser de la religion (‘One can maintain that Homer was not a good poet, and that he never even existed at all, without giving rise to the suspicion that one is either ill-disposed towards the crown or contemptuous of religion’, Hédelin 1715: 5–6.) For the date, see Lambin’s introduction to Hédelin (Lambin 2010: 40). Knowledge of d’Aubignac’s scandalous thesis circulated widely among the likes of Perrault and Boileau before the anonymous and posthumous publication of the Conjectures in 1715. But his thesis was not entirely unprecedented in France (see

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manqué, who in the last decades of the nineteenth century set out to prove that the Odyssey was in fact written by a woman and that Troy never fell. How can we explain this phenomenon? What can account for this absolute disparity in the responses to Homer’s standing and stature, in a cultural imaginary that has shown itself to be so willing to elevate and debase its own values, seemingly uniquely in the case of Homer?¹⁵ Being the extreme instance that he is, and hovering as he does between being Someone and No One, Homer can throw a revealing light on the mechanisms of canonicity and marginality and on the passions—or obsessions—that drive both. Homer plainly could not have been pushed into the margins and the gutter, which is to say depicted as a marginal figure and then debased or excoriated, unless he hadn’t first been accepted as a canonical figure, and probably as the canonical figure of all canonical poets—the sublime ocean from which all other streams and rivulets flowed, as the ancients endlessly repeated (the image is Hellenistic, but the sentiment is pervasive).¹⁶ A further paradox is that the canonical figure of Homer spawned a literature that was often minor, marginal, and paraliterary itself, whether in the form of high-brow technical disquisitions (glosses, commentaries, problems and solutions, historical inquiries, and the like) or in the form of low-brow knock-offs—by which I mean pseudo-versions of all of the above, such as Ptolemy the Quail’s Paradoxical Histories, Lucian’s True Stories, Dio Chrysostom’s Trojan Oration, and Philostratus’ Heroicus, let alone the hilarious yet learned mock-heroic send-up, the Batrachomyomachia (Battle between Frogs and Mice).¹⁷ Finally, when we put these two facts together, we arrive at a genuine problem of evaluation. The paraliterary treatments of Homer are difficult to read: are they a sign of esteem, perhaps even awe, however awkwardly expressed (or disguised), or actually one of ridicule and disdain? Most of these critiques Lambin 2010: 45–51). It was simply the most radical statement of its kind, well in advance of Vico’s much less hostile denial of Homer’s existence in 1740. For other modern encounters with Homer, see Rabau 2012. ¹⁵ A possible exception is Moses as he is read in the Babylonian Talmudic tradition in a seriocomic vein that, as Boyarin 2009: 232–42 shows, has striking affinities with Menippean satire and with Lucian in particular. ¹⁶ See the peculiar anecdote about Galaton and the Alexandrian Homereion that is preserved in Aelian (VH 13.22) and discussed by Webster 1964: 144–5. ¹⁷ While the former are exceptionally well documented, the latter—that is, the lower forms of homage—are only slowly gaining visibility (and even a certain respectability). See Hunter 2009; Kelly 2009; Kim 2010; Acosta-Hughes 2011.

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are probably not even directed at Homer, but more likely at readers of Homer and at the cultural fetishism that grew up around him, whether in grammar schools, among professional grammarians, or among greedy book collectors—that is, whenever Homer isn’t being made to stand in for poetry tout court, as he was in the moralizing world of antiquity, whether we look to Xenophanes, Plato, or Plutarch. Homer survived thanks as much to his marginality as to his centrality: the one reinforced the other. Consequently, in the case of Homer the problem of canons and margins becomes particularly enmeshed, and keeping the categories apart is difficult. On the one hand, margins are the place where canonicity is confirmed, if not also established (with the most dignity, or at least canonical authority, at Alexandria). On the other, canonicity tolerates a certain marginalization of its highest objects of reverence (indeed, to an extraordinarily high degree), whether by this we mean that it permits a certain marginalization of itself, as if through a kind of noblesse oblige, or that it survives all such abasement. There is a seductiveness to the cut-and-dry distinction between canons and margins that needs to be resisted. Simply to couch literary history in these terms may be deeply problematic: first, it presupposes a marginality where none may have existed (or may have been felt); second, margins have a way of shifting over time, as newcomers attach themselves to new centres of canonical-making power; and, third, while in one way the process of transmission and reception might create the illusion of a canon, in another it is constantly adjusting this original in a kind of ongoing rifacimento. Thus, to take up the first prong of this argument against the easy distinction between canons and margins, it may be true that Homer’s canonicity creates, de facto, a margin from which counterprojects can be launched. But it is not at all clear why those sites of literary production ought to be deemed marginal. The Alexandrians would claim to be not marginal but medial. The rhetoricians of the Second Sophistic would claim to be performing their own perfectly respectable jobs and not to be lobbing bombshells from the margins: irony, wit, and outré antics needn’t imply self-debasement, especially if they are done under the cover either of self-authorization or of equivocation and undecidability. Criticism was built into the way Homer was always read, and Homer’s fiercest critics were often attempting to adjust Homer’s image, not to jettison it altogether. Even in those cases of wholesale revision, what justifies our claiming that these revisions occur on the margin of a canon, let alone that they are vented from the margins pure and simple?

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A related question is whether Homer, in such a scenario, can ever actually be brought down into the gutter, and then what it means for him to be found in that place. It is arguable that no amount of debasing could alter Homer’s invincible status as the canon by which literary, paraliterary, and extraliterary canonicity was measured in antiquity (and beyond), each stigmatizing gesture merely reinforcing his status—until, of course, the trend tips the other way, as it could but never has. Can Homer ever fail to occupy the status he has? Is he too big to fail? Perhaps, though one suspects that this outcome is likelier to come about, in some future possible world, not through marginalization via paraliterature, but through complete and utter neglect—marginalization in its most potent form—at which point ‘margins’ no longer even signify. So, on the one hand it may be tempting to say that we have margins where we have canons and that, where there is absolute marginalization (hence no marginality at all), we have neither. But the difficulty with this schema is that Homer—the poet who stands for his works, which is to say, the received Homer—is not simply equivalent to his high canonical status. He is the total ensemble of his literary and non-literary representations, high and low, sublime and ludicrous; he is both edifice-like and permanently under construction. From this perspective, and given Homer’s seemingly irreducible status as we know it (more than any other ancient author, Homer was constantly under construction), it would be wrong to equate Homer with one pole or the other. Indeed, if we add the further consideration that Homer was commonly thought, starting with Aristotle if not earlier, to be the author of the anti-epic Margites (Madman or Idiot), a comic poem in hexameters and iambic trimeters preserved only in meagre fragments today, one has to ask whether such a distinction would have made any sense at all in antiquity.¹⁸ Homer obviously

¹⁸ Archilochus and Cratinus are said to have connected the work to Homer (West 2003: 242 [= 1971: 70]), but the testimony is quite remote, hence possibly unreliable. For two recent editions of the poem, see West 2003 and Gostoli 2007. For discussion, see Pralon 2011. The Batrachomyomachia may continue to be honoured as Homeric in the Hellenistic sculptural relief by Archelaus of Priene. Described as ‘an extravagant panegyric’ in stone and the relief, dubbed the ‘Apotheosis of Homer’ by modern scholars, the relief depicts Homer seated regally on a throne, surrounded by all the Muses and gods of culture, while ‘two mice nibble on a roll’ at his feet (Zanker 1995: 161; see also Webster 1964: 145).

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invited both kinds of reading.¹⁹ Consequently I wonder whether the very distinction between margin and canon doesn’t evaporate here: CANON–MARGIN or MARGICANON Reception is another name for this same process of indistinction. Homer can be received at various parts of the literary globe, whether at the metropole (but where is that? for starters, pick one of his seven birthplaces or adoptive home poleis) or on the diasporic boundaries and as a boundary phenomenon (Homer as a Babylonian, a Syrian, or an Egyptian). But Homer remains what he is, whatever he is—that peculiar cipher that may be unique precisely because it (or he) has no content and no identity, but merely occupies a structural position that cannot be removed without a disastrous change to the structure itself, like a gap in traffic. The boundaries can be perpetually stretched to accommodate new claims (Ionia, Athens,²⁰ Ithaca,²¹ Alexandria, Babylonia, Rome,²² Jerusalem,²³ Berlin, London . . . ); Homer moves with them. So much by way of preamble on the perplexing situation of Homer, whose success over the millennia owes as much to his being canonically marginal as to his being hors concours. That is, Homer’s ideal status was, paradoxically, sustained either by his rejection or by his reception in the gutters and the margins, and probably just as much, or more, by the latter as by his coronation in the corridors of cultural power. That said, I want to turn to one specific instance of this mechanism (Samuel Butler’s

¹⁹ The perceived lighter elements of the epics (Hephaestus playing the butler at the end of Iliad 1, the deception and seduction of Zeus in Iliad 14, or the ensnaring of Hermes and Aphrodite in Odyssey 8) would have licensed ascriptions like that of the Margites to Homer and encouraged later writers to speak of ‘the humour of Homer’ (Butler 1923 [1892]). ²⁰ Ps.-Hdt. Vit. Hom. 4.8 Allen (Aristodemus of Nyssa); Hsch. ο 250 (‘Italian’, ‘and even a Roman’). ²¹ Hsch. ο 250. ²² Ps.-Hdt. Vit. Hom. 6.18–19 Allen. ²³ See Croese 1704, whose title reads: Homer the Jew, or The History of the Jews According to Homer. All 700 pages of it cover only the Odyssey (and not even the whole of it). The second volume, on the Iliad never appeared. Croese’s claim is that diasporic Jews brought the Bible to Greece and that Homer, who was one of these Jewish Greeks (his very name would have been Hebraic, deriving from ‫אמר‬, ‘Omer’ or ‘Amer’: Croese 1704: 54), concealed traces of the Bible in his epics. Thus for Croese the Iliad tells the story of the battle of Jericho (Croese 1704: 58]), the Odyssey narrates the history of the Jews under the patriarchs in the Near East (Ithaca being actually Mesopotamia: Croese 1704: 243), and so on.

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Authoress of the Odyssey), first by considering Homer’s fragile place in the modern world—where he was caught in the meshes between reception and philology—and then by considering how this one particular debunking of Homer and his canonical place in the world of literature and culture has deep roots that were first laid down, in remarkably similar ways, in the culture of Greece under Rome in the imperial era that is known as the Second Sophistic. Both worlds offer deep lessons in the way Homer has so obligingly served the cultural imagination of the West in its efforts to situate itself in relation to the past—though by ‘Homer’ we should understand less the individual poet than the ever insistent and irresolvable questions that have surrounded him from the moment of his ‘birth’. We may begin with Samuel Butler and the Odyssey.

2. Samuel Butler and The Authoress of the Odyssey In 1897 the novelist and essayist Samuel Butler (1835–1902) published a curious, whimsically half-serious study aimed at the late Victorian public, a study with a mouthful of a title, The Authoress of the Odyssey: Where and When She Wrote, Who She Was, the Use She Made of the Iliad, and How the Poem Grew under her Hands, in which he argued that the Odyssey was written by a woman who, ‘young, self-willed, and unmarried’,²⁴ had never left her modest home in Sicily and who strongly disagreed with Homer’s portrayal of the second sex. Butler, who had read classics at Cambridge as an undergraduate between 1854 and 1858 (in his Preface he thanks those ‘men who taught me what little Greek I know’),²⁵ at some point during the early 1890s became obsessed with the origins of the Odyssey and decided to take on the classical establishment with his self-proclaimed solution. His book takes no prisoners, outraging as it does the conventions of scholarship and all ‘canons of criticism’,²⁶ often hilariously, in the spirit of Swift’s irreverent Battle of the Books from 1704 and of Nietzsche’s inaugural lecture ‘The Personality of Homer’, delivered to a perplexed public in Basel in May of 1869.²⁷ Donning the guise of an F. A. Wolf (whom Butler names) or a Wilamowitz (whom he does not name, but ²⁴ Butler 1922: 143. ²⁵ Ibid., ix. ²⁷ See Porter 2000: 62–9; 76–80.

²⁶ Ibid., 267.

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who would fit well into what Butler calls ‘the nightmares of Homeric extravagance which German professors have evolved out of their own inner consciousness’),²⁸ he analytically separates Homer’s two epics at their point of authorship (thus enrolling himself in the age-old school of ‘Separatists’, chorizontes, who denied that the same poet composed both the Iliad and the Odyssey),²⁹ and then detects signs of patchwork composition within the Odyssey itself, which has been ‘cobbled together’, and badly at that.³⁰ Butler knows: he can detect the seams.³¹ He presents himself, then, as what today would be called a soft ‘Analyst’. By his own reasoning, the mixed quality of the Odyssey is to be attributed to the steep ambitions and strained competencies of its creator, a woman who inhabited a small coastal village in Sicily (Trapani) and invented a counterepic as a way of attacking Homer’s misrepresentation of the second sex. Bentley’s gendering of the two epics here might be thought to have taken on a grotesquely literal form. But on a closer look, Butler’s logic leads to another conclusion altogether, and the grotesque turns into burlesque: his authoress is toying with the limits of epic itself, critically dismantling them, just as Butler is doing in her name. Displacing Homer to the minor Italian ‘periphery against the Arnoldian centre’, a minoritizing move if ever there was one, is a power play in the canonical geopolitics of classicism. Butler is literally deterritorializing the discipline.³² He is also drawing heavily, albeit tacitly, on what in modernity would have been deemed the marginal tradition of Homer’s reception in antiquity, which already knew how to play off ironic critique against the philological search for the truth about Homer.³³

²⁸ Butler 1922: 3. Butler approves of Adolf Kirchoff, a forerunner of Wilamowitz in Homeric studies (ibid., 253, 255). ²⁹ Schol. T Il. 2.356a1, etc.; Procl. Chr. 102.3 Allen. Butler (1922: 266) refers to them as ‘a band of scholars a century or two before the birth of Christ who refused to see the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” as the work of the same person, but erudition snubbed them and snuffed them out’. ³⁰ Ibid., 251. ³¹ Ibid., 251–9. ³² Shaffer 1988: 193 (quotation); see 193–9, a superb account of this aspect of Authoress and a healthy antidote to earlier views. In the past Butler was either taken seriously and sometimes applauded (Farrington 1929; Pocock 1957), or else slighted, as Butler bemoans (Butler 1922: x). The suspicion that Butler is representing and not questioning Victorian attitudes towards women was, likewise, fashionable once (e.g. Winkler 1990a: 129–33; Dougher 2001; Clayton 2004: 2–4). ³³ More recent treatments, while increasingly sophisticated, nevertheless overlook this lineage (e.g. Shaffer 1988: 167–203; Whitmarsh 2002; Beard 2007; Richardson 2013). Winkler (1990a: 143–4) knows about the ancient tradition but refuses to align Butler with it.

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Whether or not Butler knew it, the most obvious of these debts is the very hypothesis of female authorship. The idea, in its most explicit and possibly earliest form, is found in two of the Sibylline oracles, an amalgam of pagan, Jewish, and Christian texts, some of which date from the second century BC. There the Sibyl accuses Homer of plagiarizing her verses in his two poems (Sibylline Oracles, 3.419–33, 11.163–71), a charge that is repeated by Diodorus of Sicily in the first century BC (DS 4.66.6).³⁴ The idea of female authorship, minus the apologetics, and all apologies, receives a new lease of life at the hands of Ptolemaeus Chennos (Ptolemy ‘the Quail’), an Egyptian grammarian and prankster from around the end of the first century AD (he in fact hailed from Alexandria, the seat of all great Homeric scholarship at the time), and the author of several works on—or rather against—Homer. One of these was simply titled Anthomēros (Anti-Homer), evidently an epic in twenty-four books.³⁵ Elsewhere, in his New (or Paradoxical) History, Ptolemy claimed that Homer pinched the stories of both the Iliad and the Odyssey from two different women on two different occasions: one a certain Helen of Athens, daughter of the legendary ur-poet Musaeus, the other a certain Phantasia (‘Imagination’) hailing from Memphis in Egypt (one of Homer’s alleged birthplaces), each playing the part of Homer’s original female Muse.³⁶ Ptolemy was undoubtedly inspired by the earlier tradition and pushing it to a new extreme. In his ‘Defence of Helen’ (Oration 10; c.370 BC), Isocrates had suggested that Helen visited Homer at night, possibly in a dream, and prompted him to compose the Iliad, thereby providing him with both the impetus and an outline. The germ of the conceit may stem from Stesichorus, whose version of events Isocrates is contradicting (Isoc. 10.64). But the underlying thought could reach back to the so-called ‘descendants of Homer’, the Homeridae, to whom Isocrates attributes the story.³⁷ ³⁴ I owe the reference to the Sibylline oracles to Olivia Stewart Lester. ³⁵ The alternative translation, which has been largely discredited, is Imitation of Homer. Only the title and a generic description survive. See Chatzis 1914: 20–1 for arguments. More recent general accounts of Ptolemy include Cameron 2004: 39–56 (who nicely calls Ptolemy ‘perverse but ingenious’—and ‘well read’) and Brill’s New Jacoby (BNJ) 56F1b (= Dowden 2012). ³⁶ Phot. Bibl. cod. 190, 149b22–5; 151a37–b5 Henry. ³⁷ ‘Some of the Homeridae say that while it is partly because of Homer’s art, yet it is chiefly through her [instructions] that this poem has such charm and has become so famous among men’ (Isoc. 10.65; trans. van Hook). See further Nagy 2010: 62.

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Whatever the case may be, Ptolemy merely brings to the surface what was implicit (if not explicit) centuries before him, and he extends it now to include the Odyssey. If Butler’s knowledge of Ptolemy or the Sibylline oracles remains an open question (he would almost certainly have known the stories of Stesichorus and Isocrates), his logic is nevertheless impeccably Ptolemaic; for, as he writes in his first chapter, both epics ‘begin with an invocation addressed to a woman, who, as the head of literature, must be supposed to have been an authoress, though none of her works have come down to us’.³⁸ Butler’s central hypothesis about the Odyssey, then, is hardly novel, though his arguments are. In one respect, his claim is less radical than Ptolemy’s (Butler restricts its scope to the Odyssey), though in another it is more subversive: the authoress’s epic is itself an anti-Homeric epic, whereas Ptolemy merely makes Homer into a plagiarist.³⁹ That said, Butler claims to provide countless ‘proofs’ that betray the female authorship of the Odyssey: its author’s humour (‘No great poet would compare his hero to a paunch full of blood and fat, cooking before the fire (xx.24–8)’),⁴⁰ which Butler believes is ‘not a man’s humour, unless he is writing burlesque’;⁴¹ her overt ‘sympathy’ for the various female characters in the story,⁴² indeed ‘her desire to exalt her sex by showing how a clever woman can bring any number of men to her feet, hoodwink them, spoil them, and in the end destroy them’;⁴³ ‘the absurdities with which the killing of the suitors abounds’,⁴⁴ from the axe contest (‘a dozen men with a dozen axes should have made short work of Ulysses and his men’)⁴⁵ to the weak fastening on the main gate (which meant that ‘some of them [sc. the suitors] at any rate might have got out’);⁴⁶ the excessive and ‘aggressive’ violence of the scene;⁴⁷ Calypso’s jealousy of Penelope, which ‘is too prettily done for a man. A man would be sure to

³⁸ Butler 1922: 13. Butler could easily have come across the Sibylline tradition indirectly. See Wolfe 2015: 165–6 on the conflation between Homer and the Sibyl during the Renaissance—a development that eventually found a place in writers like Montaigne and Rabelais. Ptolemy was a more recondite, but also a more apt point of reference. ³⁹ In a further possible twist on the tradition and on the ancient pattern of inspiration, Butler claims to have awakened Nausicaa himself, as though he were her Muse (‘when I woke her and hailed her as Authoress of the Odyssey’), not the other way around (Butler 1921: 193). The most recent incarnation of the claim about female authorship is found in Dalby 2006, where it is extended to cover both epics, as in the ancient traditions. ⁴⁰ Butler 1922: 153. ⁴¹ Ibid., 153. ⁴² Ibid. ⁴³ Ibid., 128. ⁴⁴ Ibid., 155. ⁴⁵ Ibid., 153. ⁴⁶ Ibid., 154. ⁴⁷ Ibid.

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overdo it’;⁴⁸ the fact that she ‘ma[d]e Penelope out better than report says she was’, whereas Homer ‘would not have cared whether she was better or worse’;⁴⁹ or the fact that Penelope tells her story first when she and her partner are finally joined in the bed, whereas ‘I believe a male writer would have made Ulysses’ story come first’;⁵⁰ and so on. ‘The writer is out of her depth, and knows it.’⁵¹ As the writer’s incompetencies mount, so do the offences that are laid bare in Homer’s second epic—its abundance of ‘anomalies, inconsistencies, absurdities, and small slovenlinesses’.⁵² And so do the traces of the authoress’s aggressions against the epic tradition, which she succeeds in dismantling from within. Thus, offended both by Homer’s disrespect for women and by ‘his utter contempt for the gods’⁵³—she ‘recast a story which she deemed insulting to her sex, as well as disgusting in itself ’⁵⁴—the authoress plays Homer’s Iliad off against the Odyssey in a savagely contemptuous way, thereby deepening Homer’s offences, not erasing them. By ‘taking the water that was heated to wash the blood from the body of poor Patroclus (“Il.” xviii.344 &c.) and using it for Ulysses’ bath (“Od.” viii.434–437)’—that is, by repeating a formula in another context altogether, thereby creating a horrific dissonance—she manages to produce a ‘disrespect here [that] is deeper than any that can be found in Homer towards the gods’ (earlier, Butler writes, ‘I think she was angry with him, and perhaps jealous’).⁵⁵ Thanks to Butler’s inane literalism, cheerfully carried out in the guise of simple earnestness, Butler and his authoress succeed in turning Homer against Homer, in this case through a sharp inversion of the Aristarchan maxim ‘elucidate Homer from Homer’, which might as well now read: ‘tar Homer with Homer’. The authoress, then, is a perfect foil for Butler in his effort to dismantle the Odyssey while simultaneously unseating Homer from his privileged and sacrosanct position. Having proved that Penelope is being ‘whitewashed’,⁵⁶ Butler scans the horizon for further targets: ‘Let us see what [else] the “Odyssey” asks us to believe, or rather, swallow.’⁵⁷ The poem’s overt fictionality is equated with absurdity—an

⁴⁸ ⁵² ⁵⁵ ⁵⁶

Ibid., 145. ⁴⁹ Ibid., 123. ⁵⁰ Ibid., 157. ⁵¹ Ibid., 154. Ibid., 251. ⁵³ Ibid., 247. ⁵⁴ Ibid., 123. Ibid., 287. The second quotation can be found ibid., 247. Ibid., 123. ⁵⁷ Ibid., 125.

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easy criticism to make, and an ancient one as well (Eratosthenes is only the most obvious forerunner).⁵⁸ But this is just the beginning. Having proven his hypothesis about authorship, Butler radicalizes it even further (if this is even possible)—by reducing all of the authoress’s fictional creations to one entity: herself and the narrow ambit of her immediate surroundings. Not only are all the principal characters ‘Scherian’, which is to say Trapanian, like Nausicaa herself, but ‘Nestor, Ulysses, Menelaus and Alcinous are every one of them the same person playing other parts’.⁵⁹ Owing to the authoress’s limited knowledge of the wide world, every geographical place named in the Odyssey is likewise drawn from her own locale, a fact that she strives to conceal with such sly ruses as ‘the [repeated] darkness on each occasion when Ulysses seems likely to stumble upon Trapani’, or by finding other ways of clouding the issue.⁶⁰ Thus, Butler can declare, the cave of Polyphemus is manifestly homespun (his book sports a photograph of himself standing proudly in its midst, having located it to his satisfaction up on Mt Eryx seven miles north of Trapani). What is more, Ithaca turns out to lie a mere ‘two miles, or even less’, from Scheria (Trapani) just below Mt Eryx, which now doubles as Neritum, said at Odyssey 9.22 to be located on Ithaca.⁶¹ Odysseus has in effect been going in circles.⁶² Putting him to sleep on the final leg of his return, and at precisely the least plausible moment at that—when he is most keen to see his homeland again, and therefore ⁵⁸ Eratosthenes is an interesting case, since he famously assumes the fictionality of much of Homer and, what is more, opposes attempts to locate Odysseus’ wanderings geographically—not least the Sicilian hypothesis, which was held by unnamed others before him (Thucydides would have been one of these) and was reaffirmed by Polybius and Strabo after him. Eratosthenes even denies that Homer had any first-hand knowledge of Sicily, a finding that Strabo dismisses with the excuse that, although Homer undoubtedly would have known the geography of the place, he was not aiming at scientific precision (Strabo 1.2.11–15). Butler, true to form, throws to the winds Eratosthenes’ caution, as it were. He locates the Odyssey’s creator in the very place that, according to Eratosthenes, Homer could never have known: Sicily. And, at page 181 of Authoress, he supplies the reader with a handy map of Odysseus’ travels in the bargain. A later exponent of the Sicilian hypothesis was Bérard 1927–9. ⁵⁹ Butler 1922: 204–5 (emphasis added). ⁶⁰ Ibid., 204; see 163; 189: ‘with the help of a little mist’; 198. ⁶¹ Ibid., 198; 170. ⁶² ‘Lastly, I have shown that the voyage of Ulysses in effect begins with Trapani and ends with Trapani again’ (ibid., 198).

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least ‘likely to feel sleepy’—is but a desperate way of concealing this fact from him, and from us.⁶³ When feints like this fail, as they do in the case of Pylos and Sparta, the authoress has a different tactic at her disposal for occluding her fictionalizations—reticence: ‘not a single natural feature is mentioned in either case’.⁶⁴ This is the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy that Butler shares with his authoress. Plainly, she ‘did not like inventing’ except when she had to, and even then she did so strictly from the limited basis of ‘her own imagination’.⁶⁵ In this way, all the key places and persons named by the authoress turn out to be thinly veiled versions of one local identity, all reducible to one source. By the same logic, Penelope, Helen, and Arete are only one person . . . Idothea and Ino are both of them Nausicaa; so also are Circe and Calypso, only made up a little older, and doing as the writer thinks Nausicaa would do if she were a goddess and had an establishment of her own.⁶⁶

In a word, everywhere we look ‘we find Nausicaa, all Nausicaa, and nothing but Nausicaa’.⁶⁷ Ergo, their creator can only have been ‘some dependant who idolised Nausicaa . . . or Nausicaa (whatever her real name may have been) herself ’.⁶⁸ With this argument about narratorial projection on the table (in itself not a bad idea—Freud certainly would have approved, since he recognized that the authors of dreams and fantasies project themselves many times over in their dream materials),⁶⁹ Butler plumps for the last option as the ‘more likely’:⁷⁰ the authoress is Nausicaa, the goddess of washing (including whitewashing: see p. 243 above). The evidence is plain as day. One need only read the Odyssey closely, or between the lines—or else examine the frontispiece of Butler’s book (Figure 9.1). The frontispiece is a portrait of a young woman. It has all the hallmarks of a modern masterpiece, with its thick, elaborate, and goldpainted wooden frame (though the image is reproduced in grey tones). The subject stares demurely down at the viewer, a lyre resting against her left arm. The painting is subtitled ‘Nausicaa’, without any further

⁶³ Ibid., 173; 204. ⁶⁴ Ibid., 198. ⁶⁵ Ibid., 202. ⁶⁶ Ibid., 204–5. ⁶⁷ Ibid., 206. ⁶⁸ Ibid., 206. ⁶⁹ Freud 2010: 339. ⁷⁰ Butler 1922: 207.

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Figure 9.1 Frontispiece to Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey. From St John’s College Library, Samuel Butler Collection. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge.

attribution. Much later on, Butler appeals to ‘my frontispiece’ as he would to the other relics of antiquity that are generously strewn throughout his book in its photographs, though the claim to possession is in this case particularly marked. The image, he feels, speaks for itself:

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Let the reader look at my frontispiece and say whether he would find the smallest difficulty in crediting the original of the portrait with being able to write the ‘Odyssey’. Would he refuse so to credit her merely because all he happened to know about her for certain was that she once went out washing clothes with her attendants?⁷¹

Evaluating the frontispiece turns out to be anything but straightforward. Even on the supposition that the authoress identified herself with (or as) Nausicaa, arriving at the one figure through the other is barred from the start, for the authoress turns out to be the epitome of an unreliable narrator: ‘we . . . know that we are being hoodwinked as far as the writer can hoodwink us’.⁷² She is a master in the rifacimento of inherited stories, for instance in her ‘whitewashing’ of Penelope,⁷³ whose ‘scandalous’ reality⁷⁴— her ‘notorious profligacy’⁷⁵—Butler shrinks from revealing, though the signs of it are everywhere to be seen in the Odyssey. The authoress’s remaking of the Penelopean tradition was done in such a way that ‘traces of an earlier picture show up through the one she has painted over it, so distinctly as to make it obvious what the original picture represented’.⁷⁶ This is rifacimento as palimpsest, not as erasure: it exposes its own devices.⁷⁷ The same principle holds for the authoress’s self-representation. Faceless and anonymous (like Homer himself ), the authoress has inserted herself into her own tale by impersonating one of its lead female characters, Nausicaa. What is more, in doing so she has made a rifacimento of herself—not out of vanity but out of a certain mockery of truth, and taking sheer pleasure in the fiction: At the same time I think it highly probable that the writer of the ‘Odyssey’ was both short and plain, and was laughing at herself, and intending to make her audience laugh also, by describing herself as tall and beautiful. She may have been either plain or beautiful without its affecting the argument.⁷⁸

And yet, for all his nonchalance, Butler keeps directing us to his frontispiece with a devious insistence: ‘my frontispiece, so mysterious, so imperfect, and yet so divinely beyond all perfection’.⁷⁹ ⁷¹ Ibid., 207–8 (emphasis added). ⁷² Ibid., 127. ⁷³ Ibid., 136. ⁷⁴ Ibid., 125. ⁷⁵ Ibid., 254. ⁷⁶ Ibid., 123. ⁷⁷ The worry about Penelope’s chastity was an ancient one, as is the idea of ‘hoodwinking’: ‘Why are you asking whether Penelope was unchaste [inpudica], whether she hoodwinked her contemporaries [an verba saeculo suo dederit]?’ (Seneca, Letters, 88.8; trans. Fantham). ⁷⁸ Butler 1922: 208. ⁷⁹ Ibid., 269.

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Looking at this image, one is at a loss. Who is its subject? Nausicaa as she is known from the Odyssey? Or her creator and impersonator? A further ambiguity—and a further indication of its ‘mysteriousness’— is the source of the image, which turns out not to be ancient at all, as one might expect judging from its appearance alone (and not only from its modern gilded frame). In point of fact the original, of which Butler supplies a reproduction (‘taken by the kind permission of the Messrs. Alinari of Florence, from their photograph of a work in the museum at Cortona called “La Musa Polinnia” ’—i.e. Polyhymnia),⁸⁰ is a forgery dating from the eighteenth century, the authenticity of which was doubted from the time of its discovery. This detail is routinely overlooked by Butler’s readers, despite the hints that he generously strews throughout his book, even as he perpetuates the fiction of the picture’s authenticity.⁸¹ The portrait, he writes, ‘is believed to be Greek, presumably of about the Christian era, but no more precise date can be assigned to it’.⁸² Presented as an ancient work in encaustic, the picture was and still is believed to have been painted in oil, a fact that Butler winkingly draws attention to by protesting—too much— against an objection otherwise inexplicable in context: ‘There is not a trace of the barocco in my frontispiece.’⁸³ Butler here is acknowledging that he knows more than he lets on. Back in his preface, he continues with a story about the painting’s discovery. He appears to have made this up himself: I was assured at Cortona that it was found by a man who was ploughing his field, and who happened to be a baker. The size being suitable he used it for some time as a door for his oven, whence it was happily rescued and placed in the museum where it now rests.⁸⁴

This little trouvaille has now become Butler’s Muse. Posting this controversial image at the front of his book, a copy of a copy with quite possibly no (genuine) original lying behind it, merely advertises the book’s own

⁸⁰ Ibid., x. ⁸¹ The forgery, to my knowledge, went unsuspected in scholarship on The Authoress until Porter 2013. Butler had a history of devilishly meddling with art-historical ascriptions, as his two forays into Cisalpine Renaissance art, dating from 1879 and 1881, show; see Porter 2013: 269, 289–90. ⁸² Butler 1922: x. ⁸³ Ibid., 208. ⁸⁴ Ibid., x.

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qualities and serves as a stern warning: caveat lector. Butler is selling his readers a bill of goods.⁸⁵ Butler’s emphasis on the Odyssey would be inexplicable unless it had a larger point; and it does. Just as the authoress wrote the Odyssey in order ‘to rival, if not to supersede’ Homer,⁸⁶ the same can be said of Butler’s own work, which does its best to upend the primacy and the sanctity of Homer and all that this entails, from the myth of Homer in antiquity to the very idea of Homer in contemporary classical scholarship. Simply to claim to be able to identify a concrete author for the Odyssey is to mock the convention of Homer’s anonymity and impersonality, if not to utter his non-existence (as the moderns held). To rebrand the author of the Odyssey as a woman—in itself an unprovable hypothesis—is to expose the fragility of the Homeric Question with particular point. It is effectively to reimport the question of Homer’s controverted identity back into that of her own. The authoress is a deliberate cipher. Nor is this all. For in resurrecting the author(ess) of the Odyssey Butler spends a great deal of effort attacking the Iliad and its author. The two epics are, after all, cut from the same cloth and relics of a single canon, for all their manifold differences. How different are they, in fact? The answer comes towards the end of the book, when Butler turns his attentions momentarily to the Iliad. Encouraged by Homer’s own famous admission of ignorance about the facts of his own epics at the start of his Catalogue of the Ships (‘we have heard only the rumor of it and know nothing’),⁸⁷ Butler draws out a more startling conclusion, namely that Homer seems quite ignorant of the fall of Troy, and is otherwise silent about the details, which would point to a very considerable lapse of time—or else to suggest a fact which, though I have often thought it possible, I hardly dare to write—I meant

⁸⁵ The problem of forgery aside, Butler’s best recent readers are reluctant to accept the depth and perversity of his ironies, and they do so on philological grounds—the very grounds that Butler is contesting: the absence of any hard ‘proof ’ (Beard 2007: 323; Richardson 2013: 152). The fact that Butler took such pains to prepare his hoax (Richardson 2013: 152; 156) is no counterargument, and the same can be said about the fact that he had a copy in oil made for himself. (This copy is now housed in the Butler archives at St John’s College, Cambridge.) His Cisalpine wanderings (see n. 81 in this chapter) are another instance of an elaborate imposture; and they are perfectly in keeping with other mock scholarship from the time (on which see Richardson 2013: 137–48). ⁸⁶ Butler 1922: 251. ⁸⁷ Iliad 2.486.

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that Troy never fell at all, or at any rate that it did not fall with the close of the Trojan War, and that Homer knew this perfectly well.⁸⁸

This is one of the biggest bombshells of Butler’s book, itself a book of bombshells, and the core revisionist suspicion that it contains, second only to his view about the Odyssey’s authorship. To back up this argument, Butler appeals to the physical remains of Troy (its wall), offering photographs and first-hand impressions, and then concocts an intricate argument, which ensures that Homer must have lived several hundred years after the ‘supposed’ date of Troy’s fall, and thus could have had no reliable knowledge of those misty events.⁸⁹ What is more, Butler’s Homer turns out not to have been a Greek; he was instead an Asiatic of some kind, who ‘despised’ the Greeks he was catering to. And, by narrating his story as if Troy had fallen, Homer was, quite alarmingly, pulling the wool over the eyes of his intended Greek audience: [Homer], writing for a Greek audience whom he obviously despised, and whom he was fooling to the top of their bent though always sailing far enough off the wind to avoid disaster, would take very good care to tell them that—if I may be allowed the anachronism—Napoleon won the battle of Waterloo, though he very well knew that it was won by Wellington. It is certain that no even tolerably plausible account of the fall of Troy existed among the Greeks themselves; all plausibility ends with their burning of their tents and sailing away baffled (‘Od.’ viii. 500, 501)—see also the epitome of the ‘Little Iliad’, given in the fragment of Proclus. The wild story of the wooden horse only emphasises the fact that nothing more reasonable was known.⁹⁰

Homer’s deceptions seem no different in kind, and no more redeemable, than those of Butler’s authoress, let alone his own, skilled as Butler is in ‘always sailing far enough off the wind to avoid disaster’ and, like his authoress, always ‘one half laughing and the other half serious’.⁹¹

3. Dio’s Trojan Oration The heresy that Troy never fell is hardly original to Butler. One of the most prominent of these predecessors is Dio of Prusa—Dio Chrysostom the (‘Golden-Mouthed’)—who, in his eleventh (‘Trojan’) oration, takes up what can only be called a passive aggressive stance towards Homer’s ⁸⁸ Butler 1922: 216 (emphasis added). ⁹⁰ Ibid., 216–17. ⁹¹ Ibid., 259.

⁸⁹ Ibid., 216–18.

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palpable fictions in the Iliad (‘Homer was the boldest liar in existence’— but also the worst at his own game)⁹² and stands this work on its head: Helen was never abducted, ‘Troy was never sacked’ (this is first stated in the title of the speech that has come down to us; Dio, like Butler, is exploiting Homer’s silence on the topic in the Iliad), Hector actually killed Achilles, the war ended with a truce between the exhausted and defeated Achaeans and the triumphant Trojans (Butler appears to be quoting from Dio’s version here),⁹³ who gladly accepted a ‘very large and beautiful offering’ carved with the inscription ‘A Propitiation from the Achaeans to Athena of Ilium’ (later distorted into Homer’s absurd tale of the Trojan horse)—while Homer’s internal contradictions, generated but also obscured by desperate and badly done obfuscations, are massive and easy targets for the informed—and so on. In short, in the place of facts (which Dio claims to have learned from an Egyptian priest), Homer created bald-faced lies, stories of nonexistent things that are best compared to the wild ‘dreams’ of sleepers who fantasize the most grotesque improbabilities—for instance, the notion that epic warriors once slain can rise like zombies from the dead to attack again, can fly or walk on water, can converse with gods, or can take their own lives for no apparent reason;⁹⁴ or the suggestion that Hector was slain in battle, which is plainly false and credible only as a bad dream (‘a nightmare’).⁹⁵ ‘[T]he ridiculous story of the capture of the city by the horse’ is another of these lies.⁹⁶ These stories he made up to please his Greek audience, though at the same time his disregard for historical fact merely displayed the contempt with which he held this audience, so hazy were the traditions surrounding Troy and so gullible ⁹² D. Chr. 11.23. Translations are from Cohoon 1932. ⁹³ ‘The Achaeans fled in silence from Asia after burning their huts’ (D. Chr. 11.128); cf. ‘all plausibility ends with their burning of their tents and sailing away baffled’ (Butler 1922: 217). Both are maliciously inverting the meaning of Od. 8.500–1 (‘the Argives boarded their well-benched ships, and sailed away, after setting fire to their shelters’). ⁹⁴ D. Chr. 11.129. ⁹⁵ Ibid., 108. ⁹⁶ Ibid., 123; see 146: ‘For most people have no accurate knowledge. They merely accept rumor [ἀλλὰ φήμης ἀκούουσι μόνον], even when they are contemporary with the time in question, while the second and third generations are in total ignorance and readily swallow whatever anyone says [ὅτι ἂν εἴπῃ τις παραδέχονται ῥᾳδίως].’ Cf. Butler: ‘Let us see what the ‘Odyssey’ asks us to believe, or rather, swallow’ (Butler 1922: 125). Dio, meanwhile, is ribbing Homer for his embarrassing confession of ignorance at Iliad 2.486: ‘we have heard only the rumor of it [sc. of what the Muses say] and know nothing’ (ἡμεῖς δὲ κλέος οἶον ἀκούομεν οὐδέ τι ἴδμεν, trans. Lattimore).

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were his hearers.⁹⁷ Homer was, as Butler would say, fooling them to the top of his bent. Key to Dio’s rewriting of Homer is the Achaean wall episode, which he reads as the turning point in the war. The wall was breached; the Greeks were partially routed and irrecoverably broken in spirit.⁹⁸ Only this much is true. All that follows is Homer’s invention: ‘For here there is no Aeneas snatched away by Aphrodite, no Ares wounded by a mortal, nor any other such incredible tales.’⁹⁹ Not even a hero like Achilles, inspired though he allegedly was by the gods, could bring the Greeks back to life. The story that he did so ‘by his appearance’ alone strains all credulity.¹⁰⁰ Homer was fabricating things out of whole cloth. Like a true Analyst avant la lettre, Dio claims to be able to discover the seams that mark the points where Homer diverged from his ‘original plan’ and began to improve on reality with his fictional inventions: But the subsequent shift of events, including the death of Hector, which was likely to please his [Greek] hearers, he did not have in his original plan [ ὑποθέμενος], nor the final capture of Ilium. For perhaps he had not yet planned to turn everything upside down, but later, when he wishes to state the cause of the sufferings, he drops Paris and Helen, and babbles about Chryses and that man’s daughter.¹⁰¹

F. A. Wolf also knows (or so he says) how to discern that in the Iliad we have Homer’s original ‘plan’ and later embellishments by rhapsodes, redactors, or critics: he draws the line at Book 18, while declaring the final six books to be un-Homeric.¹⁰² Similar schemes were drawn up for the Odyssey in his wake (e.g. by Kirchoff in 1859 and by Wilamowitz in 1884). Though critical of ‘the Wolfian heresy’, Butler claimed with considerable confidence to be able to detect in the Odyssey traces of ‘two distinct poems, with widely different aims’, which had been ‘cobbled’ together and ‘united into a single work, not unskillfully, but still not so skillfully as to conceal a change of scheme’ by his authoress, who was making things up on the fly. In this way Butler could discern ‘how the poem grew under her hands’.¹⁰³ Critical divination like this, which was ⁹⁷ D. Chr. 11.92, cf. 37. ⁹⁸ Ibid., 89–90. ⁹⁹ Ibid., 90. ¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 91. ¹⁰¹ Ibid., 36. ¹⁰² Wolf 1985: 127; 131–2. ¹⁰³ Butler 1922: 252; 256; 258 (where ‘cobbled’ refers now to Butler’s own working methods, which, not surprisingly, parallel those of his authoress). The phrase ‘Wolfian heresy’ (Butler 1922: 2) is borrowed from Mure 1854: xiv. For Butler’s approval of Kirchoff, see n. 28 in this chapter.

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an object of derision already in antiquity,¹⁰⁴ became an art form among philologists during the nineteenth century and persisted into the twentieth. It is astonishing, nevertheless, to see the manoeuvre being applied on such a massive and unparalleled scale by Dio. By putting as much emphasis as he does on the Achaean wall, Dio is enmeshing himself in an ancient controversy, albeit one that was also of keen contemporary interest, as Philostratus attests in his parallel discussion in the Heroicus (27.7–9) and as might be inferred from Dio’s address to a Trojan audience alone.¹⁰⁵ Indeed, Dio’s revision of Homer all but presents itself as a solution to this heated debate. For at issue was the question whether Homer fabricated the entire notion of a Greek fortification, which is first proposed by Nestor in Iliad 7 and later tracelessly obliterated by Poseidon, Apollo, and Zeus.¹⁰⁶ This, at least, was the line of interpretation that Aristotle took, unfazed by the possibility that Homer was capable of fabricating something out of nothing: ‘The poet who invented it also obliterated it/made it disappear.’¹⁰⁷ In other words, the problem of the wall was a non-problem: Homer created a fictional object that he could dispose of as he wished, and readers must accept this fact. Aristotle was followed by armies of Homerists in Alexandria and elsewhere, who contributed to the critical frenzy. Among the more elaborate of their explanations was the notion that Homer obliterated a feature of his landscape in order to prevent others from searching for its telltale traces on the Troad and from discovering that the wall never existed to begin with.¹⁰⁸ Dio has a different approach, albeit one that echoes these. Homer had the gods destroy the wall that in reality brought the Greeks to their knees.¹⁰⁹ The act committed by the divinities might appear gratuitous the way Homer tells it, but on Dio’s account it suggests a deeper disavowal: that of the truth behind the Greek loss at the hands of the Trojans, which Homer disguises with the catastrophic wreckage of the Greek camp: this is described early in Book 12 and is nothing but a massive cover-up of an embarrassing fact. Homer’s disavowal can be read out of the opinions of ¹⁰⁴ Ath. 14.634c, where the Stoic Panaetius makes light of Aristarchus, the premier Homeric scholar of the day: ‘He used to refer to him as a mantis (“seer”), because he could easily divine the point of a poem’. ¹⁰⁵ See Porter 2011: 27–30. ¹⁰⁶ Il. 12.1–35. ¹⁰⁷ Strabo 13.1.36 (= Arist. fr. 162 Rose = Arist. fr. 402 Gigon). ¹⁰⁸ See Porter 2011. ¹⁰⁹ D. Chr. 11.90.

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the Greeks themselves, and in particular of their literary critics, who claim that Homer never said that the wall existed: ‘The Greeks¹¹⁰ agree with Homer in the other matters, but in the case of the wall they deny that Homer says it ever existed [τὸ δὲ τεῖχος οὔ φασιν αὐτὸν γενόμενον λέγειν]’, the proof of this being the way he made the gods obliterate it in Iliad 12!¹¹¹ Dio will have none of this nonsense, which is the strained logic of the critical tradition itself and a verbatim quotation of the scholium (or its source) to boot.¹¹² Unhappy with this tradition, he turns it inside out. Like the best of those who would ‘search’ for the traces of the wall that Homer sought to eliminate from reality, Dio insists on the wall’s historical reality. If no traces of the wall exist to be found today, the reason is not far to seek: ‘The most plausible explanation of all [ὃ πάντων πιθανώτατον] is that the foundations of the wall were inundated. Indeed, even in our day the rivers still make a marsh of the place and have deposited silt far out into the sea.’¹¹³ If Dio’s rationalization about the wall looks outwardly plausible, the psychology and reasoning he attributes to Homer are strained. But then, so is Dio’s source material, which tried to account for the vexed status of the Greek wall in Homer’s text by asking such questions as these: Why was the wall built only in the ninth year? Why did the gods need nine days to destroy something that took a mere night to build? Geographical and historical issues also came into play around the problem of the wall:

¹¹⁰ I am following a line of interpretation that originates with Lemarchand (1926: 36) and takes the subject of οἱ δέ to be ‘the Greeks’ (i.e. Greek commentators of Homer) and not ‘the Egyptians’; thus I am correcting my own prior understanding in Porter 2011: 9 n. 19, as well as the Loeb translation. It is implausible that the Egyptians should be said to agree with Homer ‘in the other matters’: the heterodox Egyptian account of Troy is the one that Dio adopts. Whether the text is completely sound here or not (Lemarchand 1926: 37 suspects not) is another question. Given the subject matter of 11.75 (an ‘earlier’ wall; see n. 115 in this chapter) and Dio’s identical game of hide-and-seek with Patroclus’ gravesite (a game couched in identical language, too), I see no reason not to view 11.76 as a direct continuation of §75 (pace Lemarchand). ¹¹¹ D. Chr. 76, my translation. ¹¹² Σ T Il. 12.3–35: Homer demolished the Achaean wall in Book 12 so as not to be vulnerable to inquiry into a vestige of something that never existed from the start, οὐ δυνάμενος δὲ ἴχνος τι ἀπαιτηθῆναι τοῦ μὴ γενομένου (literally, so that ‘a trace of what never existed could not be sought for’ [sc. on the ground]). See Str. 13.1.36 (partly quoted in n. 107): ‘For Homer says that the wall had only recently been built—or else it never even existed . . . as Aristotle says’ (νεωστὶ γὰρ γεγονέναι φησὶ τὸ τεῖχος (ἢ οὐδ’ ἐγένετο . . . ὡς Ἀριστοτέλης φησίν)). ¹¹³ D. Chr. 11.76, translation adapted.

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Where were the ships encamped? What was the historical site of Troy: Was it present-day Ilium, or the older, lower village of the Ilians, or was it somewhere else altogether?—a question of obvious relevance to Dio’s Ilian audience, who naturally heard their name in any mention of the Iliad.¹¹⁴ Lurking behind these doubts was another, deeper anxiety: What else can or cannot be verified about the Trojan War today? Sensing a nerve here, Dio turns the Greek wall into the acid test of Homer’s account and its troubled historicity. Instead of resolving the dilemmas, he cheerfully exacerbates them. Quoting various Greek critical sources, he distorts them almost beyond recognition, brutally exposing the illogicality of these attempts to rationalize Homer, while at the same time quoting from them liberally.¹¹⁵ As a result, the Greeks look even more foolish than ever, while Dio’s own intervention (which is itself borrowed)¹¹⁶ looks saner than all the other proposals: he can now easily offer ‘the most plausible explanation of all’. Needless to say, by ‘Greeks’ ¹¹⁴ See Strabo 13.1.25; Trapp 1997; Erskine 2001; Porter 2004: 328–29. Dio 11.6 professes to have delivered the speech elsewhere. If so, the Ilians would have functioned as an internal focalizer for any given audience, imaginary identifications being available as appropriate (these would allow the audiences to see themselves in, and then compare themselves to, the Trojans—a bizarre prospect for a Greek, but one that is already latent in Homer’s empathetic account of the Trojan perspective in the Iliad). The occasional nature of the speech is everywhere evident, which only increases the impression that Dio is conveniently taking a stance for the sake of the argument—one that is markedly different from his other Homeric speeches (11.53, 55–8). ¹¹⁵ Another gratuitous confusion, which shows the true depth of Dio’s erudition, is his mention of ‘another smaller wall’ that the Greeks erected in a ‘different’ place after their defeat (in Dio’s scenario) and right before their final departure from Troy (11.115). This is not a sign of Dio’s ‘phantasy’ (pace Vagnone 2003 ad loc.). It is a pointed allusion to a problem that Thucydides threw up when he contested Homer’s logic in the matter of the wall. The scholium at Th. 1.11.1 solves the problem by stating that Thucydides is not discussing the wall built in Iliad 7; he is mentioning an ‘earlier, smaller [wall], [built] on account of attacks from the enemy’. Dio has reversed the temporal sequence here (as so often in this speech), making the first wall the famous Achaean wall (11.75), while the later wall corresponds to the speculation in the Thucydidean scholium. Dio is thus using this moment to further confound and ridicule the problem of the Greek wall(s), the number and nature of which were multiplied by ancient critics. The practice has been continued by modern critics of the analytical persuasion, who have sought to explain the problem away by appealing to various compositional strata. See Porter 2011: 8–12 for discussion. ¹¹⁶ E.g. from pseudo-Heraclitus, Homeric Problems, 38, where the mythical account is ‘allegorized’ through a physical explanation (inundation or earthquakes), as Vagnone 2003 notes. A closer relative is perhaps Hestiaea of Alexandria’s perceptive analysis of the physical changes in the Trojan landscape over time; this analysis was seized upon by Demetrius of Scepsis (Strabo 13.1.37). There is no record of either scholar ever having addressed the problem of the Greek wall.

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Dio understands the whole of the reception of Homer in Greek culture. In Dio’s rendition, the Greeks are desperate to deny their loss at Troy and are saddled with a disavowal that stems from Homer, even though the argument from which their position originates arose out of a highly subtle and deep insight into Homer’s fictionality. Homer is once more being shown to be nothing but a desperate and inept liar, while his capacity to manipulate the conventions of fiction (to ‘lie well’, as Aristotle notes in the Poetics and in fr. 162 Rose, quoted earlier) is denied.¹¹⁷ Reminders of the same traditional arguments crop up elsewhere in the same speech. The most prominent of these concerns the physical location of Patroclus’ tomb, a problem that is generated by Dio himself. Tradition regarded the tomb of Achilles to be jointly occupied by the two heroes, as Patroclus himself wanted.¹¹⁸ Creating an issue where none existed, Dio calques onto this manufactured problem (zētēma) the logic of the Achaean wall controversy in its most absurd form: Then Homer had a misgiving that there might actually be some search [μή τις ἄρα ζητῇ] for the tomb of Patroclus—it would naturally be, I suppose, clearly marked just as are the tombs of the other chieftains also who were slain at Troy— so, safeguarding himself against this, he says that there was no separate tomb for Patroclus [οὐκ ἔφη τάφον αὐτοῦ γενόμενον καθ’ αὑτόν], but he was buried with Achilles.¹¹⁹

The language that is being used to deny existence, like the language of deniability itself, is nearly identical to that witnessed above in the case of the Greek wall. It is also absolutely conventional; for, as other scholia show, the logic of erasing a lie in order to avoid detection after the fact was typically couched in terms of ‘searching’ (zētein) and of barring such searches (mē zētein). In the case of the wall and in other cases, a crux that sent scholars scrolling frantically through their papyrus editions was transformed into a literal zētēsis (‘inquiry’) at the physical site of Troy.¹²⁰ But here ¹¹⁷ Arist. Poet. ch. 14, 1460a18–19: ‘it was Homer who taught other poets the proper way to tell lies [ψευδῆ λέγειν ὡς δεῖ]’ (trans. Hubbard, in Russell and Winterbottom 1972). In a later echo of the same sentiment, Hesychius (ο 718) testifies that homēriddein (Doric for homērizein, ‘to Homerize’) means ‘to lie’. ¹¹⁸ Il. 23.65–92. ¹¹⁹ D. Chr. 11.103. ¹²⁰ See Σ D to Il. 14.287 van Thiel: τότ’. . . : διὰ τούτου [i.e. τότ’] ἀνήιρηκε τὸ ψεῦδος, ὥστε μὴ ζητεῖν, ‘then [i.e. at that time]: by means of this word [i.e. then] Homer undid his fiction/ lie, by preventing anyone from searching [afterwards]’. In question is the ‘towering pine tree’ on which Sleep perched, casting her spells on Zeus in the famous deception scene— namely ‘the [tree] that grew tallest at that time on Ida’. The scholia argue that ‘at that time’

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Dio’s point is even more surreal than above; for he claims that all such searching is destined to be barren from the start, because Patroclus barely existed either. He ‘is little more than a counterfeit [ὑπόβλητος]¹²¹ that Homer has substituted for Achilles in his eagerness to conceal the truth concerning that hero’: ‘to any careful observer the falsehoods are selfevident’.¹²² Patroclus, whose death substitutes for Achilles’, has become a phantom, like Helen—a fictional device and nothing more, like so much else in Homer’s poem. This, too, is an exaggerated echo of scholiastic criticism, which sought hard to explain how Patroclus and Hector could so effortlessly fit into Achilles’ armour and why Achilles didn’t simply don Patroclus’ unused armour: all three heroes must have been identical in build (isos).¹²³ In Dio’s world, their physical equivalence makes them narratively interchangeable: if Patroclus can be a stand-in for Achilles, Hector can be said to kill Achilles. Only, according to Dio, Hector really does kill Achilles! Once again, as in the case of the Greek wall, and indeed everywhere else, Homer is shown to be ‘eager . . . to conceal [βουλόμενος . . . κρῦψαι] the truth’ at all costs.¹²⁴ Dio’s upending of Homer before an imagined audience of Trojan descendants at Ilium is complete, but also full of contradictions of its own. Homer knows too much about what he could never have known, and so the charge of intentional obfuscation can’t be made to stick, while the counterstory known to his Egyptian ‘informant’ stands on rather shaky foundations.¹²⁵ Indeed, Dio all but gives away the premise of his speech is Homer’s way of covering his tracks, lest anyone should go looking for the same tree after his lifetime in order to verify his tale. Zētein is doing double duty, standing for ‘searching’ and for the general practice of looking for solutions to problems in Homer (zētēsis). The (real or imagined) search for physical remains is merely the empirical correlative of the grammatical search–solution game. Butler exploits this ambiguity well (passim). ¹²¹ The term has the sense of bastardy and fictionality (un personaggio fittizio, Vagnone). Cf. e.g. Σ Soph. OC 794 ὑπόβλητον: οὐκ ἀληθὲς ἀλλὰ πεπλασμένον (‘hupoblēton’ [means] ‘not true’ but invented’). ¹²² D. Chr. 11.102. ¹²³ Σ bT Il. 16.793–804a ex.; Σ AbT Il. 18.192a–b ex. (throwing Automedon into the bargain). ¹²⁴ D. Chr. 11.102. Note how Dio has reverse-engineered the scholia: he starts with their answer to the Homeric problem of the armour and this leads to an ingenuous narratological explanation of his own making, which ends up wreaking havoc on Homer’s plot line. ¹²⁵ Ibid., 38. The priest’s evidence, a riff on Herodotus, is suspiciously fragile, and in a way that recalls the facts surrounding Homer (as others have noticed; most recently, Kim 2010, ch. 4). This is hardly a problem for Dio, whose humour resides in appearing to have his cake while eating it too: ‘So from what has been said it must be acknowledged that

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in his final envoi,¹²⁶ turning it all into a rhetorical paignion carried out to exonerate the Greeks from acts that they never committed and that (pace Homer) never in the world existed: ‘how much better [would it have been] for the Greeks never to have committed these excesses’—literally, ‘for these things never to have happened for the Greeks’ (ταῦτα μὴ γενόμενα τοῖς ῞Ελλησιν)—‘than for them to have captured Troy!’ But all this is neither here nor there for Dio, whose true target is not so much Homer as it is Homer’s prestige and the uses to which it was put by the Homer industry in antiquity: the scholars, grammarians, and critics who worked hard to establish the truths behind the fictions of entertainment literature, or else to render Homer’s stories internally coherent (Dio, wrinkling his nose, calls this the ‘old school’, as it were,¹²⁷ of Homeric learning)—and then the readers, from schoolboys to grown-up sophists, who were trapped in the same cultural bubble as the scholars. Of course, what is least apparent on this spoofing of a tradition is that the spoofery— the pose of the light-hearted voice in the wilderness bringing down the canonical work in antiquity from the margins—is itself part of the tradition, with precedents as venerable as Stesichorus, Gorgias, and Zoilus, to all of whom Dio nods at various points.¹²⁸ Dio’s speech is hardly original; nor is it fundamentally more radical in conception or substance: it is merely a vehement expression of these long-standing critiques of Homer. But it also stands apart from them in one crucial respect. Over his predecessors, Dio has the advantage of historical distance and of a changed perspective, given the new circumstances in which he is living and writing. And these factors are palpable in his work. And yet, for all its vehemence, Dio’s critique is underlain by a certain insouciance and by an almost palpable weariness: the academic questions are old and stale, while the mere addition of one more revisionist account

Homer was either unintelligent and a bad judge of the facts, so that he selected the more unimportant and trivial things and left to others the greatest and most impressive, or else that he was unable, as I have said, to bolster up his falsehoods and show his poetic genius in handling those incidents whose actual nature it was his purpose to conceal’ (D. Chr. 11.33). This remark, like several others, could be inserted into Butler’s Authoress and few would notice the intrusion. ¹²⁶ Ibid., 154. ¹²⁷ ἡ παλαιὰ δόξα, ibid. 144. ¹²⁸ Stesichorus (he is named, along with his palinode, at 11.39–41); Gorgias (most overtly at 11.14); Zoilus (passim).

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to the pile seems to trivialize the stakes. Historical distance and perspective bring less wisdom than cynicism, as if registering the very tedium of the addition. Why all the pretence of fury now? A further question concerns the way Dio’s changed contemporary world would have registered the ancient squabble between Greeks and non-Greeks. The question can only have been fraught—indeed, it raises, in an oddly displaced form, the issue of racial and political canons and margins. Even here Dio’s stance is relaxed, not involved: he is content merely to activate all of these problems and to allow them to resonate freely and almost uncontrollably, and at a number of different levels. On the one hand, he blurs the ethnic boundary between the two factions by recalling the Trojan ancestry of the major Achaean actors: the house of Atreus was of Asiatic descent (Agamemnon’s ‘own forefather, Pelops . . . came from that same Asia’, and Agamemnon himself ‘had many relatives in Asia’).¹²⁹ On the other hand, Dio’s Ilian audience has the reverse problem: are they Greeks or Trojans? Greeks by culture, if not also by race (and, to some unknown extent, Agamemnon’s distant relations as well), they are non-Greeks by location and by their affiliation with the Trojan past.¹³⁰ Mythology has a way of remembering and forgetting such intricacies. Dio brings these uncomfortably back to the surface. Just as Butler toys with the notion that Homer was an Asiatic (playing off his Ionian ancestry), so does Dio bring up the troubling problem of who is truly and rightfully Greek (likewise a burning issue in the Second Sophistic).¹³¹ This is something he brings out well, but in a ¹²⁹ D. Chr. 11.68; 63; cf. 47. ¹³⁰ This is what Trapp 1997 calls ‘the paradox of being a Trojan Greek’. Similarly, Kim 2010: 95 notes: ‘The Ilians’ ethnic “Trojan” ancestry thus jars with their otherwise exemplary cultural “Greekness”, represented by Dio as revolving around Homer, the center of their educational curriculum, and object of their reverence’. Whether or not the Ilians truly revered Homer (which we are not told), they can be assumed to have had a highly conflicted attitude to their past. One of the more disturbing upshots of Dio’s logic is the sorry fact that the Ilians believe the ‘lies’ of the Greek poet Homer every bit as much as the Greeks themselves do. To erase these habits (this doxa) by means of persuasion, as Dio claims to be doing, is a double-edged insult: it points up the fragility of the Ilians’ belief structures, which are no more sound than Homer’s own falsehoods. See, further, Kim 2010: 93 on ‘the power of doxa as well as the arbitrary nature of belief ’ as revealed by the speech (one of its many Gorgianic traits). ¹³¹ See Whitmarsh 2009: 216–17 on Philostratus’ Heroicus, but also on other contemporaries engaged in the ‘anti-canonical’ interrogation of Hellenic identities at the tricky boundary of the non-Hellenic. Lucian makes a career of working this boundary confusion, which is really a confusion between geographical and cultural margins.

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different way, in his oration to the Borysthenians,¹³² where he plays a similar game of displacing canons to the margins: Homer’s descendants turn out to be rude and barbarian tribes who also resemble Greeks at Troy; given the choice, do Greeks really want to identify with Homer and his reality?¹³³ And anyway, to what ethnicity did, or does, Homer belong? As we’ve seen, on this last point there was little consensus in the ancient world, even among the Greeks themselves. Last but not least, the question of Greeks and non-Greek Asians, while once politically determinative (and Dio makes much of this in his rationalizing, ‘true’ account of the Trojan War), is this no more, given the submission of both to Rome.¹³⁴ Yet to concede this changed circumstance is not to solve the dilemmas but only to perpetuate them, for Romans sensitive to the dilemmas of Roman imperial identity politics are scarcely free of contamination: Aeneas was prophesied ‘to become master of all Europe’,¹³⁵ thus fulfilling Agamemnon’s greatest ambition;¹³⁶ but he did so by bringing Homer with him, with all that this entailed. Here the Homeric Question has a real point, and Dio is exploiting it to the hilt. Perhaps the only true ‘other’ in Dio’s contemporary world is simply the past. Yet Dio knows better: the past may be a foreign country, but it inhabits us even more than we inhabit it. The past is the source of conflictual identities for those who look back on it, at least in Dio’s hands. To this extent, the past is a reflex of the conflicted present. And, on such a view of history, there are no margins or canons, but only troubling questions about both.

4. Conclusion Butler and Dio are two instances of a hallowed, and not only a minority, tradition that took pleasure in subverting the most idealized of poets and personalities from antiquity, and in a blend that, moreover, could be undecidably serious and humorous. The earliest known examples of these traditions belong to a mass of unverifiable lore, which in turn arose out of speculation on Homer’s (unknown and unknowable) identity and on the ever contested meaning of his poems. These two impetuses later ¹³² D. Chr. 11.36. ¹³³ See Porter 2001: 85–90. ¹³⁴ D. Chr. 11.150. ¹³⁵ Ibid., 141. ¹³⁶ Ibid., 51. I take it that this is one aspect of what Trapp 1997 refers to as ‘forms of civic and other-imagining’.

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became formalized in a trend that culminated in the sciences—or arts—of history, archaeology, and philology. This evolution produced refinements of the earlier attempts to construe the long-gone past, but it never transcended them: classical studies were and are as vulnerable to their original urges as any reflection on the cipher and phenomenon of Homer ever was, and the more so given the primary role that Homer played in the origins and evolution of classical study. These ‘paraliterary’ traditions, I have been arguing, are marked by two characteristics: they are as old as Homer’s first appearances by name; and they are a contributing, if complicating, element in what makes Homer canonical to begin with. In some sense, they are not really paraliterary at all. The writers featured in the present chapter are later representatives, but not perverters, of these same traditions in their earliest and middle forms. Dio and Butler stand out perhaps for their willingness to expose the more problematic aspects of the traditions to which they belong, but they are not revealing any deeper trade secrets than their forebears did. In treading (and blurring) the fine line between scholarship and fantasy and between canons and margins, they are not altering what is known (namely, the fact that this line inhabits all sides of the equations) but are merely underscoring what is denied in the way in which Homer is conceived. And to that extent they are canonical representatives of the margicanonical tradition of Homeric inquiry, to which we are only the most recent heirs.

Acknowledgements Thanks are owed to the members and audience of the original Yale conference, to the editors of this volume, to anonymous readers of the typescript, to Michael Trapp for sharing his unpublished paper on Dio, and to Larry Kim for comments.

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10 Minus opus moveo Verse Summaries of Virgil in the Anthologia Latina Scott McGill

Editions of the Anthologia Latina contain several verse argumenta of Virgil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid; these are brief summaries, all in hexameters, of the content of the poems.¹ Notable among them are the argumenta of the Aeneid that appear as the first entry in D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s Anthologia.² Two different summaries, quite probably by two different authors, comprise that entry: a set of twelve single lines, each summarizing a book of the Aeneid, and a set of ten-line pieces, each one devoted, again, to a book of Virgil’s epic. The ten-line poems are the longest of the ancient summaries. In addition, several manuscripts preserve a ten-line preface to the ten-line argumenta. The preface is in elegiac couplets and its unknown author adopts the role of Ovid, thereby making that successor to Virgil a summarizer of him.³

¹ On the Anthologia Latina, see e.g. Tandoi 1984: 198–205 and Kay 2006: 20–2. I use the abbreviation AL for the Anthologia. For an overview of the different argumenta, see Gioseffi 2012: 123–4. ² Shackleton Bailey 1982. I mainly use his text, although see p. 274 in this chapter. ³ A piece summarizing the entire Aeneid in six lines is also attributed to Ovid (AL 672a Riese), as, in one manuscript, is a set of four-line Virgilian summaries (AL 2 Shackleton Bailey), although neither has a preface. Studies of the argumenta, and of Latin verse summaries more widely, that I have found useful are Opitz 1882: 282–310; Senis 1984: 310–12; Marpicati 1999, 2000, and 2015; Friedrich 2002: 185–91; and Gioseffi 2012. On the Greek side of things, see Mossman (2010: 247–67), who discusses Euripidean hypotheses (hupotheseis) but includes some broader observations on Greek literary summaries. For a theoretical examination of ‘auxiliary texts’, a category under which the argumenta could be comfortably placed, see Dubischar 2010: 39–67.

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The monostich and decastich verse argumenta, like summaries in general, are marginal texts par excellence, and not just because they circulate today in the Anthologia Latina, a text that lies at the fringes of Latin literature. As short summaries of the Aeneid, they are, by definition, adjunct works, deriving their existence from another poem and turning that source into poetry that is significantly less—in terms of length, artistic achievement, and cultural standing—than what it was. As hypertexts to the Virgilian hypotext, the argumenta are also situated at the edge of Virgil’s canonicity, the literary centre from which they issue.⁴ It would be easy to leave things there and to treat the summaries simply as curiosities of peripheral interest in Virgil’s reception, without looking into exactly how they operate as second-degree poems and how they recast Virgil. The usual fate of the marginal text, after all, is to receive a glancing attention, if any at all. This chapter, however, will give the marginal centre stage and will examine closely the monostich and decastich summaries as well as the pseudo-Ovidian preface to the ten-line argumenta. One aim is to show that the preface is a locus of creative engagement with the Aeneid and with Ovid’s poetry, and that it conceptualizes in various ways the nature and functions of the summaries, the act of summarizing, and the relationship between the argumenta and their source text. In addition, I will explore the processes through which the author(s) of the monostich and decastich summaries re-created the Aeneid, although with an emphasis on the more involved ten-line examples. This mode of rewriting is, of course, fundamentally a matter of condensing the hypotext; but it is also a matter of adapting Virgil’s language in different ways, and through intertextual techniques that bear comparison with those in mainstream literature and in the Aeneid itself. The overarching purpose of the chapter is to bring out the complexities and nuances of the marginal, secondary preface and argumenta; those complexities and nuances, in turn, complicate the marginal, secondary status of the preface and argumenta.

1. Making Literary History The single-line and ten-line hexameter summaries of each book of the Aeneid that open Shackleton Bailey’s 1982 edition of the Anthologia ⁴ The terms ‘hypertext’ and ‘hypotext’, now in regular academic use, come from Genette 1997: 3–6 and passim; Genette discusses summaries of texts on 237–45.

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Latina appear in the famous Codex Romanus (Vat. lat. 3867), a deluxe illustrated manuscript of Virgil dating to around AD 500. Later manuscripts, from the ninth and tenth centuries, preserve a preface in elegiac couplets whose author adopts the identity of Ovid and asserts that he produced the argumenta.⁵ Because the preface is not found in the Romanus, there is doubt over whether it was original to the summaries, in which case it would have predated the Romanus but would have been omitted from it. More likely, the preface was added to them at a later point, up to the terminus ante quem that the manuscript tradition establishes.⁶ One way of understanding the decision to impersonate Ovid is that the pseudepigrapher was responding to how Ovid rewrote Virgil in Heroides 7—the letter of Dido to Aeneas—and in Metamorphoses 13 and 14—which treat events found in the Aeneid in an abbreviated and oblique manner.⁷ The summaries display an Ovid who continues to recast and condense his predecessor, now in a new fashion. It is impossible to know whether the author intended to deceive when he masqueraded as Ovid, so that readers considered the writer actually to be that poet, or whether he wanted to have the fiction recognized as such. In the latter instance, the preface would be an example of transparent role playing.⁸ In either event, the pseudepigrapher no doubt sought to strike his readers with the identity of the summarizer, particularly in light of how Ovid reworked Virgil elsewhere. ⁵ See Shackleton Bailey 1982: ix–x on the manuscript tradition, as well as Marpicati 2015: 179–81. ⁶ Marpicati (2015: 191–3) proposes Modoin, one of the poets at the court of Charlemagne, as the author of the preface. This, however, must remain a matter of speculation. On the date of the preface, see as well Marpicati 2000: 150–1 and Hexter 2011: 295–6. The reference to a titulus in the final line of the preface, discussed in what follows, indicates that the author was thinking of a set of summaries that circulated, in some way, as an independent text; if the argumenta simply preceded the Aeneid in a manuscript of the epic, a titulus identifying Ovid as their author becomes very problematic. ⁷ Particularly abbreviated is the treatment of Aeneid 4, which Ovid famously summarizes in four lines (Met. 14.78–81). Myers (2009: 11–19) provides a good overview of how Ovid sidesteps his towering predecessor and achieves Alexandrian originality by compressing or passing over what was significant in the Aeneid and by focusing instead on what was marginal there, while he also adds new material and emphases to the Aenean narrative. ⁸ On the purposes and reception of ancient pseudepigrapha generally, see Peirano 2012b passim. She emphasizes that deception is not inherent in this kind of literary role playing and, indeed, that it is usually inappropriate to project that motive onto the texts. See, similarly, Hexter 2011: 287–91, on pseudo-Ovidiana in the Middle Ages.

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The opening lines of the preface show that the pseudepigrapher also wished to present his readers with a particular picture of the relationship between Ovid and Virgil (1–4): Vergilius magno quantum concessit Homero, tantum ego Vergilio, Naso poeta, meo. nec me praelatum cupio tibi ferre, poeta; ingenio si te subsequor, hoc satis est. As much as Virgil gives place to the great Homer, so much do I, the poet Ovid, give place to my Virgil. Nor do I want to be placed above you, poet; it is enough if I come second to you in talent.

Whereas the first-century AD orator Domitius Afer had stated that Virgil, though second to Homer, was nearer to the first position than to the third,⁹ the pseudepigrapher’s stance implies that there was some considerable distance between those poets: if the third-place (subsequor)¹⁰ Ovid is decidedly inferior to Virgil, as the passage clearly implies he is, then Virgil must be correlatively (quantum . . . tantum) inferior to Homer. But the purpose is to emphasize Virgil’s superiority to Ovid, not Homer’s to Virgil. To make the point, ‘Ovid’ echoes Ovid’s Remedia amoris 395–6: tantum se nobis elegi debere fatentur, / quantum Vergilio nobile debet epos (‘elegy confesses that she owes as much to Ovid as noble epic owes to Virgil’).¹¹ The Ovidian masquerade extends to the reuse of Ovidian verses, so that ‘Ovid’ expresses himself like the actual poet—a common tactic in literary fakes as a whole. Yet, while Ovid in the Remedia ‘claims a sort of equality with Virgil’ as elegy’s answer to the epic poet,¹² the pseudepigrapher shifts the message so as to reduce Ovid to a reverential successor. The focus still lies upon Virgil’s identity as an epic poet, which of course makes sense, given that the summaries are of the Aeneid, only now Ovid mounts no challenge to him on his flank and, ⁹ See Quintilian, Inst. 10.1.86. ¹⁰ For subsequi meaning ‘to come next after (in order of merit)’, see OLD s.v. subsequor 2c. ¹¹ I use the text of Kenney 1994 for the Remedia, to which I will return. The pseudepigrapher’s stance is also similar to that of Statius in the epilogue to the Thebaid (12.816–17) vive, precor: nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta, / sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora (‘live, I pray; and do not attempt to overcome the Aeneid, but trail after it from afar and always revere its tracks’). Ziolkowski and Putnam 2008: 22 observe that the opening of the pseudo-Ovidian preface ‘exemplif[ies] the “inferiority” topos initiated by Statius’. ¹² Weiden Boyd 2009: 115.

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instead, humbly places himself below him.¹³ The pseudepigrapher adapts his model in a way that deepens his message: the intertextually alert reader can recognize the changes to the source text and see how this ‘Ovid’ is significantly more obsequious than the one of the Remedia.¹⁴ All of this highlights Virgil’s canonical status.¹⁵ It is not that Ovid is a bad poet—on the contrary, as part of a triad with Homer and Virgil, he is, by implication, an accomplished one. But he is a distant third to the other two, and far beneath even the second of them. Ovidian selfdeprecation asserts Virgilian greatness: in this example of do-it-yourself literary history, the pseudepigrapher presents, in striking terms and in a striking textual setting, the familiar story that Virgil is the master author in the Latin poetic tradition.¹⁶ Virgil is the ne plus ultra of Latin canonicity, as unreachable by others, including Ovid, as Homer is unreachable by him.¹⁷ To have ‘Ovid’ so represent Virgil is to give logic to the fiction that he chose to write Virgilian argumenta.¹⁸ The inferior poet is drawn to the superior one, whose work he summarizes out of profound respect, and even with a sense of subservience. Moreover, while association with Ovid certainly lends cachet to the summaries, the representation of him nevertheless implies that the texts are below the Aeneid. The character of ‘Ovid’ reveals the character of the argumenta, in that a lesser poet will logically produce lesser poems. This is to open up a gap between Virgil’s canonicity and the summaries of his epic. To put this in the pseudepigrapher’s terms,

¹³ Given the metre of the preface, it is possible that the pseudepigrapher wished to identify Ovid as an elegiac poet, as Ovid himself does in the Remedia. ¹⁴ While Ovid did speak well of Virgil (e.g. Am. 1.15.25–6 and 3.15.7, AA 3.337–8), he never struck such an inferior pose in relation to him as ‘Ovid’ does. So, too, the real Ovid is clear about his own importance and popularity even when he adopts a modest pose; see Tr. 4.10.127–8 cum ego praeponam multos mihi, non minor illis / dicor et in toto plurimus orbe legor (‘although I put many before me, I am said to be not less than they are and I am read most in all the world’). On Ovid’s portrayal of himself as an author, particularly at Tr. 4.10, see Zak 2012: 487–8. On the obsequious ‘Ovid’ of the preface, see Wheeler 2004–5: 16. ¹⁵ The lines also assert Homer’s canonicity. But the focus, of course, lies on Virgil, the subject of the summaries. ¹⁶ I derive ‘do-it-yourself literary history’ from Hinds 1997: 187–207 on the ‘do-ityourself literary tradition’. ¹⁷ For similar observations, see Hexter 2011: 296. ¹⁸ To reiterate an important point, the pseudepigrapher is probably not the person who wrote the argumenta. But he operates in his preface as though he were.

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as much as Ovid lies beneath Virgil, so much do the argumenta lie beneath the Aeneid.¹⁹ Yet there is more to the opening lines of the preface than this. In line 2, ‘Ovid’ further imitates Ovid by adapting the self-composed epitaph at Tr. 3.3.74 ingenio perii Naso poeta meo (‘I, the poet Ovid, have perished by my own talent’). (In line 4 he then echoes ingenio and recasts hoc satis in titulo est, ‘this is enough for an epitaph’, at Tr. 3.3.77.)²⁰ The reuse of the Tristia produces greater intertextual thickness and reinforces that ‘Ovid’ aimed to sound like Ovid and, thus, to take part in and reproduce his literary language. At the same time, it strongly proclaims ‘Ovid’s’ authorial identity. On the one hand, the self-reference establishes the pseudepigraphical situation. On the other hand, it characterizes Ovid as an assertive poet and as a rewriter of the Aeneid, even as he subordinates himself to Virgil (and Homer). The first-person pronoun ego, added to the Ovidian original, and the possessive meo, retained from Ovid but attached to a different noun, are crucial to the latter effects. While ego is necessary, in the absence of a verb, to show the first-person bearings in the second part of the correlative construction and answers Vergilius in the first line, it also emphasizes the presence of the author and thus makes the authorial ‘I’ boldly stand out and declare itself. Meo, meanwhile, expresses regard for Virgil, but also points to the act of rewriting him in the summaries. In a preface to those poems, Virgil will logically be ‘Ovid’s’ in a significant part because he is the subject of his argumenta; from ‘Ovid’s’ perspective, Virgil is ‘mine’ in the sense that he is the poet whom ‘I’ recast. The implicit idea is that ‘Ovid’, while a self-styled lesser poet than the great, revered Virgil, does not stay at a distance from that figure who is so far (tantum) above him, and instead actively engages with him by remaking his epic.

¹⁹ I thus think that the modest pose is more than a captatio benevolentiae: its rhetorical purposes transcend the wish to express conventional modesty. ²⁰ As Wheeler 2004–5: 16 observes, the pseudepigrapher’s Ovid nevertheless ‘forsakes his usual ars by ending a pentameter with a monosyllable—hoc satis est’. Marpicati 2000: 155 observes that praelatum also echoes praelata in Ovid at AA 2.4 [mea carmina] praelata Ascraeo Maeonioque seni (‘[my poems] placed before the Ascrean [Hesiod] and old Maeonian [Homer]’). The parallel is too slight to prove deliberate adaptation. Still, the difference in authorial stance is striking. Cf., too, Am. 2.1.2 ille ego nequitiae Naso poeta meae (‘I, Naso, poet of my own laziness’), Tr. 2.2. ingenio peril qui miser ipse met (‘I, the wretched one, who have perished by my own talent’).

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2. Reading for the Plot? ‘Ovid’ goes on in the preface to state why he has written his summaries. As he tells it, his aim was to educate the unknowing reader and to give him the impression that he has read the entire Aeneid in ten lines—and the reference to the length of his summaries shows that the pseudepigrapher responds with the decastichs to the longer summaries alone, not to the monostichs preserved in the Codex Romanus and elsewhere (5–8): argumenta quidem librorum priva notavi, errorem ignarus ne quis habere queat. bis quinos feci legerent quos carmine versus Aeneidos totum corpus ut esse putent.²¹ I have in fact written plot summaries of the individual books so that no one unfamiliar [with the poem] can be in error. I produced ten-line poems for them to read in verse so that they might think it is the entire work of the Aeneid.

Comparison with the argumentum to Aeneid 1 indicates that error in line 6 alludes to the ‘wandering’ of Aeneas after the fall of Troy. With the sequence errorem ignarus, ‘Ovid’ echoes that summary: line 3 contains the verb erravit with Aeneas as the subject, which responds to an important theme in Aen. 1 (see e.g. 1.32, 1.333, 1.755–6), while line 5 adapts Aen. 1.332 (ignari hominumque locorumque, ‘not knowing people or places’) and describes the hero as ignarus loci.²² The indication is that ‘Ovid’ wished to connect his reader and Virgil’s hero and echoed the argumentum to Aeneid 1 in order to help to establish the link; one can circle back to the preface from the argumentum (and, of course, from Aeneid 1) and use the verbal parallels in the two to make that connection. The pseudepigrapher implies that his ten-line summaries will keep the reader of the Aeneid from becoming another Aeneas; with those texts as guides, no one will be ignarus or experience his own form of error.

²¹ For discussion of the reading priva instead of prima, see Marpicati 2000: 156–7. While line 7 is corrupt, the sense is clear enough. ²² I use the text of Conte 2009 for the Aeneid. The verb erro appears at Aen. 1.333, with ignari as its subject (ignari hominumque locorumque / erramus, ‘we wander in ignorance of people and places’). Perhaps the summarizer was prompted by the Virgilian line to use erravit at line 3, or perhaps he thought of erravit independently of Aen. 1.333 (and maybe in response to 1.32 errabant, acti fatis, maria omnia circum, ‘they were wandering around all seas, driven by fate’), but then recalled the same verb at 1.333, which then led him to Aen. 1.332.

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The lines also encourage further intertextual digging. The image of an ignarus reader avoiding an error recalls a major theme of Ovid’s exile poetry, especially when combined with the use of carmine in line 7.²³ As is well known, Ovid attributes his exile to his carmen et error, his ‘poem’ (the Ars amatoria) and his inadvertent ‘mistake’ (see e.g. Tr. 2.207). In addition, Ovid figures his punishment in epic terms and his journey and time in Tomis as a form of epic wandering.²⁴ The pseudepigrapher’s demonstrated willingness to adapt Ovid’s poetry, including the Tristia, and the parallels between his language in lines 5–7 of his preface and Ovidian exilic themes support the conclusion that he wished to allude to the exiled Ovid when describing what his argumenta would do for his reader. Whereas an unintentional error caused Ovid to undergo epic error, the summaries will prevent an unknowing reader from making a mistake (error) about the content of Virgil’s epic. The allusion to Ovid’s exile poetry adds to the density of the preface, whose different layers give readers opportunities to read intertextually and, thus, to add meaning to the text. Because we do not know either the context in which the pseudepigrapher composed his preface or his intended audience, we cannot determine whether, behind his intertextual moves, he actually envisioned any real didactic purpose for the argumenta. At the very least, he nods to the didactic possibilities of the summary form.²⁵ His point is that the argumenta promote a basic understanding of the Aeneid by giving readers an overview of what happens in the poem. The texts are informational, and they help to instil (or solidify) familiarity with Virgil’s plot. Gabriella Senis has argued that the origins of the Virgilian verse summaries in antiquity lie in practical instruction.²⁶ Virgil was a chief object of study in the ancient grammatical schools, and the Aeneid a central text in the curriculum.²⁷ According to Senis, a plausible first step in teaching Virgil was to give a verbal sketch of the content of each book

²³ Carmine is a secure reading, despite the textual problems in the line. ²⁴ Notably, Ovid compares himself to Ulysses (Tr. 1.5.57–84, Pont. 3.1.53, 4.6.13–14, 4.10.9–30). ²⁵ See Genette 1997: 238, who states that the ‘chief function’ of a summary is ‘of a didactic order’. ²⁶ Senis 1984: 310–11. ²⁷ On Virgil in the schools, see Bonner 1977: 32, 126, 213–14, and 219 and Bloomer 2011: 115, 116, 118, and 239 n. 20.

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of the Aeneid. The verse argumenta, she goes on to suggest, came into being as variations on that scholastic practice. Senis’ position is attractive.²⁸ This does not mean, however, that ‘Ovid’ himself saw the ten-line argumenta as versions of school summaries. He could well have just been thinking in general terms about the didactic potential of the form, without having in mind any school practice—indeed, given the uncertainty surrounding his identity and date, we cannot be sure that scholastic summaries were even known to him. Although the pseudo-Ovidian preface does not appear in the Codex Romanus, his comments on the practical, didactic character of the argumenta are applicable to that textual setting. In the Romanus, the one-line and ten-line summaries alike would have naturally served as CliffsNotes introductions to the Aeneid.²⁹ The summaries are usable accessories in a material expression of Virgil’s canonicity— the great author gets the deluxe codex he deserves. The Romanus offers easy access to the outline of the Aeneid’s plot, no matter how much its owner(s) actually needed it. At a fundamental level, the argumenta play a service role, introducing the content of the books that follow them.³⁰ We cannot know whether the ten-line argumenta (as well as the single-line pieces) were written for the Romanus specifically. Quite possibly, in fact, the person who included them in that manuscript took them from some preceding text. This might have been another codex (or roll) in which the summaries likewise prefaced the Aeneid, or it might have been some kind of anthology.³¹ Perhaps the argumenta were included in an anthology as examples of light scholastic verse, that is, poems with roots in the school setting and in school practices associated with Virgil—in this case, a grammarian’s introductory recitation of the plots of the books of the Aeneid. Loose parallels appear in a sixth-century AD North African anthology preserved in the Codex Salmasianus: the

²⁸ For a different perspective on Senis’ position, see Gioseffi 2012: 122–4. ²⁹ In the Romanus, all the books of the Aeneid except Book 1 (a mistake of the scribe) are preceded by the relevant monostich argumentum followed by the relevant decastich argumentum. I thank Paolo Marpicati for clarifying this to me per litteras. ³⁰ On the service provided by the summaries in the Romanus, see Gioseffi 2012: 127. ³¹ For further discussion, see Gioseffi 2012: 127. The argumenta, of course, end up circulating later in anthologies, including Shackleton Bailey’s.

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anthology contains different examples of poems that derive from school exercises and that have a Virgilian focus.³² Assuming that Virgilian verse summaries were included in an anthology as versions of a scholastic practice, the texts would have transcended a didactic purpose. In that setting, the argumenta serve as learned entertainment. How their authors turn a grammarian’s spoken précis into hexameters would have quite possibly been essential to their effect. Surely, too, the verse summaries were to strike readers as display pieces of ludic verse, that is, as poems written according to strict ad hoc formal rules. Because those rules govern length, it stands to reason that reactions would have centred on how the argumenta shorten and thus defamiliarize the Aeneid, in that they make the familiar strange by radically reducing it.³³ By definition, of course, all verse Virgilian argumenta stand as exercises in compression, no matter how they circulated and no matter what else they did.³⁴ ‘Ovid’ calls attention to that defining feature of the texts in lines 7–8 of his preface. By stating that he has produced ten-line poems that capture the entire Aeneid,³⁵ the pseudepigrapher highlights the closed field in which he operates;³⁶ he notes the length of the summaries in order to advertise the ability to render the plot of the Aeneid in such a limited frame. ‘Ovid’ thus states that audiences can read the argumenta for the plot of Virgil’s poem, while at the same time he leads them to read for the summarizer’s technique, namely to appreciate how he negotiates the challenge of treating the Aeneid in a predetermined, fixed, small number of lines. Once more, there is a contrast with Virgil’s canonical status, as readers are to register the gap between the great (in two senses) Aeneid and the reduced version of it. Yet there is also an indirect assertion of ludic skill.

³² See McGill 2003. ³³ With ‘make the familiar look strange’, I echo David Foster Wallace’s essay ‘E Unibus Pluram’ via Jonathan Lethem, who reused Wallace in his centonic essay ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’, first published in Harper’s Magazine and reprinted in Lethem 2011. The relevant passage appears in Lethem 2011: 100. ³⁴ The shorter the summary, of course, the more intensely is it such an exercise. ³⁵ See n. 18 in this chapter. ³⁶ I take the term ‘closed field’ from Kenner 1962; in adapting it to the summaries, I use it to designate the restricted number of lines with which the summarizer works. My remarks resemble those of Gioseffi 2012: 140–1 on miniaturization.

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Lines 5–8 of ‘Ovid’s’ preface therefore proclaim the practical, didactic value of the argumenta, but do two more things as well: they generate secondary layers of meaning through intertextuality; and they make an indirect case for a particular kind of talent and achievement. In this they reveal more literariness in the preface, both because they expand its intertextual reach beyond that of its opening lines and because they point to the ambitions of the author. ‘Ovid’ sets the conditions for readers to look beyond the verbal surface of his preface and to see how he recasts Virgil even before he summarizes him, as well as how he generates still more dialogue with the work of the poet he claims to be. What is more, he encourages his readership to recognize the ability to miniaturize demonstrated in the summaries, and thus to find a kind of value in them.

3. Authorship and Authority, Margin and Centre When ‘Ovid’ states in line 8 of the preface that the argumenta will make readers think that they are reading the entire Aeneid (Aeneidos totum corpus), he makes a claim for their comprehensiveness. In doing so, he conceptualizes the relationship between the summaries and their source text in a way that contrasts with his emphasis on their brevity. At the same time as ‘Ovid’ advertises the gap in length between the short summaries and their source text, he relates that he will produce summaries that stand in for the epic. Distance from the source text coexists with a type of equality with it. No doubt the pseudepigrapher was deliberately exaggerating when making his point. The approach was to overstate what the summaries provide in order to tout in strong terms their broad coverage of what happens in the Aeneid. Still, by taking the stance he does, ‘Ovid’ implies that, to know the Aeneid, one need not bother with the Aeneid. His exaggeration plays with the idea that the argumenta could give people an easy way out by allowing them to know, or to recall, vital things about the epic without actually reading it. This is to recognize the ability of the summaries to come between audiences and Virgil’s text—to substitute and displace the Aeneid and to be the medium through which readers experience it.

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To conclude the preface, the pseudepigrapher continues to address how the summaries relate to the Aeneid (9–10): adfirmo gravitate mea, me crimine nullo livoris titulum praeposuisse tibi. I solemnly swear that the title placed me before you through no sin of envy.

With Shackleton Bailey, I suppose that titulus refers to the title of the summaries, which would have given the author’s name and would have identified the text. That meaning makes the best sense in the context: ‘Ovid’ refers to the title that preceded the preface and to the striking appearance of his own name in that title.³⁷ The clearest grounds for accusing ‘Ovid’ of envy would then have been that his name came first in the titulus. As Shackleton Bailey saw, the text would have run something like this: Ovidii Nasonis in libros Aeneidos Vergilii epigrammata.³⁸ In his estimation, the manuscript reading titulum should be emended to his conjecture titulo, an ablative of place; the message would thus be, ‘I have placed myself before you in the title through no sin of envy’. I prefer to retain titulum and to take it as the subject of praeposuisse, with me the object.³⁹ In disavowing the emulation that, he indicates, his appearance before Virgil in the title could suggest, ‘Ovid’ turns once more to the real Ovid, thus adding still more layers of intertextual depth to the preface. The source is lines 365–70 of the Remedia amoris. There Ovid dismisses his own carping critics by connecting them to the envious detractors who beset Homer and Virgil:⁴⁰

³⁷ See Donatus’ Vita Vergilii 47 titulus, in quo quaeritur cuius sit quid sit (‘the title, in which is sought whose [work] it is and what [work] it is’). The word titulus appears in the first line of the Remedia Amoris: legerat huius Amor titulum nomenque libelli (‘Love had read the title and name of this book’). It is clear from the opening lines that the Remedia was in the pseudepigrapher’s mind; as we will see, there are grounds for identifying a debt to that Ovidian poem in these closing lines as well. Given this, we might tentatively speculate that the pseudepigrapher thought back to the Remedia when referring to the titulus. Cf. the different use of titulus at Tr. 3.3.77, cited earlier. ³⁸ Shackleton Bailey 1979b: 7. ³⁹ The MS reading carmine nullum in line 9 is also difficult to understand, and I accept the conjecture crimine nullo of Tollius, printed by Shackleton Bailey. For a different approach to the text, see Marpicati 2000: 160–2. ⁴⁰ Marpicati 2000: 163 discusses the parallels between the preface and Rem. Am. 365–70. Marpicati (ibid., 162) also cites as a parallel Ov. Tr. 4.10.123–32, where the poet states that personified Livor has taken no bite out of his work (123–4) and proclaims his wide fame and

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ingenium magni livor detractat Homeri; quisquis es, ex illo, Zoile, nomen habes. et tua sacrilegae laniarunt carmina linguae, pertulit huc victos quo duce Troia deos. summa petit livor: perflant altissima venti, summa petunt dextra fulmina missa Iovis. Envy disparages the genius of the great Homer; Zoilus, whoever you are, you derive your name from him. You, too, under whose direction Troy brought her conquered gods here— impious tongues have torn apart your poems. Envy aims for the highest things; the winds sweep over what stands tallest; lightning sent from Jupiter’s hand aims for the highest things.

The end of the preface and the Remedia share no language, apart from the word livor. Still, both deal with the subject of envy directed at Virgil, and the established connections with the Remedia in the opening of the preface provide contextual grounds for seeing in that thematic parallel more than a coincidence. The suggestion is of a second turn to the Remedia—the word ingenio in line 4 of the preface (ingenio si te subsequor, ‘if I come second to you in talent’) perhaps calling to the pseudepigrapher’s mind a passage in the Remedia that contained ingenium⁴¹—and therefore of another moment where the author reworked a message by the poet he was claiming to be. A plausible aim was to emphasize, for readers who saw the connection, that this Ovid, like the Ovid of the Remedia, was rejecting envy. It is true that in the Remedia Ovid equates himself with Virgil and with Homer as a great poet,⁴² while in the preface ‘Ovid’ distinguishes himself from those two giants. Yet the fundamental parallel between the Ovid who disdains envious carping in the Remedia and the Ovid who rejects livor as a motive in the argumenta reinforces the message that the latter’s attitude is peaceable and aims are innocent. prospects for literary immortality. Dependence on that passage is possible (see, along with Livor, praeponam at line 127); but, even if we accept the debt, Rem. Am. 365–70 is, in my judgement, the more dominant model, because it refers to Virgil and rejects envy. These are variations on an envy motif that is widespread in Latin poetry (for another Ovidian example, see Pont. 4.16); an important Greek antecedent is Callimachus (Call. Aet. 1.1–17). ⁴¹ To follow up on the previous note, perhaps, too, the pseudepigrapher was led to a passage that dealt with both Virgil and Homer from his own opening lines, which likewise dealt with both Virgil and Homer. The word ingenium also appears at Tr. 4.10.126, the other possible model for the lines. ⁴² See Rem. Am. 395–6, cited earlier. See also Rem. Am. 389–94, where Ovid asserts his greatness and predicts his lasting fame.

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The assertion that the appearance of Ovid’s name before Virgil’s in the titulus owes nothing to livor is surely meant to amuse. It operates against the normal idea that summaries are no place for ambitious envy. Seeing Ovid swear on his gravitas, a trait not immediately associated with the poet, might contribute to the humour.⁴³ It seems too much to think that the detail undercuts the vow by suggesting that ‘Ovid’ swears on something unimportant to him, and thus that his words are insincere. Far more plausible is a desire to represent the poet consistently, so that he, an unenvious, uncompetitive Ovid, is similar at the end of the preface to the respectful figure he was at its beginning. If anything, gravitas works at two levels, explicitly to solemnize the pledge and implicitly, with a kind of dramatic irony, to give aware readers a jolt at ‘Ovid’s’ association with a surprising trait. As in the opening lines of the preface, ‘Ovid’ shows himself in its last two lines to be capable of thinking in multiple ways about his status as an author of the summaries. In calling attention to the appearance of the name ‘Ovid’ in the titulus, the pseudepigrapher refers to the physical manuscript, but also reveals that he is alive to the doubleness of the argumenta: while entirely dependent on the Aeneid for their existence, they are nevertheless independent works as compressed versions of Virgil’s poem. To put this differently, summarizing the Aeneid means producing another Aeneid; the argumenta are creative supplements to the canon, at once Virgilian and extra-Virgilian, derivative and transformative.⁴⁴ It is their independence that leads them to have their own titulus with Ovid as their identified author. While the summarizer is by definition a secondary writer creating hypertexts from a source poem, he is at the same time a primary one, as the creator of unique, miniature books of Virgil’s epic—a fact that the titulus reflects. Because the pseudepigrapher calls attention to the identification of Ovid on the titulus, it stands to reason that he was aware of the authorial claim a summarizer had to the new, independent poems he produced from Virgil.

⁴³ The reading gravitate seems secure, although Burman, the eighteenth-century editor of the Anthologia Latina (1759–73), proposed probitate. See Marpicati 2000: 161 for discussion. Gravitas is not alien to Ovid; see Cooley 2013: 45–6. Still, it is not a trait at all instinctively or naturally connected to him. ⁴⁴ The term ‘creative supplements’ comes from Peirano 2012b: 10.

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The element of independence in summarizing makes room, in turn, for emulation. ‘Ovid’ connects his appearance in the titulus to a competitive quest for authorial priority; the idea is that he not only produced his own epigrammata out of the Aeneid but also might have wished, out of livor, to challenge and to supersede Virgil as an Aeneid author, thus coming before him as the writer of the epic, as he does in the titulus. Because this vision of livor generates humour by playing off expectations, it reinforces the norm that no summarizer will really approach Virgil with such an attitude or intentions. Even so, ‘Ovid’ entertains the possibility that Virgil could make lesser literary lights, including Ovid, envious and hostile—and the allusion to the Remedia (summa petit livor, ‘envy aims for the highest things’) underlines the point—as well as pointing out that the act of summarizing could be an outlet for those feelings.

4. Summarizing the Aeneid, Remaking the Aeneid, Interpreting the Aeneid When they create their own versions of Virgil’s Aeneid by radically reducing it, summarizers are faced with choices about what to include and what not to include. This is a form of reading, in that the author must interpret the source text in order to determine what content is vital to it and what content is excisable, and a form of rewriting, in that the author reshapes the source text by how he cuts it.⁴⁵ In the case of the oneline summaries, the author must isolate what he considers to be the very essential action of each Virgilian book. In the case of the decastich summaries, meanwhile, the need to condense leads to some striking omissions. Thus the encounter in Aeneid 1 between Venus and Jupiter goes unmentioned; Turnus does not appear in Aeneid 7, or archaic Rome and Hercules and Cacus in Aeneid 8; the stripping of Pallas and Aeneas’ rage at his death are missing from Aeneid 10; and there is no reference to Juno’s reconciliation to Rome’s fate in Aeneid 12. Of course, omissions limit the efficacy of the argumenta as overviews of the Aeneid, even though the summarizer is largely thorough and accurate about the plot.⁴⁶ What we ⁴⁵ See, similarly, Genette 1997: 229–30. ⁴⁶ Senis 1984: 311 recognizes the summarizer’s thoroughness and accuracy, as does Mazzarino 1947: 176. Naturally, however, the omissions undercut ‘Ovid’s’ (exaggerated) claim to universal coverage.

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encounter is a reduced version of the Aeneid that is necessarily lacunose, but that reveals personal and at times surprising choices regarding what to include and what to exclude in order to capture the main plot points, which was the clear aim. It is also the case that the decastich summaries and, more dramatically, the monostich examples flatten out Virgil. This is because they relate what happened in the Aeneid almost entirely in straightforward third-person narration, a hallmark of the argument form.⁴⁷ The aim is zero-focalized exposition,⁴⁸ which obviously eliminates the richness of narration and characterization and the moral complexity of the original, as well as features of epic and Virgilian style (e.g. epic similes, visual description and ekphrasis, and paratactic constructions).⁴⁹ Counterbalancing these departures from the Aeneid are continuities of language: both sets of summaries recurrently echo Virgil’s words and phrases. In the decastich argumenta, the numerous parallels fall into three categories: words or phrases deriving from the Virgilian scene or action summarized; words or phrases deriving from a different point in the relevant Virgilian book; and words or phrases deriving from another book of the Aeneid. The author of the decastichs is not alone among the Virgilian summarizers in reusing language from his source text. The monostich argumenta contain several examples,⁵⁰ while sets of four-line ⁴⁷ So Genette 1997: 239. The only direct speech among the summaries appears in the one to Aeneid 7, quoting Iulus: ‘mensis iam vescimur’ inquit (‘ “we now feed on our tables”, he said’). ⁴⁸ ‘Zero focalization’ is a term for omniscient narration. A classic work dealing with focalization in the Aeneid is Fowler 1990. ⁴⁹ To give one vivid example of flattening, the argumentum to Aeneid 11 describes the battle scene in the book and Camilla thus (line 9): pugnatur. vincunt Troes. cadit ipsa Camilla (‘There is fight. The Trojans win. Camilla herself falls’). So much for her back story, rich character, aristeia, and pathetic death! ⁵⁰ Thus Libyae depellitur oras (‘[Aeneas] is driven to the shores of Libya’) in the summary to Aeneid 1 echoes Aen. 1.158 (Libyae . . . ad oras, ‘to Lybia’s . . . shores’), and uritur . . . Dido (‘Dido burns’) in the summary to Aeneid 4 echoes Aen. 4.68 (uritur infelix Dido, ‘unhappy Dido burns’). The author also imports language from another book in the Aeneid than the one being summarized. In the summary to Aeneid 7, septimus Aenean reddit fatalibus arvis (‘the seventh returns Aeneas to his predestined fields’), he takes the phrase fatalibus arvis from Aen. 4.355 quem regno Hesperidae fraudo et fatalibus arvis (‘whom [Ascanius] I am cheating of a Hesperian kingdom and predestined fields’). In the summary to Aeneid 8, he adapts quos armet in hostes (‘against what enemies he arms’) from armat in hostis at Aen. 10.398. In the summary to Aeneid 11 (undecimo victa est non aequo Marte Camilla, ‘in the eleventh Camilla is defeated in uneven warfare’), he takes aequo Marte from Aen. 7.540 atque ea per campos aequo dum Marte geruntur (‘and while

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and five-line texts closely or exactly reproduce the openings of Virgilian books in the Georgics and Aeneid and contain varying numbers of further linguistic resemblances.⁵¹ The author of the ten-line summaries is less committed to echoes of the first lines of the Aeneid.⁵² But in most of his books he exceeds his counterparts in the pervasiveness and variety of his debts to Virgil. It is natural for a summarizer to use language that Virgil himself used in treating the same scene or action. Such echoes are surely a matter of convenience and of aiming to sound like Virgil when reworking his poetry. But it is insufficient to view them only as that. In fact, they are the product of authorial agency and choice: the summaries are not centos, in which every line must come from Virgil, and a summarizer will decide when to reproduce Virgilian language and when not to do so.⁵³ Thus resemblances to Virgil differ in number between argumenta as well as between books within a single group of summaries. In addition, summarizers select different things to echo, and they integrate the reused elements into their texts in different ways. Usually this involves modifying the source language, but doing so with a range of approaches, so that parallels have divergent degrees of fidelity to the Aeneid. Therefore, while summarizers in general rework words and phrases from relevant Virgilian passages, they nevertheless each manage that activity differently. In this they show a measure of individual style.⁵⁴ More surprising are the echoes of Virgil that come from places in the source text other than the particular scene or action that the summarizer was treating. These, again, reveal an author who seeks to sound like Virgil; these things are done over the fields in even warfare’). Again, the author of the monostichs is probably different from the author of the decastichs. ⁵¹ See AL 2 and 2a Shackleton Bailey, as well as AL 654 Riese. The six-line summaries presented under the name of the Twelve Wise Men (AL 591–602 Riese; see also Friedrich 2002) contain fewer verbal parallels to Virgil, as do those presented under the name of Sulpicius Carthaginiensis (AL 653 Riese); in the Sulpician examples, however, they are not quite as few as in those of the Twelve. ⁵² Thus the first lines of the summaries to Aeneid 1, 5, and 6 do not echo the openings of the Virgilian books, while the summary to Aeneid 10 begins with only a faint Virgilian parallel. The summary to Aeneid 11, meanwhile, opens with parallels to Aen. 11.6–7. By contrast, the first lines of the summaries to Aeneid 8, 9, and 12 are especially close to the first lines of their source texts. On the openings of the summaries, see Marpicati 2000: 148–9. ⁵³ Marpicati 1999: 130 compares the summaries to centos. ⁵⁴ There are also verbal parallels among the argumenta that are independent of Virgil’s language; these suggest either inter-summary imitation or reliance upon a common source.

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but they cannot be reduced to convenience, since they do not use language found in a parallel Virgilian passage. Instead the parallels are further, even stronger markers of authorial choice and style. In those instances the summarizer displays a more creative approach to Virgil: he incorporates words and phrases into a new context and, in the process, gives them new signifying functions. A striking example of this technique appears in the very first line of the ten-line summary of Aeneid 1. There the author describes Aeneas as a vir magnus bello, nulli pietate secundus (‘a man great in war, second to none in piety’). The line is close in content to Aen. 1.544–5, also on Aeneas: quo iustior alter / nec pietate fuit nec bello maior et armis (‘no one was more righteous than he in piety, and no one greater in war and arms’).⁵⁵ Yet the phrase nulli pietate secundus responds as well to Aen. 11.441, where the subject is Turnus: haud ulli veterum virtute secundus (‘not at all second to any men of old in valour’). The parallels in nulli/ulli and secundus indicate the debt. The summarizer therefore adapts a phrase describing Aeneas’ enemy so that it describes Aeneas, while also changing virtute to pietate to refer to the cardinal trait of Virgil’s hero. An examination of the rest of the summary of Aeneid 1 offers further insight into how the author reused Virgilian language:⁵⁶ vir magnus bello, nulli pietate secundus Aeneas odiis Iunonis pressus iniquae Italiam quaerens Siculis erravit in undis, naufragus et tandem Libyae est advectus ad oras ignarusque loci, fido comitatus Achate, indicio matris regnum cognovit Elissae. quin etiam nebula saeptus pervenit in urbem, abreptos socios undis cum classe recepit hospitioque usus Didus per cuncta benignae excidium Troiae iussus narrare parabat.

5

A man great in war, second to none in piety, Aeneas, pressed by the hatred of hostile Juno; while seeking Italy, he wandered in Sicilian waters, and at last, a shipwreck, he was carried to the shores of Libya, and not knowing the place, accompanied by faithful Achates, he recognized the kingdom of Elissa with ⁵⁵ Cf. Aen. 6.403 Troius Aeneas pietate insignis et armis (‘Trojan Aeneas, outstanding in piety and arms’). Cf., too, Aen. 6.769–70 Silvius Aeneas pariter pietate vel armis/egregius (‘Silvius Aeneas, equally peerless in piety or in arms’). ⁵⁶ Gioseffi (2012: 129–39 and 142) examines the reuse of Virgilian language in the different summaries of Aeneid 1 found in the Anthologia Latina.

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a sign from his mother. And furthermore, veiled in a cloud, he arrived at the city; he received his comrades who had been snatched away in the waves with his fleet, and having enjoyed the hospitality of Dido, kind in all things, he prepared to narrate by command the destruction of Troy.

Line 2 of the summary shows the author turning to Virgilian material from later in Aeneid 1, as he adapts odiis Iunonis pressus iniquae from Aen. 1.668 (odiis Iunonis iniquae).⁵⁷ Similar transpositions continue in line 3, where the author looks ahead to Italiam quaero at Aen. 1.380 for Italiam quaerens before appearing to go further afield by deriving Siculis . . . in undis from Aen. 3.696. Aeneid 3 is also a source in line 4; Libyae est advectus ad oras modifies advectus in oras at Aen. 3.108, though it also echoes Libyae vertuntur ad oras (‘they turn to the coast of Libya’) at Aen. 1.158.⁵⁸ The summarizer proceeds to concentrate his attention on Aeneid 1 alone, taking language from relevant points in that book. As previously noted, ignarus loci in line 5 adapts ignari hominumque locorumque (‘not knowing people or places’) at Aen. 1.332. Comitatus Achate in the same line, meanwhile, exactly reproduces the line end at Aen. 1.312.⁵⁹ Two further parallels then appear in lines 7 and 8: nebula saeptus comes from saeptus nebula at Aen. 1.439, and socios . . . cum classe recepit recasts classem sociosque receptos at Aen. 1.583. At this point the approach shifts, as the author moves backward in Aeneid 1 for his language. For hospitio in line 9 he turns to Aen. 1.299, where the same form of the noun appears in initial position and where the name Dido is found.⁶⁰ For Didus . . . benignae he turns to regina quietum / accipit in Teucros animum et mentem benignam (‘the queen receives a peaceful heart and gentle soul toward the Teucrians’) at Aen. 1.303–4. The summarizer then concludes by adapting iussus from iubes at Aen. 2.3. There Aeneas states that Dido

⁵⁷ Several manuscripts have iniquae at Aen. 1.668, and several others have acerbae. Evidently the summarizer knew the former reading. ⁵⁸ In line 4, the Codex Romanus has iactatus for naufragus, which appears in other MSS. If that reading is correct, then it echoes Aen. 1.3 terris iactatus et alto (‘tossed on land and on the deep’). ⁵⁹ Fidus as an epithet for Achates, meanwhile, has parallels at Aen. 1.188, 6.158, 8.521, 8.586, 10.332, and 12.384. The first example is, naturally, the most likely model in a summary of Aeneid 1. ⁶⁰ Ut terrae utque novae pateant Karthaginis arces / hospitio Teucris, ne fati nescia Dido / finibus arceret (‘so that the land and the towers of new Carthage might lie open to greet the Teucrians, and so that Dido, ignorant of fate, not keep them from her lands’, Aen. 1.298–300).

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‘commands’ him to revive an unspeakable grief when having him relate the fall of Troy. It is evident that, in the summary to Aeneid 1, the author consistently uses Virgil to retell the Aeneid, and does so in a manner akin to imitatio: while reusing the language of a text one summarizes obviously departs from standard modes of imitating, the processes of adapting that language and of assimilating it to a new place and purpose are consistent with its principles—a point that holds as well for the monostich argumenta, which likewise echo Virgil creatively.⁶¹ These same processes are found throughout the summaries, including in several examples of dramatic transformation. One set appears in lines 7–10 of the summary to Aeneid 2: et regis Priami fatum miserabile semper impositumque patrem collo dextraque prehensum Ascanium, frustra a tergo comitante Creusa, ereptam hanc fato, socios in monte receptos. And [Aeneas recounted] the fate, ever wretched, of King Priam and the father placed on his neck and Ascanius held by the hand, with Creusa accompanying them in vain from behind, she snatched away by fate, comrades received on the mount.

Priami fatum miserabile semper in line 7 develops Priami fuerint quae fata (‘what was Priam’s fate’) at Aen. 2.506. This is a moment where the summarizer adds an adjective to give his account interpretative colour. The author proceeds to derive impositumque patrem collo in line 8 from Aen. 2.707 care pater, cervici imponere nostrae (‘dear father, be placed upon my neck’), before turning to an earlier line in Aeneid 2, outside of the scene he abridges, for dextraque prehensum / Ascanium. At Aen. 2.592 Virgil uses dextraque prehensum to describe Aeneas, whom his mother Venus catches by the hand to redirect his rage away from killing Helen.⁶² A Virgilian line showing Aeneas close to murder and soothed by his parent becomes a line showing Aeneas as a parent himself, pious and in charge. The author proceeds in the last line of the summary to modify Aen. 2.738–9 misero coniunx fatone erepta Creusa / substitit? (‘or did my wife Creusa, snatched away by an unhappy fate, halt?’). While at that ⁶¹ See n. 50 in this chapter. I echo Russell 1979: 16 (on imitation). ⁶² While the Helen episode is of uncertain authorship and authenticity, it is clear that the summarizer knew it. For a good overview of the authorship question, see Conte 2009: 54.

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point in Virgil’s poem Aeneas is uncertain about what happened to his wife, the summary is clear on the matter. The line is pro-Aeneas in its orientation, since it answers the question raised at Aen. 2.738–9 and states in no uncertain terms that he was not to blame for Creusa’s disappearance and death.⁶³ More examples of how the summarizer dramatically changes Virgil and recasts lines dealing with Aeneas appear in lines 7–8 of the argumentum to Aeneid 8: Evandri Pallas fatis comes ibat iniquis. iamque habilis bello et maternis laetus in armis. Pallas, the son of Evander, went as a comrade with an unkind fate. And now, fitted for war and delighting in his maternal arms, [Aeneas marvelled at the fates and fortunes and trials of his leaders].

Line 7 reworks Aen. 8.466 filius huic Pallas, illi comes ibat Achates (‘with this one came his son Pallas, with that one the companion Achates’), but also includes the foreshadowing fatis . . . iniquis. This phrase appears in the same metrical sedes at Aen. 3.17 and 10.380;⁶⁴ the latter is the presumed source here. At Aen. 10.380 the ‘unkind fate’ belongs to Lagus, the first person Pallas kills in his mini-aristeia. The strong suggestion is of pointed adaptation: the summarizer takes a phrase in a scene that describes Pallas’ success in battle to anticipate his death in battle. The summarizer continues to vary Virgil in the next line with maternis laetus in armis. This recasts the description of Aeneas at Aen. 12.107 maternis saevus in armis (‘savage in his maternal arms’). Virgil’s fierce hero on the battlefield becomes the summarizer’s hero, exultant at receiving his divine arms, a detail he takes from Aen. 8.617 ille, deae donis et tanto laetus honore (‘he [Aeneas], rejoicing in the gift of the goddess and in so great an honour’). As in the summary of Aeneid 2, the author modifies a reference to Aeneas’ ferocity; seeing as well that

⁶³ The ghost of Creusa makes it clear that Aeneas is not to blame for her death at Aen. 2.777–9. The point remains, however, that the summarizer takes an earlier moment of uncertainty in Virgil and changes it into a moment of exculpatory certainty. Socios in the final line, meanwhile, echoes socios at Aen. 2.795 sic demum socios consumpta nocte reviso (‘thus, at last, with night spent, I revisit my companions’). ⁶⁴ See also Aen. 2.257 (fatisque deum defensus iniquis, ‘[Sinon] shielded by the malign fates of the gods’).

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the summarizer does not refer to the hero’s murderous rage in Aeneid 10, it would appear that he consciously moved away from the violent side of Aeneas’ character. A final example reveals another moment where the summarizer points to how he interprets the Aeneid. In line 2 of the summary to Aeneid 4, the author states about Dido placet succumbere amori (‘it pleases [her] to yield to love’). This adapts succumbere culpae at Aen. 4.19, where Dido states that she could perhaps succumb to the one ‘weakness’ (culpa) of loving and marrying Aeneas; the idea is that Dido knows her passion is wrong—wrong in that it would lead her to betray the memory of her slain husband Sychaeus.⁶⁵ The change of culpae to amori indicates that the summarizer sought to suppress the idea that Dido’s relationship with Aeneas was culpable, and thus that he sought to cast the queen in a better light.⁶⁶ The suggestion of a sympathetic reading of Dido is then reinforced in the last line of the summary, where the author uses the pathetic thematic adjective infelix for her: et uitam infelix multo cum sanguine fudit (‘unfortunate [Dido] poured out her life in streams of blood’).⁶⁷ The summarizer also takes uitam multo . . . cum sanguine fudit from Aen. 2.532 multo uitam cum sanguine fudit, on the death of Polites at the hand of Pyrrhus and in the presence of his parents Priam and Hecuba. It is tempting to think that he adapted that line because he understood Dido’s death to be, if not as cruel and shocking as that of Polites, as worthy of sympathy as his.⁶⁸

⁶⁵ Cf. Aen. 4.172 coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam (‘[Dido] calls it marriage; with that name she veils her fault’). ⁶⁶ Servius (ad Aen. 4.19) takes the opposite view to the summarizer’s, contending that culpae is preferable to amori (bene ‘culpae’ potius quam amori, ‘better [to yield]] “to weakness” than to love’). The summarizer was perhaps influenced by Aen. 4.414 [Dido] supplex animos summittere amori (‘humbly submits her pride to love’). Even if he was, though, he still chose to replace culpae with amori from the later line, which points to an interpretative position. ⁶⁷ For the use of infelix for Dido, see Aen. 4.68, 450, 529, 596; see also 1.712, 1.749, 5.3, and 6.456. The adjective does not appear in other verse summaries of Aeneid 4 in the Anthologia Latina. ⁶⁸ The summarizer might have just adapted the last line of Aeneid 4 dilapsus calor atque in ventos vita recessit (‘her warmth fell away and her life departed into the winds’, 4.705). (He fairly closely echoes final lines in the summaries to Aeneid 3 and 11.) Instead, he looked elsewhere in Virgil. The question then becomes why he turned to 2.532 when many other descriptions of death in Virgil were available.

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5. Conclusion Because we do not know who the summarizer was or the setting and audience for which he wrote his argumenta, it is impossible to determine how much he expected his readers to recognize his Virgilian linguistic parallels and the extent to which he modified his source language.⁶⁹ What is clear is his technique of echoing, reshaping, and repurposing the language of the Aeneid—a technique also on display, albeit (necessarily) to a lesser extent, in the single-line argumenta. This results in sets of summaries that, at the linguistic level, demonstrate both dependence on and independence from Virgil’s epic. On the one hand, the echoes of Virgil bridge the gap between summarizer and summarized and cause the argumenta to read more like the Aeneid. On the other hand, the changes to Virgil create some distance between the language of the summaries and their source. At various times, parallels with Virgil in the ten-line summaries also point to an author interpreting the material that he condenses. How he reuses the Aeneid indicates how he reads the Aeneid; adaptation provides insights into reception. To investigate and identify the different ways in which the author of the decastich summaries reuses the language of the Aeneid is to raise questions about how to define them. To restate a fundamental point, the argumenta are, irreducibly, auxiliary texts: they stand as para-canonical, satellite poems orbiting their Virgilian sun. Yet they also have characteristics of independent literary works, and characteristics that are found in so much ancient post-Virgilian poetry—active, creative engagement with Virgil’s language and signs of active interpretation of his content. The monostich examples, meanwhile, also reveal an author who could adapt his source material in a manner akin to imitatio, that cardinal feature of Roman literariness. Both sets of minor texts are constructed from a major language, and the major modulates into the minor through processes like those found in conventional literary verse.⁷⁰

⁶⁹ Because the pseudo-Ovidian preface was probably not original to the summaries but was added later, it is possible to suppose that ‘Ovid’ wished to have his Ovidian echoes recognized, while questioning whether the summarizer wished to have his Virgilian echoes recognized—since we would be dealing with two different authors. ⁷⁰ I echo Hexter 2012: 38–40, who lays out some characteristics of minor literature, developing Deleuze and Guattari.

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Verse argumenta must always be marginal and secondary to the Aeneid in two ways: they are hypertexts to its hypotext, and they are lesser works than it, in terms of size, quality, and standing. In addition, the poems can have a utilitarian, service function that helps to define them as metaliterary or extraliterary. In his preface to the ten-line summaries, ‘Ovid’ reinforces the sense of secondariness by adopting an inferior, reverential posture towards Virgil and by presenting the texts as inferior to the Aeneid. Yet he also presents himself as a self-assertive, active rewriter of that predecessor and indicates that the argumenta display their author’s skills at compressing their model. What is more, he complicates the secondary status of the summaries by pointing to their ability to replace the Aeneid, to their position as both dependent and independent texts, and to the feelings of authorial emulation that they can (but normally will not) inspire. The pseudo-Ovidian preface and the monostich and ten-line summaries further problematize secondariness because of their intertextual features.⁷¹ These mingle their language with that of Virgil and Ovid and give the argumenta a literariness responding to and adapted from those models and characteristic of mainstream high verse generally. The line, then, between the marginal and the canonical is in some ways clear, but in other ways blurry in the pseudo-Ovidian preface and the verse summaries to which it is attached. Recognizing this can, and should, lead to a widening of the definition of literary value, as it makes one aware of the layered richness of texts found on the fringes of the tradition.

⁷¹ Barchiesi 2001: 150–1, on value judgements in the study of intertextuality and on the broadening of critical perspectives that has resulted from those judgements, is an influence here and in what follows.

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11 Minor Roman Poetry in the Discipline and in the Profession of Classics Lowell Edmunds

A distinction between the marginal and the canonical is undoubtedly in play in the field of classics, even if it is difficult for a classicist to remember discussions—before the conference from which this chapter has emerged—in which those terms were used as a pair of opposites.¹ If, in any case, someone in classics has called a text ‘marginal’, the word does not necessarily mean the opposite of canonical. It might mean that the text is chronologically on the borderline of the field or that, even if it fits in chronologically, it belongs to another field (in which it might be canonical). The Passion of Perpetua might be considered marginal to classics because it is ‘late’ (third century AD) or because it is in the field of Christian literature, not because it is not canonical. Texts called ‘minor’ are usually considered marginal as well, and a heuristically efficient way to approach the question of the marginal would be to look at texts of this kind. This chapter concentrates on the minor in Roman literature and, within Roman literature, on minor Roman poetry. The term ‘minor’ and the correlated concept have the advantage that they are established in classics, in force in standard histories of Roman literature, where a distinction between the minor and the major that corresponds to the one between the marginal and the ¹ Whereas various challenges to canonicity have been going on since the 1960s, but not in the name of marginality. For a useful survey, see Asper 1998: cols 876–7.

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canonical is often presupposed.² This distinction is not understood here as an opposition. It refers to relative positions on a scale; and the position of certain authors, as in the contemporary case of the Flavian epic poets (see Section 2 in this chapter), may be rethought at one time or another. Suspicion of oppositions (by now an intellectual reflex) contributes nothing, then, to the discussion. The modernity of the term ‘minor’—as used in the eighteenth-century label poetae Latini minores (‘minor Latin poets’)—and of the very concept of minor might also invite objection.³ Because they are modern, term and concept should be dismissed, it might be thought, as anachronistic. But if the modern terms and concepts used by scholars of Roman literature were ruled out, scholarship would cease to function.⁴ In principle, they have to be used. Marginal and canonical, the terms with which this chapter started, are cases in point.⁵ The modern description of minor and major happens to correspond, by and large, to the ancient Roman ranking of literary genres.⁶ To start at the bottom, the epigram, one of the lowest genres in the ancient ranking, has a minor position on the modern scale.⁷ Leaving aside judgements on individual epigrammatists and epigrams, the epigram is, for us, that

² Edmunds 2010c: 31–3. ³ Paulo maiora canamus, ‘Let us sing of slightly higher matters’ (V. Ecl. 4.1), might seem to imply that minora is the opposite term designating a kind of poetry, but the adjective minor was not so used. Maiora reworks Ecl. 4, whose original opening line was the present line 4 in the book of eclogues (Clausen 1994: 121 n. 11 cites a 1910 article by F. Jacoby in RM 65 (p. 77 n. 1))—in other words it refers to subject matter. On minores at Quint. Inst. 2.5.18–19, see Edmunds 2010c: 45; on maiores at Tac. Dial. 25.2, see Ballester 2011: 50–1. ⁴ Modernity of terms and concept: Edmunds 2010a: 45–56; Ballester 2011: 49–51. Duncan Kennedy, in a chapter called ‘Representation and the Rhetoric of Reality’, wrote: ‘If historicism achieved its aim of understanding a culture of the past “in its own terms”, the result would be totally unintelligible except to . . . that culture and moment . . . Far from past being made “present”, it would be rendered totally foreign and impenetrably alien. History cannot present the past in its own terms; it must act to some extent as a translator, an interpreter’ (Kennedy 1993: 8). ⁵ For the history of the term ‘canon’ as used of classical authors, see Asper 1998: cols 872–3. ⁶ There is also an ancient ranking of styles, for example in the doctrine of the three levels of style (grand, middle, and plain) in Rhetorica ad Herenium 4. But style is not genre. ⁷ For a figure that compares the lists of genres at Mart. 12.94 and Tac. Dial. 10.4, see Edmunds 2010a: 38. A complete discussion would include Hor. AP 73–88 and Ov. Rem. am. 373–86. On Horace and genre, see Rutherford 2007: 250–3.

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‘lowly and ephemeral genre’.⁸ Again, sophisticated suspicion, this time about genre, proves unhelpful. No matter what we see in Roman genres, no matter what Roman poets really did with them, the fact remains that genre was a Roman way of thinking and talking about poetry.⁹ But an ancient Roman poet, seen apart from his genre, can be minor simply by judgement. Manilius, in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature (volume 2: Latin Literature), appears in a section titled ‘Minor Figures’, along with the Appendix Vergiliana, C. Valgius Rufus, and various other poets.¹⁰ The status of Manilius, to be discussed in what follows, is currently changing, even if the concluding sentence of the article on Manilius in the third edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (1996), repeated in the fourth (2012), seemed and still seems premature: ‘Today Scaliger’s view of Manilius, that he was as sweet as Ovid and more majestic, is returning to favour.’¹¹

1. Distinction between Discipline and Profession If one asks what causes changes in status, it is helpful to think of the discipline of classical philology and of the profession of classics as having separate functions. The discipline of classical philology is, historically, one of three fields of ancient study, the other two being ancient history and archaeology.¹² It aims to establish texts (including texts of fragments) ⁸ Quotation from Watson and Watson: 2003: 11. ⁹ On genre, see Derrida 1992. On the non-ontological status of genre in Roman poets, see Conte 1994a, ch. 4 and Hinds 1998, ch. 5, §1. For an overview of Roman genre in theory and practice, see Farrell 2003. In Farrell’s formulation, on the one hand, Roman poets were ‘concerned, even obsessed with genre as a discursive device’ (ibid., 396; cf. the rankings found in Martial and Tacitus (n. 7 in this chapter), which are not discussed by Farrell); on the other, their practice as poets was to undermine genre distinctions, to which they paid lip service, evincing ‘the untenability of any position founded on the idea of generic essence’ (ibid.). ¹⁰ Bramble 1982: 467–94. ¹¹ Wilson 1996: 918; Wilson and Volk 2012: 893. ¹² This tripartite division is simply argumenti causa. The divisions of ancient studies have been under revision since their beginnings in the modern period. There are handy outlines of Wolf ’s and Boeckh’s divisions and of those in Müller and Otto’s Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft and in Gercke and Norden’s Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft, along with some comment on a few others, in McGuire 1961: 7–15. In response to the crisis of the 1960s, there came Neschke–Hentschke and Muhlack 1972.

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that conform as closely as possible to ‘what the author originally wrote’.¹³ It also produces commentaries with information on the language of the texts and on historical persons, places, and things. From the days when classical philology was establishing itself as an autonomous discipline, the interpretation of texts has always been in some degree of tension with the editing of texts and with commentary writing, even if it has adhered to the same norms for evidence and proof and has pursued the same goal—in the case of texts, to understand the author’s intention or the meaning of the text in its historical context. Classics as a profession means teaching, advising students, and serving one’s institution and professional associations. The profession in its institutional form, at least in the United States, judges the products and the practitioners of the discipline, above all in hiring and promotion, but also in salaries, leaves of absence, and so forth. For these matters, while policies differ from university to university, decisions are usually the result of departmental recommendations to and discussion with university administrators. In the United States it is also usually the case that departmental decisions are collective, so that Hellenists participate in decisions on the work of Latinists and vice versa, and, if there is an archaeologist or some other non-philological specialist, he or she also participates, too. Philology, for its part, is implicitly held to be a single thing, whereas in Germany, for example, it is divided into two, as evidenced in Brill’s New Pauly (BNP), where the article on philology presents separate histories of Greek and Latin scholarship.¹⁴

2. Examples of the Profession at Work So it is the profession, not the discipline, that makes the final decision on the rewards that research on minor literature receives and thus, in effect, on what is minor. Not everything that Michel Foucault said in L’ordre du discours is relevant to this point, but the profession of classics is surely what he called a ‘society of discourse’. As such, it determines the ¹³ West 1973: 48. Cf. Maas 1949: 888 (first paragraph). The history of the word ‘philology’ and of the concept of philology began of course in ancient Greece. For a survey, see Wilson, Sobotta, and Dyck 2011. ¹⁴ For Latin philology, see Schwindt 2003/Schwindt 2009b; for Greek philology, see Schmitz 2003/Schmitz 2009.

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qualifications of those who wish to employ its discourse of philology and the rules for the discourse. As a ‘society of discourse’, it does so in the first place, as Foucault says, through education.¹⁵ In the United States, the PhD reading list of ancient authors, which does not differ much from one university to another, inculcates a canon of authors, and a canon necessarily makes exclusions. Under these circumstances, the chances for a cancellation or withering of the distinction between marginal and canonical, or between minor and major, are practically nil. Because the reading list for a PhD in classics in the United States consists of two lists, one of Greek, the other of Latin authors, each list is, hypothetically, half as long as it would be if it were the only list. The canon of authors in each language is thus more exclusive than it would be if it were the only canon. The reading list, as a canon, resists change, but not absolutely. Sometimes a poet is newly evaluated. As for what causes the change in the status of a poet—how a poet who was always minor can move in the direction of the major—it is action on the part of the profession that is the cause, and it responds to an impulse from the discipline. The profession can even change the status of a whole genre from marginal to central. Froma Zeitlin describes the change in the status of the Greek novel that has taken place in recent decades: the notable successes in revising and revisioning our perceptions of the field of Greek prose fiction—to redeem it against charges of so-called ‘lewdness, marginality, and inconsequentiality’. . . —were largely due to a like-minded community of scholars, mainly in the Anglo-Saxon world. These, it may be said, created an entire sub-specialty, replete with running bibliographies, newsletters, organized colloquia, international gatherings, publication series, and review essays . . . that assessed current accomplishments and outlined future areas of research. This was a self-conscious struggle for legitimation.¹⁶

The publication of new texts of and commentaries on Greek novels would not by itself have created this sub-specialty. What happened to the Greek novel a generation or so ago is now happening to Flavian epic. The recently organized Flavian Epic Network (FEN) boasts one hundred members in thirteen countries. Its purpose is ‘to facilitate and encourage the study of the epic poets of Rome in the late first century AD: Valerius Flaccus, Statius and Silius Italicus’. At ‘About

¹⁵ Foucault 1971: 45–7.

¹⁶ Zeitlin 2016: 41.

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Us’ on FEN’s web page, the statement of the organization’s activities resembles Zeitlin’s list, with the addition of internet-based activities.¹⁷ As in the case of the Greek novel, a professional superstructure organizes and furthers research that began at isolated points in the discipline. Already in 1993, for example, Philip Hardie said of Silius Italicus and Statius: ‘these monstrous poems are possessed of a relentless and fertile energy’.¹⁸ One of FEN’s four main areas of research is ‘the reception and influence of Flavian epic and what it reveals about the workings of literary history, and the construction of canons’. It seems implicit that the non-canonical status of Flavian epic is now being problematized.¹⁹ The most striking example in recent times of the endorsement by the profession of a new impulse in the discipline is, however, the field of late antiquity. Here it is possible to point to a ‘first finder’. Few historians have literally created their own periods of inquiry and their own subjects. Peter Brown is one of these exceedingly rare spirits. To him we owe the creation of the age of Late Antiquity as a standard field of historical inquiry. He has transformed the three or four centuries of Mediterranean history that marked the transition from the world of the Greek and Roman city-states to the postRoman kingdoms of Europe and the Near East into something other than a doomed afterthought to the classical ages of ancient history. No longer an epoch of decadence, despair, and decline, the centuries in which the Roman Empire was transformed into a feudal order in the West and into a Byzantine one in the East have become, in his hands, a vital age teeming with people who demand and deserve our attention.

Thus Brent Shaw in the New York Review of Books.²⁰ The origin of the new field is dated to the publication of Brown’s World of Late Antiquity in 1971.²¹ The professional status that the field has attained can be judged from the founding of two journals and, in other respects, from ¹⁷ Visit the FEN site at http://lists.nottingham.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/flavian-epic-net work (accessed 13 January 2018; but, according to the updated home page, ‘the current archive is only available to the list members’). ¹⁸ Hardie 1993: xi. Ovid, Metamorphoses and Lucan were on the list from which I have taken the likes of Silius and Statius. ¹⁹ Of course FEN’s statement implies cognizance of the ongoing large-scale rethinking of canons and canon formation. See Edmunds 2010c 34–6 and books published since (Gerber 2011, Becker and Scholz 2012, Beilein and Winko 2012). Books that might have been cited are Kaiser and Matuschek 2001 and Moog-Grünewald 1997. ²⁰ Shaw 2002. ²¹ James 2008: 20. On the origin of the field, see also Rousseau 2009b: xix–xx; Ando 2009: 59; Rebenich 2009: 77–9.

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the web page ‘Research News in Late Antiquity’ maintained at Oxford University.²² Shaw was speaking for the profession of the historian. The formation of this new field also had consequences for literature, to be discussed later apropos of the boundary between classical Roman literature and what comes afterwards. In general, no one would want to deny the influence of the authoritative opinions of individual specialist scholars (notably in the letters that are solicited by promotion committees), but, at least in the United States, it is at the departmental, in other words professional level that these opinions are sorted through by specialists in various areas, who make collective decisions that are final. It is at the departmental level (with the advice and consent of university administrators) that decisions are made, not only on the products of particular specialists in particular fields but also on the fields that will be represented in the department—on what specialists and in what disciplines and sub-disciplines of ancient studies will be hired. These funded teaching ‘lines’, as they are often called in the United States (because they are lines in the dean’s budget), are valuable assets; they are filled only after careful consultation and deliberation, and therefore they self-consciously articulate a department’s idea of the field of ancient studies. The smaller the department, the clearer the statement. If in a small college (in the North American sense of college) there are only two lines and one is held by a philologist, the other by an archaeologist, the department is saying something strikingly different from the department with only two lines, both of which are held by philologists. The norms of the profession differ from one country to another, and of course they have differed over time everywhere. Indeed, a certain difficulty of discussing minor Roman poetry arises in the profession from the simultaneous presence of two somewhat opposing attitudes, one older, one newer. In other words, the profession as a whole is at the moment ambivalent, although it is not terribly difficult to orient oneself within this ambivalence. It is usually quite clear what view a classicist would take. The older attitude is already ambivalent in itself, and has been so since the nineteenth century.²³ On the one hand, the profession

²² Visit the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity at http://researchnewsinla.blogspot.com/ 2012/04/source-oxford-centre-for-late-antiquity.html. Also consult the two journals L’Antiquité Tardive (from 1993) and the Journal of Late Antiquity (from 2008). ²³ Edmunds 2010c: 52–4, 59–62.

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sees itself as the custodian of the great Greco-Roman patrimony of western civilization; on the other, as a field of research, it necessarily honours its foundational and fundamental methods.²⁴ These two tendencies are not always in harmony. In a moment one will see the consequences for minor Roman poetry.

3. The Textual Edition: The Example of Manilius The textual edition is the chef d’oeuvre of classical research and the editor of a classical text receives the greatest honour, at least in the older view of things. Next after the textual edition comes the commentary. Everything else comes third. This ranking of kinds of scholarship is probably not quite as secure as it once was, after a generation of critical thinking directed at the premises and methods of both the textual edition and the commentary.²⁵ And yet one could say that the profession still accords these categories, and hence their practitioners, the highest honour. What does the profession make, then, of the edition of a minor poet? Can there be a great edition of a minor poet? The answer is yes, and here the ambivalence of the profession comes into focus. Manilius is a case in point. Not even A. E. Housman, one of his great editors, could say much in his favour—a couple of words in the introduction to his edition, but in his correspondence only disparagement.²⁶ ‘I adjure you’, he wrote to Robert Bridges, ‘not to waste your time on Manilius. He writes on astronomy and astrology without knowing either. My interest in him is purely technical.’²⁷ To a young American correspondent he writes: ‘Do ²⁴ Of course the metaphor need not be ‘custodian’. See Beard 2012: 49, who declares: ‘I’m here . . . to suggest that the cultural language of the classics continues to be an essential and ineradicable dialect of “Western culture”.’ ²⁵ McGann’s 1983 book on editing modern texts is a landmark. Again on modern texts, see now Chaudhuri 2010. On classical texts, see Gurd 2005; Schwindt 2009a; Brockliss et al. 2012a: 9. On the commentary, see the collections edited by Assmann and Gladigow 1995, by Most 1999, and by Gibson and Kraus 2002. ²⁶ ‘[T]he one Latin poet who excels even Ovid in verbal point and smartness’ (Housman 1903: xxi). ²⁷ Burnett 2007, 1: 572 (letter of 25 September 1924). The rest of the letter reads: ‘His best poetry you will find in I 483–531, where he appeals to the regularity of the heavenly motions as evidence of the divinity and eternity of the universe. He has nothing else as good, and little that is nearly as good.’

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not be so infatuated as to think of studying Manilius, who is a very poor poet as well as a very difficult one.’²⁸ G. W. Bowersock in the New York Review of Books puts Housman in a genealogy of editors of the Astronomica. He characterizes the poem thus: ‘This work of dense mathematical and astrological learning, in five books of Latin hexameter verse, was, for the difficulty of its text and the even greater difficulty of its substance, an Everest that only the greatest Latinists of modern times have dared to climb.’ The editors of Manilius thus constitute an elite among the kind of scholars to whom the profession accords the greatest honour. Bowersock’s genealogy begins with Scaliger’s edition. Next comes Bentley’s, inspired by Scaliger’s. Next, after some lesser editions, comes Housman’s, inspired by Bentley’s. The last is George Goold’s. But D. R. Shackleton Bailey comes into the picture: ‘The praise that Shackleton Bailey lavished on Goold’s Loeb edition of Manilius was a kind of secular blessing from a high priest of textual criticism. The scholarly line from Bentley to Housman, and thence to Shackleton Bailey and Goold, is unmistakable and unbroken.’²⁹ Bowersock clearly assumes the older view of textual criticism. But of greater interest for present purposes is the emergence, at the end of his article, of the profession’s ambivalence concerning minor poetry: Shackleton Bailey wrote, in reviewing Goold’s Loeb edition, ‘It is sad that so few classicists know Housman’s commentary or have any idea what they are missing . . . To read it closely, intelligently, and completely is more than a unique intellectual experience.’ He suggests that there is an aesthetic pleasure that comes from the sheer technical work on such a difficult text. Work of this kind has ‘the beauty which a piece of mathematics can possess’. I suspect that this is why Scaliger, Bentley, Housman, and a handful of other major classical scholars have dedicated themselves so passionately to an obscure Latin poem in five books about, of all things, astronomy and astrology.³⁰

Bowersock is probably right about the aesthetics of the method and its lure for the happy few who are capable of responding to it because they

²⁸ Ibid., 2: 535–6 (undated letter). ²⁹ Bowersock 2011: 57. As said, the genealogy begins with Scaliger; Bowersock has good remarks on him as a source of inspiration for Bentley. Bowersock refers to Shackleton Bailey 1979a, which is a review of Goold’s Loeb edition (Goold 1997 [1977]). ‘Lavished’ is surely an exaggeration. The review is mostly critical. Goold also prepared the Teubner edition of Manilius, which was published in 1985. ³⁰ Bowersock 2011: 57.

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are capable of wielding the method on the most difficult obstacles. It is of interest, however, to see how Shackleton Bailey makes the point that Bowersock takes over from him. Shackleton Bailey’s review of Goold ends thus: Goold expresses the hope that many who use this edition will be stimulated to go on to Housman’s. Amen. It is sad that so few classicists know Housman’s commentary or have any idea what they are missing: ardua dum metuunt, amittunt vera viai [‘those who fear the hard course miss the truth on their way’, Lucr. 1.659]. To read it closely, intelligently, and completely is more than a unique intellectual experience. For a second time³¹ I resort to the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield, who so admirably expressed, mutatis mutandis, what is in my mind (emphasis added): It is not always realised that, apart from the pleasure which can be added to history by the imagination of the literary man, there is an exquisite loveliness that can arise within the realm of historical technique itself. The peak is reached when it is out of the actual scientific procedures of the authentic student that we gain our aesthetic moments, and the artistry is not an additional adornment but lies in the historical thought itself, like the beauty which a piece of mathematics can possess [George III and the Historians (London, 1957)].³²

The quotation from Butterfield comes at the very end of Shackleton Bailey’s review. In effect it is, more than an exhortation to read Housman, a defence (to use Butterfield’s words) of a five-volume commentary in Latin on an obscure poet. Twenty years earlier, Shackleton Bailey explicitly defended Housman against the charge that he ‘spent his efforts on authors of inferior quality’. He used another kind of defence. ‘A born textual critic is like a physician; he does not go too anxiously into the merit of what he heals: he gives his aid where it is most needed and most effectual.’³³ Both these kinds of argument, the one from analogy and the one about the aesthetics of the method, were used already by Housman himself, in his defence of Bentley’s edition of Manilius: Lucida tela diei [‘the bright darts of day’, Lucr. 2.148]: these are the words that come into one’s mind when one has halted at some stubborn perplexity of

³¹ Here Shackleton Bailey refers to his own review of Housman and reproduces the Butterfield quotation from there (Shackleton Bailey 1973: 190). ³² Shackleton Bailey 1979a: 169. See also Edmunds 2010c: 61–2. ³³ Shackleton Bailey 1959: 796. For the metaphor, see Tarrant 2016: 31 (‘Textual criticism . . . has gravitated towards images of crime and disease’).

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reading, or interpretation, has witnessed Scaliger and Gronovius and Huetius fumble at it one after another, and then turns to Bentley and sees Bentley strike his finger on the place and say thou ailest here, and here. His Manilius is a greater work than either the Horace or the Phalaris; yet its subject condemns it to find few readers, and those few for the most part unfit: to be read by Dorville and left unread by Madvig. Haupt alone has praised it in proportion to its merit.³⁴

Here are the happy few (but even fewer than a few) and, implicitly but obviously, the analogy of the physician—‘thou ailest’. The happy few who, undeterred by the subject of the Astronomica, are fit to read Bentley’s commentary have the experience of which the lucida tela diei are an image, that is, an aesthetic or intellectual–aesthetic experience, I would say. Housman in effect defends his own edition and commentary in advance, and establishes the terms for later classicists’ defence. (One notes his quotation of Lucretius, who will reappear in Shackleton Bailey’s review of Goold, quoted above.) Speaking for the profession to an audience mostly of non-classicists, Bowersock also did as well as he could to present the same justification for work on Manilius that the practitioners of the discipline itself make, in the voices of Shackleton Bailey and of Housman. But the discipline does not have very good arguments. It either defers the argument to an authority in another field (Butterfield) or argues from analogy (classical philology is like medicine). The argument from authority (the one about the aesthetics of the method) amounts to nothing more than an affirmation of the beauty of the discipline’s foundational and fundamental method, textual criticism. The method is the message.

4. Philology Today Philology itself cannot be expected to come up with better arguments. As Jürgen Paul Schwindt has said, ‘the question of philology ceases to be itself a philological question’, and thus lies beyond philology.³⁵ But the intellectual upheavals of the second half of the twentieth century put philology on the defensive. It was not immune to the shattering of the ‘ontological monolith of the work’ that began to be felt everywhere in the ³⁴ Housman 1903: xvi. ³⁵ Schwindt 2009a: 12. Friedrich Schlegel proposed but never wrote a ‘philosophy of philology’. Some lapidary notes remain, on which see Balfour 2010: 192–9.

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1960s.³⁶ In Roland Barthes’ formulation, the text replaced the work.³⁷ He meant not the philologist’s text, that ideal object consisting of the original words in their original order and embodying what the ancient author meant to say. On the contrary: ‘To the aestheticizing ideology of the art object . . . the text would oppose the reinsertion of its signifying practice . . . within the articulated whole of the social process . . . in which it participates.’³⁸ By 1983, speaking in a public forum, Robert Connor could say: Traditional textual criticism and literary history persist in classics, perhaps with fewer changes than in any of our sister disciplines. But even classicists have come to think about their texts in new ways. We have had to, I believe, because we have come to recognize that many of the traditional techniques of humanistic scholarship were depletive or impoverishing.³⁹

Connor’s words were prophetic of the feminist reaction to Georg Luck’s editorial statement in American Journal of Philology in 1987—a reaction that occurred in the number that inaugurated his own second editorship.⁴⁰ That reaction led, among other things, to a collection entitled Classics: A Discipline and Profession in Crisis? and edited by Phyllis Culham and me (Culham and Edmunds 1989). It was only one such effort. The next year there appeared On Philology, edited by Jan Ziolkowski: a volume of papers from a conference at Harvard entitled ‘What Is Philology?’, which he organized because he had become aware of an ‘intensifying restiveness with philology’ in several fields. For the discipline of classics, the most fundamental change (and probably obscure to many) was the collapse of its epistemological premise: the idea that it could reach unbiased truth concerning antiquity. Marilyn Skinner, in the same collection where Connor’s paper was published, said: ‘[C]lassicists have begun to grapple with the suspicion that no reading, no interpretation, is entirely value-free, that all scholarly

³⁶ The phrase comes from Iser 2006: 3. The second edition of A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory (Payne and Barbera 2010) contains an entry on the year 1968. ³⁷ Barthes 1986 [1971]. ³⁸ Ducrot and Todorov 1979: 357. ³⁹ Connor 1989: 31. This article is the revised version of a lecture given in 1983 at a National Endowment for Humanities (NEH)-sponsored colloquium on the ‘new humanities’ (as the field was then called). ⁴⁰ A good account of the immediate reaction to Luck’s statement can be found in Skinner 1989: 204. See now Adler 2016.

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knowledge is molded by the academic community itself for definite social and political ends.’⁴¹ The field of archaeology underwent the same change.⁴² One could continue the story; but the concern of this chapter is with the profession’s present outlook and with its relation to minor poetry.⁴³ To return to the terms marginal and canonical, the example of Martial suggests that central–marginal and canonical–non-canonical are two different oppositions. A poet who is marginal can move in the direction of centrality without becoming canonical. Valerius Flaccus, Statius, and Silius Italicus are examples. So is Manilius, whose revival has made him more interesting than Housman thought that he ever could be.⁴⁴ If the canon in classics is in effect the PhD reading list, then a poet who is minor can become canonical without becoming major. Martial is an example. ‘[H]e is a minor figure.’⁴⁵ In the 1960s he was not on the reading list; now he is (Table 11.1): Table 11.1 Martial and Manilius on US graduate reading lists. Institution

Martial

Manilius

Berkeley Columbia Harvard Michigan UNC Yale

yes (Book 1) yes (as in L. and P. Watson) yes (Book 1) no yes (Book 1, as in Post) yes (Book 1)

no no no no no no

The history of Martial scholarship in the twentieth century shows that he was in the hands of textual editors and commentators for most of the time, and otherwise used mainly as a documentary source for prosopography or social history or history of the libellus.⁴⁶ Then came Martial: ⁴¹ Skinner 1989: 203. ⁴² Tilley 1998. ⁴³ E.g. a conference titled ‘ “Wir Philologen?” The Boundaries and Structures of “Classics” as a Professional Discipline’ and held on 25 February 1995 at the University of Pennsylvania. ⁴⁴ Volk 2002: 196–245; Volk 2009; Green and Volk 2011. ⁴⁵ Bramble 1982: 601. ⁴⁶ For the history of Martial scholarship in the twentieth century I have relied on the summary in Sullivan 1991: 306–12. The prefaces to individual sections of Lorenz 2003–6 fill in the picture.

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The Unexpected Classic (1991), countless articles, and another landmark: Martial: The World of the Epigram (2007).⁴⁷ An article about the new Martial could be praised in these terms: ‘Stroup offers a theoretically sophisticated and intellectually exhilarating approach to the discourse of exchange in Martial’s Xenia.’⁴⁸ Compare Adrian N. Sherwin-White fifty years earlier, apropos of Pliny’s defence of his writing epigrams: ‘An unprejudiced reader might observe that it was only this fashion [of writing epigrams] that drove Martial remorselessly on in the same vein, in which his pen flows but feebly.’⁴⁹ Manilius, however, will never become canonical, no matter how much enthusiasm he generates within the discipline. To put it another way, the profession will never receive him into the canon. Furthermore, one can regard the marginal–central opposition as functioning within the canon. At any given time, there are authors who are more and authors who are less read and studied. An author may retain his place in the canon even if he is neglected. Once upon a time, David Hume (1711–76) could say, in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, that ‘Terence and Virgil maintain an [sic] universal, undisputed empire over the minds of men’. Terence is still canonical, that is, found in reading lists, but has become marginal, studied far less than Virgil. The terms ‘minor’ and ‘major’, which I have been using heuristically, are also in need of refinement. Within the minor, there is a distinction— again, scalar—between higher and lower.⁵⁰ In Rome, the lower would be the literature of the plebs, consisting of mimes, the sententiae culled from the mimes of Publilius Syrus or attached to his name, the carmina triumphalia, several other kinds of song,⁵¹ and graffiti, many in verse, not to mention non-metrical proverbs and riddles.⁵² The epitaphs of the plebs belong in this list.⁵³ One should distinguish, further, as Nicholas ⁴⁷ Sullivan 1991; Fitzgerald 2007. ⁴⁸ Bernstein 2006. ⁴⁹ Sherwin-White 1966 on Plin. Ep. 5.3.2. ⁵⁰ See Edmunds 2010c: 58 n. 115, who quotes Christa Bürger’s introduction to a collection titled Die Dichotomie von hoher und niederer Literatur. ⁵¹ Horsfall 2003: 36–47. ⁵² Ibid., 65. Toner 2009: 36–7 has a short section titled ‘Proverbs and Fables’. There is, however, little about literature in Toner. ⁵³ Hamdoune et al. 2011 have published a group of 174 epigraphical poems from North Africa, from the Carmina latina epigraphica. This collection represents the work of the Groupe de Recherches sur l’Afrique Antique de l’Université Montpellier III. The publisher’s blurb speaks of la grande diffusion d’un genre littéraire très apprécié des catégories sociales

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Horsfall does, between contact with written texts (impossible if you happened to be illiterate) and contact with literature. The dramatic performance of Virgil’s Eclogues perhaps made this type of verse accessible to persons who could not read it or would not have known it otherwise.⁵⁴

5. Limits Whatever degree of movement is possible for a poet within the canon of classics as determined by classicists, the field itself has to be fixed and stable. It has to be able to identify itself within the university, and sometimes to the world, as against other fields. Its canon of authors is a primary means of self-identification. Of the other kinds of selfidentification in which it engages, perhaps the most necessary one is chronological. The field has to assert positively the end of its period of research, the end of antiquity. It was never easy to do so, but the responsibility is now less onerous thanks to the emergence of the field of late antiquity. The ‘first finder’ of this field was a historian; and thus, from the beginning, its dates were not left in doubt. As Claude LéviStrauss said, there is no history without dates.⁵⁵ An authoritative statement on the matter comes in the introduction to a massive handbook: ‘The time has come for scholars, students, and the educated public in general to treat the period between about AD 250 and 880 as a distinctive and quite decisive period that stands on its own.’⁵⁶ The beginning of late antiquity, as determined by the scholars to whom it is of concern, serves as the end of antiquity.⁵⁷

n’appartenant pas aux ordres privilégiés de la société romaine (‘the wide diffusion of a literary genre much appreciated by social categories that did not belong to the privileged strata of Roman society’). ⁵⁴ Horsfall 2003: 55–6. ⁵⁵ Lévi-Strauss 1966: 258. ⁵⁶ Bowersock, Brown, and Grabar 1999: ix. This collection does not include an article on poetry. ⁵⁷ The new periodization provides ex post facto justification for the policy of the Oxford Latin Dictionary to exclude Latin literature after AD 200. In his review of the first fascicle of the first edition, Kenney 1970 complained about this exclusion. Stray 2012: xvi, in his historical introduction to the second edition, acknowledged the complaint but said nothing in defence of the exclusion.

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The corresponding date for the end of classical Latin literature is AD 284, the year in which Nemesianus dedicated his Cynegetica to the brother emperors, Numerian (283–4) and Carinus (283–5). The title of the relevant volume of the Handbuch der lateinischen Literatur der Antike, namely Restauration und Erneuerung: Die lateinische Literatur von 284 bis 374 n. Chr., makes the point.⁵⁸ This periodization has consequences for the canon of classical Latin literature. Much of the Latin poetry considered minor falls into the period of late antiquity and is thus excluded a priori from any scalar movement that might bring it closer to the classical canon. (The Codex Salmasianus, the core of what is today called the Anthologia Latina, is an anthology from sixth-century Africa that contains, along with poems from earlier periods, much that is certainly late antique.) At the same time, it might—or parts of it might— enter into some new canon. The same is true of Christian literature, which will serve here for illustration. With the advent of late antiquity, most Christian literature falls outside the boundary of classical Latin literature. Periodization thus ratifies and enforces a decision made long since and always more or less observed: Christian literature is not part of the field of classics (even if classicists taught and perhaps sometimes still teach New Testament Greek in the many colleges and universities in the United States founded by orders of Catholic priests and by Protestant churches). This exclusion appears in August Boeckh’s Encyklopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften. When he comes to the question of the use or application of classical study, he speaks first of an area in which it could have a positive effect. Then he turns to an objection concerning another area: ‘They talk about a lack of Christian consciousness in classical philology.’ Boeckh replies by distinguishing between philology as a science (Wissenschaft) and Christianity as a positive religion (positiv Religion).⁵⁹ As such, the two stand on completely different grounds. A philologist can be a Christian and a Christian can be a philologist, but ‘both are by themselves’ (beides sind jedes für sich). Boeckh’s position presupposes, I think, Christian belief as the

⁵⁸ Herzog 1989. The Cynegetica is the first datable late antique poem (ibid., 44). See also Edmunds 2010c: 42–4. ⁵⁹ Positive religion stands to natural religion as positive law stands to natural law. Boeckh perhaps has in mind Hegel’s ‘The Positivity of the Christian Religion’, first published in 1795 (Hegel 1971).

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norm, and could be restated thus: to study Christian literature from the neutral scientific point of view of philology would be irreverent or somehow un-Christian (and it was illicit to be un-Christian), whereas to study pagan literature from a Christian point of view would be unscientific.⁶⁰ The stakes were real. Later in his introduction, Boeckh has to answer the proposal by a Catholic professor of biblical exegesis for a rebirth of philology through a Christian conception (Auffassung) and evaluation (Würdigung) of antiquity.⁶¹ One can hear a distant echo of Boeckh’s view in Robert Browning’s introduction to the section on the later principate in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature. ‘The growth of a “committed” literature within the expanding Christian community is a topic which largely falls outside the scope of the present study.’⁶² This literature also falls outside the scope of the Oxford Latin Dictionary.⁶³ One of the reasons for this exclusion is surely that Christian literature is ‘intentionally “other” ’.⁶⁴ While it belongs somehow in a history of Latin literature, it is discontinuous with what precedes it. The new periodization provided by Peter Brown and the other-than-literary historians thus answers the need for an authoritative demarcation. It becomes possible to think not only of Christian literature but of late antique literature as things unto themselves. Marco Formisano has begun to build a theory of the latter.⁶⁵ What of the former? As ‘other’, it stands apart, with its new genres, its new diction, its new outlook. At this point one returns to the case of the Passio Perpetuae. With respect to a distinct Christian literature, it is surely central. Gian Biagio Conte in his history of Latin literature speaks of it as ‘the masterpiece of the genre’ of Passiones.⁶⁶ ⁶⁰ Boeckh 1886: 29. ⁶¹ Ibid., 71. ⁶² Browning 1982a: 688. ⁶³ See Whitton 2012: 28, in a review of the second edition of the Oxford Latin Dictionary: ‘Clarity and accuracy are its virtues, the arbitrary cut-off date of AD 200 its greatest vice: casting the Christians (even those before 200) and plenty of pagans out of the garden of Oxford made for a manageable corpus but not quite the universal work implied by the title.’ Kenney 1970 referred to the date but not to Christian literature in particular. See n. 57 in this chapter. ⁶⁴ Cavarzere, De Vivo, and Mastandrea 2003: 255 speak of the birth of a letteratura volutamente ‘altra’ rispetto ai canoni tradizionali (‘deliberately “different” vis-à-vis traditional canons’; the context here is their introduction to a chapter titled ‘ “Potenza nuova” della letteratura cristiana, crisi dei vecchi modelli’). Note the title of the relevant volume of the Handbuch der lateinischen Literatur der Antike—namely Die Literatur des Umbruchs: Von der römischen zur christlichen Literatur 117 bis 284 n. Chr. (Sallmann 1997). ⁶⁵ Formisano 2007. ⁶⁶ Conte 1994b: 599.

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6. Canons The canon, understood as the list of Greek and Roman authors prescribed for doctoral candidates in classics that excludes Christian authors, is of course more limited than the ‘classical canon’ or the ‘western canon’ in a sense still accepted. For the canon in this broader sense, a useful source is the essay ‘Kanon und Zensur als kultursoziologische Katgorien’ by Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (Assmann and Assmann 1987). The Assmanns see a canon as the narrowing of a preceding tradition (Jeder Kanon verengt eine vorgängige Tradition, ‘Every canon narrows down some previous tradition’).⁶⁷ The kind of tradition that they have in mind is characterized by resistance to change, in defiance of ‘the iron law of one-directional process’ (eherne Logik des einsinnigen Verlaufs). They give examples of six ‘traditional complexes’: ancient Egypt; Confucian China; Hinduism and Buddhism; Judaism, with Christianity and Islam; and the humanistic West. They illustrate the peculiarity of these great traditions through the example of our own culture. ‘We live in a direct relation with texts that are more than two and a half millennia old. With texts like Homer and Herodotus, Job and Paul, we can live in direct dialogue.’⁶⁸ The canon, thus defined, includes the works of the Old and the New Testaments and two pagan Greek authors. No Roman author is mentioned. But what is of greater interest is that, in the large comparative perspective of the Assmanns, Christian writers are included in the western tradition, whereas in the canon of the profession of classics they are usually not. The Assmanns argue that it is not inertia, or mere conservation in writing, or some eternal expressive force (ewige Sagkraft) that keeps these texts alive, but ‘guardians of tradition’ (Wächter der Tradition). They define three guardians: censure; care of the text; care of the sense. Censure is usually, of course, the act of a state or religious authority, and two of the Assmanns’ three kinds of censure lie squarely in these areas.⁶⁹ Censure can also preserve power in the face of subversion—their third guardian. The PhD reading list is probably maintained through

⁶⁷ Assmann and Assmann 1987: 11. This is a standard definition: cf. Asper 1998: cols 869–70. ⁶⁸ Assmann and Assmann 1987: 7. ⁶⁹ Ibid., 26 n. 11.

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censure in this sense. If this list has the purpose described in Section 2 here, it must be preserved intact. Manilius and many another author are tacitly censured and would be vocally censured if proposed for inclusion. Care of the text means preservation of the exact wording, an imperative based on religious awe (Scheu). ‘Exactly as in rite, religious awe lays down, in the smallest details, the form of the sacred act, so, with the sacred text, the wording, in the smallest details, . . . is under taboo.’⁷⁰ While the Assmanns see the preservation of the canonical text above all in institutional terms, the discipline of textual criticism in the field of classics (which is, for that matter, usually housed in an institution of some kind) can be understood as a similar care of the text. Textual criticism as practised by classicists has its origins, after all, in Protestant editing of the New Testament, which aimed ‘to restore the word of God and render it directly accessible. Karl Lachmann edited the New Testament, and the stemmatic method that bears his name and is fundamental for the field of classics was derived from earlier Protestant editors.’⁷¹ Christianity, which was excluded from classical philology in Boeckh’s foundational plan, persists latently in its foundational discipline. Classics differs profoundly, however, in its application of care of the text. It remains pious towards the method; at the same time it is indifferent to the object of the method, as argued above apropos of the editing of Manilius. Care for the text is not enough without care for sense, which compensates for semantic loss, inevitable as this is over the vast time of the great traditions. Every society that can define itself with reference to a canon of texts needs specialists in the preservation of the sense. The Assmanns refer to Brahmins, mandarins, rabbis, mullahs, sheikhs, imams, monks, learned people (Gelehrte), philologists, and theologians. This specialization leads to a disjunction between primary texts and secondary texts or commentaries. But there are different forms of commentary. The Assmanns take the philological commentary as an example of an epiphenomenon of care of the text, in other words not of care for its sense. ‘Although’, they say, ‘philological commentary is especially connected with standard texts, it reconstructs the meaning of the text historically and transmits it not generally with “life” [i.e. with meaning

⁷⁰ Ibid., 12.

⁷¹ Edmunds 2001: 4. References have not been repeated here.

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that it might have for life] but rather with the guild’s state of knowledge, which advances according to its own laws.’⁷² A truly canon-related commentary, on the other hand, is always a matter of translating the text into life. The ineluctable tension between the uniformity of a canon and the open-endedness of reality leads to a hierarchy of primary and secondary texts that differs from one tradition to another, especially between East and West. In the West, the holy book remains untouchable while the earliest levels of commentary take on their own para-canonical status (the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Greek and Latin church fathers). Care of the sense thus goes in a direction opposite to that of care of the text. The latter is governed by a taboo: the text must not be altered. The former is under no such control (the closest thing to control is dogmatism) and meets with censure only when the hierarchy of texts begins to be levelled. One cannot gainsay the Assmanns’ description of philological commentary, which, one has to add, pays equal attention and assigns equal importance to the care of non-standard texts, if by ‘standard’ the Assmanns mean major or canonical (see Section 3 in this chapter). As for care of sense, not only is the philological commentary directed, as the Assmanns say, to the guild of its producers, it is also, like care of the text, exercised indifferently on both major and minor authors. The commentaries on individual books of Martial, by different hands, in different countries, that have appeared in rapid succession since the mid-1990s presumably brought their authors the same rewards that they would have received from commentaries on a major author.⁷³ Their work is judged by its philological competence. (These commentaries were also impulses that caused the profession’s re-evaluation of Martial.) The Assmanns’ discussion of canons puts the classical canon, as presented in this chapter, in a context in which it appears rather strange in some ways. Their analysis helps one to see that the profession and the discipline of classics have opposite tendencies. The former maintains the ⁷² Assmann and Assmann 1987: 13. ⁷³ After three commentaries on individual books before 1985 (Citroni 1975 [Book 1]; Howell 1980 [Book 1]; Kay 1985 [Book 11]), there came Williams 2004 (Book 2); Fusi 2006 (Book 3); Moreno Soldevila 2006 (Book 4); Howell 1995 (Book 5); Grewing 1997 (Book 6); Galán Vioque 2002 (Book 7); Schöffel 2002 (Book 8); Henriksén 1998 (Book 9); Damschen and Heil 2004 (Book 10); Leary 2001 (Book 13); Leary 1996 (Book 14); and Coleman 2006 (Liber spectaculorum).

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canon. The latter levels distinctions in the name of method. It is said that method can in itself provide the aesthetic pleasure that is lacking in a minor author on whom the method is exercised (see Section 3 here, on Manilius). If the levelling tendency of the discipline were unchecked, two momentous results would follow. First, the distinction between major and minor would collapse completely and, as for PhD reading lists, the profession would admit new lists, always ad hoc, keyed to individual tastes. In this way, to answer a question posed by Formisano in the introduction to the 2012 conference, it would be possible to create and nurture a scholarly discourse in which a given text can be read and interpreted without necessarily locating it somewhere on the scale ‘central’ versus ‘marginal’. Second, the discipline would finally level the distinction between ancient authors and the discussion of them. The principle that the medium is the message, conceived of within the discipline of philology to justify the exercise of textual criticism on apparently unworthy objects (again, Manilius), would plausibly be extended to commentary and interpretation. (Commentary and interpretation do not differ essentially from textual criticism, which after all includes emendation and other kinds of judgement.) In this final levelling, the most successful works of scholarship would attain the status that used to be called canonical and would be accounted as equal in merit to the ancient works of literature to which they are directed. A new kind of student might choose to read, instead of Book Six of the Aeneid, Eduard Norden’s commentary on it. Such is the picture prompted by reflection on the Assmanns’ discussion of canons. The tendency that comes from care of the text in classics comes usually, one sees, from care of the sense. ‘In the dimension of sense’, say the Assmanns, ‘the boundaries are fundamentally unstable’, and they are well aware of the ultimately ‘heretical’ (they put the word in quotes) levelling of which I have spoken. They refer to the tendency of the ‘deconstructivist theory of the essential continuity between primary and secondary text’. They quote Paul de Man to illustrate this ‘fusion of discourse worlds’ (Verschmelzung von Diskurswelten).⁷⁴ The profession of classics, as I have already suggested, holds the discipline in check. It does so without having to articulate its reasons

⁷⁴ Assmann and Assmann 1987: 14 and n. 17.

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for the canon, either to itself or to outsiders, probably because it can rely on the inertia of, or on the general respect for, the larger western tradition. In this way it avoids various kinds of embarrassment, the most painful of which would be the avowal of a distinction, in the corpus of ancient Greek and Roman authors, between genius and mediocrity (see pseudo-Longinus, De sublimitate 33). Although classics does not have to justify its canon either to classicists or to others, it has come under pressure, fairly recently, to justify itself as a non-elitist and politically sensitive discipline. Don Fowler emphasized its political self-consciousness in his account of what he called the ‘New Latin’, that is, scholarship on Latin literature as practised by certain younger scholars, mainly in England but also in the United States and Italy. What is particularly distinctive about this politicisation of poetics, as I remarked above, is that it includes within its sphere the political stance of the critic himself—or herself. The critic cannot simply accept antiquity and the classical tradition as an aesthetic ideal outside time, but must constantly confront its ideologies: reading cannot be innocent, and the critic must accept the responsibility of confronting the politics of interpretation. In simultaneously engaging with both ancient and modern ideology, the New Latin has emphatically proclaimed its historical situatedness: to read a Latin text involves the critic on many different levels of political engagement.⁷⁵

7. X in ‘Philology + X’ This proclamation, made in 1995, whatever its truth for the segment of a new generation to which it referred, does not seem to indicate the path that classical scholarship followed. At least in the United States, the most important thing for classics was to appear non-elitist and, yes, engaged, but not engaged in Fowler’s sense. Classics had to show that it was not isolated—and thus perhaps elitist and non-egalitarian. It found a way to maintain itself as a ‘society of discourse’, with its own canon and its boundaries, and at the same time to jump outside those limits. This was the model of ‘philology + x’, where x was reception.⁷⁶ Charles Martindale’s ⁷⁵ Fowler 1995. ⁷⁶ I formalize a comment made by James O’Hara in discussion at a conference at Rutgers University in 2003: ‘Now we do philology and something else.’ The conference: ‘Critical Divergences: New Directions in the Study and Teaching of Roman Literature.’

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dictum of 1993 (‘meaning . . . is always realized at the point of reception’) proves to have shown the path.⁷⁷ To repeat, reception was the second of the two main tendencies identified at the conference held at Rutgers in 2003. In the same year, Lorna Hardwick’s Reception Studies appeared in the series New Surveys in the Classics (published by the journal Greece & Rome). She gave as one of the reasons for doing reception studies that ‘they also focus critical attention back towards the ancient sources and sometimes frame new questions or retrieve aspects of the sources which have been marginalized or forgotten’.⁷⁸ Hardwick refers to three bodies of theory that are important for reception studies. One of these is Hans Robert Jauss’ aesthetics of reception.⁷⁹ Jauss explained the relation of receiver or reader and received text as a dialogue.⁸⁰ The notion of dialogue has in fact proven useful to the profession of classics. In an article in the New York Review of Books, the published form of a lecture given at the New York Public Library on 30 November 2011, Mary Beard defended classics in these terms: ‘[C]lassics are embedded in the way we think about our selves, and our own history more than we usually allow. They are not just from or about the distant past. They are also a cultural language that we have learned to speak, in dialogue with the idea of antiquity.’⁸¹ The metaphor of dialogue recurs (Beard 2012: 54). Beard is in effect introducing into classics the model of hermeneutic dialogue, and she does so as a way of arguing for the self-evident relevance of classics: I do not have to defend classics because it is a given. She speaks satirically of books and articles about the decline of classics, as if those who write them are wasting their time (ibid., 50). She also fervently hopes that the dialogue she describes will go on; and she recognizes that it depends on expertise ‘in the ancient world and in ancient languages’ (ibid., 54). But the dialogue thus conceived ⁷⁷ Martindale 1993: 3. ⁷⁸ Hardwick 2003: 4. See Hinds 2005 and discussion of one of Hinds’ examples in Edmunds 2005: 5–6. ⁷⁹ Hardwick 2003: 5–8. The other two are those of Wolfgang Iser and Hans-Georg Gadamer. ⁸⁰ For the dialogue metaphor and for the parallel metaphor of horizon, see Edmunds 2010b: 351 and n. 103. In that note there is also a reference to the use of the dialogue metaphor in Gill 1995: 17–18 (he puts dialogue in quotation marks) apropos of the comparability of modern and ancient notions of the person. (On dialogue, see also Gill 2006: 342.) ⁸¹ Beard 2012: 50–1; cf. Beard and Henderson 1995: 6–7; Fowler 1995 (‘negotiation’).

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is not going to go on without institutional support, and so one necessarily returns to the state of the discipline and of the profession. Those ridiculous books and articles will keep appearing. Hardwick stresses the interdisciplinary aspect of reception studies, and it is this aspect that the profession, with its relatively new acceptance of reception as a legitimate subfield of the discipline, can use in order to show that it is open and cooperative—not elitist, exclusive, and inwardlooking.⁸² The announcement by Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands) of a conference titled ‘Framing Classical Reception Studies’ (6–8 June 2013) well articulates this new self-description: The field of classical reception studies . . . [f]rom their rather marginal role in the 20th century . . . appear now to have been granted centre stage in many leading academic communities. This development is to be welcomed: reception studies provide an excellent way for classicists to make themselves more visible, not only to other disciplines within the humanities, but also to a larger audience, through seeking to explain the role that classical civilisations have played in many cultures and cultural discourses, also beyond the Western world. So too, the discipline of classics itself is forcefully reinvigorated by this process, through the self-examination which the study of reception implies.⁸³

8. Conclusion Classics in its professional or institutional garb judges the products of the disciplines going under its name. One such product is the textual edition. The great edition of a difficult text, like that of Manilius, receives great honour. The profession of classics also maintains a canon. In modern times Manilius has usually been considered a minor poet, thus noncanonical. The profession thus honours the discipline’s work on the poet but not the poet. ⁸² For the history of reception studies in classics, see Hardwick 2003: 2. I suggest Martindale 1993 as an approximate terminus post quem. While reception puts classics in a friendly relation with other fields, it is perhaps putting classics in another difficult relation with itself. If classical scholarship is another kind of reception, is not, then, the study of reception always reception of reception? For classical scholarship as reception, see Porter 2008: 473 (‘In fact, transmission and reception are not two faces of a single coin. Rather they are two names for the selfsame activity. Classical studies are not merely the beneficiary of this activity. They are subsumed by it’). See also Edmunds 2010b: 344–8 and Peirano 2012a: 217. ⁸³ Visit now https://rogueclassicism.com/2013/01/14/cfp-framing-classical-receptionstudies (accessed 12 January 2018).

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The account that philology, for its part, gives of itself changed in the second half of the twentieth century, under intellectual pressures that were felt throughout the humanities. In classics, a new model came into play: philology and something else, for example a theoretical perspective new to the discourse of classical scholarship. On this model, a poet heretofore minor and marginal, like Martial, could move towards the centre and onto the reading list, but without becoming canonical. The marginal–central distinction operates in fact within the canon. There are limits, however, to this kind of movement. The profession needs its canon for self-definition, just as it needs a chronology, with a periodization, to define itself vis-à-vis other fields. The relatively recent definition of the period of late antiquity has served, incidentally, as a way of marking the end of classical antiquity and thus of classical literature.⁸⁴ It so happens that most of Christian literature falls outside classical literature in a way that confirms classics’ older view of the matter. Towards the end of the twentieth century the profession also faced a new, external challenge. It had to justify itself to the academy, and probably to the world, on quasi-political grounds. It had to defend itself as non-elitist, carefully eschewing any claims about the superiority of the ancient Greeks and Romans in any respect. At this point, the model of philology + x, where x was reception, became very useful. It allowed classics to be open, interdisciplinary, and cooperative and to extend its reach even to the non-western reception of classical antiquity.

⁸⁴ Contrary to the suggestion of a referee of this chapter, the work of the art historian Alois Riegl (1858–1905) was not foundational to the periodization that has resulted in late antiquity. For the periodization, see Edmunds 2010c: 42–4 (with citation of Riegl).

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12 Epilogue The Space between Subjects Joy Connolly

I think the twenty-first century will hopefully be more guided by ‘how’ questions—how am I a product? or how am I related to these people here? . . . and what is the ethics implied by this?¹ Tino Sehgal, the Berlin-based artist quoted here, is often described as a performance artist, but he rejects this label. Prominent in Sehgal’s corpus are ‘constructed situations’ composed by teams of people he carefully chooses to call ‘interpreters’ or ‘players’. They are not performers, which would imply that they follow a script; nor are they collaborators, which would presume a greater degree of independent creative agency than they possess.² Working from Sehgal’s directions, which construct an experiential framework for encounters and conversational exchange, they create conditions of spontaneous thinking and dialogue. The forms of sociality in his work—greeting, introducing, questioning—are not unfamiliar, but they are not conventionally considered art either. Even as Sehgal wins awards and much coveted exhibit spaces, he positions himself on the margins of the art world, reconfiguring the canonical experience of visual art and in the process changing our expectations about how we relate to one another and to artworks, how ideas about ethics, politics, aesthetics,

¹ Tino Sehgal, quoted in Jones 2010: 215. ² Visit http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/10041272/Tino-Sehgal-Invisibleart-worth-100k.html and http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/australia-culture-blog/ 2014/feb/06/tino-sehgal-this-is-so-contemporary-review.

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history, and a host of other issues currently emerge and circulate among us, and how they may do so in the future. The importance of exploratory conversation in Sehgal’s art places it in the tradition of the Socratic dialogue. Texts are events, and events move: Sehgal brings the eventness and movement of the Socratic text into the sphere of shared embodied experience.³ In this epilogue, in keeping with the volume’s welcome of non-canonical interlocutors, I use his work as a way to address the urgent question the editors pose about the role of classical literature in intellectual life. In their description of the conference on which the volume is based, claiming that classical literature is no longer active as an aesthetic or ethical model within contemporary literary discourse, they challenged participants to articulate the ‘specificity’ of studying Greek and Latin as opposed to other literatures. My response starts from Tino Sehgal’s version of the Socratic dialogue in his large-scale 2010 work This Progress. The piece plays out in real time the dynamic relationship between subjects, as well as between past and present, in what I offer as an exemplary textual encounter with classical literature: Hannah Arendt’s readings of Plato, Cicero, and Virgil. Arendt’s work provides a model for the aims of classical studies and a new conception of the process by which the canon comes into being and is renewed over time. For Arendt, the canon’s embedment in the distant past is not an obstacle, but precisely what legitimates it as a dialogical partner in generating new thinking in the present. What leads Arendt to classical texts (and this is also a reason why we call them ‘classical’) is precisely the temporal double bind they inhabit: they orient themselves towards both past and future. Of classical literature Arendt asks, and directs us to ask, not only what, who, when, or why, but Tino Sehgal’s question, how. How are we related to these texts here? How have others conducted their relation to them? This is a question that must be asked because we would not be reading these texts today but for the tradition constructed by past readers. And what is the ethics implied by this?

³ On eventness and motion, see Wood 2012: 163.

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1. The Space For the purpose of mounting This Progress in the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Frank Lloyd Wright’s massive rotunda and spiralling interior ramps were entirely emptied of their normal offerings of paintings and sculptures. After museum visitors bought their tickets and walked across the rotunda floor, most of them visibly (and uncomfortably) baffled and asking ‘Where’s the art?’, they encountered a child of roughly six to ten years of age who, like Socrates, asked them to define a term with the question: ‘What is progress?’ Though few visitors grasped it at that moment, this small person was the first interpreter in Sehgal’s artwork. If the visitor agreed to answer, she or he (or they, for those visitors who arrived in small groups) was ushered along the first ramp, where the child listened closely to the visitor’s definition of progress. The child then drew the visitor along the ramp a little distance—for simplicity’s sake, let me assume a lone female visitor—introduced her to a waiting teenager, and repeated her answer as accurately as possible. Once the child departed, the conversation continued in Socratic style as, walking along with the visitor, the teenager probed her answer. After several minutes, the teenager and the visitor were interrupted by an interpreter of between twenty-five and fifty years of age, and after the teenager handled introductions, the visitor and the adult interpreter strolled up the ramps for another seven or eight minutes of conversation. Near the top, through a trick of physical choreography, the interpreter departed the scene as abruptly as she or he had entered it, and a person of roughly sixty or seventy years stepped forward, introduced himself or herself, and told a short, spontaneously composed story drawn from his or her own life. The teenage and adult interpreters were enjoined to keep the conversation challenging, at a perceptible distance from everyday chat, but also lively and inviting. This was not an easy task, especially since visitors come to the Guggenheim from an immense variety of backgrounds, with radically different expectations about art. By chance, the performance artist Marina Abramovic’s popular retrospective was mounted almost simultaneously across town, at the Museum of Modern Art. In contrast with Abramovic’s attempt to intimidate or to provoke shock or embarrassment, for example by compelling visitors to walk in close proximity to naked performers, Sehgal instructed his interpreters to coax their partners

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in the artwork into reaching the most interesting place, conversationally speaking, that they could possibly reach. The Guggenheim is a crowded tourist attraction. At any moment there were fifteen or twenty children and as many teenagers and adults in dialogue with visitors on the ramps. At its best, the piece felt like a moving seminar filled with people of many ages and origins—curious, nervous, confused, delighted, or frustrated, but almost all feeling and thinking, at times perceptibly experiencing intense emotion or flashes of insight. While some elements were preset, as I have described, the talk itself was spontaneous. The balance between spontaneity and choreography let interpreters and visitors skip the clichés of social interaction upon a first meeting (‘Where are you from? What do you do for a living?’) while fostering exchanges of memories and ideas, some of them speedily and surprisingly intimate. As it disrupted the normal topographical code of the museum as an elite social space, This Progress triggered in visitors and interpreters alike a variety of sensory perceptions that subverted the dominant aesthetic regime of the museum, where the temporarily immobile human eye gazes at permanently immobile and discursively stabilized paintings, sculptures, videos, and installations.⁴ It made the museum the host of an interactive, engaged, self-consciously embodied experience. Together with the interpreter, the visitor was the artwork— or made the artwork. The power of the piece rested in the blur between being and making that was experienced in the newly created human relations, the serial sense of ‘we’ that the visitor and her interpreters created on their walks. That visitors sensed a certain disruption of the regular order of aesthetic experience and expectations was obvious from the running commentary many of them offered as they traversed the ramps. Some expressed intense dislike of the piece, which (they said) asked too much of them or made them feel confused, manipulated, or intimidated. But there were also many moments I can only call utopian, where visitors speculated what our common world would be like if conversations about progress, technology, death and its deferral, evolution, extinction, the future of science, the value of the past, the value of fiction, the bases on

⁴ I have also made this point in a short essay in Connolly 2017.

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which we make moral decisions, the liberatory possibilities of democracy, and so forth were a ‘regular’ part of ‘ordinary life’.

2. The Space Between It may be clear by now that I was an interpreter for This Progress, and I offer my reflections on it as a fitting coda to this volume for three reasons. First, Sehgal’s work disrupts the canonical spaces of the gallery and museum and remakes them afresh, as spaces where visitors can experience ideas and sensations simultaneously and can reflect on them in real time. This Progress thus strikes me as exemplary for thinking about how classicists might productively disrupt our canonical spaces—our canon, our classrooms, our departmental talks, conferences, and publications, our place in the university, and the spaces we cultivate in our minds and in our conversations with colleagues. What do we allow in and what do we try to keep out? What types of research dominate and why? Some prompts for creative disruption are already familiar in the field. For instance, how might we study poetry differently if we focused on the present-tense reading situation, reading Latin and Greek poems through, and with, modern or non-western ones?⁵ Another prompt—dogged these days by charges of presentism and utilitarianism—is, how might we configure our scholarly questions in what Arendt would call a worldly way, that is, with a view to enriching our thinking about the world we live in? When we take up the question of Herodotus’ understanding of history, for instance, how might our answers affect our arguments about what history can and should be, and how it functions in the world now?⁶ One useful anti-presentist strategy is to look at how intellectual historians and political theorists, from the Cambridge School to postmodernist thinkers like Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler, have engaged classical texts productively with worldly themes. They evoke the scholars of early modern Italian republics, who brought their knowledge of classical literature to bear in helping to galvanize political change on a world-altering scale, above all by opening up civic alternatives to kingship ⁵ This is Charles Martindale’s challenge in Redeeming the Text (Martindale 1993) and other work on reception. ⁶ On this question, see Arendt 1968a: 41–3.

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and aristocracy in Europe and the Americas. But the investigations of intellectual history and political thought characteristic of civic humanism have been largely marginalized in classics since the nineteenth century, and the political turn in posthumanism has not exerted much influence on classical scholarship to date.⁷ As classical literature is living on the margins of modern experience, classics needs to rethink the spaces it inhabits in the university and in the world. Do we choose to leave these questions to scholars of modern literature and culture or to philosophers? Is there another way to understand the matter beyond the limited, destructive binary of presentism versus historicism? I believe Arendt’s work suggests such a way. Second, like many Sehgal works, This Progress is constituted of or made by the visitors to the museum or gallery. Consequently, because the visitors are many, it is many: it is irreducibly plural, eternally new, and ephemeral. There is a single artist, but the artwork is not singular. If your ontology of art holds that interpretation is part of an artwork’s essence, you may object that this can be said of any artwork or text. But Sehgal makes a form of art where the artwork itself is new creations (plural intended). Each constructed situation pushes back against the mystification of art making, which is built into the experience of the museum as a canonical space through its attribute of requiring visitors: their presence is literally necessary for the piece to be. In the winter of 2010, when the lights went down and the doors were locked, the Guggenheim rotunda literally held no art. By requiring the presence of paying visitors, his work is vulnerable to accusations of ‘me’-generation-style consumerism or narcissism; but it also sets itself against the modern or modernist belief in the autonomy of the work of art. For visitor and interpreter alike, the experience of (making) Sehgal’s art erases the distance on which art typically depends for meaning. The art exists in the situation itself, in the experience shared by the participants, and in their memories once the

⁷ Classicists and ancient historians are pushing against this trend in very different ways—for example Clifford Ando, Melissa Lane, Michèle Lowrie, and Josiah Ober; but the field of research into Greek and Roman intellectual history is dominated by political theorists (Peter Euben, Jill Frank, Dean Hammer, Sara Monoson), philosophers (Philip Pettit), and intellectual historians of early modernity (J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner). In any consideration of the history of classical scholarship in the nineteenth century, there is of course much more to say about Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and others, for whom classical texts are central to their thinking about and against dominant traditions and regimes.

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encounter is over. Sehgal does not permit his works to be photographed, filmed, or taped: this is another of his affinities with Plato—he seems to share the ambivalence expressed in the Phaedrus towards any recorded text—so his artworks must become (only) memories. I am interested here not in the specific content of the art that This Progress made or became, but in the critical priorities that its form of entry into the world makes plausible. Classical studies, like other literary studies, has long rehearsed the debate between historicism, where the object of literary scholarship is to reconstruct the original meaning of a text (i.e. to identify the conditions that limit the text’s meaning), and the hermeneutic turn, which seeks to read the text as it presents itself to us (i.e. as it ‘is always realized at the point of reception’).⁸ Both sides of the debate treat the text, point A, and the reader, point B, as the normative objects of analysis and theory. Historicists seek meaning in these questions: Where is the text located? What conditions shape its content and style? Hermeneuticists ask: Where is the reader situated? How does she or he read the text? In contemporary literary discourse these two points are now naturalized, as Charles Martindale has warned, ‘congealed as (occluded) metaphysical entities’.⁹ This Progress holds promise as a model for reading because we cannot make sense of it by looking towards the interpreter, point A, and at the visitor, point B. Because the art exists in the conversation between visitor and interpreter, being generated anew each time a visitor answers a child and ‘starts’ the piece, it necessarily reorients our attention away from A and B to that which emerges between and beyond them. By analogy, This Progress prompts us to concentrate on the thinking that can emerge out of the reader’s encounter with the classical text—the activity and the products of thinking not just about the text, but beyond the text, in the world. What it suggests is not so much a literary hermeneutic or a theory of reception as it is a model of creative, purposive conservation.¹⁰ Although the analogy may seem implausible at first, we will see that Arendt’s work ⁸ Martindale 1993: 3, with reference to Jauss and Iser. ⁹ Martindale 1993: 15. ¹⁰ Arendt on conservation: ‘The real difficulty in modern education lies in the fact that, despite all the fashionable talk about a new conservatism, even that minimum of conservation and the conserving attitude without which education is simply not possible is in our time extraordinarily hard to achieve . . . The crisis of authority in education is most closely connected with the crisis of tradition, that is with the crisis in our attitude towards the realm of the past’ (Arendt 1968a: 193).

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with classical texts suggests that this practice of reading is not simply anachronistic—or rather its anachronism is not simple, or blind, or naive, or even ahistorical. We might call it a form of historically attuned anachronism, aware of and constantly drawing attention to past writers whose readings have become part of both the text and its current reader. Third, Sehgal has expressed the hope that This Progress and other works awaken visitors to the understanding that their ‘own presence has consequences’.¹¹ Originally trained in dance, he is keenly attentive to bodily and sensory experiences. The encounters he designs heighten our attention to the way we feel ourselves being in the world in the presence of others, in company with others. When This Progress worked as intended, walking and interacting with a hitherto unknown person on the ramps of the Guggenheim was a distinctively, passionately generative experience. The living sensation of creativity, that ideas were being birthed through conversation, rested on each agent’s visual and physical awareness of the other, of their eye contact, expression, gesture, movement. The choreography of the piece compelled us to pay close attention to the space between us. To put it from the observer’s perspective (where I as writer and you as reader are situated now), since the space between interpreter and visitor is where the art exists, that space demands critical attention. I see this aspect of Sehgal’s work as a reminder of the humanistic canon’s power to teach us to think about while thinking with. By thinking with another I mean not just with a colleague, teacher, or student but with a fictional person who exists in our imaginations (a character in a poem or a novel), or a historical person who also exists in our imagination by virtue of his or her relation to a text (the author of any classical text), or by virtue of the text itself.¹² The moments of being-with in This Progress were structured by rules: some were an explicit part of the interpreters’ training (the choreography, the introductions, the bans against lightweight chat and against talking about the artwork itself), others were implicit and shared by both interpreters and visitors (common-sense civility). These rules stylized the interactions and, along with the marked space of the museum itself, ¹¹ Sehgal, interview with Tim Griffin (Griffin 2005). ¹² Charles Larmore takes the ethical relation between author and reader in an anthropomorphizing direction rather further than I would go; see Larmore 2014.

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signalled to the visitor that the conversations were intended to be out of the ordinary, out of the everyday. They also provided an anchor, a stable framework within which the participants could let themselves speak freely and think new thoughts. In the action of the art, thinking-with was impossible to do without a capacity for creative imagination and respect for the other. That is to say, through the sensory experiences it provides and thematizes, Sehgal’s work allows us to understand and see and feel that thinking is an ethical relation. For the remainder of this chapter, let me concentrate on this ethical relation and its role in purposive conservation, in Arendt’s work with classical texts.

3. The Space between Subjects Hannah Arendt saw thinking-with as fundamental to the act of thinking itself. In her account of the high-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem and in a series of essays and lectures on moral judgement that she produced in the 1960s, Arendt argued that Eichmann was capable of committing crimes and of seeing them as defensible because he had lost the habit of thinking.¹³ By saying that Eichmann could not think, Arendt means that he was unable or unwilling to see his actions from the perspective of another because he no longer held (if he ever had) the internal dialogue with the self that tests what one can bear living with. As he lost the capacity to imagine a position other than himself-as-one, he lost the capacity to judge himself and to understand why others would desire to judge him. Arendt developed her thinking about good and evil from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement, which identifies three fundamental principles for aesthetic judgement: ‘(1) to think for oneself; (2) to think in the position of everyone else; (3) always to think in accord with oneself ’ (section 40).¹⁴ Kant’s object is to understand the purposive use of the

¹³ I develop this line of thinking further in Connolly 2018. I am grateful to Miriam Leonard, the editor of the special volume on Arendt and the classics in Classical Philology, and to Christina Kraus and Marco Formisano, for allowing me to use some material from that essay in this section. ¹⁴ Kant 2000: 174 (and 175, next quotation). A condensed version of Arendt’s argument features in Arendt 1968a: 219–26. For a broad overview of her turn to Kant’s aesthetics, see Beiner 1989: 89–155.

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cognitive faculty, and the key move in his argument, the one that attracted and held Arendt’s attention, is the second principle, which ties the self ’s cognitive processes in the judgement of taste to the judgements of others. The mark of Kant’s ‘broad-minded man’ is his capacity to set himself apart from the subjective conditions of judgement that most people are locked into and to reflect ‘from a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by putting himself into the standpoint of others)’ (section 40). His ‘enlarged way of thinking’ (eine erweiterte Denkungsart) involves an imagined dialogue with others. The self must, then, cultivate regard for and curiosity about others’ potential views.¹⁵ Arendt saw this cultivation as a process of the imagination. In The Life of the Mind, she took imagination to be a core element of humanity’s distinctiveness, citing Augustine’s Confessions to support her account of a self that ‘imagines within, yet imagines things are from without’.¹⁶ She had already argued that imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper perspective, to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias and prejudice, to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair. This ‘distancing’ of some things and bridging the abyss to others is part of the dialogue of understanding for whose purposes direct experience establishes too close a contact and mere knowledge erects artificial barriers.¹⁷

Arendt took imagination to be key to the formation of the sensus communis, the common sense that allows one to feel oneself to be the member of a community: as her imaginative reading of Plato shows, the sensus communis exists between subjects across time. Her calls for the self to position itself consciously vis-à-vis another person, text, or historical event appear throughout her work to illustrate and underscore her conviction that sharing the world with others is necessary for both

¹⁵ This is my reading, influenced by Adam Smith’s contemporary work on sympathy, imagination, and moral judgement as well as by Arendt. To critics like Terry Eagleton, Kantian aesthetics conceals its own role in sustaining relations of inequality and injustice with false, distracting promises of transcendence, universality, consensus, disinterestedness, and, above all, autonomy. ‘Taste . . . is a whole alternative to politics, suspending social hierarchy’ (Eagleton 1990: 111). ¹⁶ Arendt 1978: 101, quoting Augustine, Confessions 11.4.7. ¹⁷ Arendt 1953: 392, as quoted in Allen 2002: 357.

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individual moral judgement and the kind of ‘thinking in common’ that is crucial for politics.¹⁸ Arendt’s attempt to transform Kant’s aesthetics into a theory of political and moral judgement is well known. What is not often noted, and what interests me here, is that Arendt’s thinking about thinking and her practices of reading and writing are mutually interdependent.¹⁹ In her hands, Kant’s principles of aesthetic judgement are transformed into an intellectual and literary practice of what I call purposive conservation. Arendt thinks by thinking in the position of another, a practice she identifies as starting with Socrates; and she sees this thinking-with as the foundational act of politics and culture, a tradition whose selfconsciousness she locates in the Roman world, notably in Cicero.²⁰ This emerges in an essay on moral judgement and evildoing written not long after the Eichmann trial. Characteristically, Arendt writes in a dialogical style. First summarizing Kant, she turns next to Kant’s reading Plato, and finally to Plato, or rather to Socrates and his interlocutors.²¹ Her central argument about thinking-with unfolds in her analysis of the moment in Gorgias when Socrates is confronted with his inability to persuade Callicles (Pl. Grg. 481c). He challenges Callicles to refute him: if he fails, Socrates warns, ‘there will be no agreement between you, Callicles, and Callicles, but you will be in discord with him all your life’ (Grg. 482b). Socrates claims that he would do anything, even humiliate himself in public, ‘rather than that I, being one, should be out of tune with myself and contradict myself ’ (Grg. 482c). The challenge as Socrates sees it is to learn to think with oneself—a skill he hones by thinking with another. As any reader of Plato might guess, thinking-with is essential and necessary, since Socrates can assume no knowledge of his own: he must inquire with others into whatever question is proposed (e.g. Pl. Chrm. 165b).²² Arendt moves seamlessly from the observation of Plato’s

¹⁸ Arendt 1968a: 221. ¹⁹ Arendt’s relevance to theories of narrative, by contrast, is well studied: see e.g. Speight 2011. ²⁰ Jacques Taminiaux sketches the impact of Greek and Roman thought on Arendt with the aim of defending her from charges of naive Graecomania (Taminiaux 2000). ²¹ Arendt 2003. Some passages from the following pages will appear in Connolly 2018. ²² Arendt 2003: 279, n. 12 (to ‘Some questions of moral philosophy’) cites Plato’s Charmides and Apology: ‘Socrates’ last answer to the judges was, “I can’t give up examining.” Why couldn’t he do it in silence? The priority of dialegesthai over dianoeisthai’.

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text and its renderings in translation (‘The key notion in this sentence . . . is often left out in many English translations’) to a line of thought generated out of her encounter with Plato’s words. It takes the form of a first-person meditation: The meaning is clear: even though I am one, I am not simply one, I have a self and I am related to this self as my own self . . . if I do wrong I am condemned to live together with a wrongdoer in an unbearable intimacy.²³

Here and in the long passage that follows, Arendt imagines herself in Socrates’ place and takes on Socrates’ voice. Her writing is an enactment of her habit of thinking-with. But her engagement with Plato, here and through the rest of her essay, is not unmediated: awareness of Plato’s complex embedment in his own personal and political context, as well as of his influence on the tradition, drives her discussion of the historical Socrates; of Plato in dialogue with Duns Scotus, Aquinas, and others; and of the Athenian democratic context, the agora. Arendt’s argument is more than an exegesis of Plato’s thought. She combines intellectual history with a historically and philologically embedded claim about the nature of thought and judgement by actualizing Plato’s perspective on the world in the action of thinking-with. What I am calling purposive conservation is one reason why Arendt’s arguments are notoriously difficult to pin down. She defends few doctrines, and her arguments allow for contradiction.²⁴ Nonetheless, as a reading practice, they deserve closer attention from classicists. We have no ‘direct experience’ of classical antiquity, and our ‘mere knowledge’ can erect barriers that prevent us from thinking with the classical texts. Moreover, setting imagination on our critical agenda not as an object of study, but as a habit that reading classical texts can teach, is worthy in its own right.²⁵ Let me ask again Sehgal’s question: What is the ethics implied by this? Like This Progress, Arendt’s dialogical style presents her argument as emerging out of, and as being impossible without, a conversation with

²³ Arendt 2003: 90. ²⁴ Hanna Pitkin complains that ‘it is not easy to sort out’ Arendt’s thinking about Athenian politics and her own use of classical antiquity as an authority (Pitkin 1998: 164–5). ²⁵ The political theorist George Kateb cites imagination as the problem of our age (Kateb 2002: 484). Key to his argument is James 1899.

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another. She hears and writes the voice of Socrates as her own—not that she can become one with Socrates, but she can imagine herself in that place where she is not. The political theorist Tracy Strong sees an ethics at work in this kind of imagination. To engage in thinking-with is to recognize one’s dependence on the other ‘and to recognize one’s constant temptation to deny that relation, that is, to exclude the other as other. My existence as human depends on theirs, and this, in turn, on the acknowledgment that no one’s soul or self or body is his or her own.’²⁶ Arendt’s practice of thinking-with, I am arguing, enlivens classical texts in historical conditions where they have lost immediate contact. Thinking with Greek and Roman texts becomes a formative act of imagination and affective investment in past thinking that may renew us—specifically, by orienting us towards new objects or towards matters of concern for people far from us in space and time. Arendt comments that there is a small track of non-time which the activity of thought beats within the time–space of mortal men and into which the trains of thought, of remembrance and anticipation, save whatever they touch from the ruin of historical and biographical time. This small non-time–space in the very heart of time, unlike the world and the culture into which we are born, can only be indicated, but cannot be inherited and handed down from the past; each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew.²⁷

This is an existentialist re-envisioning of tradition that goes against the grain of the Latin etymology of the word that designates it. Once we emerge out of the non-time–space created in our thinking about ancient texts, in Arendt’s view, readers have a duty to choose texts that will allow them to hand down a tradition to later readers. Her thinking is driven by her desire to understand and guard against the horrors of the twentieth century: she aims to consider the human condition ‘from the vantage point of our newest experience and our most recent fears’ in order ‘to think what we are doing’.²⁸ We choose our ²⁶ Strong 2012: 388 (Kindle edition). I think, too, of Merleau-Ponty: ‘From the very moment we assert that . . . opinions are carried along by discordant opinions which remain below the level of reason, the consciousness that we gain of the irrationalism and contingency in us cancels them as fatalities and opens us to the other person’ (Merleau-Ponty 1969: 188). ²⁷ Arendt 1968a: 13 (emphasis added). ²⁸ Arendt 1998: 5.

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canon not only for ourselves but for the future.²⁹ We may draw on core texts or on marginal ones: what matters is the paving, which cannot hold if it has no purchase in the present. One may object that her freedom to write as an intellectual on the margins of the academy places her practice outside the realistic bounds of what is set for academics harried by talk of ‘relevance’ and ‘outcomes’.³⁰ The last charge, at least, is possible to address here. For Arendt, new thinking is necessary for us to continue living in a world whose material and technological conditions are constantly in flux.³¹ In an essay on civil disobedience, Arendt meditates on the nature of relations constructed through reception across time: ‘No civilization—the man-made artifact to house successfully generations—would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change.’³² She continues the thought in her book Men in Dark Times, where the world needs such pillars in order to guarantee continuity and permanence, without which it cannot offer mortal men the relatively secure, relatively imperishable home they need . . . The world becomes inhuman, inhospitable to human needs—which are the needs of mortals—when it is violently wrenched into a movement in which there is no longer any sort of permanence.³³

The pillars of the canon bridge the space between people and time periods: when they topple, the world as we know it becomes more vulnerable to decay and destruction.

4. Conclusion Miriam Leonard cites Hans Gadamer to support her reminder that, in seeking to understand the relationship between ancient text and modern reader, we must remember that we are not unadulterated products of or ²⁹ I do not have space to pursue the topic here, and classicists will rightly find fault with her simplistic historical sketch, but Arendt tellingly comments that the ‘final victory’ of Christianity over classical philosophy occurred partly because late antique thinkers gave up thinking about the world they lived in (Arendt 1978: 162–3). ³⁰ Peter Euben’s incisive, broad-minded critique ends with the point about introducing beauty; he agrees that ‘her Hellenism is an attempt to think through the present without being presentist’ (Euben 2000: 162–3). ³¹ Allen develops this argument in tandem with his claims about Arendt’s place in existentialism, and points out that ‘organizing remembrance’ is the aim of the polis according to Arendt (Arendt 1998: 198). See Allen 2002: 353 and, further, 356–60. ³² Arendt 1972: 78. ³³ Arendt 1968b: 10–11.

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descendants from the Greek and Roman tradition: we never confront the texts in all their freshness as things in themselves, but as things already read and, in the reading, altered.³⁴ Fredric Jameson remarks along similar lines that we read through layers of sediment.³⁵ In speaking of the study of the formation of traditions, J. G. A. Pocock describes the dynamic cyclical action undertaken by the reader who becomes a writer who is read by a reader who in turn becomes a writer. Intellectual history, he concludes, cannot be ‘the simple unfolding’ of what appears to us to be consistent patterns of thought or action; it must involve ‘envisaging charismatic figures, actions, and styles of behavior’, which may run counter to the themes of transmission and continuity privileged in conventional Geistgeschichte. In trying to explain how new modes of thinking emerge, Pocock comments: ‘The radical constructs his image of the past by re-arranging, modifying, and occasionally inverting or contradicting the concepts and documents in which some part of the contents of a tradition is conveyed in easily manageable shapes.’³⁶ Pocock’s formulation goes admirably far, but not quite far enough. Readers exist in time, and hold images of themselves as so existing; when readers look backward in time to those from whom they received a text or an idea or an argument, their experience and evaluation of that text or idea or argument is laden with a rich repertoire of associated images, sensory traces, and emotions. To understand the thinking one pursues in the encounter with a canonical text, we need to consider the phenomenology of reception: its aesthetic and corporeal and affective components. We will do better if we assign significance to the symbolic, affective, aesthetic dimensions of reception that, together, underwrite and renew the legitimacy of the concepts and ensure their acceptance. Selfconscious attention to sensation and to structures of feeling marks the transmission of political values from antiquity onward: we could talk further about the attention to material and corporeal detail in the antiquarian work of Varro or Valerius Maximus; about Machiavelli’s letter to his friend Vettori, where he describes his friendship with classical authors as a driver of his composition of The Prince; and about much more. In ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’, Wallace Stevens describes the scene of reading.³⁷ Embodiment ³⁴ Leonard 2006: 117–18. ³⁶ Pocock 1971: 263.

³⁵ Jameson 1981: 9. ³⁷ Stevens 1923.

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and longing are Stevens’ concerns: the body of the reader hovering over the page, the desire not only to understand but ‘to be / the scholar to whom his book is true’ (whether that is the original writer or the ideal, fully satisfied reader, Stevens does not make quite clear, and this blurry identification is important to attend to). And we need to consider the opposite of Stevens’ picture as well: the reader of the canon who pursues a different line of thinking, one mobilized by horror and repulsion for the text. I think, finally, of Karl Jaspers’ famous comment about Nietzsche: ‘That the source of philosophical knowledge is not to be found in thinking about mere objects or in investigating mere facts but rather in the unity of thought and life, so that thinking grows out of the provocation and agitation of the whole man’—all this constitutes for Nietszche self-consciousness of the real character of his truth: ‘I have always composed my writings with my whole body and life’; ‘All truths are bloody truths to me.’³⁸ How can we better understand how those affective investments, heavy with sensation, shape political vision, especially the natal sense of fresh possibilities? Tino Sehgal and Hannah Arendt are two figures who read and transform classical texts from the margins of academia and classical scholarship. Both adopt unfamiliar, uncanonical practices of reading that renew classical literature, its tropes and figures, even as traditional possibilities for engaging with it have slipped away or are slipping now. Whether we adopt their paths or pave our own, pave we must, I believe, and with attention to the world we inhabit now.

³⁸ Jaspers 1965: 386.

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Index Alberti, Leon Battista 81, 84–9, 92, 96–7 allusion and intertextuality 4 Altertumswissenschaft 2 andreia 142, 144–5, 148, 150, 155–6, 157, 160–2, 164–5, 172–4, 176 Anglo-American academia 4, 9, 21, 100, 293 anonymity 102, 105, 115 Anthologia Latina 263–4, 276, 280, 284, 302 Arendt, Hannah 314, 317–19, 321–6, 328 Aristotle 142, 144–76, 233, 237, 253–4, 256 Arrian 196 authenticity 177–8, 180–2 authorship 177–80, 182–3, 185 biology (biological works) 143, 145, 160, 165, 176 Boeckh, August 289, 302–3, 305 Bourdieu, Pierre 9 Butler, Samuel 234, 238–40, 242–52, 257–61 canon wars 10 censorship 15 censure 304–6 Christian literature, early 8, 19, 101–2, 134–5 Cicero 81–3, 89, 91, 94, 96–7, 314, 323 classism 79 Codex Salmasianus 271 Columbia University, Butler Library 5 Constance school 20 The Contest of Homer and Hesiod 232–4 de Man, Paul 41 death of the author 18 Deleuze, Gilles 18, 27, 28 dēmokratia 141–3, 148 deterritorialization 18, 27, 28 Dio Chrysostom 232, 235, 237, 241, 250–61

discourse analysis 37–8 displacement 59 Duchesne, Louis 104–6, 108–25, 128–40 Echtheitskritik 18–19 embodiment 142, 150, 152, 154, 156 Euripides 177–80, 182–5, 187–9, 192–4, 197–200 exclusivity 59, 63 extraneousness 1, 26–7 Fantham, Elaine 6, 7, 28 Foucault, Michel 63, 290–1 Freud, Sigmund 43 gender 141–7, 150, 156, 158, 160–2, 165, 169, 171–2, 174, 176 German philology 105–7 great books 4, 10 Guattari, Félix 18, 27–8 Hegel, Georg Friedrich 57, 65 Herodotus 53–5 Hippocratic corpus 142, 151, 170, 176 Homer 5, 16, 204, 206, 208, 212, 215–17, 219, 225, 228 Iliad, book 10 179–98 reception of 12–14, 32–3, 231–45, 247, 249–61 Homeric Lives 232, 234 Housman, A. E. 294–7, 299 imitatio 282, 285 Kafka, Franz 40 Kant, Immanuel 39, 321–3, Lachmann, Karl 102–3, 113 late antique literature 4, 6, 8, 10 late antiquity 292–3, 301–3, 311 Liber pontificalis 103–4, 113–14, 117–18, 121, 125–31, 134

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INDEX

libraries 208, 210–14, 225, 227, 229 Luhmann, Niklas 63 Manilius 289, 294–7, 299, 300, 305, 307, 310 masculinity 141–2, 154, 176 material culture 75, 77 Medieval Latin 100–3 minor literature / poets 290, 295, 299 Mommsen, Theodor 104–15, 118–20, 122–7, 132–4, 138 Monumenta Germaniae Historica 103, 105–10, 112, 114, 119, 133–4 mouvance 102–3, 105

reception studies 1–4, 15, 21, 24–5, 27, 34, 80–5, 89–91 Rezeptionsästhetik 20 Scaliger, Joseph Justus 178 Schlegel, Friedrich 40 Second Sophistic 231–2, 236, 239, 259 Sehgal, Tino 22–3, 34, 313–15, 317–21, 324, 328 Shackleton Bailey, D. R. 263–5, 271, 274, 279, 295–7 Socrates 315, 323–5 softness 169, 171, 173–4 summaries / argumenta 263–79, 282–3, 285–6

Ovid 263–86 papyri 203–6, 209–14, 216, 218–19, 221, 224, 226–8 parody 231–2 performance / performative genres 208, 221–3, 225–30 Perpetua (Passio) 287, 303 Plato 38, 150–1, 165, 314, 319, 322–4 postcolonial studies 5, 14 pre-disciplinarity 39–40 pseudepigrapha 265 Ptolemaic era 210–11 queer unhistoricism 25 Quignard, Pascal 41–5, 47–55 reading lists 10, 16, 19, 30, 76–7, 291, 299–300, 304, 307, 311

technical and scientific texts 6, 8 temporality 314 tense (shifting, aorist) 46–8 thumos 152, 155–7, 159–61, 164–5, 169, 172–4 Unheimliche (das) 43 Valckenaer, Lodewijk Caspar 178, 180–1 variation / variant 102–3 Virgil 46–7, 263–86 Waitz, Georg 106–7, 110, 113–15, 117, 119, 133, 135, 138 Weltliteratur / world literature 11–14, 58, 67 Wolf, Friedrich August 239, 252 world philology 24