The Library of the Other Antiquity / Reading Late Antiquity (Bibliothek Der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaften, 2. Reihe) 9783825367879, 3825367878

Table of contents :
Cover
Titel
Imprint
Table of Contents
Editors’ Introduction
I THEORETICAL OUTLOOKS
James Uden: Untimely Antiquity: Walter Pater and the "Vigil of Venus"
Marco Formisano: Fragments, Allegory, and Anachronicity: Walter Benjamin and Claudian
Jesús Hernández Lobato: Late Antique Foundations of Postmodern Theory: A Critical Overview
II DECADENCE AND DECLINE
Olof Heilo: Decline and Renascence: Re-reading the Late Antiquity of Jacob Burckhardt
Scott McGiLL: Reading Against the Grain: Late Latin Literature in Huysmans’ "À rebours"
Stefan Rebenich: Late Antiquity, a Gentleman Scholar and the Decline of Cultures: Oswald Spengler and "Der Untergang des Abendlandes"
Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed: Rome Post Mortem: The Many Returns of Rutilius Namatianus
Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer: Alma Johanna Koenig’s "Der heilige Palast": The Rise and Fall of Theodora in the Belletrist of the "Wiener Moderns"
Chiara O. Tommasi: A Byzantine Phaedra between Paganism, Heresy and Magic: The Tragic Fate of Silvana in "La Fiamma" by Ottorino Respighi and Claudio Guastalla (1934)
III CONTINUITIES AND TRANSFORMATION
Ad Putter: Versifications of the Book of Jonah: Late Antique to Late Medieval
David Westberg: Literary "mimesis" and the Late Antique Layer in John Doukas’ (or Phokas’) "Description of Palestine"
Helena Bodin: “I Sank through the Centuries”: Late Antiquity Inscribed in Göran Tunström’s Novel "The Thief"
Catherine Conybeare: "Mundus totus exsilium est": On Being out of Place
Notes on Contributors
Index
Backcover

Citation preview

sigrid schottenius cullhed mats malm (Eds.)

Reading Late Antiquity

  he field of Late Antique studies has involved self  reflexion and criticism since its emergence in the late nineteenth century, but in recent years there has been a widespread desire to retrace our steps more systematically and to inquire into the millennial history of previous interpretations, historicization and uses of the end of the Greco-Roman world. This volume contributes to that enterprise. It emphasizes an aspect of Late Antiquity reception that ensues from its subordination to the Classical tradition, namely its tendency to slip in and out of Western consciousness. Narratives and artifacts associated with this period have gained attention, often in times of crisis and change, and exercised influence only to disappear again. When later readers have turned to the same period and identified with what they perceive, they have tended to ascribe the feeling of relatedness to similar values and circumstances rather than to the formation of an unbroken tradition of appropriation.

schottenius cullhed malm (Eds.)

schottenius cullhed · malm (Eds.) Reading Late Antiquity

Reading Late Antiquity

Universitätsverlag

isbn 978-3-8253-6787-9

win t e r

Heidelberg

b i b l i oth ek d e r k l assisch en a lt e rt um swissen sch a ften Herausgegeben von

j ürg en paul s chwindt Neue Folge · 2. Reihe · Band 156

The Library of the Other Antiquity ma rco form isano (Ed.)

The Library of the Other Antiquity Over the past decades Late Antiquity has evolved into an independent and increasingly productive area of study. No longer seen merely as the continuation of “classical” antiquity, epigonal age or first phase of the medieval, late antiquity is understood as having its own characteristic traits, which have to be analyzed as such. Currently, a comprehensive re-engagement with Late Antiquity is taking place, promoting a shift in its evaluation as well as a variety of disciplinary approaches. The profile of Late Antiquity that is emerging is diverse, complex and problematic, as it combines cultural pluralism with a stubborn dedication to tradition. It is at this moment in the history of late-antique studies that this series intervenes. Although for terminological reasons the term ‘Late Antiquity’ cannot currently be avoided, The Other Antiquity aims to contribute to a more independent conceptualization of the epoch. The series thus understands itself as provocation and stimulus for a discussion of Late Antiquity which will open up new approaches in the areas of Classical Philology and literary studies, and simultaneously put the fascination and charm of Late Antiquity on display for other disciplines as well. This series has three major focuses: (mainly Latin) late-antique textuality, its reception in later ages in Western culture (including visual and material aspects), and Late Antiquity as a paradigm for the construction of other Western “decadences”. The Other Antiquity will open up the field to a broader cultural discussion, not least with a view to postmodern reassessments, and will offer a basis for the interpretation of texts of widely varying origin and genre. It will serve as a forum for discussing these texts in an interdisciplinary fashion, for pursuing alternative paths in research and for departing from the traditional approaches of Classical Philology. Marco Formisano, Ghent University

sigrid schottenius cullhed mats malm (Eds.)

Reading Late Antiquity

Universitätsverlag

winter

Heidelberg

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. This book was produced with generous funding from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.

cover illustration Arnold Böcklin: Die Toteninsel (Island of the Dead), First Version, 1880, in: Kunstmuseum Basel, Inv. 1055, Sammlung Online: http://sammlungonline.kunstmuseumbasel.ch/eMuseumPlus?id=691 (Accessed: 23.11.2017).

isbn 978-3-8253-6787-9 Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. © 2018 Universitätsverlag Winter GmbH Heidelberg Imprimé en Allemagne · Printed in Germany Druck: Memminger MedienCentrum, 87700 Memmingen Gedruckt auf umweltfreundlichem, chlorfrei gebleichtem und alterungsbeständigem Papier. Den Verlag erreichen Sie im Internet unter: www.winter-verlag.de

Table of Contents Editors’ Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7

I THEORETICAL OUTLOOKS

J ames U den Untimely Antiquity: Walter Pater and the Vigil of Venus . . . . . . . . . . . 17 m arco F ormisano Fragments, Allegory, and Anachronicity: Walter Benjamin and Claudian . . . 33 J esús H ernández L obato Late Antique Foundations of Postmodern Theory: A Critical Overview. . . . 51 II DECADENCE AND DECLINE

o LoF H eiLo Decline and Renascence: Re-reading the Late Antiquity of Jacob Burckhardt 73 s cott m c G iLL Reading Against the Grain: Late Latin Literature in Huysmans’ À rebours . . 85 s teFan r ebenicH Late Antiquity, a Gentleman Scholar and the Decline of Cultures: Oswald Spengler and Der Untergang des Abendlandes . . . . . . . . . . 105 s iGrid s cHotteniUs c ULLHed Rome Post Mortem: The Many Returns of Rutilius Namatianus . . . . . . . 121 H enriette H aricH -s cHwarzbaUer Alma Johanna Koenig’s Der heilige Palast: The Rise and Fall of Theodora in the Belletrist of the Wiener Moderns. . . . . . . . . . . . 137

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Table of Contents

c Hiara o. t ommasi A Byzantine Phaedra between Paganism, Heresy and Magic: The Tragic Fate of Silvana in La Fiamma by Ottorino Respighi and Claudio Guastalla (1934). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 III CONTINUITIES AND TRANSFORMATION

a d P Utter Versifications of the Book of Jonah: Late Antique to Late Medieval . . . . . 183 d avid w estberG Literary mimesis and the Late Antique Layer in John Doukas’ (or Phokas’) Description of Palestine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 H eLena b odin “I Sank through the Centuries”: Late Antiquity Inscribed in Göran Tunström’s Novel The Thief. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 c atHerine c onybeare Mundus totus exsilium est: On Being Out of Place. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

Introduction To their credit, a reader will only perceive That the language they loved was coming to grief, Expiring in preposterous mechanical tricks, Epanaleptics, rhopalics, anacyclic acrostics: To their lasting honor the stuff they wrote Can safely be spanked in a scholar’s foot-note, Called shallow by a mechanised generation to whom Haphazard oracular grunts are profound wisdom.

The sympathy expressed in “The Epigoni” for the belated verse makers of the fourth and fifth centuries C.E. was not unusual by the 1950s, when W.H. Auden wrote this poem.1 From French Symbolism to Spanish American modernismo, Italian decadentism or Greek surrealism, poets had drawn on emblematic notions, texts, and artefacts of late Roman and Greek culture in a spirit of aestheticism. Auden gives “credit” to the late antique poets for having turned inwards; for maintaining their integrity by escaping to virtuoso manipulation of language rather than pouring out in a pathetic swan song to dramatize the catastrophe they experienced. Yet, their true and eternal “honor” never radiated as strongly as when their texts landed in the hands of modern scholars and had to endure constant thrashing. Dull scholarly footnotes attacked the Epigoni for dullness, and they were spurned as “mechanical” by a generation more mechanized than any other the world had ever seen. Editorial philologists and translators could spend years on poets like Decimus Ausonius Magnus, but in the end they felt a need to expiate themselves in the preface to the edition by emphatically announcing the marked inferiority of the same poet.2 This view on late Latin and Greek texts among Classical scholars has been shaped by a series of events; Edward Gibbon’s pessimistic narrative about the political, institutional, economic and cultural decline of the Roman Empire was influential in articulating the general notion of this period as decadent, inferior by far to the classical era. Until the middle of the twentieth century, on the other hand, the idea of the preceding centuries as an epoch of cultural and political superiority impacted historical self-understanding among the educated elites in Europe, and 1 2

W.H. Auden, The Shield of Achilles (London: Faber, 1955). E.g. Hugh Evelyn-White, Ausonius (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1919), vii and passim: “the chief value of the works of Ausonius is historical.” See also Marie José Byrne, Prolegomena to an Edition of the Works of Decimus Magnus Ausonius (1916), 2; 44–45.

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Introduction

the ideals of classicism necessitated a sharp distinction between Classical Antiquity and the centuries that followed. Scholarly discourse eventually shifted during the 1970s, influenced by the development of Late Antiquity as a discrete historical period. A new paradigm, rooted in the works of the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl and culminating with the historian Peter Brown, emerged in ancient social, cultural, and religious history, but also touching on philological and archaeological practices. Some scholars felt that this development was unfolding too fast and that “hard facts” about the institutional development and crisis of the Roman Empire were being overlooked. At the end of the twentieth century, the historian Andrea Giardina questioned the consequences of Peter Brown’s influence in the seminal article “Esplosione di tardoantico.” 3 Giardina disagreed with what he regarded as more or less conscious attempts to make the socio-political decline of Rome seem less dramatic than it actually was. According to Giardina, this change of perspective had arisen from the shift of focus from legal, political, and economic issues to the religious and cultural prosperity of the period. Furthermore, this wealth had been augmented by followers of Brown, who had tended to project characteristics of the nineteenth century and experiences of Late Modernity onto this epoch. A little more than a decade after Giardina’s polemical article, Gibbon’s Roman Empire in decline was once again gaining ground among historians such as P. J. Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins, and the question of how to interpret Late Antiquity is still under negotiation. While historians are once again stressing the socio-political decay of the period, Classical philologists have only just begun the reappraisal of its literature. Charles Martindale once wrote that reception studies helped to challenge the traditional idea of what “classics” is (something most classicists, including myself, simply took for granted 30, or even 20 years ago), […] contesting the idea that classics is something fixed, whose boundaries can be shown, and whose essential nature we can understand on its own terms.4

What we today call Late Antiquity, on the other hand, has always been read as a period of movement and change with loose geographical and temporal boundaries. The scholarly movement of Late Antique Studies that emerged during the twentieth century involved self-reflexion and criticism from the start, but in recent years there have been signs of a desire to retrace our steps in a more systematic manner and to inquire into the millennial history of previous interpretations, historicization and uses of textual and material artefacts dating from the period.5 Philip 3 4

5

Andrea Giardina, “Esplosione di tardoantico,” Studi Storici 1 (1999), 157–180. Charles Martindale, “Introduction,” in Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. C.A. Martindale and R.F. Thomas (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 2. Stefan Rebenich, “Late Antiquity in Modern Eyes,” in A Companion to Late Antiquity, ed. P. Rousseau and J. Raithel (Oxford, 2006), 77–91; Edward James, “The Rise and

Introduction

9

Rousseau’s Blackwell Companion to Late Antiquity (2007) opens with the section “The View from the Future,” which adopts such a perspective. A more recent example is Clifford Ando’s and Marco Formisano’s multi-authored volume The New Late Antiquity (under publication), which approaches the topic by constructing a gallery of intellectual portraits of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars. Moreover, Scott McGill and Edward Watts’ forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Late Antique Literature will include a section on the later reception of late antique literature. This desire is part of the larger spread of reception theory and history as developed by Hans-Robert Jauss and integrated into Classical studies by Charles Martindale during the 1990s. Yet, while we have witnessed an explosion of Classical Reception Studies as well as reception of the Middle Ages (“medievalisms”), until very recently the field of Late Antiquity has remained a relatively unexplored area. It would seem that Reception Studies that focus almost exclusively on wellknown writers from the classical period can lead to further perpetuation of the established canon and thereby prevent new knowledge about the Nachleben of ancient culture in its wider sense, and its fluid boundaries in respect to the Middle Ages and Byzantium. This volume was envisioned as a contribution to the growing field of Late Antique Reception Studies. In the spring of 2015, we hosted the conference “Reading Late Antiquity” at the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in Stockholm. We invited participants to present papers on receptions of textual or material artefacts from roughly the late third to the eighth century. Several contributions showed that the construction of “Late Antiquity” has been more significant and diffuse than one might suppose. In and of itself, this is hardly surprising. As noted by Gabrielle Spiegel when reviewing claims about the pivotal role of “the medieval” in the construction of modern colonialism: I suspect that one could find the same range of utilization and varying function in the making of modernism, colonialism and postcolonialism in material drawn from almost any field of history—the Roman Empire, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment would seem likely candidates for this.6

In a specialized volume like this it is important to remember that Late Antiquity is but one of many historical narratives and collections of artefacts influencing and being appropriated by modern cultural movements. But they all have their own properties and do not play by the same rules. In the case of Late Antiquity, there

6

Function of the Concept ‘Late Antiquity’,” Journal of Late Antiquity 1 (2008), 20–30; Arnaldo Marcone, “A Long Late Antiquity? Considerations on a Controversial Periodization,” Journal of Late Antiquity 1 (2008), 4–19. Gabrielle Spiegel, Review of Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ outside Europe, ed. Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, in Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 15 (2011), 617–625; 619.

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Introduction

are clear effects of its marginalized status in relation to its counterpart, “Classical” Antiquity. Unfolding in the shadow of the hegemonic “Classical” tradition, the culture of the late Roman Empire has tended to slip in and out of western consciousness. When we come across moments in which modern minds have identified and felt a connection with this period, it is not uncommon that this feeling can be explained as forgetfulness of the influence that Late Antiquity has exerted on the debates we are participating in. In an article from 1990, Georgia Nugent discussed similarities between Postmodern literary theory and late antique aesthetics and artistic practices. From Giardina’s perspective, this kind of reading of Late Antiquity could be seen as a typical projection of the present, making Late Antiquity into a place for historiography to stage not only contemporary ideologies and sentiments about the present but also literary aesthetics. Yet, the similarities pointed out by Nugent also depend on the forgotten and occasionally suppressed influences that thinkers and artists of the late Roman era had on several precursors and exponents of modernism and postmodernism such as Paul Verlaine, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Jacques Derrida or Edward Said, to mention just a few persons that will return in this volume. The texts, images, and histories of Late Antiquity have gained attention, often in times of crisis and change, and exercised influence only to disappear again. When later readers have turned to the same period and identified with what they perceive, they have tended to ascribe the feeling of relatedness to similar values and circumstances rather than to the formation of an unbroken tradition of appropriation. The book is divided into three sections. The first is entitled “Theoretical Outlooks” and deals with the theoretical and methodological implications of reinterpreting Late Antiquity. In his chapter “Untimely Antiquity: Walter Pater and the Vigil of Venus,” James Uden explores the theoretical potentials of the critical trope of ‘untimeliness’ based on a literary analysis of Walter Pater’s (1839–1894) novel Marius the Epicurean (1885) and the anonymous late antique poem Pervigilium Veneris. This ‘untimeliness’ not only characterizes the modern conception of Late Antiquity, Uden argues, but also anticipates the theoretical concept of anachronistic reception studies, described by Sebastian Matzner as a queer approach that resists the tendency of historicism to exaggerate “the self-identity of any given moment” and thus also “the differences between any two moments.” 7 Uden transcends the limits of late antique literature and challenges us to “embrace the idea of multiple temporalities in any literary work,” concluding that the literature of this epoch “has become a paradigm for the capacity of all literature to seem to exist outside of time, simultaneously recalling ideas from the past and the future.” The concept of anachronistic reception studies is further developed in the next chapter. With inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen 7

Sebastian Matzner, “Queer Unhistoricism: Scholars, Metalepsis, and Interventions of the Unruly Past,” in Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception, edited by Shane Butler (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 181. Cf. Uden in this volume.

Introduction

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Trauerspiels (1925), Marco Formisano attempts a new definition of late antique textuality in “Fragments, Allegory, and Anachronicity: Walter Benjamin and Claudian.” Following the concept of the “anachronic” as theorized by the art historians Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood (Anachronic Renaissance, 2010), he explores the possibility of understanding late Latin texts as bearing a transhistorical meaning that cannot be reduced to the historical context within which they were conceived, nor to their attachment to previous literary tradition, which has often been their main scholarly attraction. Instead, Formisano highlights the presence of allegory, fragmentation and ruin in late Latin texts, viewing them as “an original moment, which disturbs and disrupts rather than re-affirms historical continuity.” A similar perspective is also at work in “Late Antique Foundations of Postmodern Theory: A Critical Overview,” where Jesús Hernández Lobato explores the influence that a number of late antique intellectuals and religious thinkers have had on postmodern literary theory. Late Antiquity and postmodernism are read in the light of crises of “logocentrism”: in the first case a consequence of the insight that classical modes of communication did not suffice to fathom the truths of Christianity, in the other that of the linguistic turn. Hernández Lobato observes parallel exegetical interpretations of the non-literal taking place in the light of the experience of the impossibility of articulating one’s own self in words. The second section of the book is entitled “Decadence and Decline” and treats scholarship, literary texts, and artworks that belong to the decadentist movement in France, Italy and Austria, and historiographical works from Switzerland and Germany that shaped and developed the general concept of the declining Late Roman Empire. Late Antiquity served as a mirror for modernity which scholars and intellectuals used either to lament or celebrate the state of things. In “Decline and Renascence: Re-reading the Late Antiquity of Jacob Burckhardt,” Olof Heilo pinpoints such dynamics in Burckhardt’s (1818–1897) early work Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen (1853). Late Antiquity had lost its “sense of beauty.” This is very much how Burckhardt perceives his own time, for which he airs his contempt in disguised analogies. Heilo observes that the cultural historian describes the Renaissance in Die Renaissancekultur in Italien (1860) in a similar way as the one in which he conceptualized Late Antiquity in his earlier work, yet paradoxically he arrives at entirely different conclusions: “Polemically put, what seemed like symptoms of stagnation and decline in Constantinople have become praiseworthy examples of rejuvenation in Italy.” Heilo argues that Burckhardt’s Protestant background offers important clues to his partly contradictory notions of historical change and agency. The image of a decaying Empire flourished and was transformed into an aesthetic category in the decadentist movement, above all in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ (1848–1907) epoch-making oeuvre Against the Grain (1884). In “Reading Against the Grain: Late Latin Literature in Huysmans’ À rebours,” Scott McGill explores the library of its protagonist Des Esseintes, which includes poets of Late Antiquity such as Commodian, Ausonius, Claudian, Prudentius, and Sedulius. McGill analy-

12

Introduction

ses the different traits of decadence ascribed to this poetry—moral, linguistic, and political—and how these are reflected in contemporary characteristics of French fin-de-sièclisme. As World War I and the Russian October Revolution escalated and the atmosphere of desolation that had been spreading throughout Europe since the turn of the century instensified, Late Antiquity loomed even larger than before. Many believed that their own military conflicts and ideological disputes marked the end of the global hegemony of Europe, and they brought a cyclical interpretation of history to the fore, for which the rise and fall of Rome stood as a paradigm. In “Late Antiquity, a Gentleman Scholar and the Decline of Cultures: Oswald Spengler and Der Untergang des Abendlandes,” Stefan Rebenich discusses one of the most important and influential works of this sort, Oswald Spengler’s bestseller The Decline of the West, in which the author developed the notion of the first millenium and fitted Islam into it (1917/22; ET 1926/29). Rebenich examines Spengler’s innovative view on Late Antiquity and the Fall of the Empire in relation to crises in the light of World War I and of Otto Seeck’s notorious work Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt (1897–1920) with its inverted Darwinism, which Spengler indirectly seems to renounce. One of the writers that appear in Huysmans’ Against the Grain is the early fifth-century poet Rutilius Namatianus, who “filled the dying Empire” with his crying.8 In “Rome Post Mortem: The Many Returns of Rutilius Namatianus,” Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed traces the steps of this Gallo-Roman poet; from the pen of Edward Gibbon—who saw in Rutilius an archetypal image of the crumbling Empire, to French postrevolutionary intellectuals who perceived him as a romantic hero. Rutilius’ experiences were acutely relevant in the disasters that followed after the Napoleonic Wars, but it was in the Italian nationalist and decadentist movements that his poem had its greatest political impact. Once integrated into the fascist movement, he became the voice of the Great Roman Empire that would now come alive again within this movement. Another late antique text that greatly influenced the decadentist movement was Procopius’ Secret History, and its representation of Empress Theodora. Victorien Sardou’s interpretation is well known, but Alma Johanna Koenig’s in Der Heilige Palast (1922) is less read, even though it was a bestseller in its own time, as Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer shows in “Alma Johanna Koenig’s Der heilige Palast: The Rise and Fall of Theodora in the Belletrist of the Wiener Moderns.” This almost forgotten author was well known in the Austrian fin de siècle movement, but was deported and killed in a concentration camp during the war, and her works 8

Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1884): “Rutilius, avec ses hymnes à la gloire de Rome, ses anathèmes contre les juifs et contre les moines, son itinéraire d’Italie en Gaule, où il arrive à rendre certaines impressions de la vue, le vague des paysages reflétés dans l’eau, le mirage des vapeurs, l’envolée des brumes entourant les monts.”

Introduction

13

were banned by the Nazis. Koenig’s younger lover and publisher Oskar Alfred Tauschinksi preserved them, but it would be many years before scholarly interest in her work increased. In her first book, The Holy Palace (1922), Koenig re-writes Procopius of Caesarea’s portrayal of Empress Theodora in Secret History. In Koenig’s work, Harich-Schwarzbauer argues, a modern Theodora—in many ways a projection of the author herself—strikes back against her cruel creator. In the last essay of this section, we turn to opera and thematization of late antique religion battles in Chiara O. Tommasi’s “A Byzantine Phaedra between Paganism, Heresy and Magic: The Tragic Fate of Silvana in La Fiamma by Ottorino Respighi and Claudio Guastalla (1934).” The composer Ottorino Respighi, Tommasi argues, chose a Byzantine Italian setting because of its “languid decadence and visual preciousness” and for its ability to project a complex interaction between Christianity, asceticism, and paganism onto the early twentieth century. As Tommasi demonstrates, the stylistic register of Late Antiquity is adapted and nuanced by the musical score which implements Late Antiquity as a historical frame and as a stylistic resource in this work. Not all readings of Late Antiquity have followed the pattern of a Falling Empire and cultural decadence. In other times and in other contexts, it has been perceived as an innovative period, a beginning of a new era of literary expressions and practices worth emulating in their own right. Its particular genres—the Bible paraphrase, pilgrim narratives, and hagiographical accounts—and its literary practices—elaborate uses of typology, the copying and pasting of verses or entire passages from earlier literature, the systematic amalgamations of classical pagan and biblical literature—all are features that inspired medieval prose and poetry in both the East and West. In the concluding section of this book, “Continuities and Transformations,” the chapters deal with literary texts and traditions in which late antique models are used as sources for imitation, appropriation, and rewriting. In his chapter “Versifications of the Book of Jonah: Late Antique to Late Medieval,” Ad Putter illustrates the extraordinary consistency from late classical to late medieval Biblical paraphrases of the narrative of Jonah and the whale, represented in the Carmen de Jona (once attributed to Tertullian), Prudentius’ Cathemerinon, Marbod of Rennes, and the Middle English poem Patience. Putter illustrates their common set of conventions; the recurrence of the same extra-Biblical details, assimilation of the Bible to classical epic, and their similar expressions of pathos. He also discusses how these features are reconciled with the comic potentials of the story, a factor that also gives a sense of how light-heartedly medieval poets were inclined to inscribe themselves in the late antique tradition. Turning East in the chapter “Literary mimesis and the Late Antique layer in John Doukas’ (or Phokas’) Description of Palestine,” David Westberg guides us through late antique and Byzantine mimetic conventions, exploring the reception of the orations of the rhetorician Chorikios (sixth century) by the twelfth-century author John Phokas in his narrative of a pilgrimage. Westberg concludes that Phokas not only found his dominating model in Chorikios, but that he even took pains

14

Introduction

to accentuate this in his text. Phokas’ literary use of his predecessor provides the ground for Westberg’s exploration into the techniques of visualizing discourse and further into a discussion on current notions of literary emulation, borrowing and theft. The theme of literary thievery forms a central element in Helena Bodin’s chapter “‘I Sank through the Centuries’: Late Antiquity Inscribed in Göran Tunström’s Novel The Thief.” This novel by the Swedish author Göran Tunström (1937– 2000), written in 1986, is set in provincial Swedish Sunne (twentieth century) and in sixth-century Ravenna. The Gothic Codex Argenteus—and attempts to steal it—plays a central role in this novel, as does textual and medial materiality, foregrounded in digressions on parchment, ink, and letters. Tunström integrates late ancient writing practices into his plot, and frequently alludes to the literature of the period, not least by inserting and framing the narrative with long quotations from Procopius’ The Gothic War. In the last chapter of the section and of the book, “Mundus totus exsilium est: On Being Out of Place,” we come one step closer to the twenty-first century in Catherine Conybeare’s exploration of the relevance of Augustine’s Confessions to Edward Said’s autobiographical project Out of Place: A Memoir (1999). Many of the themes and the articulation of episodes concerning significant figures have parallels in the Confessions, yet explicit references to Augustine are almost completely absent from Said’s work. Conybeare suggests reasons why Said might have preferred not to make the debt to Augustine explicit. The reasons are grounded in the complex intercultural histories and sophisticated theoretical positions of both authors, yet they share the feeling of displacement. This volume and the preceding conference were made possible by generous grants from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, and the Sven and Dagmar Salén Foundation. For many improvements we are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers.

I THEORETICAL OUTLOOKS

James Uden

Untimely Antiquity: Walter Pater and the “Vigil of Venus”*

When we read Late Antiquity, we wrestle with a problem of time. The period is defined by the chronological condition of coming after the classical. No matter the innovations of individual authors, our periodization still casts Greek and Latin authors from the third to sixth centuries as epigones, latecomers to ancient culture. Equally familiar, though, is a more paradoxical rhetoric of Late Antiquity as a period forever “in-between,” whose meaning is always deferred, never settled in its own chronological space, always recalling the classical or anticipating the medieval.1 This is the “untimeliness” of the late antique—another critical trope, to be sure, but one with intriguing historical and theoretical implications of its own. Late antique literature might be said to be untimely in any number of ways: in a belated fidelity to classical models that elides the passage of intervening centuries; in the development of allegorical modes of reading that subvert chronology to find Christian ideas anticipated in earlier works; in philosophical elaborations of the capacity of God to exist beyond human temporality.2 Here my focus is on the use of this notion of untimeliness by a nineteenth-century critic highly sensitive to how our perception of time shapes our impressions of a work of literature. The aesthetic model of reading late Latin and Greek texts demonstrated by the Oxford literary figure Walter Pater in his novel Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (1885) positively embraces the untimeliness of Late Antiquity as a way of combating its contemporary associations with decadence and decline. In his work, late Latin and Greek literary texts become paradigms for the capacity of all litera*

1

2

My warm thanks to Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed and Mats Malm for inviting me to speak at the Reading Late Antiquity conference in Stockholm, to Tobias Myers for discussing my ideas with me as I was writing, and to Daniel Libatique and Kevin Ohi for thoughtful comments on this chapter. Marco Formisano remarks that “Late antiquity is a period characterized by the very difficulty of finding a name for it…it exists somehow in between…”: “Reading Décadence—Reception and the Subaltern Late Antiquity,” in M. Formisano et al., Décadence: “Decline and Fall” or “Other Antiquity”? (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014), 8, italics original. “In the unspeakable beginning, the Word was timeless, unreachable,” begins Nonnus’ late antique paraphrase of the Gospel of John (ἄχρονος ἦν, ἀκίχητος, ἐν ἀρρήτῳ λόγος ἀρχῇ). On Augustine and time, see Andrea Nightingale, Once Out of Nature: Augustine on Time and the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2011).

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ture to seem to exist outside of time, simultaneously recalling ideas from the past and the future. By examining Pater’s vision of untimely antiquity, we recapture an important moment in the nineteenth-century reception of the late antique and explore the historical and theoretical implications of a critical trope that still shapes our analyses of late Latin and Greek literature. Marius the Epicurean is Pater’s only completed novel. It is set in the Roman Empire of the second century, and Marcus Aurelius, Apuleius, Lucian, Fronto, Aelius Aristides, and Galen all appear as characters. The liminal aspects of the age are projected by Pater as a spiritual condition. The young hero, Marius, vacillates between worlds: he is drawn first to Epicureanism (or Cyrenaicism) and invests his faith in experience, before being increasingly drawn to Christianity, which he understands as the dawn of a new, transcendent system of values. The second-century setting is deliberate and detailed, indebted to a nineteenth-century fascination with the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius and his milieu.3 Yet one of the novel’s most striking characteristics is the narrator’s constant breaks with this temporal frame. A connoisseur not only of artworks but of eras, Pater is forever appraising his characters’ philosophies and ideas by reference to subsequent writers and movements, likening Roman elegy to Wordsworth, Apuleius’ style to sixteenth-century “Euphuism,” Heraclitean philosophy to Goethe’s Faust.4 In James Porter’s words, the world of Marius the Epicurean “knows no single temporality because it is made up of plural temporalities. It is not a simple past because it is composed of several pasts that are superimposed one upon the other…” 5 Sebastian Matzner has recently argued for the value of anachronism as a way of resisting the tendency of historicism to exaggerate “the self-identity of any given moment,” and therefore “the differences between any two moments.” In so far as anachronism disrupts the historical assumptions of “straight” Classics, Matzner argues that this could constitute a distinctively queer mode of studying classical

3

4

5

On this fascination, see John Coates, “Renan and Pater’s Marius the Epicurean,” Comparative Literature Studies 37 (2000), 402–423; Daniel Orrells, “Roman Receptions/ Receptions of Rome: Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean,” in Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities, edited by Jennifer Ingleheart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 136–137. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2008 [1885]), 8, 61–65, 87. On the importance of Romanticism for Marius, see especially Stefano Evangelista, “Rome and the Romantic Heritage in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean,” in Romans and Romantics, edited by Timothy Saunders et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 305–326. James Porter,“Learning from Pater,” Classical Receptions Journal 5 (2013), 220. On Pater’s “aesthetic” vision of history, see the influential work of Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

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reception.6 The deliberate disruptions of chronology in Marius the Epicurean in many ways foreshadow this approach. Pater forges an idiosyncratic community of writers and periods otherwise stranded by separations of time. In one important scene, Pater imagines the composition of the Latin poem, the Pervigilium Veneris (“Vigil of Venus”). Pater’s heterochronic vision finds a particularly apposite object of study in the Pervigilium, an anonymous text that had itself long been regarded as strangely out of time.7 As the only extant example of an extended hymn in its meter (trochaic septenarii), the “Vigil” is notoriously difficult to place in any ancient context. Editors vary widely in their reconstruction of the text, particularly with regard to the frequency and placement of its memorable refrain (cras amet qui numquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet!, “tomorrow let him love who has never loved; he who has loved, tomorrow let him love!”). The echoes of earlier verse in the Pervigilium Veneris, particularly Lucretius, Catullus, and Ovid, look back to Classical Latin poetry. But critics typically claim that the poem also anticipates any number of future styles and periods: accentual verse, the Middle Ages, the troubadours. Ezra Pound likened its stylistic prescience to jazz.8 The first 88 lines are a hymn to the power of Venus, the return of spring, and Venus’ role in Roman history. In the final section, the poet’s own voice abruptly emerges, lamenting his exclusion: She sings; I am silent. When is my spring coming? | When will I become like the swallow, and cease my silence? | I have destroyed my Muse through silence, and Apollo pays me no heed. In this way silence destroyed Amyclae, since it did not speak.9 illa cantat: nos tacemus. quando ver venit meum? quando fiam uti chelidon, ut tacere desinam? 6

7

8

9

Sebastian Matzner “Queer Unhistoricism: Scholars, Metalepsis, and Interventions of the Unruly Past,” in Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception, edited by Shane Butler (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 181. Cf. Formisano in this volume. On the Pervigilium and Pater there is (to my knowledge) only a short and summary-heavy article by Domenico Romano, “La Genesi ed il significato del ‘Pervigilium Veneris’ nella interpretazione di Walter Pater,” Ann. Lic. Garibaldi Palermo 11–13 (1974–1976) 289–295. The Spirit of Romance, revised edition (New York: New Directions, 1952 [1929]), 18– 19: “…the metric of the Pervigilium probably indicated as great a change in sensibility in its day as the change from Viennese waltzes to jazz may indicate in our own.” Text of G.P. Goold in F.W. Cornish et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Two ancient cities called Amyclae—one in the Peloponnese near Sparta, and the other near Caieta in Latium—had the same anecdote applied to them. Frustrated by repeated false reports of an approaching enemy, Amyclae passed a law that made it illegal to mention the subject, but when an enemy did approach, this self-imposed silence led to their destruction (Serv. ad Aen. 10.564).

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James Uden perdidi Musam tacendo, nec me Phoebus respicit: sic Amyclas, cum tacerent, perdidit silentium. (Perv. Ven. 89–93).

The sudden emphasis on destruction rather than rebirth, and the urgency of the plangent personal voice, come as a surprise. It is as if the poet is interrupting himself, or even beginning to speak for the first time.10 The joy of the rest of the poem seems suddenly like a dream, or a deceit, or even a “trap” into which unsuspecting readers can fall.11 Only in the famous final stanza of Catullus 51, when the translation of Sappho is interrupted by the poet berating himself for his indulgent “leisure” (otium), is there a more startling emergence of the personal voice in Roman poetry; and indeed the abrupt allusion to the destruction of Amyclae at the end of the Pervigilium Veneris may well have been prompted by the melancholy last line of Catullus 51.12 Perdidit urbes—leisure “destroyed cities,” Catullus wrote (51.16). Our volume is called Reading Late Antiquity. Is this poem, by our standards, “late antique”? One solution to the dating controversy ascribes the Pervigilium Veneris to Tiberianus, the late third/early fourth-century Platonist and poet, who falls squarely within our chronological parameters for Late Antiquity.13 In the nineteenth century, the case for Tiberianus’ authorship had already been made by the noted German philologist Emil Baehrens.14 But readers of Pater’s day, if they dated the poem at all, were more likely to consider it a product of the second century, either as the work of the Hadrianic author Florus or some other anonymous poet of this period. The note attached to an anonymous translation of the poem in All the Year Round (December 5, 1868), a periodical edited by Charles Dickens, reads: Certainly, whatever be the period which produced the Pervigilium Veneris, it would seem to have been the period of literary decadence, such as the age of Hadrian. That which has tempted [sic] to a paraphrase of this little poem is the essentially modern character of it.

The age of Hadrian is not now considered “late antique,” and yet the rhetoric used in the periodical to describe the Pervigilium Veneris will be instantly familiar to 10

11 12

13

14

Laurence Catlow has argued for a female author, suggesting that the poem “betokens… the feelings and imaginative response” of a female poet: Pervigilium Veneris (Brussels: Latomus, 1980), 25. I leave the question open. Andrea Cucchiarelli, La veglia di Venere (Milan: BUR, 2003), 7. So Scevola Mariotti, “Catullo nella chiusa del Pervigilium Veneris,” in Hommages à R. Schilling, edited by Hubert Zehnacker et al. (Paris: Société d’édition Les Belles Lettres, 1983). Alan Cameron, “The Pervigilium Veneris,” Atti del V Corso della Scuola Superiore di Archeologia e Civiltà Medievali (Messina: Centro di Studi Umanistici, 1984), 224. Unedirte lateinische Gedichte (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1877), 36–37.

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scholars of late antique literature. The poem occupies a typically liminal space: both late and early, decadent and modern. Influenced specifically by Charles Thomas Cruttwell’s popular History of Roman Literature (1877, six editions by 1898), Pater similarly imagined the poem as a product of the second century.15 He casts the poem as late and artificial, oppressed by the “burden of precedent,” but also prophetic in its style, offering a “foretaste” of romantic beauty in the medieval world and beyond. How might individual literary works—and, by extension, entire periods—embody within them different temporalities? If the second-century world depicted by Marius the Epicurean is not chronologically late antique as we would define it, Pater’s reading of the Pervigilium Veneris nonetheless offers a powerful consideration of the aesthetic and philosophical implications of literary lateness, and a response to the nineteenth-century narrative of Roman decadence that played such a formative historical role in studies of Late Antiquity. The Shadowy Pervigilium Veneris Pater makes the Pervigilium Veneris into the work of a dying man. Pater imagines its poet, Flavian, afflicted with the Antonine plague, although suggestions of spiritual corruption earlier in the novel carry the lingering implication of venereal disease. These associations of death and decay are juxtaposed surprisingly by Pater with the overt themes of the “Vigil of Venus,” the main section of which celebrates the arrival of spring, the participation of all nature in cycles of rebirth, and the power of erotic love to create and regenerate life. But although the Pervigilium has tended to be rather blandly categorized as a celebratory paean to Venus, other themes—the silence of the poet, voices suppressed and struggling to be heard, the destructive capacities of erotic love—run as a sort of darker counterpoint to the central narrative. In a curious aside in Marius, Pater wonders if the Romans had a word for “unworldly,” and decides that the closest approximation to it is the Latin word umbratilis: “secluded,” but literally “shadowy.” 16 Not just in the abrupt and surprising conclusion, there is a shadowiness to the “Vigil of Venus,” a poem at once hymn and lament. The Pervigilium as a whole is pervaded by a sense of the singer’s exclusion from the exuberant world of Venus he is describing. The central problem is time: the first-person character of the silenced singer is consistently presented as both too early and too late to enjoy a full share of the joys being described. The surrounding world is repeatedly described in terms of human eroticism, in an al15

16

Charles Thomas Cruttwell, History of Roman Literature (London: Charles Griffin, 1877), 469. Brasenose College Library records show that Pater borrowed the book in May 1881: Billie Andrew Inman, Walter Pater and his Reading, 1874–1877 (Garland: New York, 1990), 445. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 21.

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most psychedelic vision of a personified world animated by eros. Birds “marry” (nubunt, 3). Each bull is “held by a conjugal bond” (tenetur coniugali foedere, 82), and sheep lie with their “husbands” (maritis, 83). “Marital rain showers” make the wood “loosen its hair” (nemus comam resolvit de maritis imbribus, 4). “Pleasure fertilizes the fields; the fields feel Venus” (rura fecundat voluptas, rura Venerem sentiunt, 76). Sexual deflowering awaits actual flowers: “purple blossoms have laid aside their modesty” (pudorem florulentae prodiderunt purpurae, 19), and the wetness of dew loosens their “virgin rosebuds” (virgineas papillas; papillae also means “nipples,” 21). In the morning they too are ordered to marry (ipsa iussit… virgines nubant rosae, 22). The celebration of Venus makes explicit the sexual overtones already latent in the characteristic motifs of spring description: surging, swelling, opening. Crucially, though, these actions are all described in the present or the perfect tense. They are actions ongoing or just completed. Latin spring poetry tends to manifest an excited insistence on the present: Catullus’ spring poem repeats the word “now” (iam) four times in eight lines, and the even more ecstatic description of spring in Columella’s poetic section of the De Re Rustica repeats the words nunc and iam eight times in ten lines.17 Catullus’ wedding songs (poems 61 and 62), to which the Pervigilium is also indebted, also summon a sense of action in the present (“come forth, new bride, if you are ready now…now you may come, husband”).18 The Pervigilium Veneris, however, contrasts the present romance of the natural world with the love between people, which is always referred to in the future. “Tomorrow (cras), let him love who has never loved,” says the repeated refrain; “he who has loved, tomorrow (cras) let him love.” Clearly there is a kind of universality in the line’s inclusion of those who have loved in the past and those who have not, but there is a powerful temporal disjunction in the poem between the ongoing, tumultuous eroticism of nature in the present, and the refrain’s promise of personal love in the future. The constant repetition of cras (“tomorrow”) brings an awareness of time to the surface of the text, suspending us in anticipation while we watch the erotic spectacle ongoing around us. This anticipation throughout the Pervigilium hints constantly at the alienation that will be expressed openly and powerfully at the poem’s end. The hope of love tomorrow is also an insistent, eternal, postponement of happiness. A different kind of temporal problem is suggested by the poem’s relationship with the long tradition of Latin spring poetry. In Marius the Epicurean, Pater imagines Flavian, in the process of writing the poem, wrestling in “self-torment” with the “burden of precedent.” In the late Latin literary world, he fears that there can be “no place left for novelty or originality; place only for a patient, an infinite,

17

18

Cat. 46.1–8; Colum. 10.196–206. For other examples, Cucchiarelli, La veglia di Venere, 89. Cat. 61.92–93 (prodeas nova nupta si/ iam videtur); 184 (iam licet venias, marite).

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faultlessness.” 19 Spring is a beginning of new life, and often of new poetry. It is not coincidental that Lucretius’ hymn to Venus and celebration of spring begins his work, given the association of spring and Venus with beginnings. The problem is that, although the subject matter is synonymous with newness, descriptions of spring and its effect on the natural world are among the most familiar of Latin poetic topoi. How is one sufficiently to represent newness on a theme so poetically old? The very opening line of the poem seeks to establish a place for the poet. He declares: ver novum, ver iam canorum; vere natus orbis est (“Spring is new, spring is now full of song; in spring the world was born”). The line places him immediately in a series of poems in which the incantatory repetition of the word ver (“spring”) is a binding motif. Virgil writes: ver adeo frondi nemorum, ver utile silvis/ vere tument terrae et genitalia semina poscunt, with the same pattern of cases (ver…ver…vere).20 Ovid echoes, with minor variation: nec Veneri tempus quam ver erat aptius ullum: vere nitent terrae, vere remissus ager.21 Even as they celebrate fresh beginnings, each is a reiteration—a version—of a shared technique. Varro, we might note, derives the word ver from vertere, “to turn”/ “to transform”/ “to translate.” 22 Thus, when the poet of the Pervigilium Veneris stresses that “spring is new” (ver novum), the poet simultaneously signals a repeating tradition and attempts to make a place for this work. Although the adjective canorus primarily refers to birdsong, it is tempting to hear in the phrase ver iam canorum a metapoetic reference to the intertextual saturation of the tradition; “spring is now,” or perhaps “already” (iam), “full of song.” Ezra Pound translates: “A new spring, already a spring of songsters/ Spring is born again to the world.” 23 Quando ver venit meum?, the singer will ask at the end of the poem—“when will my spring come?” When one rereads the Pervigilium Veneris after experiencing the final lament, the voice of the poet seems, in the give-and-take between allusion and innovation, to have been negotiating with tradition and struggling for audibility all along. The personal voice must therefore contend with voices from the past, the poetic tradition of those whose spring has come and gone before him. His silence is also contrasted implicitly against the ongoing sound of nature itself. In the Pervigilium Veneris, the present buzz of natural processes in the spring is repeatedly imagined as the result of speech. Everything else in this world has a voice. The words of Venus have a generative force: Venus “will speak” (dicet, 50) the laws of nature. Birds are “full of song” (canoras…alites), and that is because of the 19 20

21

22 23

Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 66. Georg. 2.323–324: “So useful is spring to the forest foliage; so useful is spring to the woods;/ in spring the ground swells and demands life-giving seed.” Fast. 4.125–126: “Nor is any season more suited for Venus than the spring:/ in spring the ground glistens, in spring the soil is made soft.” De Ling. Lat. 6.9. Pound, The Spirit of Romance, 19.

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“order” of Venus (iussit, 84). The earth’s renewal in spring is presented in terms of artistic invention: Venus “paints” the year purple (pingit, 12); the father “creates” the whole world anew with spring rainclouds (crearet, 60). Most explicitly, at lines 45–47, the poet expresses the wish of Venus that “neither Ceres nor Bacchus nor the god of poets is absent. The entire night must be lengthened, must be spent in song.” 24 One naturally thinks of this song—and yet, before nos tacemus in line 89, there is only one first-person verb in the entire poem (rogamus, 38), which editors punctuate as Venus’ direct speech. The Pervigilium Veneris never foregrounds the poet’s own voice as many Latin hymns and prayers do (“we praise,” “we sing,” “we request”). While the voices of the natural world around him are present and ongoing, he is silent, out of time. The evocation of a natural world constantly engaged in song and speech and creation serves all throughout the Pervigilium Veneris to accentuate, by contrast, the silence of the personal voice of the singer himself. In Marius the Epicurean, when Pater describes Marius reading the Pervigilium Veneris for the first time, he experiences an uncanny sense of time out of order: The impression thus forced upon Marius connected itself with a feeling, the precise inverse of that, known to everyone which seems to say—You have been just here, just thus, before!—a feeling in his case not reminiscent but prescient, which passed over him many times afterwards, coming across certain people and places; as if he detected there the process of actual change to a wholly undreamed of and renewed condition of human body and soul.25

The vertigo of intertextuality, that dizzying sense of speeding back and forth through literary time, is projected on to the experience of Marius himself. On a first-time reading of the Pervigilium Veneris, he feels a paradoxical forward-looking sense of déjà vu, as he senses, impossibly, transformations that are yet to come in aesthetic and religious history. This untimeliness finds an especial resonance in the “Vigil” itself, which describes the tragic silence of the human singer and his exclusion from natural cycles of rebirth. If Pater imagines Marius briefly outside of human time in feeling the frisson of futurity, the “Vigil of Venus” depicts the alienating dislocation between human and natural time, the ruthless unidirectionality of an individual’s life amid a world that regularly starts itself all over again. When will our spring come? “Suffering is one very long moment,” wrote Oscar Wilde. “We cannot divide it by seasons.” 26

24

25 26

Perv. Ven. 45–46: nec Ceres nec Bacchus absunt, nec poetarum deus./ detinenda tota nox est, pervigilanda canticis. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 75. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 2: De Profundis; Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, edited by Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 [1905]), 159.

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Reading Lateness with Pater In Marius the Epicurean, Pater gives Flavian a short life intensely lived. Flavian’s imprint on the sensitive young Marius is described in terms of an incorporeal world that briefly feels a body temperature. A “shadow, handling all things as shadows,” writes Pater, “had felt a sudden real and poignant heat in them.” 27 Flavian is a passionate youth with a devotion to beauty and art very much like that of the students in fin-de-siècle Oxford whose commitment to aestheticism was stirred by Pater’s own work.28 Pater reconstructs the process of writing his final, great poem—the “Vigil of Venus”—in detail across two chapters of the novel, using fiction to fill in the gaps of conventional classical scholarship. Pater accounts for the popular associations of the meter by supposing the refrain “a snatch from a popular chorus, something he had heard sounding all over the town of Pisa one April night,” and describes the boys’ experience of a ritual to Isis, which, it is implied, Flavian transforms imaginatively into the poetic ritual to Venus.29 The open eroticism of the ancient text, so foreign to Pater’s sensibilities, is not ignored, but remains tantalizingly implicit in the bond between the poet and his friend. A certain horror of sexuality is part of Marius’ personality: a lasting trauma of his youth was seeing snakes mating, which was “like a peep into the lower side of the real world” and robbed him for days of the pleasures of food and sleep.30 Yet Flavian’s poem makes sexuality pleasing and acceptable to him, even for a short time. He praises the Pervigilium as a mystic nuptial hymn that celebrates the “mating together” of “all fresh things, in the hot and genial spring time,” and even cites some bawdy lines in the poem about Cupid’s being “armed” when naked.31 Irresistibly, the eroticism of the ancient text colors the description of the relationship between Marius and Flavian, a boy described from the first in terms of the natural world (he “carried on the expression of the austere light, and the clear song of the blackbird,” and “changed much with the changes of the passing light and shade about him”).32 The intense experience of the poem’s composition, with Marius acting as both amanuensis and nurse, is charged with erotic suggestions of the boys’ own spiritual union. True to the Pervigilium’s own themes, though, potential human eroticism will be interrupted and forced into silence. Flavian composes the “Vigil” on his deathbed. Pater imagines the poem’s famous refrain being sung by “strong, young men” outside Flavian’s window, and its irregular repetition in the poem as imagined as a periodic interruption of the po27 28

29 30 31 32

Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 38. Flavian is “a brilliant youth who loved dress, and dainty foods, and flowers,” who cultivated a “foppery of words”: Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 36–37. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 65. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 19. Perv. Ven. 31–35 (= Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 74). Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 36.

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et’s feverish thoughts.33 The vagaries of the poem’s transmission are projected by Pater as the result of the poet himself fading in and out of consciousness. Flavian attempts to “fashion out, without formal dictation, still a few more broken verses of his unfinished work, in hard-set determination, defiant of pain, to arrest this or that little drop at least, from the river of sensuous imagery rushing so quickly past him.” 34 As Marius assists with writing his ostensibly exuberant Latin hymn, he is haunted by a premonition of disaster, “some shadowy adversary in the dark.” 35 The most striking omission in Pater’s account is any explicit reference to the memorable final lines, in which the poet’s voice emerges and laments the destruction of his Muse. In Pater’s retelling, though, the account of Flavian’s last hours assumes the structural place of this final passage. He literalizes the silence of the personal voice in a description of Flavian’s death. The narrative of the Pervigilium Veneris in Marius the Epicurean is, in Pater’s quiet way, a provocation. First, the imaginative and openly fictionalizing description of the poem’s composition is a subtle kind of rebellion against the premises of contemporary, conservative philology. The poem’s many uncertainties had attracted particular scholarly attention in the nineteenth century. As well as Emil Baehrens, other leading figures of nineteenth-century German classical scholarship (Franz Buecheler, Otto Ribbeck, Alexander Riese) had edited and commented on the text.36 The conjectures of the famous humanist Joseph Scaliger and his solution to the perennial dating question—“if I surmise correctly, after Constantine”—were discovered and published by the librarian of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in the same year as Marius the Epicurean.37 Pater’s approach, of course, is different. He puckishly solves the key scholarly problem, the date and origin of the Pervigilium Veneris, not through an application of “scientific” methods of philology but through an open exercise of authorial imagination. Moreover, if Marius is, as Stefano Evangelista writes, “not so much a historical novel as a novel about historiography,” Pater’s description of the poem implicitly highlights the degree to which all such judgments on literary history depend on a personal act of creative reconstruction, a conjuring of the tendencies and character of a particular author or period.38 In an evocative recent treatment, Kevin Ohi 33 34 35 36

37

38

Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 75. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 77. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 76. Cf. Franz Buecheler, Pervigilium Veneris (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1859), who tentatively decides upon a second- or third-century date (at page 51); Otto Ribbeck, “Zum Pervigilium Veneris,” Rheinisches Museum 14 (1859), 324–325; Alexander Riese, Anthologia Latina sive poesis Latinae supplementum, vol. 1 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1869), 144–148. H. Omont, “Sur le ‘Pervigilium Veneris’: Conjectures de Joseph Scaliger,” Revue de Philologie, de Littérature et d’Histoire Anciennes 9 (1885), 126. Stefano Evangelista, “Rome and the Romantic Heritage in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean,” 314.

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has demonstrated that Pater was repeatedly drawn to artifacts from antiquity that required reconstruction because they were obscure, fragmentary, or lost. When Pater fills in the gaps of knowledge in these objects, he meditates “on historical transmission and all that escapes it,” illustrating the partial nature of all extant knowledge of the past.39 So too is Pater drawn to the uncertainties regarding the context and transmission of the Pervigilium Veneris, a text out of time in both its critical estimation and its own themes. Pater’s fictionalizing solution to the scholarly mysteries of the “Vigil” highlights the role of the critical imagination in any reconstruction of the past. He makes explicit the acts of creative imagination that a more conservative kind of classical scholarship typically disavows. Second, Pater’s reading challenges any simple notion of time in the work. The poet’s age is described in Marius the Epicurean as one of “fastidious self-correction” and “voluntary archaism,” and yet it looks forward—in a typically time-bending analogy—to “something like the Neu-zeit of the German enthusiasts at the beginning of our own century.” 40 The mythological references in the poem, “coming at so late a day, had still a wonderful freshness in its old age.” 41 Marius calls it “one of the latest but not the poorest specimens of genuine Latin poetry,” yet at the same time Flavian’s writing appeared “like the foretaste of an entirely novel world of poetic beauty to come,” anticipating: …new laws of taste as regards sound…something of the rhyming cadence, the sonorous organ-music of the medieval Latin, and therewithal something of its unction and mysticity of spirit. There was in his work, along with the last splendor of the classical language, a touch, almost prophetic, of that transformed life it was to have in the rhyming middle age, just about to dawn.42

The Pervigilium is paradigmatically late antique not because of when it was written, but precisely because of its untimeliness. It is a work that looks both forward and back, in between, out of time. Even more explicitly, Pater unsettles the very aesthetic category of poetic lateness. “Were all ages, even those earliest adventurous, matutinal days, in themselves equally poetical and unpoetical…?”, Pater asks. “Had Homer, even, appeared unreal and affected in his poetic flight, to some of the people of his day; as seemed to happen with every new literature in turn?” 43 As Ohi puts it, originary “freshness” is itself, in Pater’s vision, an “illusion born of belatedness.” 44 We are all bound by what Pater calls the “enchanted-distance 39

40 41 42 43 44

Kevin Ohi, Dead Letters Sent: Queer Literary Transmission (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 83. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 35. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 74. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 74–75. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 67. Ohi, Dead Letters Sent, 83.

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fallacy” to consider earlier ages ideal against the “languor” of our own time. But which literature is fresh and which is exhausted? Such judgments are, ultimately, a trick of time. The contradictory references to the earliness and lateness of the Pervigilium Veneris mark an important difference between Pater and the contemporary, largely French or Francophile, critical discourse that embraced décadence as an artistic credo and adopted late Latin literature as a mirror of its own stylistic preoccupations.45 Pater’s lack of sympathy with this approach is clear in his treatment of a book that Marius and Flavian furtively read in an earlier chapter, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. The Metamorphoses is a particular favorite of Des Esseintes, the central character of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ influential À rebours (1884), which was an epitome of French decadent style and a bible for later aesthetes. Des Esseintes is attracted to Apuleius’ stylistic impurities. He says that the work is “bizarre” and “exotic,” full of the pollution of the provinces, salted with the salacious exuberance of Apuleius himself. He was an author, Des Esseintes decides, who must have been fat.46 This appreciative vision of Apuleian excess is simply an inversion of the typical detractions made by classicizing critics in the nineteenth century. Eduard Norden, for example, complained about the depravity of Apuleius’ style in Die antike Kunstprosa (1898), accusing him of prostituting the Latin language.47 Pater does teasingly allude in Marius the Epicurean to the contemporary “decadent” appeal of the Metamorphoses. He shows Marius and Flavian discovering the work, bound in a “yellow wrapper,” like the yellow covers of imported French paperbacks in the late nineteenth century.48 The cover called out “Flaviane! Flaviane!”, summoning Flavian while punning on Latin flavus, “yellow.” 49 The book is a tawdry mistress, covered in perfume; a sentence in the novel written about an

45

46 47

48

49

See Marie-France David, Antiquité latine et décadence (Paris: Champion, 2001), as well as Scott McGill in this volume and James Uden, “Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Visions of Late Antique Literature,” in A Companion to Late Antique Literature, edited by Scott McGill & Edward Watts (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming). Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (London: Penguin, 2003 [1884]), 31. Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa ii.600–601, cited in Stephen J. Harrison, Framing the Ass: Literary Texture in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 23: “The Roman language, a serious and worthy matron, has become a prostitute; the language of the brothel has stripped away her chastity” (Die römische Sprache, die ernste würdige Matrone, ist zum prostibulum geworden, die Sprache des lupanar hat ihre castitas ausgezogen) (trans. Harrison). Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 39. Later, in the 1890s, the scandalous “yellow book” in the narrative of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) was commonly identified with Huysmans’ À rebours, and The Yellow Book (1894–1897) was the pre-eminent periodical for the English decadent movement. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 39.

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elaborately adorned female character Pater applies to the work as a whole.50 Pater even says that sections of the novel sink to the level of “what the French writers call the macabre,” and one passage is “worthy of Théophile Gautier.” 51 Yet Pater also challenges any simplistic association of Apuleius with fashionable langueur. The Metamorphoses was a work “fresh in the world,” he says. It was a work of intense, immediate experience, in which one could almost “see and handle” the “fresh flowers.” 52 Its influence inspires Flavian to reject and “rehabilitate” the state of contemporary Latin, and the allegorical inset story of Cupid and Psyche anticipates La vita nuova of Dante.53 These references to cultural regeneration and rebirth implicitly reject contemporary narratives associating the literature of the later Empire, whether positively or negatively, with decay and decline. Untimeliness, for Pater, is a means of liberating late works of literature: by imagining them as somehow out of time, they are freed from the deadening critical impulse to understand them only as the products of an exhausted end. In the case of the Pervigilium Veneris, the anticipatory and prophetic aspects of the poem are realized within Marius the Epicurean in the development of the plot. Later, when Marius is struck by the beauty of children singing a Christian hymn, he finds the song “so novel in its effect” that it sends him back to “those old efforts of Flavian to conceive a new poesy.” 54 Christianity, a new spring, turns out to be the renewal anticipated but not realized in the earlier poem. This new religion brings “a unique expression of freshness” to the world.55 In witnessing Christian services for the first time, Marius has another uncanny moment of forward-looking déjà vu, very much as when he first heard the Pervigilium Veneris. Pater’s slow accumulation of subordinate clauses suggests a yearning to escape the onward pull of chronological time altogether: “The reader may think perhaps, that Marius, who, Epicurean as he was, had his visionary aptitudes, by an inversion of one of Plato’s peculiarities with which he was of course familiar, must have descended, by foresight, upon a later age this his own, and anticipated the reign of Christian poetry and art under Francis of Assisi.” 56 In all his work, Pater is “fascinated by temporal maladjustment.” writes Ohi, “and his characters are often out of synch with history.” 57 In this case, the emphasis on timeliness is a deliberate rejection of a fixation on the decadence of the “Vigil” and of late Latin literature more broadly. 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

“The golden fibre in her hair, and the gold thread-work in her gown, marked her as the mistress”: Marius the Epicurean, 40 [= aurum in comis et in tunicis, ibi inflexum hic intextum, matronam profecto confitebatur, Met. 2.2]. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 42. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 38, 43. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 62, 61. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 222. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 234. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 234, italics original. Kevin Ohi, Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 35.

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Pater emphasizes the untimeliness of the late antique text, its author and reader; and in doing so he provides a model for reading all literature as potentially, resonantly, out of time. Forwards and Backwards in the “Vigil” After Pater, a series of Modernist engagements attest to the continuing interest in the Pervigilium Veneris and the abiding force of his reading of it in the early twentieth century. Ezra Pound, having written about the “Vigil” in The Spirit of Romance (first edition 1910), published a poem in Lustra (1916) entitled “Pervigilium,” a brief reimagining of the Latin poem: The gilded phaloi of the crocuses are thrusting at the spring air. Here is there naught of dead gods But a procession of festival, A procession, O Giulio Romano, Fit for your spirit to dwell in. Dione, your nights are upon us. The dew is upon the leaf. The night above us is restless.58

Human sexuality again animates the natural world; the poem was retitled “Coitus” in the American edition. But, as in the “Vigil of Venus,” the prickly eroticism of the world in spring is all frenzied, ongoing activity, while human involvement is limited to observation and anticipation. We are always poised by the poem at the wrong time, waiting for Dione’s ritual to start, the dawn to break, the sky either to settle or erupt into storm. The presence of the ghost of Giulio Romano, the renaissance painter and architect, suggests another characteristic Paterian motif: reanimation. The revival of aesthetic past is presented as the uncanny conjuring of the dead.59 As an additional influence, Pound surely also knew a section of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), similarly entitled “Prufrock’s Pervigilium,” which Eliot drafted but ultimately removed from the published version.60 In this poem, which depicts a night scene in a red-light district, the spontaneous explosion of sexuality in the Latin text is transposed to sordid, shadowy city streets. The smoke rising, the gas-jet flickering, the oil-cloth curling—the appa58 59 60

Ezra Pound, Lustra (New York: Haskell House, 1973 [1916]), 46. Ohi, Innocence and Rapture, 42–50. T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, edited by Christopher Ricks (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 43–44.

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ratus of urban existence acquires the life and movement of natural processes. It is a self-consciously modernized vision of the sexuality of the Pervigilium Veneris. The editor of Eliot’s poem, Christopher Ricks, argues that Pater’s scene of Flavian falling sick while composing the “Vigil of Venus” indelibly associated the poem with disease, and particularly venereal disease, and Eliot has been influenced by this connection in “Prufrock’s Pervigilium.” When dawn does arrive in Eliot’s poetic fragment, it turns “with a sense of nausea, to see what it had stirred.” 61 Certainly the most famous Modernist engagement with the Pervigilium Veneris is “The Waste Land” (1922), a despairingly modern sort of spring poem. No one source dominates a work as complex as “The Waste Land,” but the Pervigilium resonates strongly with Eliot’s own concerns with history, violence, and the vulnerability of the individual voice. A recurrent figure in “The Waste Land” is Philomela (“by the barbarous king/ So rudely forced,” 99–100). Her voice, unlike her body, may be “inviolable,” but her birdsong—the record of her suffering—is incomprehensible (“still she cried…‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears,” 103).62 At the end of the poem, Eliot quotes directly from the emergence of the poet’s voice at the end of the Pervigilium Veneris, but even that eloquent cry has been reduced to babble. From the Latin’s quando fiam uti chelidon, ut tacere desinam? (“when will I become like the swallow, and cease my silence?”), Eliot writes “quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow” (429). Eliot’s change in the second half of the line dramatizes the struggle from voicelessness to sound, the pun on “swallow” evoking the physical effort to speak. There is no overt reference in “The Waste Land” to the original memorable refrain of the Pervigilium Veneris, “tomorrow let him love who has never loved; he who has loved, tomorrow let him love.” Yet Eliot’s poem does have its own urgent, repeated refrain: HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME, repeated five times in the second section of the poem.63 Given the pervasive echoes of the Pervigilium Veneris elsewhere, I wonder whether this could not be a reply to the ancient cras amet. The Latin poem’s postponement of happiness is replaced with the frustrated, and paradigmatically modern, plea for personal fulfillment now. In reading Late Antiquity with Pater, our challenge is not the familiar one of taking late antique literature on its own terms. It is not to place late works in a specific historical and aesthetic context, in order to free them from a critical narrative of devolution from classical models—important though that still may be. Rather, 61 62

63

Inventions of the March Hare, 43; Ricks’ commentary at 178. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997 [1922]), 8. Eliot gives both Ovid and the Pervigilium Veneris as his source in his notes (29, 36), although Swinburne’s “Itylus” is an important allusive intermediary. On the “The Waste Land” and the Pervigilium Veneris, see A. David Moody, Tracing T. S. Eliot’s Spirit: Essays on his Poetry and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 85–111; Sarah Cole, At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 75–80. Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 141, 152, 165, 168, 169.

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the challenge is to embrace the idea of multiple temporalities in any literary work, the way literary texts always seem to look both backwards and forwards, always both early and late. Aesthetic appreciation in the Paterian mode involves precisely articulating those aspects of art or literature that seem to defy history and leap across chronological gulfs as a foretaste of worlds to come. As an interpretation of Late Antiquity—or, rather, a radical broadening of the notion of lateness to capture the condition of virtually all art—Marius the Epicurean offers a particularly thoughtful early instance of a rhetoric that is still with us. The untimeliness of late antique literature, defined by its position between the classical and medieval, is all too familiar as a critical trope. Late Latin and Greek authors are still forced in many treatments forever to recall the past or foreshadow the future. For Pater, though, this quality of later literature is paradigmatic of a broader philosophical point about the ability of texts to form a bridge between eras, in a way excluded from even their human authors. The poet’s voice always cedes to silence. The words flout time.

marco Formisano

Fragments, Allegory, and Anachronicity: Walter Benjamin and Claudian Overcoming the concept of progress and overcoming the concept of decadence are two sides of the same coin. — Walter Benjamin, Passagen-Werk

In a previous paper entitled “Reading Décadence: Reception and the Subaltern Late Antiquity,” I have argued that the concept of a decadent age, although nowadays—and from a historical perspective deservedly—banned from the study of Late Antiquity, might, in virtue of its previously wide use, be profitably applied in a new way as an aesthetic paradigm in an approach to late antique textuality. Late antique literature continues to puzzle and dazzle readers, especially classicist readers, precisely because of the strange qualities which make it in many respects distant from classical textuality. “Decadence,” then, recalling one of the most persistent and productive marks in the reception of Late Antiquity in Western culture and literature, can be reconsidered as a hermeneutical tool well suited to investigating the otherness of late antique literature.1 In this paper I wish to expand upon this point by turning to other features which characterize texts of this period. Fragments and fragmentation, ruins, neglected objects, and an emergence of allegory and allegoresis, are ubiquitous and as such deserve attention, especially because recent trends in the study of late antique literature tend to emphasize affinities and continuities with the classical poetic tradition rather than difference, distancing, or rupture. One result of these trends has been that new aspects are often obscured by the weight given to the constant reference to the classical authors both formally and thematically. In what follows, I hope to give a sense of the hermeneutic possibilities opened up by a critical approach which is more independent of the previous literary tradition and more conscious of reception theory. One of the most intriguing consequences of adopting such a perspective is that late antique literature can be read on its own terms, i.e. without necessarily and constantly referring to previous periods, not to mention that it disturbs and puts 1

“Reading Décadence. Reception and the Subaltern Late Antiquity,” in Décadence: “Decline and Fall” or “Other Antiquity”?, ed. Marco Formisano et al. (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014).

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in crisis a linear concept of temporality imposed by the classical tradition and by the discipline of Classics in general. As many theorists from Paul Valéry onwards have argued, literary history is per se a problematic concept. Its major difficulty consists precisely in its inherent historicism, which tends to conceive of history as time without movement, without “original moments,” i.e. without fractures, and as an eternal progress. The “history” constructed and narrated by literary historians is made of inert, inanimate materials that are sewn together into a causal relationship, but only a posteriori. In literary history, as practiced by classicists, the tendency is to read a given text as something which “originates” from another text, which in turn “originates” from another text, and so on. Generally speaking, then, classical scholarship rarely has accepted fractures and ruptures within the received historical narrative of ancient literature. Classics tends to present itself instead as a discipline based on an uninterrupted chain of texts and genres bound together in a linear history. At the margins of the discipline remain authors, texts, genres, and perhaps even ages that do not seem to have a strong relationship with other texts and/or do not comport with a linear concept of temporality. Late antiquity thus receives a special role within this particular temporal constellation: it has arguably been conceived by a long chain of scholars including Theodor Mommsen, Otto Seeck, and Alois Riegl (to name just the forefathers) as a way of containing and at the same time delimiting “antiquity.” The very label given to the period confirms this casual relationship: after antiquity— the true antiquity—we can only have a late antiquity. Faute de mieux, we continue to use this term, telling ourselves that it is only a neutral chronological definition, and that it is in any case preferable to terms like decline or decadence, because these are so openly negative and judgmental. A preoccupation with temporality and history characterizes the work of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Although indirectly (since he never discusses Late Antiquity), Benjamin’s work is relevant for my discussion from many perspectives: not least in his concept of Ursprung or “original springing up,” for example, which he distinguishes from Entstehung, an “arising from” something. In this paper I would like to develop Benjamin’s perspective by looking at late antique textuality as an original moment, an Ursprung that disturbs and disrupts rather than reaffirms historical continuity and linear temporality, which are usually accepted as axiomatic principles and attributed to ancient literatures within the disciplinary discourse and the practice of Classics. Also relevant to the approach I would like to develop here is the concept of allegory as broadly discussed by Benjamin in his major work, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928). In order to test the validity of this approach, I will discuss one of the most frequently read of late Latin texts, Claudius Claudianus’ De raptu Proserpinae, an epic which is usually approached through an intertextual lens, with the paradoxical effects of flattening out Claudian’s most innovative elements. The insistence on Claudian as ‘the last classical Roman poet’ characterizes the way this author is read, and more generally influences classicists’ approach to late antique texts:

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in order to “save” them from their marginal status and their past negative reception, classicists reappropriate them by emphasizing their attachment to the classical poetic tradition. In what follows I suggest another hermeneutic possibility. Analogously to the affiliation of Late Antiquity to décadence suggested above, I here follow Benjamin and focus on marginality as a powerful characteristic of late antique textuality. In order to do so, however, it will be necessary to formulate and adopt a critical strategy that, from a certain perspective, challenges the historicism and the linearity inherent in the disciplinary discourse of Classics. Anachronism and anachronic Benjamin’s vision of history has been explored especially by art historians, in particular by Georges Didi-Huberman in his book Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images (2000) and by Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood in their book Anachronic Renaissance (2010). The approach taken by these art historians, although related to images, can easily be applied to texts. Didi-Huberman, building on an intellectual and scholarly current represented by Benjamin and Alois Riegl, Aby Warburg, Carl Einstein, Marc Bloch, and Nicole Loraux among others, proposes the possible benefits of the concept of anachronism in art history, since anachronism “seems to be internal to the very objects—the images—of whose history we are attempting to do.”2 He thus invites us “to interrogate within art history the object ‘history’, i.e. historicity itself.”3 Discussing a mysterious picture produced by the renaissance Italian painter Fra Angelico which seems to prefigure the action painting of Jackson Pollock, Didi-Huberman points to the methodological short circuit of usual historical research: “The emergence of the historical object as such turns out not to be the fruit of a standard historical process—whether factual, contextual, or euchronic—but of an anachronic and almost aberrant moment.”4 Aberrant is here used in its etymological sense, from ab-erro, i.e. “to deviate” from the historically linear path by conceiving another approach to images which does not comply with a linear historical narrative and instead creates transhistorical analogies that are more apt to catch the reality. This is not to say that history and temporality need to be undone. Rather, the art history envisaged by Didi-Huberman exalts temporality by 2

3

4

“Elle semble interne aux objets mêmes—les images—dont nous tentons de faire l’histoire,” Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2000), 16. All translations are mine. In order to respect Didi-Huberman’s unique prose style, I quote the original French. “C’est donc interroger, dans l’histoire de l’art, l’objet ‘histoire’, l’historicité elle-même” (13). “L’émergence de l’objet historique comme tel n’aura pas été le fruit d’une démarche historique standard—factuelle, contextuelle ou euchronique—, mais d’un moment anachronique presque aberrant” (21).

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introducing “a history of polychronic, heterochronic and anachronistic objects.”5 The intellectual program inspired by anachronism is ambitious, since it aims to identify the emergence of anachronism “precisely at the seam in the relationship between image and history.”6 Didi-Huberman makes clear that while images do have a history, the difference between images and history cannot be flattened out. But “the movement that is proper to [images], their specific power: all of this turns out to be but a symptom in history, a discomfort, a more or less violent denial, a suspension.”7 For the interpreter and the historian two avenues are open: either to obscure anachronism and thus to “tacitly crush time under history,” or else “to open up the seam and let the paradox flourish.”8 Didi-Huberman invites us to accept and integrate anachronism into our reading of images as a productive hermeneutic possibility. Anachronism, again, in these terms is not aimed at shutting down history when interpreting an image, but rather at approaching history and temporality from the vantage point of what is after all a very human tool of knowledge: the past is perceivable only through the present. Nagel and Wood build on Didi-Huberman’s anachronism through the concept of “the anachronic.” They argue that every work of art or text is, on the one hand, created within a specific historical context, the discussion and reconstruction of which is the major preoccupation of academic scholarship—I would add, especially in Classics; but on the other hand the same work of art or text points away from that moment, backward to a remote ancestral origin or even to an origin outside of historical temporality. It also points forward, moreover, to all its future recipients who will activate and reactivate it as a meaningful event. Nagel and Wood describe this transhistorical tension as an inherently “anachronic” quality. This represents an alternative to linear historicism, and is a perspective from which every artifact or text can be observed and analyzed. Yet it is my argument that late antique textuality thematizes a transhistorical and indeed anachronic approach to history and tradition in a particular way, and for this reason invites being read beyond its own immediate historical context and the poetic tradition of the past to which it refers. For example, as I will briefly suggest below, Benjamin’s work on the German baroque drama (Trauerspiel) of the seventeenth century, by shedding light on the otherness of that genre, can profitably be used to investigate the texts of that other antiquity, i.e. Late Antiquity. It is important to note that both German baroque drama and late antique textuality long suffered under massive aesthetic 5

6 7

8

“Une histoire d’objets polychroniques, d’objets hétérochroniques ou anachroniques” (22). “À la pliure exacte du rapport entre image et histoire” (25). “Le mouvement qui leur est propre, leur pouvoir spécifique, tout cela n’apparaît que comme un symptôme—un malaise, un démenti plus ou moins violent, une suspension—dans l’histoire” (25). “Écraser mouettement le temps sous l’histoire—ou bien ouvrir la pliure et laisser fleurir le paradoxe” (28).

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prejudices (in the case of Late Antiquity because of the prominence accorded to classical aesthetic principles, in that of German baroque drama because of the dominant influence of Romanticism and its critical categories) and accordingly occupied marginal positions in their respective scholarly traditions. To be sure, conceptions of time and history are now receiving more attention from a number of perspectives. For instance, within gender and queer studies a conception of temporality has been identified as “queer,” i.e. not linear and transversal, as opposed to the “straight” temporal paradigm which has so influentially been adopted within the humanities. 9 Within Classics, too, time and history have been recently questioned as scholarly principles. Shane Butler, for instance, in his introduction to a recent collection of essays bearing the title Deep Classics, thematizes time as a central category for the discipline by focussing on “the very pose by which the human present turns its attention to the distant human past” and recalling that it is time “that gives ‘antiquity’ its name.”10 This general theoretical revision has been made possible especially by the conceptual widening owed to reception studies and the study of the long classical tradition, and to gender, queer, and sexuality studies. These theoretical perspectives have energized a reconsideration of marginalized discursive practices within the discipline, but also, and more importantly, of the dominant principles of Classics itself dogmatically accepted by scholars of the field. In other words, the novelty of certain subjects or topics can modify disciplinary methodologies, and in the most interesting cases it can even generate new theoretical perspectives. Reading Late Antiquity, to quote the title of this volume, represents not only an occasion to devote more attention to late antique (and thus in most cases less studied) texts and authors, but also to introduce new paradigms able to identify new research subjects, not only or not necessarily late antique. So the big question is: can the renewed study of late antique literature and its reception create a new approach and open up new perspectives not only on late antique literature but on literature in general? Such a question would of course require much more space than a few pages. Here I can make a single small contribution, and only tentatively. One of the advantages offered by Benjamin and the anachronic approach described above is to invert the usual dynamic of historical interpretation by trying to hear the voice of our present time reverberating in the past. This way of reading is by no means meant to negate history, but rather to approach it from the perspective of the interpretation and the Nachleben of texts, their survival. 9

10

In this article I cannot discuss queer visions of history and time, to which I hope to turn elsewhere. For a critical assessment see Valerie Traub, “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies,” in Thinking Sex with the Early Modern, ed. V. Traub (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 57–81. Shane Butler “On the Origin of ‘Deep Classics’,” in Deep Classics. Rethinking Classical Reception, ed. S. Butler (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 14–15.

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Benjamin fiercely reacted to historicism, a scholarly practice also predominant in the discipline of Classics, according to which the past must be analyzed through the eyes of the past itself. He conceived the significance of texts and works of art as timeless, since their meaning cannot be determined only by their authors and their contemporaries.11 But the point is not to see how history is reflected within the text, but rather how the text tells its own history, how the text dramatically testifies to history as a text, with its own individual language, voice, and rhythm different from historical reality. History as told by the text might appear superficially different from history outside the text, but any text always catches the essence of history on a different level: as a text, by textual means. A particularly relevant point about Benjamin’s philosophy of history has generally been missed, even by such sensitive critics as Didi-Huberman. In his consideration of the “epochs of ruin and decadence” as mirages produced by successive generations, Benjamin cites Alois Riegl, the Viennese art historian who in his path-breaking Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (1901) had argued that the artistic production of Late Antiquity should not be considered as a degeneration of classical ideals, but as another approach to the very concept of art. Benjamin presents his tribute to the work of Alois Riegl as the inspirational source for his book on German baroque drama in the book itself only en passant.12 As I noted earlier, the inspirational connection between Late Antiquity and the German baroque in Benjamin’s thought has often been obscured, probably first by Benjamin himself, who seems to have known little or nothing of late antique literature, and then certainly by his readers and critics. Once again, Late Antiquity has remained marginalized in the work of one of the most audacious thinkers of the twentieth century, even as it exerted a complex though indirect influence on him, via Riegl. As Charles Rosen points out, both Riegl and Benjamin were interested in seeing how certain periods—Late Antiquity and the baroque seventeenth century—“violated the fundamental classical canons of aesthetics.” More importantly still, Benjamin insisted more radically than Riegl that, rather than attempting to insert these rebellious ages within a grand historical narrative, there needed to be a complete dismantling of the historical methodology applied to art and literature.13 Readers of this volume will hardly be surprised to find allegory, fragmentation and ruins in a paper devoted to late Latin literature. These themes are, moreover, directly relevant to my discussion of Benjamin since they pervade both late 11

12

13

Cf. Charles Rosen, “The Ruins of Walter Benjamin,” in On Walter Benjamin. Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1988), 137 and 139. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 55 and Curriculum vitae (1925 and 1940), in Gesammelte Schriften VI (Benjamin 1991). For a brief discussion of Riegl’s influence on the work of Benjamin see Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical Images. Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), 151–163. Rosen, “The Ruins,” 140–141.

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antique textuality and German baroque drama. If we adopt Didi-Huberman’s perspective on Fra Angelico’s painting, both represent anachronic and aberrant moments which cannot be explained through the usual lens offered by the linear temporality adopted by historicism. I wish to emphasize that I am not suggesting a genealogy or building a narrative of historical dependency. Rather, this is a comparison between two clearly very different and historically unassociated comparanda, a conceptual interaction which can shed light on both phenomena arguably much more effectively than any search for a historically determined influence of late antique poetry on German baroque drama or on Benjamin’s writings on it. Late antique studies Before turning to Benjamin and Claudian, it seems necessary to summarize some of the most salient features of an approach taken in most recent scholarship on late antique literature. Over the course of the renewal of interest during the last few decades and the general enthusiasm deriving from what some perceive as a sort of rediscovery, two tendencies in particular have emerged. Firstly, most scholarship today reads late antique literature as standing in a fluid continuity with classical literature, rather than representing a dramatic rupture. This approach is based on two methodologically intertwined points: continuity and intertextuality. Accordingly, late Latin literature is seen as being in harmony with the classical past, of which it represents by no means a phase of decline but rather a positive transformation. Late antique authors, both pagan and Christian, productively re-use and recur to classical texts in their texts. They use the same poetic language as their predecessors, and classicists only need to direct attention to late antique texts from their classicists’ perspective in order to see and describe this feature of the texts. Alan Cameron’s Last Pagans of Rome (2011), saluted by many scholars as one of the most important contributions to the understanding of this age, paradigmatically emblematizes this tendency. In other words, in order to re-evaluate late antique poetry in a positive light, classicists adopt a practice of assimilation: late antique poetry works exactly like classical poetry, and intertextuality is the key for the understanding of both. The “best” late antique poets are perfectly assimilable to their illustrious classical predecessors, as long as they follow in their steps. The typical statement sounds like this: Claudian, Prudentius, or Ausonius are great poets because they extensively allude to and rework Virgil, Ovid, or Statius. In contrast stands another tendency, minor so far, but growing in strength, and represented by this volume and the series in which it appears. This approach speaks not only of literature but of textuality, because the latter is more comprehensive, taking into account forms and genres which we today might not define as literature. On this approach, late antique textuality must be considered on its own terms, and interpretation takes as its point of departure not the expectations

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raised by the readers of classical texts, but rather the expectations of late antique readers and writers themselves. This approach, which I myself have embraced in the past, while it offers the great advantage of drawing scholars’ attention to the special features of late antique texts independently of their classical models, nonetheless presents a number of epistemological problems. The first and most obvious objection, which in fact affects most methodologies used in the study of ancient literatures, concerns the claim to be able to reconstruct the intentions and expectations of both (late) antique writers and readers. In this regard, although reception studies are now flourishing in Classics, the much-quoted claim that “meaning is always realized at the point of reception”14 has not really had an impact on the way classicists continue to read and interpret the ancient texts. In fact, the two questions constantly asked, despite a widely expressed enthusiasm for reception theory, continue to be: What exactly did the author intend or mean to say? And, how was the text received by its contemporary readers? While the first question is more implicit, the second has aggressively become standard. The second objection requires perhaps more nuance. Critics who take for granted the principle of historicity as described above decidedly reject an interpretation of late antique texts which appeals to our own preconceptions and expectations; but the same scholars typically argue for a comparison, for instance, with post-modern poetics.15 The best result of this tendency has been that of arriving at a better sense of how a late antique text is made by carefully describing its stylistic and conceptual features. Now we know, for instance, that a late antique text usually presents a fragmented style of discourse which substitutes the classical principle of unity;16 or that it tends to openly comment on other texts (instead of simply alluding to them);17 or that late antique authors display a characteristically focused attention on individual words as such—their shape and sound, their etymology,18 and so on. But to the extent that identification of these formal features has been more careful,

14

15

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17

18

Charles Martindale, Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3. A good example of this somewhat contradictory approach is to be found in one of the most interesting and deservedly most quoted articles on late antique poetics: Georgia S. Nugent “Ausonius’ Late-Antique Poetics and Post-Modern Literary Theory,” Ramus 19 (1990), 26–50, published at a moment when critical interest in this period of literary history was beginning to grow, also thanks to a growing relationship between Classics and literary theory. Michael Roberts, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). Aaron Pelttari, The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). Isabella Gualandri, “Words Pregnant with Meaning: The Power of Single Words in Late Latin Literature,” in The Poetics of Late Latin Literature, ed. Jaś Elsner et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 125–146.

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interpretation has arguably been less effective. How can we profitably apply these insights to interpretation? I would suggest that behind all this is a certain uncanny discomfort, which is inherent in late antique textuality itself and which demands a more radical move than the usual methodologies imply. As I noted earlier, late antique literature not only problematizes its relationship to the classical past but also gives life to a different conception of textuality itself. Scholars who are interested in creating grand narratives tend to ignore or obscure fractures, which are perceived as obstacles to the construction of a unitary vision of the past. And it is here that Walter Benjamin’s work is useful, precisely in order to shed light on this point, because he argues for a historical inquiry capable of disrupting linear notions of temporality. Walter Benjamin and allegory In a well-argued article, Filippo Trentin has compared Benjamin’s and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s concepts of allegory without identifying a specific causal relationship between the two thinkers, in other words, without building on the evidence that the Italian poet actually read the work of the German philosopher. I follow Trentin’s steps in his presentation of Benjamin’s concept of allegory in his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels.19 In the second part of this, his most discussed book, Benjamin presents and discusses a theory of allegory. In particular, he directs attention to the lasting fortune of symbolism, which has long characterized modern Western aesthetics. In Benjamin’s view, with Romanticism the symbol is called to represent the world as an unbroken whole, and this approach dominated thinking until Benjamin’s own time. Benjamin’s aim is to oppose allegory to the symbol, by emphasizing the singularity of allegory as opposed to the idealized universality of the symbol. Allegory, in Benjamin’s view, is a representation of isolated figures. In this sense, he departs from an understanding of allegory as a figure of speech and instead sees it as a form of expression: allegory, he observes, “is not a playful illustrative technique, but a form of expression, just as speech is expression, and, indeed, just as writing is.” It becomes an instrument apt to approach the world, within which, as Trentin observes, “the linguistic ability of words to represent reality drastically weakens.”20 Allegory is represented by fragments, ruins, scattered parts, all powerful images opposed to the unity of the symbolic universe attributed to the classical periods. To adopt an allegorical interpretation implies on the one hand a focus on the individuality and singularity of events and objects, and on the other a radical subversion of the literal meaning by evoking a multiplicity of 19

20

Filippo Trentin, “‘Organizing Pessimism’: Enigmatic Correlations between Walter Benjamin and Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Modern Language Review 108 (2013), 1021–41. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 162; Trentin, “‘Organizing Pessimism’,” 1024.

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extra-linguistic meanings. “Benjamin conceives of allegory as a representation of crisis that emerges in specific periods of sudden and rapid change which break with the past, and during which, as a consequence of this quick shift, words are no longer capable of simply representing things in a mimetic way.”21 To put it more bluntly, to return to allegory means to practice a systematic rupture between words and their alleged meaning. As Benjamin himself writes: “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else.”22 In order to exemplify this approach to allegory, Benjamin considers the famous print by Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I. An angel, depicted as a woman, holds her head with one hand, and in her other hand a compass. The angel’s wings draw attention to her inactivity. At her feet lie various objects, tools and instruments. The dog near the angel is emaciated while a putto is resting on her right side. A number of other elements fill up the image in a sort of horror vacui. In a famous book entitled Saturn and Melancholy (1923) Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl interpreted these objects “as the representation of a mind incapacitated in the face of an insatiable and neurotic need for knowledge.”23 But for Benjamin the picture describes the meaning of allegory itself; as Jeremy Tambling puts it, “there is no organic connection between the person who contemplates and the objects on the floor which should be put to active use.”24 On the floor the unused tools reveal the uselessness of appearance: their function is no longer that which was meant to be; they are now allegories, i.e. they represent something else, they have been alienated from their meaning. Such an alienation is the opposite of the organic unity represented by the symbol. Melancholy in Benjamin’s interpretation of Dürer’s print (as opposed to Panofsky’s symbolical reading) illustrates disintegration, fragmentation and alienation between signifier and signified. Allegory does not represent a permanent truth; rather, it points to the arbitrariness of pairing a thing with a meaning, its inherent ephemeral quality. Instead of timeless truths, there is the untimely, or in the terms discussed above the “anachronic”: the history that stands outside the chronological narrative of progress that makes up usual historical discourse. “In allegory, there are no natural comparisons; all terms of comparison are non-natural, ideological, non-proper, catachreses.”25 Instead of cosmic unity, invoked as a principle by symbolism and historicism, Benjamin’s baroque allegory emphasizes disrupture and discontinuity. As he writes, “allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.”26 The ruin and the fragment become an image for the universe, but not in 21 22 23 24 25 26

Ibid. 1024. Benjamin, The Origin, 175. Jeremy Tambling, Allegory (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid. 118. Benjamin, The Origin, 178.

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Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne)

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the sense attributed to them by Romantic writers and artists, who saw in them a symbol of universal unity. In his view, the baroque poets “pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict thought of goal.”27 This action of piling up fragments suggests that no fragment can be anything but partial and it cannot point to a complete truth. A fragment is rather a ruin, it is only a part of something gone, which we are unable to reconstruct in its unity and totality. Benjamin offers also a theory of montage related to allegory. In this he was influenced by contemporary avant-gardes, in particular by the montage of film. In allegory the meaning is given by temporarily combining different fragments in the search for coherence. In a famous passage from Über den Begriff der Geschichte in which Benjamin comments on the angel of history as represented in a picture by Paul Klee, piles of wreckage or debris recall the fragments and ruins of the baroque allegory. “Perceiving history as a chain of events unifies them and threatens to produce an ideal narrative; it resembles the thinking which produces the symbol, seeing history as telling a narratable story.”28 In Benjamin’s terms allegory thus always destabilizes its own meaning, since it not only cannot represent reality and universal truth, but it ends up representing “its own transience, its own disappearance and its lack of definite existence.”29 Claudian: Allegory, fragments, and ruins The attentive reader of these pages might have already glimpsed how a number of points made by Benjamin in his discussion of allegory can help us appreciate late antique literature as the source of new and original qualities not necessarily present in the classical tradition: in other words, as an Ursprung. But how can we adopt the critical perspective of Benjamin in order to investigate late antique texts and identify in late antique textuality the same disruptive quality characterizing baroque dramatic poetry? It is possible to identify a textuality which dramatically contrasts with, instead of placidly continues, previous conceptions of literary tradition. I say “dramatically” because of the inherent impossibility of escaping the very tradition of Latin poetic language, against which the text nonetheless appears to react precisely by adopting allegory, fragmentation and montage in a similar manner to Benjamin’s textual philosophy. On the readings of many scholars, Late Antiquity emerges as an age obsessed with its own tradition. This strong connection to the past, however, is not simply constituted by intertextual references to Virgil and other classical authors, but much more clearly by a construction of the past which is anti-linear and essentially anachronic in the terms described above. Anachronicity is present in allegory, in a fragmented and 27 28 29

Tambling, Allegory, 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid. 122.

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interrupted style of discourse, and of course in montage. Accordingly, the image of the past which emerges in this textuality is by no means harmonic—as intertextual readings currently en vogue implicitly or explicitly assume—but disruptive, characterized by interruption, fragmentation, and an extensive use of allegory. It is impossible here to outline the long history of allegory and allegoresis from archaic Greek poetry to Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and beyond, but a few key points are worth making. As pointed out by Andrew Ford for instance, allegorical interpretation seems to have represented the very first critical wave of Homeric interpretation, in particular in the work of Theagenes of Rhegium in the sixth century BCE. and in Orphic cosmic poetry, as attested in the Derveni papyrus. But, although allegorical interpretation characterized the origins of Western literary criticism, it was wholly neglected by Aristotle, who in the Poetics does not even mention it, probably because at that point, i.e after the Sophists introduced a critical methodology based on the grammatical and rhetorical study of language, allegory was marginalized as an extravagant approach.30 Peter Struck, on the other hand, pleads for the necessity of including allegory as a protagonist within the large picture of ancient literary culture rather than confining it to the margins of criticism and aesthetic theory, as has been often done following the path of Aristotle’s Poetics and the ancient rhetorical education system in general.31 For the purposes of my argument, it is important to note that allegorical interpretation or allegoresis is also a strategy that aims at subverting an established meaning, which in most cases is the literal meaning of a given text. Moreover, allegorical reading is a search for the “true” meaning of the text, a meaning that is not located within the text itself and yet is tightly connected with the literal meaning as it appears in the text. Allegorical reading accompanies, revises, or displays literal meaning. As the etymology suggests, “‘to say other’ implies an antithetical stance towards a previous ‘saying’”32; thus, allegorical reading ends up being a hermeneutic practice based on resistance to and denial of previously asserted and established meanings. Behind allegory is another way of conceiving of texts, and the ancient and late ancient use of allegory is much broader and more

30

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Andrew Ford, The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), chapter 3. See James I. Porter, “Hermeneutic Lines and Circles: Aristarchus and Crates on the Exegesis of Homer,” in Homer’s Ancient Readers, ed. Robert Lamberton et al. (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 67–114, for an excellent discussion of Stoic allegoresis. Peter Struck, Birth of The Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) is an important contribution to the discussion of allegory and allegoresis, but does not take into account Benjamin’s opposition between allegory and symbolism. David Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 7–8.

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complex than its narrower rhetorical meaning.33 In any case, what is striking about allegory is its intrinsic contradictory quality and its capacity of reversing textual meanings. Although allegory and allegoresis have been present since the origins of literary criticism, they acquired a special status precisely in Late Antiquity, when Neoplatonic critics and Christian readers were struggling to make sense both of the ancient literary tradition and of the Bible. As mentioned above, an important recent critical strand has insisted on the necessity of reading late ancient texts on their own terms. The identification of a specifically late antique literary aesthetic is owed to Michael Roberts, who in a series of articles, and above all in his monograph The Jeweled Style, was able to define some characteristic traits. “Taste has changed,” Roberts writes. “In order to appreciate late antique poetry properly, it is necessary to view it on its own terms rather than from the perspective, conscious or not, of classical aesthetics.”34 As is well known, Roberts describes as the principal mark of late Latin texts a tendency to fragmentation: discussing Ammianus’, Claudian’s and Rutilius’ narrative techniques, for example, he describes their “episodic nature,” showing how their texts are made up “of a series of self-contained vignettes, which derive their unity from a principle which operates at a higher level of abstraction than the literal level of the narrative.”35 But why not interpret the textual features so accurately described by Roberts as a process of fragmentation which leads to a disruption and dismemberment of the traditional poetic discourse, rather than insisting on a unity which, given the impossibility of locating it anywhere in the text itself, Robert suggests can be found “at a higher level of abstraction”?36 Allegory, fragmentation, disruption, and ruins are significantly present in many late antique texts, as a matter of both content and style, but in what follows I focus on a single text which in an exemplary way makes us aware of how these elements characterize late Latin poetry and late antique literature in general. Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae has been read as an epic poem in the classical style, an attempt by its author to reproduce classical themes and structures by referring to classical authorities such as Ovid and Virgil. De raptu Proserpinae is often seen as the text that consecrates Claudian as ‘the last classical Roman poet.’ But even on a superficial glance, and I would add even in its very title, this poem draws attention to displacement, fracture, fragmentation, and allegory. 33

34 35

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Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 20. Roberts, The Jeweled Style, 3 (my italics). Michael Roberts, “The Treatment of Narrative in Late Antique Literature,” Philologus 182 (1988), 187 (my italics). Here I summarize and develop some of the considerations I offer in Marco Formisano, “Displacing Tradition: A New-Allegorical Reading of Ausonius, Claudian, and Rutilius Namatianus” in The Poetics of Late Latin Literature, ed. Jaś Elsner et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 207–235.

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Although the story narrated in the poem is a well-known classical myth, Claudian’s text represents in many regards a riddle that invites the reader to search for a meaning that lies under the surface of its words.37 To begin, the poem is incomplete, the extant text consisting of three books. There is a general praefatio and, surprisingly enough, a prologue specific to the second book. Both the praefatio and the prologue to the second book are thematically unconnected with the myth of Proserpina, and their meter is elegiac couplets, a fact which in itself distinctly marks the difference from the rest of the poem, which is in hexameters. The praefatio in its entirety reads as follows: He who first cut the deep with the ship he had invented and disturbed the waters with rough-hewn oars, who dared to commit his vessel of alder-wood to the unreliable blasts and made available by his art ways which nature denies, at first trusted himself trembling to the calm waves, coasting along the edge of the shores on a safe course; soon he began to try out vast bays, to leave the land and spread his sails to the mild south wind; but when, little by little, his impetuous boldness grew and his heart forgot sluggish fear, roving now far and wide he burst upon open water, and, following the sky, mastered Aegean storms and the Ionian Sea.” 38 Inuenta secuit primus qui naue profundum et rudibus remis sollicitauit aquas, qui dubiis ausus committere flatibus alnum quas natura negat praebuit arte uias: tranquillis primum trepidus se credidit undis litora securo tramite summa legens; mox longos temptare sinus et linquere terras et leni coepit pandere uela Noto. ast ubi paulatim praeceps audacia creuit cordaque languentem dedidicere metum, iam uagus inrumpit pelagus caelumque secutus Aegaeas hiemes Ioniumque domat.

This is nothing but an allegory—whose meaning, however, remains unclear. Instead of appreciating the destabilizing force which this passage per se clearly possesses, scholars have generally attempted to reconstruct possible intertexts or—worse still—to see in this passage an autobiographical statement.39 Here I would like to insist on one point: while most scholarly interpreters read in the praefatio a conscious reference by the author to the change of genre in his poetic 37 38

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Porter, “Hermeneutic Lines,” 72. All translations of Claudian’s Latin are those of Claire Gruzelier, Claudian: De Raptu Proserpinae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). For a more nuanced discussion of this passage see Formisano, “Displacing Tradition,” 220–222 with relevant bibliography.

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career (i.e. the passage from panegyric to the more ambitious epic), the text can just as well be read for what it is on the surface: a narrative of a gradual departure from the secure shore landscape towards the dangers of the open sea. According to Aaron Pelttari, Claudian’s gesture has been interpreted as a “transgressive act” in relation to tradition precisely because the text seems to emphasize the role of “originality rather than of conventionality.”40 I would like to underscore that, no matter what Claudian’s intentions might have been, the praefatio is an indefinite allegory which can be interpreted in general terms as suggesting a departure or a separation from past poetic tradition without proposing any real alternative. In the title of the poem itself, after all, raptus suggests an abrupt disappearance. And in a coincidence we might call fortunate, the poem was not completed—i.e. in the eyes of modern readers, the text contains in its own structure the “abduction” of the end and thus becomes an example of interruption par excellence. This coincidence seems to find a sort of prefiguration in the passages in books 1 and 3, where the interruption of Proserpina’s weaving is thematized. At the end of book 1 she leaves her work unfinished (imperfectum laborem, 1, 271) because of the sudden and unexpected arrival of Venus, Minerva, and Diana. Later, her desperate mother Ceres is described as she enters the unguarded and empty house in order to look for Proserpina and finds nothing but the unfinished work: Opening the doors, as she passed through the empty rooms and deserted halls, she recognized the half-ruined weaving with its disordered threads and the work of the shuttle that had been broken off. foribusque reclusis, dum uacuas sedes et desolata pererrat atria, semirutas confuso stamine telas atque interruptas agnoscit pectinis artes. (3,153–156)

Interruption, discontinuity, and ruin are emblematically connected in a constellation which invites being read allegorically following the path opened up by Benjamin. At this point a suggestive figure emerges: That wonderful task of the goddess had gone to waste and the bold spider was completing the gap left behind with her sacrilegious web. diuinitus perit ille labor, spatiumque relictum audax sacrilego supplebat aranea textu. (3,157–158)

40

Pelttari, The Space, 7.

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As Pelttari has convincingly argued, this passage plays a highly symbolical role within Claudian’s poem because its conceptual complexity conveys different meanings. “If Claudian is like this spider, he is a secondary author; if his poem is like Proserpina’s text, its gaps remain for the reader to construe.”41 Still, it should not come as a surprise that it is precisely the Ovidian audax aranea (Met. 6.1–145) which completes the work left unfinished—perhaps because it is incapable of being finished—by Proserpina. The Ovidian Arachne, I would argue, represents imitation of the poetic tradition itself: it intervenes where Proserpina is not able to complete her work, and it fills the gaps (spatium relictum).42 Her text is “sacrilegious” precisely because, by re-activating a traditional poetic language, it subverts the sense of what Proserpina was doing at the moment when she had to leave her embroidery unfinished, as a fragment. Here, a fragment is integrated into a whole by the intervention of another author, the spider, whose work is not a continuation of Proserpina’s work, but instead an act of disruption and subversion. This is precisely how allegory works in Benjamin’s interpretation of baroque drama. Above all, Proserpina’s interrupted work and its continuation by Arachne do not stand in a peaceful relation, nor are they symbolically connected. The Ovidian element is so clearly disruptive that it is astonishing how stubbornly the scholarship on this passage has insisted on a harmonious reference to the Metamorphoses understood as an intertextual homage to the Augustan poet. What did Proserpina illustrate in her weaving? Whatever critics might say about the description of Proserpina’s tapestry as ekphrasis, there is a detail which makes the ekphrasis impossible, and perhaps this is the reason why it has been left unfinished: the original movements of the creation of the universe, depicted in the text, cannot be statically represented in a picture. The passage is pervaded by verbs indicating movement (251 discessere, fertur, 251 cadunt, 252 egit, fluxit, pependit, 254 accendit, fundit, attollit etc.), but this sense of impossibility is accompanied by the fact that Proserpina’s piece is defined as inrita munera (247), a “vain present” for her mother. She uses a medium of representation—weaving—which is not apt to describe the subject she has chosen: her language cannot match the subject, her work is inritum. Proserpina’s artistic language, precisely like words in any allegory, cannot describe any stable reality; instead it simply weakens its own mimetic capacity to the point that representation actually dissolves by referring to another meaning—allegory, saying the other.43 41 42

43

Pelttari, The Space, 163. Pelttari uses precisely this expression as the title for his monograph, The Space That Remains, which significantly opens with the discussion of the praefatio of De raptu Proserpinae and ends with the discussion of this passage. Disruption, displacement, and fragmentation characterize the poem in many other central passages, including the separation of Sicily from the Italian mainland (1.141–147), the wandering of Ceres, and above all the central scene of the abduction, the raptus of Proserpina (2.146–213).

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Catherine Ware draws attention to the possibility of an allegorical interpretation of Claudian’s epic poem by Christian readers, who under the conceptual umbrella of sacrifice might have associated the figure of Proserpina with Christian martyrs.44 Ware recognizes the allegorical potential intrinsic in this particular text as in any other late antique text, but in doing so she admits that it was probably not Claudian’s own intention to produce an allegory—as if authorial intentions were central to interpretation, especially to allegorical interpretation. On this view, the superficial content, i.e. the story of Proserpina’s abduction becomes, or can become, an allegory of Christian sacrifice, a topic which, as Ware notes, also makes use of pagan models like that of Polyxena. This is certainly a valid possibility, but it reduces allegory and allegoresis to a predetermined symbolism. In other words, this interpretation does not entirely catch the subversive power inherent in every allegory, whose effect is to produce conceptual instability by radically separating the words from the meaning commonly attributed to them. The sense of epistemic instability produced by the epic poem deserves much more attention than it has received or than is possible for me to give it in this brief chapter. The most intriguing aspect is that both form (the interrupted and unfinished structure of the text) and content (the myth of Proserpina), read as an allegory, cooperate closely in the production of this instability. Allegory is after all a strategy suited to managing and including the surplus of meaning that every text produces, independently of the original intentions of its author. Reading Claudian through the lens of German baroque drama as described by Benjamin implies the re-enacting of Benjamin’s own reading of early twentieth-century avant-garde,45 and at the same time anachronizing one by means of the other, as Didi-Huberman reads Fra Angelico through the lens of Jackson Pollock’s action painting. From a certain perspective, then, baroque drama becomes an allegory of the avant-garde. Reading Late Antiquity means reading another antiquity, perhaps an allegory of antiquity, which breaks the euchronical representation of historical development by introducing a disruptive Ursprung into it. Reading Late Antiquity from this perspective leads to a consideration of this age as a genealogical moment for every décadence, baroque, or avant-garde.

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Catherine Ware, “Proserpina and the Martyrs: Pagan and Christian in Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae,” in Listen, O Isles, unto Me: Studies in Medieval Word and Image in Honour of Jennifer O’Reilly, ed. Elizabeth Mullins et al. (Cork: Cork University Press, 2011). Trentin, “‘Organizing Pessimism’,” 1025.

J e s ú s H e r n á n d e z L o b at o

Late Antique Foundations of Postmodern Theory: A Critical Overview* According to Vico’s image, history proceeds in a spiral, and things of the past return, but obviously not in the same place; thus, there are tastes, values, behavior, “writings” of the past that may return, but in a very modern place. — Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, 282.

Late Antiquity is hot. Today, in a context of generalized resurgence of late antique studies (after centuries of neglect, lack of understanding, and contempt), the unexpected topicality of this period’s culture has begun to emerge. In the last decades, a few pioneering studies have begun to analyze and vindicate late antique literature from the novel perspective of postmodern theory, thus highlighting a series of intriguing concomitances and shared concerns with our own time and age.1 Fol*

1

This research was carried out within the Project “El fin del logocentrismo: fundamentos filosóficos y culturales de la literatura mística judía, cristiana y neoplatónica (s. IIIVI d. C.).” funded by the BBVA Foundation Programme “Ayuda Fundación BBVA a Investigadores y Creadores Culturales 2016.” See S. Georgia Nugent, “Ausonius’ ‘Late-Antique’ Poetics and ‘Post-modern’ Literary Theory,” Ramus 19.1 (1990), 26–50; Jesús Hernández Lobato, Vel Apolline muto: Estética y poética de la Antigüedad tardía (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012); Jesús Hernández Lobato, “El poema In Refectorio de Martín de Braga: ¿Un ready-made literario?,” Voces 23–24 (2012–2013), 75–92; Jesús Hernández Lobato, “Conceptual Poetry: Rethinking Optatian from Contemporary Art,” in Morphogrammata/The Lettered Art of Optatian: Figuring Cultural Transformations in the Age of Constantine, ed. M.J. Squire and J. Wienand (Munich: W. Fink, 2016), 463–496; Jesús Hernández Lobato, “To Speak or Not to Speak: The Birth of a ‘Poetics of Silence’ in Late Antique Literature,” in The Poetics of Late Latin Literature, ed. Jaś Elsner and Jesús Hernández Lobato (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 278–310; Jaś Elsner and Jesús Hernández Lobato, “Introduction: Notes towards a Poetics of Late Antique Literature,” in The Poetics of Late Latin Literature, ed. Jaś Elsner and Jesús Hernández Lobato (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1–22. Postmodern readings of specific late antique authors are perhaps more common in the field of religious and philosophical studies: see e.g. Morwenna Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Louis H. Mackey, “The Mediator Mediated: Faith and Reason in Augustine’s De Magistro,” Franciscan Studies 42 (1983), 135–155; Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire in Augustine’s De doctrina,” Journal of Literature and

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lowing Umberto Eco’s provocative suggestion, Late Antiquity might be even described as the postmodernity of the Ancient word.2 Be that as it may, contemporary theory has proven an extraordinary instrument by which to gain deeper insight into the long neglected literature of Late Antiquity, which boldly challenges the time-honored principles of Greco-Roman Classicism. This chapter raises for the first time the opposite question: was postmodern theory significantly influenced by late antique literature (taken as a whole)?3 To what extent was the creative revisitation of certain late antique authors a key element in the forging of postmodernism? Which aspects of late antique culture might have inspired the founders of contemporary theory in their crusade against the fallacies of modernity? Might our time be rightly considered the Late Antiquity of modern history? The crisis of classical/modern logocentrism: Linguistic turn, deconstruction and late antique apophaticism Today’s triumphant deconstructionism can be seen as the last manifestation of a broader trend underpinning (or rather undermining) the whole edifice of twentieth-century philosophy: the so-called “linguistic turn.” 4 This silent revolution challenged the very possibility of philosophy by focusing on the limitations, inconsistencies, playfulness, ambiguities, and “self-containedness” of language—the substance of which philosophical reasoning (and by extension human knowledge)

2

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Theology 3.2 (1989), 138–150; Phillip Cary, Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose (trans. William Weaver) (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 66: “I believe that postmodernism is not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category—or better still, a Kunstwollen, a way of operating. We could say that every period has its own postmodernism, just as every period would have its own mannerism (and, in fact, I wonder if postmodernism is not the modern name for mannerism as a metahistorical category).” Though no comprehensive work exists so far, there is of course a number of monographic studies (mostly philosophical or theological) on the impact of a specific late antique author on certain postmodern thinkers. On Augustine see e.g. Luigi Alici et al. (eds.), Verità e linguaggio: Agostino nella filosofía del Novecento (Roma: Città Nuova, 2002), vol. 3; John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds.), Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005). On Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite see Sarah Coakley and Charles M. Stang (eds.), Re-Thinking Dionysius the Areopagite (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). In the field of medieval studies, we do have a general overview: Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). This designation was popularized by Richard Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1967), in which it refers to the turn towards linguistic philosophy.

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is ultimately made. Thus the problematic relationships between philosophy and language, and knowledge and representation, became both the leitmotif and the insurmountable question for all the branches of contemporary speculation, from Saussure’s linguistics to Kristeva’s intertextuality. The progenitor and ideologist of this wide-ranging movement was undoubtedly the Viennese thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein, who boldly stated that “all philosophy is a ‘critique of language’.” 5 According to Wittgenstein’s pioneering formulation:6 Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language. […] And so it is not to be wondered at that the deepest problems are really no problems.

As I have proposed elsewhere,7 Late Antiquity was in a sense the “linguistic turn” of the Ancient world. This epochal shift following the Crisis of the Third Century stemmed in part from an unprecedented mise en crise of the very notions of language and representation […], a problem which seems to underlie and determine almost every aspect of the culture of its era and thus constitutes one of its most genuine expressions. Language, which had been taken for granted as a given beyond question, became an obsession in the late Roman period as the whole rhetorical edifice of pagan antiquity was recalibrated to articulate Christian truths.8

Not for nothing, Late Antiquity witnessed a series of novel epiphenomena which are better explained as a result of this paradigm shift and its underlying episteme:9 (a) the emergence of Neoplatonic and Christian mysticisms,10 aimed at attaining a non-discursive knowledge of the essence of things by means of an unmediated contemplation beyond language; (b) the development of Augustine of Hippo’s theory of sign—the seed of (post)modern semiotics11—and Gregory 5

6 7 8 9

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Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus 4.0031. All translations from this work are taken from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (trans. Charles Kay Ogden) (London: Kegan Paul, 1922). Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus 4.003. Hernández Lobato, “To Speak or Not to Speak,” 279. Elsner and Hernández Lobato, “Introduction,” 6–7. On the notion of episteme see Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). For a general overview see Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). On Augustine’s pioneering theory of the sign see Cary, Outward Signs (with bibliography).

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of Nyssa’s philosophy of language;12 (c) the birth of a widespread “poetics of silence” characteristic of writers like Ausonius, Sidonius Apollinaris, Augustine, Rutilius Namatianus, or Fulgentius the Mythographer;13 (d) the rise of allegorical interpretation (both pagan and Judaeo-Christian) and its reader-focused theory of multiple senses;14 (e) a progressive grammaticalization of philosophy/ philosophization of grammar (due to fully-fledged theoreticians of language like Apollonius Dyscolus and Priscian); (f) the many-layered and multivocal dissection of the inherited literature (both Greco-Roman and Biblical) by skillful and highly creative commentators such as Servius, Donatus, Macrobius, the great Christian exegetes, and the Rabbinic sages;15 (g) the creation of a Zen-like ascetic practice— namely, Evagrius Ponticus’ hesychasm—based on emptying the mind and self by abandoning all discursive thought in order to achieve an inward experience of God; (h) the rise in the works of Porphyry and Boethius of the philosophical “problem of Universals,” which would culminate in the medieval Nominalist controversy;16 (i) and last, the appearance of a revolutionary apophatic mysticism (also known as negative theology), championed, among others, by Gregory of Nyssa, PseudoDionysius the Areopagite, and Maximus the Confessor; this new form of mysticism denies the possibility of language to state anything about God, thus privileging the negative notions of alogía (absence of language), anoēsía (absence of thought), and agnōsía (unknowing) in the initiate’s wordless encounter with the Ineffable. All these unprecedented cultural expressions challenged in many different ways the time-honored logocentrism of the Greco-Roman civilization by questioning the so far undoubted ability of language to grasp and express reality. As previously stated, this “linguistic turn” avant la lettre ultimately stemmed from what the postmodern philosopher Giorgio Agamben has rightly called the “radical transformation of the experience of language that was Christianity.” 17 It 12

13 14 15

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See e.g. Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa, 231–291, and Massimiliano Zupi, Incanto e incantesimo del dire: Logica e/o mistica nella filosofia del linguaggio di Platone (Cratilo e Sofista) e Gregorio di Nissa (Contro Eunomio) (Rome: Pontificio Ateneo S. Anselmo, 2007). See Hernández Lobato, “To Speak or Not to Speak.” See the next section of this chapter. On the role of literary exegesis—both pagan and Christian—in the shaping of the new cultural paradigm see Isabella Gualandri, “Prassi esegetica e stile letterario: Alcuni problemi,” in Esegesi, parafrasi e compilazione in eta tardoantica: Atti del Terzo Convegno dell’Associazione di Studi Tardoantichi, ed. Claudio Moreschini (Naples: D’Auria, 1995), 147–174. The problem of Universals has obsessed many postmodern thinkers. For instance, it plays a crucial role in Umberto Eco’s 1980 bestseller The Name of the Rose, as already apparent from its title. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (trans. Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt) (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 68.

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is noteworthy that Agamben’s own philosophy, one of the most refined by-products of the twentieth-century linguistic turn, draws extensively on late antique and early medieval thinkers, theologians, and grammarians, such as Irenaeus of Lyons, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Augustine of Hippo, the Corpus Hermeticum, Valentinian gnostics such as Valentinus and Theodotus,18 Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Proclus, Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, the grammarians Apollonius Dyscolus and Priscian (writing on the grammatical status of the pronoun, a late antique discovery of huge philosophical implications),19 Isidore of Seville, certain late antique Jewish sources (such as the Mishnah and the Talmud),20 John of Damascus, Fredegisus of York’s Epistula de nihilo et de tenebris, Roscelin of Compiègne, etc. Thus, among all contemporary thinkers, Agamben can be justly considered the best connoisseur and the most self-aware intellectual heir of this long-neglected literature. Works like Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (first published in Italian in 1982) or The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (published in 2007 as a part of his “Homo Sacer” project) are evidence of this. Though, generally speaking, that late antique “linguistic turn” has gone unnoticed as a legitimate historical precedent by the great gurus of postmodernism (who were probably much more concerned about setting their own intellectual agendas than about identifying their possible forerunners), most of them engaged in dialogue with some of its greatest exponents while trying to lay the foundations of their own philosophies. Jacques Derrida himself considered the postmodern questioning of language as the latest link of a centuries-long “legacy (archive)”: that of “negative theologies” (in the plural), whose paradigmatic model was to be found in the late antique mystic Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite: “Before Dionysius,” Derrida argues,21 “one may search within a certain Platonic or Neoplatonic tradition; after him up to modernity in Wittgenstein and many others.” That fundamental continuity, based on a shared penchant for problematizing language and on an undisguised mystic undertone, was clearly perceived by the French scholar Pierre Hadot, whose work had an enormous influence on that of his friend, colleague, and “mentor” Michel Foucault.22 After years studying important 18 19 20

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Agamben, Language and Death, 63–65. For an in-depth discussion of this topic see Agamben, Language and Death, 19–37. Cf. e.g. Giorgio Agamben, “Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality,” in Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 205–219. Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials (trans. Ken Frieden),” in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold G. Coward and Toby Forshay (Albany, NY: Suny Press, 1992), 73–142, here 74. For instance, the second and third volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality are visibly influenced by Hadot’s theory of the “spiritual exercises” used in ancient philosophy. See on this Arnold I. Davidson, “Spiritual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy: An In-

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figures in late antique Neoplatonic apophaticism (Plotinus, Damascius, Marius Victorinus, Porphyry, etc.), Hadot considered the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, attracted by their striking familiarity with the problems raised by the Neoplatonic texts he had being dealing with so far: J’ai été personnellement conduit à réfléchir sur les limites du langage, par mes études sur le mysticisme néoplatonicien. On sait l’importance jouée dans ce mysticisme, par la théologie négative: Dieu est antérieur à tous les noms; pour l’atteindre, il faut renoncer au discours; on ne peut que le toucher obscurément au sein de l’expérience mystique. Le théoricien le plus radical de cette théologie négative, ce n’est pas Plotin—qui se permet bien des affirmations au sujet de 1’ineffable—mais c’est Damascius. […] C’est l’esprit occupé de ces problèmes, que j’ai rencontré l’ouvrage de Wittgenstein intitulé: Tractatus logico-philosophicus. […] Le livre de Wittgenstein n’a pas répondu à toutes mes questions. Mais il m’a aidé à réfléchir.

According to Hadot,23 Wittgenstein has a rightful place “dans la tradition des écrivains mystiques qui ont voulu nous conduire jusqu’aux portes du silence devant l’Ineffable.” Indeed, Wittgenstein’s works have been occasionally defined as “mystic,” “Zen,” 24 “apophatic,” 25 and even “Pseudo-Dionysian.” 26 Umberto Eco had no doubt in this respect:27 “Wittgenstein fa parte indubbiamente della grande tradizione mistica germanica, e si allinea coi celebratori dell’estasi, dell’abisso e del silenzio, da Eckhart a Suso e a Ruysbroek.” This “great German mystical tradition” emanated directly from late antique apophaticism, most particularly from Augustine of Hippo and Pseudo-Dionysius. The latter’s works, translated into Latin during the ninth century by John Scotus, had indeed a decisive influence upon the three Rheinish authors mentioned by Eco. The mystical and apophatic character of Wittgenstein’s oeuvre is self-evident from the following passages of his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus:

23 24

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troduction to Pierre Hadot,” Critical Inquiry 16.3 (1990), 475–482. It is also worth mentioning that in 1982 Hadot was named professor at the Collège de France precisely at the suggestion of Michel Foucault. Pierre Hadot, Wittgenstein et les limites du langage (Paris: Vrin, 2004), 45. Cf. e.g. Paul Wienpahl, “Zen and the Work of Wittgenstein,” Chicago Review 12.2 (1958), 67–72. Haralambos Ventis, “The Eloquent Sounds of Silence: Contrasting Intimations of the Ineffable,” θεολογία 3 (2009), 123–147 (with special attention to patristic apophaticism); Sotiris Mitralexis (ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein between Analytic Philosophy and Apophaticism (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). Earl Stanley B. Fronda, Wittgenstein’s (Misunderstood) Religious Thought (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), 27–52 (see esp. 51: “Wittgenstein’s theology is Pseudo-Dionysian”). Umberto Eco, Opera aperta: Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (Milano: Bompiani, 1962), 229.

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[6.44] Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is. [6.522] There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical. [6.54] My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Later, his Philosophical Investigations would go even further in the same direction: [133] For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear. [309] What is your aim in philosophy?—To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.28

Of course this fly-bottle is language, whose apparent transparency gives us the false impression of providing a direct access to reality, when in fact we are kept away from it precisely by its distorting and inescapable mediation. Despite the undeniable concomitances between these texts and those of—say—Pseudo-Dionysius, it is hard to determine how acquainted Wittgenstein really was with that literary tradition. There is a sole major exception: Augustine of Hippo. Wittgenstein’s obsession with Augustine’s Confessions is well known, and it exerted a vast influence on his thinking. He once declared to his friend Maurice Drury that the Confessions were possibly “the most serious book ever written.” 29 According to Drury’s account, Wittgenstein was so deeply acquainted with this work that he could find “the passage he wanted in a few seconds.” 30 Another student and friend of his, Norman Malcolm, further confirms this profound admiration: He revered the writings of St. Augustine. He told me he decided to begin his Investigations with a quotation from the latter’s Confessions, not because he could not find the conception expressed in that quotation stated as well by other philosophers, but because the conception must be important if so great a mind held it.31

It is thus no wonder that Augustine is not only the first but also the most often mentioned person in the Philosophical Investigations. The work itself has been some28

29

30 31

The translation is taken from L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (trans. Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), ad loc. Maurice O’Connor Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 76–96, here 90. Drury, “Some Notes,” 89. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 59–60.

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times described as “Wittgenstein’s Confessions” 32—or, in other words, a respectful “transformation of the Augustinian paradigm” to be placed “in the genre of confession.” 33 Though Augustine’s stances are frequently invoked to be discussed and refuted (most conspicuously in the opening quotation of Conf. 1.8.13)34, the work’s general Augustinianism cannot go unnoticed. Other Augustinian texts like De magistro, though never explicitly mentioned, also probably played a role in shaping Wittgenstein’s theory of language, as suggested by Burnyeat.35 Let us now briefly consider the iconoclastic intellectual Georges Bataille (1897–1962), whose bizarre oeuvre—an eroticized mixture of late antique apophaticism and Nietzschean philosophy—would exert a major influence on the big names of French Postmodernism: Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, JeanFrançois Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida.36 Bataille’s bedside reading during his youth (1918–1919) was Le latin mystique by Remy de Gourmont,37 published in 1892 with a preface by Joris-Karl Huysmans38. This book, a must-read for fin-desiècle decadentists, symbolists, and aestheticists, provided the young Bataille with an annotated anthology of an impressive number of late antique and medieval Latin poets, including Commodianus of Gaza, Lactantius, Claudian, Ausonius, Paulinus of Nola, Prudentius, Sidonius Apollinaris, Dracontius, and many others. Therefore, unlike many of his contemporaries, Bataille was always deeply acquainted with a literary tradition—that of late antique poetry—which had been consigned to oblivion by that time’s academic mainstream. This first-hand knowledge can be easily detected in his later writings, dominated by the ideas of apophatic mysticism, 32

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Luigi Perissinotto, (2002), “Ludwig Wittgenstein: I limiti del linguaggio,” in Luigi Alici et al. (eds.), Verità e linguaggio: Agostino nella filosofía del Novecento (Roma: Città Nuova, 2002), vol. 3, 21–44, here 24–25: “Le Confessioni sono l’opera probabilmente più vicina all’idea che Wittgenstein aveva di un’opera di filosofia e a quel modello di libro filosofico che, dopo il Tractatus logico-philosophicus, tentava di comporre; al punto che si potrebbe quasi affermare che le Ricerche filosofiche sono e intendevano essere le Confessioni di Wittgenstein.” James Wetzel, “Wittgenstein’s Augustine: The Inauguration of the Later Philosophy,” in Phillip Cary et al. (eds.), Augustine and Philosophy (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010), 219–242, here 219. Another remarkable case is Augustine’s famous question on the nature of time (Conf. 11.14.17: Quid ergo est tempus?), which Wittgenstein referred to as a paradigmatic example of the traps of language. See on this Perissinotto, “Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 39–44. Myles F. Burnyeat, “Wittgenstein and Augustine De Magistro,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Supplementary Volumes 61 (1987), 1–24. On this influence see Robert Laffont and Valentino Bompini (eds.), Dictionnaire des œuvres de tous les temps et de tous les pays (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1990), vol. 1, 242–243; Gilles Ernst and Jean-François Louette (eds.), Georges Bataille, cinquante ans après (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2013), 260. Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography (trans. by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson) (London-New York: Verso, 2002), 27–30. On Huysmans’ fondness for late antique literature see McGill in this volume.

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ecstasy, and rapture. This is particularly true of his 1943 essay Inner Experience, the first installment of a trilogy mockingly entitled Summa Atheologica after Thomas Aquinas’ celebrated treatise. This work champions a non-discursive model of knowledge based on a direct experience of the Ineffable. This model, despite of—or rather due to—its “a-theological” character, is conspicuously inspired by the apophatic mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,39 who is constantly invoked in support of the author’s view: I read in Denys l’Aréopagite [sic]: “Those who by an inward cessation of all intellectual functioning enter into an intimate union with ineffable light…only speak of God by negation” (Noms divins, 1,5). So is it from the moment that it is experience and not presupposition which reveals (to such an extent that, in the eyes of the latter, light is “a ray of darkness”; he would go so far as to say, in the tradition of Eckhart: “God is Nothingness [néant]”). But positive theology—founded on the revelation of the scriptures—is not in accord with this negative experience. Several pages after having evoked this God whom discourse only apprehends by negating, Denys writes, “He possesses absolute dominion over creation…, all things are linked to him as to their center, recognizing him as their cause, their principle and their end…” (ibid. 1,7).40

As apparent from this text, if Bataille has anything to complain about Pseudo-Dionysius, it is only that he was not always as Pseudo-Dionysian (that is, as apophatic) as he promised to be. Later on, Pseudo-Dionysius’ method of self-emptying of all conceptual thinking is explicitly vindicated as the right way to gain access to Bataille’s much sought after inner experience: “It is through an ‘intimate cessation of all intellectual operations’41 that the mind is laid bare. If not, discourse maintains it in its little complacency.” 42 Bataille’s inner experience, like the one described by Pseudo-Dionysius, abhors the trap of language and can be therefore deemed to be profoundly anti-philosophical: “The difference between inner experience and philosophy resides principally in this: that in experience, what is stated is nothing, if not a means and even, as much as a means, an obstacle; what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind.” 43 This is again Wittgenstein’s fly searching its way out of the bottle. The huge influence of late antique apophaticism on the development of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction is beyond doubt and has given rise to an extensive liter39

40

41

42 43

On the mysticism of Georges Bataille and its sources see Andrew Hussey, The Inner Scar: The Mysticism of Georges Bataille (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (trans. Leslie Anne Boldt) (Albany: State University of New York Pres, 1988), 4. This is again the same quotation from Pseudo-Dionysius’ Divine Names 1.5, though slightly reworded. Bataille, Inner Experience, 13. Bataille, Inner Experience, 13.

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ature,44 that need not be rehearsed here. Derrida himself, a self-confessed admirer of Bataille’s oeuvre, openly admitted to having “always been fascinated by the supposed movements of negative theology.” 45 Many of his works prove indeed an in-depth knowledge of late antique authors like Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, or Augustine,46 with whom he is in ceaseless dialogue in his indefatigable quest for the ineffable and in his bold questioning of language. This relationship did not go unnoticed by Derrida’s critics, as he himself admits:47 “Very early I was accused of—rather than congratulated for—resifting the procedures of negative theology.” Deconstruction and apophaticism have indeed been constantly associated in order to be accused of the same charges: Those who still denounce “deconstruction”—with its thinking of différance or the writing of the writing—as a bastardized resurgence of negative theology are also those who readily suspect those they call the “deconstructionists” of forming a sect, a brotherhood, an esoteric corporation, or more vulgarly, a clique, a gang, or (I quote) a “mafia.” 48

Not for nothing, late antique apophaticism, much in the same way as deconstruction, “questions and casts suspicion on the very essence or possibility of language,” 49 thus challenging the time-honored logocentricism of the Western world. Derrida explicitly reflects on the problematic relationship between deconstruction and apophaticism (always focusing on Pseudo-Dionysius) in two seminal works: his 1992 paper “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” (originally a conference paper delivered in 1986 in Jerusalem) and his 1993 essay On the Name (translated into English in 1995). The Derridean notion of différance (a term conveying both difference and deferral of meaning within the self-contained and self-referential web of language) is conspicuously redolent of the late antique apophatic tradition.50 As Derrida himself recognizes when reflecting on this concept, “the detours, phrases, 44

45 46

47 48 49

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Cf. e.g. Mark C. Taylor, “Non-Negative Negative Atheology,” Diacritics 20.4 (1990), 2–16; Harold G. Coward and Toby Forshay (eds.), Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany, NY: Suny Press, 1992); Antony L. Dugdale, Silent Prayers: Derridean Negativity and Negative Theology (Montreal, McGill University, Master’s thesis, 1993); John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), with extensive bibliography on the subject. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” 82. Apparently, he was less acquainted with other exponents of late antique apophaticism, such as Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius Ponticus or Damascius. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” 74. J. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” 88. See also pages 75–76 and 88–89. Jacques Derrida, On the Name (ed. Thomas Dutoit; trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr. and Ian McLeod) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 48. On the differences see Caputo, The Prayers, 1–19.

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and syntax that I shall often have to resort to will resemble—will sometimes be practically indiscernible from—those of negative theology.” 51 One of the main aspects that Derrida’s différance shares with negative theology is a secret yearning for an impossible and unattainable presence, a long-awaited encounter with reality which is endlessly deferred by the self-referential web of differences in which language consists: Without the possibility of différance, the desire of presence as such would not find its breathing-space. That means by the same token that this desire carries in itself the destiny of its non-satisfaction. Différance produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing that it makes impossible.52

Though admitting and even vindicating a vague kinship with late antique apophaticism, Derrida strives to dissociate deconstruction from this centuriesold legacy in at least two fundamental aspects: on the one hand, the alleged hyperessentiality underlying Pseudo-Dionysius’ theology (that is, the idea of a Being “beyond being” surreptitiously implied under the apparent negations);53 on the other hand, his self-contradictory eagerness to determine the “other” (which is intrinsically indeterminable) by using the name of God. To be really true to itself, negative theology should follow its own self-deconstructive impulse and get rid of this onto-theological burden: the principle of negative theology, in a movement of internal rebellion, radically contests the tradition from which it seems to come. […] Then “the name is necessary” [il y faut le nom] would mean that the name is lacking [fait défaut]: it must be lacking, a name is necessary [il faut un nom] that is lacking [fasse défaut]. Thus managing to efface itself, it itself will be safe, will be, save itself [sera sauf luimème].54 51

52

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Jacques Derrida, “Difference,” in Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (trans. David B. Allison) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 129–160, here 134. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, (1976), 143. This objection has been contested by Jean-Luc Marion, see Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” 131–133, n. 2. Douglass, for his part, holds that, unlike PseudoDionysius, Gregory of Nyssa does escape the objection of hyperessentiality, since in his theology the mystical ascent is always limited by the ideas of diástēma and epéktasis, the latter entailing “an asymptotic approach to an infinitely receding pole,” cf. S. Douglass, Theology of the Gap: Cappadocian Language Theory and Trinitarian Controversy (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 268. Thus, “the ‘hyperousiological’ is neither recuperated nor denied. It is performatively posited within a space that remains constitutionally other and inaccessible” (Douglass, Theology of the Gap, 269–270). Derrida, On the Name, 67–68.

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Like Bataille before him, Derrida’s major objection to late antique apophaticism is that it is not always as apophatic—as true to its own principles—as it should be. In this sense, deconstruction might be understood as an attempt to carry the apophatic project to its logical conclusion, thus reaching a “general apophaticism,” 55 deprived of any conceptual determination and any self-imposed cultural background.56 Late antique mysticism seems also to have marked one of the literary idols of postmodern theoreticians: the Argentine short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges.57 In fact, both Pseudo-Dionysius and his ninth-century translator and continuator, John Scotus Eriugena,58 figure prominently in Borges’s 1950 piece “From Someone to Nobody” (“De alguien a nadie”), itself a witty reflection on the historical development of, and the provocative paradoxes inherent in apophatic theology. But Borges’s interest in the subject was neither occasional nor strictly theoretical. As he reminisced in a conversation with Willis Barnstone, Borges underwent himself two mystical experiences, which he was only able to describe in apophatic terms.59 These experiences not only had a profound impact on his everyday life and his intellectual biography but also informed and inspired some of his most influential literary pieces—short stories like “The Aleph,” “A Yellow Rose,” and “Funes the Memorious” 60 or poems like “Matthew, xxv, 30.” 55 56

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Caputo, The Prayers, 41–57. Richard Kearney (moderator), “On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion,” in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds.), God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 54–78. This “religion without religion” (Kearney, “On the Gift,” 73) in which deconstruction ultimately consists was for Derrida “the condition for a universal politics, for the possibility of crossing the borders of our common context—European, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and philosophical […] I use the problematic of deconstruction and negative theology as a threshold to the definition of a new politics” (these are Derrida’s own words transcribed in Kearney, “On the Gift,” 76). Suffice it to remember that it was precisely a short story by Borges that inspired Michel Foucault’s most celebrated essay (Les mots et les choses), as he identified with its prologue. On their influence on Borges’s writings see Silvia Magnavacca, Filósofos medievales en la obra de Borges (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2009), 63–86. Willis Barnstone, Borges at Eighty: Conversations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 11: “In my life I had only two mystical experiences and I can’t tell them because what happened is not to be put into words, since words, after all, stand for shared experience. And if you have not had the experience you can’t share it—as if you were to talk about the taste of coffee and had never tried coffee. Twice in my life I had a feeling, a feeling rather agreeable than otherwise. It was astonishing, astounding. I was overwhelmed, taken aback. I had the feeling of living not in time but outside of time. I don’t know how long that feeling lasted, since I was outside time.” Meaningfully, the protagonist of this short story, Ireneo Funes, a Uruguayan with the uncanny knack of remembering absolutely everything, was named after the second-

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From the line to the labyrinth: Late antique exegesis and postmodern literary theory Deconstruction has often been defined as a criticism of the Western habit of thinking, based on a series of opposed and mutually exclusive binomials: true/false, affirmative/negative, present/absent, transcendent/immanent, etc. Such a dualistic way of reasoning, perfectly embodied in the Aristotelian law of the excluded third (also known as tertium non datur, “no third possibility is given”), ultimately grounded the whole edifice of the Enlightenment episteme, as was already the case in Classical Antiquity. A “deconstructive” attitude towards this time-honored principle can be easily traced back to Late Antiquity, most conspicuously to the works of Pseudo-Dionysius (Myst. 1.2.1000b): “Now we should not conclude that the negations are simply the opposites of the affirmations, but rather that the cause of all is considerably prior to this, beyond privations, beyond every denial, beyond every assertion.” 61 Derrida, who quotes and discusses this very passage,62 rightly points out that, when dealing with texts of this nature, “we are involved in a thinking that is essentially alien to dialectic, even if Christian negative theologies owe much to Platonic or Neoplatonic dialectic.” 63 The postmodern theologian JeanLuc Marion goes even further in the same direction:64 It [the third way] concerns a form of speech which no longer says something about something (or a name of someone), but which denies all relevance to predication, rejects the nominative function of names, and suspends the rule of truth’s two values. Dionysius indicates this new pragmatic function of language, aiming at He who surpasses all nomination by giving him the title αἰτία—not the metaphysical “cause,” but what all those who demand [αἰτιατά] demand [αἰτέω] when they aim at Him from whom they come and to whom they return.

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century bishop Irenaeus of Lyons. Not for nothing, Irenaeus figures prominently in Borges’s History of Eternity, where he is credited with having invented “our coercive eternity.” Borges’s penchant for the paradoxes of time and eternity, so characteristic of late antique speculation, naturally led him to bury himself into the works of Augustine, as apparent, for instance, from the short story “The Theologians,” set itself in Late Antiquity. On the presence of Augustine in Borges’s writings see Magnavacca, Filósofos medievales, 31–61. On the Borgesian aspects of Late Antiquity see Hernández Lobato, “Conceptual Poetry.” The translation is taken from Colm Luibheid, trans., Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 136. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” 90–91. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” 100. Jean-Luc Marion, “In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of ‘Negative Theology’,” in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds.), God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 20–41, here 27.

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In Pseudo-Dionysius’ mystical logic, inherited in equal proportion from Neoplatonic and Judeo-Christian glimpses of the Ineffable, there is no place for binary oppositions—it is the unspeakable realm of the tertium datur and the coincidentia oppositorum. As I have suggested elsewhere65 following Eco’s terminology,66 Late Antiquity witnessed how the paradigm of the line and its system of strictly dualistic oppositions (which had characterised the Latin way of thinking so far) was beginning to be gradually replaced by the paradigm of the rhizomatic labyrinth: a non-hierarchical net of ceaselessly increasing interconnections. This epistemic transformation began to take place in late antiquity, the moment when the Greco-Roman world first met the Judaeo-Christian conceptual universe, which, while questioning many of its most cherished cultural assumptions, brought into the Western context what we have called this “vertigo” of the infinite.

This paradigm shift from the line to the labyrinth, from a binomial dialectics to an infinite net of interconnections, had profound implications for the development of exegesis in Late Antiquity, thus giving rise to the groundbreaking idea of the “multiplicity of senses.” Neoplatonic, Jewish, and Christian exegetes indulged in all sorts of allegorical and mystical re-readings of their most cherished classics, be they Homer, Plato, Virgil, the Song of Songs, or the Torah. Suddenly, they all were keen to discover hidden meanings and unexpected hints in the tritest passages of their cultural legacies, thus promoting a multilayered model of superimposed readings which influenced postmodern literary criticism.67 This was particularly true of the Holy Scripture. The Bible began to be perceived as “an infinite forest of meanings” (Hier. Epist. 64.19: infinitam sensuum siluam)68 and as a “vast sea of mysteries” (Rufin. Orig. in gen. 9.1 [PG 12.210B]: uastum mysteriorum pelagus); it was no longer a text, but an “ocean” and a “labyrinth” (sanctarum scripturarum…oceanum et mysteriorum Dei, ut sic loquar, labyrinthum: “the ocean of Holy Scriptures and, so to say, the labyrinth of God’s mysteries”).69 According to Ju65 66

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Hernández Lobato, “Conceptual Poetry,” 488. Umberto Eco, “La ligne et le labyrinthe: les structures de la pensée latine,” in Georges Duby (ed.), Civilisation latine: des temps anciens au monde moderne (Paris, 1986), 27–57. Two paradigmatic examples are Umberto Eco, trained as a medievalist and hugely indebted to Augustine’s semiotics, and the literary critic Harold Bloom. The latter was particularly influenced by kabbalah, a mystical tradition of Biblical interpretation whose origins date back to Late Antiquity: see Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1975a). On the relationship between kabbalah and postmodernism see Sanford L. Drob, Kabbalah and Postmodernism: A Dialogue (New York: Peter Lang, 2009). Cf. Hier. Hom. Orig. in Ezech. 4 [PL 25.720D]: latissimam Scripturae siluam (“the exceedingly broad forest of Scripture”). Hier. In Ezech. 14 praef. [PL 25.448D; CCL 75.677].

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deo-Christian speculation, the whole universe was contained in its apparently univocal pages: ‫ דְ ּכ ֹ ָלּא בָּה‬,‫( ֲהפְָך ָבּּה ַו ֲהפְָך ָבּּה‬Pirqê Abot 5.22: “delve and delve into it, for all is in it”); omnia in ipso [sc. Dei uerbo] constant (Ambr. In psalm. 118 serm. 21.12: “all is contained in it [sc. in the word of God]”). A single interpretation was just not enough: at least four of them were required! The theory of the fourfold senses of Scripture—namely, the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic senses—is one of the major contributions of Late Antiquity to the history of literary criticism and textual interpretation.70 First proposed as such by John Cassian (ca. 360–435),71 it figures prominently in the works of Augustine of Hippo, as apparent from this passage of his De Genesi ad litteram (1.1): “In all the sacred books, we should consider the eternal truths that are taught [allegorical sense], the facts that are narrated [literal sense], the future events that are predicted [anagogic sense], and the precepts or counsels that are given [moral sense].” 72 This audacious exegetical model had a great impact on the gurus of postmodern literary theory, embarked on a critical revision of the univocal model of interpretation championed by their immediate predecessors.73 As Holsinger has convincingly suggested,74 the late antique theory of the “four senses” inspired 70

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See Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l’Écriture (Paris: Aubier, 1959–1964, 4 vols. in 2 parts). A Jewish equivalent is represented by the so-called Pardes (“paradise”), a fourfold exegetical method which would first emerge as such in the works of the thirteenth-century Spanish kabbalist Moses de León: cf. Gershom Scholem, “The Meaning of Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” in Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism (New York: Schocken, 1996), 32–86; Moshe Idel, “Pardes: The Fourfold Method of Interpretation (Appendix 1),” in Moshe Idel, Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 429–437. The name PaRDeS is in fact an acronym composed of the initials of the four interpretative levels it embraces: Peshat or “surface” (literal sense), Remez or “hint” (allegorical sense), Derash or “inquire” (homiletic/comparative/exegetical sense), and Sod or “secret” (mystical sense). On the impact of Pardes interpretation on postmodern speculation see e.g. Agamben, “Pardes.” See his Collatio 14.8 (translation: Colm Luibheid, trans., John Cassian: Conferences (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 160): “These four modes of interpretation flow into a unity so that the one Jerusalem can be understood in four different ways, in the historical sense as the city of the Jews, in allegory as the Church of Christ, in anagoge as the heavenly city of God ‘which is the mother of us all’ (Gal 4:26), in the tropological [i.e. moral] sense as the human soul.” In libris autem omnibus sanctis intueri oportet quae ibi aeterna intimentur, quae facta narrentur, quae futura praenuntientur, quae agenda praecipiantur uel admoneantur. Translation: John Hammond Taylor, trans., St. Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 19. Cf. e.g. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), esp. 95: “There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations, and so all criticism is prose poetry.” Holsinger, The Premodern Condition, 152–194.

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Roland Barthes’s 1970 masterpiece S/Z, a (post)structuralist analysis of Honoré de Balzac’s short story “Sarrazine.” This avant-garde analysis can be thus considered “a retooling of the ‘four senses’ of Scripture as studied by Lubac,” 75 a French Jesuit theologian who, barely a decade before the publication of S/Z, had published his monumental and influential study, Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l’Écriture. Barthes, probably imbued with the late antique (mainly patristic) and medieval examples dissected by Lubac, decided to transform Augustine’s four senses into five exegetical codes defining a network of interrelated meanings. The literal sense was preserved under the somewhat pompous name of “proairetic code”; the allegorical sense, which had remained as such in a slightly prior work by Barthes himself,76 was now split into two different codes: the cultural and hermeneutical; finally, the moral and the anagogic senses were secularized as (respectively) the semantic and the symbolic codes. This bold update of a typically late antique interpretive practice has to be seen as “an attempt to enlist the mechanics of premodern exegesis as part of an avant-garde interrogation of textual multiplicity.” 77 Therefore, S/Z was not only a classic of (post)structuralist criticism in its own right but also “the most remarkable instantiation of the premodern condition” 78 that can be found in literary studies. This creative return to the past was not merely incidental, but a deliberate maneuver aimed at shaking the foundations of the Enlightenment project. For Barthes, Late Antiquity and the Middles Ages, two genuine “eras of interpretation,” 79 provided both a mirror of, and a model for his own postmodern agenda, based on the emancipation of critical activity and the creative expansion of literary meaning: I don’t exile criticism in C major, but I distinguish between critical roles and critical activity, which is no longer a critic’s activity, but simply the activity of a writer. It’s an activity of the text, of the intertext, of commentary, in that at bottom one can conceive of writing infinitely on past texts, or at least I can. Now, one could very well imagine a time when works in the traditional sense of the word would no longer be written, and the works of the past would be rewritten endlessly, “endlessly” in 75 76

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Holsinger, The Premodern Condition, 184. In 1969—the year before the publication of S/Z—Barthes brought out the essay “Comment parler à Dieu?” dealing with the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, the sixteenth-century founder of the Jesuit order. This study, greatly indebted to Bataille’s Inner Experience and imbued with late antique apophaticism, would be later included as a chapter in Barthes’s 1971 book Sade, Fourier, Loyola. The whole paper, sometimes considered a foretaste of, and a testing ground for S/Z, pivots on the idea of the four senses, which remain almost unchanged—thought slightly reworded—as the “literal,” “semantic,” “allegorical,” and “anagogic” texts or levels of interpretation. For further details see Holsinger, The Premodern Condition, 167–172 and 179–189. Holsinger, The Premodern Condition, 184. Holsinger, The Premodern Condition, 158. Hernández Lobato, Vel Apolline muto, 91–107.

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the sense of “perpetually”: there would be an activity of proliferating commentary, branching out, recurrent, which would be the true writing activity of our time. After all, it’s not unthinkable, since the Middle Ages did just that, and it would be better to go back to the Middle Ages, to what is called the barbarism of the Middle Ages, than to accept a barbarism of repetition; it would be better perpetually to rewrite Bouvard and Pécuchet than to stay in the unavowed repetition of stereotypes. Obviously I’m talking about a perpetual commentary that serious theoretical analysis would take beyond the stage of paraphrase to “crack” texts and obtain something else.80

Postmodern rewritings of Augustine’s Confessions: The impossible task of saying oneself Finally, I will briefly examine a curious and meaningful phenomenon: the fact that two totemic figures of postmodernism such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard decided to model their respective intellectual testaments on the flagship of late antique literature: Augustine’s Confessions. Derrida’s autobiographical Circumfession (Circonfession in its original French title)81 stemmed from a friendly wager with Geoffrey Bennington. Bennington had embarked on writing an all-embracing essay systematizing and summarizing his friend’s philosophy under the form of a fake computer program: the Derridabase. Derrida, for his part, had to produce an unpredictable response aimed at undermining and escaping Bennington’s systematization. The resultant texts were juxtaposed in parallel within the frame of a single book—Bennington’s Derridabase occupied the place of the main text, whereas Derrida’s Circumfession was laid out in smaller print at the bottom of each page. Derrida’s text, a 59-chapter autobiographical stream of consciousness,82 was conceived as a deliberate 80

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Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980 (trans. Linda Coverdale) (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 148. For an English translation see Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession: Fifty-nine Periods and Periphrases,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (trans. Geoffrey Bennington) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). On its relationship with Augustine’s Confessions see Caputo, The Prayers, 281–329; Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida (trans. Peretz Kidron) (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 43–50; Silvano Petrosino, “Lacan, Derrida, Lyotard e la compagnia di Agostino,” in Luigi Alici et al. (eds.), Verità e linguaggio: Agostino nella filosofía del Novecento (Roma: Città Nuova, 2002), vol. 3, 199–236, here 215–226; Caputo and Scanlon (eds.), Augustine and Postmodernism (passim); Louise Nelstrop, Kevin Magill and Bradley B. Onishi, Christian Mysticism: An Introduction to Contemporary Theoretical Approaches (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 245–249 and 251–254. Derrida was 59 when he composed his Circumfession, so each chapter corresponds symbolically to one year of his life.

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mimicking of Augustine’s Confessions. Its title (Circumfession) evokes that of Augustine’s masterwork while making a pun with the literal and metaphorical notion of “circumcision,” thus allowing Derrida to display an underlying reflection on his own Jewishness.83 Derrida’s scarcely punctuated French freely intermingles with Augustine’s Latin, as he looks at himself in the philosophical, literary, and autobiographical mirror of his “compatriot” Augustine, as he calls him.84 Geoffrey Bennington’s comprehensive study plays the role of the omniscient God to whom Augustine struggles to address his confession, frustrated by the inability of words to communicate with Him who is beyond all language and who, moreover, has no need to be informed of anything. But this game of identifications is far from superficial. Derrida, like Augustine, considered the impossible task of writing an autobiography as something intimately linked to the ideas of silence, unknowing, and apophasis, something which escapes any possibility of systematization.85 It is my contention that the title Circum-fession should also be interpreted in this (etymological) sense, as hinting at the ideas of circum-locution, peri-phrasis, or roundabout speech.86 This way, Derrida seems to remind us that a confession is but a circumfession, that is, a useless roundabout speech aimed at putting into words the most inexpressible and evasive of all subjects: oneself. Both this game of literary masks (based of the equations Derrida = Augustine, Bennington = God, Circumfession = Confessions) and its underlying apophatic dimension can be easily detected in the following passage: [Geoffrey Bennington] remains very close to God, for he knows everything about the “logic” of what I might have written in the past but also of what I might think or write in the future, on any subject at all, so that he can rightly do […] transcendental deduction of me, so that I should have nothing left to say that might surprise him still and bring something about for him, who you would be tempted to compare to Augustine’s God when he asks whether there is any sense in confessing anything to him when He knows everything in advance, which did not stop my compatriot from going beyond this Cur confitemur Deo scienti, not towards a verity, a severity of avowal which never amounts merely to speaking the truth, to making anything known or to presenting oneself naked in one’s truth, as though Augustine still wanted, by force of love, to bring it about that in arriving at God, something should 83

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As it is well-known, Derrida was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in French Algeria. On the Jewish dimension of this work see esp. Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida, 43–50. See e.g. the quotation below. Both Derrida and Augustine were born in today’s Algeria, though in different cities. Cf. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 135, n. 13, referring to his conference on apophatic theology (“How to Avoid Speaking: Denials”): “Despite this silence, or in fact because of it, one will perhaps permit me to interpret this lecture as the most ‘autobiographical’ speech I have ever risked.” Not for nothing, the full title of Derrida’s contribution is “Circumfession: Fiftynine Periods and Periphrases.” Note the equivalence of the Latin prefix circum- in “circumfession” and the Greek peri- in “periods” and “periphrases.”

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happen to God, and someone happen to him who would transform the science of God into a learned ignorance, he says he has to do so in writing, precisely, after the death of his mother…87

Certainly, Augustine composed his Confessions shortly after the death of his mother, Monica, with whom he had shared a mystical experience at Ostia which he would later describe—in strictly apophatic terms—as surpassing the limits of language.88 Similarly, Derrida wrote his Circumfession during the year before his mother Georgette died, while she was laid up in a coma, speechless and blind. Like Monica, her silent presence dominates Derrida’s book; like Augustine’s God, she is also the mute and blind addressee of Derrida’s impossible confession: “but why do I address her like him, my God, to avow.”89 Curiously enough, Derrida, the North African/European deconstructionist, the Jew who had spent his childhood on the rue Saint-Augustin of Algiers, composed this Augustinian/apophatic tribute to his dying mother while living in Santa Monica (California),90 thus rounding off this bewildering literary, philosophical, and biographical masquerade. But Derrida was not an exception. Jean-François Lyotard’s last and most personal work was also devoted to the bishop of Hippo, with whom he clearly identified on an almost intimate level. Though unfinished at his death, it was posthumously published in 1998 under the title of La Confession d’Augustin.91 In this work, Lyotard “explains the fragmented, temporal nature of human selfhood by interspersing quotations from Augustine within his own writing so that the two voices (that of Lyotard and that of Augustine) become blurred almost to the point 87 88 89 90

91

Derrida, “Circumfession,” 16–18. Aug. Conf. 9.10.23–26. Derrida, “Circumfession,” 58. Derrida, “Circumfession,” 18–20: “not that I dare link what he [i.e. Augustine] says about confession with the deaths of our respective mothers, I am not writing about Saint Georgette, the name of my mother, […] for my mother was not a saint, not a Catholic one in any case, but what these two women had in common is the fact that St. Monica, the name of the place in California near to which I am writing, also ended her days, as my mother will too, on the other side [i.e. the European one] of the Mediterranean, far from her land, in her case in the cemetery in Nice which was profaned in 1984, and the son reports her wishes nos concurrimus, sed cito reddita est sensui et aspexit astantes me et fratrem meum et ait nobis quasi quaerenti silimis: ‘ubi eram?’deinde nos intuens maerore attonitos: ‘ponitis hic’ inquit ‘matrem uestram’. ego silebam et fletum frenabam [Aug. Conf. 9.11.27], sentences I quote in Latin, I have taught a lot about these subjects, and if I must not continue doing so here, I owe it to autobiography to say that I have spent my life teaching so as to return in the end to what mixes prayers and tears with blood, salus non erat in sanguine.” For a translation into English see Jean-François Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine (trans. Richard Beardsworth) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). For more on this work see Petrosino, “Lacan, Derrida, Lyotard,” 226–236, and Nelstrop, Magill, and Onishi, Christian Mysticism, 249–254.

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of being indistinguishable.”92 It is hardly a coincidence that Derrida, the father of deconstruction, and Lyotard, the author of the most influential manifesto of postmodernism, La condition postmoderne, finally found the most radical expression of their respective voices in the words of the late antique thinker par excellence: Augustine of Hippo. After all, is there a work more deconstructive, postmodern, unconventional, or challenging than Augustine’s Confessions?93

92 93

Nelstrop, Magill, and Onishi, Christian Mysticism, 250. Cf. e.g. James J. O’Donnell, Augustine. Confessions. Volume II: Commentary Books 1–7 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 8–9: “The work is not verse, but it is not conventional prose either: […] A[ugustine] invented a form and style unique in his own œuvre and in the traditions he inherited. […] As a literary text, Conf. resembles a onesided, non-fiction epistolary novel, enacted in the presence of the silence (and darkness) of God. What A[ugustine] attempts is a radical turn away from common sense—seen as tragically flawed by mad self-love—towards the wholly other, and thus towards the true self—for to him, we are not who we think we are.”

II DECADENCE AND DECLINE

oLoF HeiLo

Decline and Renascence: Re-reading the Late Antiquity of Jacob Burckhardt The idea that the end of Antiquity marks a break in the linear narrative of Western history owes much to the Basel cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897). He is mainly associated with his bestseller, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), but it is important to note – and easily forgotten – that this study of the end of the Middle Ages and the rediscovery of Antiquity was preceded by a mirroring study of the end of Antiquity and the advent of the Middle Ages, Die Zeit des Constantins der Grossen (1853). It is a work that, when read in the larger context of Burckhardt and his time, raises important questions about the tripartite notion of Western history to which it has contributed. The following paper will compare Burckhardt’s notions of decline in Late Antiquity to his notions of renascence in the Renaissance and show why both his writings and the historical continuum on which he tries to set words are in fact less closed than it might seem. By the time when Burckhardt published his debut work, the decline and fall of the ancient world was a worn-out topic and the interpretations of Late Antiquity that have colored so many modern perceptions of Late Antiquity, those of Gibbon and Montesquieu, were already a century old. Contrary to his eloquent but condescending predecessors, Burckhardt was interested in the declining Roman Empire for its own sake, and struggled to understand it on its own terms. His youthful work shows no particular wish to blame Christianity for the evils of the world, and it refrains from treating political developments as if they had been detached from the more crass ground-level matters.1 He takes care to frame his protagonists, Diocletian and Constantine, by the circumstances that explain their actions, even if his way of depicting the latter as a scheming strategist – rather than a pious champion of Christianity – would have sounded harsh to many of his contemporaries.2 Burckhardt pays attention to the religious diversity of the ancient 1

2

Jacob Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen, ed. Hartmut Leppin, Manuela Keßler, Mikkel Mangold (Basel: C.H. Beck Verlag, 2013), 56–62 (66/67–75). Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen, 295–296 (402–403). On precursors to this view and its reception, cf. Santo Mazzarino, “‘Politologisches’ bei Jacob Burckhardt: Betrachtungen zu Burckhardts ‘Zeit Constantin’s’ und zu verwandten Problemen der historischen Begriffsbildung.” Saeculum 22 (1971), 25–28; Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W.M.L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt and

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world, and notes the convergences between non-Christian and Christian beliefs that make the spread of the latter seem less static.3 With profound knowledge and enviable depth he finds his way through the turmoil of the late Roman era without resorting to extreme simplification or bias, and he even reminds his readers what they owe to the Middle Ages. 4 It is only when the young Burckhardt approaches the field of culture, art, and literature that he begins to furnish his narrative with emotionally laden expressions. From the chapter called Alterung des antiken Lebens und seiner Kultur (“On the aging of the ancient world and its culture”) it seems increasingly clear that even if the late Roman world had not lost its political will or moral compass, according to Burckhardt it had lost something far more precious: its sense of beauty. The “theocrasis,” the mixture of faiths and cults around the Mediterranean, appears as the symptom of a world that has abandoned all concepts of order and harmony,5 and in a revealing passage Burckhardt describes how portraits from this period indicate the “racial degeneration” of the Roman elite: An inherent ugliness pervades most images from the time: something sick, strumous, swollen or haggard…Constantine, whose apparition we know from coins and statues, has a sound, regular form…Constantine II shows us the round and not entirely pleasant head of his father, whereas Constans and Constantius are more drawn-out…Much more telling than these Illyrian faces, even more than portraits as such, are the ideal figures of the time in which the artists have put down the whole degeneration of mankind at the time. In den meisten Bildnissen dieser Zeit herrscht teils eine natürliche Hässlichkeit, teils etwas Krankhaftes, Skrophulöses, Aufgedunsenes oder Eingefallenes vor… Constantin, dessen Äusseres wir aus Statuen und Münzen genau kennen, zeigt zwar im ganzen eine gesunde regelmässige Bildung…Constantin II. hat dabei die nicht ganz angenehme rundliche Kopfbildung seines Vaters, Constans und Constantius eine mehr in die Länge gezogene. Viel entscheidender als diese Illyriotengesichter, ja vielleicht mehr als die Bildnisse überhaupt, sprechen die eigentlichen Idealfigu-

3

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the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 147–157 and Hartmut Leppin, “Constantin der Große und das Christentum bei Jacob Burckhardt.” in Dieter Hein, Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Schulz (eds.), Historie und Leben: Der Historiker als Wissenschaftler und Zeitgenosse. Festschrift für Lothar Gall zum 70. Geburtstag (München: De Gruyter Oldenburg, 2006), 441–442. Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen, 121–127 (157/158–166/167), 161–163 (213/214–216/217). Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen, 317 (433). Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen, 131–157 (172–209).

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ren der Zeit, in welchen die Künstler das allgemein Gültige niederlegen wollen, die Verschlechterung des damaligen Menschentypus aus.6

The word Burckhardt uses to denote this “degeneration” is ausarten, but it is not long before he brings up the even more laden term entarten when speaking of the visual culture of the time.7 In his eyes, the Romans at the time of Constantine had become physically ugly and repugnant, but had also lost their sense for dressing, adorning themselves, and even for setting up their hair. The increased use of make-up, parti-colored garments, and golden embroidery matched a world where expensive mosaics replaced paintings, statues were made up of exotic composite materials and nothing but a rhetorical shell remained of literature.8 An obsession with appearance rather than true beauty turned the artist into a mere artisan: the palace of Diocletian in Split and the arch of Constantine in Rome are used to illustrate the utter lack of taste that characterizes the world in which these rulers lived. 9 In Burckhardt’s eyes, this development seems to culminate with the foundation of Constantinople. The syncretistic efforts of its founder to reconcile the disparate faiths, expressions and practices of the Late Roman world receives a matching monument in the new capital on the Bosporus, and Burckhardt notes with horror how it not only gathered different people but also monuments and pieces of art from all over the ancient world without any feeling for their origins or contexts: The heaping together of the incompatible, like the 427 statues in front of the Church of St. Sophia, must have made a crude and repugnant impression; in some cases, statues underwent alterations in the most barbarian manner (…) A strange, colorful splendor was the dominant characteristic of the Constantinian complexes: domes,

6 7

8

9

Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen, 215–217 (289/90–292/293). Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen, 221 (298). It is difficult to come up with English terms to illustrate the slight difference between ausarten and entarten: both mean “to degenerate”, but it was the latter term that the Nazis in Germany used to denote the “degenerate art” to which they counted most artistic developments from expressionism onwards. On the “genetic pattern” in Burckhardt and his contemporaries, see esp. Linda Simonis, Genetisches Prinzip: Zur Struktur der Kulturgeschichte bei Jacob Burckhardt, Georg Lukács, Ernst Robert Curtius und Walter Benjamin (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998), 1–11, 35–39 and Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 78–83. On Burckhardt and aging, see Egon Flaig, “Der Begriff der ‘Alterung’ in Jacob Burckhardts ‘Zeit Konstantins des Großen’, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 28 (1984), 201–213. Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen, 217–219 (292/293–295), 221–224 (298–302/303), 232–238 (314–322). Particularly noteworthy here is his condemnation of floor mosaics: they have an aesthetic value, but there is “something barbarian” about the idea of “walking around” on the Alexander Mosaic. Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen, 215–216 (289/290–291), 222 (299/300).

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The Constantinople that Burckhardt envisions is a pandemonium of unrest, dissonance and unrestrained gaudiness, and as he allows his gaze to wander back to Rome and Athens for one last farewell, he cannot conceal his feelings for the beauty he assumes they possessed even in their old age. He concludes, however, by mentioning Constantine’s building activities in Jerusalem and how they would later boost the defiance of Christianity in the face of Islam.11 The last comment makes it tempting to trace perceptions about external and internal causes of the decline of the Ancient world in the work of Burckhardt, perhaps even an Orientalist bias of the kind that is well known from other descriptions of the later Roman or Byzantine Empire.12 According to Burckhardt, the meritocratic system of the tetrarchy succumbed to the hereditary monarchy of Constantine due to a “sultanic” preference for dynasties in the eastern parts of the empire, culminating in the murders of Fausta, Crispus, and Licinian; similarly, speeches and court ceremonies from this time are said to display an “Egyptian characteristic” to iterate and repeat old customs and traditions.13 It is almost tempting to suggest that his Renaissance Culture resumes at the very point where The Time of Constantine ends, with the “Oriental” emperor Frederick II acting as a new Constantine, from whose illiberal ambitions the Italian city-states are asserting their independence.14 A closer look, however, shows Burckhardt’s Orient to be not so much an active enemy as a passive deterrent to his own world: it provides an example of what the West will become if it succumbs to the inherent forces of stagnation and decline. As does Gibbon, Burckhardt reveals himself to be a deeply pessimistic man with little faith in the scientific progress and technological advances that were a main 10 11 12

13

14

Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen, 344–346 (470/71–473/474). Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen, 348–368 (476/477–505). Cf. Averil Cameron, The Use & Abuse of Byzantium: An Essay on Reception (London, 1992), 9–12, 19–20. Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen, 255 (346), 270 (368), 275–276 (375– 376/377), cf. 282 (385/286); 339 (463/464). Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch, ed. Walther Rehm (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960), 29–30.

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source of pride for the liberal bourgeoisie at his time:15 in The Renaissance Culture the term “modern” is used (exactly like the term “oriental”) with reference to Frederick II and the Italian city-states,16 and if the Time of Constantine reveals the inner convictions of its author, it is not so much because it contains reminiscences of an Orientalizing bias or racial slur that was common at his time. It is far more tempting to read its description of a technological and materialistic world with a superficial preference for the exotic and eclectic as a direct criticism of the nineteenth century in the wake of the 1848 revolutions.17 Burckhardt avoids overt parallels, but from time to time they appear and offer a glimpse of an author writing with a strong contempt for his contemporaries. Speaking about the rhetorical tradition in the late Roman era, he adds that they have no right to judge it, since their own ways of speaking and writing are amorphous, their own ideals disharmonic and mixed with coarse barbarisms; as he talks about late Roman families who spent time and money on musicians instead of their libraries, he draws a comparison to his own time, when “music serves to cover up social deficits” and the grandiloquence of the composers is “strikingly similar” to the empty exercises of late Roman orators.18 The term “decadence” is used with reference to Bernini, and late Roman taste is described as a kind of “rococo”:19 although not articulated as such, one can already discern a cyclical pattern of ascendancy, decline, and “eternal return,” that Oswald Spengler will fashion into his epic pessimistic work, The Decline of the West, where the baroque is paralleled with the Classical age.20 15

16 17

18

19 20

Herman, The Idea of Decline, 76–86; Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism, 157–160; John R. Hinde, Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000), 8–13, 299–301. Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, loc. cit. Brian Brennan, “Burckhardt and Ranke on the Age of Constantine the Great.” Quaderni di storia 41 (1995), 59–60; Thomas Albert Howard, “Jacob Burckhardt, Religion, and the Historiography of ‘Crisis’ and ‘Transition’,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60:1 (1999), 154–58; Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 264–269, 280–282; Egon Flaig, “Philosophy of History and Theory of Historiography in Jacob Burckhardt.” in Peter Koslowski (ed.), The Discovery of Historicity in German Idealism and Historism (New York and Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2005), 91–95. Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen, 235–236 (318/319–320), 358 (491). Cf. Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, 278–279 and esp. 60–62 for the historical context of Basel society at the time. The fact that Burckhardt abhorred Wagner’s music in particular further reinforces this point of view, although it contains the same paradox—a pessimist viewpoint that ultimately negates itself—that can be observed elsewhere here: Wagner, too, was a great admirer of the pessimist Schopenhauer and a friend of the young Nietzsche. Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen, 218 (294), 222 (299/300). A concise overview is provided by Herman, The Idea of Decline, 86–108, 221–255; but for a less biased analysis of both Burckhardt and pessimism, see Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism, 157–169, and of Spengler, see the contribution of Rebenich to

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But what is the nature of the West whose downfall Burckhardt laments? As a historical continuum, it presents the reader with a riddle. In the Age of Constantine, the reader met a world apparently in a deplorable state of discontinuity despite its care to maintain an outer appearance of continuity; and yet the Renaissance Culture that Burckhardt praises seems to be marked by a great openness to changes in spite of its fascination with the past. Perhaps most strikingly, the man who has deplored the passing of the ancient world takes on a completely different tone as he talks about the passing of the Middle Ages: The rest of the Western world had to see how it either repelled or appropriated the enormous impetus from Italy; in the latter case one should refrain from lamenting the downfall of medieval culture and its beliefs: if they had been able to defend themselves they would still be living. Those elegiac minds, who now long for this era to return, would gasp for modern air if they had to spend a mere hour in it. During great historical processes of this kind it is inevitable that many a beautiful flower will die without being immortalized in tradition or poetry; but this does not entitle us to wish it undone. Das übrige Abendland mochte zusehen, wie es den grossen, aus Italien kommenden Antrieb abwehrte oder sich halb oder ganz aneignete; wo letzteres geschah, sollte man sich die Klagen über den frühzeitigen Untergang unserer mittelalterlichen Kulturformen und Vorstellungen ersparen. Hätten sie sich wehren können, so würden sie noch leben. Wenn jene elegischen Gemüter, die sich danach zurücksehnen, nur eine Stunde darin zubringen müssten, sie würden heftig nach moderner Luft begehren. Dass bei grossen Prozessen jener Art manche edle Einzelblüte mit zugrunde geht, ohne in Tradition und Poesie unvergänglich gesichert zu sein, ist gewiss; allein das grosse Gesamtereignis darf man deshalb nicht ungeschehen wünschen.21

It is hard to escape the feeling that Burckhardt is applying double standards here, especially when he praises the great expenditure of renaissance Italians on books and artifacts, their enthusiasm for music and rhetoric, their rich and colorful way of dressing (including the painstaking efforts of the women of the time to maintain a beautiful appearance by means of makeup), their cosmopolitan and pluralistic outlook, their religious syncretism and even tolerance towards Islam.22 Polemically put, what seemed like symptoms of stagnation and decline in Constantinople have become praiseworthy examples of rejuvenation in Italy; what was a tiresome iteration of old forms, customs and tastes in the Age of Constantine has become

21 22

this volume. Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, compares the cyclical notions of history in Burckhardt (240–249, 290) to those of his Basel colleague and contemporary Bachofen (128–137). Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, 202. Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, 123–125, 161–168, 217–224, 258– 268, 322–323, 398–405, 420–424, 518–536.

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a laudable rediscovery of history in the Renaissance Culture; and where the Late Ancient world meekly succumbs to the autocratic rule of Diocletian and Constantine, the agents of the Renaissance are all individuals.23 To understand the logic behind this we need to consider two things. The first one is that Burckhardt, for all of his disagreement with the closed Protestant environment in Basel – where his father had been a clergyman – had never abandoned its soteriological notions of the individual and the world.24 A parallelism between the Renaissance and the Reformation underlies his analysis:25 the latter – for which the impetus comes from Germany – restores Christianity to a state where each individual has access to God through the Gospels; the former – the outcome of the “Italian nation” – marks a process of cultural rediscovery by which the individual adherents gain similar access to a quasi-religious experience of beauty. The second thing we should recall here is that his great predecessor in pessimism, Arthur Schopenhauer, believes in an occasional redemption from the worst of all possible worlds in the contemplation of art, an idea that Richard Wagner tried to put into practice, and which Burckhardt recognizes in the Italian Renaissance, where the individual has thrown off the medieval “veil of faith, childish bias and foolishness” and the state has turned into a “piece of art.”26 This is a form of historicism that operates on a vertical rather than horizontal level, and Burckhardt admits that it has replaced the religious commonality of Christianity in Europe with a mediating culture that divides people into “educated and uneducated,”27 by which we are probably supposed to understand those who have found redemption in the sublime art and literature of the Italian Renaissance and those who have not. With the humble officiousness of a door-knocking missionary Burckhardt leaves the reader with the choice to accept or refuse this invitation, concluding his work

23

24

25 26

27

Cf. Heinz Ritzenhofen, Kontinuität und Krise: Jacob Burckhardts ästhetische Geschichtskonzeption (PhD diss., Köln, 1979), 52–58; Simonis, Genetisches Prinzip, 39–61; Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, 285; William N. West, “Jacob Burckhardt’s Untimely Observations,” Modern Language Quarterly 68:1 (2007), 30–31. On Burckhardt and religion, see Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism, 124– 136, and Hinde, Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity, 114–118; on Protestantism and neo-humanism, see Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, 73–74. Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, 158–160, 489–492, 498, 532. Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, 27–28, 161; cf. Ritzenhofen, Kontinuität und Krise, 33–52; Howard “Jacob Burckhardt, Religion, and the Historiography of ‘Crisis’ and ‘Transition’,” 158–164; Hinde, Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity, 122–130, 234–236; Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, 211–214; Flaig, “Philosophy of History and Theory of Historiography in Jacob Burckhardt,” 79–80. Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, 202; cf. Hinde, Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity, 13–14, 19–23, 133–136, 199–231.

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with the pious wish that the Italian Renaissance will serve as a main guidance for our age.28 His prayers were partly heard. The Renaissance Culture became an instant hit with the Bildungsbürgertum of the late nineteenth century, and an entire generation of young middle-class travelers to Italy used the Cicerone that Burckhardt published a few years later to find their way among the monuments of Rome, Venice, and Florence. Burckhardt would most certainly have disliked the parallel, but in a sense he had offered a visual equivalent to the musical Kunstreligion that Wagner had tried to forge out of the old Germanic and medieval myths. His ambitions were humbler, but as Friedrich Nietzsche well knew he lived in an age that was quick to make new idols to replace those that it had destroyed. Wagner, by no means unwillingly, was one of the first to be turned into an object of secular devotion by his contemporaries, and as for Nietzsche, he sent one of his first mad letters after his mental breakdown in Turin to Burckhardt, telling him that it was nobler to be a god than a professor in Basel.29 Once the pessimist confines of their creators had been swept away by the unrestrained optimism of their adepts, Wagner’s German Middle Ages and Burckhardt’s Italian Renaissance would be put to historicizing uses of the worst kind. But the correlation itself has been politically exploited,30 and we owe Burckhardt the justice to approach it from a different angle. One famous reader of Jacob Burckhardt was Sigmund Freud, who made use of the Cicerone on a trip to Rome in 1914, just after the devastating break with Carl Gustav Jung. Burckhardt’s description drew him to Michelangelo’s statue of Moses at the tomb of Pope Julius II in San Pietro in Vincoli which – according to Burckhardt – shows Moses at the point when he has discovered the people shouting and dancing around the golden calf and is about to stand up and smash the stone tablets.31 Freud elaborated his interpretation: the silent wrath in the gaze that Michelangelo has bestowed upon Moses shows the inherent threat in such a way that the actual breaking of the tablets becomes superfluous.32 By showing Mo28 29

30

31

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Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, 600. Heinrich Detering, Antichrist und der Gekreuzigte: Friedrich Nietzsches letzte Texte (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010), 148–149, 156. Herman, The Idea of Decline is a characteristic example (cf. loc. cit. and 441–451) of a progressivist criticism that has been influential in the United States and which tries to find a correlation between pessimism (whether racial, cultural, or ecological) and totalitarianism, but which for that very reason often ends up with an equally closed mind. Cf. John N. Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 20–49, 77–97, 261–297 for an opposite viewpoint. Jacob Burckhardt, Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens: Architektur und Skulptur, ed. Christine Roeck, Martin Tauber & Bernd Warnke (Basel: C.H. Beck Verlag, 2001), 535 (671): “Moses scheint in dem Moment dargestellt, da er die Verehrung des goldenen Kalbes erblickt und aufspringen will.” Sigmund Freud, “Der Moses des Michelangelo,” in Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1960), 172–201.

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ses in this way, Freud concludes, Michelangelo has psychologically processed the stormy relationship to his papal patron. In fact more than one reader has remarked that this bears a suspicious resemblance to Freud’s own mood after the break with Jung: his immediate reaction to the mutiny of the friend and disciple would have been to smash the whole psychoanalytic tradition, but instead he finds redemption in the identification with Michelangelo.33 Here we have a whole chain of readings: scholars reading Freud reading Burckhardt reading Michelangelo reading Moses…it could go on forever. The point here, of course, is creativity. A reading is active, not passive: it continuously adds something to the material because it goes through the eyes of a beholding subject. To admit this might have been less of a problem to Michelangelo or Wagner, for instance, because they never tried to conceal that they were artists and that their interpretations of Moses or Parsifal were their creations. But it lies as a shadow over all human efforts to claim objectivity of the kind that we often strikingly find among theologians, philosophers and scientists. The Reformation claimed to liberate Christianity from medieval additions and restore it to its original state, but in reality it was a creative process, as proven by the multitude of groups that felt encouraged by its re-reading of the Scriptures. As for the Renaissance, it was a creative process that actively encouraged re-readings and re-interpretations of the ancient classics, rather than the closed and quasi-apocalyptic process that Burckhardt often seems to envision. In fact, Burckhardt’s work is itself a creative re-reading of the period, and this is what makes us free to re-read him. He believed himself to live in an era of artistic decline, and found redemption in the contemplation of a bygone beauty; but this contemplation was an active and creative process on his part as much as on that of the objects he studied, and serves as proof that his age was not void of creativity.34 The “decadence” or “decline” only sets in at the moment when his ideals have been idolized and allowed to satisfy desires for a merely passive redemption in the name of history, the nation, or the culture. In conclusion, then, the creative decline that the young Burckhardt deplores in Late Ancient art might as well be his own disinclination – and that of his contemporaries – to re-read it in a creative way. For a creative mind such as his this would indeed be a strange thing, and it should not come as a surprise that Burckhardt, in a lecture from later in his life, takes on the task of criticizing the condescending way in which the later Roman and Byzantine Empire has been treated in Western historiography. Instead, Burckhardt pleads for an honest effort to reinterpret it: Still in this alien world, the unbiased observer will recognize a great vitality that furiously defended itself against enemies on all sides and that still today, four centu33

34

Franz Maciejewski, Der Moses des Sigmund Freud: Ein unheimlicher Bruder (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 170–172. West, “Jacob Burckhardt’s Untimely Observations,” 34–38.

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Though he bases his lecture on a somewhat limited and uninspiring selection of source material from the Middle-Byzantine historiographers to which he had access, Burckhardt finds ways to approach their world on its own terms, noting how the emperors, even if they were utter scoundrels on a personal level, were capable administrators who managed to keep the state budgets together, maintain order, and defend the borders for the inhabitants living within them; and he particularly notes that – with one or two possible exceptions – no Commodus, Caracalla, or Elagabal ever ascended the throne in Constantinople.36 Perhaps the mixture of feelings with which the older Burckhardt encounters the alien and yet familiar world of the Byzantines explains why his younger self interpreted the world of Constantine and that of the Renaissance in such diametrically different ways. Complete identification – with the ancient classics or the Renaissance – would leave no room for subjective approaches; complete estrangement – towards the orient or the Middle Ages – would leave no room for recognition of the other. At this point the problem of continuity and change turns out to be illusory. History has lost its linear form and become what is known as a Schachtelgeschichte in German: a story within a story, within a story… It begs the question whether any actual break has ever taken place except in the eyes of the historical subjects we study; or conversely, whether a revival has ever taken place except in our own eyes. It might well turn out that we are all caught up in different cycles of re-reading the past, and that the bridge between the reader and the historical text is automatically bound to cross a “Middle Age” of time in various degrees of reflection or transparency.37 In order to understand why some readings have enjoyed wider circulation and social status, we should seek 35

36 37

Jacob Burckhardt, Vorträge 1870–1892, ed. Maurizio Ghelardi, Susanne Müller, Reinhard Bernauer (Basel: C.H. Beck, 2003), 535. Burckhardt, Vorträge, 539, 544, 546. Cf. Detering, Antichrist und der Gekreuzigte, 161–168. For an interesting study of structurally similar misreadings within misreadings, see Robert Irwin, “Petrarch and ‘That Mad Dog Averroës’,” in Gerald MacLean (ed.), Re-Orienting the Renaissance (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 120–121.

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information not only from their own ways of narrating the past: we should also focus on the practical circumstances that have enabled their readings to flourish and proliferate. Reading Burckhardt may not provide any conclusive answers, but it is certainly a good start.

scott mcGiLL

Reading Against the Grain: Late Latin Literature in Huysmans’ À rebours

Late Antiquity has deep roots in apology. Defenses of the period go back to Alois Riegl, whose Spätrömische Kunstindustrie in 1901 introduced the term Spätantike into archeological studies and art history.1 The stated objective of Riegl’s work was to end the prejudice against Late Antiquity in the history of art and aesthetics. Riegl’s way of historicizing Late Antiquity has spread to other areas of study, including Latin poetry. Critics have sought to individuate the period in literary history by identifying distinctive features of late antique Latin verse, to liberate texts from classicizing prejudices, and to make the case that Late Antiquity was not an age of decline and fall in poetry but of transformation and even growth.2 Michael Roberts illustrates the tendency in his important 1989 book, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity. Roberts’ purpose is “to view [late antique Latin poetry] on its own terms rather than from the perspective, conscious or not, of classical aesthetics” (3). To him, posteriority does not imply inferiority. Instead, late poets create a new chapter in ancient literary history and a style of their age, with features comparable to those in late antique art. A strong influence on Roberts was the work of Henri-Irénée Marrou.3 In 1949, Marrou published a reissue of Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, in which he retracted his previous view that Late Antiquity was a time of decadence and a degenerate version of the classical world. Marrou argued instead that classical culture had become something very different in that period; as he later put it, Late Antiquity was “another antiquity, another civilization, and one must learn to recognize it in its originality and to judge it for itself, not by the standards of a previous age” (une autre antiquité, une autre civilisation, qu’il faut apprendre à reconnaître dans son originalité et à juger pour elle-même et non à travers les canons des âges antérieurs).4 To condemn the non-classical for not being classical 1

2

3

4

For discussion, see J. Elsner, “The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901,” Art History 25.3 (2002), 358. Riegl’s “Late Antiquity” was the period from Constantine to Charlemagne. The third goal in the list echoes M. Formisano, “Late Antiquity, New Departures,” in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, ed. R. J. Hexter and D. Townsend (Oxford, 2012), 509–534, here 510. M. Roberts, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca and London, 1989), 3–4. H.-I. Marrou, Décadence romaine ou Antiquité tardive? (Paris, 1977), 13.

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was, for Marrou, to demand static history and to overlook the cultural changes that rendered Late Antiquity different from the past, but not worse than it. Marrou, Roberts, Riegl, and others, then, have sought to redefine the terms of debate so as to distance Late Antiquity from decadence and decline. But must those things always be argued away? Must one deny decadence and decline to find merit in the art and literature of Late Antiquity? For one notorious individual, the answer to both questions is a powerful no. That person comes not from the world of scholarship, but of fiction: Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose French novel À rebours, translated into English as Against Nature or Against the Grain, is the outstanding example of the decadent movement in nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle literature. It centers on Jean Des Esseintes, a man born into faded aristocracy, a sophisticate and aesthete, and a neurotic. There is virtually no action in the book. Instead, it largely explores the thoughts and tastes of its main character after he retreats from Paris to a villa in Fontenay-aux-Roses. Des Esseintes is alienated from, and disgusted by, the bourgeois banalities of Parisian life, which have left him in a state of nervous exhaustion. In response, he seeks the solitude of the villa, where he luxuriates in his ennui and gives himself over to the pursuit and enjoyment of aesthetic extremes. The book is intensely claustrophobic, both because it is mainly set in the isolated and sealed villa and because it focuses on the inner life of Des Esseintes, which, like the place he inhabits, is crepuscular, airless, and excessively ornamented. There is to the novel the feel of a fevered dream, an uncanny, almost hallucinatory quality as Des Esseintes spends page after page savoring the “systematic cultivation of the senses, with the aid of exotic flowers, potent liquors, bizarre pets and an arcane library.” 5 In Chapter Three of À rebours, Huysmans describes the Latin works that filled one section of the bookshelves lining the wall of Des Esseintes’ orange and blue study.6 Huysmans introduces those works by stating that they are examples of what academia characterizes as “the Decadence.” For Huysmans, “Decadence” is an elephantine category, extending from the first century ce to the tenth.7 But he devotes most of his attention to Roman antiquity into the sixth century. My interest lies in examining Huysmans’ account of that time period as a case study in the reception of late Latin literature and in the construction of that literature as the product and expression of decadence. I will identify characteristics that Huysmans assigns to Latin decadent texts from the first century CE onward, but 5

6

7

M. Travers, An Introduction to Modern European Literature: From Romanticism to Postmodernism (London and New York, 1998), 111. I use the English translation of M. Mauldon (Against Nature, Oxford, 1998) unless otherwise indicated; the French text is that of M. Fumaroli (ed.), Huysmans: À rebours, second edition (Paris, 1983). The numbers in parentheses throughout the essay refer to the page numbers in Mauldon. I echo James Uden, who discusses Huysmans in a chapter on the modern reception of Late Antiquity, forthcoming in Blackwell’s Companion to Late Antique Literature. Cf., too, Uden in this volume.

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I will also show that decadence develops new contours in the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, i.e., centuries that belong to the period we know today as Late Antiquity.8 As Huysmans presents that time span, therefore, it is both part of a broader historical trend and distinctive in some of its features. The nineteenth century, including the fin de siècle, was crucial to the development of the modern conception of a decadent late Roman Empire, including that of what we call Late Antiquity—and the apologetic scholarship that Riegl, Marrou, and Roberts represent is a legacy of that way of thinking, because it is a response to it.9 Huysmans offers a vivid example of the making of late antique decadence in the 1800s, and he shows what traits could be found in and projected onto late Latin literature to create the historical narrative. Leaden gold Chapter Three of À rebours opens with an overview of Des Esseintes’ library of Latin texts (23): One section of the bookshelves lining the walls of his orange and blue study was filled exclusively with works in Latin, works which are classified under the generic term “The Decadence” by those intellects which have been tamed into conformity by the deplorable, endlessly reiterated lectures of the colleges of the Sorbonne.10 Une partie des rayons plaqués contre les murs de son cabinet, orange et bleu, était exclusivement couverte par des ouvrages latins, par ceux que les intelligences qu’ont domestiquées les déplorables leçons ressassées dans les Sorbonnes désignent sous ce nom générique: “la décadence.”

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On the periodization of Late Antiquity, with a focus on Latin literature, see D. Shanzer, “Literature, History, Periodization, and the Pleasures of the Latin Literary History of Late Antiquity,” History Compass 7 (2009), 1–38. The nineteenth century did not conceptualize Late Antiquity as a distinct period from (roughly) the mid-third to the early seventh century, as we commonly do today. Cf. A.E. Carter, The Idea of Decadence in French Literature 1830–1900 (Toronto, 1958), 147: “The last Roman poets were only decadent because the nineteenth century wished them to be so.” On the nineteenth-century construction of late Roman decadence, see, further, N. Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1997), 247–268. M. Formisano, “Reading Décadence—Reception and the Subaltern Late Antiquity,” in Décadence: “Decline and Fall” or “Other Antiquity”?, ed. M. Formisano and T. Fuhrer (Heidelberg, 2014), 7–16, examines the wider understanding of Late Antiquity as a period of decadence. “The Decadence” departs from Mauldon, who translates “The Decadent Period.”

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It becomes immediately clear that the library will be an expression of Des Esseintes’ unconventional tastes and intellectual snobbery. He stands aloof from prevailing academic standards and is attracted to what is omitted from the canon perpetuated at the Sorbonne. From his point of view—and the chapter, like the book generally, is focalized through him11—the elite university is a place not of real thought, but of conformist groupthink. Professors mindlessly repeat a tired narrative that dismisses a body of Latin texts by labeling them decadent. By understood contrast, Des Esseintes thinks for himself and finds value in what conventional and empty academics shunt aside. Huysmans proceeds to emphasize Des Esseintes’ aversion to the received canon. The Latin language of the period that “professors persist in calling the ‘Golden Age’” 12 holds hardly any appeal to him and, indeed, strikes him as rigid, colorless, pompous, vague, tedious, and unoriginal. Des Esseintes is also dismissive of several canonical authors, although he reserves his harshest attack for Virgil. To him, Virgil was “not only one of the most terrible pedants but also one of the dullest bores that Antiquity ever produced” (23) (ainsi que l’un des plus terribles cuistres, l’un des plus sinistres raseurs que l’antiquité ait jamais produits). Also intolerable were some of Virgil’s characters, including Aeneas, “an irresolute, indeterminate character who struts about gesturing woodenly, like a silhouette in a shadow box, behind the ill-fitting, obtrusive transparency of the poem” (23) (ce personnage indécis et fluent qui se promène, pareil à une ombre chinoise, avec des gestes en bois, derrière le transparent mal assujetti et mal huilé du poème). Des Esseintes might have borne those figures and their tedious, contrived dialogue, just as he might have excused Virgil’s plagiarism of Homer and other writers and his vapidity. What puts him over the edge, however, are Virgil’s hexameters, which, we are told in an extended critique, are tinny, sterile, pedantic, stiff, and mechanical (24). The faults of Virgil’s meter, coupled with his vocabulary, at once padded and poverty-stricken, torment Des Esseintes and turn him into an arch-obtrectator of the poet. Anyone at all familiar with Virgilian style will recognize that Des Esseintes gets his prosody and language wrong. One might also, of course, take issue with the rest of his characterization of Virgil’s poetry. But that is entirely the point. Des Esseintes’ approach to Virgil is a provocation; he sees things as mainstream culture does not, and he is vicious where that culture is respectful, seeking to tear down what dominant opinion extols. In his subversiveness, he refuses to glorify

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Hence throughout this essay, I ascribe thoughts and feelings to Des Esseintes even when the narrative is in the third person, without explicit markers that the point of view is his. Identification with Des Esseintes’ perspective is often just understood, but it is total as a kind of free indirect discourse in Chapter Three of À rebours. “Les professeurs s’obstinent encore à appeler le grand siècle.” On “grand siècle,” see note 26 below.

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what others deem classical excellence, and he stands opposed to, and places himself above, the institutional authority that canonizes it.13 By implication, the literature of “the Decadence” to which Des Esseintes is drawn is not only post-classical but also counter-classical. It is defined by its distance and difference from the canonical Golden Age of Latin; there is no sense of continuity between the two, but rather a stark divide. Late literature also stands as the body of work cast aside by the gatekeepers of classicism because, as the label “decadence” implies, it falls away from classical standards. By distinguishing his own ideas from authoritative academic norms, Des Esseintes locates the appeal of late literature in inverted judgment, where disparaged recherché texts stand above canonical works in an alternative reconstruction of literary history.14 He defines decadent texts as the literary Other, existing outside of and in contrast to the works of the Golden Age, and then reverses the established hierarchy between them. Clearly Des Esseintes tastes are outré. But Huysmans is not satirizing them or him; this would require that he collaborate with the “grain” or “nature” that the novel so forcefully resists and displaces.15 À rebours presents a protagonist’s uninhibited embrace of decadence even when the extremity of that embrace leads things into the realm of the grotesque, the absurd, and the mad. Huysmans creates the great decadent antihero, with his attendant perversions and pathologies, and 13

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Huysmans is also rejecting, and reversing, the positions of nineteenth-century French critics. This includes Désirée Nisard, who in 1834 published his Études de moeurs et de critique sur les poètes latins de la décadence, in which “décadence” is pejorative, signifying, as P. McGuinness, Joris-Karl Huysmans: Against Nature (À rebours), introduction and notes (London, 2003), xxx, puts it, “a period of description, where verbal ingenuity replaced moral vision, ornament replaced substance and false complexity replaced clarity of thought and language.” For other authoritative literary histories that Huysmans appears to have used, notably Adolf Ebert’s Histoíre générale de la littérature du moyen âge en Occident, see J. Céard “Des Esseintes et la décadence latine,” Studi Francesi 65–66 (1978), 298–310, as well as Shanzer, “Literature, History, Periodization,” 27 n. 114 and 115. Huysmans appears to have known most of the Latin authors he treats at least primarily, if not completely, through the literary histories, rather than at first hand. Cf. Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome, 263, on how Huysmans reacts to standard histories of Latin literature: “It was a simple matter to accept the information and invert the valuation.” See also Shanzer, “Literature, History, Periodization,” 12, who states that “there is surely a bit of ‘Evil, be though my good’” about Des Esseintes’ views. I owe this point and the next sentence to conversation with Deborah Harter. In a preface written twenty years after the novel, for an edition printed in 1903, Huysmans states that his tastes in Latin remained what they were when he wrote À rebours: he was not at all drawn to Virgil and Cicero, and he preferred late Latin, especially the Latin of the Vulgate, to that of the Augustan Age (see Mauldon, 188). This is consistent with the idea that Chapter Three is no satire; instead of satirizing Des Essences, Huysmans shares his tastes for the late over the classical.

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pushes the ideas and behaviors that belong to him as far as they can go.16 Far from engaging in literary criticism, Huysmans filters his estimation of Latin poetry and prose through that character, who embodies the decadent spirit and seeks the exotic, precious, obscure, and eccentric out of anti-conformist, anti-bourgeois impulses, but also as a disillusioned and unbalanced misanthrope.17 Huysmans does not appear to have read many of the late Latin texts discussed in Chapter Three.18 This can lead him into demonstrable error.19 But he knew enough about them to create a panoramic, tendentious reader of them, one who was committed to a particular narrative of Roman literary history in which decline was a form of improvement. Des Esseintes wants to liberate literary history from the tyranny of the canon and to elevate the late and marginal because, being the kind of reader he is, he prefers the unusual to the familiar, the periphery to the center. Chapter Three of À rebours then, is not a defense of late Latin texts; it is Des Esseintes’ defense of late Latin texts. The vision of literary history it provides is refracted through him and must be colored by what Huysmans lets us know about him. Thus we should consider his sense of Latin literature to be, like Des Esseintes himself, rebellious and thrilling in its novelty, but also willfully contrarian, alienated, and even perverse. His take on the Latin literary past reveals not what it is, but who he is and how he thinks as an avatar of decadence—and the fact that Des Esseintes echoes Charles Baudelaire’s preference for late Latin authors over Cicero and Virgil only locates his views that much more in the decadent movement of the fin de siècle.20

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Ultimately, Des Esseintes’ is a tragic decadence; he is unable to maintain his decadent posture in the face of “the waters of human mediocrity, like a tidal wave…rising up to the sky” (180) (les vagues de la médiocrité humaine montent jusqu’au ciel), and the novel concludes with him soon to return to Paris. Still, the Des Esseintes of the secluded villa is an extreme, and perhaps the ultimate, figure of decadence. “Exotic, precious, obscure” derives from R. J. Hexter, “Canonicity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, ed. R. J. Hexter and D. Townsend (Oxford, 2012), 25–44, here 33. Hexter’s subject is the way in which Medieval Latin is prized in those terms. Yet he compares such appreciation of that body of work with Des Esseintes’ sense of the texts in his Latin library. See note 15 above. In Chapter Three, Huysmans might have also been having some fun with critics, with an eye to sending them “scuttling off to Latin poets they had never read,” S. Romer (trans.), French Decadent Tales (Oxford, 2013), xi. See note 39 below. As Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome, 253 relates, it was Théophile Gautier who noted that Baudelaire preferred the later Latin of such writers as Apuleius and Tertullian—two authors who also figure prominently later in the survey of Des Esseintes’ library.

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The dawn of decadence Des Esseintes does not confine his dislikes to the Golden Age of Latin literature. In fact, Huysmans lists in a scattershot fashion several authors spanning the period from Plautus to Juvenal for whom Des Esseintes has no use. Yet two writers within that stretch of time escape the critical carnage. The first is Lucan, with whom Des Esseintes is said to have begun to take an interest in the Latin language–and language is a prevailing concern throughout the chapter. Des Esseintes admires the expressiveness of Lucan’s Latin and the craftsmanship of his “enameled, jewel-studded verses” (25) (verses plaqués d’émaux, pavés de joaillerie).21 Yet that regard is only partial: for Des Esseintes, the virtues of Lucan’s style do not entirely hide his faults, in both form and content.22 A second author, Petronius, appeals more strongly to Des Esseintes. His library contains an exquisite copy of the Satyricon, a 1585 octavo edition printed by J. Dousa at Leyden. This is Des Esseintes the book fetishist, who savors a text as a physical, aesthetic object.23 But his is not merely a dilettante’s regard for the beautiful and expensive edition. In fact, specific features of the Satyricon lead him to regard it as he does. One is its language, whose appeal is very different from that of Lucan’s. Petronius is admired for the vigor and variety of his Latin: he has every person speak in his own idiom, from uneducated freedmen to foreigners to foolish pedants. This is to find in the Satyricon a realistic reflection of mixed and polyglot Rome. It is also, once more, to resist and to reject traditional standards of correct classicizing judgment. In the eyes of Des Esseintes, Petronius’ linguistic realism “pushes back all the boundaries…[and] ignores all the trammels of the so-called Golden Age” (26) (reculant toutes les limites, toutes les entraves du soi-disant grand siècle).24 What gives the novel value is the way it leaves behind classicism 21

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My translation differs slightly from Mauldon, who has “brightly enameled, gemstudded verses.” Huysmans’ metaphorical language resembles Roberts’ title The Jeweled Style, discussed earlier. It is an interesting coincidence that Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford, [1890] 2008), 107, describes Huysmans’ À rebours as having been written in “that curious jeweled style” of the French Symbolists. “…But that exclusive preoccupation with form, those sonorous reverberations, those metallic bursts of sound did not completely blind him to the intellectual vacuity, to the bloating of the stylistic blisters that mar the surface of the Pharsalia” (25) (mais cette préoccupation exclusive de la forme, ces sonorités de timbres, ces éclats de métal, ne lui masquaient pas entièrement le vide de la pensée, la boursouflure de ces ampoules qui bossuent la peau de la Pharsale). So, similarly, McGuinness, xxix. Cf. the discussion of Tertullian later in Chapter Three, where Des Esseintes is said to have kept Tertullian in his library “more perhaps for the sake of the Aldine edition of his works than for the works themselves” (27) ([qu’il conservait] peut-être plus pour son édition de Alde, que pour son œuvre même). The phrase “grand siècle” has specific meaning in French, since it is used to refer to the long seventeenth century (1589–1715) and the rule of Louis XIV. “Golden Age” is an

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and turns to a realism that encompasses the marginal, the low, the ridiculous, and the exotic. In another example of inverted valuation, Des Esseintes rejects the classical and embraces its alternative, which liberates him from what he considers the constraints of Golden Age values. Des Esseintes also thrills to the content of the Satyricon, with its focus on life in Rome in all its obscenity, violence, and sordidness. In the novel, he finds insolent villas and lowly inns filled with fleas; lurid whorehouses where the sex is visible; and a gallery of depraved and grotesque characters, including the master-vulgarian Trimalchio. In his pessimism and misanthropy, Des Esseintes had been drawn to urban degradation in Paris before he took flight to his solitary villa in a state of advanced ennui.25 Likewise, he savors the muck and mire of everyday life in the Satyricon, with a particular taste for lower-class depravity and garishness. His tendencies lead him to a particular appreciation of Petronius, whose novel strips away all illusions about the classical civilization of Rome, just as Des Esseintes had, through experience, come to have no illusions about modern Parisian life. A concluding paragraph on the Satyricon sums up things about the work that Des Esseintes rates highly. In his view, the work was a realist novel and a “slice carved from the flesh of Roman daily life, without—whatever anyone may say—any thought of reform or satire or any need for a specific goal or moralizing purpose” (26) (ce roman réaliste, cette tranche découpée dans le vif de la vie romaine, sans préoccupation, quoi qu’on en puisse dire, de réforme et de satire, sans besoin de fin apprêtée et de morale). Des Esseintes feels no need to redeem the work, as he indicates others do, by investing it with moral purpose. Instead, he appreciates the impersonality, the objective naturalism,26 with which Petronius presents the world of Rome in all its glorious sordidness: This story, without any plot or action, which sets before us the sexual encounters of Sodomites, analyzing with shrewd placidity the pleasures and the pains of those amours and those couples; this story depicting in splendidly wrought language, without the author ever showing himself or passing a single comment, or approving or condemning the actions and the thoughts of his characters, the vices of a decayed civilization, a crumbling empire; this story gripped Des Esseintes.27 Cette histoire, sans intrigue, sans action, mettant en scène les aventures de gibiers de Sodome; analysant avec une placide finesse les joies et les douleurs de ces amours et de ces couples; dépeignant, en une langue splendidement orfévrie, sans

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apt translation (and one that Mauldon also uses on page 23, cited earlier [cette époque que les professeurs s’obstinent encore à appeler le grand siècle]). The prologue to À rebours recounts these details of Des Esseintes’ life in Paris and his subsequent disorders and departure to his villa. See note 36. I translate “crumbling empire” rather than Mauldon’s “splintering empire” for empire qui se fêle, and I cut down her final clause, “this work of Petronius excited and gripped Des Esseintes’ attention.”

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que l’auteur se montre une seule fois, sans qu’il se livre à aucun commentaire, sans qu’il approuve ou maudisse les actes et les pensées de ses personnages, les vices d’une civilisation décrépite, d’un empire qui se fêle, poignait des Esseintes.

For Des Esseintes, Roman decadence, “ordinarily the most simplistic of moral paradigms,” 28 lies beyond good and evil in the Satyricon. Petronius writes as an amoral realist, presenting without any proto-bourgeois judgment a chronicle of the lurid excesses—material, sexual, and gustatory—of a fading civilization. Petronian Rome is the decadent late empire as imagined by Paul Verlaine, which mixes the “voluptuous mind and the wearied flesh,” is filled with “violent splendors,” and is “redolent of the rouge of courtesans.” 29 In Des Esseintes’ view, the moral and cultural decline marking that Rome brings literary progress; Latin literature comes into its own when it reflects the decadence of Rome and, thus, becomes decadent itself. While Des Esseintes understands the Satyricon to capture all the exquisite ugliness of its historical moment, he also considers it to be a modern-looking novel. Huysmans ends his comments on the book by stating that Des Esseintes found in its “astute observation, its solid structure…curious parallels and strange analogies with the handful of modern French novels he was able to tolerate” (26) (dans l’acuité de l’observation, dans la fermeté de la méthode, de singuliers rapprochements, de curieuses analogies, avec les quelques romans français modernes qu’il supportait). This is to couple Petronius’ work with literature in contemporary France and to propose that it has in particular affinities with finde-siècle decadence. But it is also to signal to the reader to identify the Satyricon with À rebours itself. As Huysmans had to have known, it is difficult not to see Petronius’ novel, with its linguistic vigor and variety and its amoral vision of decadent excess and depravity, as a double for Huysmans’.30 In a moment of self-reflexivity, his closing statement gestures toward that connection; like Des Esseintes, the reader is to link the ancient and the modern, but is then to take the

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E. Prettejohn, “‘The Monstrous Diversion of a Show of Gladiator:’ Simeon Solomon’s Habet!” in Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945, ed. C. Edwards (Cambridge, 1999), 157–172, here 160. “Il est fait d’un mélange d’esprit charnel et de chair triste et de toutes les splendeurs violentes du bas-empire; il respire le fard des courtisanes.” The French is quoted in G. Ducrey (ed.), Romans fin-de-siècle, 1890–1900 (Paris, 1999), xxvi; the translation is that of Romer, French Decadent Tales, ix. On Huysmans’ style, see C. Lloyd, J.-K. Huysmans and the Fin-de-siècle Novel (Edinburgh, 1990), 19–54. In his note on his translation of À rebours (Against Nature, London, 1959), Robert Baldick described its style as “one of the strangest literary idioms in existence, packed with purple passages, intricate sentences, weird metaphors, unexpected tense changes, and a vocabulary rich in slang and technical terms.”

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further step of identifying Petronius with Huysmans’ own work.31 The Satyricon stands as an À rebours before À rebours. In this reconstruction of the literary past, Huysmans sees in Petronius’ tableaux of a decadent civilization a mirror of himself. Christian morality, Christian corruption The next author to please Des Esseintes and find a place in his library is Apuleius. The exoticism of Apuleius’ language is a primary source of that enjoyment. Indeed, Des Esseintes feels that in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, Latin “was flowing at full tide, carrying along with it the sediment and waters of different tributaries from every province; all this, blended together and intermingled, created a tone that was strange, exotic, almost novel” (27) ([la langue latine] battait le plein dans ses Métamorphoses; elle roulait des limons, des eaux variées, accourues de toutes les provinces, et toutes se mêlaient, se confondaient en une teinte bizarre, exotique, presque neuve). Once more, Des Esseintes’ tastes are counter-classical, and he shows regard for a language that is an exotic salmagundi, a mix of international idioms and of high and low. But Des Esseintes also enjoys Apuleius the person. He finds in him “the joviality of an unquestionably fat man” whose “southern exuberance” made him seem “like a bawdy, high-spirited companion when compared with the Christian apologists of the same period” (27).32 The contrast lies between the louche pleasure-seeker and Christians of the second century CE. The high-spirited immorality of the former appeals to Des Esseintes, while the latter leave him cold as they defend their Christian faith. Des Esseintes continues by focusing on one of the Christian apologists, Apuleius’ fellow African Tertullian. Although interested in Tertullian’s style, Des Esseintes struggles to endure his theological discussions and his Christian polemics. The one work that he can read, but only a little, is the De cultu feminarum; in it, Tertullian calls upon women to avoid jewelry and finery and demands that they use no cosmetics to improve upon nature.33 Des Esseintes tolerates this text only because he enjoys seeing ideas that are so diametrically opposed to his own— 31

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This means that the statement is, on one level, also a moment of ironic self-deprecation; naturally, Huysmans wishes for his reader to do more than tolerate his novel. It bears noting that Huysmans here presents further grounds for distancing À rebours from satire, in that he links the book to an ancient novel that, he asserts, does not satirize. “Puis sa jovialité d’homme évidemment gras, son exubérance méridionale amusaient. Il apparaissait ainsi qu’un salace et gai compère à côté des apologistes chrétiens qui vivaient, au même siècle.” “At the very most he sometimes read a page or two of the De cultu feminarum where Tertullian exhorts women not to adorn their persons with jewels and precious stuffs, and forbids them to use cosmetics because these attempt to correct and improve on nature” (27) (tout au plus, lisait-il quelques pages du De cultu feminarum où Tertullien objurgue

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and the notion that one should not turn to cosmetics to improve one’s natural appearance is antithetical to fundamental principles of decadence, which preferred the artificial to nature.34 He pursues a version of hate-reading, i.e., of reading a text that one finds ridiculous in order to take pleasure in its absurdity. Des Esseintes also relishes the powerful contrast between Tertullian and the Severan emperor Elagabulus.35 Ruling a tottering empire, Elagabalus traipses about in wasteful opulence with eunuchs and calls himself Empress every night as he beds down with the lowborn, while Tertullian preaches with perfect selfpossession “carnal abstinence, frugality at table, [and] sobriety of dress” (28) (l’abstinence charnelle, la frugalité des repas, la sobriété de la toilette). Elagabulus extends the model of moral decline found in Petronius—the decline of moral rot, as exemplified by vices and follies—but now at the highest levels of society, while Tertullian fights his little Christian campaigns. Implicitly but unmistakably, Elagabulus’ excesses make Tertullian’s juxtaposed righteousness look foolish to Des Esseintes, rather than the other way around. This is a further stand against conventional moralizing, which now has a religious dimension, as well as a characteristically decadent appreciation for hedonism and depravity. But Christianity, Des Esseintes recognizes, is not so easily dismissed.36 As he sees things, Christianity began to grow ascendant during Tertullian’s lifetime and to change irrevocably the Latin language (28): The Latin language, having attained its greatest perfection with Petronius, was on the point of dissolution; the literature of Christianity was now establishing itself, bringing, along with new ideas, fresh words, innovative constructions, unknown

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les femmes de ne pas se parer de bijoux et d’étoffes preécieuses, et leur défend l’usage des cosmétiques parce qu’ils essayent de corriger la nature et de l’embellir). On decadent attitudes toward nature and artifice, see J. Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination: 1880–1900, trans. D. Coltman (Chicago and London, 1981), 166–190; Hansen, Disaffection and Decadence, 88–90; D. Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst, 1995), 4–5. As C. Bernheimer notes (Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe [Baltimore and London, 2002], 71), Des Esseintes “polemicizes memorably against nature, which he says ‘has had its day,’ and praises artifice as ‘the distinctive mark of human genius’.” This is, Bernheimer continues, a “kind of counter-discourse to naturalism,” although Bernheimer is right to observe that the relationship between Huysmans and naturalism is more complicated (71–72). On that relationship, see also McGuinness, xxiv–xxv. “This sharp contrast [sc. between Tertullian and Elagabulus] enchanted Des Esseintes” (28) (cette antithèse le ravissait). On Christianity, and specifically Roman Catholicism, in À rebours generally, see Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, 86. Huysmans himself converted to the religion in the 1890s after a period of occultism; see Lloyd, J.-K. Huysmans and the Fin-de-siècle Novel, 2–3 and 13–14.

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In this reconstruction of cultural and linguistic history, the story of Christianity’s rising presence and influence in Roman culture is one of decline; Christian literature corrupts Latin with its neologisms, strange constructions, and abstraction. A following paragraph conveys that, to Des Esseintes, the corruption occurred slowly and partially during the 200s.37 But in the fourth century, and even more in the following centuries, the “odor” of Christianity gave pagan Latin a “special gamey redolence” as it “decomposed like venison” (28).38 In yet another example of how Des Esseintes reads against the grain, he is drawn to the linguistic decay that Christianity brings. Indeed, he finds a kind of beauty in the ugliness implied by the comparison of Christian Latin with decomposing meat, savoring the tanginess of the now tainted, putrescent language. The imagery resembles that of Théophile Gautier, who in his preface to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal compared the decadent style, in its heterogenous mixture of literary and nonliterary vocabularies, to the Latin of the Roman decadence, marbled by green

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“However, this linguistic deliquescence, which continued after Tertullian’s death with his pupil St Cyprian, with Arnobius, and with the ponderous Lactantius, was an unappealing process. An incomplete and sluggish decay, it was marked by awkward regressions to Ciceronian grandiloquence (28) (seulement, cette déliquescence continuée après la mort de Tertullien, par son élève saint Cyprien, par Arnobe, par le pâteux Lactance, était sans attrait. C’était un faisandage incomplet et alenti; c’étaient de gauches retours aux emphases cicéroniennes). The treatment of the third century also includes praise of the third-century Commodian. Huysmans errs when he describes Commodian’s Carmen apologeticum (confidently ascribed to 259) as a “compendium of moral maxims that he had twisted into acrostics” (28) (un recueil d’instructions, tortillées en acrostiches); it is Commodian’s Instructiones that has acrostics. The mistake exemplifies Huysmans’ imperfect familiarity with late antique literature. But again, to focus on the limitations of Huysmans’ knowledge is to miss what he set out to do: to create a portrait of literary taste. Des Esseintes is drawn to the strangeness and grotesquerie that he ascribes to the Carmen apologeticum; this demonstrates the kind of reader he is, the sort of poetry that appeals to him. “Ce fumet spécial qu’au IVe siècle, et surtout pendant les siècles qui vont suivre, l’odeur du christianisme donnera à la langue païenne, décomposée comme une venaison.”

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streaks of decomposition.39 For both Gautier and Des Esseintes, what should be repellent is, instead, charged with aesthetic value. The striking image of rotting meat is given new expression later in Chapter Three, after an overview of fourth- and fifth-century Christian authors. Now Latin of the fifth century is compared to a carcass that is more decayed than the venison was (31): Des Esseintes’ interest in the Latin language remained undiminished, now that it hung like a completely rotted corpse, its limbs falling off, dripping with pus, and preserving, in the total corruption of its body, barely a few firm parts, which the Christians took away to steep in the brine of their new idiom. L’intérêt que portait des Esseintes à la langue latine ne faiblissait pas, maintenant que complètement pourrie, elle pendait, perdant ses membres, coulant son pus, gardant à peine, dans toute la corruption de son corps, quelques parties fermes que les chrétiens détachaient afin de les mariner dans la saumure de leur nouvelle langue.

Des Esseintes continues to do what much scholarship today goes out of its way not to do and to isolate Christianity from the classical world, treating it as an antithesis to pagan and classical culture and as something that marks an end to that culture. In the process, he identifies a particularly late antique brand of decadence, understood as a specific kind of cultural decline: the linguistic corruption that the development of Christianity and Christian literature brings.40 In the fifth century, Latin is at a very advanced stage of decomposition, due, it is understood, to the influence of the religion. Yet Des Esseintes is not hostile to the Christians. Only Augustine among fourth- and fifth-century Christian writers meets with his extended disapproval, and surely because of his great authority: Des Esseintes is as contrarian with him as he is with the authors of the Golden Age.41 When it comes 39

40

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“La langue marbrée déjà des verdeurs de la decomposition et faisandée du basempire romain” (125). The page number comes from the edition of C.-M. Senninger, Baudelaire par Théophile Gautier (Paris, 1986). Huysmans returns to the imagery in Chapter Fourteen, where gaminess is ascribed to several authors (Tristan Corbière, Théodore Hannon, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Verlaine), and where contemporary French language is said to be at a point of decomposition. In his preface to his 1903 edition of À rebours, moreover, Huysmans describes Latin of the decadent period in similar metaphorical terms (Mauldon, 198). For a wide-ranging study of the concept of decadent Latin and of nineteenth-century French ideas about the period we call Late Antiquity, see, M.-F. David, Antiquité latine et décadence (Paris, 2001). Des Esseintes is also unfriendly toward Ambrose, but only briefly, describing him as “the author of indigestible sermons, the tedious Christian Cicero” (29) (l’auteur d’indigestes homélies, l’ennuyeux Cicéron chrétien); I use “tedious” for Mauldon’s “boring”). No doubt Ambrose, like Augustine, comes in for attack because of his authority.

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to the corruption of Latin that Christianity caused, meanwhile, Des Esseintes takes perverse pleasure—indeed, a connoisseur’s delight—in the process. His is a story of late antique decline. But it is one that he tells with morbid fascination and with appreciation, because of how it corresponds to his decadent sensibilities. The barbarian curtain In Des Esseintes’ grand narrative of Late Antiquity, the decline of the Latin language took place within a civilization that was falling to the barbarians. This first becomes clear in the initial discussion of Christian Latin in the chapter. An introductory, thumbnail history of the development of that Latin states that, in the fifth and sixth centuries, the pagan tongue was “falling apart at the same time as the civilization of the Ancient World crumbled into dust, at the same time as Empires, rotted by the putrefaction of centuries, collapsed under the onslaught of the barbarians” (28) (s’émiettant en même temps que s’effritera la civilisation du vieux monde, en même temps que s’écrouleront, sous la poussée des Barbares, les Empires putréfiés par la sanie des siècles). The reference to the attacking hordes offers up the old (and now, of course, antiquated) vision of the barbarian Other—violent, unassimilable, and uncivilized destroyer of Roman civilization. While Christianity ravages the Latin language, the barbarians ravage the Empire, bringing upheaval and ruin. For Des Esseintes, the barbarian menace went back to the late fourth and very early fifth centuries, when the poets Ausonius, Rutilius Namatianus, and Claudian were active.42 Des Esseintes appreciates the artistry of all three, as it is revealed in their command of meter and their “many-faceted, magnificent language” (29) (langue tachetée et superbe)—a compliment echoed in Chapter Fourteen, although just in connection with Claudian and Rutilius, whose style Des Esseintes compares with that of the Goncourt brothers.43 The poets cultivate those virtues, moreover, in dire conditions: Ausonius, Rutilius, and Claudian are said to have been “masters 42

43

Des Esseintes turns to these poets upon briefly commending non-Christian authors of the fourth century whose style had an over-ripe corruption similar to that of Christian writers. The authors are Ammianus Marcellinus, Aurelius Victor, Symmachus, and Macrobius. (Macrobius’ Saturnalia does not, in fact, date from the fourth century, but it is clear from the organization of the chapter that Huysmans places him there.) “The variegated, magnificent styles of Claudian and Rutilius” (163) (le verbe tacheté et superbe de Claudien et de Rutilius); Huysmans soon thereafter repeats himself when describing the style of the Goncourt brothers (le style tacheté et superbe des de Goncourt), thus again connecting the two decadent traditions. Earlier in Chapter Fourteen (Mauldon, 148), however, Huysmans includes Ausonius with Claudian and Rutilius when he first compares their styles, and especially Rutilius’, with that of the Goncourt brothers. (The words tacheté et superbe do not appear in that passage.)

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of their art” who “filled the dying Empire with their cries.” 44 When, in the following paragraph, we hear of teeming barbarians pushing against the strained gates of the decaying Roman world at the time of Claudian,45 it becomes evident that the barbarian menace is one of the things that drove the Empire toward its demise. The statement that the authors’ cries filled the dying Empire presents a snapshot of poetry at the dusk of time. This is, of course, a distortion of history: despite the Battle of Adrianople in 378 and the sack of Rome in 410, the Empire, both East and West, was not in existential danger in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Des Esseintes adheres to a different narrative, in which Rome in that period was already in a terminal state and well on its way to its fall. Ausonius, Rutilius, and Claudian live in that age of doom, issuing their cris amid the crisis. This image of the poets carries a strong sense of desolation and loss. But Des Esseintes offers up no elegiac lament. On the contrary, he savors the tableau, because he is drawn, vertigo-like, to the violent collapse of civilization. Nor do Ausonius, Rutilius, and Claudian mourn or protest the destruction of their world when they fill the dying Empire with their cries. The rest of the passage on them shows as much. It begins by citing approvingly two poems of Ausonius, the Cento nuptialis and “rich, elaborate” (abondant et paré) Moselle. While, in Des Esseintes’ bleak history, the Empire dies around Ausonius, he writes a cento, viz., a poetic game in which he reconnects discrete lines of Virgil to produce a wedding poem with a vividly pornographic ending,46 and a finely worked piece on the Moselle River. As it turns out, therefore, Ausonius’ cris consist in a ludic and partly obscene text as well as in highly wrought descriptive verse. The chapter places the poet in a time of ruin, but then sets him outside of it, in that it portrays him as a writer of works that lie at a remove from, and do not engage with, the historical currents engulfing the Empire.47 Immediately following the brief comments on Ausonius is a summary of Rutilius’ work. This notes in passing that Rutilius produced “hymns to the glory of Rome” (29) (hymnes à gloire de Rome). The reference is to the beginning of Rutilius’ On His Return (1.1–164): the poem describes his journey from Rome back to his home in Gaul seven years after the sack of Rome in 410 (although it breaks 44

45 46

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“Ceux-là étaient alors les maîtres de l’art; ils emplissaient l’Empire mourant, de leurs cris.” See the passage cited on page 98. The passage specifies that Ausonius is a Christian author of the Cento nuptialis (le chrétien Ausone, avec son Centon nuptial). It is tempting to think that there is a tacit and sly contrast between the poet’s religion and the pornography in his cento. I do not want to suggest that Ausonius could have been portrayed differently, as a poet who responds to “the dying Empire;” that pessimistic vision would have no doubt been alien to him (cf., e.g., Ordo urbium nobilium 1, Moselle 389–460). My point is simply that the chapter situates Ausonius in a particular historical context defined by the phrase l’Empire mourant, but then shows him issuing anything but cries over the state of the Empire.

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off at La Spezia). Rutilius is defiant in the face of the barbarian threat, and in his opening passage, he sings the praises of the sacked city and touts the global, everlasting power of the Empire despite the damage done by the Visigoths in Rome, Italy, and Gaul. Des Esseintes, however, gives none of that context. As a result, Rutilius’ hymns to Rome lose their connection to the history of the “dying Empire;” this, in turn, obscures their status as historically engaged verse. In addition, what really strikes Des Esseintes about Rutilius is the poet’s skill in conveying visual impressions from his journey—“the indistinct quality of landscapes reflected in water, the mirage effect of haze, the swirling of mists about the mountaintops” (29) (le vague des paysages reflétés dans l’eau, le mirage des vapeurs, l’envolée des brumes entourant les monts).48 By underlining that aspect of Rutilius’ work, Des Esseintes emphasizes that he was an artist as he traveled through the “dying Empire.” Rutilius’ purpose is to aestheticize his world and to give it a quality of dreamy unreality by rendering nature with something like narcotic detail. While Des Esseintes takes delight in Ausonius and Rutilius, the praise of Claudian is much more expansive. The poet is described as “a kind of avatar of Lucan” (29) (une sorte d’avatar de Lucain) who dominated the fourth century with the hexameters he hammered out on his anvil. This is poetry of strength, grandeur, and vitality, whose qualities are all the more striking when placed in their historical context. For Claudian is a last burst of pagan antiquity amid the crumbling Western Empire and the cultural dominance of Christianity (29): Amid the ever-growing decay of the Western Empire, with the chaos of endless massacres reigning on every side, and the perpetual threat of the barbarians now pushing in their multitudes against the straining hinges of the gates to the Empire, he brings Antiquity back to life, sings of the Rape of Proserpina, daubs on his vibrant colors and moves past with all his lights brightly shining into the darkness that is encroaching upon the world. Paganism lives again in him, sounding its final fanfare, raising up its last great poet high above Christianity which will from then on engulf the language in its entirety, which will become, and forever remain, sole master of the poetic art. Dans l’Empire d’Occident qui s’effondre de plus en plus, dans le gâchis des égorgements réitérés qui l’entourent; dans la menace perpétuelle des Barbares qui se pressent maintenant en foule aux portes de l’Empire dont les gonds craquent, il ranime l’antiquité, chante l’enlèvement de Proserpine, plaque ses couleurs vibrantes, passe avec tous ses feux allumés dans l’obscurité qui envahit le monde. Le paganisme revit en lui, sonnant sa dernière fanfare, élevant son dernier grand poète au-dessus du christianisme qui va désormais submerger entièrement la langue, qui va, pour toujours maintenant, rester seul maître de l’art.

48

“The mirage effect of haze” is my translation for Mauldon’s “mirages of mist,” while have “mists” replaces her “fog.”

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Exhilarating bleakness underlies this portrait of Claudian’s age, “the feeling, at once oppressive and exalting,” 49 that the poet wrote in a civilization that was plunging headlong toward its fall. The passage elaborates on the earlier reference to the “dying Empire,” and it presents with patent excitement the barbarian invaders about to burst into the Roman world in Claudian’s time (he came to prominence in Rome and the western court in 395 and died ca. 404). Along with distorting history by caricaturing the barbarians and by exaggerating the chaos and threats to Rome, this ignores the victories of Claudian’s patron Stilicho against Alaric and the Visigoths in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Des Esseintes’ selective history that equates lateness with death—in this case, the death of civilization itself—has no place for any such military success; hence he also ignores Claudian’s panegyric poetry that celebrated it. By instead focusing only on the poet’s De raptu Proserpinae, Des Esseintes presents a version of the reductive dichotomy, implied in his treatment of Ausonius and Rutilius and dominant in the fin de siècle, of the “literariness…of the late Roman Empire threatened by vigorous barbarians at the gates.” 50 Amid massacres and barbarian danger, Claudian retreats to the literary past. His poetry, like that of Ausonius and Rutilius, is decadent insofar as it appears at a time of civilizational collapse. At the same time, Claudian embraces a form of decadent escapism, which consists in a turn to a curated, aestheticized paganism. Like the Empire in Verlaine’s Langeur that, at the end of its decline, sees tall, fair-haired barbarians pass while it composes indolent acrostics in a style of gold,51 Claudian stands to the side of history and disappears into his poetry while the destructive barbarians gather. The vigor of his verse is not of a kind needed to triumph over the threats that bore down on Rome. Claudian cannot resist the coming darkness; he can only create an alternative to it in art, and can only produce a temporary brilliant light that the encroaching gloom will extinguish. His actions have an obvious parallel in Des Esseintes’ life at Fontenay-aux-Roses, where the decadent hero seeks to escape from reality by constructing an enclosed aesthetic world. Claudian’s flight to paganism places him at the outer edge of history in a second way as well. In this expression of the idea that Claudian was the “last classical

49

50

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I quote the Russian poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, defining decadence as “the feeling, at once oppressive and exalting, of being the last in a series.” R. Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. G. Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA, 1968), 75 cites Ivanov. Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome, 263. The barbarians stand in for the powerful and victorious Germans of the later nineteenth century; on French attitudes toward them, see Hansen, Disaffection and Decadence, 4. “Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la décadence, / qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs / en composant des acrostiches indolents / d’un style d’or où la langueur du soleil danse.”

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poet of Rome,” 52 he is a terminus on two fronts: his mythological poem is a final flash of pagan civilization before barbarian destruction, and he is the “last great poet” before Christianity overruns the Latin language and Latin literature. This is to make Claudian’s work a valediction. It is a farewell to a culture about to be lost, with barbarism and Christianity lowering ever more upon Roman civilization and bringing different but simultaneous forms of destruction. A spectacular vision of the end of the Western Empire comes later in the chapter, in a description of the second half of the fifth century. There are cataclysmic assaults on Gaul and Rome, hideous barbarians arrayed on the Danube, and hordes of Huns wreaking havoc until their defeat by Aetius, at which “the plain, gorged with blood, frothed like a sea of crimson” (31) (la plaine, gorgée de sang, moutonna comme une mer de pourpre).53 Despite Aetius’ efforts, the Western Empire was overrun and destroyed, its civilization disappearing “in the dust from the galloping horses” (dans la poussière des galops) of the barbarians and “in the smoke from the fires” (dans la fumée des incendies) they lit. Rather than bemoaning how the bloodthirsty barbarians crashed through the gates of civilization and destroyed what they encountered, Des Esseintes, still thrilling at decline, savors the mayhem and the destruction. In his view, that destruction was a mercy killing, extinguishing as it did a Western Empire that had been dragging out a failing life “in imbecility and filth” (31) (dans la imbécillité et dans l’ordure).54 A consequence of the fifth-century cataclysm was the near disappearance of Latin; the language “in its turn appeared to be collapsing beneath the ruins of the world” (31) (le latin parut s’effondrer, à son tour, sous les ruines du monde). Only the monasteries saved it from death. Yet amid the ruin, there were still a few poets who kept a meager flame burning. These, along with some Christian prose writers, found their way into Des Esseintes’ library, as did an even smaller number of authors of the sixth century. One of the latter, the poet Venantius Fortunatus, brings Des Esseintes some pleasure. He finds his thoughts haunted on certain days by Fortunatus, whose hymns and Vexilla Regis were “carved out of the old carcass of the Latin language and seasoned with the aromatic spices of the Church” (32) (taillés dans la vieille charogne de la langue latine, épicée par les aromates de l’Église). Once more, a carcass stands for linguistic decline. Once more, Des Esseintes finds enjoyment in it. The fascination with the decay of Latin remains, as does the sense that what is bad about Christian poetry is what is good about Christian poetry. 52

53

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M. Hadas, A History of Latin Literature (New York, 1952), 388. Roberts, The Jeweled Style, 2, who quotes Hadas, notes that Claudian has frequently been described in this manner. My translation varies somewhat that of Mauldon, who writes, “The plain, surfeited with blood, frothed like a sea of purple.” Ordure is difficult to translate; it suggests filthiness and corruption, which leads me to translate as I do, rather than to follow Mauldon in using “infamy.”

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Conclusion The remaining pages of Chapter Three of À rebours cover later authors and reach into the Middle Ages. Some recherché texts continue to appeal to Des Esseintes, although his enthusiasm wanes, and his collection of Latin works stops at the tenth century. As we have seen, the literature from Petronius into the sixth century CE lies at the heart of his interests. In Huysmans’ treatment of that material, different forms of decline appear. One is moral decline within a decaying civilization. A second is the decline of the Latin language, caused by the rise of Christianity and Christian literature. A third is the decline and fall of the Western Empire, brought about by barbarian invasion. The last two of these arise and develop in the age we know as Late Antiquity. While Huysmans does not conceive of it as its own period, he identifies historical conditions specific to the late antique world that set it apart from what preceded it and that bring new forms of decline. Huysmans defies expectations and norms by having Des Esseintes find value in all of this, rather than in the classical ideal. The character delights in the various manifestations of decline, which is also to delight in decadence. Not only are decline and decadence synonymous, but also the forms of ancient decline in Chapter Three of À rebours, as well as ancient responses to decline with which Des Esseintes sympathizes, possess features that are characteristic of the decadent–notably, excess, immorality, exoticism, and aestheticism. In addition, Des Esseintes’ conception of the declining Roman Empire in several ways reflects broader thinking in fin-de-siècle France about decadent Rome. Des Esseintes embraces decadent Rome, of course, as an arch-decadent himself. He is a powerfully interested reader who vividly illustrates how a person can understand texts based on his own interests and experiences and can project those interests and experiences onto the literary past. His history of Latin literature demonstrates his independence of thought and unconventional spirit, but it is also, like him as he is portrayed in the novel, elitist, eccentric, and perverse. Huysmans does not satirize or condemn him for the latter. Rather, he presents Des Esseintes’ views as manifestations of his character, of how he embodies in an extreme and total manner the “new and beautiful and interesting disease” of decadence.55 Des Esseintes’ outsider status and outsider tastes as a decadent antihero marginalize the Latin literature that appeals to him, including that of Late Antiquity. The body of work is the obverse of the canon; it is distinguished from mainstream, authoritative texts, and it is aligned with the counter-intuitive and the curious.56 55

56

Arthur Symons, Selected Writings, ed. R. Holdsworth (New York, 2003), 72, on decadent literature; the essay in which the quoted matter appears was originally published in Harper’s Magazine in 1893. Cf. Hexter, “Canonicity,” 33: “What Huysmans concocted was deliberately outré, intended to define not so much a canon as an anti-canon.” Cf., too, H. Pfeiffer, “Flauberts Versuchung der Spätantike,” in Décadence: “Decline and Fall” or “Other Antiquity”?,

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Whether or not this is the right way of thinking about Roman literary history is immaterial. Huysmans demonstrates through Des Esseintes what late Latin literature could become, not what it really was; he provides a striking example of how that literature found an afterlife as an emblem of decadence.

ed. M. Formisano and T. Fuhrer (Heidelberg, 2014), 55–75, here 61, who asserts that Huysmans laid out “an aesthetic counter-canon, counter to the Latin classics” (einen ästhetischen Gegenkanon…gegen die lateinischen Klassiker).

s t e Fa n r e b e n i c H

Late Antiquity, a Gentleman Scholar and the Decline of Cultures: Oswald Spengler and Der Untergang des Abendlandes* “Certainly, Spengler was a dangerous author. But is not also the truth itself dangerous?” — Heinrich Beck, Oswald Spengler’s publisher.1

It was an age of anxiety. The experience of World War I and the Russian October Revolution increased the atmosphere of desolation which had spread throughout Europe around the turn of the century. Many believed that the armed conflicts and ideological disputes marked the end of the global hegemony of Europe, and some intellectuals tried to come to terms with this perception by creating cyclical concepts of history, which referred back to the historic paradigm of the fall of Rome. The most important and influential work in this respect was Der Untergang des Abendlandes by Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), published in two volumes in 1918 and 1922.2 The Decline of the West, to use the title of the English translation published between 1926 and 1929,3 Spengler’s most important and most influential work, interpreted the military defeat of the Kaiserreich in World War I as a symptom of the decline of European-American culture. Spengler, born in 1880 in Blankenburg in the Duchy of Brunswick, was the son of a postal secretary and failed as a classicist. His doctoral thesis on Heraclitus, which was supervised by the Neo-Kantian philosopher Alois Riehl at the * 1

2

3

I would like to thank Anthony Ellis who read and corrected the first English version of this paper and with whom I was able to discuss Spengler’s Decline of the West. “Freilich war er ein gefährlicherAutor; aber ist nicht eben auch die Wahrheit gefährlich?”. To the German philosopher Eduard Spranger, April 28, 1947. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Nachlass Eduard Spranger (N 1182/143). Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, 2 vols. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1918/22) (various reprints). I quote from the special edition in one volume, Munich: C.H. Beck, 1981. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality, authorized translation with notes by Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926/29) (various reprints). An electronic version is available: https://archive.org/details/ Decline-Of-The-West-Oswald-Spengler. I quote from this version; my alterations are indicated with an asterisk (*).

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University of Halle, was first refused;4 only a revised version was later accepted. It was marked with the lowest grade, rite—sufficient.5 If Spengler had nourished any hopes of academic success, this calamity ended his university career before it had begun. He made his living from school teaching until his mother’s death in 1911, and then moved to Munich where the modest wealth he had inherited allowed him to live the life of a gentleman scholar. The Second Moroccan Crisis, the so-called Panthersprung to Agadir of 1911, had a deep impact on Spengler and prompted him to develop the philosophical concept of his opus magnum. The international tensions seemed to foreshadow a global military conflict. When World War I broke out, Spengler had completed a first version of the book which could not be published owing to the strife; so he spent his time revising the manuscript of the first volume until 1917. He later confessed that he had perceived the approaching World War “as imminent and also as the inevitable outward manifestation of the historical crisis,” and his “endeavor was to comprehend it from an examination of the spirit of the preceding centuries—not years”6 (Der Weltkrieg—als die bereits unvermeidlich gewordene äußere Form der historischen Krisis—stand damals unmittelbar bevor, und es handelte sich darum, ihn aus dem Geiste der voraufgehenden Jahrhunderte—nicht Jahre—zu begreifen).7 Spengler was an ardent patriot and belligerent observer of contemporary events, but he could not join the German forces since he was exempted from military service due to a congenital heart defect.8 He hoped that his Decline of the West would be published in time to celebrate the German victory in the war. Like so many of his contemporaries, Spengler was deeply shocked by the unexpected defeat of Germany and the subsequent collapse of its political system. He hated “the dirty revolution of 1918” (die schmutzige Revolution von 1918),9 rejected the democratic constitution of the new republic, and advocated the world-historical mission of Germany, whose primary agent could be identified as the bourgeoisie. He was one of those intellectuals who undermined parliamentary democracy, supported the idea of an authoritarian corporate state, and came to admire the Italian fascist Benito Mussolini. But he criticized the National Socialist’s coming

4

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6 7 8 9

Der Metaphysische Grundgedanke der Heraklitischen Philosophie (PhD diss., Univ. of Halle, 1904). Anton M. Koktanek, Oswald Spengler in seiner Zeit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1968), 67– 68. Spengler, Decline, vol. i, 49. Spengler, Untergang, 65. Koktanek, Oswald Spengler, 10 and 180. Oswald Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung: Deutschland und die weltgeschichtliche Entwicklung (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1933), VII.

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to power in 1933 and was not impressed by Hitler, whom he taunted as “prolet-Aryan” (Prolet-Arier).10 His Decline of the West, however, keenly touched contemporary sensibilities and determined the historical—and political—perceptions of a whole generation. Already in the mid-1920s, more than 100,000 copies had been sold;11 quite an impressive figure for a difficult book on the philosophy of history. His readers were fascinated by the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untravelled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and specifically of the only Culture of our time and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfilment—the West-European-American.12 [dem ] Versuch […], Geschichte vorauszubestimmen. Es handelt sich darum, das Schicksal einer Kultur, und zwar der einzigen, die heute auf diesem Planeten in Vollendung begriffen ist, der westeuropäisch-amerikanischen, in den noch nicht abgelaufenen Stadien zu verfolgen.13

They were captivated by the promise of reconstructing “the prototype of a historical starting point occurring within a specific historical organism at a moment preordained for it hundreds of years ago”14 ([den] Typus einer historischen Zeitwende, die innerhalb eines großen historischen Organismus von genau abgrenzbarem Umfange einen biographisch seit Jahrhunderten vorbestimmten Platz hatte).15 Spengler’s historical-philosophical speculation in the Decline of the West certainly contributed to the perception of the crisis in the 1920s. In accordance with the organicist model of birth and death, Spengler predicted the inescapable end of West-European and American culture. Hardly anybody remained unaffected by the concept of the radical endangering and dissolution of all that had been considered important up to that time.16 At the same time, Spengler’s Decline sparked an interest in Caesarism and provided, especially in intellectual circles, a way of understanding and rationalizing the rise of totalitarian dictatorships.17 Democracy became an impracticable middle 10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17

Cf. Koktanek, Oswald Spengler, 458; Markus Henkel, “Oswald Spengler, der Nationalsozialismus und die Nachkriegszeit (1918–1970). Vom Schrecken der Moderne,” Historische Mitteilungen 20 (2007), 185. Albert Heinrich, Bibliographie Verlag C.H. Beck 1913–1988. Biederstein Verlag 1946– 1988. Verlag Franz Vahlen 1970–1988 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988), 616. Spengler, Decline, vol. i, 3. Spengler, Untergang, 3. Spengler, Decline, vol. i, 47. Spengler, Untergang, 67 (Spengler’s accentuation). Cf. Manfred Landfester, “Dritter Humanismus,” Der Neue Pauly 13 (1999), 879. Cf. Hans Kloft and Jens Köhler, “Caesarismus,” Der Neue Pauly 13 (1999), 628.

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stage between monarchical and dictatorial rule. From a historico-philosophical perspective, the Republic of Weimar was deconstructed. These general observations are hardly new and it is not my intention to present a further interpretation.18 Instead, I will (i) summarize Spengler’s description of Late Antiquity and (ii) compare his account with that of an ancient historian, Otto Seeck, who was Spengler’s contemporary. I will then (iii) sketch Spengler’s notion of the classical world and Late Antiquity in the context of the contemporary crisis of classical scholarship. Finally (iv), I will discuss whether Spengler’s reading of Late Antiquity was a historiographical dead-end or had any innovative potential. (i) What’s it all about? Spengler’s Late Antiquity The historical paradigm for the decline of the West was the decline of classical antiquity. Although Spengler was interested in the analogy between antiquity and the Occident,19 he developed a comparative “morphology” of eight “high cultures” (Hochkulturen): the Babylonian, Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, Mexican, i.e. Mayan and Aztec, Graeco-Roman, Arabian, and Western, i.e. European and American. The interpretation of world history which Spengler formulated was based on the assumption that every culture advanced through the ages of man in accordance with natural law and was to be divided into the stages youth (Jugend), rise (Aufstieg), 18

19

Cf. e.g. Frits Boterman, Oswald Spengler und sein “Untergang des Abendlandes,” trans. Christoph Strupp (Köln: SH-Verlag, 2000); Alexander Demandt and John Farrenkopf (eds.), Der Fall Spengler: Eine kritische Bilanz (Cologne: Böhlau, 1994); John Farrenkopf, Prophet of Decline: Spengler on World History and Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); Manfred Gangl, Gilbert Merlio and Markus Ophälders (eds.), Spengler—Ein Denker der Zeitenwende (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009); Zaur T. Gasimov and Carl Antonius Lemke Duque (eds.), Oswald Spengler als europäisches Phänomen: Der Transfer der Kultur- und Geschichtsmorphologie im Europa der Zwischenkriegszeit 1919–1939 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013); Markus Henkel, Nationalkonservative Politik und mediale Repräsentation. Oswald Spenglers politische Philosophie und Programmatik im Netzwerk der Oligarchen (1910–1925) (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012); Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner, “Oswald Spengler zwischen ‘Untergang desAbendlandes’und ‘Preußischem Sozialismus’,” in Wolfgang Hardtwig and Erhard Schütz (eds.), Geschichte für Leser: Populäre Geschichtsschreibung in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005), 309–330; Rolf Peter Sieferle, “Zivilisation als Schicksal: Oswald Spengler,” in id., Die Konservative Revolution: Fünf biographische Skizzen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995), 106–131; Karen Swassjan, Der Untergang eines Abendländers: Oswald Spengler und sein Requiem auf Europa (Berlin: Heinrich, 1998); Manfred Thöndl, “Wie oft stirbt das Abendland? Oswald Spenglers These vom zweifachen Untergang,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 86 (2004), 441–461. Detlef Felken, Oswald Spengler: Konservativer Denker zwischen Kaiserreich und Diktatur (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988), 42.

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maturity (Blütezeit), and decline (Verfall). But the destiny of every culture was “civilization,” which indicates the moment when cultures are no longer expanding and innovative. Since the nineteenth century, the West had, in Spengler’s opinion, reached the phase of “civilization” and hence the period of decline. The different cultures, however, were characterized through a specific cultural unity and its underlying soul. Spengler described in greater detail three souls, the Apolline soul of classical antiquity, the Faustian soul of the West, and the Magian soul of the Arabian period. “Henceforth,” he wrote, we shall designate the soul of the Classical Culture, which chose the sensuouslypresent individual body as the ideal type of the extended, by the name of the Apolline20 familiarized by Nietzsche. In opposition to this* we have the Faustian soul, whose prime-symbol is pure and limitless space, and whose “body” is the Western Culture that blossomed* with the birth of the Romanesque style in the 10th century in the Northern plain between the Elbe and the Tagus. The nude statue is Apolline, the art of the fugue Faustian. Apolline are: mechanical statics, the sensuous cult of the Olympian gods, the politically individual city-states of Greece, the doom of Oedipus and the phallus-symbol. Faustian are: Galileian dynamics, Catholic and Protestant dogmatics, the great dynasties of the Baroque with their cabinet diplomacy, the destiny of Lear and the Madonna-ideal from Dante’s Beatrice to the last line of Faust II. The painting that defines the individual body by contours is Apolline, that which forms space by means of light and shade is Faustian— this is the difference between the fresco of Polygnotus and the oil painting of Rembrandt. The Apolline existence is that of the Greek who describes his ego as soma and who lacks all idea of inner development* and therefore all real history, inward and outward; the Faustian is an existence which is led with a deep consciousness and introspection of the ego, and a resolutely personal culture evidenced in memoirs, reflections, retrospects and prospects and conscience. And in the time of Augustus, in the countries between the Nile and the Tigris, the Black Sea* and South Arabia, there appears—aloof but able to speak to us through forms borrowed, adopted and inherited—the Magian soul of the Arabian Culture with its algebra, astrology and alchemy, its mosaics and arabesques, its caliphates and mosques, and the sacraments and scriptures of the Persian, Jewish, Christian, “lateantique”* and Manichean religions.21 Ich will von nun an die Seele der antiken Kultur, welche den sinnlich-gegenwärtigen Einzelkörper zum Idealtypus des Ausgedehnten wählte, die apollinische nennen. 20

21

Atkinson rendered “apollinisch” with “Apollonian.” But Spengler’s reference to Nietzsche suggests “Apolline.” A “Dionysian” soul, however, does not exist; Spengler only refers to “Nietzsche’s Dionysus-Dithyrambs” when describing “a plaintive autumnal accent” in “the lyric poetry of all Western languages” (Spengler, Decline, vol. i, 257). Spengler, Decline, vol. i, 181.

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Stefan Rebenich Seit Nietzsche ist diese Bezeichnung jedem verständlich. Ihr gegenüber stelle ich die faustische Seele, deren Ursymbol der reine grenzenlose Raum und deren “Leib” die abendländische Kultur ist, wie sie mit der Geburt des romanischen Stils im 10. Jahrhundert in den nordischen Ebenen zwischen Elbe und Tajo aufblühte. Apollinisch ist die Bildsäule des nackten Menschen, faustisch die Kunst der Fuge. Apollinisch sind die mechanische Statik, die sinnlichen Kulte der olympischen Götter, die politisch vereinzelten Griechenstädte, das Verhängnis des Ödipus und das Symbol des Phallus, faustisch die Dynamik Galileis, die katholisch-protestantische Dogmatik, die großen Dynastien der Barockzeit mit ihrer Kabinettspolitik, das Schicksal Lears und das Ideal der Madonna von Dantes Beatrice bis zum Schlüsse des zweiten Faust. Apollinisch ist die Malerei, welche einzelne Körper durch scharfe Linien, Konturen begrenzt; faustisch ist die, welche durch Licht und Schatten Räume imaginiert. So unterscheidet sich das Fresko Polygnots vom Ölgemälde Rembrandts. Apollinisch ist das Dasein des Griechen, der sein Ich als soma bezeichnet und dem die Idee einer innern Entwicklung und damit eine wirkliche innere oder äußere Geschichte fehlt; es ist die euklidische, punktförmige, der Reflexion gänzlich fremde Existenz; faustisch ist ein Dasein, das mit tiefster Bewußtheit als Innenleben geführt wird, das sich selbst zusieht, eine eminent persönliche Kultur der Memoiren, Reflexionen, der Rück- und Ausblicke und des Gewissens. Und fernab, obwohl vermittelnd, Formen entlehnend, umdeutend, vererbend, erscheint die magische Seele der arabischen Kultur, zur Zeit des Augustus in der Landschaft zwischen Euphrat und Nil erwachend, mit ihrer Algebra und Alchymie, ihren Mosaiken und Arabesken, ihren Kalifaten und Moscheen, den Sakramenten und heiligen Büchern der persischen, jüdischen, christlichen, ‘spätantiken’ und manichäischen Religion.22

What do we learn from this passage? Spengler concluded antiquity with the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE and the reign of Augustus; thereafter followed an intermediate period of a thousand years without any development, which he saw characterized by a “Magian” or “Arabian” culture. With regard to its structure this culture was still influenced by antiquity, or more precisely by Greek civilization. Its nature, however, was fundamentally characterized by the Orient. The empire, with its “more and more negroid” struggle for the Caesar-title (immer negerhafteren Kämpfen um den Caesarentitel)23, to cite Spengler’s racist phrasing, and the crisis of Late Antiquity and the turmoil of barbarian migrations, were a consequence of the ossification of the once lively ancient culture, which began with Augustus. Spengler called this process “pseudomorphosis,” a term he borrowed from mineralogy: In a rock-stratum are embedded crystals of a mineral. Clefts and cracks occur, water filters in, and the crystals are gradually washed out so that in due course only their hollow mould remains. Then come volcanic outbursts which explode the mountain; molten masses pour in, stiffen, and crystallize out in their turn. But these are not 22 23

Spengler, Untergang, 234–235. Spengler, Decline, vol. ii, 51 = Spengler, Untergang, 616.

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free to do so in their own special forms. They must fill up the spaces that they find available. Thus there arise counterfeit* forms, crystals whose inner structure contradicts their external shape, stones of one kind presenting the appearance of stones of another kind. The mineralogists call this phenomenon pseudomorphosis. By the term “historical pseudomorphosis” I propose to designate those cases in which an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land that a young Culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression-forms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness. All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in the old moulds, young feelings stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing up* in its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows to be monstrous. This is the case of the Arabian Culture.24 In einer Gesteinsschicht sind Kristalle eines Minerals eingeschlossen. Es entstehen Spalten und Risse; Wasser sickert herab und wäscht allmählich die Kristalle aus, so dass nur ihre Hohlform übrig bleibt. Später treten vulkanische Ereignisse ein, welche das Gebirge sprengen; glühende Massen quellen herein, erstarren und kristallieren ebenfalls aus. Aber es steht ihnen nicht frei, es in ihrer eigenen Form zu tun; sie müssen die vorhandenen ausfüllen, und so entstehen gefälschte Formen, Kristalle, deren innere Struktur dem äußeren Bau widerspricht, eine Gesteinsart in der Erscheinungsweise einer fremden. Dies wird von den Mineralogen Pseudomorphose genannt. Historische Pseudomorphosen nenne ich Fälle, in welchen eine fremde alte Kultur so mächtig über dem Lande liegt, dass eine junge, die hier zu Hause ist, nicht zu Atem kommt und nicht nur zu keiner Bildung reiner, eigener Ausdrucksformen, sondern nicht einmal zur vollen Entfaltung ihres Selbstbewußtseins gelangt. Alles was aus der Tiefe eines früheren Seelentums emporsteigt, wird in die Hohlformen des fremden Lebens ergossen; junge Gefühle erstarren in ältlichen Werken und statt des Sichaufreckens in eigener Gestaltungskraft wächst nur der Haß gegen die ferne Gewalt zur Riesengröße. Dies ist der Fall der arabischen Kultur.25

Spengler created a new millenium by separating Late Antiquity from the preceding classical period and the early Middle Ages from the subsequent High Middle Ages. Diocletian was thus described as the first “Caliph,” who “had linked the Imperium with the pagan cult-Churches” (die heidnische Kultkirche mit dem Imperium verbunden hatte),26 and Augustine as the last great thinker of early Arabian scholasticism, who is said to have been “anything but a Western intellect” (nichts weniger als ein abendländischer Geist).27

24 25 26 27

Spengler, Decline, vol. ii, 189. Spengler, Untergang, 784. Spengler, Decline, vol. ii, 178 = Spengler, Untergang, 771. Spengler, Decline, vol. ii, 241 = Spengler, Untergang, 851.

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(ii) A different story to be told: Otto Seeck’s Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt Otto Seeck (1850–1921) was a pupil of Theodor Mommsen and professor of Ancient History at Greifswald University who specialized in the study of Late Antiquity. He had tried to offer an explanation for the fall of Rome before Spengler finished his book. His six-volume history of the decline of the ancient world28 particularly stands out for its close adherence to the sources, its impressive wealth of detail, and its superior control of the subject matter; the work aims to be more than just a résumé of what happened. Seeck introduces the reader to “the laws of historical formation and decline” (die Gesetze des historischen Werdens und Vergehens).29 The thematically oriented chapters of the first few volumes, in which he constructs an impressive scenario of decline that culminates in the “elimination of the best” (Ausrottung der Besten),30 are particularly devoted to this objective. This catchphrase describes a process of negative selection, the beginning of which Seeck dates to the end of the second century BCE, when the Gracchi, Tiberius and Gaius, tried to reform the Roman Republic; yet their legislation resulted in political polarization and turmoil. But the ancient world would not necessarily have needed to come to an end, Seeck argued. The moment of collapse had only come about when the most industrious people had been turned into a small minority by internal shortcomings, the “inherited cowardice” (angeerbte Feigheit) and “moral weakening” (moralisches Erschlaffen) had become the dominant characteristics of society due to the laws of heredity.31 The decline of the ancient world was used as a paradigm for the Western world of his own time; history was understood as magistra vitae, and the contemporary society should, in Seeck’s view, learn from the example of Rome. Whereas Spengler was deeply influenced by Nietzsche, Seeck’s ideas were shaped by evolutionary biology of the nineteenth century. These theories are generally rejected by scholars today, but are nevertheless representative of the period. At that time an entire generation of scholars tried to transfer the discoveries gained by the natural sciences, especially the theory of heredity, onto the cultural evolution of mankind. Evolutionary biology turned into the paradigm for historical discovery. If humans were integrated into this wider vision, scholars could now question the importance of evolution and selection in society. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, Darwin’s theory of the descent of man was equally popular amongst left-wing politicians, liberal intellec28

29 30 31

Otto Seeck, Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt, 6 vols. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1895–1921) (various editions and reprints). I quote from the reprint, Darmstadt: Primus, 2000. Seeck, Geschichte des Untergangs, vol. i, preface. Seeck, Geschichte des Untergangs, vol. i, 269–307. Seeck, Geschichte des Untergangs, vol. i, 293 and 388.

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tuals, and conservative philosophers. His thesis on the heredity of acquired characteristics neatly justified the middle-class ideology of achievement. A number of different, partly contradictory theories were published that are usually classed as connected to “social Darwinism.” These were joined by eugenic considerations, scientific reflections on population, racial deliberations, and thoughts about social hygiene. Seeck eclectically adapted research that he came across in biology and transferred it to the history of Late Antiquity. His account is a synthesis of a detailed event-oriented history, based on a meticulously critical assessment of the sources, and biological concepts.32 Yet Seeck’s Geschichte des Untergangs, which was reprinted several times in quick succession and was therefore widely appreciated by a large audience, remained the work of an outsider. Seeck’s primary thesis of the “elimination of the best” (Ausrottung der Besten), which presented a biological model of inverse Darwinism, met with disapproval among scholars. Only his proximity to the sources when describing political history was praised. Ancient historians in Germany and in other European countries continued to make use of the concept of “decline” when interpreting Late Antiquity but instead perceived it as a complex process of political, social, and religious disintegration, already begun in the empire (or even the republic) and often explained in terms of denationalization, proletarianization, and orientalization. The hostility of Christians towards the state was thought by many to have been one cause of the crisis. Not only the Germanic peoples but also the Catholic Church were regarded as the legitimate heirs to the Roman Empire.33 Spengler claims to have accidentally discovered Seeck’s work in a shop window; so at least his sister reported later.34 Der Untergang der antiken Welt inspired Spengler to give his book the title Der Untergang des Abendlandes. 32

33

34

Cf. Hartmut Leppin, “Ein ‘Spätling der Aufklärung’: Otto Seeck und der Untergang der antiken Welt,” in Peter Kneißl and Volker Losemann (eds.), Imperium Romanum: Studien zu Geschichte und Rezeption. Festschrift für Karl Christ zum 75. Geburtstag (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998), 472–491; Stefan Lorenz, “Otto Seeck und die Spätantike,” Historia 55 (2006), 228–243; Stefan Rebenich, “Otto Seeck, Theodor Mommsen und die ‘Römische Geschichte’,” in Peter Kneißl and Volker Losemann (eds.), Imperium Romanum: Studien zu Geschichte und Rezeption. Festschrift für Karl Christ zum 75. Geburtstag (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998), 582–607; Stefan Rebenich, “Otto Seeck und die Notwendigkeit, Alte Geschichte zu lehren,” in Wiliam M. Calder III et al. (eds.), Wilamowitz in Greifswald (Hildesheim: Olms, 2000), 262–298; Stefan Rebenich, Einleitung zur Neuauflage. Otto Seeck, Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt (Darmstadt: Primus, 2000), V–XVIII. Cf. Alexander Demandt, Der Fall Roms. Die Auflösung des Römischen Reiches im Urteil der Nachwelt. 2nd ed. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2014); Stefan Rebenich, “Late Antiquity in Modern Eyes,” in Blackwell Companion to Late Antiquity, ed. Philip Rousseau (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 77–92. Koktanek, Oswald Spengler, 140; cf. Felken, Oswald Spengler, 39.

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Although the gentleman scholar did not cite the ancient historian, and although we do not know whether Spengler read the latter’s account, Spengler’s philosophy of history can be understood, in some respects, as a direct response to Seeck. Yet, Spengler’s cultural pessimism and his doctrine of the inevitable decline of cultures differed in principle from Seeck’s account. Seeck tried to reconstruct the laws of historical formation and decline, but he did not actualize the past in order to aid the analysis of the political present. On the other hand, Spengler’s distinction between historical and scientific knowledge can be read as an answer to Seeck. Historiography was not “a piece of natural science in disguise*” (ein Stück verkappter Naturwissenschaft), but the study of “the morphological relationship that inwardly binds together the forms of expression used in all areas of a culture*” (Studium der morphologischen Verwandtschaft, welche die Formsprache aller Kulturgebiete innerlich verbindet).35 Spengler’s interpretation of world history, in which every culture advanced through the ages of man in accordance with nature, was diametrically opposed to Seeck’s concept, which rejects the idea of unavoidable decay deduced from a cyclical interpretation of history. We may conclude that in The Decline of the West, Spengler reflected on and responded to specific ideas and concepts which were discussed in classical and historical scholarship of his time. (iii) The crisis of historicism: overcoming history through philosophy of history A sense of crisis spread through various fields of historical and classical scholarship at the end of the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries.36 The explosive increase of knowledge and the pluralization of values led to a deeply-felt sense of insecurity. Critical voices were increasingly denouncing the “positivism” of self-absorbed factual research and the relativism of an analytical and empirical scholarship that historicized all values without differentiation. Historicism was equated with the sterile, hostile-to-life objectives of antiquarian research. One often-heard reproach was that an abundance of material was accumulated without accounting for the necessity and function of such collections. The Basel historian Jacob Burckhardt criticized the life-denying consequences of a historical science based on an individualizing interpretation detached from real life, and Friedrich Nietzsche attacked the optimistic belief in progress current among his colleagues. In his view, because of the destruction of all historical norms, historical studies could no longer offer any concrete help for the proper conduct of one’s life. Therefore, against the theoretical and methodological standards of contemporary 35 36

Spengler, Decline, vol. i, 8 = Spengler, Untergang, 6. For this chapter see Stefan Rebenich, “Historismus,” Der Neue Pauly 14 (2000), 469– 485 (with further references).

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classical and historical studies, Nietzsche created the concept of a history which serves life. However, these ideas did not initially affect historiographical practice. Historians refused to engage in a discussion of theory and insisted on objectivity while renewing their claim to cultural and educational leadership. But the question of the correlation between historical research and living reality, which Nietzsche clearly formulated but by no means convincingly answered, subsequently became a central problem in the fields of epistemology and the philosophy of history. At the same time, critical voices denounced the discipline of Classics, which, in their eyes, only produced epigoni and was in danger of fragmentation. Critics questioned the legitimacy of a discipline that recognized its purpose in positivistic productivity, and whose self-declared scientific approach undermined the normative function of antiquity. Calls for comprehensive reconstruction and contemporary synthesis grew louder.37 Within classical studies itself, Hermann Usener (1834–1905) outlined a new comparative type of cultural studies that advanced from historical facts to insights of universal validity, while Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931) defined philology as a historical discipline that must understand and bring to life Greek and Roman cultures in their true natures and all their expressions. This required a double effort: not only that of collecting sources but also that of interpreting them. Finally, Eduard Meyer (1855–1930) presented ancient history as an integral part of universal history. World War I, the October Revolution of 1917, and the political turmoil of the 1920s were experienced as a universal crisis, which also affected academia. Even the various disciplines of classical studies were forced to confront the urgent question of how to bridge the gap between scholarship and life. The majority of the concepts developed under this leitmotiv shared a desire to re-establish antiquity as a significant historical epoch but rejected a return to historicism.38 Members of the Stefan George Circle, who turned against the “historical malaise,” sought their salvation in the scienza nuova ideology. Classical philologists remembered Nietzsche’s “philology of the future” and defended him against Wilamowitz’s verdict. With his Third Humanism Werner Jaeger founded a concept of Classicism “beyond historicism” that focused on Greek antiquity. Its content was determined by the term paideia, and it defined history as a teleological process. Archaeology observed and analyzed style and together with classical philology searched for ‘inner form’ and ‘spiritual’ substance. Historical understanding of individuality and the ‘spirit’ was also demanded in ancient history. The criticism levelled against a supposedly degenerate historicism, against the epigonal character of purely 37

38

Cf. Stefan Rebenich, “Philologie und Geschichtswissenschaft: Hermann Usener und Theodor Mommsen,” in Michel Espagne and Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn (eds.), Hermann Usener und die Metamorphosen der Philologie, (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2011), 89–105 Cf. Stefan Rebenich, “‘Dass ein strahl von Hellas auf euch fiel’– Platon im Georgekreis,” George-Jahrbuch 7 (2008/9), 115–141.

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positivistic scholarly research, and against the absolutization of individualistic subjectivity, increased through the 1920s and 1930s. And what about the study of Late Antiquity?39 In 1901 the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl (1858–1905) published his research on the Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, part of which included the aesthetics of the fin de siècle in the contemplation of the art of the early Christian period and of Late Antiquity.40 The distinction between prosperity and decline, between beautiful and hideous was abolished; the artistic style of the epoch was not understood as the product of a universal culture but as an autonomous phenomenon. Riegl did not regard the architecture and sculpture, painting and craftwork of the late empire as evidence for a barbaric style or cultural decline, but rather as proof of a specific ‘artistic will’ that constituted a separate epochal style, which continued to reflect its classical legacy, but originated from a concern with the afterlife, whose religious manifestation was Christianity. He defined Late Antiquity as an epoch bounded by the Edict of Milan (313) and the accession of Charlemagne (768). Students of the later Roman Empire adopted this periodization from art history. According to Seeck, antiquity had ended with the political demise of the Western Roman Empire in the year 476. But Eduard Meyer, in the second edition of his opus magnum, the “History of Antiquity” (Geschichte des Altertums), defined Late Antiquity as the transitional period between Diocletian and Charlemagne.41 Matthias Gelzer (1886–1974), in his programmatic lecture on classical studies and Late Antiquity (Altertumswissenschaft und Spätantike) from 1926, described Late Antiquity as a period from the third to the sixth centuries.42 A “long” Late Antiquity was formed. Within this context—the crisis of historicism and the constitution of a long Late Antiquity—Spengler’s theory of the decline of cultures should be placed. His Decline of the West may have been more influential than Seeck’s Untergang der antiken Welt; the philosopher at least reached a much wider audience than the ancient historian. With this said, it is time to ask the final question:

39 40

41

42

Cf. Rebenich, “Late Antiquity.” with further reading. Alois Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn dargestellt, vol i. Vienna: Österreichisches Archäologisches Institut, 1901 (vol. ii: 1923). An English translation by Rolf Wilkes, Late Roman Art Industry, was published in 1985 (Rome: Bretschneider). Cf. Jaś Elsner, “The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski,” Art History 25 (2002), 361–370. Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, vol. i 1, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart and Berlin: Cotta, 1910), 248–249. Cf. Matthias Gelzer, “Altertumswissenschaft und Spätantike,” in Kleine Schriften, vol. ii (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1963), 387–400.

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(iv) Spengler’s Late Antiquity: dead-end or innovation? In 1920–21, a special issue of Logos, an “international journal for philosophy and culture,” was published, “in which the Olympians of scholarship passed judgement on every inaccuracy or unsupported statement that they could detect [sc. in Spengler’s Decline of the West]. These were in fact numerous in the first edition and the author corrected or modified them in detail in the new edition, on which the English translation was based.”43 In academia, Spengler’s book caused a sensation. Outstanding scholars like Eduard Meyer,44 Eduard Schwartz,45 and even the princeps philologorum, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff,46 welcomed The Decline of the West. The latter described the work as both “ingenious” (geistreich) and “unhistorical” (unhistorisch).47 Eduard Meyer discussed in detail Spengler’s reading of Late Antiquity. He differed from Spengler on the scope and origin of the Magian culture.48 But the historian was fascinated by the idea that Christianity, the mystery religions of Hellenistic syncretism, Rabbinic Judaism, and the Parsian Church were “the great creations” of this soul at its beginning, and the coming of Islam marked the closure, i.e. the transition of culture to civilization.49 Meyer concluded: It is obvious that with these aspects a peculiar epoch of cultural development different from all others is accurately characterized, and it is a great and lasting achievement of Spengler’s work that he has epitomized and presented this epoch in a lively fashion. Daß mit diesen Zügen eine eigenartige, von allen anderen abweichende Epoche der Kulturentwicklung zutreffend charakterisiert wird, liegt auf der Hand, und sie in 43

44

45

46

47 48 49

Translator’s preface to Spengler, Decline, x. Cf. Manfred Schroeter, Der Streit um Spengler, Kritik seiner Kritiker (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1922). Eduard Meyer, “Spenglers Untergang des Abendlandes,” Deutsche Literaturzeitung 45 (1924), 1759–80 (= Berlin: K. Curtius, 1925). Eduard Schwartz, “Über das Verhältnis der Hellenen zur Geschichte,” Logos 9 (1920), 171–187 (= id., Gesammelte Schriften, vol. i [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1938]: 47–66). Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, “Die Geltung des klassischen Altertums im Wandel der Zeiten,” Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte 36 (1921/2), 73–77 (= id., Kleine Schriften, vol. vi [Berlin/Amsterdam: Akademie-Verlag and Hakkert, 1972]: 144–153). Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, “Geltung,” 151. Cf. Translator’s preface to Spengler, Decline, x. Cf. Meyer, “Spenglers Untergang,” 1772–73: “Die Geburt dieser neuen Seele fällt in das letzte Jahrhundert v. Chr., etwa die Zeit des Augustus; das Christentum, die Mysterienreligion des hellenistischen Synkretismus nebst dem astrologischen Weltbild, das rabbinische Judentum, die parsische Kirche sind ihre großen Schöpfungen, der Islam […] bildet den Abschluß, von dem es dann durch die Spätzeit der Kultur zur Zivilisation geht.”

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Stefan Rebenich dieser Weise zusammengefaßt und lebendig gestaltet zu haben, ist ein großes und bleibendes Verdienst des Spenglerschen Werkes.50

At the same time, Meyer questioned the idea that a “cultural soul” (Kulturseele) could come into being suddenly and without any connection to what preceded it.51 Since the 1980s, Alexander Demandt has taken Meyer’s criticism much further: The political, ethnic and religious traditions, which connect the first millenium partly with the preceding, partly with the following age, are sacrificed on the altar of Spengler’s periodization, whereas the breaks in the middle of the millennium are stuck together with his magical cultural clue. Thereby Spengler ridicules not only the self-perception of the people involved, who had every right to feel they were Romans, but at the same time he frustrates the readers’ expectations, who would like to find themselves at the end, not at the beginning of the imperial period. Die politischen, ethnischen und religiösen Traditionen, die das erste Jahrtausend teils mit der vorausgegangenen, teils mit der nachfolgenden Zeit verbinden, fallen Spenglers Periodenschere zum Opfer, die Brüche in der Jahrtausendmitte dagegen werden mit seinem magischen Kulturkleister verpappt. Damit verhöhnt Spengler nicht nur das Selbstverständnis der Betroffenen, die ein Recht hatten, sich als Römer zu fühlen, sondern enttäuscht zugleich die Erwartungen der Leser, die sich ans Ende, nicht an den Anfang der Kaiserzeit gesetzt sehen möchten.52

But Spengler went further and was more innovative than Alexander Demandt is prepared to accept. In conceptual terms, Spengler broke with the received conventions of Western historiography. He rejected not only the traditional periodization of history into antiquity, the Middle Ages and modernity, which goes back to Christoph Cellarius (1638–1707),53 but he explicitly adopts a perspective of universal history which placed the Arabian, Indian, Babylonian, Mexican, Chinese, and Egyptian “high culture” side by side with classical antiquity and the West. The geographic expansion, which he called a “Copernican discovery,” was meant to overcome “the Ptolemaic system of history.”54 At the same time, Spengler broadens his perspective so as to understand Late Antiquity as a cultural entity which integrated Jewish-Christian and Arabian elements. For its study a new type of “historical research” is necessary which integrates different diciplines 50 51

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Meyer, “Spenglers Untergang,” 1773. Meyer, “Spenglers Untergang,” “Aber eine andere Frage ist, ob es sich hier wirklich […] um eine neue, urplötzlich und ohne einen Zusammenhang mit dem Vorhergehenden ins Leben tretende ‘Kulturseele’ handelt. Da erheben sich sofort die größten Bedenken.” Demandt, Der Fall Roms, 448. This division described Spengler as “a creation of the Magian world sense,” cf. Spengler, Decline, vol. i, 18 = Spengler, Untergang, 24. Spengler, Decline, vol. i, 18 = Spengler, Untergang, 24.

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and allows the scholar to comprehend the Arabian culture. Spengler criticizes philological and theological prepossessions and the academic tendency of hyperspecialization which, in his view, has fragmented scholarly research into a number of separate fields, “each distinguished from the others not merely by its materials and its methods, but by its very way of thinking.”55 Historians stayed within the domain of classical philology and did not overcome the language border; they just ignored the eastern context and the interdependencies of development on both sides of the frontiers. Theological research, in its turn, broke up its domain into subdivisions according to the different West-European confessions, and so the “philological” frontier between West and East came into force, and still is in force, for Christian theology also. The Persian world fell to the student of Iranian philology, and as the Avesta texts were disseminated, though not composed, in an Aryan dialect, their immense problem came to be regarded as a minor branch of the Indologist’s work and so disappeared absolutely from the field of vision of Christian theology. And lastly the history of Talmudic Judaism, since Hebrew philology became bound up in one specialism with Old Testament research, not only never obtained separate treatment, but has been completely forgotten by all the major histories of religions with which I am acquainted, although these find room for every Indian sect (since folklore, too, ranks as a specialism) and every primitive Negro religion to boot. Such is the preparation of scholarship for the greatest task that historical research has to face to-day.56 Die Religionsforschung zerlegte das Gebiet in Einzelfächer nach westeuropäischen Konfessionen, und für die christliche Theologie ist wieder die “Philologengrenze” im Osten maßgebend gewesen und ist es noch. Das Persertum fiel in die Hände der iranischen Philologie. Weil die Awestatexte in einem arischen Dialekt nicht abgefaßt, aber verbreitet wurden, ist dies gewaltige Problem als Nebenaufgabe für Indologen betrachtet worden und verschwand damit völlig aus dem Gesichtskreis der christlichen Theologie. Für die Geschichte des talmudischen Judentums ist endlich, da die hebräische Philologie mit der alttestamentlichen Forschung ein Fach bildet, kein weiteres Fach abgegrenzt worden und es wurde deshalb in allen großen Religionsgeschichten, die ich kenne, die jede primitive Negerreligion – weil es eine Völkerkunde als Fach gibt – und jede indische Sekte in Betracht ziehen, vollständig vergessen. Das ist die gelehrte Vorbereitung der größten Aufgabe, welche der heutigen Geschichtsforschung gestellt ist.57

Spengler’s philosophy of history can only be judged skeptically; the crude division of the Magian culture from the Apolline culture of classical antiquity and the Faustian culture of the West is not persuasive; the postulated millennium and its periodization has rightly been criticized; numerous shortcomings, exaggerations, 55 56 57

Spengler, Decline, vol. ii, 190 = Spengler, Untergang, 786. Spengler, Decline, vol. ii, 191 (original emphasis). Spengler, Untergang, 786 f. (Spengler’s emphasis).

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inconsistencies, factual errors, questionable analogies, and misinterpretations have been observed.58 But Spengler also transcends traditional stereotypes. He abandons 476 as a boundary between two epochs and stresses—along with Alois Riegl, Eduard Meyer and Matthias Gelzer—the continuity of the epoch despite political discontinuities. He recognizes the Arabian tradition as an autonomous entity between Graeco-Roman antiquity and Western modernity, or more precisely: between Greek civilization and the premodern culture of the West. He interprets the coming of Islam as an integral part rather than the end of Late Antiquity. He makes Late Antiquity the subject of interdisciplinary and comparative research avant la lettre, and this research is not directed by religious or epistemological presuppositions. Spengler created a basis for a new understanding of the epoch and for an innovative approach to research in the field of Late Antiquity, which necessarily includes the Arabian history and Islamic culture. In this regard at least, if not in others, Oswald Spengler was ahead of his time.59

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Cf. Alexander Demandt, “Spengler und die Spätantike,” in Peter Christian Ludz (ed.), Spengler heute. Sechs Essays (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1980), 25–48 (= id., Geschichte der Geschichte. Wissenschaftshistorische Essays [Cologne: Böhlau, 1997]: 60–80). It may be noted that Garth Fowden has recently “refocused” the “first millenium” “in order to fit Islam into it, for the Arabian doctrine is excluded from the conventional narrative.” Amazingly, Fowden does not refer to Oswald Spengler and his work; cf. Before and After Muhammad: The First Millennium Refocused (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014) and Stefan Rebenich, “Spengler redivivus? Garth Fowden’s First Millennium.” Millennium 13 (2016), 53–56.

siGrid scHotteniUs cULLHed

Rome Post Mortem: The Many Returns of Rutilius Namatianus* This tale begins in 2004, when Il ritorno, an Italian movie adaptation of the unfinished travel poem On His Return (De reditu suo) by the Gallo-Roman poet Claudius Rutilius Namatianus, was released. What survives of the poem in 356 elegiac couplets, probably composed in 417–418, consists of two books, truncated at the beginning and end.1 The first narrates Rutilius’ travel from Rome, where he had served as praefectus urbi in 414, to Pisa; the second ends abruptly after 68 verses, when Rutilius has arrived at Luna on his way to his native home in Southern Gaul. In several interviews that followed the release, the director Claudio Bondì said that he had dreamt of filming On His Return ever since he studied for an exam in Latin literature as a twenty-year-old student at La Sapienza in Rome in 1964. Now, with a budget of three million euros, the dream had finally come true. The same quality of Rutilius’ poem that had captivated the young man forty years earlier was invoked in favor of the poem’s relevance, namely its extraordinary modernity (straordinarie modernità): 2 [Rutilius’] journey takes place a few years after the sack of Rome by the Goths under Alaric. It was a traumatic and unbelievable event, something like the tragedy of the Twin Towers, that is, a direct attack at the core of the world’s greatest power. Il suo viaggio si svolge pochi anni dopo il sacco di Roma ad opera dei Goti di Alarico. Si trattò di un evento traumatico ed impensabile, qualcosa come il dramma delle Twin Towers, ovvero un attacco diretto al cuore del potere planetario.

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This research was supported by a fellowship from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. For the date and general introduction see Joëlle Soler, “Introduction,” Rutilius Namatianus: Sur son retour, in S. Lancel, J. Soler, E. Wolff (2007) ix–xc; for Rutilius’ biography, see e.g. Ernst Dolbhofer, De reditu suo sive Iter Gallicum, vol. 1 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1972), 17–27. Interview from 2003 quoted from Alessandro Fo, Il ritorno (Torino: Nino Aragno Editore, 2011), 115. Translations my own unless otherwise indicated.

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Bondì’s aim in bringing this Gallo-Roman nobleman to the silver screen was to allow the public to understand the present and its perils: “His difficulty is very similar to ours with the Islamic world.” (La sua difficoltà assomiglia molto alla nostra con il mondo islamico).3 The alleged similarities between the sack of Rome and 9/11 were frequently repeated in reviews and in other contexts.4 We find the same analogy in a recent translation of the poem into English.5 In both of these moments of crisis, the translator argues, the material losses were relatively small, but the events still had a “shocking and psychologically transformative” effect. Rutilius is presented as the strongest manifestation of these sentiments.6 He has become a poet of crisis and shock. But was this always the case? And, if not, how did we get here? This chapter searches for answers to these questions by retracing the steps of Rutilius’ Wirkungsgeschichte, focusing on four moments in which his poem found a certain popularity. Rutilius and Gibbon Thirteen years before the appearance of the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s famous History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), the historian had his first encounter with our poet. Gibbon was hardly impressed with his travel account. He reacted against the anachronism of the lengthy eulogy to Rome that introduces the poem (47–164).7 The city had fallen into decay after Alaric’s sack and was no longer a fitting subject for panegyric. Gibbon found Rutilius insensitive to the world changing around him, unable to redirect his gaze to the new seats of empire: Ravenna and Constantinople. He should not have been a poet at all; he had versified a narrative that had “no connexion with verse.” 8 3

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Claudio Bondì, “L’arte di ‘mostrare e non dimostrare’: De reditu–Il ritorno, un film che viene dalla latinità,” Cafoscari: Rivista universitaria di cultura vol. XI: 2 (2007), 16. Fo, Il ritorno, 147–149; Online October 3, 2016: http://trovacinema.repubblica.it/news/ dettaglio/de-reditu-torna-il-peplum-allitaliana/265582/; http://news.cinecitta.com/IT/it-it/ news/53/23167/de-reditu-in-sala-da-venerdi.aspx. Martha Malamud, Rutilius Namatianus’ Going Home: De reditu suo (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 6–7. Malamud, Rutilius Namatianus’ Going Home, 7: “DRS reflects both the intellectual and emotional shock of the elite Romans at the sack of their city and the extent of the disruptions caused by waves of immigrant peoples and internal civil strife.” Edward Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esquire, vol. 3 (Basel: J. J. Tourneisen, 1837 [1797]), 532. Quotation from Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, 534. In the French original the phrasing is slightly different: Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon (2014), 256: “Il [De reditu suo] est intéressant et utile; mais pourquoi écrire en vers? […] La relation d’un voyage convenoit au philosophe, à l’homme d’esprit, au bon écrivain, mais elle n’a aucun rapport avec le poëte.”

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These remarks in Gibbon’s diary might seem insignificant, but the intellectual historian J.G.A. Pocock has argued that this reading experience and the reflections that accompanied it were important factors in Gibbon’s decision to write the epochmaking History he began publishing thirteen years later. Rutilius had failed to elevate convincingly what Gibbon considered to be the now meaningless monuments of Rome and produce a poetic celebration of the Dea Roma. His sad elegiacs and their tragic glow embodied the symbolism of the Decline and Fall, but in an unsatisfactory way. It called for a philosophical project, which, to cite Pocock, “can only be the history of empire.” 9 Regardless of whether we agree about the importance of Rutilius’ impact on the Enlightenment historian, Gibbon’s impact on Rutilius’ legacy was undeniably a decisive one. Having been largely unknown during the Middle Ages,10 and mainly read as a didactic poem for geographical purposes during the Early Modern period,11 On His Return acquired a wholly new 9

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Quotation from J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 274, see also 272–274, 285. The poem was preserved only in the exceptional case of a now lost manuscript spectacularly discovered in Bobbio in 1493. This manuscript dated to the ninth century and contained various previously unknown works of Late Latin poetry. See G. Morelli, “Le liste degli autori scoperti a Bobbio nel 1493,” Rivista di filologia e istruzione classica 117 (1989), 5–33. A copy of the codex was brought to Rome by the Humanist Tommaso Fedra Inghirami no later than 1506 and was copied together with ancient texts on fishing and hunting such as ps.-Ovid’s Halieutica, and Grattius’ and Nemesianus Cynegetica (Vindobonensis 277). A second indirect copy of the Bobiensis (Romanus Ms. Caet. 158) dating from 1530 introduces a manuscript with scientific works in Arabic. The interest taken in the poem between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries was usually geographical and topographical in nature, including the first edition by Giovan Battista Pio (De laudibus urbis, Etruriae, et Italiae, Claudius Rutilius poeta priscus, Bologna, 1520) which was a gift presented to Pope Leo X. Pio’s text was reprinted in De Roma prisca et nova varii auctores (1523), where Francesco Albertini Mazzocchi described the geography of Rome with the support of ancient and contemporary literary texts. On His Return was also quoted in Leandro Alberti’s Descrittione di tutta Italia (1550). The first book in Onofrio Panvinio’s Reipublicae romanae commentariorum libri tres (1558), reprinted in 1588, entitled Antiquae urbis imago, concludes with Pio’s text. Josias Simler published the poem together with other topographical texts under the title Ex Bibliotheca P. Pithoei cum scholiis Josiae Simleri (Basel, 1575). In Pierre Pithou’s edition Epigrammata et poematio vetera (Paris, 1590), it is placed at the end together with other travel narratives. Cf. Dolbhofer, De reditu suo sive Iter Gallicum, vol. 1, 71–73. De reditu is listed under the subject “geography” in Gabriel Naudé’s Catalogue des livres qui sont en l’estude de G. Naudé à Paris (Paris BnF, frçs 5681). See Estelle Boeuf, La bibliothèque parisienne de Gabriel Naudé en 1630: Les lectures d’un libertin érudit (Geneva: Droz, 2007), 79. Theodoor Jansson van Almeloveen’s commented edition Cl. Rutilii Numatiani Galli Itinerarium (Amsterdam, 1687) presents the poem as a primarily geographical text and includes a map picturing Rutilius’ itinerary along

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significance after Gibbon. Rutilius’ boat ride through the Roman ruins and vain dreams of a glorious recuperation gained a symbolic value that would remain. For Gibbon the scenario constituted a negative example. The problem was not Rutilius’ shock but his self-delusion and clinging to a hope for what was long gone. Post-revolutionary France The same aspects of Rutilius’ work that Gibbon rejected were embraced by romanticists in post-revolutionary France. But the mode and ideological underpinnings of the appropriations varied. A comparison between the “curious but occasionally brilliant” Rutilius Namatianus and the melancholic traveler of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818) is found in a section of the entry on Lord Byron in the Biographie universelle from 1835, written by Abel-Francois Villemain (1790–1870). Byron and Rutilius shared the same “decadence” of taste and genius, Villemain argued. They both experienced the demise of the religion to which they adhered, and were disillusioned with post-revolutionary and post-imperial Europe respectively, “without meaning and end.” They traveled through ruins in times of upheaval for the sake of faiths and empires. Everywhere they turned there were traces of violence, left by Alaric in the case of Rutilius, and by Napoleon in the case of Byron.12 Ultimately, Villemain’s point was that Byron surpassed the descriptive and declamatory frigidity of earlier travel poetry, such as Rutilius’, by animating the travel account with his hero’s passionate temperament. But these reservations were seldom recognized by Villemain’s readers. His analogy was quoted as the discovery of a spiritual link between the two poets that exposed proto-Romantic traits in Rutilius: a sensitive and passionate man at odds with contemporary society.13 That same year, Villemain’s colleague Jean-Jacques Ampère published an article on medieval representations of Rome, where Rutilius stood as the first example. It was the first ever panegyric to Rome in ruins—the same Rome a modern traveler would find—and it was expressed with “penetrating melancholy” (mélan-

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the Tyrrhenian coast. Itasius Lemniacus’ commented translation Des Claudius Rutilius Namatianus Rutilius Heimkehr (Berlin, 1872) has that character. It was in Peter Burman’s edition from 1731 in the series Poetae Latini Minores (which Gibbon had read) that the poet is “canonized” as a minor poet for the first time. Abel-François Villemain, “Byron,” Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne, Supplément, vol. 59 (Paris: Michaud Frères, 1835), 478–500: 485–86. See e.g. Antoine Claude Valéry, Voyages en Corse, à l’île d’Elbe et en Sardaigne (Paris: Bourgeois-Maze, 1837), 41; Charles Labitte, La Revue de Paris 8 (1839), 204–215: 209; Jean-Baptiste Capefigue, Les quatre premiers siècles de l’Église chrétienne, vol. 3 (Paris: Amyot, 1850), 38 n. 2. Villemain’s derogatory stance was recognized, on the other hand, by Nicolaas Beets, Navolgingen van Lord Byron (Haarlem: E.F. Bohn, 1848), xiii.

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colie pénétrante).14 Ampère returned to Rutilius in 1839, and here he states more specifically that the delusion criticized by Gibbon was in fact Rutilius’ greatest merit. Rutilius’ eyes were so firmly fixed on the past that he did not see the present and the future.15 Although they do not emphasize this, it was probably not unimportant for Villemain and Ampère that Rutilius came from Gaul. He was among a number of late antique poets invoked as ancestors of French literature.16 This was important when another pioneer of comparative literature, Philarète Chasles, wrote about Rutilius three years later in an unexpected context.17 In a review of recent English publications, Chasles comments on a certain Oxford scholar who had recently published a collection of ancient travel poems under the title of Hodoeporicon. I (and others before me) have failed to find any copy of this publication, yet Chasles offers quite extensive passages that he claims are quotations from the volume in his French translation.18 Chasles is primarily interested in the essentially French nature of Rutilius. He has the “vitality of a Gaul, a vitality that never dies” (la vitalité gauloise, vitalité qui ne se dément jamais). Chasles praises his “touching and childish, clever and sweet” (touchant et puéril, ingénieux et doux) and “fine and sensitive spirit” (un bel-esprit). He then goes on to quote what he claims to be the unnamed British editor’s verdict on Gibbon:19 Through his spectacles of systematic philosopher, Gibbon, as an historian, understands nothing of this character. Gibbon lived too long and too exclusively in the company of his dear books, by his lake in Lausanne; the mountains of his acquired erudition veiled for him a much better, higher and deeper study, the mother and mistress of all branches of study, the knowledge of men. A travers ses lunettes de philosophe systématique, l’historien Gibbon ne comprend rien à ce caractère. Gibbon avait vécu trop long-temps et trop exclusivement avec 14

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Jean Jacques Ampère, “Portraits de Rome à différens âges,” La revue des deux mondes (1835), 499. Jean-Jacques Ampère, “Le dernier écrivain païen de la Gaule: Rutilius Numatianus,” Revue de Paris 5 (1839), 39. Robert Green, The Works of Ausonius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), xxxvii. Philarète Chasles, “Littérature Anglaise: Drame, histoire, traductions, antiquités,” Revue des Deux Mondes (1842), 87–91. Jules Vessereau, Cl. Rutilius Namatianus (Paris: Fontemoing, 1904), 144 also complains that he cannot get hold of this publication: “A mon grand regret, je n’ai pu découvrir de quoi il s’agissait. Je n’ai pas retrouvé le nom de l’éditeur, ni même pu contrôler l’existence de l’édition. Elle n’est mentionnée dans aucune des biographies que j’ai consultées, et aucun des éditeurs postérieurs à 1842 ne paraît en avoir eu connaissance. L’article que consacre Phil. Chasles à Rutilius à cette occasion est assez banal et renferme même quelques appréciations qui tiennent de la pure fantaisie.” Chasles, “Littérature Anglaise,” 90.

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Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed ses chers livres, au bord de son lac de Lausanne; les montagnes de son érudition acquise lui voilaient une autre étude bien préférable, bien plus haute, bien plus profonde, la mère et la directrice de toutes les études, la connaissance des hommes.

Chasles was either lucky to find an Oxford scholar who fully agreed with his point of view or—at least we cannot exclude this possibility until the publication has been found—invented it in order to gain license to write about Rutilius in this context. Gibbon was uniformly criticized, but the opinions of the character and motifs of the romantic hero Rutilius differed. Villemain’s analogy with Childe Harold was criticized by the writer Jean-Joseph-François Poujoulat (1808–1880) in his chapter on fourth- and fifth-century Roman culture in the History of Jerusalem (1842). Poujoulat pointed out a number of discrepancies between the ancient and modern writers. Rutilius had deplored the decay he witnessed, but Byron had embraced it and prayed for its acceleration. The ancient poet had declined and died unwillingly, but Byron had willingly idolized such death.20 Therefore, he agreed that there was a certain “similarity of epoch and form, but not of character, soul and genius.” In this respect, the French Catholic Poujoulat was much more sympathetic to the pagan Rutilius, who had seen his religion and its monuments perish in an age of upheaval and destruction, than to the libertine lord Byron.21 In the same year, another French Catholic scholar, François-Zenon Collombet, published his translation of the poem. He had previously used Villemain’s analogy in his Histoire civile et religieuse des lettres latines au IVe et au Ve siècle (1839, 110), but now he turned against it and voiced his support for Poujoulat’s criticism.22 To summarize, intellectuals in post-revolutionary France praised Rutilius Namatianus precisely for the qualities that Gibbon had criticized. His blind patriotic conservatism amidst the crumbling monuments became a sign of spiritual greatness. His paganism had to make way for Christianity, just as Catholicism had to make way for secularism. This romantic Rutilius remained and was worthy of an appearance in the “bible of decadentism,” Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À rebours (1884). Here he is called “master of art” (maître d’art) because he “filled the dying Empire” with his crying.23 In this French tradition of reception it was certainly not 20 21

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Jean-Joseph Poujoulat, Histoire de Jérusalem, vol. 2 (Paris: L.F. Hivert, 1842), 144. On Poujoulat from this aspect see Gavin Murray-Miller, “A Narrative of Death and Resurrection: Emplotment and Decadence in Nineteenth-Century French Catholic Ideology,” Arc: The Journal of The Faculty of Religious Studies 38 (2010), 163–75. François Zenon Collombet, Itinéraire de Rutilius Claudius Namatianus ou son retour de Rome dans les Gaules; poème en deux livres (Paris: J. Delalain, 1842) xlvj. Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1884): “Rutilius, avec ses hymnes à la gloire de Rome, ses anathèmes contre les juifs et contre les moines, son itinéraire d’Italie en Gaule, où il arrive à rendre certaines impressions de la vue, le

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a disadvantage that Rutilius was born in Gaul. Yet, his importance would soon grow much stronger in another national decadentist movement. Rutilius and the Rivista di Studi e di Vita Romana In 1923, the year after Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party marched on Rome, the first issue of the Rivista di Studi e di Vita Romana was published. The first piece, excluding the preface of the scholar and fascist politician Enrico Corradini, was a translation of Rutilius’ “Hymn to Rome” (verses 12–20 and 35– 166 in On His Return) by Luigi Siciliani.24 It is true that the journal tended to focus on previously neglected material. There was even a separate section entitled Roma ignorata. But Rutilius’ presence was remarkably strong. In the fourth issue from the same year, the fascist scholar Pietro Misciattelli invoked On His Return in an article on Rome as the universal capital of love and of the soul. Once more we find him briefly paired with Lord Byron, as Misciattelli quotes the British poet’s words: “Oh Rome, my country, city of the soul.” But Rutilius’ praise of the appearance of sunlight in the city was designated as the most important:25 This vision of Rome as a solar city, beacon of the world, expressed for the first time by a poet that today we would call French, born on French soil, was to offer the dominant image of the City that survives in Western human consciousness. Questa visione di Roma, quale città solare, faro del mondo, espressa primieramente da un poeta che oggi diremmo francese, nato in terra di Francia, era destinata ad offrire l’immagine dominante che dell’Urbe sopravvive nella coscienza umana occidentale.

We might have expected that a monumental song to the empire at its birth, such as Virgil’s Aeneid, could serve the purpose of glorifying the rise of fascism. But instead fascists often turned to Rutilius, a historically marginal figure born far from Italy and a singer of the empire at its death. This was precisely the point: Rutilius had praised Rome when it had lost its political strength and its monuments had

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vague des paysages reflétés dans l’eau, le mirage des vapeurs, l’envolée des brumes entourant les monts.” On Rutilius and Huysmans, see McGill in this volume. Enrico Ghidetti, “Le lettere di Giovanni Pascoli a Luigi Siciliani,” La rassegna della letteratura italiana 83 (1979), 263. Quotation from Piero Misciattelli, “Roma Amor,” Roma: Rivista di Studi e di Vita Romana 4 (1923), 137, see also 135–137.

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become ruins. He had sung about a Rome that did not exist anymore. He was the first to be able to offer a truly utopian vision of Rome as a universal empire:26 For nations far apart thou hast made a single fatherland; | under thy dominion captivity hath meant profit even for those who knew not justice: | and by offering to the vanquished a share in thine own justice, | thou hast made a city of what was erstwhile a world. fecisti patriam diversis gentibus unam; profuit iniustis te dominante capi. dumque offers victis proprii consortia iuris, urbem fecisti quod prius orbis erat. (vv. 63–66)

The same idea was expressed one year later in the same journal by another fascist scholar, Vincenzo Ussani. In a catalogue of various ancient representations of Rome, Ussani ends with two late antique poets, Rutilius and Claudian. He stresses their foreign nationalities, but also their belated position in history as advantageous: Perhaps these late poets, whose art often dissolves into a technique altogether esoteric and scholastic, owe the sentimental and intimate exquisiteness of their poetry when they speak of Rome to the imbalance that existed between the grandeur of the city that they wondered at in the glorious records, and the present state of the city and of the empire, forced to negotiate and redeem its own life, day by day and hour by hour. Forse questi tardi poeti la cui arte si risolve spesso in una tecnica tutta esteriore e scolastica, debbono la squisitezza sentimentale e intima della loro poesia quando parlano di Roma, al dislivello che esisteva tra la grandezza della città quale essi la ammiravano nei ricordi gloriosi, e lo stato presente della città e dell’impero costretti a patteggiare e redimere giorno per giorno ora per ora la propria vita.27

The “painful comparison” (confronto doloroso) between the past glories and the miserable present of Rome were expressed in Claudian’s and Rutilius’ “anxious love for Rome” (amore trepido per Roma), a love similar to “that one feels for a dear thing that dies” (come per una cosa cara che si spegne). Ussani ends his article with a forceful exhortation to his audience to take the auspices from this “phantom of the Roman revival” (fantasma della rinascita romana) for the com26

27

Claudius Rutilius Namatianus, “De Reditu Suo,” Minor Latin Poets, vol. 2, trans. Wight J. Duff and Arnold M. Duff (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 768– 769. Vincenzo Ussani, “Concezioni e immagini di Roma nelle letterature antique,” Rivista di Studi e di Vita Romana 3 (1924), 112.

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ing year, and with its “new life” (vita nuova) fundamentally reform the Italian schools and universities.28 Rutilius’ popularity in the fascist context had a history. The Nobel Prize laureate and pioneer of Italian decadentism Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907) translated the eulogy to Rome in 1879 and drew on Rutilius in his patriotic hymn “At the annual celebration of the foundation of Rome” (Nell’annuale della fondazione di Roma), printed in his Barbarian Odes (1877). Carducci hails dèa Roma and expresses his love for his divine homeland with tears in his eyes (21–24), echoing Rutilius’ farewell (49). In the eighth stanza he uses Rutilius’ praise for Rome as the empire that absorbs a multiplicity of peoples, expressed in verse 63 (fecisti patriam diversis gentibus unam), in order to praise the unifying power of Italy: “…you made one name of free people, Italy” (…tu di libere / genti facesti nome uno, 29–30).29 Carducci’s student and successor to the chair in Bologna, Giovanni Pascoli, also translated parts of the hymn (vv. 47–66),30 and alluded to it in several poems.31 Moreover, Pascoli was the teacher and mentor of Luigi Siciliani, whose translation was published in Roma. Pascoli’s collection “Hymnus in Romam” (1911) ends with the fulfilled promise of a resurgent Roman Empire in the form of a synthesis of the pagan and Christian Rome. The final section that praises the eternal light and spirit of Rome is strongly reminiscent of On His Return.32 “Hymnus in Romam” was composed for the fiftieth anniversary of Italy (April 21, 1911) and was published shortly after in an illustrated edition, reviewed by an enthusiastic Gabriele D’Annunzio.33 The same year, a third decadentist poet, Ceccardo Roccatagliata Ceccardi (1871–1919), sent his translation of the poem (1.399–416, 429–486 and 11.11.68) as a gift to the politician Carlo Sforza.34 Translating On His Return was a rite of passage, as it were, in Italian decadentism. This popularity paved the way for the fascists’ political abuse of On His Return. Rutilius was used to help invest the Roman ruins with a certain topicality, which had political implications, not least in justifying the choice of Rome as the 28 29 30

31

32 33

34

Ussani, “Concezioni e immagini di Roma nelle letterature antique,” 113. Giosuè Carducci, Poesie di Giosue Carducci (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1906), 792–794. Giovanni Pascoli, Poesie: Tutte le opere di Giovanni Pascoli, vol. 2 (Milano: A. Mondadori, 1971), 1674–1675: “A Roma nella sventura. Inno d’un celta: anno 416 d.c.” Poemata Christiana (1901–1911) and Post Occasum Urbis (1907). See Fo, Il ritorno, 39–40. Fo, Il ritorno, 39–40. In Corriere della Sera, May 3, 1911, see Guido Capovilla, D’Annunzio e la poesia ‘barbara’ (Modena, 2006), 22: “Giovanni Pascoli is the greatest Latin poet that the world has seen since the century of Augustus. […] In his loftiest poems he is not an imitator but a continuator of the Ancients.” (Giovanni Pascoli è il più grande poeta latino che sia sorto nel mondo, dal secolo di Augusto a oggi. […] Nei suoi più alti poemi egli non è un imitatore ma un continuatore degli Antichi.) Fo, Il ritorno, 41–42.

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capital of Italy, which was not entirely uncontroversial.35 Several new elements were added to the understanding of his character in the early fascist movement. Loving Roman ruins was not enough. Fascist scholars urged for action. The general sense of humiliation in Italy after World War I, not least palpable among nationalists, made a figure like Rutilius—a statesman whose beloved Rome had been defeated by barbarians—the perfect mouthpiece. The mixture of genres, of moods and tempers found in On His Return, the poet’s tears for the old and aggression towards monks, Jews and Goths; all of this could be used to fuel hopes for retribution. The unchecked series of triumphs of classical epic was an unrealistic model. Enrico Corradini presented the eulogy to Rome as a symbol of eternal renewal in which the Italians could find solace and reinforcement: “triumphs and ruins, glory and misery, millennia of life and human diligence in the name of Rome, continuously reborn” (trionfi e rovine, Gloria e miseria, millenni di vita e di operosità umane nel nome sempre risorgente di Roma).36 One of the main purposes of Rivista di Studi e di Vita Romana and its institute was to establish an allegiance between fascist Italy and Catholic Rome.37 Even here Rutilius came to play a role, despite the antagonistic invectives against monks and hermits in On His Return. Eugeni Pacelli (Pope Pius XII in 1939) gave On His Return a distinguished position in his influential essay “Rome where Christ is Roman” (Roma onde Cristo è romano):38 And we Christians have believed in God’s love for us; and in the picture of ancient idolatrous Rome, who makes herself into the mother of peoples and the children of barbarians into her own children and citizens—Fecisti patriam diversis gentibus unam (cf. Rut. 1.62)—we find a vision that anticipates Christian Rome, Mother of all Churches and common fatherland of all of God’s children, preordained by the waters of Baptism and by the regenerative Grace to be citizens of this heavenly Rome, “where Christ is a Roman.” (Dante, Purgatory 32.102)

35

36 37

38

On Rome in this context see Andrea Giardina and André Vauchez, Il mito di Roma: Da Carlo Magno a Mussolini (Rome: GLF editori Laterza, 2000), 186–187; Joshua Arthurs, Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 9–23. Enrico Corradini, no title, Rivista di Roma (1923), 1–2. Donatello Aramini, “‘Caesar’s Rome’ and ‘Christian Rome’: The Institute of Roman Studies between the Fascist Regime and the Vatican,” Catholicism and Fascism in Europe 1918–1945, ed. Jan Nelis et al. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2015), 258: “Galassi Paluzzi’s institute explicitly linked pagan Rome to its Christian successor: it was both within Rome, and because of Rome, that Christianity had reached its triumph.” See also Antonio La Penna, “Il culto della romanità nel periodo fascista: La rivista ‘Roma e l’Istituto di studi romani’, Italia contemporanea 217 (1999), 605–630. Eugenio Pacelli, “Il sacro destino de Roma,” Roma “onde Cristo e Romano,” vol. 1 (1936), 7.

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E noi, Cristiani, abbiamo creduto all’amore di Dio per noi; e nella immagine dell’antica Roma idolatra, che si fa madre dei popoli e fa suoi figli e cittadini i figli stessi dei barbari,—fecisti patriam diversis gentibus unam (Cl. Rutilio Namaziano, De Reditu 1.63)—, riconosciamo l’anticipata visione della Roma cristiana, Madre di tutte le Chiese e Patria comune di tutti i figli di Dio, preordinati dalle acque del Battesimo e dalla Grazia rigeneratrice a cittadini di quella superna Roma, “onde Cristo è Romano” (Purg., XXXII, 102).

Rutilius’ grand vision of Rome deserved a place alongside Dante’s description of Paradise as a heavenly Rome. For Pacelli, it seems irrelevant that Rutilius was considered the last outpost of pagan Rome. Instead, he became a historic example to prove that there are mystical connections between Rome the city, the ancient Roman empire and the Catholic church. It is mainly his cultification of the Roman state that seems vital. Rutilius formulated a relationship to the Roman state that could be called religious,39 which was at the core of the fascist ideology. Fecisti patriam diversis gentibus unam and its abuses In the later years of the fascist regime, the abuses of Rutilius appear more flagrant. His significance was more or less reduced to the verse patriam fecisti de diversis gentibus unam, which was repeatedly used as a slogan to authorize the occupation of Libya and Ethiopia,40 and to justify positions in the debate on racial laws. Yet, the implications of this verse would eventually lead to its abandonment. The Mediterraneanists regarded the Roman stirpe as a superior result of a specific cultural, historical, and spiritual development, while the “Nordicists” were more aligned with race biology and saw the origins of the “Roman race” in the “Aryan.” “La forza unitaria” defined the Italian nation, claimed the fascist politician and Mediterraneanist Giacomo Acerbo (1888–1969), and he quoted Rutilius (without even mentioning his name) to illustrate this: Fecisti patriam diversis gentibus unam.41 The anti-Semitic journalist Giovanni Preziozi quickly reacted: “Why does he, on page 28, quote Rutilius Namatianus’ verses that exalt the universalist Rome of the decadence?” 42 An anonymous writer in the newspaper Il Tevere came to Acer39

40

41

42

Wim Verbaal, “A Man and his Gods: Religion in the De reditu suo of Rutilius Claudius Namatianus,” Wiener Studien 119 (2006), 170. For example J. Gomez de Teràn in “Libia italiana e musulmana,” Meridiano di Roma (1937), xiii. Cf. Mariella Cagnetta, Antichisti e impero fascista (Bari: Dedalo libri, 1979), 145, n. 14. Giacomo Acerbo, I fondamenti della dottrina fascista della razza (Rome: Ministero della Cultura Populare, 1940), 28. Giovanni Preziosi, “Per la serietà degli studi razziali italiani (Dedicato al camerata Giacomo Acerbo),” La Vita Italiana (1940), 74. Cf. Francesco Cassata, “La Difesa della razza”: Politica, ideologia e immagine del razzismo fascista (Torino: Einaudi, 2008), 67–69.

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bo’s defense. The verses of Rutilius Namatianus aimed at “the positive purifying work by the Italian races that was achieved by Rome” (opera purificatrice delle stirpi italiche compiuta da Roma),43 but on the following day, a certain Guiseppe Dell’Isola (ps. Pensabene) continued the criticism of Acerbo: The Rome that the fifth-century Gallic poet invoked was the “Universalistic Rome of the decadence that already since 200 years had given citizenship to all the people and races of the Empire, including Hebrews, Levantines, Orientals, and Africans.” (La Roma universalistica della decadenza la quale aveva dato, già da due secoli, la cittadinanza a tutti i popoli e le razze dell’Impero, compresi gli ebrei, I levantini, gli orientali e gli africani.)44 Rutilius was no longer in fashion. Paradoxically, Joshua Arthurs has noted, “romanità began to be eclipsed at the very moment that Fascism grasped most aggressively at the mantle of empire.” 45 By the end of the war, many Italians were fed up with Rutilius. The author Gino Doria declared that he was so weary of the falsifications of history, all the talk about “Roman unity” (unità romana) as a model for the present unity, and about being the son of the mother (Rome), that he would give Rutilius Namatianus a punch in the face (if he could) because of his fecisti patriam diversis gentibus unam.46 Rutilius today History repeats itself, and this goes for Rutilius’ history of effect too, sometimes even down to the smallest detail. In the introduction to Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (2016), before reaching the conclusion that “antiquity’s shadow” has been as important as its “light,” Shane Butler makes a similar comparison between Rutilius’ journey from Rome and Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as that made by Abel-François Villemain almost two hundred years earlier. Byron’s “deliberately disconsolate” look upon Rome is juxtaposed to that of Rutilius:47 “No survivor can forget you,” is the backward cry of the poet Rutilius Claudius Namatianus to Rome, as he makes his way from the city to Gaul through the ravaged Italian peninsula, in 416.

43 44 45 46

47

Cassata, “La Difesa della razza,” 68. Cassata, “La Difesa della razza,” 69. Arthurs, Excavating Modernity, 126. Caterina Genna, Guido De Ruggiero e ‘La Nuova Europa’: Tra idealismo e storicismo (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2010), 280. Shane Butler, Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 10.

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“The tone had been set,” Butler continues, “the Rome the world had known was gone, forever.” 48 In the twenty-first century, Rutilius is no longer naïve (as in the Enlightenment), fine and sensitive (as for the Romantics) or utopian (as in Fascist Italy), but shocked and traumatized.49 Moreover, he was not a soldier but a civilian in shock, making it possible to use this post-Alaric poem as a symbol for the psychological effects of unconventional warfare and terrorism. Such analogies—a shared experience of crisis and turmoil between Late Antiquity and the twentieth century—have provided a common argument for the relevance of historical investigation on this period. This goes for Rutilius as well. In the introduction to his edition from 1961, Italo Lana compared the position of Rutilius to that of his own generation. The possibilities of truly understanding Rutilius had never been greater, he argued, since his contemporaries were faced with similar challenges: they struggled to grasp an entirely new era, and getting to grips with what had gone wrong in the past.50 Similarly, ten years later, Lucie Porterfield expressed a deep sympathy with the poet: “Rutilius can hardly be blamed for his ardent faith in the supranational empire. The longing to transform the world into one fatherland has not been restricted to classical antiquity, and we who live in a similar era of mingled hope and anxiety should be able to understand and sympathize with the poet’s confidence in Rome’s renaissance.” 51 The list continues. Tommaso di Francesco in 1993: “it goes without saying that this limited testimony from the poetry of Late Antiquity is eerily relevant today: it is the pathos of our contemporary ruins that runs through Rutilius’ verse journey” (va da sé che questo angusto testimoniare in poesia dell’epoca tardolatina e di una attualità che spaventa: è il pathos delle nostre contemporanee rovine che scorre nel viaggio in versi di Rutilio).52 This is the Rutilius that Claudio Bondì sought to transmit in his Il ritorno. His friend and colleague Alessandro Fo notes that the director “repeatedly stressed how [the movie] warns about the current ‘global’ situation, which is 48 49

50 51

52

Butler, Deep Classics, 10. Bondì in Fo, Il ritorno, 115; Neil Christie, “Barren Fields? Landscapes and Settlements in Late Roman and Post-Roman Italy,” Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity, ed. Graham Shipley and John Salmon (London and New York: Routledge, 2013 [1996]), 256; Malamud, Rutilius Namatianus Going Home, 6–8. See also discussion in Catherine Conybeare, “How to Lament an Eternal City: The Ambiguous Fall of Rome,” in The Fall of Cities in the Mediterranean: Commemoration in Literature, Folk-Song, and Liturgy, ed. M. R. Bachvarova et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 224: “The impact of the sack was not so much a sharp shock or instant change in worldview as a tectonic shift. The shift took preexisting ideas and permanently realigned them.” Italo Lana, Rutilio Namaziano (Torino: Università di Torino, 1961), 9. Lucie Anne Porterfield, Rutilius Namatianus: De reditu suo; Some Historical, Political and Literary Considerations (PhD diss., Colombia University, 1971), 467. Tommaso di Francesco, “In viaggio con Rutilio Namaziano tra barbari e città moribonde,” Il manifesto—la talpa libri, February 19 (1993), 4. See also Fo, Il ritorno, 29.

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not very different from the one that led Germanic peoples to invade the Roman Empire’s lands of wealth and well-being” (ha ripetutamente sottolineato come avverta l’attuale situazione ‘globale’ non lontana da quella che trascinò i popoli germanici a invadere le terre di ricchezza e benessere dell’impero romano.)53 Put it this way, Alessandro Fo makes it sound as if there is an implied critique of Western semi-colonial exercise of power and its consequences in Bondì’s undertaking, but it is hard to discern this in the film or in the director’s own descriptions of it. Claudio Bondì was assistant director to Roberto Rossellini in his 1972 screen version Agostino d’Ippona. Filippo Carlà and Andreas Goltz have noted that there is a fundamental difference in the representation of the conflicts between pagans and Christians in these two movies; in Agostino d’Ippona Augustine fights against the “extremism of the radical monks” and the Christian Alypius “praises even Julian for his sense of the sacred.” 54 In Il ritorno, on the other hand, there is no longer any trace of this representation of tolerant Christians. Rutilius’ negative responses are underlined and the movie “sets the classical, civil, peaceful and cultivated classical world against the fanaticism of the adepts of the new religion.” Carlà and Goltz draw their conclusions:55 The political message is clear, and not far away from the one that will be overtaken by Agora a few years later: intolerance and religious fanaticism are the reasons for the decline in the “dark ages”; a reason that, after 2001, applies also to the modern world as a sort of caveat.

The changes and innovations that Bondì makes speak for themselves. In the movie, the purpose of Rutilius’ perilous journey is to collect money and to reunite men and arms in order to overturn the rule of the Christian Honorius and proclaim a pagan emperor. Moreover, Bondì deletes Rutilius’ unsavory anti-Semitic attacks, and has the author and protagonist killed off by Christians at the end. In an interview, the director states that the film was inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s legendary movie The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964).56 But Il ritorno implies an inversion of this model, as it is Rutilius the pagan who dies the death of a martyr in the hands of Christians.

53 54

55 56

Fo, Il ritorno, 30. Filippo Carlà and Andreas Goltz, “The Late Antique City in Movies,” in Imagining Ancient Cities in Film: From Babylon to Cinecittà, ed. M. García Morcillo et al. (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 208. Carlà and Goltz, Imagining Ancient Cities in Film, 210. October 4, 2016: http://news.cinecitta.com/IT/it-it/news/54/61347/claudio-bondi.aspx.

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Final words In a history of Roman literature we are informed that “[s]ubsequent generations have paid little attention to Rutilius,” 57 but we have seen that this is not the whole truth. On His Return has been criticized, appreciated, used and abused in a number of contexts since the Enlightenment. Many scholars today dealing with the text pay much attention to politically sensitive passages, such as the anti-Semitic attack.58 The lofty hymn to Rome, however, and its Nachleben in the hands of totalitarian ideologists is never addressed. But its utopian message continues to resonate. In 2006, the British politician Boris Johnson quoted it when offering Rome as his ideal model for the EU. The union needed a strong leader, he argued, one “with a semi-divine status,” and it needed to stand united: “‘You have made out of diverse races one patria, one country,’ he said. ‘You have made a city out of what was the world.’” 59 Ten years later Great Britain has voted to leave the EU. Rutilius the utopian dreamer has departed. Meanwhile, there are signs that Late Antiquity as Peter Brown’s multicultural melting-pot and enriching transformation is giving ground back to Gibbon’s decline and fall.60 Rutilius the disillusioned or even shocked conservative is returning.

57

58

59 60

Michael von Albrecht and Gareth L. Schmeling, A History of Roman Literature: From Livius Andronicus to Boethius (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 1335. See for instance Francesco Corsaro, Studi Rutiliani (Bologna: Pàtron, 1981), 55–67; Stéphane Ratti, “Le De reditu suo de Rutilius Namatianus: Un hymne païen à la vie,” Vita Latina 173 (2005), 75–86; Verbaal, “A Man and his Gods”; Soler, Rutilius Namatianus, li–lv; Malamud, Rutilius Namatianus Going Home, 24–26. Boris Johnson, The Dream of Rome (London: Harper Collins, 2006), 52. Access October 7, 2016: http://blog.oup.com/2005/12/the_fall_of_rom/; http://www. lancaster.ac.uk/staff/haywardp/hist119/seminars/eleven.htm; http://www.bu.edu/historic/hs/perkins.pdf.

H e n r i e t t e H a r i c H -s c H wa r z b a U e r

Alma Johanna Koenig’s Der heilige Palast “The Rise and Fall” of Theodora in the Belletrist of the Wiener Moderns*

Beyond school learning—Alma Johanna Koenig encounters Late Antiquity In the fin de siècle movement, Late Antiquity experienced a renaissance. With the dawn of literary Feuilletons, Late Antiquity secured an audience for itself through novels from antiquity beyond what scholarly speculation termed the “downfall” of the Occident; an audience not achieved via traditional, elitist institutions. The theater and silent films also offered Late Antiquity “enactments” a representative stage with increasing frequency. We generally associate Late Antiquity with the renunciation of classical aesthetics, with exoticism, orientalism, religious strife and nationalistic trends—to name the most important characteristics. The rejection of bourgeois norms belongs on this list also.1 The aura of fin de siècle and especially the Wiener Moderne, a reaction to social changes in the wake of the end of monarchy and World War I, which manifested itself in a specific (literary) modern pluralism of stylistic expression, deeply influenced the Austrian author Alma Johanna Koenig (1887–1942). In most of her novels and poetry, classical Roman times and Late Antiquity provided the setting, but Koenig distanced herself from Historicism’s optimistic expectations regarding the past, although she never explicitly denounced them. While she constantly engaged with Antiquity, she never expected history to provide answers for her own time. Rather, she aimed to demonstrate that this way of viewing history could never explain the aporia of the individual in her entanglements of existence. *

1

Translation Austin Diaz. For her critical reading of this article my special thanks go to Sina dell’Anno. I presented a first draft of this contribution, where I also included the novel Der jugendliche Gott, at the international congress “Classical Greek and Roman Literature: Gendered Perspectives in Reading and Reception” (April 1, 2012) at the University of Maryland, College Park. For analogies between Late Antiquity and fin de siècle consult Marco Formisano, “Reading Late Antiquity—Reception and the Subaltern Late Antiquity,” in Décadence. “Decline and Fall” or “Other Antiquity”? ed. Marco Formisano and Therese Fuhrer (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 12–13.

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Koenig was well-read in matters relating to antiquity, as she found it more fascinating than other epochs. Her lust for reading opened a world which the education offered to girls at this time did not give access to. She was also inspired by the contemporary artistic environment in Vienna, for which Late Antiquity had achieved the position of choice. At the center of my contribution stands the question how Koenig, against the background of the precarious conditions of education provided for a woman, received and reworked the post-classical historiographer Procopius of Caesarea. Since the fin de siècle provided an amalgamation of scholarship and art which centered around Late Antiquity, Procopius was not unknown. Consequently, Koenig was able to study his person and his work. Her novel The Holy Palace (1922)2 and her poems The Songs of Fausta (1922) stand at the beginning of her impressive literary production, while her final work, The Youthful God, was submitted in May, 1942, only before she was killed in a concentration camp at Minsk. We can trace her journey through life via her work, her friends, and her publisher Oskar Jan Tauschinski, who provides us with important insights into her exposure to Late Antiquity. Access to Classical Studies was not a given for girls of her generation. Koenig’s example shows us what fascination ancient times, including Late Antiquity, must have held for the general public. Koenig enjoys little recognition currently, thus an overview of her life will cast a light on her literary interests and elucidate her attraction to figures from the ancient world. Although we should avoid biographical interpretations of literature, Koenig’s personal narrative helps us understand how she came to the world of Late Antiquity and how she first conceived and imagined the Byzantine empress Theodora. Koenig, an assimilated Jew, daughter of a retired military officer, emigrated in 1888 from Prague to Vienna with her family. The youngest of four siblings, she often cared for her ailing mother, something that may have kept her from finishing school at the Lyceum in the Viennese Frauen-Erwerb-Verein. Yet, she circumvented the social strictures her father placed on her, becoming part of Viennese artistic circles from early on. Her writing career also had an early start; she was awarded Vienna’s Literature Prize in 1925, at the age of 38. She had less luck in her marriage. In the same year that she won her prize, she accompanied her husband Bernhart Gangolf Ehrenfels—to whom she dedicated The Holy Palace—to Algiers, where he served as a diplomat. Five years later she returned to Vienna alone. In 1933 she began a relationship with Oskar Alfred Tauschinksi, a man twenty years her junior.3 He apparently remained devoted to her after her death. Tauschinksi, who later became a famous writer and translator, kept her work safe 2

3

The novel was first published by Rikola-Vertrag (Vienna, Leipzig, and Munich) in 1922. However, I have used the second edition (1923). Koenig had already delved into classical themes before: her earlier book of poetry The Wind’s Bride (Amalthea-Verlag; Zurich, Leipzig, and Vienna, 1918) contained the poem The Anacreontic Singer. Whom Koenig called Jan after the opera singer Jan Kiepura.

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from the Gestapo and took care of her literary legacy. Koenig wrote her first poem under the masculine pseudonym “Johannes Herdan.”4 After 1933 it was no longer permitted to publish her works, but beginning at this time, she held over 40 lectures in private circles, particularly among the woman of the Viennese bourgeoisie. Koenig was not a scholar and did not wish to be. Yet she was extremely well read, complementing her literary and historical education with the diligent preparation of her lectures, researching details and dates.5 How well acquainted she became with Latin and Greek, if at all, we cannot say for sure. We find evidence that she diligently sought to apply the proper Latin and Greek terms in the glossary for The Book of Petron (Buch Petron).6 As soon as she began writing, Koenig addressed the traditional gender roles of her time and those she found in literature. Her critical approach converged with how she lived out her womanhood, intensely and unapologetically. She entered relationships that left bourgeois conventions behind. Among other things, she articulated an aging woman’s right to an active sexuality and thematized the liaison with a younger man in several of her writings.7 For the theme of Reading Late Antiquity, it is important to note that Koenig was able to develop an enthusiasm for the classical world that includes Late Antiquity. At that time, girls of her social background could access knowledge only indirectly, mostly at home, while their brothers received an education. Admittance to the Gymnasium, especially the humanistic Gymnasium, was still forbidden to women.8 Women could, however, take part in private lectures. They, of course, had access to women’s associations, but we should not forget the theater. Koenig dis-

4

5

6

7

8

Cf. Oskar Jan Tauschinski, Einleitung zu Alma Johanna König. Gute Liebe – Böse Liebe by Oskar Jan Tauschinski (Graz and Vienna: Stiasny Verlag, 1960), 22–23. See a touching and personal foreword from Oskar Jan Tauschinski, Alma Johanna König: Schicksale in Bilderschrift. Historische Miniaturen (Vienna: Bergland-Verlag, 1967), 6–8. Regarding this question, my former student Adriane Wildbacher has presented important results. For this paper I profited greatly from her unpublished thesis Leidenschaft Antike: Alma Johanna Koenigs historischer Roman “Der jugendliche Gott” im Kontext taciteischer Darstellungskunst (Graz, 2002), which I am supervising. For Koenig’s education background cf. Wildbacher (Leidenschaft Antike, 24–35), to whose results I will often return. E.g. Schicksale in Bilderschrift: Historische Miniaturen (1967); Sonette für Jan (Vienna: Luckmann, 1946); cf. Evelyne Polt-Heinzl, Zeitlos: Neun Porträts. Von der ersten Krimiautorin Österreichs bis zur ersten Satirikerin Deutschlands (Vienna: Milena Verlag, 2005), 106–107. Koenig visited an establishment for higher education for girls, called “Mädchen-Lyzeum des Wiener Frauen-Erwerb-Vereines” from 1889 on. Only in 1902/3 was the lyceum augmented with a four-year Latin School. I am grateful to Wildbacher, Leidenschaft Antike, 28, for this information.

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played a great interest in anything involving the classical world.9 She mostly drew her ideas of antiquity from reading, not unlike her young female protagonists. Koenig’s character Theodora creates her own world with the help of literature: She [Theodora] never went out, and spent half her days with books in her small house garden, in which fire-lilies burnt like torches. When she had thoroughly and thoughtfully exhausted the writings, she could then remain in repose for a long time, her gaze riveted to the fountain stretching to the sky, petting her white, always-freezing marmoset sleeping in her lap with those hands of hers more manicured than ever. Sie [Theodora] ging niemals aus und verbrachte halbe Tage über Büchern in ihrem kleinen Hausgärtchen, in dem die Feuerlilien wie Fackeln brannten. Hatte sie die Schriften nachdenklich-ermattet fortgelegt, dann konnte sie lange verharren, den unbewegten Blick auf den himmelanstrebenden Springstrahl geheftet, mit den sorgsamer als je gepflegten Händen das weiße, immer-frierende Seidenäffchen streichelnd, das in ihrem Schoß schlief.10

It is worth taking into account the literary and publishing environments in which Koenig released her novel. The Holy Palace was published by Rikola-Verlag, which had its heyday in 1920–1926, and which strove to support young Austrian authors.11 The critics hailed the story of Theodora’s ascent from the Circus milieu to empress of the Eastern Roman Empire.12 The book became a bestseller,13 but simultaneously stirred up controversy, as people decried it as pornography. The literary quality of the text, however, repudiated such a label. From 1933 on, it was forbidden to publish Koenig’s works. Only the Neue Wiener Tagblatt offered her publication the possibility of publication after that point.14 After 1945, there was in many parts of Europe a wish to avoid remembering the loss of literary personalities to war, expulsion and persecution. This applied to 9

10 11

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14

Cf. Oskar Jan Tauschinski, Nachwort zu Alma Johanna König: Vor dem Spiegel. Lyrische Autobiographie by Oskar Jan Tauschinski (Graz, Cologne, and Vienna: Styria, 1978), 110. The Holy Palace, 61. Koenig was also able to publish contributions in 1923 and 1924 in the Almanach, a subsidiary of the Rikola-Verlag. Cf. Bettina Hey’l, Geschichtsdenken und literarische Moderne: Zum historischen Roman in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 190 n. 38. The specific ways in which the Wiener Moderne shaped Koenig’s work remained unclear to Hey’l, who concentrated on her arguments on the Weimar Republic. Already in 1923, the novel was translated into Swedish and Hungarian, and later into Serbo-Croatian; cf. Franziska Raynaud, “Alma Johanna Koenig (1887–1942?): Leben und Dichten einer Wienerin,” Leo Baeck Institute Bulletin H. 64 (1983), 37–38. Cf. Tauschinski, Alma Johanna König, 7.

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Koenig also, yet something else delayed her rediscovery. It was not easy to orient her among the writers of her time. She was not a frontline fighter for women, in whom literary studies began to show an interest. In addition, the first significant phase of Classical Reception Studies (from around 1970) focused on the classical canon of authors and canonical themes in general; the second phase, in the 1980s, focused its attention on the reception of the so-called daily routine in antiquity. Film and new media advanced this approach. None of these developments, however, paved the way for a rediscovery of The Holy Palace. Add to all this the near-total absence of any of Koenig’s works in libraries.15 The first ample German-language dissertation about Koenig’s work appeared only in the year 2000.16 Such a lack of scholarship in the field of reception is especially disconcerting in light of the Franco-Austrian author Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer’s (born 1936) high estimation of Koenig as a literary figure as early in 1980.17 The Holy Palace enjoyed immediate success, and was compared by critics to Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô, based on Polybius’ Histories.18 Uninhibited phantasmagoria, ghastly perversions and erotic images legitimized such a comparison. Just as Flaubert exploited source materials without sacrificing literary aesthetics, Koenig, too, read Procopius of Caesarea, whose Anecdota reported on the rule of Justinian and Theodora as an act of retaliation, in order to bear witness to their “grandiose luminosity and vitality.”19 Procopius wanted his socalled Secret History to be understood as a backdrop to his writings that dealt with the wars (bella) and the buildings (aedificia) in the Justinian era—stories he could not publicly address while the emperor still lived.20 The Secret History was probably finished around 550/551. Alongside the protagonists, Justinian and Theodora, Procopius mentions several times the general Belisarius and his wife Antonia, one of Theodora’s few confidants. That Koenig closely studied Procopius in translation and did not rely on secondary literature is evident. Against the hate 15

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For the non-presence of Koenig in literary history, cf. Arnd Bohm, “Gender and History in the Works of Alma Johanna Koenig,” in Frauen: MitSprechen, MitSchreiben: Beiträge zur literatur- und sprachwissenschaftlichen Frauenforschung, ed. Marianne Henn and Britta Hufeisen (Stuttgart: Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, Akademischer Verlag, 1997), 455–467. Ellen Johanna Löffler, Weiblichkeitsentwürfe in Leben und Werk der Wiener Autorin Alma Johanna König: Frauen- und Selbstbildnis einer leidenschaftlichen Intellektuellen (Graz, 2000 [unpublished]). Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer, Der weibliche Name des Widerstands: Sieben Berichte (Olten and Freiburg: Walter-Verlag, 1980, repr. Klagenfurt and Vienna: Wieser, 2006). Cf. Christine Trouvaillon, “Frauenromane,” Das literarische Echo, Halbmonatsschrift für Literaturfreunde, 1921/1922, Heft 24, Sp. 1490; André Robert Vie Litteraire (No. 62), June 1925 n.p. (cited after Raynaud 1983), 38. Walter Angelmann, “Frauenromane,” Die Neue Freie Presse (Morgenblatt), September 19, 1922, 33, col. 1 (quoted here from Wildbacher, Leidenschaft Antike, 48). Cf. Procop. Anecd. 1,3.

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and contempt with which Procopius approached Theodora and the monolithic chronique scandaleuse, to which the ruling pair’s relationship gave life, Koenig offers a sometimes stately, sometimes still and sensible, almost gentle tale about Theodora. Hereafter I present a cursory review of the novel to show how Koenig recreated Procopius’ narrative of Theodora and conveyed her image of Late Antiquity. The Holy Palace—an outline21 Within a span of 370 pages, separated into two sections and divided into 79 episodes, Koenig narrates Theodora’s story from earliest childhood to her death. At the beginning we only learn so much about her origins: that she was conceived as the result of a chance encounter between a lion tamer and an aristocrat destined for a life in a monastery. The initially anonymous mother—who wears a precious, pearl-encrusted patriarchal cross made of amethyst—deposits the newborn by her father, the lion tamer Grypho. Days later a lion mauls Grypho. The family of the bear-ward Akakios takes her in and Akakios’ wife names her Theodora. Theodora grows up in the circus milieu. She can handle herself around wild animals, and earns her first fortune making her boy-like body the object of pederasty. When the rivalry between two circus factions, the “Blues” and the “Greens,” threatens her stepfather’s existence in the circus, though still a child, she dances into the arena. She imitates the veil dance of a Phrygian hetaera and wins public support for her request to save her stepfather’s life. The bishop Vigilius, witness to her performance, comments on the incident: This little beetle will one day be the greatest prostitute of Byzantium. Dieser Käfer da wird einmal die größte Dirne von Byzanz.

Theodora learns from the Amethyst cross—now in her possession—how she came into the world from her foster mother, yet the child has no idea what such a story could mean for her. However, her behavior towards her devoted stepmother allows the reader to conjecture what sort of life the girl will one day lead: Get up! I will walk in golden shoes, but ones I’ve earned for myself. Steh auf! Ich werde in goldenen Schuhen schreiten, aber in meinen, die ich mir verdient habe. 21

Hartmut Leppin’s instructive overview of the empress’s life and activities, “Theodora und Iustinian,” in Die Kaiserinnen Roms: Von Livia bis Theodora, ed. Hildegard Temporini-Gräfin Vitzhum (Munich: Beck, 2002), 437–482, proves very useful here.

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The pages where Koenig describes Theodora growing into a young woman are fascinating. The young girl impatiently yearns for womanhood. A high point of her story-telling comes when Koenig interprets the scene in which Theodora plays out the myth of Leda and the swan.22 Here, as in many other places, we recognize how closely Koenig studied the Anecdota, as Procopius also presents this Leda scene. Among other things, Procopius notes that Theodora happily set aside the binding covering her breasts.23 Koenig modifies this note from the Secret History. The Theodora of the novel wears a suspender belt, whose removal circus regulations prevent.24 Procopius vilifies Theodora, characterizing her as a completely shameless being: geese pick grains from her lap and, so he implies, she is proud of this fact. Koenig portrays her heroine differently. Her Theodora acts out the vulgar streak, but doesn’t seem to be submitted to it. The actress plays her role skillfully, holding herself distant to the play: The simultaneously shocked and longing commitment in Leda’s visage facing the audience flew away. The simultaneously painful and knowing smile of virgin lust faded. The circus prostitute Theodora sprang high and laughing aloft and she blew kisses to the crowd careening senselessly in every place. Die zugleich erschreckte und lechzende Hingabe in Ledas hergewandtem Gesicht verflog. Das zugleich schmerzliche und erkennende Lächeln jungfräulicher Lust erlosch. Die Zirkusdirne Theodora sprang steil und lachend empor und warf Kußhändchen in die Menge, die auf allen Plätzen besinnungslos raste.

Koenig’s Theodora fell in love only once in her life. In clear distinction to the account of Procopius,25 who mentions the relationship between the young woman and the merchant Hekebolos, she loved this Tyrian, whom she met at a dinner party held by the poet Agathon. She lived together with Hekebolos until he was ruined financially. After their separation she aborted their child.26 She left Constantinople and traveled to Alexandria, where she worked as a prostitute to keep her head above water. A monk introduced her to true Christianity, one not characterized by dogmatic arguments. One day Agathon appeared in Alexandria, accompanied by Procopius. Theodora travels back to Byzantium with Agathon. The poet’s house and symposiums are a popular meeting point for artists and high officials of the city. With Agathon, Koenig brings a key figure of the classical Greek literature into her romance, a kind of dramatic intertextuality is to be observed. It stands 22 23 24 25 26

The Holy Palace, 26–28. Anecd. 9, 20–22. The Holy Palace, 27. Anecd. 9, 27. Procopius (Anecd. 9,19) reports that abortion was practiced by Theodora again and again.

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to reason that Koenig transferred to her own novel the figure of Agathon found in Plato’s Symposium (194c–197e), where a man with the same name intones an encomium to the god Eros. Agathon overtakes, if quietly, the role of matchmaker— rendering the reference to Plato even more plausible. The same Agathon, on his arrival in Alexandria, had recognized the song that Theodora sings as that of a port prostitute. He exclaims: “My ode to Love!” This is conceivably an allusion to the hymn to Eros at the end of Agathon’s speech in the Symposium. 27 Among such society, Theodora gets to know Antonina, lover of general Belisarius. Vigilius, the now old bishop, goes in and out of Theodora’s house—a gift from Agathon—and feasts on her dancing recitals.28 Justinian first appears in Chapter 22. He receives a supplicant in the state apartments of his palace: The long side of the chamber was adorned with a mosaic, the depiction of the giant Christophorus carrying the Christ child through the flood. Near to the stone floor surged four waves of lapis lazuli, in whose deep blue swam three rosy and plump fish. Die Längsseite des Gelasses war mit einem Mosaikbild geschmückt, einer Darstellung des Riesen Christophorus, der das Christusknäblein durch die Fluten trägt. Nah dem Estrich erhoben sich vier Wogen aus Lapislazuli, in deren tiefem Blau drei rosige, dickbäuchige Fische schwammen.29

Justinian is introduced as an ascetic man, who forgoes food and sleep, who lives without sensual pleasures in his giant palace, attending to his responsibilities. Procopius, his private secretary,30 is a key figure for the emperor, but hardly someone who instills confidence or even serves as a sympathetic companion. However, one day, indeed contrary to all expectations, Justinian asks Procopius about Theodora. In order to get to know her, he sends her a pearl necklace. Pearls do not seduce Theodora. The emperor then sends Procopius to her, over whose face the “shadow of hate, violence and murder”31 lay. Procopius does not succeed. Justinian goes to Theodora himself. She compels him to a marriage legitimized by law. She would not agree to a “standard” relationship of an emperor to a prostitute. She also demands that anyone who disparages her should be put to death. Once in the holy palace—mentioned for the first time32—she wants to consummate the marriage. On that same night, the wedding takes place. The Abbess Anastasia 27 28 29 30 31 32

The Holy Palace, 54. The Holy Palace, 65–66. The Holy Palace, 67. The Holy Palace, 84. The Holy Palace, 85. The Holy Palace, 92.

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refuses to kneel before the “circus prostitute” until she notices Theodora’s amethyst cross and falls to her knees. Theodora immediately recognizes the woman kneeling before her: her mother. Immediately afterwards, Justinian issues a decree allowing actresses and prostitutes to marry high-ranking Romans. Procopius is discharged, only to return soon after to the emperor’s service. Later, the emperor searches for the basilissa in her palace chambers. The first description of Theodora in full regalia comes soon thereafter: Her rounded tiara, which completely covered her hair, held at its middle a calyx of seven enormous gems of every color. Pearls the size of hazelnuts circled about the headband thrice and fell in lightly jangling vines to her shoulders. Her mantle, opened only at the right side, held a buckle adorned with a flat, ovoid ruby. Ihre oben gerundete Tiara, die das Haar völlig verbarg, trug in der Mitte einen Blütenkelch aus sieben riesigen Edelsteinen aller Farben. Perlen von Haselnußgröße liefen dreimal um den Stirnteil der Tiara und hingen in leise klirrenden Traubenbüscheln bis auf die Schultern herab. Den nur auf der rechten Seite geöffneten Mantel hielt eine Spange, die ein eiförmiger flacher Rubin schmückte.33

This description of the empress could be derived from Theodora’s image on the most famous mosaic of the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna.34 Theodora and her entourage were depicted in Ravenna around the year 548; on the other side of the apse Justinian and his entourage were portrayed.35 In this famous mosaic Theodora’s hair is likewise hidden beneath the empress’crown, the stemma, studded with pearls and gems, the latter imitating a calyx. The soft sound emitted by the chains of pearls, the pendilia, renders this literary description quite effective. And this description does not remain the only instance in which Koenig employs her gifts to offer remarkable synesthetic visuals. Detailed descriptions of the palatial area, its brilliant, if sometimes dark chambers and the ritual procession that filled the palace also capture the mind.36 Theodora proves herself a prudent woman at the side of her husband—not seduced by anything. She chooses her companions with discernment. She informs herself regarding any intrigue, especially that 33 34

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36

The Holy Palace, 99. Depictions of buildings, costly garments and objects of art are a preferred topic in Koenig. They illustrate the extravagance of the imperial palace and its residents, evoking the Byzantine atmosphere of splendor. Koenig indulges not only in the literary ekphrases of Procopius and Paulus Silentiarius, but also in actual objects of art that she knew of (cf. notes 63 and 64). Koenig’s fascinating artistic presentation was influenced by the trends of fin de siècle, but cannot be treated in any detail here—it would require a study of its own. The brooch with the remarkable ovoid gem holding the purple mantle together was most probably adapted from the depiction of Justinian in this mosaic in San Vitale. The Holy Palace, 67–68.

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endangering her husband’s throne. Against her enemies she exacts subtle revenge. The corruptibility of the general population, whom she never trusts, factors into her calculations. She overcomes her first crisis, a life-threatening illness suffered by Justinian, by refusing the advice of the doctor, choosing instead to follow the council of the Abbess Anastasia, trusting the support of demons. She also heads off a revolt caused by starvation among the populace, something often caused by the loss of military power and the general corruptibility of the clergy. She identifies the guilty and punishes them with her own methods: in line with her childhood in the circus, she sets wild animals against the rebels at the Nika revolt—though no one connects the deed to her. Justinian owes solely to her the fact that he remains in power, as all his other counselors, including Belisarius, advised flight. Only Theodora dared stay in Constantinople during the crisis and convinced the emperor with her words.37 Koenig could have read this famous, oft-quoted speech in Procopius’ Persian Wars.38 Theodora removes a potential rival, the queen of the Ostrogoths, Amalasuntha, with the help of a high-ranking church dignitary. Yet, one blemish remains, her childlessness, which the military leaders turn, over time, into an accusation. Hearing discreetly of this critique, Theodora reacts immediately and relays a dream in which the holy Simon prophesied an offspring for her and Justinian. She begins choosing younger men, probably not simply for sexual gratification, but also to conceive the longed-for heir to the throne. She later has these men killed, to keep her plans secret. This lone weakness, barrenness, eventually spells Theodora’s doom. She confesses her guilt to the Abbess, telling her about an abortion in her youth, and begs for absolution. For all her sins, Anastasia wishes to take on all the guilt herself, except for the murder of the unborn. Theodora, in a first hint of her madness, kills the nun, her biological mother.39 This madness soon takes on perverse and savage aspects. Showing herself for the last time in full regalia, Theodora organizes a festival for women, intended to stimulate erotic desire. The women begin to fulfill their sensual demands with one another until Theodora destroys this erotically loaded atmosphere. In her madness, she lets apes loose on the women. They attack the women and kill quite a few. An ape destroys the symbol of Byzantium rule, the crown of Saint Helena. None other than Procopius himself conveys this horrible news to the emperor, exactly at a time when Justinian is facing mounting pressure to divorce the demented Theodora. Justinian resists this advice. With an even more dire report, expressing all the tragedy of the once so powerful woman, the novel ends. In her madness, Theodora locks herself away; she is irretrievably lost. What’s more, a fatal disease eats her body. As Justinian strides through the women’s chambers, devastation and death crowd every corner:

37 38 39

The Holy Palace, 189–190. Procop. Bell. Pers., 1, 24, 33–37; Leppin, “Theodora und Iustinian,” 457–458. The Holy Palace, 341–348.

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And dust covered all the lost things, as if time wanted to bury them with decay, a smell akin to rot and death settled, a sound of crumbling mortar and timber, as though the palace was dying with its empress. Und über all den verlorenen Dingen lag der Staub, als wolle die Zeit sie mit ihrem Moder verschütten, lag ein Geruch wie Fäulnis und Tod, ein Geräusch wie von bröckelndem Mörtel und Gebälk, als sterbe der Palast zugleich mit seiner Herrin.40

Justinian weeps as he spies his ailing wife through a secret peephole. With this quiet emotion, Koenig shows how his affection for Theodora remains unbroken. When her chambers are opened, Theodora dies. The hate for her of those present becomes unbridled. Only the doctor, a Jew, feels sympathy for the woman who had to die so alone. Koenig’s Theodora—the degradation of Procopius How to deal with power is a skill to be learned – this is a central message of the novel. Theodora learned her lesson early. The experiences that defined her life happened when was still a girl living with the circus. Her mottoes remained always the same: never yield, never open the innermost self to anyone, never trust anyone, convert everything to money, whatever and however it comes. Theodora found success with these mottoes. Despite her relatively early death, she ruled the Roman Empire together with Justinian for a rather long time—in this point Koenig finds agreement with historical tradition—and averted crisis. As an example of the development of one ascending to power and ruling for a long period, Theodora proves an ideal figure. Koenig uses her to illustrate how a woman can rise from the lower classes and gain power. In contrast to Procopius she does not despise Theodora’s low social origin nor condemn her morally. On the contrary, this unique biography attracts her and allows her to create the impressive portrait of an impressive, but not sympathetic female figure. The available research tells us that Koenig, like many other authors of her time, remained apolitical, in that she never criticized the state or those running it. Her interests focused on the internal development of the individual. Theodora is defined by childhood experiences that lead to contra-normative behaviors. The circus-child Theodora quickly recognizes the possible profit to be made from a beautiful, if still boy-like body. She grasps that she must emotionally arm herself against setbacks and not strive to be loved. Koenig did not solicit sympathy for Theodora from her readers. Rather she adhered to the words of Friedrich Hebbel: “You shouldn’t excuse me, just say how it happened” (Du sollst mich 40

The Holy Palace, 364–365.

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nicht entschuldigen. Du sollst nur sagen, wie es kam!)41 This motto, which she later appends to the opening of The Youthful God, also applies to her Theodora novel. For Koenig pursues a pedagogical interest in both novels. She wanted to return to Theodora, not just read Procopius against the grain. Koenig does repudiate Procopius’ view that, due to her background, Theodora brought the politics of the empire to ruin. However, she targets a different sort of recognition. With her psychological interpretation, something beyond Procopius’ ability, yet something his text continually inspires, Koenig succeeds, given certain societal conditions, in rendering whatever Theodora does, understandable. Koenig prizes Procopius’ ability as a storyteller. Much sensitivity prominent in the fin de siècle is found in Procopius’ works, not least his art of description in De aedificiis and his talent in emphasizing the demonic character of the ruling couple in the Anecdota. Most important, Procopius’ representational quality provides reams of stimuli, with which to imagine the atmosphere of imperial luxury in Byzantium. Far different from her Nero figure, Koenig’s Theodora moves through an age of advanced crisis and massive cultural upheaval, an age which, in both small and large ways, boasts rich analogies to the political and societal realities of the tense, eccentric, and excessive fin de siècle. Koenig conveys a late antique ambiance through numerous ekphraseis, which were also a constitutive element of the age’s literature. Procopius led the way in this regard and provides ample material.42 Splendid vestments, blazes of color, gold, gems, marble, and jewelry of every kind convert places and people alike into works of art. A representative example of Koenig’s narrative style in this regard comes with the majestic description of the palace district,43 inspired, we can assume, by Procopius’ account of the same in De aedificiis.44 The listing of the various marble types recalls Paulus Silentiarius’ description of the Hagia Sophia:45 41

42

43 44 45

Koenig quotes this motto from Friedrich Hebbel’s The Ring of Gyges as the motto of The Youthful God. For this, see Tauschinski, Alma Johanna König, 24–25. For the Motto of this novel and the psychological tendencies of Koenig, Wildbacher, Leidenschaft Antike, 70; Christine Walde: “Spurensuche—Alma Johanna Koenigs Nero in ihrem Roman Der jugendliche Gott (1942 [1947]),” in Neros Wirklichkeiten: Zur Rezeption einer umstrittenen Gestalt, ed. Christine Walde (Rahden: Marie Leidorf, 2013), 10–42, here 35. He lavishly describes the pomp of the Hagia Sophia thus in Aedif. 1,1,59,61: “Who could enumerate the majesty of the columns and stones with which the church is adorned? One could feel transported to the bloom of spring. For what the stones touched, so would the beholder properly marvel at the purple of these, the green of those, here a blooming red and there blinding white, and still in addition those pieces, which nature allowed a painter to depict in the most vibrant colors” (translated into English from Otto Veh’s (1977) German translation). The Holy Palace, 106–107. Procop. Aedif. 1,9–10 depicts the entrance hallway of the palace, the Chalke. Paulus Silentiarius, Ekphrasis 617–646, particularly verses 628–630: “You can also see the green shimmer of the Laconian marble and other stone flashing in serpentine grains,

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On both sides of the door stood climbing steps of porphyry, a wide balustrade, the sentinels, gold-clad, helmeted and shielded…in the middle of the gold-domed rotunda reaching crepuscular heights, its multicolored walls iridescent to which Phrygia, Laconia, Egypt and the Carian mountain Jassys had contributed their marble, sat Procopius… (Auf den beiden Seiten der zum Tor hinansteigenden Prophyrtreppen standen, ein lebendes Geländer, die Wachen, goldgepanzert, behelmt und beschildet…Inmitten der in dämmriger Höhe goldig überkuppelten Rotunde, zu deren vielfarbig schillernden Wänden Phrygien, Lakonien, Ägypten und der karische Berg Jassys ihren Marmor dargebracht hatten, saß Prokop…)

A comparison with Procopius shows that Koenig always proceeds from her central model, the Anecdota, when she claims to illuminate the protagonist’s psychological state, showing her in extremis. Where the late antique chronologist remains silent—Theodora’s past remains in the dark in Procopius’ writings—Koenig generates stories. In the novel she is the illegitimate child of a high-ranking woman destined for life in a monastery, who must, therefore, deny the fruit of her passionate affair. In doing so, the author gains space in which she can address the problem of religious institutions of Late Antiquity, while simultaneously creating a level of reflection on which to play out the problems of motherhood in service to dynastic pressures and in the face of the guilt of having killed an unborn child. The pressure to produce an heir drives Theodora insane.46 The intensification of Theodora’s “original sin,” her abortion, could underline her moral guilt and explain why Koenig in her rewriting doesn’t mention that Theodora probably had two other children.47 The Late Antique setting A metropolis, Constantinople (and for some chapters, Alexandria), serves as the novel’s setting. Characteristic for a life in an urban center is the multitude of nations and religions. Unruliness is the rule of the day. An insufficient food supply and constant religious tensions lead to frequent revolts. Theodora, who

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as they were brought from the deep ravine in the Jassian hills” (translated from Otto Veh’s 1977 translation). Hey’l, Geschichtsdenken und literarische Moderne, 192, puts it differently: Koenig demonstrates with this regret that motherhood bestows a moral context even the “inhuman” Theodora cannot leave behind. For Theodora’s three children, see Leppin, “Theodora und Iustinian,” 473–474 and 478–479 (an overview of the Justinian family tree). Procopius. Anecd. 17, 16–23 reports on her son Johannes. For a grandchild, the son of a daughter, Anecd. 4,37; 5,18– 24.

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often confronted Christian rituals in her childhood, but considered it nothing more than superstition with loathsome “incense and prayer offerings,”48 is converted in Alexandria by the monk Anthimius. From then on, she professes the Arian strain of Christianity. Anthimius tells her of anachorites and holy women, who praised chastity and founded monasteries. The persecution of dissenters constitutes an recurring theme in the novel. Both Jews and unorthodox Christians live precariously in Justinian’s empire, exemplified by two young women, a Christian and a Jew, who during the Nika revolt (532) knowingly accept death to avoid both the violence and subsequent persecution. As empress, Theodora constantly draws on the power of the thoroughly corrupt high clergy to strengthen her position of power. In public, her belief manifests itself through, among other things, her participation in a procession, the building of a church in gratitude for her vision prophesying an heir and her charitable action of “re-socializing” prostitutes by turning them into nuns.49 Procopius ranks Justinian and Theodora among the devastating demons.50 Koenig, however, doesn’t imagine the demonic forces of the ruling couple as purely negative. As expected, Koenig is more concerned with the demonic nature of Theodora, which has helping and healing aspects as well. Theodora, with her supernatural gifts, not only saves Justinian’s life, but once, even before she is converted to the Christian religion, also becomes the savior of a persecuted monk in Alexandria: A white, pale angel clad in long, flowing robes and golden hair bent over the bleeding man and led him away with a gentle hand through grey walls. Ein weißer, blasser Engel, in langwallendem Hemd und goldenem Haar beugte sich über den Blutenden und entführte ihn an sachter Hand lautlos, durch graue Mauern hin.

The general and the army play a supporting role throughout the novel, including Belisarius’ (dis-)loyalty, as it is the stately and youthful Germans who attract Theodora’s attention. In short, the social hardships, the military presence and the oppression, if not bald persecution, of dissenters against the background of the customary corruption of the elite and the imperial opulence evoke the crisis in which Byzantium found itself.

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The Holy Palace 47. The monastery Metanoia (Procop. Aedif. 1,9,1–10) was set up by the ruling couple for prostitutes in what had previously been a palace, a majestic construction built on an estuary so that the women would feel compelled to pursue any “gainful” employment, Procop. Anecd. 17,1–6 (with criticism of the forced conversion). Procop. Anecd. 12,14–32; 18,1–4, 36–37; 30; 34; cf. Hartmut Leppin, Justinian: Das christliche Experiment (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2011), 16–17.

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Procopius was not the only author Koenig turned into a literary source. In The Book of Petron,51 a young woman named Pallas (here the daughter of Nero’s stepbrother Britannicus) is filled with enthusiasm for Petronius’ work and pines away for this unusual man, to whom, however, she refuses to give herself.52 Seneca and Lucan also become literary sources.53 Koenig presents them as problematic figures, but does not develop critical portraits of them. In The Holy Palace, Theodora avenges herself on Procopius, who always disparages her lowly birth and always refers to her as a whore, even the whore of the world. The high point of his debasement comes on the day of his wedding, when, chained, gagged and sown into a sack, he must listen as Theodora seduces his bride, Praxedis.54 How closely Koenig studied the ancient historiographer is revealed by seemingly superfluous details. One example: The only aspect for which Procopius praised Theodora was the latter’s beauty55 and the beauty of her black eyes.56 The last episode of the novel turns around the color of these eyes as Theodora lies dead. Only the Jewish doctor, Jefraim, is willing to let her soul be at peace and to close her eyes: “Did she…did she not always have black eyes?” “I don’t know!” answered the Jew with a shudder. “…because just now they were blue like steel!” “Silence,” said Jefraim. “We should not ask, when God’s hand plays a role…” “Hat sie…hat sie nicht immer schwarze Augen gehabt?” “Ich weiß nicht!” Antwortete der Jude schaudernd. “…denn jetzt waren sie blau wie Stahl!” “Still” sagte Jefraim. “Man soll nicht fragen, wenn Gottes Hand im Spiele ist!…”

The novel ends with Jefraim’s conciliatory words: “Is it not enough that she died so alone, so alone?” he asked. And he covered, almost gently, the dead with his mantle.

51 52 53

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Handwritten, unpublished novel fragments, 273 pages. National Library of Vienna. Cf. Wildbacher, Leidenschaft Antike, 41. Lucan in the poetry collection The Songs of Fausta. Seneca in the novel The Youthful God. The Holy Palace, 121–135. Procop. Aedif. 1,11,8–9 for the image of Theodora at the entrance to the public baths in Arkadianai. He speaks of the good adaptation, yet neither picture nor prose could appropriately convey the beauty of the empress. Procop. Anecd. 10,11.

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Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer “Ist es nicht genug, dass sie so allein starb, so allein?” fragte er. Und er deckte fast zärtlich seinen Mantel über die Tote.57

It is quite possible that Koenig read a very old translation of Procopius’ Anecdota or had him translated from the original text. It is also not impossible that she looked into the new English translation of the Bella. We cannot be more exact.58 Yet she was very familiar with his writings and not only at second hand. In the scene where Theodora derides Procopius, Koenig questioned the claims of the historiographer, exposing the truth behind the official history and also problematized the figure of male authorship. Through her severe criticism of Procopius, Koenig distanced herself from the historical novel that in its form as a professorial novel was very popular. An authentic Late Antiquity suitable for scholarship did not exist for her. She also did not want to practice such scholarship. When we consider how meticulously Koenig read texts, she was, after all, known as an English translator, we can easily explain her “mistakes” regarding (the orthography of) names, technical terms, etc. The remarks usually found in professorial novels do not bring the reader closer to Late Antiquity: The Theodora of the novel wears a “tiara” as an empress’s crown, which misses the mark, as tiara meant the pope’s crown. However, the description of the tiara evokes an image that recalls Byzantine majesty. The Theodora of Modernity The Holy Palace illuminated Late Antiquity from the perspective of literary modernity. The crisis experienced by the shattering of homogeneous identities, the critique of the faith in history and the laws of the historical process laid the foundation from which Koenig’s late antique world emerges, and guided her choice of characters active in Byzantium. Grand scenes constantly illuminate Theodora’s psyche, and through all the manifestations of power evinced by the empress, Koenig fosters the atmosphere of late Rome that becomes readable anew at the fin de siècle.59 57 58

59

The Holy Palace, 369–370. The facing texts edition for the Loeb Classical Library in Cambridge/M., transl. H. B. Dewing (Harvard Univ. Pr.), appeared in the years 1914–1940, the Bella (3 vols) 1914– 1919, the Anecdota later in 1935, De aedificiis in 1940. At the time the novel was being written only an old Procopius translation by Peter F. Kanngiesser in German, 4 vols, Greifswald, 1807–1831. Emil Fuchs’ translation was published by Luckmann-Verlag of Vienna in 1946. For the description of the Hagia Sophia she might have used the translation of W. Kortüm, Des Silentiarius Paulus Beschreibung der Hagia Sophia und des Ambon: Metrische Übersetzung mit Anmerkungen (Berlin, 1854). Hey’l, Geschichtsdenken und literarische Moderne, takes no notice of the fact that the novel takes place in Late Antiquity.

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Koenig was not alone in casting new light on Theodora. Victorien Sardou had provided an important influence with his production of a stage version of Theodora with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role. In Sardou’s drama, the late antique theme was limited to the dancer Theodora as the monarch of the Roman east. This interpretation departed from the historical record. Sardou’s work ends with the execution of Theodora and her lover.60 Charles Diehl also made use of Theodora in his much-read monograph Théodora impératrice de Byzance61 but Koenig did not incorporate this work of French reception. She seems to stand in another reception tradition, in which Late Antiquity demonstrated a strong affinity for Byzantium, the fin de siècle. In avant-garde artistic circles, the renaissance of Late Antiquity was obvious, particularly where painters were concerned. Theodora was an important subject and touchstone for modernity. The painter and interior designer Vanessa Bell (born 1879), the older sister of Virginia Woolf, is an important example in this regard. A member of the Bloomsbury Group, Bell painted a Theodora that recalled the Ravenna mosaic by which it is demonstrably inspired. In 1912, Bell depicted Theodora in profile as “Byzantine Lady.” In this significant modification to the original, Theodora stands in sharp contrast to the mosaic with the iconic frontal view, with heavily painted white face and deep rouge on her cheeks. Bell intimates that she imagines a Late Antiquity relevant to her own time. Like Bell, Koenig moved in artistic and academic circles. In Vienna, the Orientalism of the Byzantine variety was all the rage.62 Archaeological research had also rediscovered the Ravenna mosaic and introduced Theodora into its discourse, as Jean Paul Richter’s The Mosaics from Ravenna: Contribution of a Critical History of

60

61

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See Filippo Carlà, “Prostitute, Saint, Pin-Up, Revolutionary: The Reception of Theodora in Twentieth-Century Italy,” In Seduction and Power: Antiquity in the Visual and Performing Arts, ed. Silke Knippschild and Marta Garcia (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 243–262, here 244–249; ibid. “Historische Quellen, literarische Erzählungen, phantasievolle Konstruktionen. Die vielen Leben der Theodora von Byzanz,” in Transkulturelle Dynamiken. Aktanten—Prozesse—Theorien ed. Jutta Ernst and Florian Freitag (Bielefeld: Transkript, 2015), 31–62; for the reception at the end of the nineteenth century, 42–50 (“Theodora Goes Wild”). The Holy Palace appears to be inspired neither by Sardou nor the silent film directed by Leopoldo Carlucci, which he produced in 1919 in Turin. The film premiered in 1919 in the United States. Only in 1922, after the novel had been published, did the film appear for the first time in Europe. For advice regarding the reception of Theodora in films I am grateful to Dr. Anja Wieber. In the series Figures Byzantines (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1939), Diehl once again summarized his study from 1903 (Théodora impératrice de Byzance, Paris: E. de Boccard) and augmented it with reports found in the interim, including John of Ephesus (Diehl 1939, 51–53; 61, note 1). Carlà, “Prostitute, Saint, Pin-Up, Revolutionary,” 42 mentions Orientalism in connection with Theodora’s reception.

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Mosaic of Theodora, Basilica of San Vitale (photograph by Petar Milošević)

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Classical Christian Painting proves. Travel reports and the like followed its publication in 1878.63 Like Vanessa Bell, Alma Johanna Koenig was a woman who left social conventions behind. Whether or not the two were in contact is not known, nor is it crucial for the reception of Late Antiquity in Modernity. It is, however, important to observe how Theodora attracted women in intellectual and artistic milieus. Their readings of Late Antiquity did not seek to trace history or construct historical legitimacy but rather pondered the possibilities and limitations of a feminine way of life using this famous figure.64 In Koenig’s novel The Holy Palace, Late Antiquity is revived in the atmosphere of the Wiener Moderns. The novel is infused with an enthusiasm for Late Antiquity, without idealizing the epoch. König appears highly attracted to Byzantine splendour, manifested in her descriptions of buildings, garb and adornment. However, she is not infatuated: among the repelling things she describes, there are the intrigues of Justinian and Theodora, Klerus’s lust for power, the persecution of dissenters, and the social chasms. The at once splendid and terrifying, Byzantium is the soil in which this thoroughly eccentric female figure can flourish but must also perish.

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Regarding Vanessa Bell and the research history of the Ravenna Mosaic, I am grateful to my colleague, the art historian and Byzantinist Prof. Barbara Schellewald, Basel, who is currently preparing an article on this topic. The picture in question, oil on canvas, 72 × 51.5 cm, is in the United Kingdom Government Art Collection. David Potter, Theodora. Actress, Empress, Saint (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2015), 212–213, proceeds with the assumption that a critical reception of Procopius began only towards the end of the twentieth century. Diehl’s scientific valuation of Theodora is ambivalent (Potter, 51).

c H i a r a o. t o m m a s i

A Byzantine Phaedra between Paganism, Heresy and Magic: The Tragic Fate of Silvana in La Fiamma by Ottorino Respighi and Claudio Guastalla (1934)

Pagans and Christians in Opera The present paper investigates in detail an interesting, albeit less known, case of Late Antiquity in opera: set in the Byzantine Ravenna of the late seventh (or even eighth) century, La Fiamma (The Flame), an opera in three acts originating in the long and productive collaboration between Ottorino Respighi1 and Claudio Guastalla,2 provides a remarkable example of the fashion that the Bas-Empire (and Byzantium in particular) exerted on the literary, visual and performing arts in 1

2

For a general profile of this Italian composer see the entry written by J. Waterhouse and J. C. G. Waterhouse in The New Grove Dictionary of Music, vol. 21, 214–220; L. G. Barrow, Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936): An Annotated Bibliography (Lanham, Toronto, and Oxford: Scarecrow, 2004). A critical evaluation is provided by A. Cantù, Respighi compositore (Turin: EDT, 1982); G. Rostirolla (ed.), Ottorino Respighi (Turin: ERI, 1985), a miscellaneous work that collects old and new essays; M. Modugno, “Fortuna e sfortuna di Respighi,” in F. Nicolodi (ed.), Musica italiana del primo Novecento, “La Generazione dell’Ottanta”: Atti del Convegno (Firenze, 9–11 maggio 1980) (Florence: Olschki, 1981), 125–134; D. Bryant (ed.), Il Novecento musicale italiano, tra Neoclassicismo e Neogoticismo (Florence: Olschki, 1988), which is mainly dedicated to Respighi on the fiftieth anniversary of his death; and recently by C. Flamm, Ottorino Respighi und die italienische Instrumentalmusik von der Jahrhundertwende bis zum Faschismus (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2008). Claudio Guastalla (Rome 1880–1948) is mainly known for his activity as an operatic librettist, and especially for his cooperation with Respighi, for whom he wrote Belfagor (1923); Die versunkene Glocke (1927); Maria Egiziaca (1932); Lucrezia (posthumously performed in 1937); the ballet Belkis, regina di Saba (1932), the revision of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, besides La Fiamma. See also C. Guastalla, “L’opera di Ottorino Respighi nei ricordi di Claudio Guastalla,” Ricordiana 1 (1955), 44–47; M. Buran, Il recupero dell’antico nell’opera di Ottorino Respighi e l’archivio documentario alla Fondazione Giorgio Cini di Venezia, PhD Diss. Padua, 2010 (http://paduaresearch.cab. unipd.it/3116/1/martina.buran.pdf, accessed September 2016), 44 ff.

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European Decadentism,3 which interpreted the period as another reflection of the idea of “otherness” and “Orientalism.”4 Interestingly enough, the same perspective seems to be at work in contemporary historiography.5 In this opera another theme is reshaped, namely the momentous conflict between pagans and Christians. In representing one of the most remarkable aspects that characterized Late Antiquity and its subsequent perception,6 this theme has not escaped the fantasy of librettos and operatic plots, and other visual or 3

4

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6

In this respect it seems better to speak of an attraction for Late Antiquity together with that for the Middle Ages, expressed by the adjective “neogotico,” on which see especially F. Nicolodi, “Riflessi neogotici nel teatro musicale del Novecento,” in D. Bryant (ed.), Il Novecento musicale italiano, tra Neoclassicismo e Neogoticismo (Florence: Olschki, 1988), 271–304. On self-representation and idealization of Byzantine subjects see, more in general, I. Nilsson and P. Stephenson (eds.), Wanted: Byzantium. The Desire for a Lost Empire, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia, 15 (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2014), and P. Marciniak and D. C. Smythe, The Reception of Byzantium in European Culture since 1500 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016). Cf. D.C. Smythe, “Byzantium: A Night at the Opera,” in Marciniak and Smythe, The Reception of Byzantium: with the exception of Donizetti’s Belisario, the majority of “Byzantine” operas are set in medieval Constantinople: this is the case of Haendel’s Tamerlano, Massenet’s Esclarmonde, Siegfried Wagner’s Sonnenflammen. For Orientalism see also M. Girardi, “Esotismo e dramma in Iris e Madama Butterfly,” in Puccini e Mascagni: Atti della giornata di studi (Viareggio, 3 agosto 1995) (Lucca: Pacini, 1996), 37–54 (http://www-5.unipv.it/girardi/saggi/iris.pdf, accessed September 2016); C. O. Tommasi, “Immenso Fthà: Verdi tra patriottismo risorgimentale ed antichità egiziane,” Paideia 66 (2011), 339–363 with further references. See Av. Cameron, Byzantine Matters (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014): meaningfully the book ends with the mention of Neil Jordan’s movie, where Byzantium is the name of a filthy hotel, thus immediately awakening in the audience the worst stereotypes connected to the Byzantine period. See Cameron’s previous “The Use and Abuse of Byzantium,” Inaugural Lecture, King’s College, 1990 (Changing Cultures in Early Byzantium) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), n. XIII); this paper offers a reconsideration of Byzantium as well as the Byzantines in popular imagination and starts by recalling the great historian of Byzantium J. R. Bury and his personal relationship with the Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, and with an almost obligatory reference to Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The traditional view, represented by the seminal book of A. Momigliano (ed.), The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), a book that may be counted among the first attempts at reviving the academic study of Late Antiquity, has been lately subjected to a radical reshaping, testified by a lavish array of studies produced over the last decades. For a discussion of these studies and some assessments see also my forthcoming paper on “The Grand Narrative of Paganism.” An interesting (although necessarily selective) perspective on the reprise of paganism in nineteenth-century literature is discussed by D. Pellizzari, Il ritorno degli dèi pagani in alcuni racconti dell’Ottocento (PhD diss., University of Pisa, 2013).

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performative arts.7 Among the different subjects inspired by the last centuries of the Roman Empire (such as the fate of emperors like Justinian and Constantine or the conflict with barbarian tribes),8 stories dealing with early Christianity enjoyed a certain popularity. Examples can be found in works inspired by the reign of Nero, in particular Boito’s Nerone,9 or by the narration of the persecutions, such as Les Martyrs written by Donizetti in two different redactions.10 Dramatic and spectacular accounts of martyrdom, the morbid attraction of which has been recently over-emphasized by many scholars,11 therefore constitute the background of works in which the traditional operatic elements of contrasted love, broken 7

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9

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A good survey of “Roman” operas (not only those devoted to Late Antiquity) is provided by D. Porte, Roma Diva: L’inspiration antique dans l’Opéra (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1987). See also M. G. Bajoni, “La fortuna dei classici nell’opera lirica italiana del XX secolo,” Acta Classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis 38–39 (2002– 2003), 241–257. See, e.g., Donizetti’s Belisario and Fausta respectively, on which cf. V. Aiello, “Il dramma familiare di Costantino nel melodramma italiano,” Koinonia 32 (2008), 9–39; or Verdi’s Attila, and, partly, Bellini’s Norma—this latter an interesting case, for the libretto of Felice Romani eliminates any chronological hint and seems to suggest a setting during the first phase of the Roman conquest of Gaul, whereas the original tragedy by Alexandre Soumet emphasizes the contrast between the Christianized Romans and the Gaulish worshippers of cruel and bloody gods. Among the many operas having Nero as subject (on which see G. Manuwald, Nero in Opera: Librettos as Transformations of Ancient Sources (Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), which does not venture to provide any in-depth analysis, as noted by many reviewers), Boito’s one is particularly interesting, for it offers a re-elaboration of the episode narrated in the Pseudo-Clementine corpus, namely, that of the confrontation between Peter and Simon Magus, which Boito probably derived from a reading of Renan (some hints already in C. Questa, “I Romani sulla scena operistica,” in L’aquila a due teste: Immagini di Roma e dei Romani [Urbino: Quattro Venti, 1998], 173–227; Tommasi, “Immenso Fthà,” esp. 354. Namely, the Italian one, Poliuto (1838, but actually only staged ten years after the planned representation, because of the censorship in the Kingdom of Naples) and the French one, Les Martyrs (1840; libretto by E. Scribe), whose recent discographic revival in the Opera Rara series has benefited from the new critical edition by Flora Wilson. The plot is derived from Corneille’s tragedy with an intermingling of Chateaubriand’s novel Les Martyrs. For a general overview see W. Ashbrook, Donizetti and his Operas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 136 ff. and 418 ff. Another interesting example is provided by Debussy’s mystery play Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, with a French libretto by Gabriele D’Annunzio (1911), on which see A. Mirabile, “Visual Intertextualities in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien,” Modern Language Notes 128 (2013), 124–150. See e.g. J.N. Bremmer and M. Formisano, Perpetua’s Passions: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); D. Frankfurter, “Martyrology and the Prurient Gaze,” Journal of Early Christian Studies, 17 (2009), 215–245 pushes the argument too far, accentuating only the

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familiar ties, betrayed friendship, rival jealousy, eventual agnition, and atonement find their ideal setting.12 Conversely, the triumph of Christianity and the defeat of the old gods also provides the backbone for another array of operas set in Late Antiquity, where paganism contains elements of magic and witchcraft, according to the motif (already developed in the Fathers of the Church) that pagan gods are nothing other than demons or obscure forces, to be therefore equated to Satan. It seems unlikely that these elements could coexist with such a strong insistence on asceticism and on the struggle against Evil, as may be seen, for example, in operas relying on the lives of the Desert Fathers, or on accounts of repentant (female) sinners who become saints by abandoning their formerly lustful lives. These operas, in fact, have a strong accent on the dramatic tension between carnality and asceticism: this was already emphasized in the original hagiographical narratives, although the main concern of these writings was moral edification rather than simple amusement.13 These motifs are to be found in Thaïs (1894), by Jules Massenet in a libretto by Louis Gallet, derived from Anatole France.14 Sin and redemption juxtaposed with an exotic background were a favorite theme in art and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the figure of Salome, its erotic potential contrasting with the background of religion, falls in the same province.15

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15

scandalizing aspect and putting into shadow the exhortatory and exemplary purpose implied in these texts. Much ink has been spilled on possible contacts and tangency between the so-called ancient novel and Christian narratives, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century. This type of analysis has been refined over the last twenty years, coinciding with the revival of scholarly research on the novel, which often also bears narratorial elements in mind: a recent perspective is provided by M. P. Futre Pinheiro, J. Perkins, and R. Pervo (eds.), The Ancient Novel and Early Christian and Jewish Narratives: Fictional Intersections (Eelde: Barkhuis, 2013). For similar cases cf. F.E. Consolino, “Modelli di santità nelle più antiche Passioni romane,” in L’agiografia latina nei secoli IV–VII: XII Incontro di Studiosi dell’antichità cristiana (= Augustinianum 24 [1984]), 83–113; C. Moreschini, “Motivi romanzeschi e interessi cristiani nelle Recognitiones dello Pseudo Clemente tradotte da Rufino,” Koinonia 35 (2011), 179–196. K. Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), ch. 4, deals with accounts of former prostitutes that became saints, interpreting them as paradoxical and outlining the deep transformation the concept of sexuality underwent from pagan to Christian times. For further information see the essays collected in the program of Thaïs (Teatro La Fenice in Venice, Season 2002–2003, http://www.teatrolafenice.it/media/libretti/35_1407thais_jm.pdf, accessed September 2016); see also infra, note 29. In very recent years The Temptation of St. Anthony (2003) deserves a mention: based on the novel by Flaubert, libretto and music have been composed by Bernice Johnson Reagon, whereas staging and direction are the work of Robert Wilson. A useful summary of the artistic fortune of Salome is provided by Buran, Il recupero dell’antico, 143.

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La Fiamma: Themes and plot The Phaedra theme, namely, the illicit love of a woman for her stepson, constitutes the backbone of the plot, which is enriched by other, but no less important, motifs, such as the bigoted and oppressing figure of the mother-in-law Eudossia, who contrasts with the mysterious and ambiguous figure of the sorceress Agnese of Cervia. The unsolved tension between religion (always perceived as rigid and intransigent) and magic (alluring and yet illicit) pervades the whole drama, set against the background of an actual historical event, namely the involvement of the exarch in the Monothelite controversy between the Pope and the Byzantine Emperor in the second half of the seventh century. The title presents a double allusion to the flame of love, that unquenchably consumes and destroys, and the attraction of magic and demonic powers, inherited by her mother, that the female protagonist Silvana dramatically perceives in her breast.16 Set in the exarch Basilio’s (baritone) villa in the nearby city of Ravenna, Act 1 opens with his mother Eudossia (mezzo-soprano) supervising the court ladies while they weave and sing. Once she has left, Silvana (soprano), the second wife of the exarch, enters. In spite of her youth and charm she feels oppressed in the palace, because her much older husband is distant and detained away by his military duties, but most of all because her mother-in-law openly detests her, praising the former wife of Basilio as a model of grace, religious zeal and marital devotion. In the meantime, an off-scene crowd is heard pursuing Agnese di Cervia (mezzo-soprano), accusing her of sorcery and infanticide. Invoking her long-lasting friendship with Silvana’s mother (probably a sorceress herself), Agnese begs Silvana to hide her. After a dramatic confrontation between the two women, the scene changes and Donello (tenor), Basilio’s son by his first marriage, arrives. He cheerfully addresses Silvana, remembering that the two had met some years before, when they were young: wounded during a hunt, Donello had been recovered by Silvana, who took him to the house of Agnese to be healed. Silvana is reticent about that. Eudossia also welcomes her grandson on his return from Constantinople, the city where she was born and that longs in vain to return to. At the urging of the crowd, Agnese is finally discovered and, in spite of her claims of innocence, she is taken to be processed and condemned as witch. Act 2 opens with the young servants singing and playing with Donello in the imperial palace of Theoderic.17 He narrates some episodes of Greek mythology that 16

17

Cf. Act. 2 (no scene division): “Forse la fiamma, che sì fiera avvampa entro di me, forse è il materno sangue” (“Perhaps the flame which burns so proudly in me, perhaps is my mother’s blood”; the English version follows and partly modifies that of Mária Steiner printed in the libretto of the Hungaroton Classic recording of 1995). It seems worth citing the entire stage description: “La scena è composita, per fingere che l’azione successivamente si svolga in più luoghi del palazzo di Teodorico in Ravenna. La parte a sinistra rappresenterà la loggia superiore che si vede nel mosaico

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deal with Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Suddenly Silvana enters and challenges one of the ladies, Monica, about her behavior, revealing that she loves the young prince. Angry and unconsciously jealous, Silvana immediately orders Monica to be banished to a convent. In the following scene, Basilio enters, preparing for war against the Pope. Before leaving, he asks Silvana to comfort him, for, notwithstanding his quasi-ascetical commitment to war, he feels love also. Silvana is troubled and insists that Donello recount Agnese’s last utterances before the execution: namely, that the exarch had married Silvana on account of a sortilege performed by her mother. Alone with his wife, Basilio admits that Agnese had told the truth, then he leaves, while Silvana is shocked by this revelation. Wondering whether such powers might be transmitted from mother to daughter, and almost fearing this terrible secret, Silvana tries to summon her beloved Donello on her own, who indeed suddenly appears and embraces her. At the beginning of Act 3 the love of Donello and Silvana is interrupted by the sudden entrance of Eudossia, who guesses the situation and challenges Silvana. The young woman stands her ground against her mother-in-law, abandoning her usual submissive temperament, as if she were stirred by the new situation. Even when her husband Basilio arrives, passing on the Empress’s orders that Donello is to go back to the capital, Silvana tries to prevent his departure, suggesting that this is an intrigue of Eudossia in order to separate her and Donello. The young man, for his part, wavers between his love for Silvana and his sense of duty. In a vivid confrontation, Silvana accuses her husband of having neglected her and of having denied her own life and feelings; she even confesses to have wished him dead, for she is enamoured of Donello. Basilio suddenly collapses and Eudossia accuses Silvana of having killed Basilio with her magical powers. The final scene is set in the San Vitale Basilica, where the bishop in charge of instituting the trial proceedings against Silvana asks her to prove her innocence by swearing on some sacred relics. Silvana confesses that her only sin is nothing but a profound and true love for the young Donello (who asks for her absolution), although Eudossia insists in claiming that she is a sorceress. When Silvana feels that also Donello doubts her actual temperament and feelings, she breaks down and is unable to utter the oath:

del ‘Palatium’ in Sant’Apollinare nuovo. La parte a destra è bassa e cupa: la camera dell’antico palazzo barbarico avrà la severità di una cripta. Sopra una tavola di marmo, due candelabri in bronzo. Nella parte centrale, invece, la fantasia bisantina ha profuso colori. Tende negli intercolunni” (“The scene is arranged to allow one to imagine that the action takes place successively in different parts of the Palace of Theoderic in Ravenna. The left-hand part represents the upper loggia, as is in the Palatium mosaic in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo. The right-hand part is deep and dark. The great hall of the ancient barbarous palace is bleak as a sepulchral vault. Two bronze chandeliers are on a marble table. The central part, however, is decorated profusely with colors by a Byzantine imagination. There are canvasses between the columns”).

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cursed by the bishop and charged as “witch” by the crowd (which, at first, had a sympathetic attitude towards her), she falls down abandoned and alone.18 Reception First performed in January 1934 at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, conducted by Respighi himself and staged by Alessandro Sanine and Nicola Benois,19 the opera gained an immediate success and in the following months performances followed in Chicago, Buenos Aires, Milan, Budapest, Berlin, and Vienna. La Fiamma is considered one of the mature masterpieces of Respighi, produced only two years before his untimely death in 1936.20 It indeed represents a return to the glorious tradition of Italian opera, in spite of the audacity of modern experimental attempts that marked a crisis of the genre and that seemed to suggest its end, and also in spite of some polemics that troubled the musical scene of the early Thirties. Among other reviewers, Gaetano Cesari wrote in the Corriere della Sera:21 While sinister voices seem to announce the imminent end of melodrama, the dangers provoked by its senescence, the corrosive action produced by mechanical surrogates, here we have Ottorino Respighi, member of the Accademia d’Italia, who frankly reaffirms his faith in a theatrical genre defended by the Italian genius 18

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From the last words of the libretto it remains unclear whether she dies or not: “[Quadro:] il Vescovo maledicente, i due diaconi che portano via gelosamente la teca delle reliquie, la folla fuggente, e Silvana ripiegata sopra se stessa, affranta sola” (“Closing scene: the bishop speaking the curse, the two deacons who carefully carry away the reliquary and fleeing crowd. Silvana collapsed, downcast and alone”). In the original drama, Anne, having gone mad, in a paroxysmal finale auto-denounces her as witch. A thank-you letter addressed by Respighi to Mussolini, who attended the première, is published in F. Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Fiesole: Discanto, 1984), 153–154; Mussolini, however, diplomatically delayed Respighi’s request to be received in audience. See also infra, notes 22 and 24. After Respighi’s death in 1936, it was his widow Elsa Olivieri di Sangiacomo, herself a singer and a composer, who devoted a great part of her life to the promotion of her husband’s legacy: see E. Respighi, Ottorino Respighi: Dati biografici ordinati (Milan: Ricordi, 1954); L. Bragaglia and E. Respighi, Il teatro di Respighi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1978). Elsa exerted an enormous influence on Respighi, and her intelligence and shrewdness are responsible for much of the international success of her husband: on Elsa’s life and career (as a novelist as well) see the biography by L. Bragaglia, Ardendo vivo (Elsa Respighi, tre vite in una): Quasi un romanzo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1983). These examples derive from Buran, Il recupero dell’antico, 171 f. For further discussion see T. S. Vitzthum, Nazionalismo e Internazionalismo: Ottorino Respighi, Alfredo Casella und Gian Francesco Malipiero und die kulturpolitischen Debatten zwischen 1912 und 1938 in Italien (PhD diss., Regensburg, 2007) (http://epub.uni-regensburg. de/10768/1/Dissertation_Vitzthum.pdf, accessed September 2016), 96 ff.

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Chiara O. Tommasi and secured by tradition. More coherent than those composers who, while intoning the requiem for opera, do not refrain from dressing the old musical forms in modern harmonies, Respighi returns to the lyrical stage with an overt melodrama: in fact, neither Respighi nor the librettist defined in different terms La Fiamma, first staged this evening at the Royal Theater. This should not be a scandal for twentieth-century opera composers. Art by no means suffers or is diminished by the great symphonist who was able to advance together with the musical spirit of his time, reach the highest peaks of technical mastery, and deserve universal renown. Mentre corrono sinistre le voci intorno alla prossima fine del melodramma, ai guai cagionati dalla sua senità e all’azione corrosiva prodotta sopra di esso dai surrogati meccanici, ecco Ottorino Respighi, accademico d’Italia, riaffermare francamente la sua fede nel genere di teatro che la genialità italiana difende e la tradizione assicura. Più coerente di quei compositori che, mentre recitano il requiem all’opera in musica, non rinunziano a rivestire di armonie contemporanee le vecchie forme strumentali, Respighi ritorna oggi alla scena lirica dichiaratamente con un melodramma; ché altrimenti non è stata definita da lui e dal librettista Claudio Guastalla La fiamma data stasera per la prima volta al Teatro Reale. Non si scandalizzino però per questo gli operisti del Novecento. L’arte nulla ha da soffrire dal forte sinfonista che seppe progredire di conserva con lo spirito musicale del suo tempo, raggiungere i gradi più elevati del magistero tecnico, meritarsi la considerazione universale.

Likewise, Alceo Toni (one of the more political critics) reviewed the work in Il Popolo d’Italia, stating that: It preserves all the formal structure and typical characteristics of the old lyrical opera: it is agitated by melodic waves that are contained, or squared so to speak, by passages in closed form; it is vibrant, jerky, drama and music correspond perfectly, and it has some emphatic redundancies typical of the most indubitable and obvious melodrama. It has been written by the most felicitous hand and is full of Respighi’s most beautiful melodies. Ha, infatti, della vecchia opera lirica tutta l’ossatura formale e le caratteristiche tipiche: è tutta corsa da ondate melodiche arginate, squadrate, vogliam dire, storicamente, con brani a forma chiusa; è vibrante, a scatti, in perfetta rispondenza drammatica e musicale, con ridondanze enfatiche del più indubbio ed ovvio melodrammismo. È scritta con la più felice mano respighiana, ed è piena delle più belle musiche del Respighi.

The success was probably also due to the fact that, by virtue of the archaizing and pagan flavor that permeates some of his compositions (namely those dedicated to Rome), Respighi had willy-nilly become the embodiment of the values of martial Romanitas that most attracted Fascism. The “dangerous liaisons” between the Fascist regime and prominent musicians (some of whom are counted among the most original voices in the contemporary Italian scene) are the object of accurate and

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documented reconstructions that demonstrate how attitudes were varied and often intermingled with personal rivalries: whereas Ildebrando Pizzetti and (to a lesser degree) Alfredo Casella or Pietro Mascagni showed a sort of compliant attitude, Gian Francesco Malipiero wavered between requests of patronage and open rejection of the regime after World War II,22 Respighi’s position represents a peculiar case, for he was perhaps the only composer of his generation that Fascism spontaneously supported by appointing him to the Accademia d’Italia in 1932, even though he had never joined the party. This was due to the style of his operas, not least the Roman trilogy, which was reputed to represent the image of Roman and Fascist Italy throughout the world; in addition, the composer enjoyed international success and his music was known to be popular. Indeed, like other intellectuals who were not overtly embedded, Respighi appeared rather indifferent to politics, mainly because of a solipsistic concentration on his own work, even though the regime appropriated some of his compositions, claiming them to be consistent with a populistic or Romano-centric Weltanschauung.23 His death, in 1936, was perhaps responsible for the posthumous charge of collusion, after the war and the fall of the regime, as can be argued from his widow’s “Precisazione” that appeared in Il mondo musicale (April 8, 1945): Dear De Rensis, I learn from the Il mondo musicale (n. 2, page 2) that some people, reproaching the moral feebleness of Italian composers of symphonies inspired by a false Romanhood, alluded to Respighi as well. It is my duty to remind those who have forgotten (or are unaware) that Fontane di Roma was performed for the first time in 1917 and, although performed in 1924, I Pini di Roma was conceived much earlier…Besides, I don’t know if those who dare speak of “moral feebleness” in the case of Respighi had the same vigor to avoid enrolling in the dominant party and to refuse its membership card: I only know that Respighi had this strength. Caro De Rensis, apprendo da Il mondo musicale (n. 2, p. 2) che taluni, rimproverando la ‘debolezza morale dei compositori italiani, autori di opere sinfoniche dal titolo inspirato a un clima di falsa romanità’, avrebbe alluso anche a Respighi. Ritengo mio dovere rammentare, a chi lo ha dimenticato o l’ignora, che le Fontane di Roma furono eseguite primamente nel 1917, e I Pini di Roma nel 1924 ma concepiti assai avanti. […] Io non so se chi osa parlare di debolezza morale a proposito anche

22

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See F. Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista and R. Illiano (ed.), Italian Music during the Fascist Period (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004); conversely, H. Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), appears to be animated by a peculiar and personal perspective. See also E. Levi, “Towards an Aesthetic of Fascist Opera,” in G. Berghaus (ed.), Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996), 260–276. Buran, Il recupero dell’antico, 87.

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Chiara O. Tommasi di Respighi, abbia avuto la forza morale di non inscriversi al partito dominante e di rifiutarne la tessera: so soltanto che Respighi questa forza ebbe.24

From Norway to Byzantium, or the penchant for antiquity The story of the opera is adapted from an almost contemporary play, Anne Pedersdotter, written in 1908 by the Norwegian novelist and playwright Hans Wiers-Jenssen (1866–1925), and set in Bergen at the end of the sixteenth century, when the eponymous woman was accused of witchcraft and burnt at the stake.25 Wiers-Jenssens’s drama takes many historical licences, among which the most striking is the love affair between Anne and her stepson Martin, unrecorded in any source and surely invented for the sake of dramatic intrigue. Actually, we know that Anne was Absalom Beyer’s only wife, so she could not have any stepson; moreover, Anne was condemned fifteen years after the death of her husband, and one of the couple’s eight children figured among her fiercest accusers. It should also be mentioned that Absalom Beyer had been one of the most prominent and enlightened figures of the Reformation in Norway: this seems omitted in the drama (although Absalom is represented as a merciful pastor, probably by virtue of the secret he keeps, namely, that he married Anne as result of an enchantment), 24

25

On the question see the reflection put forward by S. Bagnoli, “Ritratto di Respighi: Lettere, carteggi, documenti, immagini dall’archivio del Fondo,” in D. Bryant (ed.), Il Novecento musicale italiano, tra Neoclassicismo e Neogoticismo (Florence: Olschki, 1988), 463–483, esp. 477; to be supplemented with the reasoned considerations by O. Flamm, “‘Tu, Ottorino, scandisci il passo delle nostre legioni’: Respighis ‘Römische Trilogie’ als musikalisches Symbol des italianischen Faschismus?” in Illiano (ed.), 331–369, and the interesting reflections of L. G. Barrow, “Guilt by Association: The Effect of Attitudes toward Fascism on the Critical Assessment of the Music of Ottorino Respighi,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 42 (2011), 79–95. It seems also worth mentioning a personal souvenir by Jan Meyerowitz, when he states that in 1936, when Elsa went to Berlin to stage La Fiamma, he refused the invitation of Goebbels and preferred to dine with Meyerowitz’s own (Jewish) family, (J. Meyerowitz, “Con Respighi,” in D. Bryant (ed.), Il Novecento musicale italiano, tra Neoclassicismo e Neogoticismo (Florence: Olschki, 1988), 23–31, esp. 31. We read it in the English translation by J. Masefield (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1917). In all probability Guastalla also used the Italian version by F. Santandrea (Milan: Mondadori, 1921). Besides, the drama had been staged in Rome, starring Emma Gramatica in the title role. Wiers-Jenssen freely took inspiration from an actual case, which ended in one of the most famous trials for witchcraft in Norwegian history: see the information provided in https://nbl.snl.no/Anne_Pedersdotter (accessed September 2016); and the records available at http://www.edd.uio.no/perl/ search/display.cgi?schema=usd_ikos_heksep.usd_objectpresentation&exec=event_as_ html%28%27643%27%29 (September 2016).

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whereas the disputes between Catholics and Lutherans, against the background of which the actual trial is to be read, play a major role. From our perspective it seems meaningful to state that Respighi explicitly wanted a late antique setting, instead of the original ambiance in Lutheran Norway, which is maintained in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Dies Irae, the most famous adaptation of Anne Pedersdotter.26 As recorded by Guastalla himself, it was on the explicit demand of the composer that he changed the setting, transferring it to Ravenna—in fact, Respighi had long since nourished the idea of composing a drama on a Byzantine subject, the Empress Theodora:27 Already many years before, immediately after Belfagor, Respighi urged me to read Diehl’s Figures Byzantines and other books, so that I could recreate a Zoe, an Eirene or a Eudoxia. In the summer of 1929, on crossing the Equator back from Argentina, and enthusiastic over the success enjoyed by La Campana Sommersa, the Master telegraphed me “Equatorial Greetings. Come to the station with the basilissa.” The basilissa was Theodora, for during the American tour I should have written a libretto set in Byzantium, with the famous Empress as the main character. I went to Genoa to meet my dearest friend, but I let the basilissa rest in her green sepulcher of Hierapolis […] One evening, however, while I was meticulously and affectionately elaborating the mystery play of the Alexandrinian Saint, at Palazzo Borghese I explained to Respighi the plot of another libretto which I had in mind for 26

27

Cf. M. Coiner, “Dramaturgy and Theme: A Comparison of Day of Wrath and Anne Pedersdotter,” Literature Film Quarterly 17 (1989), 123–128; A. Prosperi, “Dies irae e la storia,” in Dies irae il cinema del 1943, ed. F. Bolzoni and G. Fink (Milan: Fabbri, 1993), 153–175; Id., “Introduzione a Dies Irae,” in L. Caretti and D. Corsi (eds.), Incanti e sortilegi: Streghe nella storia e nel cinema (Pisa: ETS, 2002), 133–152; U. Longo, “La passione di Dreyer per Giovanna,” in S. Botta and E. Prinzivalli (eds.), Cinema e religioni (Rome: Carocci, 2010), 65–79. For further information see the online references at http://english.carlthdreyer.dk/Films/Vredens-Dag/Based-on.aspx (accessed September 2016). Besides Respighi, Wiers-Jenssen’s text was also adapted for opera in 1971 by the Norwegian composer and conductor Edvard Fliflet Braein (1924–1976), with a libretto by Hans Kristiansen: a Simax label 1991 recording with Per Ake Andersson conducting the Norwegian National Opera is available. As is possible to reconstruct from Guastalla’s notes, the inspiration came from C. Diehl’s Figures Byzantines (Paris: Armand Colin, 1927) (see now the recent Italian translation with a bibliographical update by S. Ronchey et al., Turin: Einaudi, 2007). The otherwise extremely accurate analysis of M. Buran, however, fails in indicating that Respighi was interested not in the famous wife of Justinian, but in the homonymous eleventh-century empress, the last representative of the Macedonian dynasty (54 and 167). The image of Theodora in art has been extensively investigated and discussed by M. della Valle, “Teodora: Cento volti e nessuno,” Lanx 7 (2010), 315–342, and by F. Carlà, “Prostitute, Saint, Pin-Up, Revolutionary: Theodora in Twentieth-Century Italian Reception,” in S. Knippschild and M. G. Morcillo (eds.) Seduction and Power (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 243–262, with bibliography. Conversely, F. Conca, “Teodora tra skene e palcoscenico,” Koinonia 33 (2009), 37–60, seems somewhat superficial.

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Chiara O. Tommasi another composer: it was an idea that I could draw from a dark Norwegian drama, Anne, the daughter of Peter, by Johann Wiers Jenssen, but illuminating it on the warm soil of our Romagna. Respighi immediately took a confident decision: Yes, but in Byzantium! This is the subject I want!” Già molti anni prima, subito dopo Belfagor, Respighi aveva voluto che io leggessi le “Figure bizantine” del Diehl e qualche altro libro perché rievocassi una Zoe o una Irene o una Eudossia. Nell’estate del ‘29, al passaggio dell’equatore, mentre tornava dall’Argentina lieto del gran esito della sua Campana sommersa, il maestro mi telegrafava: Saluti equatoriali. Vieni stazione con basilissa. La basilissa era Teodora, perché durante quel viaggio in America io avrei dovuto portare avanti un libretto d’ambiente bizantino, protagonista la famosa imperatrice. Andai a Genova a incontrare il principe dei miei amici ma lasciai dormire la basilissa nel suo sarcofago verde di Ierapoli28. […] Ma una sera—in quell’autunno in cui andavo elaborando con infinito amore il Mistero della Santa di Alessandria29—a Palazzo Borghese, esposi a Respighi l’argomento di un altro libretto che pensavo per un altro musicista, e quel che credevo di poter trarre da un cupo dramma norvegese— Anna figlia di Peter di Giovanni Wiers Jenssen—illuminandolo al sole caldo della nostra Romagna.30 Respighi decise con immediata sicurezza: Sì, ma a Bisanzio! Ecco il soggetto che voglio!31

The Byzantine ambiance is thus perceivable in the setting and in the choice of the two main characters, Basilio and Eudossia, whose names are Greek in origin and common in Late Antiquity, as are those of some minor figures, such as Agata, Zoe, Agnese, and Monica.32 The female heroine, Silvana, on the other hand, 28

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The allusion to Theodora’s tomb in green Hierapolan marble points to some famous lines of D’Annunzio’s ‘Byzantine’ poem La Nave (episode 1, p. 129 of the first edition, Milan: Treves, 1908) – a passage that is in all likelihood inspired by C. Diehl, Théodora, impératrice de Byzance (Paris: Eugène Rey, 1904), 308. Namely, the subject of Maria Egiziaca, celebrated by Goethe in his Faust II, which draws inspiration from another late antique legend similar to that of Thaïs: see M. Viale Ferrero, “Di alcune eclettiche Sante della scena musicale novecentesca,” in D. Bryant (ed.), Il Novecento musicale italiano, tra Neoclassicismo e Neogoticismo (Florence: Olschki, 1988), 341–360; Buran, Il recupero dell’antico, 141 ff., who concludes by observing how this piece represents a further stage in the development of the penchant for antique style that anticipates La Fiamma. The word “nostra” is to be interpreted as synonymous with Italian, but a personal nuance cannot be excluded in Guastalla’s reference, for Respighi was actually born in Bologna (that is, quite close to Romagna). The passage, dated 1929, is taken from the Carte Guastalla in the Archivio della Fondazione Cini in Venezia (CG Q2 c. 237): for the quotation we are indebted to Buran, Il recupero dell’antico, 55. Conversely, the name Donello has somewhat a medieval sound (a diminutive of “dominus”?), and perhaps Guastalla was inspired by the famous Late-Renaissance French

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bears a Latin name, which recalls a “chthonian” dimension, that of the woods and wilderness, therefore alluding to her obscure and quasi-magical powers.33 Such an earthly or heathen dimension is reflected in the wood of Cervia (nowadays a nature reserve which incorporates the Basilica of St. Apollinare in Classe), which is mentioned as shadowy place by Donello in the recollection of his first encounter with his stepmother many years earlier, when she took him to the house of Agnese (Act 1):34 E laggiù la pineta che sʼinfiamma al tramonto, verso terra, e si fa tutta fosca verso il mare.

Without engaging in the old debate as to whether the term paganus finds its roots in the idea that the countryside was still a collection of un-Christianized villages,35 it is nevertheless certain that the forest on the one hand, and the splendid palaces on the other, are meant to represent the contrast between urban areas, where Christianity had been largely widespread, and the countryside, still prey to pagan superstitions, as is recorded in hagiographical accounts, such as those of Sulpicius Severus, Gregory the Great, and Gregory of Tours.36 In the opera, such an awe-

33

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jurist Hugo Doneau (Donellus). It cannot be excluded that we have here a reformulation of the archaic Italian word donzello (“young man”), thus alluding to his handsomeness and youth. One might wonder whether the name Agnese, chosen for the supposed witch, might instead point to her innocence, insofar as it recalls one of the most famous Christian martyrs. The etymology of the Latin god Silvanus is controversial and has been related to the Etruscan deity Selvans: S. Skovgaard-Jensen, “Silvanus and his Cult,” Analecta Romana Instituti Danici 2 (1969), 11–42. See, more in general, E. Malaspina, “Prospettive di studio per l’immaginario del bosco nella letteratura latina,” Incontri triestini di filologia classica 3 (2003–2004), 97–118; Id., La forêt: lieu de plaisir—absence de plaisir , in P. Galand-Hallyn, C. Lévy, and W. Verbaal (eds.), Le plaisir dans l’Antiquité et à la Renaissance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 11–28. “And down there the pine forest which flames up towards land and becomes all black against the sea.” In addition, Act 1 is set in the Exarch’s villa, located, according to the stage description, “fra la marina e la pineta spessa e viva” (“amidst the sea and a dense and living pinewood”). In the original Norwegian drama (Act 2, sc. 3), it is said that Anne’s mother and her friend Marte Herlofs had learnt magical arts from the Finns, thus suggesting a certain “shamanistic” tradition, one related to the wilderness. Although unfavored by many scholars, this etymology has recently been defended by C. P. Jones, C. P. Jones, Between Pagan and Christian (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014). Cf. e.g. S. De Luca, Aspetti dell’identità gallica nel Tardo Impero alla luce delle testimonianze di alcuni scrittori gallo-romani (fine III–fine V secolo d.C.), PhD Diss. University of Rome La Sapienza (2011–2012), available (September 2016) at http://padis. uniroma1.it/bitstream/10805/1672/1/Aspetti%20dell’identit%C3%A0%20gallica%20

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inspiring place is counterbalanced by the solemnity and sheen of the Byzantine churches and mosaics, places that Respighi and Guastalla had visited various times during the composition of the opera, in order to join visual experiences to musical ideas. In addition, Guastalla presents a more concrete development of the main characters, who become clear-cut figures, by emphasizing frailness, complexity, and alienation37 and, we would add, by an effective shortening of the source text, in which the characters sound somewhat didascalic or pedantic: Eudossia, the old mother, implacably hostile towards the young daughter-in-law; Silvana, overwhelmed by the constant reminders of the former wife, tortured by sadness, unrest, and inquietude; Basilio, captured by a May-December passion: indeed, at first he was attracted to Silvana by magical arts, but now he loves her deeply.38 The final result is a tableau “of gold and polychrome, that smells of incense and adultery, against the background of the Exarchate of Ravenna in the seventh century,” where “passions, curses, cries, dead, demonic forces, glowing pinewoods, witches burnt at the stake stir up a story that for the first time in Respighi’s theatrical production displays rounded characters and not mere allusive symbolic projections.”39

37 38

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nel%20Tardo%20Impero%20alla%20luce%20delle%20testimonianze%20di%20alcuni%20scrittori%20gallo-romani%20(fine%20III%20-%20fine%20V%20secolo%20 d.C).pdf. Cf. Buran, Il recupero dell’antico, 168. Cf. Act 2, when he recalls the magical arts by which he was enchanted, although uncertain whether this was actually love: “E allora ti vidi primamente, Silvana, / e fui prigione. Forse è questo lʼamore / nume ignoto che non temevo. / Forse è questo lʼamore che non temevo. Le mie nozze brevi erano state un rito / senza gioia, tra guerra e guerra, / sempre in un campo e in arme, per la / gloria di Cristo e dellʼImpero. / Il mio cilizio mi cingeva i lombi di / castità, per il regno dei cieli: ma / forse tu, Silvana, eri lʼamore. / Questo è raggio di luce: lʼaltro è oscuro…Dellʼoscuro passato sono chiuse le porte. / No, tu non devi piangere: sii forte…Lʼanima tua, Silvana, è dritta, / è immune: lo so. Non ti turbare: / prega e spera” (“And then I saw you for the first time, Silvana, and I became your prisoner. Perhaps this is love that had not feared. My former wedding had been brief, a ritual without joy, between one war and another, always in the battlefield and in arms, for the glory of Christ and the Emperor. My cilice covered my loins, for the heavenly kingdom, but perhaps you, Silvana, you embodied love. This is a ray of light: the rest is darkness…The gates of the dark past are closed now: No, you must not weep: you must be strong…your soul Silvana is hones and immune: I know. Don’t let it trouble you: pray and hope”). F. Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 153. See Guastalla’s own words: “sorgeva l’emozione e l’ispirazione, dal tumulto della folla che ondeggiava tra religione e superstizione, e dal dubbio di magia che serpeggia in tutta la tragedia. Questo senso pauroso ha sempre trovato in Respighi suggestiva espressione” (Q2 c 241, cited in Buran, Il recupero dell’antico, 170).

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Towards an aesthetic of archaism Respighi’s penchant for antiquity in musical style and in the choice of subjects is well acknowledged, and La Fiamma represents no exception: it comes after titles like I Persiani (“The Persians,” vocal and orchestral, 1908, after Aeschylus); Semirama (“poema tragico,” 1910), Deità Silvane (“Silvan Deities,” vocal and orchestral, 1917–1925); In Praise of the Birth of the Lord (1930); Belkis, regina di Saba (“Belkis, Queen of Shebah” ballet, 1931); Maria Egiziaca (“mistero” in three acts, 1932); and was followed by his last opera Lucrezia (inspired by Livy; unfinished, completed by his widow Elsa, staged in 1937), not to mention orchestral works such as Metamorphoseon XII Modi (1930), various minor cantatas, or the renowned Roman symphonic poems. From a musical point of view, commentators have long since noted that, together with a substantial reduction of the orchestra, the score is characterized by an imitation of antique technique, which Respighi was able to master by constant practice in transcribing renaissance texts and through long training in the Gregorian style (also at Elsa’s impulse) that included the monodic lauda and the polyphony of the Ars Nova.40 The penchant for Gregorian style, to be understood as a revolutionary experiment in contrast to the contemporary tendency towards bold forms of experimentalism pursued, for example, by Casella and Malipiero, is shown already in works such as Preludi sopra melodie gregoriane (1921) and Vetrate di Chiesa (1927). Transferring Gregorian chant and old tonalities to the world of grand opera thanks to a “will of archaism,” Respighi was able to obtain a drier and more transparent color for his orchestration. Together with a neo-Cecilian approach, which overcomes the temptation of mannerism or esoteric spiritualism, Respighi’s numerous works that took inspiration from classical antiquity are not a mere erudite re-evocation, but instead a sincere expression of cultural fervor and nostalgic fascination. The same tendency is perceivable, from a literary perspective, in the near-contemporary productions of Giosuè Carducci and Giovanni Pascoli. This is also the idea implied in the pre-Raphaelite vogue in the art, which coincides with the revival of Giotto (see, e.g., the case of Ardengo Soffici), although an even more pertinent comparison can be made with the Neoclassicism of Giorgio De Chirico. Interestingly enough, Respighi presents a strange intertwining of sacred and profane. In spite of certain pagan and Roman resonances, symphonic poems such as Le Fontane di Roma (1916), I Pini di Roma (1924), and Feste Romane (1926), are more intimist: therefore, it would be more pertinent to compare the evocative, 40

Such a mimetic exigence of re-appropriation of the past is obtained by paying homage to great figures and moments in the history of the opera: therefore the witchcraft motif and the stake echoes Azucena in Verdi’s Trovatore and the kiss between Silvana and Donello is inspired by the Combattimento of Tancredi and Clorinda in Monteverdi. Their love duet in Act 3 is reminiscent of Giacomo Puccini and Richard Strauss.

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rather than impressionistic, forms of the symphonic poems dedicated to Rome, and the hidden foreshortenings in the Eternal City described by Gabriele D’Annunzio in his novel Il Piacere, dedicated to the natural elements rather than to the high society.41 Echoing Gabriele D’Annunzio Likewise, the libretto is marked by the imitation of the style of D’Annunzio, some of whose poems had already been set to music by Respighi,42 and by archaisms that recall the rarefied atmosphere of a long-distant past. Generally, the libretto of Guastalla shares some beloved themes of the Vate, such as “the tragic confrontation between the Pagan and the Christian world set in a mythical past (in the play La Nave); the slightly morbid fascination for the adolescent body subjected to martyrdom (in the film Cabiria); and, more generally, the attraction to historical moments of decadence and transformation (the collapse of the Roman Empire and Byzantium) and the blending of the verbal and the visual arts.”43 Moreover, the influence of D’Annunzio is clear in the witchcraft theme, which recalls Mila 41

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These considerations have largely benefited from S. Martinotti, “Respighi tra modernità e arcaismo,” in F. Nicolodi (ed.), Musica italiana del primo Novecento, “La Generazione dell’Ottanta”: Atti del Convegno (Firenze, 9–11 maggio 1980) (Florence: Olschki, 1981), 111–124, esp. 116: “Così in Respighi s’apre la cadenza dell’arcaismo, l’ombra dell’arcano e del fatalismo di fronte al mistero delle cose. E così la via al misticismo è dischiusa, con una sensibilità spaziata e suggestiva, nient’affatto intellettualistica.” With regard to this motif, Guastalla himself wrote (CG, Q2, c. 245, from Buran, Il recupero dell’antico, 170): “La favola della Fiamma non pretendeva affatto d’esser nuova e, per ogni buon conto, io m’ero fatto premura di dire a tutti che il mio libretto ed il dramma da cui lo aveva rivelato e derivato ripetevano un eterno motivo quanto quello di Fedra e di Parisina, già trattato da Euripide, da Racine, da Byron, da D’Annunzio e da cento altri minori.” In 1915 Pizzetti orchestrated a Fedra, whose libretto had been written by D’Annunzio. Mirabile, “Visual Intertextualities,” 128. In addition, it should be noted that Respighi declined the invitation to compose scene music for La Nave, whereas this task was eventually accomplished by Ildebrando Pizzetti, and that the cooperation between the Vate and Pizzetti was repeated with Fedra and La Figlia di Iorio (F. Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti); see also A. Guarnieri Corazzol, “D’Annunzio sulla scena lirica: Libretto o poema?” Archivio D’Annunzio 1 (2014), 9–42. The relationship between D’Annunzio and music is thoroughly investigated in the volume by A. Guarnieri, F. Nicolodi, and C. Orselli (eds.), D’Annunzio, musico immaginifico: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Siena 14–16 luglio 2005 (Florence: Olsckhi, 2008). La Nave was put to music by Italo Montemezzi as well: see R. Mellace, “Prolegomeni a una lettura della Nave: Una collaborazione tra d’Annunzio, M. e Tito Ricordi,” in the aforementioned volume D’Annunzio, musico immaginifico, 417–453.

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di Codra in La Figlia di Iorio (1903)44 and also in the liaison between stepmother and stepson described in Parisina (the 1913 opera by Mascagni and D’Annunzio, which took inspiration from Lord Byron). It is not out of place to add that Ravenna had been the object of a famous lyric by D’Annunzio, who praises the city as celestial night glowing of gold (“glauca notte rutilante d’oro”) and also the forests, which tremble animated by a mystical foreshadowing and by wild fever (“ti loderò pel mistico presagio / che è nella tua selva quando trema, / che è nella selvaggia febbre in che tu ardi”).45 Respighi and Guastalla surely chose Byzantine Italy because it represented a singular blend of languid decadence and visual preciousness: the years of the Exarchate (seventh–eighth century) represent one of the most interesting moments in the history of Ravenna and testify to a fundamental change in the political life of Italy. However, as is clear from the previous considerations, the plot, in particular the aforementioned Phaedra theme, which per se would not be quite original, gains further interest from the Byzantine setting and most of all from the important role played by religion throughout the story. Historical references: struggles for orthodoxy E dite al Papa, che non si dimentichi dʼesser soggetto di Bisanzio, e che io son braccio da metter, come Eraclio, a sacco San Giovanni Laterano. E di Papa Martino gli sovvenga…Cavalcheremo per la via Romea e su, attraverso lʼAppennino, andremo ad insegnar a questo nestoriano la regola ortodossa.

The historical events alluded to in Basilio’s threat against the pope46 point to the complex development of the Christological controversies that involved an intricate web of relationships between East and West, and the empire and the papacy, enabling the emergence of the thrust for autonomy on the part of the newly established Germanic kingdoms and the local churches (and, as far as the See of Ravenna is concerned, its autocephaly). As some details (such as the mention of Theoderic’s Palace, which actually was the residence of the exarch), testify to, the redaction of La Fiamma led Guastalla to deepen the history of the Exarchate in 44

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Quasi-verbal reprises are underlined by M. Viale Ferrero, “Di alcune eclettiche Sante,” 351 ff. G. D’Annunzio, Le città del Silenzio, in Versi d’amore e di gloria, a cura di A. Andreoli and N. Lorenzini (Milan: Mondadori, 1984), 368. The Pineta di Classe is also evoked in the final part of his Francesca da Rimini. “And tell the pope that he should not forget he is subject of Byzantium and that, like Heraclius, my hand is capable of sacking San Giovanni Laterano. And remind him of Pope Martin.…We shall ride on the via Romea and up across the Apennines, we shall go and teach these Nestorians the orthodox rule”: such menacing words mark the entrance of Basilio in Act 2.

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Ravenna, together with accessory information such as the succession of the popes, the names of the Greek saints worshipped in Italy, the army structure, and the kind of clothing. He could obtain a thorough knowledge of the period thanks to Charles Diehl’s Études sur l’administration byzantine dans l’exarchat de Ravenne (568–751), Paris, 1888.47 As vague or imprecise as these references are, they nonetheless allow a reconstruction of some historical details: the story is surely set after the Monothelite controversy between Rome and Constantinople, when the popes refused to accept Heraclius’ Ekthesis (638), the document that sanctioned Monotheletism as the official Christian doctrine of the Empire. This background clarifies the allusion in the aforementioned lines and in particular the stock charge of Nestorianism directed against the pope. The episode, which took place in the last years of Heraclius’ reign, saw a direct involvement of the exarch Isaac, namely when the troops lead by the chartularius Maurice sacked the Lateran and part of the treasury was sent to Constantinople; four years later, in 643, Maurice sided now with the pope, when the exarch, profiting from a popular riot in Rome, sent his troops to quell the turmoil and captured Maurice, who was then beheaded in Cervia. The other prisoners, according to the Liber Pontificalis, were spared thanks to the sudden death of Isaac. Hostilities between Rome and Ravenna also continued in the following years, in particular under the pontificate of Martin, who was even taken prisoner in Constantinople. These events represent therefore a sure terminus ante quem. Nevertheless, an exarch named Basil is not attested elsewhere; however, in 725 an imperial duke with this name, under the exarchate of Paul, received an order to kill the pontiff (this conspiracy, however, failed).48 A more precise indication is to be found in the mention of Irene, who reigned from 775 to 780 as empress consort of Leo IV, then as dowager and regent, and finally as empress until 802. Interestingly, Irene is mentioned in the first dialogue between Donello and Eudossia, when the young man gives his grandmother some gifts on behalf of the empress, among them a sacred icon: in fact, Irene is acknowledged to have ended iconoclasm. Nevertheless, it ought also to be noted that the exarchate formally ends in 751, therefore the libretto, while succeeds in recreating a likely scenario, cannot be taken as a reliable historical source. Finally, an interesting point is found in Act 3, when the crowd, at first sympathetic towards Silvana, says that the woman has been accused by Eudossia, moved by “Greek hatred” towards local people: this small patriotic hint perhaps reflects the difficult

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Diehl’s fundamental work is now to be supplemented with D. Mauskopf Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also W. Kaegi, Heraclius. Emperor of Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 271ff. The events are primarily recorded in Liber Pontificalis, 1, 328ff. Duchesne. Liber Pontificalis, 1,408 Duchesne.

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relationship between the “Greeks” (perceived as foreigners and extraneous) and the Italians, probably increased by religious struggles.49 Certainly, Guastalla (and Respighi) are not concerned with historical exactitude or the subtleties of theological disquisitions, but prefer a clear-cut dichotomy between orthodoxy and heresy, which runs through the text, in particular in the references to the imperial court or to the supposed “Nestorianism” of the Pope.50 This represents a reflection of the main theme, that of the opposition between sorcery (i.e. heathenism) and Christian truth. The intransigency of orthodoxy is embodied by the severe and grave character of Eudossia, whose hatred towards Silvana seems somewhat mitigated by her nostalgic recalling of Constantinople and the affection for the grandson.51 In any case, Respighi gives her the majority of the old-style melodies, which he reconstructs through a reliance on woodwinds (to the detriment of strings), by reproducing “oriental” scales, and by employing modalities that avoid the sensible note.52 The chorus of the clerics (which acts a counterbalance to the enraged crowd in the finales of both Act 1 and Act 3) is likewise characterized by a dignified Gregorian-style score, enlightened by the solemn usage of Latin in the libretto (Psalm 69 and other exorcism formulas, or Lent penitential prayers): Una voce: Humiliate capita vestra Deo. / Coro: Domini Crux mecum. / Flectamus genua.…Una voce: Emmanuel! Libera nos a malo, / et ab insidiis diaboli nos libera. / Deus, in adjutorium meum intende! / Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina! / Deus, in adjutorium meum intende!…Mora! Strega! Lamia! Maga! Emmanuel! / Una voce: Nobiscum Deus. Crux est vita mihi. / Crux erit mors atra, inimice, tibi. (Act One)

In Act three the chorus sings in Italian (with some Greek loanwords): Sia gloria e lode a Te, / Cristo Pantocrate!…Figlio di Dio! Tu che esalti la fede / dei cristiani, / Figlio di Dio, governa con lʼAutocrate! / Figlio di Dio, aumenta la 49

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Cf. C. Diehl, Études sur l’administration byzantine dans l’exarchat de Ravenne (568– 751) (Paris: Thorin, 1888), 275 ff. on the spread of Hellenic customs in society. As stated earlier, Wiers-Jenssen’s drama is mostly concerned with allusions to Lutheran theology and its anti-Catholicism. It should be noted that in Wiers-Jenssen’s text, at the beginning, Mertene, the motherin-law, is not so openly hostile towards Anne as is Eudossia in the libretto; however, in the dramatic dialogue of Act 3, sc. 3, when she has understood that the young Martin is attracted to Anne and warns him against lustful temptation, she declares: “I hate her and fear her. I don’t know whether I hate her or fear her most.” Buran, Il recupero dell’antico, 176. See also P. Mioli, “Cantare! Sì, un bel canto! Ora si può!” in D. Bryant (ed.), Il Novecento musicale italiano, tra Neoclassicismo e Neogoticismo (Florence: Olschki, 1988), 169–208, esp. 198 ff. See also P. Isotta, Altri canti di Marte: Udire in voce mista al dolce suono (Venice: Marsilio, 2015), ch. 17.

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Chiara O. Tommasi potenza dei Romani!…Chi è grande come il nostro Iddio? / Chi è forte come lʼIddio che / prodiga i miracoli? / Come il Dio che trionfa della morte? / Come il Dio che ama gli uomini? /…Gloria a te, Aghios Christos!”53

Youth, love and magic The score, however, has lighter and more relaxed moments, for example when the young servants are let free to laugh and chatter. In particular, the opening scene in Act 2 deserves special mention, for this section also reflects the vivid contrast between Christian asceticism and the (implied) perils of lust and sin. Donello trifles with the young maidens, referring to a sort of ordeal legend according to which the clothes of unchaste women that come across a statue are lifted up by a mysterious wind. He continues narrating the different fates of two women, the pure Dionea and the roguish Teofano,54 while the maidens laugh and comment, echoing the story—a joke that will ultimately arouse Silvana’s unexpressed jealousy, when 53

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“A voice: Humiliate yourselves to God—Chorus: The cross of God be with me! Let’s kneel! A voice: Emmanuel! Deliver us from evil and from the snares of the Devil free us. Make haste, o God, to deliver me; Make haste to help me, o Lord (twice).…Let her perish! Witch! Vampire! Magician!”; “Glory and praise to you Christos pantocrator… Son of God! You who exalt the faith of Christians, Son of God, rule with the Emperor! Son of God, increase the power of the Romans. Who is as great as our God? Who is as strong as our God who works miracles? Like God, who triumph over death? Like God, who loves men? Glory to you, hagios Christos.” Wiers-Jenssen (Act 4, sc. 7) presents the (slightly varied) text of Prudentius’ Cathemerinon 10,30 ff.: Iam maesta quiescat querela, / Lacrymas suspendite matres, / Nullus sua pignora planget / Mors haec separatio vitae est. / Veniant mode tempora justa, / Spem Deus impleat omnem, / Reddas patefacta necesse est / Qualem tibi trade figuram. This hymn for the burial of the dead had a certain renown in Lutheran (particular Scandinavian) countries. This seems a variation on a common motif, namely chastity tests (see H.411.4 and 411.7 in S. Thompson, Motif-index of folk-literature: a classification of narrative elements in folktales, ballads, myths, fables, mediaeval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books and local legends, revised edition [Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1975]). The story Donello refers to in the libretto is recorded in the later compilation of the Patria Constantinopolitana 2,65 Preger, which sets the episode during the age of Constantine the Great and states that in front of a brothel (later transformed into a charitable hostel) a statue of Aphrodite tested the virginity of the girls by suddenly naking them in case they had failed to remain chaste. Guastalla derived the information from Diehl’s Théodora, 110, which presents a French paraphrase of the Greek text. A modern extensive treatment is provided by G. Dagron, Constantinople Imaginaire: étude sur le recueil des Patria (Paris: PUF, 1984), 139, who counts the record “au niveau d’un folklore grivois et gouailleur, irrispectueux de la religion et des autorités,” offering at the same time further examples of ‘horned statues’ in Constantinople that were meant to warn cuckolded husbands.

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she surprises Monica and sends her to a convent. The representation comes very close to Don Carlos, where Elizabeth, upset at the revelation that Princess Eboli, enamoured of Carlos as well, had betrayed her, exiles the woman to a nunnery.55 This scene is an original creation of Guastalla, who successfully substitutes the dramatically weaker conversation between some Lutheran theologians in Absalom’s house about witchcraft and “papists.” It functions as a balance to the female chorus in Act 1, according to the principle of symmetry that regularly informs the structure of La Fiamma (see for example the finales of Acts 1 and 3, with the two opposing choruses, that of the hysterical crowd and that of the clerics). Emotionally complex, the character of Silvana displays a wide-ranging texture, as is shown in the initial aria, with its contrasting images of warm dreams and the oppression of her present life to the brooding climax that follows (in Act 2) the revelation of her mother’s magical arts, in which Silvana wavers between horror and attraction. The events proceed even more dramatically in the last act: already “the orchestral prelude suggests frenzied, illicit passion and tragic foreboding. As the textures thin, the two lovers sing ardently of their passion: Silvana of her sexual awakening after ‘an eternal winter dream’ and Donello, torn between rapture and a desire to escape his bewitchment.”56 Later on, when Basilio is implacable in stating that Donello must leave, the woman explodes in rage, accusing the husband of having robbed her of her youth; she even goes on to admit that she has always wanted him dead. Her score ranges from acute notes to the grave register, with insistence on a sort of syllabic declamation, constructed by brief intervals in the median register, to reproduce Gregorian psalmody that recalls Silvana’s mother, who had been spared by Basilio because she had enchanted him.57 Themes appealing to sorcery run through the composition, with dark, threatening music sustained mostly by strings. Respighi was not new to the evocation of supernatural or enchanted scenes, with which he had already experimented in a comic form (Belfagor)58 or in the more serious opera La Campana Sommersa, whose subject is centered on the perilous love between Enrico and the Undine Ra55

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It hardly needs to be mentioned that Don Carlos also presents the love story between a woman and her stepson, although Elizabeth ultimately remains faithful to her husband. The quotation is derived from an online review of the Hungaroton Classic 1995 recording (staging Ilona Tokody as Silvana, and Lamberto Gardelli as conductor), available at http://www.musicweb-international.com/respighi/lafiamma.htm (accessed September 2016). See Buran, Il recupero dell’antico, 180. Performed in 1923, the work represents the first example of the cooperation between Respighi and Guastalla; it derives from the comedy of the same title by Eugenio Luigi Morselli, which, in turn, is influenced by the famous tale by Niccolò Machiavelli. See W. Zidaric, “Belfagor di Claudio Guastalla e Ottorino Respighi: La vena comica e nazionalistica nel melodramma italiano del primo ’900,” Chroniques italiennes 77–78 (2006), 175–200.

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utendelein.59 Although the imagery of witchcraft seems more fitting to late medieval or renaissance contexts, one must bear in mind that magic was a favored subject in classical and late antique sources,60 where it often became intertwined with themes such as commerce with the Devil and diabolic possession and the need for prophylactic amulets, sacred images, and even exorcism.61 At the same time it was often used as a marginalizing tool, not devoid of gender implications, or a rhetorical strategy in contests over religious authority (orthodoxy vs. heresy, or Christianity vs. paganism), also because maleficium was counted among the gravest crimes, coming after high treason (crimen maiestatis) and murder (homicidium).62 Thus magic represents an umbrella term vague enough to cover many different ac59

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The work derives from the drama by Gerhart Hauptmann (1896) and develops a familiar theme in German literature (see R. Fassbind-Eigenheer, Undine, oder Die nasse Grenze zwischen mir und mir: Ursprung und literarische Bearbeitungen eines Wasserfrauenmythos, von Paracelsus über Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué zu Ingeborg Bachmann [Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994]), involving a subtle contrast between Christianity and paganism. For a general introduction on the theme and the distinction between magic and witchcraft see J. Burton Russell and S. Magliocco, “Witchcraft: Concepts of Witchcraft,” in L. Jones (Chief Editor), Encyclopedia of Religion, second edition, Detroit, etc.: Thomson, 2004, vol. 14, 9768–9776. Antique magic has been a favored subject in recent years, although works such as those by A. Dieterich and A. Abt can be still regarded as fundamental. Here we can limit ourselves to mention D. J. Collins SJ (ed.), The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), with invaluable contributions by M. Kahlos and A. Walker dedicated to Late Antiquity and the Early Byzantine period. See also C. Galatariotou, “Holy Women and Witches: Aspects of Byzantine Conceptions of Gender,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 9 (1985), 55–96. For the sake of brevity we will not discuss the issues involved in the modern period. On exorcism see A. Nicolotti, Esorcismo cristiano e possessione diabolica tra II e III secolo (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011); F. Young, A History of Exorcism in Catholic Christianity (Cambridge: Palgrave, 2016). D. Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Satanic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) presents a deconstructive reading of these phenomena that stresses the aspects of rhetorical construction in demonizing “otherness” – an interpretation which seems too extreme as it has been argued by J.N. Bremmer, “Early Christian Human Sacrifice between Fact and Fiction.” in F. Prescendi and A. Nagy (eds.), Sacrifices humains: discours et réalité (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 165–176. “There are practices, beliefs and texts that are given—usually by outsiders—the label of being magical, so that magic functions as a discourse—and most often as a polemic. The category of magic belonged to the arsenal of polemical strategies against rival and often deviant forms of rituals, texts and behaviours. Magic was by no means the only label; these practices were also branded as idolatrous, superstitious, pagan, barbarian, heretic, Manichaean and so forth.”: M. Kahlos, “Magic and the Early Church,” in D. J. Collins (ed.), Cambridge History of Witchcraft and Magic, 148–182, 148. See also M. Kahlos, “Artis heu magicis: The Label of Magic in the Fourth-century Disputes and

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tivities, as it becomes clear when considering, on the other hand, private forms of divination or bearing prophylactic amulets (attested also for Christians) that were continuously at risk of falling into the category of forbidden magic.63 In addition, some previously mentioned authors who lived in a society where paganism and heresy were still considered threats, such as Gregory the Great, record some trials for magic that ended with condemnation to the stake, 64 whereas the idea of sexual intercourse between women, often endowed with superhuman beauty, and demons, is more widespread in the Greek world. This idea is retained in the opera, which emphasizes the gender dialectic, by stressing the feminine aspect of sorcery, its sexual allure, and the contrast between religion and magic.65 Concluding remarks Respighi’s choice of a late antique setting for a modern subject, conscientiously seconded by his friend and favourite librettist, fulfils a twofold function. On the one hand, it represents a tribute to the artistic fashion of the time which identified a potentially promising subject in the idealised Byzantine world. The refined, archaic-style prose of the libretto, full of literary echoes, represents the ideal backbone for an austere and evocative score. As highlighted by Martina Buran, moving from the aesthetic peculiarities of Decadentism and by means of a progressive “defleshing,” Respighi was able to obtain a synthesis of styles that was most apt to describe and embody the complexity of the musical language of the twentieth century. This brought about a new successfully revitalised lexicon, intertwining elements that range from the old-fashioned to the extremely modern.66

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Conflicts,” in M. Sághy, M. R. Salzman, and R. Lizzi Testa (eds.), Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 162–177. For some cases see D. Boschung, J.N. Bremmer (eds.), The Materiality of Magic (Paderborn, Fink, 2015). Cf. the case of Basilius, recorded in Gregory the Great, Dialogi 1, 4, and Cassiodorus, Variae 4, 22, 3. See already the case of the charioteer Athanasius (in Ammianus Marcellinus, 29, 3, 5). See also the presence of precious Greek-sounding terms like empusa or lamia, on which cf. T. Braccini, Prima di Dracula: Archeologia del Vampiro (Bologna: Il Mulino 2011). The present writer wishes to thank Martina Buran and Domitilla Campanile for invaluable suggestions.

III CONTINUITIES AND TRANSFORMATIONS

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Versifications of the Book of Jonah: Late Antique to Late Medieval For anyone interested in the reception of Late Antiquity, the tradition of poetic paraphrases of the Bible deserves special attention. The fusion of classical epic and scripture that is the hallmark of the genre proved popular in Late Antiquity, when it provided a compelling solution to the ideological problem of how to reconcile Christianity with the cultural legacy of the pagans. It endured in the centuries that followed, for medieval readers evidently admired the fusion and many imitated it in their own writings. Like their late antique forebears, medieval poets knew their classics just as well as their Bible, and before they tried their hand at Biblical verse paraphrase, whether in Latin or in their mother tongue, they had usually read earlier poems in the same tradition, and learned from these the art of amplifying terse Biblical prose into artful verse. When early Christian-Latin poets first began to write Biblical poems, they thus invented a genre of enduring appeal, and anyone familiar with their works will recognize their influence on later Biblical poems, even on ones composed many centuries later and in a different language.1 A resounding example is that great landmark of English literature, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which clearly harks back to late classical Biblical epics.2 As we know from the Statutes of St Paul’s school, which was founded in London in 1509 and which Milton attended, these epics were still in use as recommended reading for students in the Renaissance.3 Particularly noticeable in Paradise Lost 1

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For general discussions of the connections between late-classical and medieval Biblical versifications see Dieter Kartschoke, Bibeldichtung: Studien zur Geschichte der epischen Bibelparaphrase von Juvencus bis Otfrid von Weißenburg (Munich: Fink, 1975), Michael Lapidge, “Versifying the Bible in the Middle Ages,” in The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers, ed. Jill Mann and Maura Nolan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 11–40, and Ad Putter, “Prudentius and the Late Classical Biblical Epics of Juvencus, Proba, Sedulius, Arator, and Avitus,” in The Oxford History of Classical Reception, vol. 1, 800–1558, ed. Rita Copeland (Oxford University Press, 2016), 351–76. See J.M. Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). The Statutes were edited by Nicholas Carlisle, A Concise Description of the Endowed Grammar Schools in England and Wales, 2 vols. (London, 1818), II, 71–83.

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is the influence of Avitus’ Carmina de spiritalis historiae gestis,4 a poem with an unbroken history of literary influence stretching from Anglo-Saxon to Early Modern English.5 My aim in this essay is to show that Biblical versification was a highly intertextual genre. Its practitioners assiduously read both classical epics and earlier poems in the genre, and this method of composing Biblical verse, with one eye on the Bible and another on epic poetry and earlier Biblical poets, continued into the Middle Ages. To make this case I would like to explore some intertextual connections between late antique and medieval Biblical poetry with specific reference to literature inspired by the Old Testament Book of Jonah. This will take us from the early fourth century to the late fourteenth, when the anonymous poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight wrote Patience, the finest retelling of the story in English. In tracing literary manifestations of the Book of Jonah across a thousand years, I shall necessarily have to be selective, and texts and authors will pass by without much of an introduction. In chronological order, the main witnesses who will be called upon to testify to Jonah’s literary afterlife are Zeno of Verona (d. ca. 375), Prudentius (d. ca. 413), Paulinus of Nola (d. 431), the anonymous poet of Carmen de Iona (fifth century?), Avitus of Vienne (d. ca. 519), Marbod of Rennes (d. 1123), the “Archpoet” (twelfth century), and the Gawain poet (late fourteenth century). These witnesses have here been brought together with little respect for their individuality;6 but taking a broad sweep across literary history also has some meth4

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See Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition, 262–265, and Daniel J. Nodes (ed.), Avitus: The Fall of Man (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1985), 7–10. Nodes (ed.), Avitus (5) lists early prints of Avitus. See also Carl E. Springer, “The Biblical Epic in Late Antiquity and the Early Modern Period: The Poetics of Tradition,” in Antiquity Renewed: Late Classical and Early Modern Texts, ed. Zweder von Martels and Victor M. Schmidt (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 103–127. No insular manuscripts of Avitus have survived from the Old English period but there are mentions of Avitus in connection with the Cathedral libraries of York and Peterborough (Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006], 134 and 230), and there are echoes of his poems in various Latin and Old English poems (see Fontes Anglo-Saxonici, http://fontes.english.ox.ac.uk/, accessed September 2016), J.M. Evans, “Genesis B and Its Background,” Review of English Studies 14 (1963): 1–16, 113–123), and Lapidge, “Versifying the Bible,” 23–27. Avitus’ influence on Middle English poems (Genesis and Exodus and Cleanness) has been discussed by Olof Arngart, “St. Avitus and the Genesis and Exodus Poet,” English Studies 50 (1969), 487–495; Jane Lecklider, Cleanness: Structure and Meaning (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 78, 104–106, 109, 125, 142, and Ad Putter, “Sources and Backgrounds for Descriptions of the Flood in Medieval and Renaissance Literature,” Studies in Philology 94 (1997), 137–159. A taxonomy of Biblical poems that pays proper attention to differences within the genre is offered by Greti Dinkova-Bruun, “Biblical Versifications from Late Antiquity to the Middle of the Thirteenth Century: History or Allegory?” in Willemien Otten and Karla Pollmann (eds.), Poetry and Exegesis in Premodern Latin Christianity: The Encoun-

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odological advantages. For my purpose, the main advantage is that it can reveal generic similarities of form and content in ways that detailed synchronic studies of poems cannot. Often the limitations of a synchronic perspective also beset source studies, where larger issues raised by generic continuities tend to lose out to the more immediate question of whether an author did, or did not, have any particular literary precedent in mind. In the case of Patience, source studies of this kind are plentiful, and some of the similarities between early Christian-Latin poems and Patience that will occupy us later have been noticed by the authors of these source studies.7 My perspective is rather different from theirs, however. If we look at various poetic incarnations of the story of Jonah over time, it becomes apparent that many of the similarities that have been adduced as evidence of direct influence are perhaps better regarded as recurring family traits. Of course, family resemblances do not rule out direct parentage, and it is certainly not unlikely that later medieval poets could have had immediate access to earlier Latin poems. Indeed, one of the striking things about Latin Biblical poetry is how much of it survived into the late medieval period and was demonstrably available for use by later writers such as the Gawain poet.8 But cases of direct borrowing, too, take on a different complex-

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ter Between Classical and Christian Strategies of Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 315–342. See, e.g., O. F Emmerson, “A Parallel between the Middle English Poem Patience and an Early Poem attributed to Tertullian,” PMLA 10 (n.s. 3) (1895), 242–248; S.B. Liljegren, “Has the Poet of Patience Read De Iona?” Englische Studien 48 (1914), 337–441; Ordelle Hill, “The Late-Latin De Iona as a Source for Patience,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 66 (1967), 21–25; Attila Fáj, “Marbodean and Patristic Reminiscences in Patience,” Revue de littérature comparée 49 (1975), 284–290; William Vantuono, “The Structure and Sources of Patience,” Mediaeval Studies 34 (1972), 401–422; Ellin M. Kelly, “Parallels between the Middle English Patience and Hymnus leiunantium of Prudentius,” English Language Notes 4 (1966–67), 244–247. The most thorough work on the afterlife of Latin Biblical poets has focused on the works of Arator and Sedulius, which survive in numerous medieval manuscripts that have been catalogued: Arthur Patch McKinlay, Arator: The Codices (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1942); Carl P. E. Springer, The Manuscripts of Sedulius: A Provisional Handlist (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1995). There exists no comparable catalogue for Prudentius manuscripts except for ones compiled by art historians interested only in illustrated manuscripts (Richard Stettiner, Die illustrierte Prudentius-Handschriften im Mittelalter, 2 vols. (Berlin: Grote, 1895, 1905), and Helen Woodruff, “The Illustrated Manuscripts of Prudentius,” Art Studies 7 (1929), 3–49. However, the popularity of all of Prudentius’ works, including Cathemerinon (which contains the Jonah episode), is shown by borrowings from it by medieval writers, borrowings catalogued by Eugene Bartlett Vest, “Prudentius in the Middle Ages” (PhD diss., Harvard, 1932, published on microfiche, Chicago, 1956). Marbod of Rennes’s Naufragium Ionae prophetae was also available in medieval England. F. N. M. Diekstra’s remark apropos of this text—“It would be interesting to know whether this poem on Jonah was accessible to the poet of Patience” (“Jonah and Patience: The Psychology

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ion in my broader perspective, which shows that drawing on poems from the same tradition of Biblical versification and from the larger epic tradition is something that Biblical poets did as a matter of course: dense intertextuality was a condition of the genre. The circumstances in which Biblical versification was born explain that intertextuality. The Roman school tradition provided pupils with a thorough grounding in epic poetry (which was used in the teaching of grammar) and in the art of rhetoric, and to anyone reared on a diet of Virgil and Cicero, the Bible must have seemed a very poor substitute.9 When ca. 329 the pioneer of Biblical versification, Juvencus, began his Evangelia,10 perhaps with the aim of providing a decent Christian alternative to pagan epic for use in the classroom, he set about this task by modeling the style of his Biblical narrative after Virgil. Juvencus’ main source may be the Bible, but his language is Virgil’s.11 No doubt this is partly because Juvencus knew Virgil by heart and because Virgilian phrases came in handy (especially since he was writing in the same meter), but we are also dealing with a powerful mimetic rivalry, with borrowing that involved the transference, not just of apt phrases, but of the cultural capital that had been vested in the great classics and that was now to be re-invested in the Bible.

9

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of a Prophet,” English Studies 55 (1974), 205–217 (213, n. 31)—has been read by later critics as implying the poem was inaccessible (e.g. Francis Cairns, “Latin Sources and Analogues of the Middle English Patience,” Studia Neophilologica 59 (1987), 7–18), but Marbod’s poems were widely disseminated in England. This dissemination was no doubt aided by the fact that Marbod traveled to England and wrote for English patrons. A manuscript containing his poems (including Naufragium Ionae prophetae), BL, Cotton Vitellius A xii, was put together in England (see André Boutemy, “Notice sur le receuil poétique du manuscript Cotton, Vitellius A xii,” Latomus 1 (1937), 278–313), and A. G. Rigg describes Marbod’s poems as “perennial favourites” with English anthologizers from the twelfth through to the fifteenth centuries (History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 149). Besides being communicated in insular manuscripts, Naufragium appears under the title “Versus de transgressione Ione prophete” in the fourteenth-century library list of the Benedictines in Peterborough (see http://mlgb3.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/authortitle/medieval_catalogues/ BP21). It was also known to the antiquary John Bale (1495–1563), who tellingly attributed it to an English poet, John of Hyde: Index Britanniae Scriptorum, ed. R. L. Poole and M. Bateson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1902), 214. Various Christian-Latin writers (Augustine, Jerome, Lactantius) felt compelled to apologize for the “humble” style of Scripture: see Anthony Dykes, Reading Sin in the World: The Hamartigenia of Prudentius and the Vocation of the Responsible Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 106–109. Juvencus, Evangeliorum libri quattuor, ed. Johann Huemer, CSEL 24 (Vienna, 1891). It has been estimated that 92 percent of his vocabulary is Virgilian: Michael Roberts, “Virgil and the Gospels: The Evangeliorum libri IV of Juvencus,” in Romane memento: Virgil in the Fourth Century, ed. Roger Rees (London: Duckworth, 2004), 47–61 (50).

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In writing scriptural verse, poets from Juvencus on thus usually had one eye on the Bible and another on the classical canon. Episodes in the Bible that had something in common with those in classical epic were therefore doubly attractive to Christian-Latin Biblical versifiers, and these episodes are typically the ones that give rise to opportunistic poetic amplification. This brings us to one of the earliest “poetic” treatments of the Book of Jonah in Latin by the fourth-century African rhetor Zeno of Verona.12 I have put “poetic” in inverted commas since the works attributed to Zeno are actually a collection of prose sermons. In book 2, sermon 17, Zeno (assuming he was the author) gives a brief summary of the book of Jonah, in the course of which he suddenly becomes expansive: So Jonah the prophet was sent to the Ninevites by God, to announce the destruction that was threatening their city, for they were weighed down by an enormous burden of sin. But he headed off into a different direction, and went on a ship going to Tarshish. Then suddenly the sea roared with violent thrashing of the winds that had been whipped up and that were warring with each together; and, with white-crested waves like sheer mountains from the raging sea, the prospect of shipwreck seemed imminent. The swelling storms grew ever more violent; the rigging hissed horribly; the yards groaned as the sails yielded to the wind, and the ship, repulsed in all directions, could not find a way forward. The sailors were terrified, and hastened to lighten the ship, still in one piece, by throwing cargo overboard, but the ship was pressed down by the burden of the prophet. Jonas adaeque propheta ad Ninivitas missus a Deo est, eorum ut imminere civitati interitum nuntiaret: ingentibus enim peccatorum sarcinis premebantur. At ille alio deflexus itinere, navem Tarsos petiturus ascendit; cum subito compugnantium ventorum flatu violento lacessitum fremit mare, sollicitique gurgitis praeruptorum montium canis voluminibus, minatur per momenta naufragium: procellae crebrescentes insaniunt; horrendum sibilant funes, gemunt cedentibus velis antennae, retunsa undique iter non invenit prora. Trepidant nautae, festinant incassum jactura vasorum navem levare ponderibus, quae prophetae pondere premebatur.13

With the sailors throwing the ship’s cargo overboard we rejoin the Bible, but what precedes it is Zeno’s own contribution. All the Latin Bible says, in rudimentary prose, is that God sent a great wind and that “a great storm was made” (facta est tempestas magna).14 It is true that Zeno also writes in prose, but his is clearly po12

13

14

I owe the reference to Zeno of Verona (and much else besides) to the excellent study by Yves-Marie Duval, Le livre de Ionas dans la littérature grecque et latine (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1973), 220. Zeno of Verona, Tractatus, II, xvii, PL 11, 447, with my translation. I am not aware of any published English translation of Zeno’s works. Quotations from the Latin Bible are from the Vulgate version (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1969). There is as yet no convenient modern edition of the Book of

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etic prose. This is evident from Zeno’s vocabulary: flatus, volumen (in the sense of “roll, whirl”), prora as a metonymy for ship, gurges (in the sense of “sea”) are all typically confined to poetry.15 It is also evident from allusions to other poets. The “groaning sailyards” are probably from Horace’s Odes (antennae gemant, 1.14),16 and the “yielding sails” are from Lucan’s Pharsalia (cedentibus velis, 3.1).17 The metaphor of the winds fighting with each other, compugnantium, compresses the conceit of the four winds coming together in war, each from their respective quarters in the east, west, north and south. The conceit is found in Virgil’s Aeneid (1.81–86),18 in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (11. 489–491),19 and no doubt in other texts: Juvenal, when referring to the clichés regurgitated by second-rate poets, specifically mentions the stale trope of “what the winds are up to” (quid agant venti, 1.9).20 Zeno’s metaphor of the mountains of water (praeruptorum montium) is an echo of Virgil, who uses the same adjective-noun combination: insequitur cumulo praeruptus aquae mons (“down in a heap comes a sheer mountain of water,” Aeneid, 1.104). The obvious explanation for the density of literary allusions at this point in Zeno’s sermon is that, like the poets he borrowed from, Zeno knew he was treading on a commonplace of epic literature: the storm at sea. Sea storms in Biblical epics are pre-eminent examples what Ralph Williams calls “intertextual moments,” that is, moments when, as we read one text, others “so obtrude on our awareness that [they are] importantly and simultaneously present in our consciousness.”21 This

15

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17

18

19

20

21

the Jonah in the Vetus Latina version. I have checked the Vulgate text against the edition of the Vetus Italica by Pierre Sabatier, Bibliorum Sacrorum Latinae Versiones Antiquae, 3 vols. (Reims, 1743–49), vol. 2, and flagged up any significant variants. References to the Greek Septuagint are to the bilingual online edition at www.ellopos.net/elpenor/ greek-texts/septuagint/. English translations are from the King James Version. All these words (in the senses indicated above) are listed as poetical in Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966). Horace, Odes and Epodes, ed. and trans. Nial Rudd (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Lucan, The Civil War (Pharsalia), trans. J.D. Duff (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928). Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough and G.P. Goold, rev. edn, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2nd edn rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. Susanna Morton Braund (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Ralph G. Williams, “Textual Boundaries, Authors, and Intent,” in G. Bornstein and R. G. Williams (eds.), Palimpsest (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 45–66 (49). The relevance of Williams’s observation to sea storms in literature has been pointed out by Barbara A. Mowat, “‘Knowing I loved my books’: Reading The Tempest Intertextually,” in Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, The Tempest and Its Travels (London: Reaktion, 2000), 27–36.

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happens in descriptions of sea storms in all of the major Biblical epics from the late antique period.22 Even Juvencus, whose paraphrase of the Bible is normally quite restrained, allows himself poetic freedom when he comes to Christ’s calming of the storm at the sea of Galilee (Evangelia 2.25–42). Sedulius’ treatment of this same episode is more expansive still (Paschale carmen 3.46–69),23 while Arator pulls out all the stops for his retelling of St. Paul’s shipwreck on the Mediterranean Sea (Historia apostolica 2.1067–1155).24 With this background in mind, it is interesting to examine how versifiers of the Book of Jonah handled the storm at sea. Prudentius, who incorporates the story of Jonah in Cathemerinon 7, passes up the opportunity for a set piece on the storm.25 The obvious reason is that the poem in question, Hymnus de ieiunantium, is about the efficacy of fasting: the narrative focus is therefore on the repentance by the Ninevites who by fasting allay God’s righteous anger. The epic annihilation of the city of Nineveh thus never materializes—which explains why, when Prudentius does strike epic notes, they are deliberately false ones. Thus Prudentius begins the story of Jonah with an evocation of the deity offended by the Ninevites: In the end, though ever lenient, the Controller is offended and aroused in righteous anger, arming his right hand with spear-fire, wielding and brandishing crashing clouds and shattering whirlwinds in a swarm of thundering flames. offensa tandem iugis indulgentiae censura iustis excitatur motibus, dextram perarmat romfeali incendio, nimbos crepantes et fragosos turbines vibrans tonantum nube flammarum quatit. (Cathemerinon 7.91–95)

If one did not know the context, one could be excused for thinking this was a description of Jupiter, sending down bolts of thunder with his right hand (cf. Virgil, Aeneid, 7.142–143). It is impressive stuff, but, of course, God relents and never vents his fury, and so the rhetorical fireworks are curiously beside the point. When Jonah clambers up a mountain to watch the destruction of the city, Prudentius treats us to some more of that fire and brimstone that God signally fails to deliver in reality: 22

23

24 25

See the seminal study by Roger Green, Latin Epics of the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). The examples of Juvencus, Sedulius and Arator are discussed on 61–62, 200–201, and 333–336. Sedulius, The Paschal Song and Hymns, ed. and trans. Carl P. E. Springer (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013). Arator, Historia apostolica, ed. A.P. Orbán, CCSL 130 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006). Prudentius, Cathemerinon, ed. and trans. Gerard O’Daly, Days Linked By Song (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Translations from Prudentius are taken from O’Daly.

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Ad Putter Then he seeks the peak of a high mountain, to see from there the thick smoke as the debris crashes down in a mass, the dreadful heap of destruction. apicem deinde ardui montis petit, visurus inde conglobatum turbidae fumum ruinae cladis et dirae struem…(136–138)

Here epic expectations are again raised only to be frustrated. Jonah’s merciful God is not really like Jupiter at all. That is Prudentius’ whole point. When Jonah goes aboard ship, however, we move into the realm of actuality and can smell the fresh sea breeze: The gangway is ready, he boards a high ship, the wet mooring-rope is cast off, the ship sails: they cross the deep sea… celsam paratis pontibus scandit ratem, udo revincta fune puppis solvitur, itur per altum…(106–108)

The scene is beautifully visualized, and Prudentius launches his boat with a rhetorical flourish that has Virgil written all over it. The trick, as Gerard O’Daly notes,26 is to maneuver the verb into line-initial position, as in Virgil’s portentous itur in antiquam silvam (6.179). Far less restrained is the treatment of the storm in Carmen de Iona.27 This is in the same heroic meter as Virgil’s Aeneid, and it shows. After a brief prologue, the poet sets the scene in the same way as Virgil. In the Aeneid, Aeneas’ sea journey is framed by the following scene-setting: “Urbs antiqua fuit (Tyrii tenuere coloni) / Karthago, Italiam contra” (“There was an ancient city, the home of Tyrian settlers, Carthage, over against Italy”); in Carmen de Iona, the poet embarks on Jonah’s voyage in this fashion: “urbs oras Cilicum contra libratur Ioppe, / inde igitur Tarsos properus rate scandit Ionas” (“There is a city called Jaffa poised over against Cilicia, from where Jonah hastily embarks on a ship to Tarshish,” 24–25).The phrase ratem scandit is perhaps an echo of Prudentius’ scandit ratem. The stage is now prepared for a fine set piece, a description of the ship at the mercy of the waves. There is not space to quote the entire passage (lines 28–52), but here is a taster: 26 27

O’Daly, Days Linked by Song, 220. Both Carmen de Iona and Carmen de Sodoma are cited from the edition by R. Peiper, Cypriani Galli Heptatevchos, CSEL 23 (Vienna, 1881). For discussion and bibliography, see Karla Pollmann, “Pseudo-Tertullianus: Zwei Versifizierte Szenen des Alten Testaments,” forthcoming in Handbuch der lateinischen Literatur der Antike, vol. 6, ed. Reinhart Herzog and Peter Lebrecht Schmidt (Munich: Beck Verlag).

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The sea becomes a mirror of the sky; the waves are dyed black all around; the air rushes down into the dark depths, while the sea surges so that the waves reach up amidst the clouds with impunity, whipped up into a whirlpool with the vaunting of the winds. All manner of frenzy raged against Jonah, and one ship became the battleground between sea and sky. The ship is turned one way and the other; all the timber trembles under the crashing blow of the waves, and the spine of the keel is shaken, the sail-yard shudders, its creaking exertions are terrifying. The mast itself bends, fearful of being broken. In the meanwhile the the sailors with groaning and shouting try everything for for the sake of the ship and for dear life’s sake: to send for the ropes that remain, to tie the cable, and to keep control of the rudder, and with strength to force the ship back on its reluctant course. Some bail out the foulstinking bilge from the bowels of the sea, and others throw overboard all the wares and all the cargo and try to conquer the dangers by losing their goods. fit speculum caeli pelagus: niger ambitus undas inficit. in tenebras ruit aether et mare surgit, nequiquam medios fluctus dum nubila tangunt, gloria ventorum quos omnis turbine miscet. diuersus furor in profugum frendebat Ionam; una ratis certamen erat caeloque fretoque, tunditur hinc illic, tremit omnis silua sub ictu fluctifrago. subter concussa est spina carinae, palpitat antemna, stridens labor horret ab alto, ipsa etiam infringi dubitans inflectitur arbor. nauticus interea gemitus uoxque omnia temptat pro rate proque anima: spiras mandare morantes, oblaqueare mitram, clauorum stringere nisus atque reluctantes impellere pectore giros. pars maris interni putidum grave odore uicissim egerit, at rapiunt pars merces atque onus omne praecipitant certantque pericula uincere damnis. (Carmen de Iona, 32–48)

The only part of this excerpt that has any Biblical warrant is the mariners casting their goods overboard; the rest is the poet’s independent variation on the familiar theme of the sea storm, which is here elaborated with some recognizable poetic touches: the sky and seas turn black; the aether (that is, the air on high) rushes down (ruit aether), as in the autumn storm from Virgil’s Georgics (ruit arduus aether, I, 324), while the ocean rises as if determined to touch the clouds. The locus classicus is the shipwreck of Ceyx, the legendary king of Thessaly, in Ovid, Metamorphoses, 11.474–572, which takes place in a storm that is so fierce that the waves of the sea rise to touch the clouds: “fluctibus erigitur caelumque aequare videtur / pontus et inductas aspergine tangere nubes” (“the sea is raised up with waves and seems to reach out to the heavens and to splash the clouds with its spray,” 497–498). In this episode, too, the efforts of the sailors are itemized: some (pars) hurry to take in the oars, some to reinforce the sides of the ship; some take down the sails; others bail out the water (egerit hic fluctus).

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The continuities with the classical tradition are striking, and we see such continuities just as clearly when we leap across ten centuries to examine the Middle English versification of the Book of Jonah by the Gawain poet in Patience. Here the storm scene begins with God calling on the four winds: “You, Eurus and Aquilo, who dwell in the east, blow both at my command on the dark waters.” Then there was no delay between God’s word and their deeds, so keen were they both to do His bidding. Immediately from the north-east the noise begins as both winds began to blow on the dark water. Fierce storm clouds arose with red light below; the sea moaned sorely; it was wondrous to hear. The winds on the dark water so wrestled together that the raging waves rolled so high and then plunged down to the abyss that panic-stricken fishes dared nowhere to remain at the sea bottom. When the wind and the sea and the boat came together Jonah found himself in a joyless boat; for it rolled around on the rough waves, and the blast bore down on it from behind so that all their gear shattered. The tiller and the rudder were thrown in a heap; first the ropes broke and then the mast; the sail trailed on the sea; and then the boat was forced to drink the cold water; and then the clamor begins. Yet they cut the ropes and cast it all overboard; many a boy leapt forth to bail and to cast out the water; they scooped out the harmful water, keen as they were to escape. For no matter how awful a man’s burden may be, life is always sweet. “Eurus and Aquilon that on est sittes, Blowes bothe at my bode upon blo watteres!” Then was there no tom there bitwene his tale and her dede, So bayn were thay bothe two his bone for to worke. Anon out of the north-est the noyse bigynnes When bothe brethes con blowe upon blo wateres; Rogh rakkes there ros with rudnyng anunder; The see soughed ful sore, grete selly to here. The wyndes on the wonne water so wrastel togeder That the wawes ful wode waltered so highe And eft busched to the abyme, that breede fisches Raghte nowhere for rogh arest at the bothom. When the breth and the brok and the bote metten, Hit was a joyles gyn that Jonas was inne, For hit reled on rounde upon the rogh ythes. The bur bere to hit baft that barst all her gere. Then hurled on a hepe the helme and the sterne. Fyrst tomurte mony rop and the mast after; The sayl sweyed on the see; then suppe behoved The coge of the colde water, and then the cry rises.

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Yet corven thay the cordes and cast all thereoute. Mony ladde there forth lep to lave and to caste; Scopen out the scathel water, that fayn scape wolde. For be mannes lode never so luther, the lif is aye swete. (143–156)28

Although the poet’s God is Christian, his actions are probably modeled on those of Aeolus, who unleashes the winds, including Aquilo and Eurus, that strike Aeneas’ boat in Virgil. The conceit of the winds “wrestling together” takes us back via Zeno of Carthage (compugnantium ventorum) to the classics, as again does the frantic activity of the sailors. There are also obvious parallels between Carmen de Iona and Patience, but while I would not want to belittle these, I do think they need to be seen in the context of a broader generic characteristic: what both texts exemplify is the habit of Biblical versifiers to reach back beyond the Bible and other Biblical poems to classical models. Even some of the more startling similarities provide uncertain evidence about the poet’s immediate sources. Jonah’s rude awakening from his sleep at the bottom of the boat is a case in point. All the Bible says is that Jonah is fast asleep in the boat when the shipmaster comes to him and asks him what he is doing there. The Gawain poet has more to say: He had fled for fear of the sounds of the flood into the bottom of the boat and lay on a plank, huddled up near the bilge to escape the vengeful violence of the heavens, fallen into a dozy sleep, and drooling he snores. The man kicked him with his foot and ordered him to get up. He was flowen for ferde of the flod lotes Into the bothom of the bote, and on a brede lyggede, Onhelde by the hurrok for the heven wrake, Slypped upon a sloumbe slepe, and sloberande he routes. The freke him frunt with his fot and bede him ferk uppe. (183–187)

Here the parallel with Carmen de Iona is close: Ignorant of all of this the guilty one beneath the hollow arch of the ship was snoring away in sleep with snorting nose, but, just when his dream was shadowing forth an image of the lord, so at the same time the man in charge of the boat shoved him and roused the insolent dreamer from his sleep and his placid peace.

28

The Works of the Gawain Poet, ed. Ad Putter and Myra Stokes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014).

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Ad Putter Nescius haec reus ipse cavo sub fornice puppis stertens inflate resonat nare soporem. iam tunc in somno domini formando figuram hunc simul undisequae cogit qui munia prorae, pace soporatum placidaque quiete superbum increpat inpulsans…. (53–58)

It is not surprising that some critics think that the Gawain poet made direct use of Carmen de Iona. A point in favor of this hypothesis is that Carmen de Iona is preceded in the manuscript tradition by another poem, Carmen de Sodoma (on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah), which in turn shows some similarities with Cleanness, the poem that precedes Patience in the single surviving manuscript of the Gawain poet’s words (London BL, MS Cotton Nero A.x).29 The possibility that both sets of poems, Carmen de Sodoma and Carmen de Iona on the one hand, and Cleanness and Patience on the other, form a deliberate pairing, showing divine vengeance in one poem and divine forbearance in another, is worth considering.30 The problem is, however, that both the specific details and the pairing of the stories of Sodom and Jonah are traditional. Avitus, who has in fact been credited with the authorship of Carmen de Sodoma and Carmen de Iona,31 similarly pairs descriptions of the fates of Sodom and Gomorrah and Nineveh in his great Biblical epic, Carmina de spiritalis historiae gestis (2.329–774 and 4.355–390), to which we shall return later.32 The striking details of Jonah snoring and waking up after being kicked awake also resound throughout the wider tradition. Jonah’s unflattering snoring goes back to the Greek Septuagint and is also found in the preVulgate Latin Bible known as the Vetus Latina, while Jonah’s rude awakening in Patience takes us to Marbod of Rennes, who early in the twelfth century composed a humorous poem about Jonah. Perhaps Marbod knew the Carmen de Iona, for his tableau of Jonah asleep begins in the same way:

29 30

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I owe this point to Karla Pollman (personal communication). This suggestion has been made, apropos of Cleanness and Patience, by Cecilia Hatt, God and the Gawain Poet (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015), 121, and apropos of De Sodoma and De Iona by Zoja Pavlovskis-Petit, “Storm and Stress: The Natural and the Unnatural in De Sodoma and De Iona,” Classica et Mediaevalia 47 (1996), 281–302. Michael Dando, “Alcimus Avitus as the author of the De Resurrectione Mortuorum, De pascha (De Cruce), De Sodoma and De Jona formerly attributed to Tertullian and Cyprian,” Classica et Medievalia 26 (1967), 258–275. The attribution has not gained general acceptance. References to Avitus’ Carmina are to the edition by Nicole Hecquet-Noti, Avit de Vienne: Histoire Spirituelle, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2005). Hecquet-Noti provides further parallels for the pairing of the stories of Sodom and Jonah on page 76 n. 3.

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Jonah is ignorant of all this, and rests oppressed by sleep. The bowels of the ship have become the prophet’s bedroom. But a sailor approaches and having kicked Jonah with his foot assails him with his voice. Haec Jonas nescit, pressusque sopore quiescit. Interioria ratis sunt facta cubilia vatis. Nauta sed accessit, pulsum pede voce lacessit.33

Was Carmen de Iona a source for Marbod’s Naufragium, and was one (or both) a source for Patience? The difficulty we have in answering these questions arises from the fact that even very concrete details like Jonah snoring and being kicked awake are repeatedly heard in the vast echo chamber of Biblical poetry. A distinctive voice in this echo chamber is that of Paulinus of Nola, whom I mentioned in my introduction. Paulinus did not actually write a poem about the Book of Jonah, but he did weave the story into a number of his poems. In Carmen 17, he writes to wish his friend Nicetas a smooth journey; he will have nothing to fear from the great beasts of the sea, since they are under God’s command. The story of Jonah and the beast that swallowed him is then adduced to prove the point. In Carmen 22, Paulinus writes to Jovius that every chance event is controlled by God, even the random storms of the sea: again he reminds his reader of what happened to Jonah. The most interesting use Paulinus makes of the Jonah story is in Carmen 24. This poem recounts Martianus’ shipwreck in a narrative that deliberately conflates Martianus’ story with that of Jonah: Like Jonah hiding from the boat’s wind he snores in heavy sleep, but roused by the clamor all around him and with all his limbs trampled on by the feet of the crowd, he got up from his uncomfortable bed. Having been submerged many times inside the ship’s belly, the sailors rush swiftly along the perimeter of the ship’s sides to where they usually go, to take down the sails or to lift them with poles, while still the ship floats over the dark abyss on its outermost boards. Ionas ut olim vente navis abditus somnos anhelabat graves, sed excitatus luctuosis undique pereuntium clamoribus pedibusque turbae membra quassus omnia duro cubili prosilit. plerisque mersis intus in navis utero laterum per oras, qua solent, ut vela tollant sive contis subrigant nautae expediti currere, 33

Marbod of Rennes, De Naufragio Jonae Prophetae, Patrologia Latina 171, col. 1677.

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Ad Putter tabulis adhuc supernatabat extimis operta navis gurgite. (169–180)34

Martianus’ adventures are momentarily imagined as the exact counterpart of Jonah’s, and it is in this context that the details we earlier encountered in Carmen de Iona recur: here again is Jonah/Martianus snoring below deck, and Jonah/Martianus being rudely awakened. Modern audiences will know that the next thing that happens to Jonah is that he is thrown overboard and swallowed up by a whale. I say “whale” but actually the Vulgate reads a “great fish” (piscis grandis). The usual word in the Vetus Latina, and in Latin Biblical versifications, however, was cetus (“sea monster”). This reading had the authority of the Greek Septuagint and of Matthew 12:40, which both refer to the beast that swallows Jonah as ketus (Latin cetus). Although, in later Latin, cetus came to mean “whale,” the original sense of ketus/cetus as “a monster of the deep” helped Biblical poets lend epic gravitas to Jonah’s adventures at sea. We have already had a taste of this in Carmen de Iona, which frames Jonah’s sea journey in the same way as Virgil frames Aeneas’. Avitus of Vienne in his Carmina de spiritalis historiae gestis takes this one step further. In Avitus’ version of the story (4.355–394) Jonah is portrayed as a man on a divinely appointed mission who arrives at his destination after overcoming many obstacles on the way—“nam venerat istic / iussus multum ille et terris iactatus et alto” (because he had come there as commanded, having been greatly thrown off course on land as well as on the sea, 4.358–359). The allusion to Virgil’s description of Aeneas—“multum ille et terris iactatus et alto” (Aeneid, 1.3) is unmistakeable. The presentation of the “great fish” as a sea monster allows Avitus to keep this epic style going: A monster had come to swallow him with its powerful jaws, and enclosed the man immersed in the sea in the cavity of its entrails. Although the fiery monster had been given the capacity to consume the man and to fill its huge belly, yet it was not allowed to bite into him nor to use its teeth. Hauserat hunc ualido peruadens belua rictu immersumque mari uentris concluserat arca. Degluttire uirum faucesque implere capaces ardenti monstro cum sit permissa potestas, non licuit mordere tamen; nil dentibus actum. (4.362–366)

34

Ed. G. de Hartel, CSEL 30 (Vienna, 1894). The translation is my own. The poems have been translated by P. G. Walsh, The Poems of St. Paulinus of Nola (New York: Newman Press, 1975).

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Belua is the usual word for a monster in epic verse (cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.8), while ardens similarly describes the sea monster that swallows Laocoön in Virgil’s Aeneid (2.210). Since the Old Testament Jonah is not really much of a hero, not every Biblical poet could maintain the epic mode with a straight face, and I do not want to give the misleading impression that literary treatments of Jonah are all solemnly epic. There were also humorous versions of the story. The discovery of this approach should be credited to the Old Testament story,35 which communicates Jonah’s willful contrariness by contrasting what God orders (“Arise, go to Nineveh,” Jonah 1:3) with what Jonah actually does (“But Jonah…went down to Joppa.” Jonah 1:4). However, the preposterousness of Jonah’s attempt to flee from God becomes a more explicit theme in Christian-Latin texts, and particularly with writers of a theological bent, who liked to point out that since God is all-seeing and omnipresent Jonah’s idea that he can get out of God’s reach is not a clever one. A sermon attributed to Fulgentius (468–533), which contains an ample paraphrase of the story of Jonah, is interesting from this and other points of view.36 There is much in this prose sermon to remind us of the poetic treatments of Jonah we have already discussed: the description of the storm is amplified along epic lines, and Jonah is again rudely awakened from his slumbers when the ship captain prods him (eum pulsans, col. 879). What is new is that Jonah is mocked for his silly belief that he can outrun God: Although God was sent to preach destruction to the Ninevites, his immoral vanity gave him the idea of fleeing, and quickly he went down to Joppa and employed a ship to flee to Tarshish in contempt of God, as if he could escape the knowledge of God, and as if there were (and that cannot be) some region that was outside God’s sphere. Cum Jona mitteretur Ninivitis interitum praedicare, mox ei improba vanitas fugae ingessit consilium; properusque descendit in Joppem, ratemque adhibuit contempto Deo fugere Tharsis, quasi posset scientiam latere divinam, ac si esset (quod non licet) extra Dei orbem aliqua regio.

Poets with any grounding in Christian theology could see the absurdity of Jonah’s thinking and some felt that absurdity needed to be exposed and corrected. Interestingly, the double vision of Jonah as epic hero and prophet that we have seen in Carmen de Iona and Avitus is just as much a feature of Biblical poets who see the funny side of the Book of Jonah. A few writers unflatteringly present Jonah as a bald man. Behind this presentation lies the idea that Jonah emerged from the 35

36

See John C. Holbert, “‘Deliverance Belongs to Jahweh’: Satire in the Book of Jonah,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 21 (1981), 59–81. Sermo xvi, Patrologia Latina 65, cols. 878–880.

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whale with no hair. As Jan Ziolkowski has shown, this idea results from the assimilation of the Bible with classical epic, and in particular from contamination between the story of Jonah and that of Hercules, who famously entered the mouth of the sea monster (ketus) sent to consume Hesione, but came out fighting after hacking his way through the monster’s side.37 The only damage sustained by Hercules is to his hair, which is completely burnt by the intense heat inside the monster’s belly. A comically anti-heroic version of Jonah as bald hero appears in versions of the parodic poem Cena Cypriani, which portrays famous Biblical figures as guests at a feast, and captures them in emblematic and unflattering poses: Jonah is caught napping,38 and is bald (caluus).39 A witty throwback to this tradition occurs in Fama tuba dante sonum, the Archpoet’s begging poem to his patron, Reinald of Dassel (archbishop of Cologne).40 In a comic plea for money, the Archpoet likens himself to Jonah. He is in dire straits, like Jonah inside the whale; but as God saved Jonah, so his patron can rescue him. Like Jonah, whom the whale vomited up bald (vomet vatem decalvatum, 56), the poet hopes to escape from his financial crisis. Since the Archpoet was presumably a tonsured cleric, the mention of Jonah’s baldness is not just a nod to Jonah’s legendary history but also points up an unexpected physical resemblance between the two men, prophet and poet, who both need their lord’s favor. The conscious use of epic style to accentuate Jonah’s anti-heroic status is also a feature of Marbod of Rennes and the Gawain poet. An example from Marbod is the wonderfully bathetic transition from the loud epic storm to the sleeping prophet: Everywhere there is harsh thunder, and the din fills the entire sky. Thick flashes of lightning light up the sky, as if all things joined to say: “return, you fugitive, and obey God’s command.” But all this passes Jonah by and he rests weighed down by sleep. Undique triste tonat, coelum fragor omne coronat. Fulgura crebra micant, tanquam simul omnia dicant: O fugitive redi, jussoque Tonantis obedi! Haec Jonas nescit, pressusque sopore quiescit. (col. 1677)

37

38

39

40

Jan Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 74–87. For a different explanation of why Jonah was sometimes depicted as bald, see John B. Friedman, “Bald Jonah and the Exegesis of 4 Kings 2:23,” Traditio 44 (1988), 125–144. “Sompnus tenebat Jonam” (l. 336), ed. Lucie Doležalová, “Quoddam notabile vel ridiculum: An Unnoticed Version of the Cena Cypriani (Ms. Uppsala, UL C178),” in Archivum latinitatis medii aevi 62 (2005), 137–160. Cena Iohannis Diaconi, ll. 153 and 166, ed. Christine Modesti, Studien zur Cena Cypriani und deren Rezeption (Tubingen: Narr, 1992), 180–201. Ed. Karl Langosch, Die Lieder des Archipoeta (Stuttgard: Reklam, 1965).

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God is the “Thunderer,” the epithet for Jupiter that had already been used for God by Juvencus (2.795).41 The fulgura crebra that micant and foretell omens for humans come straight from Lucan’s Pharsalia (fulgura micuerent … crebra, I, 530). Everything here shouts “epic!”—everything, that is, except our hero, who does not seem to know what genre he is supposed to be in. The Gawain poet, too, uses epic scene-setting to bathetic ends. Here, for example, is Jonah as he sets off for Tarshish: Then he stepped on deck, and they get their tackle ready, hoist the sail-yard, fasten the cables, swiftly weigh anchor at the windlass, quickly attached to the bowsprit the spare bowline, take hold of the ropes, the main sail falls; they set the ship to port side to catch the wind; the pleasant breeze at their back finds the bosom of the sail— it swings the lovely ship away from the harbor. No Jew was ever happier than Jonah was then, having so boldly escaped the power of the Lord. He evidently imagined that the man who created the whole world had no power to harm a man on that sea. Then he tron on tho tres, and thay her tramme richen, Cachen up the crossayl, cables thay fasten, Wight at the wyndas, weyen her ankres, Spenned spak to the sprete the spare bawelyne, Gederen to the gyde-ropes, the grete clothe falls; Thay layden in on laddeborde and the lofe wynnes; The blythe breth at her bak the bosum he fyndes— He swenges me this swete schip swift fro the haven. Was never so joyful a Jue as Jonas was thenne, That the daunger of Dryhtyn so derfly eschaped. He wende wel that the Wye that all the world planted Had no might in that mere no man for to greve. (101–112)

The hero’s ship is “launched” in epic fashion,42 and the funny thing is that Jonah is deluded enough to think this fashion suits him. As far as he is concerned, he is not a coward, shirking his duty, but a hero embarked on a brave mission to stand up “derfly” (“boldly”) to God’s tyranny. Of course, the poet knows better, and, like pseudo-Fulgentius, he goes on to mock Jonah, “the wytlesse wreche” (113), for feeble theological thinking: God is everywhere, and Jonah is stupid to think there are places that are off-limits to the Creator of the universe.43 41 42

43

Juvencus, Evangeliorum Libri Quattor, ed. J. Huemer, CSEL 24 (Vienna, 1891). Cf. Prudentius’ Cathemerinon VII, 106–108, cited above, and O’Daly’s comments on its “epic colouring” (221). The same idea is developed by Marbod of Rennes, “O animum vatis mirandae simplicitatis! / Si procul esse putat Dominum sibi, dum loca mutat / Qui complet totum

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I would like to end my discussion of the connections between Biblical poets at the place where the Book of Jonah ends: at the city of Nineveh, which repents when Jonah preaches there. In the Bible, the scenes of repentance are short and matter-of-fact: “So the people of Nineveh…proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth (saccis), from the greatest even to the least of them. For when word came unto the king of Nineveh…he arose from his throne, and he laid his robes from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes” (Jonah: 3:5–6). But this is not how poets do it, and if we look across at Biblical versifications of this scene from late antique Latin to late medieval English we see signs of an unbroken tradition. Three distinctive hallmarks of that tradition are worth mentioning. The first is the imaginative license that allowed, and in fact encouraged, Biblical poets to body forth the story in the realistic detail of the here-and-now. Thus in Prudentius the city dwellers are not Ninevites at all; we seem rather to be in Rome: They rush in crowds through the spacious city, plebs and senator, citizens of all ages, young men with pale faces, shrieking women. cursant per ampla congregatim moenia plebs et senatus, omnis aetas civium, pallens iuventus, heiulantes feminae. (143–145)

In Marbod of Rennes the scene is updated to become a twelfth-century court: The magnates’ court subjects itself to the same ordeal: the courtier and the knight imitate the women’s mourning. Curia magnatum fert consimilem cruciatum. Aulicus et miles luctus imitantur heriles. (col. 1678)

And finally in the Gawain poet we have arrived in the more familiar surroundings of the late medieval town: These words arose in that place and spread all around, to burgesses and to knights bachelor who lived in that town. This speche sprang in that space and sprad all aboute To borges and to bacheleres that in that burgh dwelled. (365–366)

nihil huic valet esse remotum” (“O, what astonishing naivety for a prophet! As if he thought he could be out of God’s reach by changing places. But it is impossible to be remote from him who extends over everything”).

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Second, in describing rituals of mourning and penance, these poets clearly operate within a shared set of conventions. To pick out one curious detail, in Patience the Ninevites put dust on their heads (“Dropped dust on her hede,” 375). This is not in the Bible, but we find it in Prudentius, where the king dramatically abjects himself before Jonah: The king himself pulls the pin away, and rips up his gleaming mantle of Coan purple, takes off his bright jewels and precious bands of stones, the crown that encircles his brow, crams into his hair the filthy dust. Rex ipse Coos aestuantem murices laenam revulsa dissipabat fibula, gemmas virentes et lapillos sutiles insigne frontis exuebat vinculum, turpi capillos inpeditus pulvere. (156–160)

Had the Gawain poet read Prudentius’ Cathemerinon? The suggestion has been made, but with little awareness that such scenes of “performed emotion” force us back into a crowded intertextual echo chamber. Biblical poets did know this. Prudentius echoes lines in Virgil’s Aeneid, in which another king contemplates the ruin of his city: So Latinus goes, his clothes torn, dazed by his wife’s death and the fall of the city, defiling his white hair, pouring dust over it. It scissa veste Latinus Coniugis attonitus fatis urbisque ruina Canitiem immundo perfusam pulvere turpans. (Aeneid 12.609–611)

And medieval Biblical poets knew this also. Here, for instance, is the King of the Ninevites in Marbod of Rennes’ Naufragium: And disturbed because he knew himself to be guilty, the king in a rarely-seen instance does not disdain to descend from his resplendent throne, but bemoans himself and is tearful. Then before Jonah he takes off his lofty crown, presses ashes on his head in memory of the end. Et conturbatus pro cognitione reatus, Exemplo raro solio descendere claro Non dedignatus, se planxit, et est lacrymatus. Tunc coram Jona deponitur alta corona, Imprimitur cinis capiti, memoratio finis. (col. 1678)

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And here is the same king in Avitus’ version: He himself who at that time had the dignity of being king, before his troops in tears carried the symbol of their welfare and—it is unheard of—anxious to overcome this crisis threw his scepter to the ground, left the supreme throne, removed his purple-colored cloak in contempt of riches, and despising silken clothes donned rougher garments. Ipse etiam, dignus tali qui tempore princeps ante aciem flentum portet vexilla salutis atque, novum dictu, metuens discrimina vincat proicit hic spectrum, linquit sublime tribunal, pallia blattarum spreto diffibulat auro, serica despiciens atque aspera tegmina sumens. (3.382–387)

Was Marbod drawing on Avitus or Prudentius or both? And did the Gawain poet know one or any of these poets? When you are in an intertextual hall of mirrors, it is difficult to be confident. The third and final common characteristic of Biblical versifiers (and classical epic) I should mention is a love of pathos. The story of Jonah may not seem to offer much scope for scenes of pathos, but Biblical poets were able to make something of the repentant Ninevites. We have already seen the king of Nineveh in tears, pouring dust over his head in mourning, but nothing excites pathos more than the sight of little babies. The poet of Patience specifically includes them when the fast is announced: “Seses childer of her sok soghe hem so never” (“Stop children from breast-feeding, however much it may grieve them,” 391). Since there is no mention of babies in the Book of Jonah, the detail is curious. Even more curious, however, is the fact that we find the same detail in Marbod’s Naufragium: “Dum genetrix luget, nullus puer ubera suget” (“While the mother mourns, let no little one suck the breast,” col. 1678). I used to think that the Gawain poet got this detail from Marbod of Rennes,44 but having found the same detail in Prudentius, I am less sure: The cradles are wet with the tears of infants crying as they go without milk, for the nurse denies them and withdraws the juice of her breasts. quin et negato lacte vagientium fletu madescunt parvulorum cunulae sucum papillae parca nutrix derogat. (163–165; italics mine)

44

Ad Putter, An Introduction to the Gawain-Poet (London: Longman, 1996), 8, 131.

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Since the echoes stretch back even further into the epic tradition—the victims of Caesar’s civil war in Lucan’s Pharsalia die of thirst, lacte negato … ab ubere (IV.314–315),45 we may well be looking at signs, not of direct borrowing, but of a common repertoire of epic motifs shared by Biblical poets across the centuries. To appreciate the art of later medieval Biblical poems we therefore need to go back to the Christian-Latin poets of Late Antiquity, who invented the rules of the game. One of the ground rules which I hope to have illustrated with reference to versifications of the Book of Jonah is that poets were expected to seize any opportunities to assimilate the Bible to classical epic. The Book of Jonah at first sight seems to offer few such opportunities, but Biblical poets detected them all right (the sea voyage, the storm, scenes of mourning and fasting) and had no doubt learned from predecessors in the genre where to find and how to exploit them. We have often caught our poets with one eye on the Bible and another on Virgil or Lucan, whether it be in order to present Jonah as a true epic hero (as in Carmen de Iona and Avitus) or, conversely, to expose how preposterously unqualified Jonah is for that role (as in Marbod of Rennes and Patience). The most striking thing we have found is the recurrence of the same extra-Biblical details (for instance, Jonah being kicked awake, babies going without milk) in poems ranging from the fourth to the fourteenth century. Biblical poets, it would appear, were very conscious of earlier poems in the genre. Whether any of these parallels amount to evidence of direct influence remains unclear, but they do point to a remarkable consistency of content and approach that is hard to explain without assuming a continuous history of reception and tradition from the late classical to the late medieval period.

45

The parallel is noted in the edition (with Italian translation) of Prudentius’ Cathemerinon and Peristephanon by Mario Spinelli, Gli inni quotidiani; Le corone dei martiri (Rome: Città Nuova, 2009), 103.

d av i d w e s t b e r G

Literary mimesis and the Late Antique layer in John Doukas’ (or Phokas’) Description of Palestine Perhaps in the late twelfth century a pilgrim, probably (but perhaps not) by the name of John Doukas, probably (but perhaps not) traveled in the Holy Land, south along the coast of present-day Syria and Lebanon and then inland into Palestine. His description (ekphrasis) of the journey, in 29 chapters of varying length, begins with Antioch-on-the-Orontes and continues unto Jerusalem and its surroundings, which occupy the larger part of the description.1 On the way Doukas passed through Nazareth, where, as he puts it, “the great mystery was announced by the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mother of God” (X, 533.32–34).2 Doukas describes the church located on the site of the house of Joseph. On the left side of the church, he writes, there is a small cave containing the actual house with the spot where the annunciation took place and “a little chamber, in which the Ever-Virgin Mother of 1

2

The title of Doukas’ work is Ἔκφρασις ἐν συνόψει τῶν ἀπ’ Ἀντιοχείας μέχρις Ἱεροσολύμων κάστρων καὶ χωρῶν Συρίας, Φοινίκης καὶ τῶν κατὰ Παλαιστίνην ἁγίων τόπων (“A General Description of the Settlements and Places Belonging to Syria and Phoenicia on the Way from Antioch to Jerusalem, and of the Holy Places of Palestine” in Wilkinson’s translation, cf. no 2 below). In this paper, I will abbreviate the title to Ekphrasis in the running text and refer only to chapters in Roman numerals. A survey of the four manuscripts containing the text, editions and translations can be found in Charis Messis, “Littérature, voyage et politique au XIIe siècle. L’Ekphrasis des lieux saints de Jean ‘Phokas’,” in Ekphrasis: La représentation des monuments dans les littératures byzantine et byzantino-slaves. Réalités et imaginaires, ed. Vladimit Vavřínek, Paolo Odorico, and Vlastimil Drbal (Byzantinoslavica 69 / 3 supplementum, Prague, 2011), 146–166, here 146–149, together with a discussion on the author and date to which I shall refer again below. There is a recent edition in a Master’s thesis (Thessaloniki, 2008) by Abd Elnur Fadi, but as it is not yet published I refer to the chapter, page, and lines in the 1875 edition by Miller. Translations of Doukas and Chorikios in this chapter are my own but I have made use of the existing translations in Aubrey Stewart, trans., The Pilgrimage of Joannes Phocas in the Holy Land (In the Year 1185 A.D.) (London: Palestine Pilgrims Text Society, 1889), 5–36, and John Wilkinson, ed. Jerusalem Pilgrimage 1099–1185 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1988), 315–336, as well as translations of the corresponding passages in Chorikios in Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 64–65.

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God used to dwell” (X 535.5–6). Doukas also provides the following description of the painting above the entrance to the cave (X 534.23–35): and above it, through the painter’s hand, a winged angel who has descended greets with good tidings her who has not yet become a mother without a husband, finding her solemn and solemnly spinning wool. And he is portrayed as someone conversing with her, but as she was struck by the unexpected sight, and suddenly turned around in confusion, the purple nearly fell from her hand; she, walking out from the room in fear, meets a woman, who was a relative and friend, and greets her with friendly kisses. καὶ τοῦτο ὕπερ διὰ τῆς τοῦ ζωγράφου χειρὸς ὑπόπτερος ἄγγελος κατελθὼν παρὰ τὴν ἄνευ συνοίκου μητέρα μήπω γενομένην εὐαγγελίοις ἀσπάζεται, σεμνῇ σεμνῶς ταλασιουργούσῃ περιτυχών· καὶ σχηματίζεται μὲν οἷά τις πρὸς ταύτην διαλεγόμενος, ἐκπλαγείσης δὲ πρὸς τὴν ἀνέλπιστον θέαν, ἀθρόως τε τῷ θορύβῳ μεταστραφείσης, μικροῦ τῆς χειρὸς ἐξέπεσεν ἡ πορφύρα· ἣ καὶ τοῦ θαλάμου ἐξιοῦσα σὺν φόβῳ, γυναικὶ συγγενεῖ καὶ φίλει προσυπαντᾷ καὶ ἀσπασμοῖς δειοῦται ταύτην φιλίοις.

This is a vivid description of the annunciation, and it adds emotion, movement and temporality to the image, including remarks on events that took place after the depicted scene. In this regard Doukas follows the advice drawn up by the ancient schoolmasters by adding enargeia, vividness, to the description of the image, and his way of describing it stands within an established rhetorical tradition.3 In Doukas’ case, however, the adherence to tradition went beyond the application of established literary techniques. The description of the painting of the annunciation just quoted is a slightly reworked excerpt from a speech by the sixthcentury rhetorician Chorikios in honor of Markianos, bishop of Gaza. Chorikios too described a painting in Palestine, but in the church of St. Sergios at Gaza that contained a series of paintings, including one of the Annunciation (Or. 1.48–50).4 Nor is this Doukas’ only borrowing from Chorikios. The description by Chorikios of the very next image in the cycle at St. Sergios—that of the Nativity (Or. 1.51– 54)—was inserted by Doukas later in his narrative (XXVII 555.17–556.14), when he has reached Bethlehem and describes the painting in the apse of the grotto of the nativity. Finally, there is a passage at the beginning of Doukas’ Ekphrasis (I 527.31–528.9) taken from Chorikios’ introduction to his descriptions of the

3

4

For a thorough survey of ekphrasis as a genre and technique in antiquity and beyond, see Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). The speech is thought to have been delivered before 536. For Chorikios, I use the standard edition by Foerster and Richtsteig (1929), abbreviated as F.–R.

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paintings in St. Sergios (Or. 1.16), which elaborates on the reason for transposing the images to words. From Doukas we thus move back in time almost 700 years. We are still in Palestine, but long before the crusades, before iconoclasm, some 50 years before Muhammad was born in Mecca and before the eastern provinces, including Egypt, Syria and Palestine, were lost to Byzantium in the Arab conquests of the seventh century. What is the connection between these two different texts, and for what reason did our mid-Byzantine pilgrim insert these passages from the late-antique rhetorician Chorikios into his own narrative? Eugenio Amato, in a survey of Chorikios’ later reception, remarks on how Doukas “with an accomplished forger’s skill” appropriated the Chorikian passages, which are referred to as the “indictable” ones.5 The evaluation may seem harsh given the pervasiveness of rhetorical mimesis in medieval as well as ancient culture, but it does raise some questions about the nature and purpose of such imitation, that are relevant to explore.6 How was Doukas’ work supposed to be received? Did he hope to “get away with” his Chorikian borrowings without anybody noticing? If not, was there an aesthetic point to it? Was he just too lazy and unskilled to write his own descriptions, or did his reuse of Chorikian material communicate something to his peers that could not be communicated in any other way? To shed some light on these issues I wish to explore the intertextual relationship between Chorikios’ and Doukas’ texts. After some contextualising remarks on Doukas’ work and the incorporation of Chorikian material, I will look at the authority of late antique authors in Komnenian Byzantium together with notions of literary imitation, “theft” and quotation, paving the way for a conclusion concerning the function of Doukas’ intertextualities in terms of aesthetic pleasure, identity, and the Byzantine cultural memory of Palestine.

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Eugenio Amato, “Epilogue: The Fortune and Reception of Choricius and of his Works,” transl. Robert J. Penella, in Rhetorical Exercises from Late Antiquity: A Translation of Choricius of Gaza’s Preliminary Talks and Declamations, ed. Robert J. Penella (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 261–302, here 301. The parallel case of quotations from Chorikios in ps.-Gregory of Nyssa’s In Sanctum Ephraim is decribed by Amato as a “conscious act of falsification.” My use of the term mimesis includes the sense of rhetorical or literary imitation; for a terminological overview, see e.g. Andreas Rhoby and Elizabeth Schiffer, “Einleitung,” in Imitatio – Aemulatio – Variatio. Akten des internationalen wissenschaftlichen Symposions zur byzantinischen Sprache und Literatur (Wien, 22.-25. Oktober 2008), ed. Andreas Rhoby and Elisabeth Schiffer (Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010), 17–22.

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The work and its genre The Ekphrasis has traditionally been attributed not to John Doukas but to John Phokas, a former soldier from Crete turned priest.7 This information is based on the title in cod. Vallicellianus gr. 158, but, according to Messis, the title has been rewritten twice. The name of the author in the original title he discerns to be “the sebastos John Doukas,” an attribution which I have adopted in this chapter.8 A likely candidate among many sebastoi with this name is an imperial officer under Manuel I, who carried out a diplomatic mission to Palestine in 1177.9 Messis points to the difficulties in genre designation noting that Doukas’ work combines the genres of ekphrasis and the pilgrim travel account.10 Both these genres have their own inherent problems of definition and have been the subject of much discussion. Ekphrasis as a rhetorical device is for example sometimes contrasted with “independent” or “free-standing” ekphrasis as a genre, while the genre designation “pilgrim literature” is problematic since the concept of “pilgrimage” is a loose and modern one, usually covering both the journey and the spiritual goal. Byzantine pilgrimage texts “focus on the culmination of one’s journey, usually the visitation of a holy site or the veneration of relics.”11 The pilgrim’s journey as such may therefore be presented from a variety of different angles in a variety of different genres.

7

8 9

10

11

See, e.g., Herbert Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, vol. 1: Philosopie—Rhetorik—Epistolographie—Geschichtschreibung—Geographie, Byzantinisches Handbuch 5.1 (Munich: Beck, 1978), 172, 517–518. Messis, “Littérature, voyage et politique,” 147. This fact is based on a passage in Eustathios of Thessaloniki, see Messis, “Littérature, voyage et politique,” 148 with n. 16 for references and discussion. Messis, “Littérature, voyage et politique,” 149: “Le texte combine des traditions littéraires indépendantes les unes des autres mais avoisinantes, celle de l’ekphrasis et celle de l’itinéraire de pèlerinage et pose de sérieux problèmes de taxinomie.” As a work of travel it has been compared with works on geography. This is where Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur, 517–518, placed it; though it also appears (as Messis remarks) in the section on ekphrasis, 172. It has also been related to works about diplomatic missions and in this capacity sometimes put in relation to Manasses’ roughly contemporary Hodoiporikon. Cf. Andreas Külzer, Peregrinatio graeca in Terram Sanctam: Studien zu Pilgerführern und Reisebeschreibungen über Syrien, Palästina und den Sinai aus byzantinischer und metabyzantinischer Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994), 17–20; Andreas Külzer, “Konstantinos Manasses und Johannes Phokas—Zwei byzantinische Orientreisende des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Erkundung und Beschreibung der Welt: Zur Poetik der Reise- und Länderberichte, ed. Xenja von Ertzdorf and Gerhard Giesemann (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), 185–209. Alice-Mary Talbot, “Pilgrimage to Healing Shrines: The Evidence of Miracle Accounts,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 56 (2002), 153–173, here 61.

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After the discovery of the True Cross and Constantine’s building activities in Jerusalem, the Holy Land became the self-evident target of sacred tourism.12 In the early period of Christian pilgrimage travelers such as Egeria and Jerome went for a first-hand experience of the sites of the Bible. After the sixth century, however, the interest became less intense, probably at least partly due to the changed political circumstances.13 Instead Constantinople, with its many churches, monasteries, and relics, became a popular destination for religious travel in the middle Byzantine period.14 Thus, even if reports of travelers to the Holy Land after the late antique period appear in various sources, not least in hagiography,15 sustained literary renderings of pilgrimage or travelogues like that of Egeria are rare before the thirteenth century.16 Apart from Doukas’ Ekphrasis there is only a somewhat laconic travel account (Διήγησις εἰς τύπον περιηγητοῦ περὶ τῆς Συρίας καὶ τῆς ἁγίας πόλεως καί τῶν έν αὐτῇ ἁγίων τόπων) by Epiphanios the monk from the late eighth or ninth century.17 The resurgence of Byzantine pilgrim literature in the thirteenth century may in fact, as Messis suggests, have been inspired by Doukas’ Ekphrasis, something we will return to.18 Doukas’ adaptation of Chorikios As mentioned initially there are (to my knowledge) three immediately discernible quotations from Chorikios in Doukas’ Ekphrasis: (1) an introductory remark on the purpose of literary description (I 527.31–528.9 ~ Chor. Or. 1.16 7.2–11 F.–R.), (2) a description of the Annunciation (X 534.22–35 ~ Chor. Or. 1.48–50 14.18–15.15 F.–R.), and (3) a description of the Nativity (XXVII 555.17–556.14 ~ Chor. Or. 1.51–54.16–17.6 F.–R.). 12

13

14

15

16 17

18

For a detailed exposition see Pierre Maraval, Lieux saints et pèlerinages d’Orient: Histoire et géographie des origines à la conquête arabe (Paris: Cerf, 1985). See the overview in James C. Skedros, “Shrines, Festivals, and the ‘Undistinguished Mob’,” in Byzantine Christianity, ed. Derek Krueger (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 81–101, here 89 which also contains a brief discussion on Phokas (= Doukas). Anthony Kaldellis, The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 167. See Alice-Mary Talbot, “Byzantine Pilgrimage to the Holy Land from the Eighth to the Fifteenth Century,” in The Sabaite Heritage in the Orthodox Church from the Fifth Century to the Present, ed. Joseph Patrich (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 97–110. Messis, “Littérature, voyage et politique,” 150. See Herbert Donner, “Die Palästinabeschreibung des Epiphanius Monachus Hagiopolita,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 87 (1971), 42–91. The character of this work is very different from Doukas’ Ekphrasis, with only very brief notes on the different sites and their location. Messis, “Littérature, voyage et politique,” 149–150.

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The latter quotations (2 and 3 above) in chapters X and XXVII are well known, although I do not know who was the first to notice them. They are not remarked upon in Miller’s 1875 edition (nor by the translator Stewart in 1896), but they were used as independent witnesses to Chorikios’ text in the 1929 edition by Richard Foerster and Eberhard Richtsteig. By contrast, the first quotation, from Chorikios Or. 1.16, has gone pretty much under the scholarly radar; Messis refers to it in his article on Doukas,19 but unlike the other two passages, it is not referred to in Foerster–Richtsteig, nor is it mentioned by Amato in his discussion of Doukas’ reception of Chorikios.20 The passage is of particular interest because it belongs to Doukas’ theoretical preface and not, like the other two, to the description of images. The quotations from Chorikios in Doukas’ Ekphrasis are therefore not restricted to images depicting similar scenes and thus made possible through “a certain fixity of Byzantine iconographic motifs,” as suggested by Amato,21 but extend to meta-literary remarks as well. Even if the passages from Chorikios are often said to be more or less verbatim inserted into Doukas’ account,22 Doukas has also, as Amato remarks, altered them.23 An example of this is how the performance situation is taken into account. Chorikios presumably performed his rhetorical description of the church of St. Sergios in situ before an audience which could behold the building and the images he described, while he was describing them, while Doukas directs his work towards an audience who may or may not have made the journey themselves. Chorikios’ present forms are therefore changed by Doukas into aorist and future forms. Chorikios’ sentence about the difficulty of hearing Gabriel’s words, had the artist endowed the image with speech, is dropped by Doukas. Chorikios described images around the ceiling of a church, but the remark about the distance to the image would be irrelevant with regard to the image Doukas is describing, which he states was painted immediately above the entrance to a cave in Joseph’s house (now turned into a church) and thus fairly close to the viewer. Unlike Chorikios, Doukas does not avoid unclassical vocabulary. Throughout his detailed description of the image-cycle depicting scenes from the life of Christ, Chorikios does not mention Christ’s name a single time. Doukas, though writing in a high-style register, has no such aesthetic agenda, but, for example, changes τις ὑπόπτερος (“someone winged”) into ὑπόπτερος ἄγγελος (“a winged angel”).24 19 20 21 22

23 24

Messis, “Littérature, voyage et politique,” 152 n. 32. Amato “Epilogue,” 300–302. Amato “Epilogue,” 301. Henry Maguire, “Truth and Convention in Byzantine Descriptions of Works of Art,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 28 (1974), 110–140, here 116; Messis, “Littérature, voyage et politique,” 153. Amato “Epilogue,” 301. Chorikios uses the word ἄγγελος four times in his preserved works, each time in the ancient sense of ‘messenger’. In three of these cases the word unmistakably refers to human messengers (Or. 3 [III].69; Decl. 3 [XIV].1; Decl. 4 [XVII].32), while the fourth

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Doukas’ classicism is thus more moderate, and elsewhere in his travel description he refers to places with their non-classicizing names, or to peoples and religious sects that were unknown to the ancient Athenians.25 The borrowings are adapted both by abbreviation and by expansion, whether in response to actual differences in the images or in changed ekphrastic taste. Sometimes these changes make syntactic adjustments necessary. In the description of the image of the Annunciation Doukas has a sentence in which he substitutes Chorikios’ conjunct participles in the dative with absolute genitives, since he has left out part of the sentence, including the main word αὐτῇ (“for her”) on which Chorikios’ participles depend. In the Nativity scene, on the other hand, Doukas adds details about the gazes of the Virgin and the shepherds, while completely leaving out Chorikios’ repeated remarks about the “purpose” and “meaning” of the image (βούλημα, νοῦς). Doukas also adds a line on the Magi, who, as Mango noted, “were apparently omitted” in the image in the church of St. Sergios.26 All-in-all the alterations make sense in the new context. They also indicate that Doukas has a fair grasp of the Atticizing language, as shown by his use of Attic forms, including the dual as well as the full classicizing range of the future and other tenses, participles, and infinitives. Still, he is not a strict Atticist concerned with hiding Christian (or any contemporary) terms. The Komnenian background and the tradition of late antique rhetoric Doukas’ work is a product of twelfth-century Komnenian educated culture.27 By this time, there was already a long Byzantine tradition of looking back on and

25

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case (Or. 1[I].54) is ambiguous, referring to angels in their capacity of divine messengers; this last instance is actually part of Doukas’ quotation from Chorikios in Ekphr. XXVII. A good example is his discussion of the Chasysians (Ch. III), whom he straightforwardly describes as “a Saracen people, who are neither Christian nor esteem the doctrines of Muhammad, but have a heresy of their own to confess God […].” Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 63 n. 48. Cf. the discussion in Liz James, “The Church of the Holy Apostles: Fact and Fantasy, Descriptions and Reconstructions,” in Constantine of Rhodes, On Constantinople and the Church of the Holy Apostles: With a New Edition of the Greek Text by Ioannis Vassis, ed. Liz James (Ashgate: Farnham and Burlington, 2012), 181–217, here 205 on differences between Constantine of Rhodes’ and Nikolaos Mesarites’ descriptions of the mosacis in the church of the Holy Apostles. For the period, see Alexander Kazhdan and Ann Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1985), esp. 120–166 on the intellectual milieu. For a characterisation of the period as a “Hellenic revival.” see Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 225–316.

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identifying with Late Antiquity.28 There is, for example, a continuous presence of late antique rhetorical material in Byzantium, intensified during the tenth and eleventh centuries onwards, but evident also earlier.29 This is clear not only from quotations and excerpts, but also from the rhetorical manuals and introductions. Many of these are commentaries on late antique rhetorical treatises and schoolbooks such as those by Aphthonios and Hermogenes, which can be found together with the originals in collections that originated in an educational context.30

28

29

30

See the overviews in Petre Guran, “Late Antiquity in Byzantium,” in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1148–1171, and Stratis Papaioannou, “The Byzantine Late Antiquity,” in A Companion to Late Antiquity, ed. Philip Rousseau (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 17–28, though there is a problematic dichotomy in both chapters between a “classical” heritage from Classical Antiquity and a “Christian” heritage from Late Antiquity. Cf. also Ingela Nilsson, “The Same Story, but Another: A Reappraisal of Literary Imitation in Byzantium,” in Imitatio – Aemulatio – Variatio. Akten des internationalen wissenschaftlichen Symposions zur byzantinischen Sprache und Literatur (Wien, 22.-25. Oktober 2008), ed. by Andreas Rhoby and Elisabeth Schiffer (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010), 195–208, here 199 on Byzantine authors’ relationship with their various pasts as an ongoing “invention of beginnings.” Cf. Robert Browning, “The Language of Byzantine Literature,” in The Past in Medieval and Modern Greek Culture, ed. Speros Vryonis (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1978), 103–133, here 119: “The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the classicism introduced by the Macedonian Renaissance come to full fruition.” though this hardly accounts for the elaborate register variations to which this classicism could be put to use; hence the seemingly contradictory remark in Antonia Giannouli, “Education and Literary Language in Byzantium,” in The Language of Byzantine Learned Literature, ed. Martin Hinterberger (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 52–71, here 52–53, that “Byzantine authors avoided the use of the spoken language, at least until the twelfth century.” The conclusion is that the linguistic options broadened in the Komnenian period. Recent studies underline the experimental character of much of its literature, a context that suits Doukas’ work and its genre and language mixture well. Such as the Corpus rhetoricum, now being edited as a unit by Michel Patillon. For formation of the educational curriculum in the early Byzantine period, see Ann Moffatt, “Early Byzantine School Curricula and a Liberal Education,” in Byzance et les Slaves. Études des Civilisation. Mélanges Ivan Dujčev (Paris: Association des amis des études archéologiques des mondes byzantino-slaves et du christianisme oriental, 1979), 275– 288, and for the importance of Aphthonios, see Elisabeth Schiffer, “Bemerkungen zur Auseinandersetzung mit Progymnasmata in byzantinischen Lehrschriften zur Rhetorik,” in Imitatio – Aemulatio – Variatio. Akten des internationalen wissenschaftlichen Symposions zur byzantinischen Sprache und Literatur (Wien, 22.-25. Oktober 2008), ed. Andreas Rhoby and Elisabeth Schiffer (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010), 195–208.

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The Byzantine reception of Chorikios has been thoroughly described by Amato.31 The early reception is obscure, but Amato speaks of a “rediscovery” of Chorikios later in the Byzantine period.32 In Photios’ Bibliotheka there is a fairly extensive entry on Chorikios, which provides us with some clues as to why he was of interest to a later audience. The entire beginning concerns stylistic issues based on criteria adapted primarily from Hermogenes.33 Then there is a comment about Chorikios being a Christian, even if he introduces pagan myths a little too often for Photios’ taste. Finally Photios adds a “works-and-life section” enumerating the rhetorical genres Chorikios employed and some biographical information. Photios also makes some remarks on Chorikios’ sententious style. This latter feature probably made it easy to extract maxims from his work into the medieval florilegia, in which Chorikios is given a place among other (predominantly late antique) rhetoricians and intellectuals: Synesios, Dio Chrysostom, Plutarch, Aelius Aristides, the historian Herodian, Aeschines, Lucian, Demosthenes, and Libanios.34 After Photios the interest in Chorikios seems to have remained on a fairly high level. One of Doukas’ contemporaries, John Tzetzes (ca. 1110–80/85), laments in a letter that he has received a book ascribed to Chorikios, but actually containing one of Aristotle’s ethical works.35 Slightly later, in the thirteenth-century treatise On the Four Parts of the Perfect Speech, Chorikios is included in a list of recommended authors.36 The treatise seems to have been of some importance, since it was added in a later manuscript to the early twelfth-century bishop Gregory Pardos’ On Syntax,37 and also partially inserted by Joseph Rhakendytes (ca. 1260 31 32 33

34 35 36

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Amato “Epilogue.” Amato “Epilogue,” 262f., 269. On Photios’ literary criticism, see George L. Kustas, “The Literary Criticism of Photius: A Christian Definition of Style,” Ἑλληνικά 17 (1962): 132–169; Dimitrij E. Afinogenov, “Patriarch Photius as Literary Theorist,” Byzantinoslavica 56 (1995): 339–345; Thomas M. Conley, “Byzantine Criticism and the Uses of Literature,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2: The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 669–692, here 672–675. Amato “Epilogue,” 282. Amato “Epilogue,” 297. On the Four Parts of the Perfect Speech is edited with a German translation and commentary in Wolfram Hörandner, “Pseudo-Gregorios Korinthios, Über die vier Teile der perfekten Rede,” Medioevo Greco 12 (2012): 87–131. See also the remarks in Thomas M. Conley, “Rummaging in Walz’ Attic: Two Anonymous Opuscula in Rhetores Graeci,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 46 (2006), 101–122. Ed. Daniel Donnet, Le traité Περὶ συντάξεως λόγου de Grégoire de Corinthe. Étude de la tradition manuscrite, édition, traduction et commentaire (Bruxelles–Rome: Academia Belgica, 1967). The relationship between these rhetorical works is therefore a bit complicated: On the Four Parts has been thought to be part of Gregory’s On Syntax (this is also how Amato “Epilogue,” 284–285 presents it), but is clearly later; see Hörandner 2012.

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or 1280–ca. 1330) into his Synopsis of Rhetoric.38 Chorikios is presented as one of the best examples for study, next to Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Libanios, Isocrates, Prokopios of Gaza, Himerios, Lucian, and Achilles Tatios. As in the florilegia, the strong position of late antique authors is evident. This presence of late antique authors in Komnenian culture is an important fact for how Doukas’ ekphrasis, its intertextuality and intended effects should be evaluated. Textual authority, literary theft and mimesis In the Bibliotheka Photios mentions that Chorikios is “useful, above all, when he develops descriptions (ekphrases) and encomia.” The word “useful” (χρήσιμος) is noteworthy against the background of Doukas’ use of Chorikios’ ekphrases. The notion of usefulness recalls Basil of Caesarea’s famous advice to “pluck all that is useful and protect ourselves from the harmful” in pagan literature as when avoiding the thorns and picking the roses.39 Similarly, Metochites places Aristides above Demosthenes precisely on account of his usefulness.40 In general, it is clear that Chorikios (like his teacher Procopius) was considered a good stylistic model, useful for imitation in the rhetorical schools. The term ‘imitation’ is a blunt one, however. What should be imitated, and in what way?41 What is the relationship between content and form? What is considered good or successful imitation, and what is bad imitation or “theft” (and why)? Can Doukas’ quotes from Chorikios be considered a case of literary mimesis, or should they be classified as something else? To answer such questions it is necessary to go beyond the single concept of “imitation” and instead explore some of the various ways in, and levels on, which it could be carried out.

38

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40 41

Ed. Christian Walz, Rhetores Graeci, vol. 3 (Stuttgart and Tübingen: Cotta, 1834), 467–569. Basil of Caesarea, How to Benefit from the Writings of the Greeks 5. This is perhaps why Photios’ remark on Chorikios’ usefulness appears in connection with a discussion about Chorikios’ religion and his (in Photios’ view excessive) use of pagan myths. Photios remarks that Chorikios is a Christian, but because of Chorikios’ casual handling of pagan myth, Basil’s method may nevertheless be applicable. For the concept of “usefulness” in Patristic authors, see Christian Gnilka, Χρῆσις. Die Methode der Kirchenväter im Umgang mit der antiken Kultur I: Der Begriff des “rechten Gebrauchs” (Basel & Stuttgart: Schwabe & Co., 1984). See Conley, “Byzantine Criticism,” 669. Cf. Nilsson “The Same Story, but Another,” 201–202, who on the basis of the same questions approaches literary imitation and intertextuality with the more precise terminological tools from narratology (Genette).

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One well-known result of the bluntness of the term “imitation” is that notions of unoriginality and even plagiarism are projected upon it.42 In the case of plagiarism, however, it has often been pointed out that the term is a modern one, imbued with presuppositions about copyright, property and spiritual ownership.43 On the other hand, literary production in a culture where literary expressions from the past were seen as a repertoire and even a prerequisite for subsequent literary output does not, of course, mean that authorial recognition was in a total flux.44 Successful or failed mimesis is often framed as a question of how ‘originality’ or ‘creativity’ is perceived,45 but at its core lies notions of authority, involving canon building with implications for the school curricula as well as for the rhetorical and stylistic teaching and reading of texts. Authority also involves concepts 42

43

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45

Cf. Nilsson “The Same Story, but Another,” 197 for a brief contextualization of the view that imitation in general tends to be placed “on a par with plagiarism and forgery.” For overview articles with bibliographies on ancient ‘plagiarism’, see Konrat Ziegler, “Plagiat,” Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft 20.2 (1950): 1956–1997; Kathrin Ackermann, “Plagiat,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. 6 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003) 1223–1230; Michael Silk. “Plagiarism,” in Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1153; cf. also Marianina Olcott, “Ancient and Modern Notions of Plagiarism: A Study of Concepts of Intellectual Property in Classical Greece,” Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. 49 (2001–2), 1047–52, and the brief remarks on “plagiarism” in René Nünlist, “Poetics and Literary Criticism in the Framework of Ancient Greek Scholarship,” in Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship, vol. 2: Between Theory and Practice, ed. Franco Montanari, Stephanos Matthaios and Antonios Rengakos (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 706–755, here 742. Extended treatments of various aspects of “plagiarism” and “forgeries” in Antiquity include Eduard Stemplinger, Das Plagiat in der griechischen Literatur (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1912), Ziegler “Plagiat,” Wolfgang Speyer, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum. Ein Versuch ihrer Deutung (Munich: Beck, 1971), Scott McGill, Plagiarism in Latin Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. 1–30. For recent discussions on the literary functions of authors and authorship in Antiquity and Byzantium, see the essays in The Author’s Voice in Classical and Late Antiquity, ed. Anna Marmodoro and Jonathan Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and Aglae Pizzone, ed. The Author in Middle Byzantine Literature: Modes, Functions, and Identities (Boston and Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014). For Byzantium, see the contributions in Anthony Littlewood, ed. Originality in Byzantine Literature, Art, and Music: A Collection of Essays (Oxford: Oxbow, 1995). Mary B. Cunningham remarks (“Innovation or Mimesis in Byzantine Sermons?” in Littlewood Originality, 67–80, here 67): “The quest for originality in literary, artistic and musical genres is not one which the Byzantines themselves would have pursued or even perhaps have understood. It is thus important to recognize at the outset that the scholarly endeavour represented in this collection of essays reflects twentieth century preoccupations rather than medieval ones. Recognition of this fact does not however represent a denial of the importance of such a study.”

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of authorship, which is partly reflected also in, for example, Roman legislation.46 Notions of authority affected the practices of intertextuality for both aesthetic purposes and in-group formation, the reception of earlier texts, and the understanding of what constitutes a ‘literary theft’—an illegitimate mimesis. All of these issues are relevant in Doukas’ case. At an early stage, ancient scholars compiled lists enumerating passages of borrowings in authors such as Menander or Sophocles from other authors. The Alexandrian sholar and librarian Aristophanes of Byzantium may have been the first to produce a list of ‘thefts’ in an author.47 Such collections, by Stemplinger referred to as ‘κλοπαὶ-Literatur’, are largely lost, and our primary sources for their existence and content are the reports by Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–211/6) and Eusebios of Caesarea (c. 260–339/40).48 In the sixth book of his Stromateis Clement set out to demonstrate that the culture of the (pagan) Greeks was derivative from the Hebrew (thus: Christian) tradition. Some time after Clement, Eusebios in his Praeparatio Evangelica entered into a similar discussion on the Greeks’ dependence on the Hebrews. As part of his argument he included (PE 10.3) a table talk discussion concerning literary theft from the Neoplatonist Porphyry’s (234–at latest 305) lost Philological Lecture (Φιλόλογος ἀκρόασις).49 Judging from the examples adduced by Clement and Eusebios, Doukas’ use of Chorikios could certainly, in a quantitative sense, be labelled ‘theft’ (κλοπή).50 46

47

48 49

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See Russ VerSteeg, “The Roman Law Roots of Copyright,” Maryland Law Review 59 (2000): 522–52, esp. 530–6; Katharina de la Durantaye, “The Origins of the Protection of Literary Authorship in Ancient Rome,” Boston University International Law Journal 37 (2007): 37–111. The testimony is a quote from Porphyry in Eusebios PE 10.3.12 = Porphyry fr. 408F Smith = Arist.Byz. fr. 376 Slater = Menander test. 76 K.–A. Porphyry/Eusebios uses the word ‘steal’ (κλέπτειν), but it is debated whether it was actually part of the title of Aristophanes’ work. The text has “in the parallel selections both from him and from those from which he stole” (ἐν ταῖς Παραλλήλοις αὐτοῦ τε καὶ ἀφ’ ὧν ἔκλεψεν ἐκλογαῖς). Stemplinger, Das Plagiat, 7 takes the full phrase to be the title of the work, while Ziegler “Plagiat,” 1979 thinks that “stole” was not part of the original title. On Aristophanes’ critical activity in its Alexandrian context, see also Fausto Montana, “Hellenistic Scholarship,” in Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship, vol. 1: History; Disciplinary Profiles, ed. Franco Montanari, Stephanos Matthaios and Antonios Rengakos (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 60–183, here 122–123. Stemplinger, Das Plagiat, 6–80 and summary in Ziegler “Plagiat,” 1978–84. Porphyry 408F Smith. Porphyry, who also authored a work Against the Christians, is Eusebios’ main antagonist in the PE. For a discussion of PE 10.3, the people involved and the possible relevance for a re-attribution of On Sublimity to the third-century critic Cassius Longinus, see Malcolm Heath, “Longinus On Sublimity,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 45 (1999): 43–74. In Doukas’ case it would be a theft κατὰ λέξιν (cf. Clem. Al. Strom. 6.2.26.1 and 3; Porph. ap. Eus. 10.3.16), i.e. more or less verbatim as opposed to a theft “of ideas.” κατὰ διάνοιαν (cf. Clem. Al. Strom. 6.2.25.1)—these overarching categories of

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The issue is more complicated, however. Obviously, Clement and Eusebios had their own ideological agenda in dethroning the classical prestige culture and present similarities and imitations as “theft.” Quite apart from this, however, it is also possible to see in their works a qualitative differentiation between different kinds of imitation and how it may be valued on a scale from thievish repetition to brilliant emulation, a discussion that also surfaces in ps.-Longinos’ On sublimity.51 Some of the most important factors for such evaluation are on the one hand the writer’s authority and intentions, and on the other the aesthetic outcome of the imitation, i.e. whether or not it is a successful emulation. In Porphyry’s dinner discussion, the sophist Nikagoras remarks that Theopompos in his Hellenika has “transferred” (μετατίθημι) many things from Xenophon “and the terrible thing is that he made them worse” (Eus. PE 10.3.9 καὶ τὸ δεινόν, ὅτι ἐπὶ τὸ χεῖρον). Apart from the identification of similarities between works, this is also an aesthetic evaluation based on stylistic criteria: in transferring the account of the meeting between Pharnazabos and Agesilaos’ envoy Apollophanes from the fourth book of Xenophon’s Hellenika, Theopompos has made it “dull, without motion and effect” (10.3.10 ἀργά τε καὶ ἀκίνητα… καὶ ἄπρακτα). Similarities between Hyperides and Demosthenes, where the chronology between the authors is uncertain, are also judged as successful or unsuccessful imitation on the basis of their aesthetic effects. Demosthenes is to be admired “if he

51

κλοπή are clear (see Stemplinger 1912, e.g. 62), though the terminology is not consistent. On the related issue of form–content and meaning–referent divisions in Greek linguistic and rhetorical theories and the terminology employed, see the summary in Ineke Sluiter, “The Greek Tradition,” in Wout van Bekkum, Jan Houben, Ineke Sluiter and Kees Versteegh, The Emergence of Semantics in Four Linguistic Traditions: Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997), 147–224, here 151–155. These differentiations are especially clear in Eusebios’ quote from Porphyry although it is embedded in a work with the explicit aim to use direct quotations from pagan opponents so as to turn their arguments back on themselves like “missiles and arrows” (PE 5.5.5). As in Clement, Eusebios’ conclusion is that Porphyry’s account “proves what the character of Greek writers was like and that they did not spare even one another” (10.3.26 ὁποῖος…τῶν Ἑλληνικῶν συγγραφέων ὁ τρόπος ὅτι τε οὐδὲ τοῦ καθ’ ἑαυτῶν ἐφείσαντο ἐλέγχου). For an introduction to PE and its strategies, see Aaron P. Johnson, “Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica as Literary Experiment,” in Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism, ed. Scott F. Johnson (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 67–89. Incidentally, the dinner party that forms the setting of Porphyry’s discussion in Eusebios is hosted by the Platonist and literary critic Longinos to whom the treatise On sublimity has been ascribed; see Heath “Longinus On Sublimity.”

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took from Hyperides and corrected it appropriately” but Hyperides to be blamed “if he took from Demosthenes and perverted it for the worse.” (10.3.15).52 The importance of authority (which may of course be connected to aesthetic competence) is evident from ps.-Longinos’ famous passage from On the Sublime 13–14, dealing with the fuzzy borders between imitation and literary theft: Was Herodotus alone Homeric in the highest degree? No, there was Stesichorus at a still earlier date and Archilochos too, and above all others Plato, who drew off for his own use ten thousand runnels from the great Homeric spring. We might need to give instances, had not people like Ammonius drawn up a collection. Such borrowing (τὸ πρᾶγμα, lit. ‘the thing’, ‘the business’) is no theft (κλοπή); it is rather like the reproduction (ἀποτύπωσις) of good character by sculptures or other works of art. (On the Sublime 13.3–4, tr. Fyfe rev. Russell) μόνος Ἡρόδοτος Ὁμηρικώτατος ἐγένετο; Στησίχορος ἔτι πρότερον ὅ τε Ἀρχίλοχος, πάντων δὲ τούτων μάλιστα ὁ Πλάτων, ἀπὸ τοῦ Ὁμηρικοῦ κείνου νάματος εἰς αὑτὸν μυρίας ὅσας παρατροπὰς ἀποχετευσάμενος. καὶ ἴσως ἡμῖν ἀποδείξεων ἔδει, εἰ μὴ τὰ ἐπ’ εἴδους καὶ οἱ περὶ Ἀμμώνιον ἐκλέξαντες ἀνέγραψαν. ἔστι δ’ οὐ κλοπὴ τὸ πρᾶγμα, ἀλλ’ ὡς ἀπὸ καλῶν ἠθῶν ἡ πλασμάτων ἢ δημιουργημάτων ἀποτύπωσις.

Ps.-Longinus here claims that Plato’s emulatory engagement with Homer is not theft (κλοπή)—in fact, “zealous imitation” (13.2 μίμησίς τε καὶ ζήλωσις) of ancient prose writers and poets is a way of attaining sublimity. Plato’s authority seems to account at least partly for ps.-Longinos’ reluctance to brand his use of Homer as “theft.”53 For an author like Clement, on the other hand, whose purpose is precisely to undermine Plato’s authority, he is simply a thief. In the famous dictum, which Clement earlier in his work (Strom. 1.22.150.4) had ascribed to Numenius of Apamea (fr. 8.13): “What is Plato but an Atticizing Moses?” To settle questions of quantity (what and how much has been taken over) as well as issues of source criticism and chronology (from where and by whom) is thus only one step in determining a relationship between texts.54 Next to this 52

53

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Cf. also the remarks in Nilsson “The Same Story, but Another,” 199, on Psellos’ comparison between Achilles Tatios and Heliodoros, where he “seems to judge the chronology of the two novels in literary, not historical time.” Chronology is important, but the aesthetic judgement has the last word, whether the emulation is successful or not, or, as in the case of Achilles Tatios and Heliodoros, the novels outmerit one another on different levels. On Plato as a hero in ps.-Longinos, cf. Donald A. Russell, ‘Longinus’ On the Sublime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), xvii. In Porphyry apud Eusebios (PE 10.3.15), Nikagoras the sophist tells Apollonios the Grammarian that it is the latter’s task “to track down the thief on the basis of the dates” (ἐκ τῶν χρόνων ἀνιχνεῦσαι τὸν κλέπτην). This may have been the task of the sixth

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comes the judgement of whether the emulation was a successful one or not, based on criteria such as the (current) authority of both source and target text, the author’s perceived intention to deceive and “hide” the imitation, and the aesthetic evaluation of the imitating work in its totality and the function of the imitation within it. In the end, all of these parameters are largely extratextual and dependent on the audience’s reception of the text and their own agenda. In the case of Doukas there are no explicit critical evaluations extant; we do not know how his work was perceived. Nevertheless, against the background of the Komnenian culture discussed above and some clues provided by the text some tentative answers may be provided. The double perspective It is an axiom in cognitive linguistics as well as in traditional varieties of reader response theory that the meaning of a text or utterance is underdetermined by its language (the accumulated syntactic string). This necessitates inferences in the mind of the reader. These inferences can be guided by signals in the text that are not, strictly speaking, necessary for the syntactic and semantic parsing of the work, but functions as ‘clues’ to the reader. The references to late antique authors in Doukas’ Ekphrasis provide precisely such clues that may or may not be picked up depending on the reader’s competence. If we would read the text only by itself, and final part of grammar (the κρίσις ποιημάτων) as it is presented in Dionysios Thrax’s Art of Grammar. The exact nature of this “judgment of poems” has been debated, in antiquity as well as in recent discussions (the various interpretations, ancient and modern, of the nature of the κρίσις ποιημάτων are conveniently summarized and discussed in Alfons Wouters and Pierre Swiggers, “Definitions of Grammar,” in Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship, vol. 1: History; Disciplinary Profiles, ed. Franco Montanari, Stephanos Matthaios and Antonios Rengakos (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 515–544, here 528). It has been argued that at least part of it was precisely the ability to decide upon whether a work was correctly attributed to an author, cf. Dirk M. Schenkeveld, “The Linguistic Contents of Dionysius’ Παραγγέλματα,” in Dionysius Thrax and the Technē Grammatikē, ed. V. Law and I. Sluiter, 2nd rev. ed. (Münster: Nodus, 1998), 41–53, here 47 n. 9; similarly Conley “Byzantine Criticism,” 670; Nigel Wilson, “Scholiasts and Commentators,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 47 (2007), 39–70, here 63–65. But cf. T. Morgan, “Dionysius Thrax and the Educational Uses of Grammar,” in Dionysius Thrax and the Technē Grammatikē, ed. V. Law and I. Sluiter, 2nd rev. ed. (Münster: Nodus, 1998), 74–94, here 88, who remarks that “the ‘judgement’ or ‘interpretation’ of poems […] sits rather oddly with the other five parts, all of which are ‘technical’ in the sense that they all require the reader to apply clear methods of analysis to a passage in order to understand it.” She instead suggests that Dionysios may have indented the κρίσις ποιημάτων “to be the culmination of all the other processes rather than simply another means of exegesis” (89).

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as a “well wrought urn”, or if Chorikios’ text had been lost and we were unable to recognize the quotation, the text would ‘work’ anyway. Nevertheless, the intertextual clues that Doukas provides and that we can recognize certainly add a dimension to the interpretation of the Ekphrasis, even if many aspects and nuances available to Doukas and his original audience are lost to us. In particular there is a sustained evokation of late antique culture in the text. In a discussion of how Doukas presents the episode with a holy man in the monastery of St. Gerasimos, Efthymiadis remarks on how Doukas’ “description brings together or rather blends two distant worlds: the real one of his own age with the world conjured up in the literature of Late Antiquity.”55 Against the background of the Chorikian material outlined above, I should like to elaborate on that observation and show how it is valid on various levels of Doukas’ discourse and in various forms. Apart from the parallels in Chorikios, other dependencies, borrowings or intertexts in Doukas’ work have been commented on. With regard to Doukas’ description of Antioch (Ch. II), Hunger points to the “deutliche Anleihen bei dem Antiochos des Libanios.”56 This is not, however, a case of direct borrowings like those from Chorikios,57 but rather an affinity with regard to diction and turns of phrase to the degree that it is sometimes difficult to discern whether Doukas is describing Libanios’ Antioch or that of his own time. Nevertheless markers are inserted, highlighting the distance between now and then.58 Further, Doukas’ models are not limited to high-style rhetoricians; as Efthymiadis has noted he also “reproduces with little variation several narrative themes from the story of St. Gerasimos (d. 475)” down to the level of exact details in the scene (Ch. XXIII) in which an Iberian (Georgian) holy man cures a wounded 55

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Stephanos Efthymiadis, “Redeeming the Genre’s Remnants: Some Beneficial Tales Written in the Last Centuries of Byzantium,” Scripta & e-Scripta 8–9 (2010), 307–325, here 311. Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur, 19.78, 172. See also the remarks on Doukas’ imitation of Libanios in Glanville Downey, “An Illustrated Commentary on Libanius’ Antiochikos,” in Miscellanea Critica, vol. I (Leipzig: Teubner, 1964), 79–88, here 85 n. 6. For the general context of rhetorical traditions in Byzantine descriptions of cities, see Helen G. Saradi, “The Kallos of the Byzantine City: The Development of a Rhetorical Topos and Historical Reality,” Gesta 34 (1995), 37–56, with a brief discussion of Doukas on page 45. Also Helen G. Saradi, The Byzantine City in the Sixth Century: Literary Images and Historical Reality (Athens: Society of Messenian Archaeological Studies, 2006), 49–68; Messis, “Littérature, voyage et politique,” 154– 156. Though, as Messis remarks, the existence of an intermediary text cannot be ruled out; Messis, “Littérature, voyage et politique,” 159. II 528.10–18: “There was indeed a time when Theopolis of Antiochus on the Orontes took pride in…But time and a barbarous hand caused this good fortune to vanish…” (trans. Wilkinson). Cf. Messis, “Littérature, voyage et politique,” 154–155.

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lion—“Phokas seems to have encountered the late antique saint’s ‘literary descendant’ rather than a living holy ascetic.”59 This literary descendant functions as a reinforcement of how Gerasimos pervades time and keeps on working his miracles through new representatives throughout the generations. Besides these tacit borrowings or intertexts there are also explicit references to authorities on debated issues. In XIV.14 Doukas refers to Josephos when pronouncing his doubts as to the age of the Tower of David in Jerusalem, the sight of which does not fit Josephos’ description. Doukas also includes literary references, as in VI.1 where he refers the reader to “the writer of Leukippe,” i.e. Achilles Tatios, for an accurate description of the harbor at Sidon: “if you stay there you can see how the real harbor and the entry strait agree with the written description” (VI.2). Even the difficult genre designation points back to Late Antiquity. As discussed initially in this chapter, there was a drop in the output of pilgrim literature after Late Antiquity, after which Doukas’ work has been seen as a possible starting point for a new set of Byzantine pilgrims’ travel accounts. Doukas’ work then resurrects a late antique genre, within the framework of ‘ekphrasis’. If Doukas’ work indeed sparkled a revived twelfth-century interest in Greek pilgrim literature, this may be seen as a phenomenon parallel to the interest this period showed in another late antique genre: the novel. This interest, in turn, is displayed by Doukas himself in his reference to Achilles Tatios just mentioned. Thus, we find that Doukas reaches back to late antique models on all levels: genre, scenes and figures, quotes and idiom. The result of these late antique evocations is that a sustained late antique overlay is created over the contemporary travel account. The two layers are prevented from merging fully with one another through references to contemporary phenomena and people. To borrow some terminology from Gilles Fauconnier’s Blending Theory, the ekphrasis sets up a contemporary ‘mother’-space of Palestinian topography in which Doukas’ travel takes place. By the evocation of genre, scenes, figures, quotes and idiom discussed above, a late antique ‘daughter’-space is set up covering the same geographical territory.60 These two spaces—the late antique and the contemporary one—rather than fully blending into a synchronous unit, function as frames for a larger chronological span, creating a sense of cultural unity from Late Antiquity to the present. The parameters of the construction are: (i) a

59 60

Efthymiadis, “Redeeming the Genre’s Remnants,” 311. The full exposition of Blending Theory was presented in Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, “Conceptual Intergration Networks,” Cognitive Science 22 (1998), 133–187; see also the reprinted version with revisions in Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings, ed. Dirk Geeraerts (Berlin & New York: de Gruyter, 2006), 303–371.

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single physical space (Palestine) onto which are projected (ii) two chronological points (Late Antiquity and 12th c. Byzantium) framing a time-span.61 The effect of this interplay between past and present Palestine is the formation of a concept of cultural unity and continuity within this spatio-temporal setting. Doukas performs a re-enactment of Late Antiquity while at the same time thematizing the temporal distance needed to form a sense of continuity at all.62 Doukas’ audience would presumably have experienced aesthetic pleasure from the recognition of the various clues that Doukas lays out in the text. Such recognition creates, on the one hand, a sense of in-group belonging within the literary elite acquainted with a set of familiar authors. As in all in-group jargon, naming the source would ruin the game. Papaioannou, discussing the consequences of the fact that “rhetorical handbooks presented highly self-referential earlier authors as models at the top of the canon” notes: “What may appear as deference to authority, in fact operated as a self-authorizing mask. It is notable, for instance, that middle Byzantine authors usually do not alert the reader that they are citing an earlier authority.”63 This is what Stemplinger refers to as “Komplimentzitate” and the same idea colors Sanders’ distinction between quotation, citation, adaptation, and appropriation: “Citation,” she says, “presumes a more deferential relationship [than quotation]; it is frequently self-authenticating, even reverential, in its reference to the canon of ‘authoritative’, culturally validated, texts.”64 As outlined above, Chorikios was precisely such a model author, by no means an obscure reference in the literary circles of the twelfth century.65 “Forgery” or “plagiarism” seems to be unusable analytical concepts here, and whatever intentions Doukas may have had with his work it seems unlikely that he wanted his references—and his use of them—to go unnoticed. The intertextual recognition is a prerequisite for the inference of continuity just discussed. Not only would the intertexts be recognised as late antique, but also as Syrio-Palestinian. The references to St. Gerasimos, occurring precisely at the monastery dedicated to him, is perhaps the most clear-cut case of where the chronological spaces overlap 61

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Biblical time and narration is of course a part of the amalgam, but I leave that aside in this analysis. On imitation as a means of highlighting distance, cf. Nilsson “The Same Story, but Another,” 199. Stratis Papaioannou, “Voice, Signature, Mask: The Byzantine Author,” in The Author in Middle Byzantine Literature: Modes, Functions, and Identities, ed. Aglae Pizzone (Boston and Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 21–40, here 24–25. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, The New Cultural Idiom (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006), 4. On Byzantine theatra, cf. Margaret Mullett, “Aristocracy and Patronage in the Literary Circles of Comnenian Constantinople,” in The Byzantine Aristocracy IX to XIII Centuries, ed. Michael Angold (Oxford: B.A.R., 1984), 173–201, and the contributions in Michael Grünbart, ed. Theatron: Rhetorische Kultur in Spätantike und Mittelalter (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007).

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topographically. Similarly, Libanios is an obvious choice for Antioch, and it is probably no coincidence that Chorikios, being a Palestinian author, is employed for the descriptions of images. The late antique backdrop is therefore important not only for purposes of literary aesthetics. It takes on a special significance when combined with Palestine and with pilgrimage. The resurrection of the late antique genre of pilgrim literature is not only a symptom of an experimental literary culture. It is also part of a memorial competition as the fourth crusade drew near. By reinforcing the specifically Greek past of Palestine, bridging the gap between Late Antiquity and his own twelfth century he is, in effect, saying that things have indeed changed, yet remain the same. In projecting a late antique layer onto his text about the holy places of Palestine, Doukas makes the simultaneously literary, political, cultural, and religious claim that the contested area of the Holy Land was, and is, Greek.

HeLena bodin

“I Sank through the Centuries”: Late Antiquity Inscribed in Göran Tunström’s Novel The Thief A unique treasure has been kept in Uppsala University Library in Sweden since the seventeenth century: the Gothic Codex Argenteus. One of the scribes who created this precious object has lately been identified as a certain Wiljarith bokareis, i.e. Wiljarith the scribe.1 Originally produced for Theoderic the Great in early sixth-century Ravenna, the Codex Argenteus, or the Silver Bible, has become a part of Swedish culture, history, and memory. A recurring deficiency in popular presentations of this treasure consists in the fact that its history is narrated as if it had begun in the seventeenth century, when the codex was transported as booty from Prague to Sweden and donated to Uppsala University Library by Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie. Without a doubt, the Codex Argenteus has had a remarkable reception history in Sweden. On display at Uppsala University Library, it has been subject to several mysterious thefts and also an actual robbery.2 Against this background, the Swedish writer Göran Tunström (1937–2000) has crafted a compelling story. The Codex Argenteus plays a significant role in his highly acclaimed novel Tjuven (1986; The Thief).3 The quest of the protagonist, Johan Jonson Lök, a doctoral student specializing in Gothic at Uppsala University in the middle of the twentieth century, is to gain knowledge about the Silver Bible in order to steal it. Particularly interesting is the latter part of the novel, where 1

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For Wiljarith as a historical person, see Marta Bigus, “Codex Argenteus and Political Ideology in the Ostrogothic Kingdom,” Lychnos 2011: 11–12. For the adventures of the Codex Argenteus, see Lars Munkhammar, The Silver Bible: Origins and History of the Codex Argenteus (Uppsala: Selenas, 2011), 69–112, and “Codex Argenteus,” Uppsala University Library, accessed June 21, 2017, http://www. ub.uu.se/about-the-library/exhibitions/codex-argenteus/codex-argenteus-history. Göran Tunström, Tjuven: Roman (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1986). Tjuven has been translated into no less than eleven languages, but it has never been published in English. This article therefore benefits greatly from being able to quote from a complete but never published English translation left by translator Joan Tate (1922–2000) in her archive at Lund University Library. Its first chapter has however been published, together with an article by Tate, “How Would You Put It?”, where she discusses some of the problems the translator encountered, in Swedish Book Review. Supplement 1988. Göran Tunström (London: SELTA, 1988), 28–37 and 38–40.

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a previously unknown (and obviously fictive) Gothic manuscript, produced by Wiljarith the scribe, is rendered into Swedish blank verse. Obsession with writing It has been suggested that The Thief is a novel about the kind of obsession and ruthlessness that can make writers sacrifice those nearest to them.4 Göran Tunström has also expressed similar thoughts.5 As will be demonstrated in this chapter, such an obsession with writing is as characteristic of Johan Jonson Lök, the modern academic, as it is of Wiljarith, the Gothic scribe. Inspired by this interpretation of the novel, the aim of the present chapter is to examine The Thief and its use of late antique writing techniques and texts, both real and fictive, from the perspective of cultural memory studies, with a particular interest in media studies. In Memory in Culture (2011), based on semiotic models, the literary historian Astrid Erll has defined cultural memory as an instance in which historical reference to the past functions as one mode of cultural remembering, specific to the modern era. Consequently, historiography is regarded as a medium of cultural memory, alongside others such as the novel.6 With regard to literature, Erll has furthermore suggested that it is a medium simultaneously building and observing memory. While it gives its readers “the illusion of glimpsing the past,” it is also “a major medium of critical reflection upon such processes of representation.”7 Erll differentiates among three functional aspects of memory media on a collective level: storage, circulation, and cue.8 A storage medium is one where the contents of cultural memory are stored. According to Erll, it is characterized by its capacity to “remember something” while simultaneously being remembered itself.9 A circulation medium is a medium whereby the contents of cultural memory are disseminated across space, as in popular culture.10 As Erll observes, versions and images of the past communicated in this way try to maintain the illusion of transparency; that is, they tend to be “more effective the less attention is drawn to their ‘mediatedness’.”11 Since they are tied to specific ideas or problems, yet another characteristic of circulation media with regard to cultural memory is their 4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11

Majgull Axelsson, “Det mänskliga pergamentet,” 00-tal: Tidskrift om litteratur & konst 16 (2004), 109. Tunström, Under tiden, 121–22. Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. Sara B. Young (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 45. Erll, Memory in Culture, 159. Erll, Memory in Culture, 126–31, esp. table V.1 at 129. Erll, Memory in Culture, 127. Erll, Memory in Culture, 126. Erll, Memory in Culture, 127.

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ability to fulfill an ideological function.12 When it comes to the media cue, ‘media’ does not necessarily refer to a medium proper as defined by information theory, but rather to something similar to the well-known notion of lieux de mémoire, a phrase coined by Pierre Nora. Particular locations may trigger collective remembrance which “the mnemonic community associates with specific narratives about the past,” for example crimes or terrorist deeds.13 These functional aspects of memory media are particularly interesting for the analysis of The Thief, considering its literary capacity for building and observing memory, and the various functions of Codex Argenteus in the novel. After a short résumé of the story, I will discuss the different functions of the codex, the novel and the library, respectively, as memory media. This is done in order to inquire into the identity of the thief and to demonstrate the importance of media for the plot. Thereafter, late antique writing techniques and intertexts, together with the role of the historian Procopius (early sixth century) in the novel are explored, before turning to an examination of the motif of writing on skin in The Thief, particularly the writing of history on female skin. By focusing on how Late Antiquity is inscribed in Tunström’s novel, it will be demonstrated how the obsession with writing is vital for all these aspects of the mediation of cultural memory. Working on “the Book” Göran Tunström was neither a historian nor a philologist. From the outset, it was neither Gothic nor late antique history that caught his attention, but a burlesque, tragicomic tale about a man who planned to steal the Silver Bible from the library in Uppsala, which he overheard at a dinner.14 Like several of Tunström’s novels, The Thief is partly set in the small Swedish provincial town of Sunne, where the author grew up, but as the story develops, it moves along to Uppsala and further to Ravenna.15 Two stories run parallel in the novel—one contemporary, set in Sweden during a few decades following the Second World War, and one late antique, set in Ravenna during and after the reign of Theoderic in the early sixth century. Beginning in Sunne, the childhood, career, and lifelong lie of the protagonist, Johan Jonson Lök, are described. His upbringing is said to take place “in the 12 13 14 15

Erll, Memory in Culture, 127. Erll, Memory in Culture, 128. Göran Tunström, Under tiden (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1993), 119. For presentations in English of Tunström’s novels, including The Thief, see Karin Petherick, “Göran Tunström,” in Swedish Book Review. Supplement 1988. Göran Tunström (London: SELTA, 1988), 2–7; and Charlotte Wittingham, “Göran Tunström,” in “Chapter X. Twelve Modern Novelists,” in Aspects of Modern Swedish Literature, ed. Irene Scobbie (Norwich: Norvik Press, 1999), 395–401.

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midden of civilisation” (343), and as a young boy he promises his equally poor cousin Hedvig that he will create a new, wealthy life for both of them together. His plan is to steal the Silver Bible, “the Book,” from the Uppsala University Library and then sell it for profit. He enrolls as a student at Uppsala University in the Department of Nordic Languages to study Gothic, and soon he becomes an expert, having climbed the social ladder from poverty in a provincial town to academic honor in Uppsala, the city of learning. As a doctoral student, Johan unexpectedly succeeds in piecing together a message out of Gothic letters hidden as a cryptogram in the Codex Argenteus. In the novel, this message is presented as an enigma in Latin script: “undaro wlita mein anamma is wlits anar” (“beneath my face/image lies another face/image,” 244).16 While in Ravenna on a scholarship, and by means of a surprising interpretation of the enigmatic message, Johan discovers—and steals—a previously unknown manuscript in Gothic transcribed by the hand of Wiljarith, and a few years later he bases his dissertation on this finding. This so-called Ravenna manuscript, which takes up about 25 pages of the novel, is rendered in Swedish blank verse but pretends to be composed in Gothic. It tells the story of the Gothic scribe Wiljarith, who was employed by Theoderic in order to produce “the Book.” After the death of King Theoderic, wars, plague and famine torment the region of Ravenna for decades.17 Wiljarith is left with a seemingly impossible task in a new time and an unstable situation, where learning is put aside and wars and famine succeed each other. No one can still read “the Book” that Wiljarith has worked on, no one speaks his language any more, and he does not understand the languages he hears around him (315). Thus he ends his chronicle: Soldier I never was. I know but one thing: to write, and steadfastly—while the laughter of history rolled beneath the sky—I have, until now, at the entrance of the tide, believed I served a kind of necessity. I no longer think so, as the last words are imprinted on a skin I cut from the body of the woman whom I willingly and with joy took as my wife. (316)

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Göran Tunström, The Thief, trans. Joan Tate, 1990. Unpublished manuscript in Joan Tate’s Collection, Lund University Library. Pages referring to The Thief are given in connection with quotations. Fortunately, the pagination of Tate’s manuscript is the same as in the Swedish original. I have made a few corrections of typing errors in Tate’s translation. See further Brent D. Shaw, “War and Violence.” in Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, ed. G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), esp. at 131–133.

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The despairing and dystopic setting of Wiljarith’s chronicle recorded in the Ravenna manuscript in many ways matches the apocalyptic atmosphere of the unraveling of the modern part of the novel. By concentrating on his academic career, Johan deceives Hedvig, who suffers from an incurable mental disorder as a result of her father’s incestuous relationship with her. Johan never steals “the Book;” neither does he succeed in rescuing Hedvig, though they live together for some time. While Johan is occupied with finishing his academic work, Hedvig dies in a fire after having given birth to their son. Though Johan never carries out his intention to steal the Silver Bible, it is evident from the plot that he is nevertheless a thief—he steals the Ravenna manuscript, which is the property of the Italian state, and by procrastinating he robs Hedvig of her future. As explicitly stated in the novel, the time in which the modern protagonist lives, characterized by environmental destruction and degradation, mirrors the situation of the Gothic scribe, living in a Ravenna afflicted by wars and famine. They are also both relentlessly working on “the Book,” as Codex Argenteus is called in the novel. Johan, the protagonist, questions himself with particular regard to the similarity between their “mindless projects” (343): […] is my life like Wiljarith’s, devoted to a task that at its completion no one will care about or have the chance to care about? It often seems as if I have penetrated his body and found myself seated there, with no chance of making contact with my own time. Year after year, he-I imprint letters on parchment made of calf-hide, calves needed more for the starving during those long wars. Words are added to words. (342)

Cultural memory mediated by the codex, the novel, and the library As one of the world’s most famous manuscripts, the Codex Argenteus functions as a medium where the contents of cultural memory are stored, in this case the Gospels in Gothic translation. These are however of less significance in The Thief, where the focus is rather on the otherwise dead and lost Gothic language and script, an equally important part of the stored content of the codex. Particularly the message discovered in the dead language plays a crucial role in the novel, both in its plot and in the protagonist’s quest. Reflecting on his achievements after having defended his dissertation, Johan exclaims joyfully: “To have discovered an already dead language, to claim its place in the mind of this new ahistorical day!” (349) The dead Gothic language, preserved for modern times in the Codex Argenteus, is paradoxically revived in Tunström’s novel by means of the fictive hidden message in Gothic, its translation into Swedish, and its consequences for the plot.

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In the novel, a long excerpt is quoted from the Swedish Latinist and palaeographer Jan-Olof Tjäder’s 1975 article on the Silver Bible’s route to Sweden (196–199).18 The codex, with its distinctive purple parchment with letters inscribed in silver and gold is characterized as “a magnificent volume—a book that was to be looked at rather than read,” and its lettering is described as “an artistic script in which the letters are intended to have an ornamental effect even at the expense of their basic model” (197). In this excerpt the Gothic scribe Wiljarith is also introduced under the signature Wiljarith bokareis, who was known in Ravenna as late as 551, and is most likely to have been the scribe in charge of producing the Silver Bible for King Theoderic at the Gothic court, where it functioned as a status symbol.19 In this way, some features of the manuscript, including details about its script, are presented to Johan and to the reader. As is well known, Late Antiquity was a time when Bibles and Gospel books like the Codex Argenteus were fashioned as precious objects, richly adorned, granting glory to rulers, courts, churches, and monasteries.20 Johan refers especially to this transitional historical phase and the various functions of books during the period in a lecture he gave during his first years in Uppsala “on the development of the Christian book from an ‘open’ book, which was to be read, to a ‘closed book’ which was to be revered and represent the divinity” (207–208). This theme concerning books as symbols is also elaborated in the fictive Ravenna manuscript, where Wiljarith the scribe recounts how King Theoderic commissioned from his workshop a book similar to the one owned by his rival Odoacer. Theoderic himself cannot read, but according to the fictive Ravenna manuscript, he nevertheless understands that books in the Goths’ own language are needed in order to build a cultivated Gothic society. It is evident that Theoderic desires the book precisely as a magnificent object, since he commands Wiljarith: “Go now and make me an outer work that will / last long beyond your death and mine.” (301) But in Tunström’s novel, the Silver Bible is not only an object. It also acquires agency. When Johan eventually achieves his academic goal and can look forward to being appointed head of the library’s manuscript department with keys and direct access to “the Book,” Johan accuses the codex of being “the Thief,” as it slowly takes over his life: “I seemed to have already taken it, just as it had already taken me. Bit by bit, it had been transmitted to my inner being, yes, it was in there, 18

19

20

Jan-Olof Tjäder, “Silverbibeln och dess väg till Sverige,” Religion och Bibel 1975: 70–86. Several pages (Tjäder 71–74, 79–80) are rendered in the novel with only minor changes, including a few mistakes, concerning the spelling of Latin and Gothic names and a quote erroneously attributed to John Chrysostom. Tjäder, “Silverbibeln och dess väg till Sverige,” 198. See also Bigus, “Codex Argenteus and Political Ideology in the Ostrogothic Kingdom,” mentioned above. On the exterior of Early Christian books, see further John Lowden, “The Word Made Visible: The Exterior of the Early Christian Book as Visual Argument,” in The Early Christian Book, ed. William E. Klingshirn and Linda Safran (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 13–47.

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rotting, decaying from the filth of our day, a shell of rubbish” (348). Such an interpretation, casting the codex in the role of the thief, is also supported by the cover of the original Swedish edition of the novel, on which the word Tjuven (The Thief) is written on a page of the Codex Argenteus, as in a palimpsest. The codex is in this way branded as the thief, but still there are yet more thieves to be found, both in the novel and at the site of display of the codex in the library. At first glance, the novel appears to the reader as a conventionally narrated story, but about halfway through the text, a confessional and subjective narrating “I” appears, and reveals itself to be the protagonist, Johan Jonson Lök, who is a prisoner, writing down his life story. Up until this point he has figured as one of the characters: “I have tried to keep a distance by referring to myself in the third person. That is no longer possible.” (161) The addressee of his confession is his newborn son, whom he names “Judge” (Sw. “Domare,” 179). By being composed as a confession, the novel achieves an air of directness and transparency. Such directness is also achieved through the many apostrophes addressed to the absent You, the little child functioning as “the Judge,” a position which the reader is also invited to assume as the vicarious addressee of the prisoner’s confessions.21 Both narrative devices aim to identify Johan, the protagonist-cum-narrator, as the culprit, and thereby also as the thief in the novel’s title, since he is writing his confession from prison and appealing to his judge. However, his confession concerns neither the Silver Bible, which he never stole, nor so much the actual theft of the Ravenna manuscript, since he has returned it in a parcel sent to the Italian embassy, but his lifelong deception of Hedvig. What is more, the design and display of the Silver Bible in Uppsala University Library offer a site that is associated with crimes and mysteries.22 The purple parchment of Codex Argenteus, with letters inscribed in silver and gold, is displayed in a room, almost a crypt, with alabaster windows simulating “the holy rooms in Ravenna, e.g. the mausoleum of Galla Placidia.”23 Visitors seem to be invited directly into a past of bloody and cruel deeds, but also into a rich culture of uttermost splendour. This atmosphere of obscurity and mystery is also expressed in Tunström’s novel, as Johan begins to increase his knowledge of the Codex Argenteus: “The disappointment I had felt over the single page in the display case vanished. I went over to the case and again looked at that dark shimmering piece of parchment, the lettering on it scarcely discernible.” (199) The plot of The Thief 21

22

23

Anders Tyrberg, Anrop och ansvar: Berättarkonst och etik hos Lars Ahlin, Göran Tunström, Birgitta Trotzig, Torgny Lindgren (Stockholm: Carlssons, 2002), 54–55, 182– 183, and 204–205. For mysterious thefts, see Munkhammar, The Silver Bible, 141–60. There is also a recent Swedish detective novel, a pastiche, by the pseudonym Marianne Minck, Fallet Cassberg (Uppsala: Selenas, 2015; The Case of Cassberg) involving Codex Argenteus and Uppsala University Library. Munkhammar, The Silver Bible, 19, with photos from the exhibition.

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only adds to the many media cues and big headlines that the Silver Bible has supplied while on display in the library. As a matter of fact, a robbery was actually accomplished in April 1995, albeit in a much less sophisticated manner than in the theft planned in the novel and ending in failure.24 As we have seen, the novel’s title The Thief may refer not only to the protagonist but also to several different agents and actions of theft and deception. All of them—the codex, the novel, and the exhibition in the library—activate the role of media as storing, circulating, and triggering collective memories. Late Antique writing techniques and intertexts In The Thief, there are several excursive sections treating late antique writing techniques, where significant digressions about parchment, ink, and letters are foregrounded. In the fictive chronicle rendered in the novel, Wiljarith describes in detail how his men in the workshop happily began their immense new task by preparing parchment from calves and requesting silver and gold for the ink from the king’s treasurer (303). Johan also gives a detailed description of his work on the codex during late nights spent at the library: “I was leaning over letters I was distinguishing from their meaning with the finest of knives” (241). Included in Johan’s written confession, which forms the novel, is a long description of “his findings regarding the structure of the parchment” (241) of the Silver Bible. It dwells, for example, on the contrast between the parchment’s hair and flesh side, and on nuances of the coloring: “Especially when the silver and gold ink has dissolved and particles of it spread over the page, this then acquires a yellowish grey, largely brownish and occasionally a harsh green colour” (242). By his meticulous examination of the manuscript and his endeavor to merge with Wiljarith’s hand, Johan thinks he can follow the scribe’s pauses and happens thereby to find some letters written in a darker color: I leant over the text in order to see these pauses, see if the text had been disturbed by anything external, but I saw no sideways sliding, no crooked strokes. However, I did see something else. At a certain slant, some of the surfaces of the letters flickered in a darker colour than those nearby. The ink seemed to come to an end in the pen, then he filled it again—a bluish violet colour. (243)

Thanks to these darker letters, Johan is finally able to decipher the mysterious message from the codex: “undaro wlita mein anamma is wlits anar” (“beneath 24

See Munkhammar, The Silver Bible, 157–60.

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my face/image lies another face/image,” 244). It is clear that the novel’s deep engagement with late antique writing techniques is of decisive importance to its plot. Furthermore, there is a deliberate and creative re-use of well-known late antique texts in The Thief. They might be the objects of explicit allusions or function as concealed intertexts. The Bible, in particular the Book of Revelation and its apocalyptic vision, features as a prominent source of allusions. Since the novel shares a number of motifs with the Book of Revelation—not only the one of “coming like a thief” (Rev 3:3, 16:15)—it could be regarded as a late modern, secular, and burlesque narrative staging of the lofty vision concluding the Bible.25 The novel’s many allusions to the resurrection prophecy in Ezekiel 37, where the dry bones in the valley become alive with sinews, flesh, skin, and breath (Ez. 37: 1–10), have also been discussed by several scholars.26 The novel is subdivided into three parts, designated as “books.” Within the narrative, the three books of the novel correspond to the black notebooks of Johan, where he pens his confession, and each book has a short motto taken from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.” These extracts have been the focus of earlier research on The Thief, wherein the pronounced Orphic theme of the novel—to sing the beloved back from the Underworld—is rightly emphasized.27 Tunström’s novel alludes to the ancient Orpheus myth by quoting Rilke, who is one of its modern mediators.28 It is clear from the chosen mottoes that The Thief deploys the same motifs as Rilke does, but with a new focus on books and writing: There are the silver and red colors of Hades, which in The Thief are the colors of the Silver Bible; there is the lament sung by Orpheus, which may recreate a whole world, an effect which in The Thief is accomplished by the written confession of Johan; and there is the woman, who in Hades no longer is what she once was, who in The Thief has counterparts in the characters of both Hedvig, Johan’s cousin, and 25

26 27

28

See further Skans Kersti Nilsson, Det förlorade paradiset: En studie i Göran Tunströms Sunneromaner (PhD diss., University of Gothenburg, 2003), 77–92, on The Thief as an apocalypse. See Tyrberg, Anrop och ansvar, 145–149; Nilsson, Det förlorade paradiset. The mottoes are not rendered in Tate’s translation but found on pages 5, 177, and 267 in Tjuven. Tunström quotes Rilke’s poem in Swedish translation by Carl-Henrik Wittrock, in Rainer Maria Rilke, Dikter (Stockholm: FIB:s lyrikklubb, 1978), 89–91. For the Orphic theme, see Tyrberg, Anrop och ansvar, 190–200; Lena Malmberg, “Myten om Orfeus hos Rådström, Tunström och Frostenson,” in Myter och motiv, ed. Susanne Larsson-Krieg, Svensklärarföreningens årsskrift 1995 (Stockholm: Natur och kultur & Svensklärarföreningen, 1995), 106–127; Karin Birgitta Adam, Jag kräver en inre Columbus—ich verlange einen inneren Columbus: Versuch über die Poetik Göran Tunströms (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004). For Orphism in Late Antiquity, see “Orpheus,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3:1538; Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, Orphism and Christianity in Late Antiquity (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 2010).

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Mathalasuintha, the wife of the Gothic scribe Wiljarith, as will be demonstrated. Ultimately, the silence and death of these women form the condition for writing in The Thief. Procopius’s The Gothic War The subdivision into books rather than chapters might appear antiquated in the context of a twentieth-century novel. It seems that Tunström uses this device not only to hint at the notebooks of Johan but also at the extensive though concealed use of Procopius’s The Gothic War (fl. 550) in The Thief, in the Ravenna manuscript.29 As the analysis will demonstrate, it appears to have been Tunström’s principal late antique text and source of inspiration while he was working on his novel. One of the phrases often repeated by Procopius, “So much for this matter,” is quoted on the first page of the novel.30 Contrasted with the characters living in Swedish Sunne, he is also immediately introduced to the readers: “So much for this matter,” as Procopius says. Procopius was not from Sunne. He was born in Caesarea in Palestine at the end of the fifth century, a superb military historian who knew how to take revenge after carefully observing the decline and fall of the Roman Empire from his viewpoint on the back of Field Marshal Belisarius during the Gothic wars. “More of that later.” (7)

Tunström is also indebted to Procopius for several pages of Wiljarith’s fictive chronicle of life, work, and wars in Ravenna in the early sixth century, the Ravenna manuscript. Just as Johan does at the beginning of his confession on the novel’s first page, so too Wiljarith quotes Procopius, after having described the tide in Ravenna: In the afternoon, the water turns again, “so much for this matter” as Procopius writes from his observation post on the back of Belisarius when on the emperor’s orders he insults us and call us barbarians. (298)

29

30

Procopius’s account of the Gothic war is rendered in books V–VIII of History of the Wars, vol. 3–5, trans. H.B. Dewing (London: Heinemann, 1919). For Procopius and the Gothic war, see the chapters “The Historian of the Wars” and “Procopius in Italy” in Averil Cameron, Procopius and the Sixth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 134–151 and 188–206. Tunström, The Thief, 7; Procopius, History of the Wars V.i.23 (as one of many examples).

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As a matter of fact, it is Tunström himself who seems to write Wiljarith’s chronicle perched, so to speak, on Procopius’s shoulders. About half of the fictive chronicle builds closely on information and episodes rendered by Procopius in the first two volumes of his book on the Gothic war: both Wiljarith and Procopius mention the marshes of Ravenna and describe the workings of the tide, as it is affected by the moon.31 They share the stories about how Theoderic’s people—including women and children—left Thrace in order to lay siege to Ravenna,32 and how Theoderic after three years of war killed his rival Odoacer and then ruled for 37 years.33 Wiljarith also relates the same story as Procopius about the death of Theoderic, but in this case it is Wiljarith himself and not Procopius who observes a striking likeness between the head of the philosopher Symmachus, who was killed by Theoderic, and the head of the great fish the king was served.34 This episode is only one among many examples of details found in Procopius that Tunström re-uses. They are so pregnant and suggestive that readers familiar with Tunström’s narrative style readily regard them as Tunström’s own inventions. After Theoderic’s death, Wiljarith proceeds to render in more or less the same wording as Procopius the conflict between Amalasuintha, Theoderic’s daughter, and the Gothic men concerning the education of her son, Atalaric, who was only eight years old when he succeeded Theoderic on the throne.35 Wiljarith’s chronicle follows Procopius’s history of the Gothic war closely up to the fourth part of the first book, in which Amalasuintha is killed by Theodatus,36 after which the war begins. Procopius writes, “there would be war without truce between the emperor and themselves,” and Wiljarith echoes: “Thus began the most fearful of wars.”37 When describing the effects of the war—diseases such as the plague, and a famine so severe it even caused the outbreak of cannibalism—the chronicle follows two full pages of Procopius’s account.38 There are also individual episodes from the war described by Wiljarith and Procopius, for example the tale of Vittiges and his evil wife,39 or the touching story about an orphaned newborn baby who was nursed by a goat: […] Someone told of a woman giving birth to a child 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

For the marshes: Tunström, The Thief, 293; Procopius, History of the Wars V.i.18. For the tide: Tunström, The Thief, 295 and 297–98; Procopius, History of the Wars V.i.17, 19–21 and 23. Tunström, The Thief, 297; Procopius, History of the Wars V.i.10 and 12. Tunström, The Thief, 297–98; Procopius, History of the Wars V.i.24–27. Tunström, The Thief, 298–99; Procopius, History of the Wars V.i.32–38. Tunström, The Thief, 307; Procopius, History of the Wars V.ii.1, 3, 6, 11–19. Tunström, The Thief, 308; Procopius, History of the Wars V.iv.9, 13–14, 16, 27–28. Tunström, The Thief, 308; Procopius, History of the Wars V.iv.30. Tunström, The Thief, 310; Procopius, History of the Wars VI.xx.19–32. Tunström, The Thief, 311; Procopius, History of the Wars V.xi.27 and VI.x.11.

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Helena Bodin at once having to forsake the place and presumably also her own life, for she never returned. Thus it was for many. But in her village a goat had recently given birth and lowered her full udder over the screaming child, gave of her milk and protected it, preventing its death.40

The key difference between Tunström’s fictive “Ravenna manuscript,” which he claims to be written by Wiljarith, and Procopius’s The Gothic War is the identity of the eyewitness and thus of the narrator. Tunström’s method seems to have been to expand and perhaps also enhance Procopius’s narrative with sections about Wiljarith’s life as a scribe, written from the perspective of an old and bitter man of Gothic origin who has been severely afflicted by war. He has remained in his workshop in Ravenna after having emigrated there from Thrace a long time ago, and he is likely to be about two decades older than Procopius (b. 500).41 Having worked for decades on a magnificent book for a dead king in a language that will soon be dead and forgotten, Wiljarith ends up in a state of lonely despair: […] For my people’s sake I have done it. I have done it for my day, BUT IN A LANGUAGE THAT SOON NO MAN WILL UNDERSTAND. (296)

In contrast, Procopius was a much more fortunate man—a travelled and experienced historian, writing in versatile Greek and able to combine different perspectives and aims into a single narrative. Writing history on female skin The message “undaro wlita mein anamma is wlits anar” (“beneath my face/image lies another face/image,” 244), which Johan extracts from the letters in Codex Argenteus, proves to be nothing less than a riddle in the form of an epigram, a one-line ekphrasis.42 Only when linked with the correct work of art can it be 40 41

42

Tunström, The Thief, 309; Procopius, History of the Wars VI. xvii.1–11. In Tunström, The Thief, 304–05, it is mentioned that Wiljarith is 44 years old one year before the death of Theoderic (d. 526). Cf. Adam, Jag kräver en inre Columbus—ich verlange einen inneren Columbus, 252–253, who analyzes the message as an emblematic heading. It should be noted, however, that the enigmatic phrase in Gothic is a little corrupt: mein anamma should rather be written as one word, meinamma (dative singular of the Gothic word for “my.” needed because wlita, face/image, is in the dative). Also, the letter thorn (þ or th) has been dropped in anar, which should be correctly rendered as anþar. I am grateful to professor Jenny Larsson at Stockholm University for these observations.

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solved, namely, with the mosaic panel representing Justinian and his suite in the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, probably built between 532 and 547,43 that is, during the life of Wiljarith. Johan is eventually able to find a previously unknown manuscript—that is, the fictive Ravenna manuscript—hidden in a cavity behind one of the portrayed faces in the mosaic panel, representing one of the men in emperor Justinian’s suite, probably a court official (280–289).44 The explanation provided in the novel is that this very portrait must have been made after a living model, namely Wiljarith the scribe, who had not only lent his features to the portrait of the official but also deposited his chronicle in the cavity behind this picture of his face in the mosaic panel. According to Johan’s deciphering of the Gothic riddle, the word wlits could mean either face or image. When the manuscript of Wiljarith’s chronicle is found “beneath my image,” (244) or to be even more precise “beneath the image of my face,” the first wlits of the enigmatic message has been successfully interpreted. But what about the second wlits? Is the discovered manuscript intended to be interpreted metaphorically as yet another face? This remains unclear to the reader until the last line of Wiljarith’s chronicle in the Ravenna manuscript, where he confesses that he is writing his last words not on parchment made from the hides of calves but from the skin of his wife: “on a skin I / cut from the body of the woman whom I / willingly and with joy took as my wife.” (316) The second wlits of the Gothic riddle or epigram thus signifies the remnants of a real face and not an image, since the manuscript consists of skin from Wiljarith’s wife, Mathalasuintha. She is described in Wiljarith’s chronicle as being always silent and thus as having a reserved and distant character, in contrast to himself, “who had words as his living and loved speech” (312). When Wiljarith spends long nights working on “the Book,” he tells himself that it is because of her silence that he has taken on his enormous task (314). There might be different explanations for Mathalasuintha’s silence, and a few are hinted at in the chronicle. According to one explanation, she suffers from a trauma, perhaps caused by harassment or rape experienced during the war, as Wiljarith indicates: Like sentries her hands lay, always ready for what she saw as attack from an alien system. Loudly they related to my body what her words never could. (313)

43

44

See Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 226, referring to Deichmann. For a description of the mosaic panel and the man standing between Justinian and Maximian, supposed to portray Wiljarith, see Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiquity, 238–240, ill. at 241.

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Another explanation is that Mathalasuintha acts in accordance with late antique norms governing the behavior of modest Roman noblewomen, actively choosing silence as a means of communication.45 Wiljarith’s chronicle supports this explanation as well, stating that “her silence was rich” (312), and that she, together with the children, “hid behind their gleaming bodies / and drew in the air a smile which all in / there then swiftly drowned in” (314). However, Wiljarith is aware that he has after all learnt from his wife’s silence, and also that he has betrayed her by concentrating on his work on “the Book,” commissioned by Theoderic: “Nor do I deny that I betrayed / that silence in which I learnt to read a long / story that moved me greatly” (312). The Ravenna manuscript’s contrast between the writing man Wiljarith and the silent woman Mathalasuintha, whose skin becomes parchment for the man’s words, is mirrored and reinforced in the novel by Johan’s focus on his academic work at the cost of Hedvig’s health and sanity—Hedvig’s speech never makes much sense, and occasionally, she is totally silent. When imprisoned and working on his life story and confession, Johan reflects on his zeal for writing: “As long as I am writing, I try to say to myself, I can establish that zone of freedom and independence” (185–186). When referring to his life in prison, he also makes use of a metaphor based on writing: “The foundations of the past rest on every gesture, every word. We are never blank, unwritten” (186). These reflections might be innocent, but as soon as it becomes known to the reader that Wiljarith’s parchment is made from female skin, they become more problematic. Once the reader has become acquainted with the Ravenna manuscript, the novel’s obsession with writing irreversibly appears in another light. Writing is now associated with violence and assault—writing has become a way of violating a dead and beloved woman’s body. Furthermore, in the novel’s concluding pages, the manuscript made from female skin is repeatedly at the centre of the narrative: when Johan has smuggled the Ravenna manuscript out of Italy, “those vulnerable parchment pages” (319) are regularly taken out of the safe at Uppsala University Library; when defending his dissertation, Johan shows the manuscript to the audience (353); when back at home, he wraps it carefully in paper in order to return it to the Italian embassy (355); and finally, when Hedvig and Johan wrestle in the kitchen, where some putrid perch lie uneaten, one of the disgusting fish lands right on the manuscript (356). But the peculiar quality of the parchment, the fact that it is made out of female skin, is never mentioned again. The silence on this topic only enhances the uncanny feeling that the reader experiences towards the end of the novel.

45

See Kate Wilkinson, “The Modest Mouth,” Women and Modesty in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 86–116; Gillian Clark, “Being Female,” Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Life-styles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 119–38.

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When the Gothic cryptogram in the Codex Argenteus is decoded and its second wlits (face/image) is found to refer to the Ravenna manuscript—to its parchment as skin taken from the scribe’s wife’s body—the horrific effects of Wiljarith’s and Johan’s obsession with writing are foregrounded. In the late antique part of the novel, a silent woman who does not speak may, once she is dead, have her skin covered in script by a man obsessed with writing, in order to rescue the language and thus the memory of a dying, disappearing culture. In the modern sections of the novel, the problems seem to be similar. Johan, the academic, takes refuge in the library when Hedvig is inaccessible in both mind and body: “I longed for the library, for the silent peace beneath those lights, for the abstract symbols of the scripts. I could bend and twist the syllables and in the end they gave way. But Hedvig was a closed system and I seemed not to possess fine enough instruments to penetrate it.” (326) By means of the clearly sexualized verbal imagery of this passage, Johan carries out an elaborated comparison of the palaeographer’s and philologist’s careful work on the manuscript with the penetration of the female body. It comes as no surprise that The Thief has been characterized as a dystopia rather than a historical novel.46 This characterization is also particularly apt with regard to the potential future disappearance of human languages, a scenario that Johan envisages in one of the darker passages of his confession. His reflection also clearly mirrors how the Gothic language was dying out in Late Antiquity: “[…] when memory is crumbled to nothing and when during the night words such as Flight, Salvation, Grace are eliminated from our vocabulary. When the word YOU…” (343). Johan furthermore predicts “a time when objects start breathing and looking at human beings with indifference” (343). In contrast to such objects, books of all kinds—books like Johan’s black notebooks, the Codex Argenteus, the Ravenna manuscript, or the novel The Thief—must be regarded as unique items, since they are repositories not only of content but also of languages, by means of their script. Johan’s relentless writing of his confession therefore becomes an enduring witness to the fact that writing may serve as an antidote to a future of suffocated languages, where objects breathe but do not speak. Furthermore, in The Thief, writing is the activity that succeeds in bringing together different historical times. When Johan, as he writes his confession, addresses his and Hedvig’s newborn son, it is not only as “Judge” but also as “History” (340, 350) with a capitalized initial letter. In the still happy moment before everything breaks down in the apocalyptic ending of the novel, on the day of his doctoral defense, Johan characterizes time as “one great big embrace—the past and present resting together” (344). Were one to suggest an allegorical interpretation of the novel, it would be tempting to regard the fruit of this embrace precisely as History, that is, the newborn son 46

Nilsson, Det förlorade paradiset, 25.

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of Johan’s obsession with writings of the past and Hedvig’s speechless psychotic presence. Reflecting on history is also part of the endeavours of both Johan, the modern academic, and Wiljarith, the Gothic scribe, who find themselves sinking or falling through centuries and layers of history while writing. Johan “sank through the centuries” (241) when imitating the hand of the scribe of the Codex Argenteus, and Wiljarith observes that he “fell through layers of history / and thoughts” (313) while working on “the Book.” But when Johan on the day of his doctoral defence eventually identifies the Silver Bible as “the Thief,” as a mere abstract idea shielding him from Hedvig’s needs (351), history is no more: “The glow round the incunabula all round me was extinguished, history was extinguished, the letters drooped and died.” (348) History, and thus cultural memory, seem in Tunström’s novel to be not so much themes as a relation that is kept alive only when writing, or when being obsessed with writing.47 This might bring some hope into the dystopia, were it not at the cost of the women’s lives, in the contemporary setting of the novel and in the late antique one. The prominent female characters, the psychotic Hedvig and the silent Mathalasuintha, live solely among things—things disconnected from or wholly without words. When Johan is together with Hedvig, he feels that “everything round us was clearer than usual” (165), and Wiljarith describes how Mathalasuintha sits in the garden among flowers and insects, “things that had not yet acquired a language” (312). It is the male narrators, the academic Johan and the scribe Wiljarith, obsessed with writing, who manage to bring together objects and names, objects and notions. From early on in the novel, writing is portrayed as the equivalent of living, as when Johan, writing his confession in prison, states: “I must write until I die, otherwise I’ll die. In other words, repeat the life I have lived while I wait to be allowed to live” (161). But all the same, Johan suffers from doubts surrounding the meaning of his work similar to those Wiljarith once admitted to feeling in his chronicle. At the end of the novel, Johan addresses his questions to his and Hedvig’s son, “the Judge,” trying to find an excuse for his obsession with “the Book” and asking for understanding. Simultaneously, his own and Wiljarith’s life stories are paralleled once more, when Johan asks his son and future judge: Is my language, if you read it, still valid? Can you translate my intentions to your world? In other words, will I survive you? Language is expunged and dies, civilisations, too. What I have devoted my life to, digging an already dead language out of oblivion—is that a defence for such obsession? Is obsession something you can understand? (342–343) 47

Cf. Yuri Lotman’s well-known definition of culture as “the nonhereditary memory of the community,” emphasizing temporal aspects and the necessity of mediation, quoted in Erll, Memory in Culture, 102.

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Concluding discussion As we have seen, The Thief includes not only cultural memories in the form of accounts from different historical and contemporary situations and places, but also memories of writing techniques, literary genres and modes of both late antique and modern writing, such as calligraphic scripts, scholarly essays and dissertations, confessions, apocalyptic visions, historical narratives and chronicles. There is also deliberate re-use of late antique texts as intertexts. Along with the references to a large number of literary and Biblical intertexts, historiography forms an important part of the novel, into which Procopius’s account of the Gothic war has been smuggled and concealed in a manner similar to the fictive Ravenna manuscript, hidden behind one of the portrayed faces in the mosaic panel representing Emperor Justinian and his suite. Furthermore, the fictive Ravenna manuscript poses as an invented late antique historical source. The comparison between this fictive manuscript and Procopius’s The Gothic War demonstrates Procopius’s text to be by far the most important late antique source of inspiration for Göran Tunström. That Tunström’s dependence on Procopius has not been noticed before is perhaps due to the fact that the wide-ranging literary interests of modern writers do not always coincide with the repertoires of their critics. In this respect, late antique and Byzantine writers have been particularly neglected by scholars and critics as potential sources of inspiration. The deliberate use of late antique texts and the thematization of writing techniques in The Thief touch on aspects of its composition, but also affect the novel’s writing characters themselves. They also affect the author: Wiljarith, the Gothic scribe who experiences the Gothic war from the perspective of the losers, appears as a failed shadow of his more successful contemporary, Procopius of Caesarea. At the same time, on the level of the novel’s plot, the fates of the modern academic Johan and the Gothic scribe Wiljarith mirror one another, in a way comparable to the manner in which the modern novel and the late antique texts reflect one another. As a matter of fact, the modern author, Göran Tunström, and the late antique historiographer, Procopius, might also be seen to reflect each other’s zeal for writing stories that function as historiography, or historiography that functions as stories, mediating collective memories. The way in which historiographic and literary texts reflect, hide, and overlap with one another in The Thief also raises ideological questions. While studying the script of the Codex Argenteus, Johan wonders about the circumstances and beliefs of its scribe: Did Wiljarith believe in the text he was copying, obedient servant that he was? How much of the outside world did he see as he filled the parchment, while battles were being fought all round and his people being decimated? Did he go out on to the steps to listen to the world? Did he himself have blood on his hands, or was he detached, distant from what is called the delirium of the teeming masses? (243)

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As we have seen, all of these questions receive their terrible answers in the Ravenna manuscript. Though Wiljarith himself was a victim of the Gothic war, he was also guilty of producing parchment from his wife’s skin. His detachment and distance from the immediate external events did not exclude the violence and assault that are triggered by war, plague and famine. Even at the age of seventy-four, Wiljarith in his chronicle expresses the wish that he could have had a different kind of life: If there existed a different history than of war I would write it. The children’s and the women’s, yes, rather the story of the cows and grass, as long as I escaped naming that hateful word. (297)

Had another history than one of war, violence, and thefts been possible to write, other kinds of cultural memories would have been mediated—those of the victims suffering from war and from the obsession with writing. In Tunström’s novel, we have seen that the mediation of cultural memory depends not solely on the Codex Argenteus as a storage medium. Neither does it depend solely on the novel The Thief as a circulation medium, nor on Uppsala University Library as a site of display of the Silver Bible and as a media cue for crimes involving book thefts. Even more so, it depends on female silence and—inevitably—on female bodies being inscribed. What Astrid Erll has emphasized as being a special capacity of literature, to build and observe memory, is certainly realized in The Thief. Cultural memory, focusing on late antique writing techniques, stored in the Codex Argenteus on display at Uppsala University Library, is simultaneously being built, represented, observed, and critically reflected upon in Göran Tunström’s novel—and even invented anew in the fictive Ravenna manuscript.48

48

Erll, Memory in Culture, 159.

c at H e r i n e c o n y b e a r e

Mundus totus exsilium est: On Being out of Place An exile, said Zafar, is a refugee with a library. — Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

I begin with the autobiographical texts of two men. Both are writing about their mothers. One of the two is widely familiar to students of Late Antiquity; the other perhaps less so. My mother’s maddening insistence that because she loved me, she alone knew what I was, what I had been, and would always remain infuriated me. “I know my own son,” she would say… So certain was [my mother] that you…would grant what was still lacking, that she told me very tranquilly and with full confidence that in Christ she believed she would see me a faithful Catholic before she departed this life. So much she said to me…(quia certa erat et quod restabat te daturum…placidissime et pectore pleno fiduciae respondit mihi credere se in Christo quod priusquam de hac vita emigraret me visura esset fidelem catholicum. et hoc quidem mihi.)

Neither mother has an easy marriage: …she was deposited into an arranged marriage with my father.…I was trained by her…to see it as something difficult at first, to which she gradually adjusted over the course of nearly forty years, and which she transformed into the main event in her life. When she attained full marriageable age she was entrusted to a husband; she served him as her lord, but she made it her business to win him for you…(ubi plenis annis nubilis facta est, tradita viro servivit veluti domino et sategit eum lucrari tibi…)

When they die, both mothers are buried far from home, on another continent, to which they have pursued their beloved sons across the sea. One of them minds terribly: she “ended up dying and ultimately being buried in the America she had always tried to avoid, had always basically disliked.” The other has a last-minute change of heart, and is reconciled to the notion of burial in an alien land: “‘Put this body anywhere…One thing only do I ask of you, that you remember me at the altar

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of the Lord wherever you may be’” (“ponite,” inquit, “hoc corpus ubicumque.… tantum illud vos rogo, ut ad domini altare memineritis mei, ubiubi fueritis”). Each of these sons is undone by his mother’s death. In the second of each of these paired excerpts, you will have recognized the unmistakable cadences of Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions.1 Augustine famously details his attempts to control his grief after the death of his mother, Monnica, and the passion of tears to which he ultimately gives way;2 he suggests that he has written an extensive section of the Confessions to secure for his mother her final request to be remembered.3 The other voice comes from the late twentieth century: it is that of the scholar, cultural critic, and political activist Edward Said, most famous for his analysis of Western Europe’s construction of the East as “orientalism.”4 In Said’s autobiography, Out of Place, he tells us that he wrote to his mother Hilda every week while she was alive; indeed, so interwoven was she with his emotional life that he suddenly found himself writing to her at a time of intense strain a year after her death.5 Perhaps it is not so odd for the driven sons of ambitious mothers to describe their complicated relationship of deep love and intense ambivalence in similar terms, and to put that relationship at the heart of their respective autobiographies.6 Perhaps, too, an account of a cool and distant relationship with a domineering father—which both also share—is more or less inevitable. But there is a further 1

2

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The three passages are respectively conf. 6.1.1 (quia certa erat), conf. 9.9.19 (ubi plenis annis), and conf. 9.11.27 (ponite). I use the text of J.J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), the translation is that of Maria Boulding, OSB, St. Augustine: The Confessions (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997). All translations in this essay from Latin works other than the Confessions are my own. See Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller, “Confessing Monica,” in Feminist Interpretations of Augustine, ed. Judith Chelius Stark (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 119–146. “So that as many of you as read this may remember at your altar Monnica, your servant…” (ut quotquot haec legerint, meminerint ad altare tuum Monnicae, famulae tuae): conf. 9.13.37. See Catherine Conybeare, “Quotquot haec legerint meminerint: All Who Read This Will Remember,” in De Theoria: Early Modern Essays in Memory of Eugene Vance, ed. Denyse Delcourt and Steven Nichols, Modern Language Notes Supplement 127:5 (2012), 823–833. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978; reissued, with a new preface by the author, New York: Vintage, 2003). Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (London: Granta Books, 1999), 215. Earlier excerpts: “my mother’s maddening insistence,” 255; “deposited into an arranged marriage,” 14; “buried in the America,” 133. Augustine narrates the preeminent spiritual experience of the Confessions, the ascent at Ostia, as one shared with his mother (conf. 9.10.23–25); compare Said, Out of Place, 292: “That feeling I had of both beginning and ending with my mother, of her sustaining presence and, I imagined, infinite capacity for cherishing me, softly, imperceptibly, underwrote my life for years and years.”

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striking parallel between the two narratives. Augustine presents as a turning point the death of an unnamed friend, who had been drawn by him into Manicheism but, receiving Christian baptism while unconscious from fever, rejects both Manicheism and Augustine before he dies. This is Augustine’s nadir, from which he begins to turn and rise towards the Christian God.7 Said’s great conversion is not to Christianity (with which, though he is baptized and confirmed, he has a far more distant relationship) but to the Palestinian cause; again, the turning point is the death of a friend. This time, the friend is named—he is Dr. Farid Haddad— and he dies not of a fever but at the hands of the Egyptian security forces. Dr. Haddad was a Communist as well as an activist on behalf of the Palestinians: “Forty years later I discovered that even his Communist party friends considered him to be a saint…[his] life and death have been an underground motif in my life for four decades now, not all of them periods of awareness or of active political struggle.”8 Just as Augustine is shocked into reflection by the death of his friend, even though it will be some years longer before he makes his public commitment to Christianity—and that commitment itself will presage a lifelong struggle to promote the cause of orthodoxy—so does Said present himself as shocked into political commitment and, eventually, a vocal commitment to Palestine, by the courageous life and violent death of Dr. Farid Haddad. Edward Said composed his autobiographical narrative almost exactly sixteen hundred years after Augustine of Hippo composed the Confessions.9 Said certainly knew the Confessions—he taught it repeatedly in the Core Curriculum at Columbia University in New York10—though he makes no explicit reference to the work here or (as far as I know) anywhere else, and I cannot prove that he had it in mind when he embarked on his memoir. The similarities, however, are illuminating. Both men were writing under circumstances of considerable personal strain. Said had recently been diagnosed with the chronic lymphocytic leukemia which was ultimately to take his life. He began to write his memoir a couple of months after starting chemotherapy: “I realized that I had…entered, if not the final phase of my life, then the period—like Adam and Eve leaving the garden—from which there would be no return to my old life.”11 Augustine too had been forced into a new 7 8 9

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Conf. 4.4.7–4.7.12. Said, Out of Place, 123–124. Said started work on his book in May 1994 (Out of Place, 216). Augustine is generally accepted as having started work on the Confessions in 397; the recent argument of Robin Lane Fox, that he completed it in a single intense burst of activity “between the start of Lent and Easter 397,” suggests extraordinary speed of composition but does capture the conceptual unity and sustained intensity of the work. Robin Lane Fox, Augustine: Conversions to Confessions (London: Penguin Books, 2015), 537. Personal communication from Roosevelt Montás, Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum: October 10, 2014. Said, Out of Place, 216; Said’s emphasis. The portrayal of the period as an expulsion from paradise is, in this context, notable.

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life, through his ordination first as priest, then as bishop. We know from his letters and from the testimony of his first biographer, Possidius, that he was ordained only with reluctance, alarmed at his new responsibilities;12 there is more than a hint in the Confessions that he would have preferred monastic solitude to episcopal commitments.13 As is well known, Augustine closes the chronological narrative of the Confessions soon after his dramatic moment of conversion, before he returned to North Africa, even though that return had been made a decade before the time of writing: yet in some ways, the dramatic arc of the Confessions is an attempt to grapple with the notion that this conversion was only the beginning, that “there would be no return to my old life.” The Confessions was also written—I am increasingly convinced—under intense pressure from those of his compatriots who refused to believe that Augustine had abandoned the Manicheism of which he had been such a vocal disciple;14 there must have been huge pressure, too, from adherents of the Donatist church, who claimed that their beliefs—and not the Roman Christianity that Augustine had brought home with him—were the true manifestation of the church in Africa.15 Both men, then, were writing at what they saw, with a more or less bitter acuity, as the start of a very different stage of life. Each man was writing with a heightened awareness of his own identity, or rather, of the many conflicting strands of identity that he embodied. Augustine was both African and Roman, first a classicizing orator then a biblical exegete; once a Manichean, now a Christian, but adhering to a Christianity that turned its back on his African affiliations. He had returned to his native soil to preach to those whose lives were very different from his. Said’s personal geography was yet more complicated: he was of Palestinian origins, brought up in Cairo and Lebanon, adoptive American. He was both Arab 12

13 14

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The locus classicus is Augustine, Letter 21, to his bishop Valerius, pleading for a leave of absence to study the bible: Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum vol. 34, 49–54. See also Possidius, Vita Augustini 4; ed. A.A.R. Bastiaensen, Vita dei santi III (Milan: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, 1975),130–240. Conf. 10.43.70. The lingering effects of Augustine’s Manicheism are at present being extensively explored by Jason BeDuhn: see especially the first two volumes of a projected trilogy, Jason D. BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, 1: Conversion and Apostasy 373–388 C.E. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), and Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, 2: Making a “Catholic” Self, 388–401 C.E. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). The classic work on Donatism remains W.H.C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in North Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952). Brent D. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), contains much on the mutual hostilities of Donatist and Roman Christians; I have recently charted the Donatists’ pressure on Augustine in Catherine Conybeare, “Augustini Hipponensis Africitas,” Journal of Medieval Latin 25 (2015), 111–130.

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and Christian; defender of the Palestinian cause, expert on European literature and music; passionate interrogator of the assumptions of the Western academic tradition within which he flourished.16 For both Augustine and Said, the composition of these works seems to have been a way of drawing together the disparate, confusing strands of their identity and imposing a sense of continuity on a fragmented life.17 Augustine is quite explicit about this process: When a true account is given of past events, what is brought forth from the memory is not the events themselves, which have passed away, but words formed from images of those events which as they happened and went on their way left some kind of traces in the mind through the medium of the senses. This is the case with my childhood, which no longer exists: it belongs to past time which exists no longer, but when I recall it and tell the story I contemplate the image of it which is still in my memory. (conf. 11.18.23) praeterita cum vera narrantur, ex memoria proferuntur non res ipsae quae praeterierunt, sed verba concepta ex imaginibus earum quae in animo velut vestigia per sensus praetereundo fixerunt. pueritia quippe mea, quae iam non est, in tempore praeterito est, quod iam non est; imaginem vero eius, cum eam recolo et narro, in praesenti tempore intueor, quia est adhuc in memoria mea.

The attempt to give a “true account,” we may note, not only secures a certain temporal continuity but also connects the inner and outer selves, as experiences that exist only in memory are narrated aloud. Meanwhile, Said tries to make a virtue of necessity: he writes at the end of his memoir, “I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance.”18 But the bravado dissipates a few lines later: “A form of freedom, I’d like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is.”19 As Augustine might have put it, “I have become an enigma to myself” (mihi quaestio factus sum).20 16

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19 20

Said describes himself at university in similar terms, as “split in different parts (Arab, musician, young intellectual, solitary eccentric, dutiful student, political misfit),” Out of Place, 281. Well encapsulated in Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), “A Stork for an Introduction,” 1–4; the book as a whole is a fertile reflection on the themes of its subtitle. Said, Out of Place, 295. Contrast Said, Out of Place, 137: “The split between…my public, outer self, and the loose, irresponsible fantasy-ridden churning metamorphoses of my private, inner life was very marked.” Said, Out of Place, 295. Conf. 10.33.50. Augustine also uses the phrase when he recounts his spiritual nadir, the death of his unnamed friend: conf. 4.4.9.

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“Out of place” is not only the title of Edward Said’s memoir; the phrase also constitutes the final words of the work. Some of the ways in which the title might be suitable are immediately suggested simply by the biographical summary and the excerpts that I have given. “Place” for him is, however, not just part of an autobiographical narrative, for he reflects explicitly on the notion in the course of his critical writings. We may begin to infer what he understands by the phrase “out of place” from his comments on its converse in the first chapter of his earlier work, The World, the Text, and the Critic.21 There, he notes the temptation to associate the notion of “place” with nationhood, but suggests that we should not succumb to it; “the phrase at home or in place,” he writes, entails nuances “principally of reassurance, fitness, belonging, association, and community.”22 He points out that these categories may, in the hands of hegemonic powers, take an aggressive cultural turn; they may, accordingly, under certain circumstances be resisted; but they have an ineluctable appeal. To be out of place, then, is not necessarily to reside in a nation other than one’s own, but to feel that one does not fit, or belong, where one is; there is no grounding sense of reassurance, no community. It is a lonely, exilic state; the web of natural human relationships is ruptured. Said could—as we shall see—have developed this notion in conversation with Augustine, with whose thought and sensibilities he was to show such a natural affinity in Out of Place. Here, however, Augustine is not his source. Instead, Said is explicitly thinking about what it means to be “in place” or “out of place” with reference to another exilic figure, Erich Auerbach, and the circumstances of composition of Auerbach’s great work, Mimesis.23 Mimesis is an episodic exploration of the whole time-span of European literature from Homer and Genesis to Woolf and Proust, and of the shifting techniques for the “representation of reality” in these texts. But despite its Western European focus, the work was written on the “wrong” side of what Said calls “the exaggerated boundary drawn between Europe and the Orient,” in the remorselessly “orientalized” nation of Turkey.24 Auerbach was quite literally in exile there from 1935 on: as a German Jew, he had been deprived of his academic position by the Nazis, and had been offered a post at the University of Istanbul instead.25 And yet, Auerbach avers, 21

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Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). World, Text, and Critic, 8. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953; reprinted, with a new introduction by Edward W. Said, 2003). World, Text, and Critic, 8. In this connection, Auerbach’s description of Stendhal is poignant: “though in no sense weary or discouraged, yet already a man of forty, whose early and successful career lay far behind him, alone and comparatively poor, he became aware, with all the sting of that knowledge, that he belonged nowhere.” Auerbach, Mimesis, 460–461. Auerbach was in his early forties when he moved to Istanbul.

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his very distance from familiar academic infrastructures and his native soil— combined with an urgent desire to preserve what he saw as “civilization”26—were what made the majestic span of his work possible.27 In a late essay, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” Auerbach explains his project further.28 There, he writes of European literatures winning their “self-consciousness” from Latin civilization,29 and of the subsequent need for an account of them that emphasizes their profound interconnectedness while still recognizing the individuality of the cultures from which they emerge. He laments the difficulty of gaining a “commanding overview” of these literatures, or even of determining the starting point for such an investigation;30 but he insists that this must, nonetheless, be the philologist’s ambition. There is, however, a caveat: “our philological home is the earth,” and therefore we must transcend national culture and language.31 Auerbach leaves us with the paradoxical notion of simultaneously searching for “history-from-within” while cultivating what is effectively a view from nowhere.32 We must be able to apprehend cultural specificity, and yet transcend our own cultural affiliations. Only so shall we—in the last words of the essay—“earn a proper love for the world.” There is no grace in Auerbach’s vision. Our self-distancing from the reassurance and community of being “in place” is achieved with painful labor: it must be earned. And yet the reward, or at least the ideal, is a form of transcendence. Philological transcendence, perhaps, but nonetheless a state that moves us outside and beyond our bounded vision. The religious language here is not accidental. Auerbach hangs the conclusion of his essay on a couple of phrases from the Didascalicon of the twelfth-century writer Hugh, an Augustinian monk from the abbey of St. Victor in Paris. Said

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29 30 31 32

Brian Stock observes, “Mimesis was intended to be something more than a contribution to literary criticism; or perhaps [Auerbach] thought that criticism should deal with something more than the purely literary.” Brian Stock, Listening for the Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 57. This accounts for the slippage, at the end of the first chapter of Mimesis, between “the literary representation of reality in European culture” and “the representation of reality in European literature.” Auerbach, Mimesis, 23; emphasis mine. “It is quite possible that the book owes its existence to [the] lack of a rich and specialized library. If it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects, I might never have reached the point of writing.” Auerbach, Mimesis, 557. Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. Maire and Edward Said, The Centennial Review 13 (1969), 1–17. First published in Weltliteratur: Festgabe für Fritz Strich zum 70. Geburtstag ed. Walter Muschg et al. (Berne: Francke Verlag, 1952). Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 3. Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 9. Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 17. Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 11.

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finds these phrases “hauntingly beautiful”;33 and indeed, they demonstrably haunt him through some of his greatest works. He quotes them first in the third and final chapter of Orientalism: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.”34 Auerbach, as befitted his cultural patrimony, had quoted them untranslated: delicatus ille est adhuc cui patria dulcis est; fortis autem iam, cui omne solum patria est; perfectus vero, cui mundus totus exsilium est.35 Said comments, “The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home, the more easily is one able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true vision.” 36 The aim is “to assess oneself and alien cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance.”37 The second time that Said quotes Hugh of St. Victor, in The World, the Text, and the Critic, he adds the sequel from the Didascalicon that Auerbach, in a telling act of aposiopesis, chose to omit. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil, and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant’s hut, and I know, too, how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and panelled halls.38

Mimesis, Said adds, is built on an “agonizing distance” from the Western cultural tradition that it magisterially reaffirms.39 But he also points out that it was Hugh of St. Victor who showed Auerbach how to convert his sense of exile into a “positive mission.” “Mission” is perhaps a strange word to choose of the attempt of a secular Jew to create a grand narrative of Western European literary culture; and yet there is a certain missionary zeal in the very adoption of an impossibly ambitious 33 34 35

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Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 406. Said, Orientalism, 259. The Latin text of the Didascalicon may be found in Hugonis de Sancto Victore Didascalicon De Studio Legendi ed. Charles Henry Buttimer (Washington D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1939). Said, Orientalism, 259; emphasis his. Compare the recent reflection on “being home” of Hisham Mattar, on returning to Libya after many years’ exile: “is this what being home is like: home as a place from which the entire world is suddenly possible?” Hisham Mattar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (New York: Random House, 2016), 110. Said, Orientalism, 259. Didascalicon 3.19. Said uses the translation of Jerome Taylor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961); this passage at 101. Said, World, Text, and Critic, 8.

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project—and certainly Said shows the zeal of the disciple in his reverence for that project, which overrides the fact that its relationship to his own intellectual mission is, to say the least, complicated.—When, at the very end of his life, Said wrote an introduction to Mimesis, he reflected on the “fruitful inner tension” generated by Auerbach’s “vacillation” between his erudite sensitivity to Christian modes of interpretation and his identity as resolutely secular while culturally Jewish.40 The term “mission,” paradoxically, elides the Jewishness which necessitated Auerbach’s exile, while bringing to the foreground his commitment to a European—and hence, overwhelmingly Christian—intellectual tradition. The last time that Said quotes his haunting passage from Hugh of St. Victor is at the end of Culture and Imperialism. The autobiographical coda, “from boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil” (ego a puero exsulavi), is suppressed this time, though it is closely pertinent to what Said goes on to do with the passage. In his commentary, he emphasizes that the “perfect” person has worked through his attachments, not rejected them.41 Despite the fact that the word “exile” does not appear in the English translation, Said’s explication continues, “Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and a real bond with one’s native place; the universal truth of exile is not that one has lost that love or home, but that inherent in each is an unexpected, unwelcome loss.”42 One should try, therefore, to live always as if one were about to lose them. Said’s personal circumstances seem—not for the first time—to be quietly intruding here. Certainly, it is hard to square this definition of “home” with the reassurance and belonging with which it was earlier associated. And he moves directly from this reading of Hugh into the peroration of the book, in which he inveighs against the way in which the logic of imperialism obliterates multiple, interwoven cultural identities to impose only the monolithic imperialist version. The passage that Said had originally appropriated to describe the distance necessary for “true vision” becomes increasingly, urgently associated with pain and loss. The beauty and coherence of an exilic vision comes, it seems, at too high a cost. Part of the problem here is the unexplored tension between Auerbach’s intellectual project and his own. Auerbach is invested in an integrated reading of his Western European cultural inheritance; the instrument of that reading is an old-fashioned, capacious notion of philology. He recognizes that the texts that he is analyzing are produced in the presence and pressure of “historical forces,”43 40

41 42 43

Edward W. Said, “Introduction,” in Auerbach, Mimesis (edition of 2003), xxii; reprinted posthumously in Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 85–118. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 407; Said’s emphasis. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 407. “Historical forces:” Auerbach, Mimesis, 44. On the complexity of such forces, see e.g. Auerbach, Mimesis, 19–20.

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but it is the texts, not the forces, that are the focus of his work.44 Moreover, he does not wish to pause in the moment of writing, which he sees all too clearly as one of fragmentation and destruction; instead, he claims that the tendency is now towards unity: “It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible.”45 Said, too, is invested in Western European culture—he specialized in the English and French literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth century—but he engages it more obliquely, and his primary project is to narrate the colonizing structure within which it is forged, and its invidious undertow of constructing the non-European (the “oriental”) from a Eurocentric point of view, at the expense of the cultural specificity of the colonized. He passionately defends the reading of texts explicitly as a product of their culture, from an equally specific position of critical engagement.46 He even goes so far as to suggest that the production of texts from a “discursive situation” reproduces the relationship between “colonizer and colonized”: that there is a cultural violence inherent in the very act of writing.47 There is another problem, and it lies in the slippery interpretation of “exile.” Said almost completely ignores the first sentence of the excerpt from Hugh: “It is…a great source of virtue for the practised mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether” (magnum virtutis principium est, ut discat paulatim exercitatus animus visibilia haec et transitoria primum commutare, ut postmodum possit etiam delinquere).48 In the Didascalicon, the application is relatively clear. The work is a guide to reading; its subtitle is de studio legendi. Hugh states in his preface that his object is to instruct his students in what they ought to read; in what order they should read it; and how they should read it. This he does successively for secular works, in the first half of the Didascalicon, and for holy scripture, in the 44

45

46

47

48

This does not preclude perceptive historical observations: for example, Auerbach writes of Don Quixote, “he is the victim of a social order in which he belongs to a class that has no function.” Auerbach, Mimesis, 137. Auerbach, Mimesis, 552; contrast his earlier analysis of the “temptation to entrust oneself to a sect which solved all problems with a single formula, whose power of suggestion imposed solidarity, and which ostracized everything which would not fit in and submit,” Mimesis, 550. Chapter 9 of World, Text, and Critic, “Criticism Between Culture and System,” works through the theoretical basis for these preoccupations in an especially cogent manner. The closing paragraph begins, “Criticism cannot assume that its province is merely the text, not even the great literary text. It must see itself…inhabiting a much contested cultural space, in which what has counted in the continuity and transmission of knowledge has been the signifier, as an event that has left lasting traces upon the human subject.” World, Text, and Critic, 225. Said, World, Text, and Critic, 47–48. Contrast a glancing remark in Auerbach, Mimesis, 242: “everything determined by class is non-humanist.” Didascalicon 3.19.

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second half. The passage on exile is the culmination of the “how one should read” section at the end of the first half. The three things that students need, writes Hugh, are natura (i.e. ingenium), natural aptitude, exercitium, practice, and disciplina, ascetic discipline.49 Discipline relates to the material circumstances in which the student lives his life; practice, to his personal disposition, and the exsilium section falls explicitly under the heading of “practice”: “Finally, a foreign soil is proposed, since it too gives a man practice” (Postremo terra aliena posita est, quae et ipsa quoque hominem exercet).50 It is quite clear that what Hugh is initially suggesting is a literal, not a metaphorical, exile: living in a land not one’s own helps one to detach oneself from love of worldly things. Through practice in this detachment, one may come to an appreciation of the spiritual, permanent things that transcend the “visible and transitory.” So we slide, in fact, from literal exile, which would seem to fall more under the heading of disciplina, to the willed cultivation of a spiritual exile. This makes the passage a perfect transition to the second part of Hugh’s book, which instructs the student in how to read holy scripture. It also beautifully describes Auerbach’s project, as he labored in Istanbul to capture a vision of philological transcendence. But it does not really capture Said’s project, which has a far more complicated relationship both to exile and to transcendence. He refuses to lose his sense of exile, because that would be to deny his attachment to home—a home which, nonetheless, does not convey a sense of belonging and community so much as of ever-looming loss. This sounds almost like the ascetics’ aspirational loss of the world, their detachment from “visible and transitory things”; but the critical strategy that Said develops is dependent upon returning to the world, analyzing that sense of exile and loss, and showing how it is always immanent in the state of those colonized and “othered.” Claims of transcendence are suspect to Said, however much he may admire Auerbach and his work on figuralism and mimesis. From this refusal of transcendence comes Said’s claim in The World, the Text, and the Critic that texts are “always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society”;51 from it comes, too, a preferred notion of identity which is described in the introduction to Culture and Imperialism as “contrapuntal and often nomadic.”52 It is ironic that Said became haunted by Hugh of St Victor and his insistence on exile. For exile is a static notion: a state that freezes both past and present in a perduring sense of loss. And, as Hugh frames it, it aspires to rejection of the world. But Said’s characterization of both text and self is a dynamic one, set firmly in the world. How much better suited to his critical perspective is one of the fundamental notions in the work of Augustine of Hippo, to whom Said was to show such natural

49 50 51 52

Didascalicon 3.6. Didascalicon 3.19. Said, World, Text, and Critic, 35. Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxix.

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affiliation in his autobiography: the notion of peregrinatio, wandering; or, more fully put, traveling through foreign lands.53 For Augustine, like Said, favors process, not stasis. He is far more interested in wandering than in a state of exile as such. Words cognate with peregrinatio occur in his work almost ten times as often as the entire range cognate with exsilium.54 The patria from which one wanders is often construed as a heavenly one, not attainable in this life: Augustine frequently uses 2 Corinthians 5:6–7, “we wander from the Lord: for we walk by faith, not by sight” (peregrinamur a domino: per fidem enim ambulamus, non per speciem). But Augustine also dealt with the forced peregrinatio of refugees from the sack of Rome in 410 CE, many of whom came to North Africa: his ideas about civitas and peregrinatio are first developed in sermons preached to congregations that included these refugees, for whom these were lively issues, and he subsequently worked through these ideas more fully in his magnum opus, the City of God (De civitate dei).55 Said’s earthly patria was, for geopolitical reasons, unattainable to him too. He would, I think, have approved of Augustine’s statement, in a sermon, that “every wanderer (peregrinus) certainly has a homeland, for no one without a homeland is a wanderer…” (omnis peregrinus utique habet patriam, nam nemo sine patria peregrinus est).56 This reverses the causal chain: it starts from the person, the wanderer, instead of the country: if this is his identity, he must have a homeland. But the “homeland,” on this equation, does not risk being tied to the nation state (which would be, as we have seen, repugnant to Said). It can be whatever the person experiences himself as, of necessity, wandering apart from. As Augustine put it in another sermon, this time on the exile—in literal, earthly terms—of St Cyprian: “you thought you were driving him out of his own homeland into a foreign one— 53

54

55

56

Instances of explicit contradistinction of peregrinatio and ex(s)ilium at Thesaurus Linguae Latinae 1301, ll. 57 and 75; there are also examples of the phrase peregrinatio exilii, but this does not preclude contrasting meanings. We have no single word in English that captures the meaning of peregrinatio. A search on peregrin* in the Cetedoc Library of Latin Texts produces 776 sententiae containing the words peregrinus, peregrinari, or peregrinatio; since some of the sententiae contain more than one instance of these words, the total usage count is 846. The search for exsilium and its cognates is more complex: a search on exsili* must exclude derivatives of exsilire; on exili* must, likewise, exclude exilire, exilis, and exilitas, all of which have quite different meanings. The total usage for ex(s)ilium is 80 instances; adding ex(s)ul and ex(s)ulare gives another 29. I explore this topic more fully in “The City of Augustine: On the Interpretation of Civitas,” in Being Christian in Late Antiquity: A Festschrift for Gillian Clark, ed. Carol Harrison et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 139–155; in addition to the bibliography there, see James J. O’Donnell, “The Inspiration for Augustine’s De Civitate Dei,” Augustinian Studies 10 (1979), 75–79. Augustine, sermon 346B. Miscellanea Agostiniana, vol. 1: Sancti Augustini sermones post Maurinos reperti, ed. G. Morin (Rome: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1930), 285.

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but a man of God is nowhere an exile in Christ, while in the flesh he is everywhere a wanderer” (de patria sua in alienam te arbitraris excludere hominem dei, in Christo nusquam exsulem, in carne ubique peregrinum).57 Augustine refuses the notion of exile, and replaces it with the dynamic peregrinatio. There is a further way in which peregrinatio would have been more helpful to Said than the poignant exsilium. Whereas exile—being “out of place”—is a lonely state, deprived of “belonging, association, and community,”58 Augustine is at pains to show that wandering is yet dependent on community. Indeed, as he demands in another sermon, on the story of Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38–42), “take away hunger: for whom will you break bread? Take away wandering: to whom will you show hospitality?” (tolle famem: cui frangis panem? Tolle peregrinationem; cui exhibes hospitalitatem?)59 This is the idea at the base of his notion of civitas, when he observes that the civitas dei, the “city of God,” during this life “wanders living by faith amid the godless” (inter impios peregrinatur ex fide vivens).60 “What is a civitas,” Augustine demands elsewhere, “if not a throng of people gathered into a certain bond of harmony?” (Quid est autem civitas nisi hominum multitudo in quoddam vinculum redacta concordiae?)61 Augustine’s emphasis on community epitomizes his refusal to dismiss the value of life in this world, even as he anticipates the next one: if you like, it demonstrates his appreciation of immanence as well as of transcendence. Is this to do no more than to make the biographical point that, for all the similarities between the two men, for all their tangled sense of identity and anxious relation to texts, Augustine went home and Said did not? I hope not. As I have tried to show, the issues are not that simple. Augustine returned to the place of his birth, and subsequently made his career barely 100 kilometers away from there; but he returned to play a very different role—bishop, not teacher of rhetoric—amid an ecclesiastical landscape that he would scarcely have recognized. Said was born in Jerusalem, before the foundation of the state of Israel; his subsequent campaign for Palestinian rights, even as he made his career in the United States, put on painful display the complexities of sustaining a relationship with his birthplace. (“During my lifetime…the parts of the Arab world that I was most attached to either have been changed utterly by civil upheavals and war, or have simply ceased to exist.” 62) As Edward Said and Augustine of Hippo reflected on home, the self, 57 58 59

60

61 62

Augustine, Sermon 309.2, Patrologia Latina 38, col. 1410. Said, World, Text, and Critic, 8. Augustine, Sermon 104.2, Patrologia Latina 38, col. 617; a fuller version edited by C. Lambot, Sancti Aurelii Augustini Sermones selecti duodeviginti Stromata Patristica et Mediaevalia, 1 (Brussels: Spectrum, 1950), 54–60; this at 55. Augustine, De Civitate Dei Praefatio, ed. Dombart and Kalb, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 47. Augustine, Letter 138.10, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 44, 135. Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxx. In a happier vein, we may note Said’s co-founding, with Daniel Barenboim, of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, to promote understand-

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and the world, each might in related ways be said to have been out of place. Said’s sensibility is far closer to that of Augustine than has previously been appreciated. If he had ever hit upon the Augustinian concept of peregrinatio, it would have unified his ideas far more satisfactorily than Auerbach and Hugh’s exsilium. This has been, in a sense, an aporetic paper. The resonances between Augustine’s Confessions and Said’s Out of Place seemed so pressing that I assumed there would be such resonances elsewhere in Said’s work. As I have tried to show, resonances of sensibility do obtain between the two men; indeed, they are strong. If Said is directly indebted to Augustine, however, the debt remains unannotated. Yet the past – and specifically, the late antique past – is no less present in his work. Or perhaps in making this claim I am merely inserting myself into the chain of readers that runs from Augustine through Hugh and Auerbach to Said. To return to one of the touchstones of this volume’s introduction, Charles Martindale, “meaning…is always realized at the point of reception;” our “interpretations of ancient texts, whether or not we are aware of it, are, in complex ways, constructed by the chain of receptions through which their continued readability has been effected.”63 This is not a one-way process. My reading of Said is inflected by my immersion in Augustine; but my reading of Augustine is refreshed and re-contoured through my reading of Said. The textual relationships between Late Antiquity and today shimmer and shift. Augustine described the happy apprehension of scripture with a delightful metaphor: there are people “for whom these words are no longer a nest. For them they are shady thickets in which they espy hidden fruit; they fly to and fro joyfully, chattering as they search it out, and plucking it” (quibus haec verba non iam nidus sed opaca frutecta sunt, vident in eis latentes fructus et volitant laetantes et garriunt scrutantes et carpunt eos).64 This essay may be no more than the diachronic chatter of interpretation. But amid that chatter, the complicated displacement of two men is illuminated.

63

64

ing and collaboration across the Arab-Israeli divide; see also the conversations of the two men, transcribed in Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, ed. Ara Guzelimian (New York: Vintage Books, 2004). Charles Martindale, Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3 and 7. Conf. 12.28.38.

Notes on Contributors H e L e n a b o d i n is Professor of Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, and Senior Lecturer at The Newman Institute in Uppsala, Sweden. Her research concerns the functions of literature at boundaries, such as between languages, nations, arts and media. She has particularly studied modern literature’s engagement with the Byzantine Orthodox Christian tradition from the various perspectives of intermedial studies, cultural semiotics, and translation studies, including aspects of multilingualism. c at H e r i n e c o n y b e a r e is Professor and Chair in the Department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies at Bryn Mawr College. Her wide range of publications puts the literature of Late Antiquity into conversation with the theoretical concerns of the present; she is particularly known for her work on Augustine of Hippo. Her most recent books are The Laughter of Sarah: Biblical Exegesis, Feminist Theory, and the Concept of Delight (2013) and The Routledge Guidebook to Augustine’s Confessions (2016). m a r c o F o r m i s a n o is Professor of Latin Literature at Ghent University (Belgium). In his research, he focuses in particular 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” (Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg), devoted to the literature of Late Antiquity and its reception. H e n r i e t t e H a r i c H -s c H wa r z b a U e r is Ordinaria of Latin Philology at the University of Basel. Her research focuses on the literature of Late Antiquity, the History of Ancient Philosophy (female philosophers), Gender Studies, Neolatin and Reception Studies. Recent publications: Hypatia. Die spätantiken Quellen. Eingeleitet, kommentiert und interpretiert (2011); co-editor of the volumes Carmen perpetuum. Ovids Metamorphosen in der Weltliteratur (2013); Der Fall Roms und seine Wiederauferstehungen in Antike und Mittelalter ( 2013); editor of the volume Weben und Gewebe in der Antike. Materialität – Repräsentation – Episteme – Metapoetik (2016). o L o F H e i L o studied ancient Greek, Arabic and Persian in Lund and Copenhagen and wrote his PhD in Byzantine and Islamic history at the University of Vienna.

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He has researched Byzantine history in Vienna and taught Middle Eastern History in Lund. Since 2016 he is deputy director at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. J e s ú s H e r n á n d e z L o b at o is a Lecturer in Latin Language and Literature at the University of Salamanca. He holds two PhDs (in Latin Philology from the University of Salamanca; in Humanism and Renaissance Civilization from the University of Florence) and four University Degrees (Classical Philology; Fine Arts; Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature; Hebrew Philology). His research explores the interrelationship of late antique literature, aesthetics, religion and thinking, as well as the reception of late antique authors and ideas. His publications include the books: Vel Apolline muto. Estética y poética de la Antigüedad tardía (2012); El Humanismo que no fue. Sidonio Apolinar en el Renacimiento (2014); The Poetics of Late Latin Literature (coedited with Jaś Elsner) (2017). Currently, he is the principal investigator of the BBVA Foundation Project “El fin del logocentrismo: fundamentos filosóficos y culturales de la literatura mística judía, cristiana y neoplatónica (s. III-VI d. C.)”. m at s m a L m is Professor of Comparative literature at the University of Gothenburg. His main fields are early modern and medieval Scandinavian literature and culture as modelled on the heritage of Antiquity, not least the reception of poetics, primarily that of Aristotle. s c o t t m c G i L L is Professor of Classical Studies at Rice University in Houston, TX. He is the author of Virgil Recomposed: The Mythological and Secular Centos in Antiquity (2005) and Plagiarism in Latin Literature (2012). His verse translation, with introduction and notes, of Juvencus’ Four Books of the Gospels appeared with Routledge in 2016. He is also co-editor of two volumes, most recently Classics Renewed: Reception and Innovation in the Latin Poetry of Late Antiquity (2016). a d P U t t e r teaches at the University of Bristol, where is Professor of Medieval English Literature. He has written extensively on English and European literature of the Middle Ages, and on metre. His books include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance (1996) and An Introduction to the Gawain Poet (1997) and Studies in the Metre of Alliterative Verse (2007). He has also edited, with Elizabeth Archibald, The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend (2009) and, with Myra Stokes, the Penguin edition of The Works of the Gawain Poet (2014). Publications on Latin texts include chapters and articles on Gerald of Wales, on medieval Latin chronicles, and on the medieval reception of late antique Biblical poets.

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s t e Fa n r e b e n i c H is Professor of Ancient History and the Classical Tradition in the Department of History at the University of Berne, Switzerland. He has published widely in the field of Late Antiquity and the history of historiography, including Hieronymus und sein Kreis (1992), Jerome (2002), Theodor Mommsen. Eine Biographie (first published 2002, 2nd ed. 2007), and, C.H. Beck. 1763–2013. Der kulturwissenschaftliche Verlag und seine Geschichte (2013). Most recently, he has edited a volume on Monarchische Herrschaft im Altertum (2017). s i G r i d s c H o t t e n i U s c U L L H e d is a Research Fellow in Comparative Literature at Uppsala University, financed by The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. She received her PhD from the University of Gothenburg in 2012. Since then she has published the book Proba the Prophet (2015), and a number of articles on literary and scholarly reception of ancient and late ancient authors. c H i a r a o. t o m m a s i , former pupil at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, received her PhD in Classical Philology at the University of Pisa (2000), where she is currently associate professor of History of Religions. She has published extensively on fifth and sixth century Latin poetry and on ‘esoteric’ trends in Late Antiquity, investigating the reception of Gnosticism and Platonism in authors like Tertullian, Apuleius, and Marius Victorinus. Her most recent works include The Bee Orchid. Religione e Cultura in Marziano Capella (2012) and an Italian commented edition of Arnobius’ Against the Pagans (2017). She is also interested in the Nachleben of classical imagery in opera, and has written on Aida, Zauberfloete and Tosca. J a m e s U d e n is an Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on Late Antiquity, as well as The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second-Century Rome (2015). d av i d w e s t b e r G is Senior Lecturer in Greek at Uppsala University. He has worked on late antique rhetoric and on the monastic reception of classical culture.

Index 11 September 2001 122 A Giacomo Acerbo 131–132 Achilles Tatios 214; 218; 221 Aeolus 193 Aeschines 213 Africa 69; 94; 132; 187; 246; 254 Giorgio Agamben 54–55; 65 allegory and allegoresis 17; 29; 33–50; 54; 64–66; 239 Eugenio Amato 207; 210–213 Ambrose 65; 97 Ammianus Marcellinus 46; 98; 179 Jean-Jacques Ampère 124–125 anachronicity 18; 33–50; 122 Clifford Ando 9 Fra Angelico 35; 39; 50 Aphthonios 212 Apollo 19; 109; 119–120 Apollonius Dyscolus 54–55 aposiopesis 250 Apuleius 18; 28–29; 90; 94 Aquilo (the north wind) 193–194 Arabs 109–111; 118; 120; 207; 246; 255 archaeology 115; 153 Archpoet 184; 198 Aelius Aristides 18; 213; 214 Aristophanes of Byzantium 216 Aristotle 45; 63; 213 Joshua Arthurs 132 “Aryans” 106; 119; 131 Atticism 211; 218 W.H. Auden 7

Erich Auerbach 248–253; 256 Augustine of Hippo 17; 51–57; 60; 65; 67; 97; 134; 186; 243–256 Aurelius Victor 98 Decimus Ausonius Magnus 7; 39; 54; 58; 98–101 Avitus of Vienne 184; 194; 196; 197; 202 B Emil Baehrens 20; 26 Honoré de Balzac 66 “barbarians” 75; 98–103; 110; 130 Willis Barnstone 62 Roland Barthes 51; 66 Basil of Caesarea 55; 214 Georges Bataille 58–61 Charles Baudelaire 90; 96 Jean Baudrillard 58 Belisarius 141; 144; 146; 151; 159; 234 Vanessa Bell 153–154 Walter Benjamin 33–50 Geoffrey Bennington 67–68 Nicola Benois 163 Sarah Bernhardt 153 Absalom Beyer 166 biblical verse paraphrases 183–203 Marc Bloch 35 Boethius 54–55 Arrigo Boito 159 Claudio Bondì 121–122; 133–134 Book of Jonah 183–203 Jorge Luis Borges 62–63 Peter Brown 8; 135

262

Franz Buecheler 26 Jacob Burckhardt 73–83; 114 Shane Butler 10; 19; 37; 132 Lord Byron 124–127; 132; 158; 172 Byzantium 9; 76; 81–82; 138–156; 148; 157–182; 205–230; 241 C Julius Caesar 203 Alan Cameron 39 Caracalla 82 Giosuè Carducci 129–130; 171 Filippo Carlà 134; 153 Carmen de Iona 184–203 Carmen de Sodoma 194 Alfredo Casella 165; 171 Cassian 65 catholicism 69; 95; 109; 113; 126; 130; 167; 175; 243 Catullus 19–22 Ceccardo Roccatagliata Ceccardi 129 Christoph Cellarius 118 Cena Cypriani (poem) 198 Gaetano Cesari 163 Charlemagne 85; 116 Philarète Chasles 125 Chorikios 206–230 Cicero 90–91; 96; 186 classical philology. see philology Claudius Claudianus 33–50; 58; 98–102; 128 Clement of Alexandria 55; 160; 216–218 Codex Argenteus 225–252 François-Zenon Collombet 126 Columella 22 Commodian 58; 96 Commodus 82 communism 245 conservatism 112; 126; 135 Constans 74

Index

Constantine I 26; 73–83; 85; 159; 176; 209 Constantine II 74 Constantinople 75–78; 82; 122; 143; 146; 150–152; 158; 161; 174–177; 209 Constantius 74 Corpus Hermeticum 55 Enrico Corradini 127; 130 cosmopolitanism 78 Flavius Julius Crispus 76 Charles Thomas Cruttwell 21 cultural memory 207; 225–252 Cupid 25 Cupid and Psyche 29 St Cyprian 96; 254 D Damascius 56; 60; 168 Gabriele D’Annunzio 10; 129; 159; 172–173 Dante Alighieri 29; 109–110; 130–131 Charles Darwin 112–113 decadence and decadentism 20–21; 28; 33–35; 38; 71–177; 158 deconstruction 51–70; 178 Guiseppe Dell’Isola 132 Paul de Man 45 Alexander Demandt 108; 113; 118–119 Demosthenes 213; 214; 217 Jacques Derrida 10; 55–70 Derveni papyrus 45 Charles Dickens 20 Georges Didi-Huberman 35–41; 50 Charles Diehl 153–154; 167–168; 174–176 Tommaso di Francesco 133 Dio Chrysostom 213 Diocletian 73–75; 79; 111; 116 Dione 30

Index

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 52– 64 Donatus 54 Gaetano Donizetti 158–159 Gino Doria 132 Dracontius 58 Albrecht Dürer 42–43 E Umberto Eco 52; 54; 56; 64 Stephanos Efthymiadis 220–221 Egeria 209 Bernhart Gangolf Ehrenfels 138 Carl Einstein 35 ekphrasis 49; 149; 205–230; 236 Elagabal 82; 95 T. S. Eliot 30–31 Enlightenment 9; 63; 66; 123; 133; 135 Epicureanism 18; 29 John Scotus Eriugena 56; 62 Astrid Erll 226–227; 240; 242 Ethiopia 131 European Union 135 Eurus 192–193 Eusebios of Caesarea 216–218 Evagrius Ponticus 54; 60 Stefano Evangelista 26 evolutionary biology 112 exile 177; 243–256 F Fascism 106; 127–133; 163–166 Gilles Fauconnier 221 Faust 18; 109–110; 168 Fausta Flavia Maxima 76; 138; 151; 159 Gustave Flaubert 141; 160 Florus 20

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Alessandro Fo 133–134 Richard Foerster 210 Andrew Ford 45 Marco Formisano 9; 11 Michel Foucault 55–58; 62 fragments 33–50 Anatole France 160 Francis of Assisi 29 Fredegisus of York 55 Frederick II 76–77 French revolution 124–126 Sigmund Freud 80–81 Marcus Cornelius Fronto 18 Fulgentius 54; 197; 199 G Galen 18 Galla Placidia 231 Louis Gallet 160 Gaul 99–102; 125–127; 132; 159 Théophile Gautier 29; 90; 96–97 Gawain 184–203 Matthias Gelzer 116; 120 Genesis 248 Andrea Giardina 8–10; 130 Edward Gibbon 7–8; 12; 73; 76; 122–126; 135 gnosticism 55 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 18; 168 Andreas Goltz 134 Goths 100; 121; 130; 146; 225–252 Remy de Gourmont 58 Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus 112 Gregory of Nazianzus 55; 214 Gregory of Nyssa 53–55; 60; 61; 207 Gregory of Tours 170 Gregory Pardos 213 Gregory the Great 170; 179 Claudio Guastalla 157–182

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Index

H Hades 233 Pierre Hadot 55–56 P.J. Heather 8 Friedrich Hebbel 147–148 Heraclitus 18; 105 Heraclius 174–175 Hercules 198 Hermogenes of Tarsus 212–213 Herodian 213 Hesione 198 Himerios 214 historicism 34–36; 38–39; 42; 114–117; 137 Adolf Hitler 106 Bruce Holsinger 52; 66 Homer 27; 45–46; 64; 88; 218; 248 Horace 188 Hugh of St Victor 249–250; 253 Huns 102 Joris-Karl Huysmans 28; 58; 85–104; 126 Hyperides 217 I idealization 41; 156; 158; 179 intertextuality 24; 34; 39; 44–45; 49; 53; 143; 172; 184; 186; 188; 201; 207; 214–215; 220–221; 221; 222; 233; 241 Irenaeus of Lyons 55; 63 Isidore of Seville 55 Islam 76; 78; 117; 120; 122 Isocrates 214 J Werner Jaeger 115 Hans-Robert Jauss 9

Jerome 64; 209 Jews 55; 62–69; 130; 150; 166; 199; 248–251 John Chrysostom 55; 214 John Doukas (or Phokas) 205–230 John of Damascus 55 Boris Johnson 135 Josephos 221 Carl Gustav Jung 80 Justinian 141; 144–154; 159; 167; 237; 241 Juvenal 91; 188 Juvencus 186–187; 189; 199 K Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer 141 Raymond Klibansky 42 Alma Johanna Koenig 137–156 L Lactantius 58; 96; 186 Italo Lana 133 lateness 7; 21; 25–30; 101; 128 Libanios 213–214; 220; 223 liberalism 76; 112 Libya 131; 250 Flavius Galerius Valerius Licinianus Licinius 76 linguistic turn 52–57 Nicole Loraux 35 Lucan 91; 100; 151; 188; 199; 203 Lucian 18; 213–214 Lucretius 19; 23 Jean-François Lyotard 58; 67; 69–70 M Macrobius 54; 98

Index

Martha Malamud 122 Norman Malcolm 57 Gian Francesco Malipiero 165; 171 Manicheism 245–246 Manuel I Komnenos 208 Marbod of Rennes 184–203 Marcus Aurelius 18 Jean-Luc Marion 61–63 Marius Victorinus 56 Markianos, bishop of Gaza 206 Henri-Irénée Marrou 85–87 Charles Martindale 8–9; 40; 256 Pietro Mascagni 165 Jules Massenet 160 Sebastian Matzner 18 Maximus the Confessor 54; 55 Scott McGill 9 medievalism (reception of the Western middle ages) 9; 52 Menander 216 Charis Messis 205; 208–210 Theodore Metochites 214 Eduard Meyer 115; 117–120 Michelangelo 80; 81 Middle Ages 67; 73–74; 78; 80; 82; 103; 111; 118; 123; 158; 183–185 John Milton 183 Theodor Mommsen 34; 111 Monotheletism 174 Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu 73 Moses 80–81; 218 Benito Mussolini 106; 127; 163 N Alexander Nagel 35–37 Nazism 75; 106; 248 Neoplatonism 46; 53–56; 63; 216 Nero 148; 151; 159 Nestorianism 173–175

265

Friedrich Nietzsche 58; 77; 80; 109–111; 112; 114 Nika revolt 146; 150 Ninevites 187–203 Pierre Nora 227 Eduard Norden 28 Georgia S. Nugent 10; 40; 51 Numenius of Apamea 218 O October Revolution of 1917 12; 105; 115 Gerard O’Daly 190 Odoacer 230; 235 Kevin Ohi 17; 26–27; 29 Henri Omont 26 opera 157–182 orientalism 76; 137; 153; 158; 244–256 Origen 55 Orphism 233 Orthodox Christianity 82; 173 otium 20 Ottomans 82 Ovid 19; 23; 31; 39; 46; 49; 188; 191; 197 Oxford 17; 25; 125–126 P Eugeni Pacelli 130–131 pagans 13; 39; 50; 53–54; 96; 96–102; 111; 126; 129–134; 157–161; 160; 164; 169; 172; 178; 186; 213–217 Erwin Panofsky 42 Stratis Papaioannou 212; 222 Giovanni Pascoli 129 Pier Paolo Pasolini 41; 134 Walter Pater 17–32 Paulinus of Nola 58; 184; 195–196

266

Index

Aaron Pelttari 48–49 Pervigilium Veneris 19–32 Petronius 91–95; 103; 151 philology 7; 26; 34; 88; 115; 117; 119; 249 Philomela 31 Photios 213–214 Pirqê Abot 65 Pius XII 130 Ildebrando Pizzetti 165; 172 plagiarism 88; 215; 222 Plato 29; 64; 144; 218 Plotinus 56; 60 pluralism 78; 137 Plutarch 213 J.G.A. Pocock 123 Jackson Pollock 35; 50 Polybius 141 Porphyry 54; 56; 216–218 Lucie Porterfield 133 postmodern theory 10; 51–70 Jean-Joseph-François Poujoulat 126 Ezra Pound 19; 23; 30 Giovanni Preziozi 131 Priscian 54–55 Proclus 55 Procopius of Caesarea 138–156; 227–252 Procopius of Gaza 214 Protestantism 79; 109; 167 Prudentius 39; 58; 176; 183–186; 189–190; 200–203 pseudo-Longinos 216–218 Q queer 10; 18; 37 R racism 110; 131

Ravenna 14; 122; 145; 153–155; 161– 162; 167; 170; 173–174; 225–252 Reformation 79; 81; 166 Renaissance 9; 30; 35; 73–83; 171; 178; 183 Ottorino Respighi 157–182 Joseph Rhakendytes 213–214 Otto Ribbeck 26 Eberhard Richtsteig 210 Alois Riegl 8; 34–35; 38; 85–87; 105; 115–116; 120 Alexander Riese 26 Rainer Maria Rilke 233 Michael Roberts 40; 46; 85; 87 rococo 77 Giulio Romano 30 Roscelin of Compiègne 55 Charles Rosen 38 Roberto Rossellini 134 Philip Rousseau 8–9 Rufinus 65 ruins 33; 42–47; 102; 124; 128–130; 133 Rutilius Namatianus 46; 54; 98–101; 121–135 S Edward Said 10; 243–267 Alessandro Sanine 163 Sappho 20 Fritz Saxl 42 Joseph Scaliger 26 Arthur Schopenhauer 77; 79 Eduard Schwartz 117 Sedulius 185; 189 Otto Seeck 34; 108; 111–113; 116 Septuagint 194; 196 Servius 54 Sulpicius Severus 169 Carlo Sforza 129 Luigi Siciliani 127; 129

Index

Sidonius Apollinaris 54; 58 Paulus Silentiarius 145; 149 Song of Songs 64 Sophocles 216 Oswald Spengler 77; 105–120 Gabrielle Spiegel 9 Statius 39 Eduard Stemplinger 216; 222 Peter Struck 45 Symmachus 98; 235 syncretism 75; 78; 117 Synesios 213 T Oskar Jan Tauschinski 138–140; 148 Tertullian 55; 90; 94–96 Theagenes of Rhegium 45 theft 207; 214–219; 225 Theoderic the Great 162; 174; 225–252 Theodora 137–156; 167–168 Theodotus 55 Theopompos 217 Thomas Aquinas 59 Tiberianus 20 Jan-Olof Tjäder 230 Alceo Toni 164 Torah 64 Filippo Trentin 41; 50 Göran Tunström 225–252 Turkey 248 John Tzetzes 213 U Uppsala University Library 225–252 Hermann Usener 115 Vincenzo Ussani 128

267

V Valentinus (gnostic) 55 Paul Valéry 34 Venantius Fortunatus 102 Venus 17–32; 48 Paul Verlaine 10 Verlaine 93; 97; 101 Vetus Latina 188; 194; 196 Vienna 137–156 Abel-Francois Villemain 124–126; 132 Virgil 23; 39; 44–46; 64; 88; 90; 127; 186–203 Richard Wagner 77–80; 158 Aby Warburg 35 Bryan Ward-Perkins 8 Catherine Ware 50 Hans Wiers-Jenssen 166–169; 175 Ulrich von WilamowitzMoellendorff 115; 117 Oscar Wilde 24; 28; 91 Ralph Williams 188 Ludwig Wittgenstein 53–63 Christopher Wood 35–37 Virginia Woolf 153; 248 William Wordsworth 18 Wiljarith 225–26, 230 World War I 105; 106; 115; 130; 137 World War II 165; 227 X Xenophon 217 Z Zen buddhism 54; 56 Zeno of Verona 184–193 Jan Ziolkowski 198

sigrid schottenius cullhed mats malm (Eds.)

Reading Late Antiquity

  he field of Late Antique studies has involved self  reflexion and criticism since its emergence in the late nineteenth century, but in recent years there has been a widespread desire to retrace our steps more systematically and to inquire into the millennial history of previous interpretations, historicization and uses of the end of the Greco-Roman world. This volume contributes to that enterprise. It emphasizes an aspect of Late Antiquity reception that ensues from its subordination to the Classical tradition, namely its tendency to slip in and out of Western consciousness. Narratives and artifacts associated with this period have gained attention, often in times of crisis and change, and exercised influence only to disappear again. When later readers have turned to the same period and identified with what they perceive, they have tended to ascribe the feeling of relatedness to similar values and circumstances rather than to the formation of an unbroken tradition of appropriation.

schottenius cullhed malm (Eds.)

schottenius cullhed · malm (Eds.) Reading Late Antiquity

Reading Late Antiquity

Universitätsverlag

isbn 978-3-8253-6787-9

win t e r

Heidelberg