All of this happened naturally and not by design. It is ridiculous to imagine that peoples taking their first baby steps in civilization had the wit to understand, and the desire to ensure that knowledge was handed down to posterity by the only means that they then had—verses preserved by memory—and to compose verses especially for this purpose. See p. 4351, beginning.
[4345] In that literature before writing, the only way for people to make their own compositions public was to sing them, or teach them to others who would sing them. *“Indeed, this” (the art of the rhapsodes) “was for a long time the only way to reveal one’s genius in public”* (Wolf, § 23, p. XCVIII.) For many centuries these were the publications of the Greeks, so that even after writing came into common use, *“even Xenophanes performed his own poems as a rhapsode,”* as Wolf observes (ibid.) quoting Laertius, 9, 18, which others have misinterpreted. And perhaps it is for this reason that Herodotus, one of the first writers of prose, wanted to recite his prose in public (if the story is true; and perhaps this observation could make it more probable). (See p. 4375.)1 Given the common practice of previous ages, and habit, nothing appeared to have been published, put forth, unless it had truly been communicated, aloud, to the people. I leave aside the fact that after the use of writing as described, the Greeks continued to recite or sing in public the verses of Homer and other ancient poets. *“At first, and almost up to the time of Pericles, Greece still knew Homer and its other ἀοιδοὺς [poets] more from hearing than from reading. Even then, few people took the trouble to write, and reading was toilsome and difficult; hence, they paid the greatest attention to the rhapsodes, and hung from their lips, captivated by the extraordinary sweetness of their songs. Cynaethus is mentioned among the most famous rhapsodes of this age,” (the age of Pericles) “around the Sixty-ninth Olympiad. A contemporary of Pindar, he emigrated from Chios to Syracuse, or at least practiced his art especially there.”* (Wolf, § 36, p. CIX).2 The rhapsodes in Socrates’s time are well known, Plato (ibid., p. CLXI, note 22) and Xenophon, § 23, p. XCVI, and the author [4346] of the Hipparchus (a dialogue which is placed among the works of the latter)1 states that in his time also the verses of Homer were recited by the rhapsodes at the five-yearly Panathenaic festivals and in that order which, according to him, Hipparchus, son of Peisistratus had directed the rhapsodes to follow in reciting them.2 And until the final years of Greece, at banquets and in conversations among educated people, the practice continued of reciting from memory poetic extracts from various authors, which was called ῥῆσιν εἰπεῖν and similar; see p. 4438, and see Coray’s Commentary on Theophrastus’s Characters and Casaubon’s on Athenaeus.3 All of those compositions of a literary and epideictic nature, which the sophists and rhetoricians in Roman times publicly declaimed through the cities of Greece, Asia, and Gaul, especially in the 2nd century, in praise of those cities, or of the emperors, or the Gods or heroes, etc., of that country, or on questions of morality, national philology, etc., can be regarded as a continuation of the ancient rhapsodic practice. See p. 4351.
We laugh at that ancient method of publication; perhaps the ancients would laugh as much at ours. Certainly, we cannot deny that theirs was a natural (indeed the only natural) and true method of publication. We say we have published a composition when we have printed a few hundred copies, which will go at most to a few hundred hands; as if those hundreds of readers were the nation: and in truth the nation, the true public, the people, know absolutely nothing about it. Publication in those days meant giving and presenting to the people, who today are alien to our editions. As already *“Plato (Phaedrus, p. 274e) and other ancient philosophers judged that … the discovery of letters had helped the branches of learning but had hindered those who would learn them. In fact, the very invention that had been called the medicine of memory might not [4347] unjustly be termed its injury and ruin instead.”* (Wolf, § 24, pp. CI–CII), so it would be no less paradoxical and perhaps truer to say that writing, celebrated for having popularized education, was, on the contrary, partly the cause of the depopularization of literature, which once existed only among the people, and of the separation between the people and learned men who before then had necessarily been a part of them. Writing alone created the possibility of a literature which is more cultivated, refined, and perfect, but which by its nature cannot be, and never will be, popular. (Today we are at a point where, in order to make it so, it is necessary to deperfect it, to return it to a kind of infancy, to a roughness, sacrificing beauty for utility.) See p. 4367. And not just prose, and doctrinal writing, but also poetry, which at the beginning, as we have seen, had the people as its rightful listeners; which was the whole of literature when literature was popular; which still today, and in every century ancient and modern, the cry goes up, it must be popular, it is popular by its very nature; and yet poetry has been lost to the people through the fault of writing; actually, it is the genre of writing that is furthest away from being popular, and the hardest to get back to being popular, impossible in fact, unless and until the poetry of whatever modern literature is, I do not say reformed, but completely abolished, and another is created that is new, through and through. See p. 4352.1
By composing without writing, entrusting their own compositions only to memory (*“from that comes the diligent and, in the Iliad, strenuously repeated invocation of the Muses, the goddesses of memory”*: Wolf, § 20, p. LXXXIX), Homer and the poets of those times were far from aspiring to immortality. *“In those days, not even immortality for one’s own name was reason enough to make anyone seek out enduring monuments; and to believe that Homer sought them is wishful thinking rather than [4348] convincing argument. For where does he indicate that he is possessed by such an ambition? Where does he utter a declaration of this sort, so frequent among other poets, or cunningly conceal one?”* (§ 22, p. XCIV.) The idea of immortality had still not been conceived, and the desire for it even less so. Glory was much desired, in other words the honor and praise of contemporaries—of acquaintances, citizens, or compatriots—during life and in the early days after death: this was quite sufficient stimulus for the greatest deeds. *“But, in general, that age, playing as it were under its nurse’s eyes and following the impulse of its divine genius, was content simply to experiment with very beautiful things and to offer them for the delectation of others: if it sought any reward, it was the applause and praise of the contemporary audience,”* says Wolf (§ 22, pp. XCIV–V, and quotes Horace, Epistulae 2, 1, 93).1 And what he says about poets in those times must likewise be said of warriors, magistrates, or strong, just, virtuous men. See p. 4352. Another advantage in those Homeric times of having no notion of immortality of name: (1) they were not tormented by a desire so difficult to fulfill, (2) much more philosophically and rationally than us (as those of the earliest times are always more philosophical than us), they limited their desires to what is sensible, and natural to desire, the praise of people who are alive; they did not extend their sights beyond what is granted to the individual, beyond the space assigned to them by nature, i.e., beyond life; finally, they had no concern about what could neither assist, nor harm, nor please, nor displease us, about what will be thought of us after our death.2
And here it is curious and philosophical, as well as sad, to consider that Homer achieved immortality without desiring or aspiring to it; and we who desire it, we, by the very effect of writing, which has inspired such a desire, [4349] will not achieve it. The verses and the heroes of Homer, entrusted to memory alone, have crossed almost 30 centuries, and will last, so to speak, as long as the human race, as long as our present conception of time; our compositions and our heroes, entrusted to writing, which must now have millions of compositions and heroes to preserve, will barely survive the future generation. Another very true paradox: writing which (alone or principally) has produced the idea and the desire for immortality, writing considered as an instrument of immortality itself, that same writing, by multiplying beyond measure the objects consigned to tradition,
has (alone or principally) now made immortality impossible to achieve. Even great men, writers, and events are now necessarily lost in the crowd: when consigned to memory alone, they did not become mixed up among a great multitude, and that instrument which was apparently so weak, by which I mean simple memory, was well able to preserve them in perpetuity. Which writing can no longer do. Writing does harm to fame, of which it is believed to be the source and principal and necessary organ. See p. 4354.
With regard to forms of modern literature in which poetry preceded prose, such as Italian and English, the reason for this is different. And first it is necessary to make a distinction. If we are talking about any kind of verses and prose, this is not true. We have prose writings, including those destined and made to last, and which form one kind of literature; we have chronicles (Ricordano, Dino, etc.),1 legends, etc., which are as old as our oldest verses, or at least it would be very difficult to prove that the verses are older. So far as classics are concerned, certainly Dante for example preceded all of our classic prose writers. The reason is that modern languages were at first [4350] thought to be inappropriate for literature. And this is natural. Before they were refined, literature was considered to reside in cultured language, in that language which was half dead and half alive, in which all good books and learned literature were written. See p. 4372. Prose writers who aspired to being cultured therefore wrote in cultured language, even though it was different from that in which they spoke. But the poet needs to express his feelings in the language in which he thinks, and finds every other language incapable of conveying them. It is said that Dante, in composing the Divine Comedy, first tried Latin, but naturally had to return to the vernacular.1 This is known to be so with Petrarch. But as writing was commonly used at that time, cultured prose could not remain for long behind cultured poetry. Boccaccio came a few years after Dante, and was only a little younger than Petrarch, whereas the first cultured prose to be seen in Greece did not appear until 400 years after the Homeric period. Nor was this perhaps the first cultured poetry to be produced in Greece. Indeed everything suggests the contrary. *“But Homeric diction is very distant from the stridency of the rough tropes and images of primitive peoples, and is quite restrained in words and phrases. In its even and modest tenor it announces in advance, so to speak, the prose diction that will follow after it—which however, we find that no one attempted for more than three centuries.” (Wolf places Homer in 950 BCE. See p. 4352, paragraph 2.) “Hence I tend to think that it was not the level of mental cultivation but certain other factors, and especially the difficulty of writing, that hindered prose from following poetic eloquence as quickly as nature would allow.”* (Wolf, § 17, pp. LXXI–II.) (21–22 Aug. 1828.) See p. 4352, beginning.
[4351] For p. 4344, end. The extent to which Homer thought about preserving the memory of the facts, and standing in as a historian, as Courier describes him (see p. 4318), can be seen from the fables of the gods which, without there being any superstitious need for them, and just for beauty’s sake, and clearly of his own invention, he mixes in with his stories, to the point that they are in large part made up of fables. See p. 4367.
For p. 4346. Greek literature and Greek authors always, or certainly mostly, and for longer than any other literature, sought out the people. They had the people in mind when composing, they aimed to benefit and please the people, and were nourished by the aura of its acclaim, unlike what happened particularly to the literature of another nation, even during its finest period, whose political situation was by no means less popular than that of Greece. I am referring here to Roman literature, which in terms of artistic perfection exceeded Greek literature, and perhaps exceeded all known literature, but yet, in essence, remained—rather than becoming—quite inaccessible to the people. This was caused by its very art and perfection, and because it did not originate in Latium but was imported. Whereas, on the other hand, there is no doubt that the perpetual popularity of Greek literature was largely derived from a sort of memory of its origin, from an influence continually exercised by it, from the primitive impulse, from its original and enduring spirit, from the direction it took at the beginning. See p. 4354. Greek literature, according to Courier (preface to the Prospectus d’une nouvelle traduction d’Hérodote)1 is the only literature to have been born of itself, in its own country, through the wits of its own people, not from other literature. This is not true, in general terms, because many other peoples have, or have had, an autochthonous literature, very much like early Greek, consisting just of poetry, and poetry which is unwritten, or written down many centuries after being composed [4352] (see p. 4319 and references therein). However what Courier says is true in relation to forms of literature more familiar to us, that is, Latin and the more cultured of the modern literatures.
For p. 4350, end. See p. 4326, paragraph 2 —So far as other nations are concerned, such as those mentioned at the end of the previous page, it is not correct to say that poetry preceded prose, but that they had no other literature than poetry. (22 Aug. 1828.)
For the same page, margin. *“We set the first age” (of the Homeric poems) “from their origins, that is, from the time of the refined poetry of the Ionians (around 950 BCE) to Peisistratus,”* etc.1 Wolf, § 7, p. XXII. (22 Aug. 1828.)
For p. 4348. Nor do I still believe that Miltiades at Marathon, nor the 300 at Thermopylae, aspired to be immortalized in name,2 as did Philip and Alexander once the use of histories and books had spread.
For p. 4347. Those ancients could say with much justification that their verses, when simply sung, were published, and that our books, when printed, remain unpublished. See p. 4317, and p. 4388, last paragraph.
For p. 4340. *“And yet we find generally similar classes of men” (“who had time throughout their lives for this one art, so that they could either compose poems in order to make them public afterward by singing, or learn them from others once they had been made public in this way”)3 “among other peoples as well:” (in addition to the Greeks) “among the Jews, what they call the schools of the prophets; then, again, more akin to us, the bards, the scalds, (sic)4 the Druids. Caesar and Mela report (Caesar, De bello Gallico 6, 14; Mela, 3, 2) that the druids had their own course of training, in which some pupils remained for up to twenty years, ‘so that they could learn by heart a vast number of verses which had not been committed to writing.’ (Similar things have often been reported elsewhere, most recently about the narration of Ossian by W. Thornton, in Transactions of the American Philosophical [4353] Society at Philadelphia, vol. 3, pp. 314ff.: even now there are in that nation old men who preserve such an abundance of ancient songs in their memory that they could exhaust even the fastest scribe by dictating for several months.)1 How I wish that the Greeks had transmitted to us even that much about their own bards and rhapsodes! For I judge it to be quite certain that they too had their own course of training and a particular devotion to their art.”* (Friedrich August Wolf, loc. cit. p. 4343, § 24, pp. CII–III.) — *“Therefore it was under the rule of the Peisistratids that Greece first saw the ancient poems of its bards consigned to durable records. A number of nations have experienced such an age, one when letters and a greater civic culture were in their infancy. By comparing these carefully, much light may be shed upon the matters we are discussing here. For—to touch in passing upon two nations entirely dissimilar both to one another and to the Greeks—scholars agree that in our own Germany, which had celebrated civil wars and the deeds of its princes and generals in poems even before the time of Tacitus,a Charlemagne at last collected these first fruits of rude genius and put them into books. So too the Arabs began only in the seventh century to gather into collections (Divans) the disorganized poetry of earlier ages which had been transmitted by memory, and the diversity of the early texts of the Koran itself shows that it had a fate similar to Homer’s. Besides these and other peoples we should compare the Jews. Widespread literacy and writing of books were, in my view at least, a good bit more recent among them than is ge
nerally thought, and hence the corpus of writings, especially the more ancient ones, is less genuine. But experts on Oriental literature will decide about these questions and about those Arab collections.”* (§ 35, p. CLVI.)
[4354] For p. 4351. Although things change and become corrupted, deformed, distorted by progress, they always retain some sign of their origin, and some vestige of their original spirit and state. In Rome, where literature was not popular from the beginning, even orations to the people, which were certainly delivered in popular style and language, were written down (unlike Attic orations) in a style that was definitely not popular, because when they were written, they entered into the dominion of literature, and they were written not for the people but for the educated. (23 Aug. [1828].)
Zibaldone Page 324