by Stuart Kelly
This was reason enough for Pope to produce his own Dunciad, from the Preface to which the above words are taken.
Can we tell from the title what the book was about? The definition of madness is never fixed, but fluid, shaped by its culture and dependent on what is considered sane, reasonable, or self-evident. A rational, scientifically minded Greek of the fifth century B.C.E. could maintain that when a woman had a nosebleed, it meant her menstruation had got lost, that the Sun gave birth to maggots in dung, and that a tribe of one-eyed men called the Arimaspi lived in the extreme North. Madness encompasses murderous rage and inappropriate levity, fearfulness and fearlessness, silence and babble. The title could suggest just about anything.
All that is left of Homer’s comic epic are a few lines, pickled in other works. The Scholiast, writing on Aeschines, gives a thumbnail sketch that fits with his etymologically unfortunate name: “Margites . . . a man, who, though fully grown, did not know if his mother or father had given birth to him, and who would not sleep with his wife, saying he was afraid she would give a bad account of him to his mother.” At this point, Margitesseems to coincide with Nietzsche’s description of the comedy of cruelty, as Schadenfreude. We laugh, because we know we are superior to poor Margites, for whom the birds and the bees are mysteries.
Plato and Aristotle each record a snippet of the poem. From Plato’s fragmentary Alcibiades we learn that “he knew many things, but all badly.” This Margites is a quack, a clown, a halfwit. It is not his innocence in a chaotic world that forms the comedy, but the chaos of his half-baked theories and half-assed ideas. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, offers a different hint: “the gods taught him neither to dig nor to plough, nor any other skill; he failed in every craft.” Odd. Odd indeed. Aristotle’s Margites is an idiot, he has no function, no social reason. He’s a spare part, an appendix. A vague imputation of laziness hangs over this creature who is confused by the difference between spades and hoes.
Is this a naïve Stan or a flustering Ollie? Was he the stooge, the kid from the sticks, the fish out of water, the innocent abroad, or the country cousin? Zenobius presents, again, an illustration. “The fox knows many a ruse, but the hedgehog’s single trick beats them all,” a phrase also attributed to Archilochus. Is Margites the fox or the hedgehog? Nowhere in the extant extracts is there the sense that Margites is a cheat, a con, or a wily individual. Zenobius suggests something else: the wise little man. Chaplin. Forrest Gump. Candide. The Good Soldier Schweik. Homer Simpson.
The Margites is not the only comic epic that existed. Arctinus of Miletus, the author of the lost War of the Titans and a continuation of The Iliad, may be the author of The Cercopes. The Suda records that
these were two brothers living upon the earth who practiced every kind of knavery. They were called Cercopes (or “The Monkey-Men”) because of their cunning doings: one of them was named Passalus and the other Acmon. Their mother, a daughter of Memnon, seeing their tricks, told them to keep clear of Black-bottom, that is, of Heracles. These Cercopes were sons of Theia and Ocean, and are said to have been turned to stone for trying to deceive Zeus. Liars and cheats, skilled in deeds irremediable, accomplished knaves. Far over the world they roamed deceiving men as they wandered continually.
This form of comedy seems subtly different from the Margites: this is a pair of rogues, a couple of tricksters. We know they came an inevitable cropper. A carved frieze depicts Herakles with the scallywags trussed up by their ankles, hanging upside down.
With The Cercopes the audience is permitted a double empathy: we can enjoy their shameless pranks and outrageous antics, as well as the satisfaction of seeing their eventual comeuppance. Where the sympathies lie with Margites is far less clear. The heroes of The Iliad and The Odyssey are far from perfect. Achilles is petulant and inhumane, Odysseus is untrustworthy and vengeful. But a flawed hero can nonetheless be a real hero—a flawed schmuck seems, frankly, unimaginable. What could we have learned if the Margites had been spared! Did the Greeks laugh at or with or in a wholly different preposition? Did they yearn, in a rebuke to their entrenched sophistication, for a fool who muddled through? Did they mock the afflicted or smirk at the affected?
Of all the lost books, the Margites is the least explicable, the most tantalizing. Its author was esteemed beyond measure. It was unique among his works. But perhaps—just perhaps—its loss should not be mourned too deeply. What is gone must be reinvented. In the absence of a comedy by the greatest poet of all time, successive generations have been free to imagine sarcastic, sentimental, whimsical, serious, gentle, and black comedies, wit and smut, slapstick and riddle. An explosion of new forms may be worth one extinction.
Hesiod
{seventh century B.C.E.}
HOMER IS ONLY ever glimpsed in his work. At the opening of the Theogony, one of the two extant works attributed to the Boeotian poet Hesiod, the poet himself appears. Although the bulk of the poem is an elaborate catalogue of the genealogy of the gods, it opens with a scene describing how, on Mount Helicon, the Muses taught the shepherd Hesiod how to sing, swiftly shifting their address to the first-person poet. “They gave me a staff of blooming laurel,” he says, and “breathed a sacred voice” into him.
But scholars from the earliest days have wondered how much of the work attributed to Hesiod was actually written by him. Longinus was so offended by a line about the snot-nosed goddess Trouble that he thought fit to exonerate the actual Hesiod from being the author of the lost work from which the line came, the Shield of Herakles. Of the two poems we have, the Theogony and Works and Days, most contemporary scholars would like at least one to be by Hesiod.
So the appearance of Hesiod in the Theogony might be thought to clinch the case. But on grounds of style, diction, and the fact that it is occasionally rather gauche and boring, translators and critics have been loath to believe it can be by the same author as Works and Days. Nonetheless, the Greeks thought they were written by one author, and we shall proceed as if Hesiod wrote both poems.
Works and Days is strikingly dissimilar to the Theogony. It begins with two origin myths that account for the state of mankind. First, the reader is told about Pandora’s box, and the unleashing of manifold pains, cares, and diseases on humanity. Then we learn about Zeus’ fivefold attempts at creation: the gold, silver, bronze, heroic, and iron races, of which, Hesiod gloomily informs us, he belongs to the ferrous species, and would rather have died sooner or not been born yet.
The later parts of the work offer agricultural maxims, interspersed with autobiographical asides, and the whole is cast as an epistle to his cheating brother Perses, who would do well to listen to some homespun advice. No one can argue with “Wrap up warm to prevent gooseflesh” or “Invite your friends, not your enemies, to dinner,” though “Don’t piss facing the sun” and “Never have sex after funerals” seem more peculiar prohibitions.
The writer of Works and Days is not some autodidact, spinning his gripes and saws into a more mnemonic form. He tells us he won a poetry competition at the funeral games for King Amphidamas, and placed the prize (a tripod) on Mount Helicon, where he first started to write, on returning home. In Works and Days Hesiod does not tell us the title of his award-winning entry, and, since such works as The Preceptsof Chiron, The Astronomy, The Marriage of Ceyx, Melampodia, Aegimius, Idaean Dactyls, and The List of Heroines have all proven vulnerable to the corrosion of passing time, at least one academic has made a virtue of necessity and argued that Hesiod must have been reciting the Theogony.
But against whom was he vying in this competition? At the beginning of Works and Days, when surveying the effects of the goddess Strife, Hesiod conjectures that there must be two goddesses; since some forms of striving, such as warfare, are pernicious, and others, such as the healthy competition between tradesmen, farmers, and even poets, are wholly beneficial. The ancients took this as a cue to link Hesiod (whoever he was) with the only other great early poet, Homer (whoever he was).
Another poem, called
The Contest of Homer and Hesiod, is sometimes ascribed to Hesiod, even though the version that we have dates from nearly a millennium later. In it, Homer trounces Hesiod in every bout, and at one point seems to exasperate him into speaking nonsense. In the final round, they each read from “their” greatest works: The Iliad and Works and Days. The judges eventually give the victory (surprise, surprise! It’s a tripod!) to Hesiod, since the man who praises peace is better than the man who glorifies war. Blatantly apocryphal and clearly anachronistic, it is still the story that would be most charming, if true.
The Yahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist, the Priestly Author, and the Redactor
{c. sixth century B.C.E.}
THE BIBLE IS frequently described as a library rather than a book: it is also a mausoleum of writers, a vast graveyard of authors. Who wrote the Bible? The orthodox answer is, assuredly, God; but even the most inflexible traditionalist does not believe that the Infinite condescended to ink. Through prophecy, inspiration, and occasionally blatant dictation, God speaks but Man writes. God does have books—in particular, one which He is inordinately fond of editing. As He says to Moses, “Whoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book.” But the books of the Bible as we have them are by God by proxy at best.
With the books of prophecy, it seemed logical to assign them to the prophets themselves as nominal authors. We are exhorted to “Hear the Word of the Lord,” regurgitated through human agency, as in the case of Ezekiel, whom God forced to swallow a scroll containing His message. The prophets sometimes employed their God’s method of production: Jeremiah entrusted the actual transcription of his prophecies, which threatened the impending Babylonian conquest, to Baruch, who had to make multiple copies since the king, Jehoiakim, kept on burning the offending prophecies.
Jeremiah raged against false prophets, who were predicting an opposite outcome. Naturally enough, when Babylon did conquer Israel, the words of the worthless prophets were lost, and the correct foretellings of Jeremiah acquired the authenticity of oracular revelation. The scribes who collected the prophets were not above sleight of hand in this matter: the Book of Isaiah collates the words of an eighth-century B.C.E. prophet with the words of another, unknown prophet who lived two centuries after Isaiah’s death. Hindsight makes exceptionally good foresight.
Then there are the five first books, the Pentateuch, which contain the laws given to Moses and the prehistorical origin of the world. Tradition ascribed these books to Moses himself, which seems unlikely, given that they also contain an account of Moses’ death, and his burial by God, “no man knows where.”
Though apologists and ideologues are keen to present the scriptural texts as a unity (the Gideon Bible, for example, refers to the authors from different eras and backgrounds who nonetheless “perfectly agree on doctrine”), the Bible is riddled with snags and stray threads. In particular, we can investigate the books in the Bible, rather than the books of it. King Solomon, for example, “spake three thousand proverbs: and his songs were a thousand and five.” There are 1,175 verses in the Book of Proverbs, and only one “Song of Songs.” Even in cataloguing the accomplishments of the ruler, the Bible also reveals the extent to which his achievements are lost.
Likewise, we have no idea what became of the “book in seven parts” commissioned by Joshua, which described the cities that would be divided among the Israelites. Nor do we have the Book of Jasher, cited twice, and which, presumably, contained material on King David’s archery lessons and the stilling of the sun in the valley of Ajalon. The “Book of the Battles of Yahweh,” mentioned in the Book of Numbers, chapter 21, is likewise lost. Throughout the First and Second Book of Kings and the First and Second Book of Chronicles, the writer refers the reader to the “Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel” and the “Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah,” neither of which invaluable resource has survived.
In the Apocrypha, we learn that the Book of the Maccabees is a summary of the more complete, five-volume work by Jason of Cyrene. The Apocrypha also contains an account of the creation of the scriptures. “For thy law is burnt, therefore no man knoweth the things that are done of thee, or the works that shall begin,” complains Esdras, and in response God commands him to recite the 204 books containing the Law, which are transcribed by five scholars over a period of forty days. The final 70, the “Books of Mystery,” are held back from the people: still, it leaves 95 whole volumes unaccounted for.
The Bible appears again in its own history. In the Second Book of Kings, King Josiah intends to reconsecrate and refurbish the Temple in 621 B.C.E., after its desecration by the Baal-worshiping sons of Athaliah. Hilkiah, the high priest, is told to reckon up the amount of silver they have; and, in doing so, stumbles on the long-lost Book of the Law. With Shaphan the scribe, they show it to the young king, who rends his garments on hearing of what will happen to those who do not follow in the paths of righteousness. Saint Jerome and Saint John Chrysostom in the fourth century C.E. both identified this Book of the Law with the Book of Deuteronomy. Josiah instructs them to seek out Huldah the prophetess, to explain the work in detail. She confirms that if the king rectifies the behavior of the people, God’s anger will be deflected. Though Josiah is told that God will “gather him into his grave in peace,” the Second Book of Chronicles claims he is murdered by his people, suffering from great diseases, after a Syrian incursion. The whole story of Hilkiah, Shaphan, and Huldah is omitted from Chronicles. It is not the only, or most bizarre, contradiction between the pseudo-historical accounts; compare, for example, 2 Samuel 24:1 (“And again the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah”) with 1 Chronicles 21:1 (“And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel”).
Though the epithet “People of the Book” was conferred on all the followers of the first Abrahamic religions, it appears that in the histories and prophecies we are more likely to encounter lost books, burned manuscripts, and secret scrolls. Then, in the nineteenth century, a shocking new perspective on the question “Who wrote the Bible?” was found.
The so-called documentary hypothesis is an exercise in pure stylistics. We may not be able to know the names of the biblical authors, but, as Jean Astruc first demonstrated in 1753, we can trace their signatures and idiosyncratic constructions throughout the individual books. In effect, the Bible’s text can bring us back to its putative authors.
The theory stems from a cluster of inconsistencies in the Book of Genesis. At times, God is referred to as “Yahweh,” and at others, as “Elohim.” Moreover, in chapters 1 and 2, the same event—the Creation of Adam and Eve—is narrated twice; at Genesis 1:26–27 and at Genesis 2:7, 21–23. In chapter 1, we are told “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” In chapter 2, we are told of Adam being fashioned out of dust and breath, and Eve from Adam’s rib. There are further curious anomalies. In chapter 1, God makes the birds and sea creatures on the fifth day, and the land animals on the sixth, prior to Adam. In chapter 2, verse 19, God creates animals after Adam.
The documentary hypothesis suggests that there were originally two books of Genesis, one by “J”—the Yahwist, the writer who calls God Yahweh—and another by “E”—the Elohist, who refers to Elohim. These “urtexts” were synthesized into one version, with both contradictory sections aspicked together. “J,” for example, is fond of puns: it is to him that the etymology of “Adam,” meaning red earth, belongs. “J” also is keen to give explanations for how things came about and why names are attached to particular places. “E” is altogether more cryptic, an older version, perhaps especially considering his name for God is unaccountably in the plural.
To “J” and “E” were added the Deuteronomist (“D”) and the Priestly Author (“P”). “D” had a clear ideological theology: that God punished Israel for its intransigence and for straying from the Law, and that the history of the Jewi
sh people was a moral lesson in the consequences of disobedience. The Priestly Author was a liturgist and ecclesiast, defining the ramifications of the Law, the categories of clean and unclean, the role of the Levites, and the authority of the Torah. “D” understood the reasons for the Exile; “P” reaffirmed the centrality of the Temple.
It’s a neat quartet, and an attractive theory. Unfortunately, it is only a theory. As much as one can almost hallucinate the differing qualities of “D,” “E,” “J,” and “P,” they are virtual authors at best, makeshift theories of possible writers. All of them collapse, especially at the advance of the fifth single-letter function: enter “R,” the Redactor.
“R” was the genius who spliced together “J” and “E” to give us the Old Testament. Only, “R” was never singular; “R” is a veritable host of textual editors, a dynasty of tinkerers, eliders, alterers, correctors, amenders, and tidiers. A redactor, from the Latin redigere, redactum, is one who brings back. In effect, their shaping and framing never did recapture an aboriginal lost text, but tessellated a heap of fragments. The sublime Isaiah—or all three different writers who were merged together under that name—is jimmied next to a satire on the attitude of prophets (the Book of Jonah); the earnest claim that the good man has never been seen without sustenance, in the Book of Proverbs, is countered by the sadistic, inexplicable punishment of the good man Job (although admittedly, he does get fourteen thousand sheep in compensation). As a theologian friend once said to me, in utter exasperation, “It’s all just redacted to buggery.”