by Stuart Kelly
“A big book is a big evil” was one of Callimachus’ maxims. His penchant for the literary miniature did not, however, increase his chances of survival. The feud—even if it is a later fiction—between the modernist sophisticate and the orthodox traditionalist proved more immortal than his works.
The Caesars
Julius {100–44 B.C.E.}, Augustus {63 B.C.E.–14 C.E.}, Tiberius {42 B.C.E.–37 C.E.}, Caligula {12–41 C.E.}, Claudius {10 B.C.E.–54 C.E.}, and Nero {37–68 C.E.}
FROM SHAKESPEARE TO Racine and Robert Graves to Albert Camus, we are more accustomed to the earliest Roman emperors being the subjects, not the authors, of books. But in addition to ruling the known world, Julius Caesar and the five descendants who took the title emperor all harbored literary ambitions. Most of their compositions, however, went the same way as their Empire.
For generations, the first contact schoolchildren had with a Latin author was Caesar himself, and his Conquest of Gaul. This was not the atrophied hangover of centuries of sycophancy; Julius Caesar’s prose style was generally held by his contemporaries to be exceptional. Cicero praised it as “chaste, pellucid and grand, not to say noble,” and enthused to Cornelius Nepos that no one else had “a vocabulary so varied and yet so precise.”
Like most cultured young Romans, Julius tried his hand at drama; however, his successor, Augustus, decreed that such juvenilia as the Oedipus, as well as Collected Sayings and In Praise of Hercules, should not be circulated. The Conquest of Gaul was completed by his friend Hirtius, and other volumes of “memoirs” detailing the campaigns in Alexandria, Africa, and Spain were soon appearing from opportunistic authors. Caesar was also a poet: his lost verse travelogue The Journey detailed his travels over twenty-four days between Rome and Spain, and an Essay on Analogy was said to have been composed while he was crossing the Alps.
Under Augustus, Roman literature flourished: Virgil dedicated his Aeneid to the emperor, Horace praised him in exquisitely ironic, nuanced Odes, and Ovid entertained with risqué humor, until he overstepped the mark. Surrounded by such talents, it is unsurprising that the emperor scrapped his tragedy Ajax, and contented himself with a brief poem on Sicily (though it too was lost) and his thirteen-volume My Autobiography. This early example of a politician’s self-assessment was not considered sufficiently pertinent to preserve, though his grandiloquently entitled Actions of the Divine Augustus, carved rather than entrusted to friable scrolls, allows us a little insight into his sense of his own achievements. No doubt An Encouragement to the Study of Philosophy was a very worthy endeavor; however, it has not been handed down to posterity.
Tiberius Caesar completed Augustus’ Reply to Brutus’ Eulogy of Cato, and wrote his own Elegy on the Death of Julius Caesar. According to Suetonius, his prose style was affected and ponderous, and his taste in literature rather limited. He preferred the works of Euphorion, Rhianus, and Parthenius, none of which have survived, even though academics attempted to outdo each other in producing editions of the emperor’s favorite writing. As he declined into bloated, lecherous decrepitude, he spent more time patronizing toadies than bothering to do anything himself. Asellius Sabinus appreciated the two thousand gold coins he received for a dialogue where a mushroom, an oyster, a fig, and a thrush argue who is tastiest.
Gaius Caesar, nicknamed Caligula, was “no man of letters,” according to his biographer. He thought Virgil overrated, and dismissed Seneca: but then again, he found the idea that gods might be superior to him infuriating. In one notorious act of literary criticism, he not only burned the work of an Atellan comedian, but then had the author burned in the theater. The only flashes of eloquence conspicuous in Caligula are in his sadistic wit. “If only the Roman people had a single neck!” he screamed, when the crowd cheered for the wrong team. His uncle, the stammering Claudius, destroyed two manuscripts of Caligula’s that he found in the private apartments on his accession: one entitled The Dagger and another called The Sword, detailing his insane nephew’s program of conspiracies and intended victims.
Claudius, like Augustus, wrote an autobiography, which, according to Suetonius, suffered from “lack of taste” rather than “lack of style.” The work he was most proud of was a typically eccentric scheme. Claudius decided to reform the Latin alphabet, introducing three new characters: ) to represent the Greek psi, ⊦ for a vowel between u and i, and for the consonantal v. Both the Official Gazette and state monuments adopted the new letters, and dropped them soon after the emperor’s demise.
In Greek, rather than Latin, Claudius compiled twenty volumes of Etruscan history and eight volumes of Carthaginian history. His Roman history stretched to forty-three volumes, heavily censored by his family. So voluminous was his output that the Library at Alexandria had to build a new wing, the Claudian, to commemorate his historical writing. Even this testament to a state leader’s literary bent was less steadfast than might have been expected.
Claudius was the first emperor since Augustus to be deified. Nero, who succeeded Claudius, ordered his tutor Seneca to mock the apotheosis in verse, as The Pumpkinification of the Divine Claudius. The Stoic philosopher struggled in vain to inculcate a sense of self-control and mental discipline into his wayward ward, and eventually committed suicide as Nero’s murderous regime sought out new traitors. His nephew, the poet Lucan, similarly killed himself, leaving his poem about Julius, The Pharsalia, incomplete.
Nero fancied himself as an artist, and acted in various plays and farces, sometimes scandalizing the court by playing the female roles. His attack on Claudius Pollio, The One-Eyed Man, has perished alongside the rest of his oeuvre. “What an artist dies with me!” he had lamented as the troops hunted him down. History disagreed.
Gallus
{c. 70–26 B.C.E.}
IN THE FIFTEENTH poem of his first book of Amores, Ovid makes a bold claim for the immortality of poetry: “carmina morte carent,” “songs from death are free.” To prove his point he catalogues the imperishable names of Homer, Sophocles, and Virgil, concluding with the lines
Gallus et Hesperiis et Gallus notus Eois et sua cum Gallo nota Lycoris erit.
Gallus, from the West and even to the East, Gallus will be famed and with Gallus will be famed his Lycoris.
Gallus’ literary perpetuity was more precarious than that of the illustrious company in which Ovid places him; and Ovid may have had a suspicion that this was the case. Inscribing his name three times in two lines is almost laying it on a little thick, especially when Homer is only referred to as “the son of Maeonia.” Ovid’s insistence on Gallus’ greatness extended across his career: he is mentioned again in book III of The Amores, in The Art of Love (where young men are advised to memorize poems by Gallus), and thrice in his Tristia.
Nor was Ovid the only poet to commemorate the achievements of Gallus. Propertius links his name with the earliest Latin love elegists, and two of Virgil’s Eclogues feature Gallus. In Eclogue VI, he appears with no less than Orpheus and the god Phoebus in a cantata of poetic themes. Eclogue X is both dedicated to Gallus and descriptive of him. “Who would refuse poetry to Gallus?” asks Virgil. The answer was the emperor.
Servius, the commentator on Virgil, tells us that Gallus composed four books of amatory elegies for Lycoris, whose real name was Cytheris, an actress rumored to be the mistress of Mark Antony. He was one of the neoteroi, or “new poets” (“modernists” might be an acceptable comparison), who drew their inspiration from the allusive, finely polished poetry of Callimachus and the Alexandrians. As well as being an eminent poet, Gallus was a soldier. He fought alongside Octavian (who became Augustus Caesar) against Mark Antony, and was rewarded for his loyalty and bravery during the capture of Alexandria by being made prefect of Egypt in 30 B.C.E. Some unspecified indiscretion or rumor of ambitions or unacceptable conduct led to his fall from imperial favor: he committed suicide in exile in 26 B.C.E.
Though Augustus could be forgiving—Horace, his panegyricist and ode writer, had fought alongside Mark Antony—he could also be imp
lacable. Servius claims that the emperor demanded that Virgil remove a section praising Gallus from the fourth Georgic, but it seems as if the commentator had confused the final, fourth poem of the Georgics with the final, tenth poem of the Eclogues. Absence of evidence often being mistaken for evidence of absence, several scholars were later on embroiled in trying to hypothesize about the missing accolade, while ignoring the evidence that Virgil did not remove a reference.
We do not know if Gallus’ work was actively suppressed: nonetheless, no manuscripts have come down to us. Servius claimed that the words Virgil puts in Gallus’ mouth were actually Gallus’ own: if so, the phrase “Love conquers all” would be attributable to him. However, the lines could as easily be completely fictitious, and given Virgil’s close relationship with the emperor, it is unlikely he would flaunt the talent of someone who had incurred Augustus’ displeasure.
Only one line that is without a doubt by Gallus has been preserved. In Vibius Sequester’s book on geography, he quotes the line “uno tellures dividit amne duas”: “it is divided by one river into two lands.” It is hardly a fitting tribute to posterity for a poet whose expressions of the pains of love had inspired a generation.
Ovid
{43 B.C.E.–18 C.E.}
BEING A POET in ancient Rome was a perilous business. Catullus had lauded his friend C. Helvius Cinna for his epyllion Zmyrna, sure it would be read by future generations. The poem has not survived, and Cinna met an exceptionally sticky end, when a mob mistook him for his namesake L. Cornelius Cinna, the conspirator against Julius Caesar, battered him to death, and paraded his head on a spear through the city. A century later, Petronius would be driven to suicide at the hands of Julius’ descendant, Nero. Publius Ovidius Naso, called Ovid, was luckier—although his career too was blighted, “by a poem and a mistake.”
Ovid’s first book of poems, the Amores, opens with a dedication telling the reader that he has slimmed it down from five volumes to three. He was candid about the necessity of reworking and revising, mentioning “the flames which emend.” The Amores is a waggish take on the Roman love elegy, in which he praises, pleads with, and vilifies his mistress Corinna. Unlike Lesbia, whom Catullus alternately hated and loved, or Propertius’ Cynthia or Tibullus’ Delia, all of whose noms de plume have been unraveled by commentators, Corinna is a mystery. While the earlier elegists had struggled to convey, convincingly, their earnest passion, Ovid, with delicious glee and urbane wit, confutes expectations and winks at the audience. There is no “real” Corinna at all; she exists only because a love poet needs an object for his affection.
Ovid was a virtuoso, also composing a tragedy on Medea (which Quintilian thought best displayed his talents, but which has not survived) and a gloriously abundant compendium of myths, The Metamorphoses,and inventing the dramatic monologue, in his Heroides, where he gives a voice to legendary heroines. The poem that blasted his fortunes, however, was the Ars Amatoria, The Art of Love. In debonair and sardonic fashion, he advises the youth of Rome how to flatter, avoid suspicion from jealous husbands, deport themselves at the chariot games, and variously wheedle their way into the beds of Rome’s women. It is a cosmopolitan extravaganza, conjuring up the alleys and banquets of the city. As a manual for seduction, it earned the ire of the emperor.
Augustus, whose impatience at the moral laxity of his subjects was manifesting itself in strict legislation against extramarital affairs, was less than amused. The Art of Love was the poem, but the error that accompanied it is shrouded in speculation. Suggestions range from the idea that Ovid was conducting an affair with the emperor’s granddaughter, or that he had seen the empress naked, or had defiled the rites of Isis: whatever it was, Ovid was discreet enough, and perhaps humbled enough, never to make the charge specific. All he would let slip was that he “had eyes.”
His punishment was severe. Ovid was banished from the Rome he so lovingly described to Tomis, on the Black Sea, the outermost edge of the empire. The suavest of poets would live with barbarians. He continued to write, sending letters and regretful poems back to his friends. The gravity of his sentence has often been heightened by comparison: imagine Byron in Saskatchewan, or Oscar Wilde in Iceland. During his ostracism, he started to compose a celebration of the Roman calendar, The Fasti, commemorating the way time used to be governed in a place where it was fixed by the flow of tides, seasons, and equinoxes. He completed only six months of his evocation of the etiquette and mythology of the holidays and holy days in Rome.
In the Epistulae ex Ponto, however, Ovid tells us of one remarkable feat he accomplished in exile. He learned the Getic language of the savages, and even composed poems in it. His subject was a eulogy for Augustus, and the tribe were impressed enough to call him a bard. But, they insisted, since he sang the praises of the emperor, surely he would be restored to civilization? He never was, and the lines in which he celebrated the divine Caesars in the rough tongue of his despised compatriots were left unpreserved. As, for that matter, was the entire Getic language.
Longinus
{fl. first century C.E.}
THE TREATISE ENTITLED Peri Hypsous or On the Sublime is not only a reliquary for lost books, but is itself a lost book. The Paris manuscript has pages missing; it ends on a remark about another literary discussion the author wrote called On the Emotions. The author is about to summarize its contents, when the pages suddenly cease. Its lacunae create weird disjunctions: Alexander’s retort to Parmenio, “I would have been content . . . ,” segues into “the distance between heaven and earth; it may be said this is the stature of Homer.”
Almost every aspect of On the Sublime flickers with a sense of instability. The opening page names one Postumius Florentianus as the dedicatee of the essay; he is not mentioned again, and it is to one Terentianus that the subsequent points are addressed. The author is called Dionysius Longinus, though on the contents page this becomes Dionysius or Longinus. Earlier scholars presumed Longinus to be Cassius Longinus (c. 213–73), the Neoplatonic philosopher and rhetorician, who advised Queen Zenobia to secede from the Roman Empire and was executed by the Emperor Aurelian when he quashed the move toward independence. Most critical opinion now gravitates toward On the Sublime being rather earlier, and the author is given the clumsy title of “Pseudo-Longinus.”
Pseudo-Longinus defines the sublime as “the echo of the greatness of spirit,” and quotes widely, and sometimes wildly, to prove his definition. It is thanks to On the Sublime that we have fragments of Aeschylus’ Orithyia, Sophocles’ Polyxena, and Euripides’ Phaethon. Conversely, there are lines that cannot be attributed to any known author. Whoever wrote, “His field was smaller than a letter,” or, “Immediately, along the beaches, a countless crowd called out Tuna!” was once so famous he or she did not need to be named.
The most remarkable preservation in On the Sublime is an almost completely intact poem by Sappho. Indeed, of her nine volumes, the only complete poem is contained in the Longinus manuscript. Though the book itself was to inspire aesthetic theories by Pope, Burke, Kant, and Coleridge, its conservation of these priceless lines would guarantee its readership.
But this stroke of luck should not obscure those shivering uncertainties in the text. Longinus elsewhere quotes Homer, but inaccurately. A description of the god Poseidon splices together lines from books XIII and XX of The Iliad; another account, of the Olympian gods in battle, conflates parts of books XX and XXI. In an extremely curious throwaway line, Longinus also claims that the “lawgiver of the Jews” displays the characteristics of the sublime; he quotes the opening of Genesis, which apparently reads, “God said Let there be Light and there was Light, Let there be Land and there was Land.”
Pseudo-Longinus has safeguarded our sole intact poem by Sappho; however, given his other discernible errors and misquotations, the awful specter rises that our one poem might not be as genuine and immaculate as we might have hoped.
St. Paul (Saul of Tarsus)
{first decade–c. 65 C.E.}
AROUND 200 C.E., an unknown Christian bound together a codex containing ten epistles by St. Paul (known to us as p46, the “Chester-Beatty Papyrus,” the earliest extant manuscript of Paul’s work). It includes Romans, Hebrews, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians. Did the compiler pause as he or she inscribed the text of 2 Thessalonians 2:2, where the saint warns the church at Thessalonica to be troubled “neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us”? Since Paul himself had been vexed by forged letters purporting to be his, the scribe’s task took on the onerous responsibility of regulating divine revelation. Unfortunately, 2 Thessalonians is not by Paul.
Saul, born in Tarsus, the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia, was a Jewish Roman citizen. He was educated by the Pharisee Gamaliel and came from a family of tent-makers (though given the importance of canvas shelters to the Roman army, “military procurement” might be a more apt description of his profession). He tells us in the Epistle to the Galatians that he was “exceedingly zealous” in his faith, to the extent that he persecuted the apocalyptic sect founded by a Nazarene called Jesus, which his followers called “the Way.” When Stephen, the first martyr, was stoned to death by a mob, the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of Saul. According to the Acts of the Apostles, this Saul “made havock of the church.”