Agricola 1-9, Tacitean panegyric and the Stoic exempla virtutis

Salve!

The first nine sections of the Agricola appear to be a standard introduction section of panegyric, introducing the theme of the work ostensibly as that of preserving for posterity the ‘clarorum virorum facta moresque’ (Ag.1.1), the acts and character of men of renown to posterity. But there is something else going on, not merely panegyric, but the sense that Tacitus is looking back over his shoulder at a troubled age where to praise certain prominent figures of whom the emperor disapproved would invariably lead to a death sentence and simultaneously casting a moralistic glance at the evils and decadence of the present. It is panegyric shot through with the classic Tacitean raspberry ripple swirls of moral disdain and cynical foreboding, never entirely free of the PTSD resulting from the imposed silence of the troubled reign of Domitian. Tacitus never fails to remind us, in a way which to has a distinctly old Roman, republican vibe, that everything was more pure, more morally elevated in the old days, virtue was its own reward, good men really were sometimes in the forefront of society and their qualities were celebrated and honoured without guile...he ends the first section in typical pithy epigrammatic style with his terse verbal finger pointed at the present…’, tam saeva et infesta virtutibus tempora’(Ag.1.4) So harsh is the spirit of our times, so hostile towards virtue.’

Section two opens with a couple of human exampla virtutis, moral examples of those who lost their lives in publicly extolling the virtues of others, Rusticus Arulenus and Herennius Senecio, with the fascinating image of the executioner given the task of burning the books that these men had written, as if to extinguish their very thoughts - to erase them from the record and block their road to the minds of the future. Prescient shades of the Nazis and even 1984. Rusticus Arulenus (35-93  CE) or rather Arulenus Rusticus was a Roman senator and friend and admirer of Thrasea Paetus the notable stoic senator and enemy of Nero. Rusticus tried to save Thrasea from being condemned to death by senatorial vote by offering to veto the decision but Thrasea stopped him knowing that such an act would not only be in vain but also be very likely to result in his own death. In the end Thrasea was unable to save him and Rusticus too was handed an Imperial death sentence under Domitian.

Herrenius Senecio (sentenced to death in 93 CE), another Stoic leaning senator and the author of a biography of the Stoic martyr Helvidius Priscus and linked to Thrasea by the fact of his marriage to his daughter Fannia, was another victim of the Domitian era persecution. Perhaps Tacitus is alluding to the ongoing culture wars between some of the heavily stoic pro-republican members of the senate who felt that the principate was trying to render them politically irrelevant. Tacitus’ use of these men as examples of the dangers of panegyric is slightly odd to me because elsewhere in his work he implies that he disapproves of the Stoics outspoken behaviour and in his eyes futile and over the top acts of self-sacrifice (see for example his comment on this very issue in Ag.42.4)

'sciant, quibus moris est inlicita mirari posse etiam sub malis principibus magnos viros esse, obseqiumque ac modestiam, si industria ac vigor adsint, eo laudis escendere, quo plerique per abrupta, sed in nullam rei publicae usum, ambitiosa morte inclaruerunt.'

'Let those whose way it is to admire only things forbidden learn from him that great men can live even under bad rulers; and that submission and moderation, if animation and energy go with them, reach the same pinnacle of fame, whither more often men have climbed, with no profit to the state, by the steep path of a pretentious death.'

 He clearly disapproves of the noble suicide so beloved of the Stoics while admiring their courage in standing up for the continued role of the senate as guardians of law and order both in Rome and in the provinces. It’s a compromised attitude (not in a completely negative sense) for me since I feel that Stoicism as a thought system is very much interlaced with old school republicanism, something dear to Tacitus’ heart and to a significant extent anti tyrannical in outlook, hence the inevitable and fatal clash with the political role and state actions of the principate. In a way, throughout Nero’s and later Domitian's reigns, the senate was struggling to answer the question of their meaningful function in the principate, both within itself as a legislative body and within the Imperial entourage for example in the form of Seneca as Nero’s Stoic influenced advisor. It is also interesting to note that Tacitus may have been providing the differing but not inconsistent Stoic approaches to tyranny in the contrasting exempla of Thrasea and Agricola; the former of outright confrontation and the latter of wise and informed and ultimately more productive accommodation.

In short, Tacitus was certainly bound up with the idea of history as a moral force with his extensive use of exempla but how much of that force should be wedded to the core concepts of Stoicism is less clear or at least it is difficult to determine which concepts he fully subscribed to and which he thought were not useful to his purpose or even potentially counterproductive to it.

Tacitus neatly contrasts the servitude that this imposed tyranny of censorship resulted in with the freedom and license of previous ages ‘; et sicut vetus aetas vidit quid ultimum in libertate esset, ita nos quid in servitute, adempto per inquisitiones etiam loquendi audiendique commercio.’ (Ag.2.3) ‘ and just as previous ages were witness to the extremes of freedom, so in our times we see the depths of our servitude in which informers have deprived us even of the free exchange of listening and speaking with one another.’ Grim times indeed - Tacitus seems a man for our own times too if we consider our current political controversies over the freedom of information and personal privacy.

But all is not lost as section three opens with a return a trope of panegyric, a thinly veiled exhortation to the virtues and great beneficence of the current ruler Nerva, who has once again united previously incompatible concepts, Empire and Liberty. Tacitus returns again to the theme of the damage of the previous era, the men who were in their prime losing fifteen years of their life, the mature men reduced to decrepitude and both under the yoke of enforced silence unable to speak out against the crimes of that era. With Section four we move into more familiar Panegyric territory with a brief outline of Agricola’s birth in Forum Iulii in Gaul and education in the city of Massilia - a city combining Greek refinement and provincial simplicity. Luckily for his mother, he doesn’t succumb to the philosophy of the Greeks too much and goes on after his schooling to a standard elite Roman career path, serving as tribune under the then provincial Governor Suetonius Paulinus in Britain in around 58 CE. It was certainly a good time to cut your military teeth – Britain was in revolt and at times things appeared to be on a knife edge ‘; trucidati veterani, incensae coloniae, intercepti exercitus; tum de salute, mox de victoria certavere.’ (Ag.5.3-4) Veterans were slaughtered, colonies were razed, military units cut off from their base, the men at one point fighting for their lives and the next fighting for victory.’

Agricola is recalled to Rome after a modest but respectable performance in Britain, by all accounts preferring to discuss the finer points of military strategy and camp morale with his superiors rather than getting pissed up on the best Falernian in the junior officer’s mess surrounded by alluring pale skinned slaves. He marries into a respectable elite family and then his career continues with quaestorships in Asia, followed by tribune of the plebs back in Rome and a praetorship where he is careful to walk the delicate balance between excessively mean and dangerously profligate in his role of provider of the official games..Tacitus has him being ‘far from extravagant but also mindful of public opinion’

From section seven onwards we are nearing the era of the year of the four emperors (69 CE) and Agricola is struck by sudden misfortune when he receives that wandering marauders in the service of one the Imperial wannabes Otho have killed his mother during a raid on the family estate in Liguria. He swiftly joins arms with Vespasian and assists him in his path to victory. After things settle down at Rome, Agricola is sent back to Britain, this time as commander of legio XX Valeria Victrix assisting Petilius Cerialis in the suppression of the Brigantes in the northern reaches of the island province in 71-4(?) CE. He then has a three-year stint as the governor of Aquitania and then, after marrying his daughter to Tacitus…heads off to Britain to assume the governorship proper in 77 CE which leads us to the start of the main body of the Britannia narrative.

I think that the questions we need to ask ourselves regarding this initial panegyric section are several: - How well has Tacitus joined this to the body of the narrative which in all likelihood was taken from notes out of his larger work the Annals/Histories? Is it seamless or can we see the cracks? Does it work structurally, thematically? Furthermore, to what extent can we accept Agricola as panegyric exempla as a realistic figure? Is it meant to be taken as real even? Has Tacitus had to compromise somewhere, making of Agricola a traditional stoic exempla of a man cut from the ‘traditional morally upright republican stuff’ but having to tone down the heavier aspects of stoic defiance in the face of tyranny, especially its more suicidal aspects, for example, defiance at all costs, even that of one’s life in service of the truth? Is it sometimes a moral act for Tacitus to serve tyrants rather than foolishly oppose them?

We must not forget that Tacitus contrasts bad princeps with good, Nero/Domitian=bad tyrants versus Nerva=benevolent prince who re-unites Empire with Liberty. So he comes across to the reader as interested to both accommodate respect for the principate and suggest ways in which adherence to exempla virtutis could benefit both camps despite his old school republican and pro-senatorial sympathies. Evidently there is much to chew over.

I look forward to discussing this section and indeed the main text with you all soon.

Vale!

Tacitus - Agricola - The MSS and the SS

Salve!

A copy of the text of the Agricola and Germania is winging its way to me via the Roman coastal fortress town of Crowborough as we speak and while it is I would like to share with you the curious story surrounding one of the Manuscripts of the minor works of Tacitus, the sole survivor of the Renaissance treasures rediscovered in the early years of the 20th Century. The manuscript in question is the Codex Aesinas Latinus 8 (E).

Until its discovery in 1902 in the private library collection of Count Aurelio Gugliemi Balleani of Jesi, there were only two other MSS which were the source of the Agricola text, namely Vatican Lat. 3429 or ‘A’, and Vatican Lat. 4498 or ‘B’ both of which were assumed to be of common ancestry deriving from a now lost Renaissance copy or copies. With the emergence of Codex Aesinas Latinus 8 (E), scholars soon came to the conclusion that this recent addition to the MSS extant, containing folios from the 10th Century could very well be the archetype of the Vatican and other MSS. It’s certainly the closest we have to the original text as imagined by Tacitus himself pace the usual scribal errors.

The codex was thought to have been lost in the intervening years after its initial discovery but resurfaced in 1980 in the collection of Count Arelio’s great nephew, Count Balleschi-Balleani. It was on loan to the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence and later sold to the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome and it now listed as Cod.Vitt.Em. 1631.

The curious story I alluded to is recounted in the excellent blog pages of Roger Pearse, whose interest seems to be patristics and related MSS but he covers a wealth of other areas mostly related to classical and late antiquity. Rather than paraphrase and try to rehash what is already an excellent piece of research work, I thought I would direct you to the relevant pages for you to read yourself. You can find the entry relating to the curious tale here and while you are at it please visit Roger Pearse's blog too, its well worth a visit. I hope to pick up the text of the Agricola in a couple of days and so should be posting a few ideas for discussion in the near future. In the meantime I give you this entry in the way of an appetizer, a roasted lark in garum sauce for your delectation!

Vale!

Pliny - Selected Letters

Salve!

I have managed to get hold of a Loeb edition of Pliny’s Letters translated by William Melmoth (revised by W.M.L. Hutchinson) LOEB, Harvard University Press in two volumes, 1953, so I will be using this version to refer to the following suggested selection of letters for us to focus on when we meet again in June.

I must add a note of caution here since I have immediately noticed (as perhaps you have too!) that the numbering of the letters can vary depending on the version you are reading. The Loeb version I have divides the letters into ten books (I-X) over two volumes and I will refer to the letter by its book number first, followed by its individual letter number (both in Roman numerals) and finally as an aid to those reading from different hymnals as it were, the name of the addresses and my own brief descriptive docket title.

I have tried to make a selection based on the more general interest letters that give us a glimpse into the personal life of Pliny, his leisure pursuits, friends and descriptions of remarkable events that happened to catch his attention.

Here then is a draft list of the letters which I think we could take a closer look at. I will give the book number followed by the letter number, addressee and a very brief docket description to aid location. Please let me know if you have any suggestions either way (subtraction or addition!).

Book 1/3 To Caninnus Rufus. Retreat to the country and leisure studies
Book 1/9 To Minucius Fundaminus. Books v trifling work duties
Book 2/6 To Avitus. The treatment of dinner guests.
Book 2/17 To Gallus. My Laurens  Villa.
Book 6/16 and 20. To Tacitus. The Eruption of Vesuvius
Book 7/27 To Sura. Ghosts and the supernatural.
Book 8/19 To Maximus ' Et gaudium mihi et solacium in litteris nihilque tam laetum, quid his laetius, tam triste, quid non per has sit minus triste. The overlooked wonders on your doorstep.
Book 9/33 To Caninnus. Miraculous dolphin.
Book 10/33 Fire in Nicomedia.
Book 10/96 To Trajan. Dealing with Christians

Vale!

Lucian - Splendid Boot-boy of the Second Sophistic

    

Xaire! Our attention now turns to Lucian of Samosata (c. 120 – 180CE), failed sculptor’s assistant, turned rhetorician, finally satirist and if we accept the outraged judgement of retired Royal Artillery Officer Henry William Lovett Hime in his 1900 monograph’ Lucian- The Syrian Satirist’, an amoral thug, who enjoys nothing better than uncalled for a repeated literary kicking of the Gods and Heroes of antiquity.

A search for biographical detail (scarce at the best of times for Lucian) trawled up Hime's work as well as the French scholar Professor Maurice Croisset (Essai sur la vie et les oeuvres de Lucien, 1882) which I am still reading, but since Hime often quotes the French scholar favourably it seems appropriate to assume that he shares a lot of the moral outrage at Lucian's apparent unsportsmanlike approach to lampooning those characters and subjects which , at least to these two Edwardian/Late Victorian figures, were deemed sacrosanct and off limits. Is it a case of era sensitive moral outrage or do the critics have something useful to say upon artistic grounds? After all, Hime reminds us grace á Juvenal of the true aim of Satire (at least what was accepted as their benchmark author). And it's a quote by the way that could as easily vindicate as indict Lucian; a matter of rhetoric and perhaps of ironic apposition to the sui generis satirist.

'quidquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli'

[Juvenal 1/1:85-6]

Hime adds by way of clarification and probably a bit of classic setting up on the side as a prelude to his damning judgement later on of the Samosatan that satire is -

' the expression of amusement at folly or of disgust at vice. But this expression of ridicule or scorn is subject to two conditions: first, it must be conveyed in literary form (I presume that by the term 'literary', Hime means literary according to classical rules or the rules of his era);and secondly, when aimed at the unseemly it must possess some tincture of wit and humour. The grounds for these conditions are obvious. If literary form be absent, the expression of our contempt or derision degenerates into a sneer or a gibe. If humour and wit be wholly wanting in attacks upon vice, satire sinks into a sermon or invective.' [Hime, Lucian -The Syrian Satirist, Longmans, Green and Co, 1900]

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let’s continue to look through the Himian lens as it were but start at the beginning where we get some details of Lucian's life and background to the works before all the moral outrage stuff pours over his head from the Edwardian military heights.

Hime arranges his monograph into five sections covering Lucian’s life, a classification of Lucian’s works, a section he titles the limits of satire (containing his moral objections to Lucian sticking the boot in to no useful purpose), and ends with sections on Lucian’s take on philosophy and religious views and some other characteristics arising from the extant works attributable to Lucian.

As far as I can tell, not much has happened in a 100 years regarding the general biographical details for Lucian, since outside the texts themselves not a lot of information is available. Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists is one of the only sources apart from a couple of brief mentions in other works and fragments and so we can assume that Hime's outline is about the best we can do. 

Lucian was born around 120/5 CE and died while serving in an Imperial official post in Egypt around 180 CE (recently revised by some scholars to 200 CE).

Lucian left school in around 140 and was apprenticed to his maternal uncle to learn the trade of sculpting images – possibly masks or ornaments but was soon kicked out for incompetence or being otherwise unsuited to the trade. He then makes his way to Ionia which during his time of the Second Sophistic (a literary-historico term to describe Greek writers from the reign of Nero up until about 230 CE) was the Las Vegas for the rhetoricians of the day. Even in his youth Lucian would have been exposed to the stars of rhetoric both past and present through his basic education, and we can imagine he was already a little bookish, precocious and fired up with wanting to learn at the feet of the Ionian rock stars of the profession and perhaps make a name for himself. It appears however that he quickly realised the shortcomings of the rhetoricians and in his Rhetorical Precepts 15 describes the recipe of their success in the amphitheatres and other places they collected in to declaim. Their success for him relied upon:

‘ignorance coupled with impudence, boldness and effrontery. Leave modesty, fair play and a sense shame at home.’

And furthermore:

‘Talk without ceasing say at haphazard whatever occurs to you…but whatever you do, don’t hesitate – talk on and on’

Lucian is in his mid to late twenties in 150 CE and after spending some time in Ionia observing the rhetoricians in action and possibly trying his hand at the profession himself for a couple of years, he moves on to other locations in Greece and then to Rome and on through northern Italy and into Gaul where he settles into an Imperial post and begins to make a comfortable living.

He later returns to Ionia and Samosata as ‘local boy made well’ and for a time turns to the rhetorician’s profession and was in Antioch around 162-3 CE at the time of the Emperor Lucius Verus. He leaves Antioch in 164 and returns to Greece, to sail from the Troad in the ambiguous company of the cynic Peregrinus Proteus (95-165 CE) to Corinth and then to the Olympic Games where Peregrinus very publicly self-immolated after a tepidly received farewell speech. In 165 CE, Lucian apparently gives up the profession of rhetoric (a waste of 15 years of his life in his own opinion) to concentrate on the writing of satire as serious project for his predominantly Greek audience. It is sometime after this that he takes up another Imperial posting in Egypt, possibly someone from his Gaul days had put in a good word for him and as a plus his native fluency in spoken and written Greek would certainly have made him very useful there ( in Alexandria and other major cities of the province). It might not be too fanciful to imagine him as a regular at the great library of Alexandria, mining its treasures in order to flesh out his increasingly popular satirical works

A number of Lucian’s works are both modelled on and a unique departure from the Menippean satirical style. We have touched upon Menippean Satire before when looking at the works of the Roman satirist Juvenal and should remember that this style is characterised by humorous attacks on mental attitudes as opposed to purely ad hominem invective directed at heroic or mythic entities; essentially, mythic parody or burlesque. Lucian takes the Menippean style into disturbing new territory by jettisoning the moral purport overt or implied of the original style and stripping it down to pure ad hominem invective. This is the essence of Hime’s disdain for Lucian, upon both  moral and artistic grounds. The satirist as mirror of society’s ills has become merely an amoral window into its further horror. The rod of moral instruction has become a tool of sadistic enjoyment, a clepsydristic orange redolent of verbal hypraviolence in the best written Greek of the time!

Thus Hime’s central issue with Lucian is one of morality pointing out that satire aimed as something which is not a vice (in the Juvenalian definition) such as religious belief constitutes a moral error and an artistic crime. He views this approach as ‘essentially destructive’, rather than constructive satirical criticism and not the mark of a true master.

By way of contrast ,Thomas More (of Utopia fame), although from a  very different era to Hime, displays a surprisingly enlightened attitude to Lucian in the preface addressed to Thomas Ruthall in his introductory apology to his translations:

'If most learned sir, there was anyone who fulfilled the Horatian precept and combined delight with profit, I think Lucian certainly stood primus inter pares in this respect. Refraining both from the arrogant teachings of the philosophers and the more dissolute dallyings of the poets, he everywhere remarks and censures, with very honest and at the same time very amusing wit, the shortcomings of mortals. And this he does so cleverly and so effectively that although no one pricks more deeply, yet there is no one of impartial mind who would not allow his stings of sarcasm.' [More, Opera Omnia, 1689, pp.258ff]

The Horatian precept referred to by More is that of Horace's Ars Poetica 333-4, 'aut prodesse volunt aut delectae poetae aut simul et iucunda dicere vitae' Poets aim either to benefit,or to amuse or to utter words at once both pleasing and helpful to life.

Lucian was at least fair in his treatment and rather than single out the gods, mythic heroes, and the famous of the day, he was also a ‘hater and ridiculer of philosophical systems’. For example in other works such as Charon, we see Socrates throwing a wobbly at entering Hades fearing for his street cred. He is also notably dismissive of the Christians as gullible tools in the hands of charlatans like Peregrinus. For Hime this all boils down to Lucian being an ‘Oriental’ whatever that might mean in ancient terms and he considers such races incapable of developed rational thought being sharp enough at the details but hopeless at the bigger picture of philosophical or religious systems. Croisset tends to concur:

‘..il est vraiment frappe des details, mais il voit peu les ensembles..en literature, en religion, en philosophie, il eu sera de même; partout des observations excellentes, mais nulle synthèse.’ [Essai sur Lucian 101]

Perhaps these two scholars of the early 20th century were missing the point of Lucians style and Hime himself hints as much when he observes ‘one age may read without a smile what another age laughs at’. Could there be such a thing as Lucanian Satire, a dangerous step further beyond moral confines or at perhaps even a subtle sublimation or subversion of the moral codes so that they are present but in an ironic ‘presence by absence’, as employed by the more leftfield comedians of today such as Stewart Lee with his complex multi-faceted adversarial and self-conflicted style. I look forward to discussing the possibility of Lucian’s moral redemption with you soon.

Euge!

You're everywhere and nowhere baby - Homeric topography

           You’re everywhere and nowhere baby – or-
Odyssey Book V -Ogygia and the problem of Homeric geography

Ogygia! Ogygia! It’s only a model - or rather it’s an island, the island of Calypso, the immortal and sorceress daughter of the Titan Atlas who keeps Odysseus captive for seven years as her semi-reluctant boon companion and bedmate.

But where is it? This is a recurring problem with the place names in the Odyssey and I’m using Ogygia here as a symbol of that curious phenomenon. Lift up the name cover on a Homeric location and it could lead you halfway around the known and into the unknown reaches of the ancient Greek world. The connections are fascinating and bizarre..but leave us in the dark as to the precise whereabouts of these islands – perhaps deliberately so since we are trying to pin down legends and myths from as far back as the Greek dark ages. As is often the case, the links, dripping with mythical festoonery take us everywhere and nowhere.

Ogygia has been connected with the mythical lost realm of Atlantis (remember Calypsos fathers name?). Scholars of the late Hellenistic or Alexandrian period such as Euhemerus (4th C BCE) and later endorsed in the comments of Callimachus identify the lsland of Ogygia with the Maltese island of Gozo. However, Aeschylus give the river Nile the epithet, Ogygian and Eustathius the Byzantine Grammarian gives Ogygia as the earliest known name for Egypt. Ogygia may have have some cognate link with Aegyptos but it is just as likely to be an over imaginative linguistic identification – seeing connections where the only evidence is a suggestion word or sound similarity – quite common in ancient Greek commentary (I’m thinking of some of the references in Plutarch’s Moralia here as Pausanias in his Guide to Greece). The description of the islands trees, thick and tall black cypress and the pungent aroma of cedar on the salt breeze, for me heralds distant echoes of Lebanon and scenes from the epic of Gilgamesh.

Bernard Knox, quoted in the Introduction to the Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey states a clear position on all this – and I think I tend to concur. In the section The Western Seas, he describes Eratosthenes’ disdain of such fruitless enterprises – demonstrating that these attempts to place the Odyssey in a meaningful or reality based geography have been ridiculed since antiquity, not that it seems to stem the flow of countless new theories as to the possible real world identity of many of the islands and strange shores that our hero found himself washed up upon.

The wanderings of Odysseus are rather a topography of the soul,  the map of his changing fortunes, the places where the whim or ire of the gods may place us…the destinations are one of character or fate and the ways in which fate can be challenged and faced and ultimately overcome – though by means obscure and often uncertain. Odysseus is many wiled but is also many guised, hero, pirate, prisoner, escapee, hostage, guest, shipwreck – these then are the places he visits as a psychodramatic template overlaying the mysterious coordinates of the wine-dark sea – they are places inside himself and by extension places that exist in all of us as we navigate through the trials, joys and sufferings of existence.

Euge!

The Mighty Dead - Homer Matters for sure...but why?

Xaire!

 

We take a departure from our usual interacting with the original texts (or at least translations of them) to delve into Adam Nicholson’s The Mighty Dead – Why Homer Matters (published by William Collins 2014/15). I have to say that I am not normally a fan of general books about Classics or for that matter other ancient historical subjects. The result of most of them tends to be a bit like fast food, quite enjoyable at the time but soon after digesting them one comes away with the feeling of ‘What was that about? I still don’t know’. Or to add a further analogy, a book about the making of a film or the background history to a novel rather than the novel itself. For me it has to be something really special, a complete departure the kind one finds in W.G.Sebold, or Durrell. It has to be pure poetical flight of fancy or serious in-depth crunchy analysis. The Mighty Dead steers a middle course between the two, at times fascinating and at others almost contrived and irrelevant. A hit and miss affair.

 

With Nicholson we get bits of both but never quite enough to sustain the book as a whole and therefore in the final analysis a failure for me. I get the fact that Homer really matters according the writer, he mentions it enough in as many contexts as he can, but I still don’t really know why. I am not sure if he has made a convincing case – and by a convincing case I mean a well thought out, sustained, and coherent argument which has the strong possibility of swaying the naysayers such as the Goncourts of this world. There are flashes of it and he says some really perceptive and surprising things about Homer and the world to which he might have belonged and the ones which he (or she or even they depending on which scholarship you go for personally) evoked in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

As I came across these brief flashes of insight my appetite was whetted and I thought he was going to take off but the Sopwith Camel left the chocks and taxied down the fairway but then veered off into the bushes, containing a fascinating anecdote about one thing or another, loosely connected to the Homeric world. A bizarre case in point is the authors harrowing experience in Syria at the hands of a knife wielding chancer during an evening stroll. Nicholson describes even this event as ‘Homeric’ likening it to the women and children as victims of violence during Illiadic conflict. I have an issue with this in the sense that if it’s possible to ‘homercize’ these kinds of things then it’s difficult to see what cannot be made so . Will we find ourselves holding a roasted chicken aloft on the end of our umbrella during a visit to M&S and declaring at top of our voices that this is a Homeric act! This leads me back to why I am not a big fan of these kinds of books – the conclusion of most them being that everything is simply fascinating and interconnected. It’s something we instinctively know and don’t need to be instructed in, however many anecdotes are strung together to illustrate it.

 

I have issues as a Classicist and as an Ancient Historian with the work as well. I don’t wholly agree with his ideas of northern Steppes mobile warrior culture meets sedate city dweller but sophisticated southern Mediterranean cultures to fuse into the Homeric synthesis – it smacks too much of the dualistic conceit that many lightweight analyses fall into. It’s really difficult to avoid this and requires a stronger grip on the facts and theory to be able to create something truly perceptive, especially about a period about which so little is known.

 

I am troubled by his chronology, and some of his offhand references. Anyone who refers to ‘shogunal Japan (whatever that means) could be accused of a lazy historical shorthand – dangerous when dealing with well documented periods, utterly lethal where the evidence is scanty.

 

Having said all this negative stuff, I do like a lot of what he says about Homer. His love and passion for the subject is clear and very endearing and he does have some genuinely good ideas about the work. I particularly liked his comparison between the Iliad and the Odyssey as the worlds of fate and fixed paths versus anything could happen, despair and doom versus the possibility of something good around the corner, that the future can be made in the Odyssey where it is written in the Iliad and can never be avoided. I found a lot of what he has to say about the works and what they might mean very rewarding and stimulating reading. In a way the book might have been better as a long essay with all of these imaginative theoretical speculations compressed and sustained. As it is, the book does meander and tie some very tenuous links to places where they shouldn’t really go – Spanish mining locations for the House of Hades, or the Tale of Sinuhe for examples.

 

So there were some things I liked about this book but I was reminded why I tend not to read these sorts of things! I would prefer to stick to the texts or read something more scholarly I guess but that it is my personal bias. The key peeve remains that a general reader probably still wouldn’t know why on earth Homer matters and therefore the title is a misnomer surely. I also think that he was unlucky with his Greek teacher, being unable to make anything of Homer as a young student. That was not my experience at all – but then I was fortunate enough to start my study of Greek at a slightly older age, although still at school and have a teacher who was able to convey the magic and power of the language to us, especially with Homers Iliad and Odyssey. There was also nothing about the teaching of Homer or how it could be relevant and matter to future generations…on this Nicholson seems to have little to say. Another strange thing is the inclusion of Greek words in transliteration and describing their meaning. I can’t see that this much use to the non-Greek reader and to those who do its faintly annoying that the original script (with bracketed transcription) isn’t included. Perhaps this is unfair since it may be a printing issue or following a convention of many non-specialist books on ancient/classical matters.

 

I look forward to discussing these issues with you at the next Legendum

Euge!

Socrates in Love - the Symposium

Xaire!

Plato's Symposium marks a departure in both theme and structure from the exploration of the Socratic method of dialectics common to the previous dialogues. It comes as a particular surprise, albeit a very pleasant one, that Plato should write so extensively on the theme of love, such an unusual work coming from someone who would strictly limit or do away with poetry in his ideal image of a utopian Republic.

But perhaps its purpose is dual, not only to showcase some of the ideas and attitudes towards sexual love, male and otherwise in 5th Century Athens and in the process provide a vehicle to introduce a beginners module as it were to his pet Theory of Forms,  with the ever brilliant and engaging Socrates as posthumous spokesman, but also to create a personal and impassioned yet gentle homage to his greatest hero and to offer much by way of apology for one of the greatest thinkers the west has ever produced.  

I feel compelled to say this because, more than any other work of his, the Symposium is replete with warmth, wit and humour as well as very touching scenes of loving friendship between males in company that make for a very endearing poignant and inspiring work, one that is still resonating with us today as a work of so many facets for so short a piece of writing. In this short work we go on a journey from bland and flat rhetoric to the very sublime heights of the purpose of life itself...against a backdrop of very human and life-like characters drinking and enjoying an evening of stimulating sublime conversation as well as some fine teasing and ribaldry in true Athenian, even Aristophanian fashion. There is much of the sublime and ridiculous in the work, both quite admirable qualities when expertly mixed in the wine bowl!

I was going to write in some detail about each of the speeches but I have decided in the interests of time and the approaching end of the year to refer in passing to our very stimulating discussion of them when we last met. The thing that strikes me in particular about this work is that it comes across strongly as Plato’s attempt to leave both an homage and an apology for Socrates and give the lie to his accusers picture of him as a corrupter of youth and one who was impious and worshipped other gods. Perhaps it was this endearing love of his hero that caused Plato to embark on such an unusually dramatic and vivid piece of writing in the first place. I can also recommend Benjamin Jowett’s (Master of Balliol and translator of the Dialogues of Plato in five volumes for the Oxford University Press 3rd Edition 1892) analysis and introduction to the Symposium, which although dated, is remarkable for its very even handed and almost prescient treatment of the issues throughout the dialogue.

I would also like to mention a couple of the things in the text itself that struck me as particularly interesting. One of these is the framing narrative at the start of the work where an unknown person has heard of the discourse in praise of love by Socrates at the celebratory dinner held in honour of Agathon and wanting to hear the account more accurately asks Apollodorus to recount it to him.

The story or rather action of the Symposium is buried Russian doll-like inside other times and the accounts and retellings of different voices at different times - it’s almost a precursor of the technique which features heavily in later masterpieces of narrative such as The Thousand and One Nights. Further hints at later Arab literary usage or at least inspiration arise from the concept of the lover and the beloved, in Pausanias’ speech and in Alcibiades speech on the effect of Socrates upon him and by extension all men fortunate enough to really hear what he is saying. I’m thinking of works of Sufi literature such as the Mantiq-ut-Tayr (c. 1177) of Attar of Nishapur in which several concepts of Platonic theory of Forms as applied to love and desire are mirrored and expanded upon. Another is the theme of role reversal, firstly in the passage dealing with Socrates and Diotima, possibly the most mysterious and fascinating of all of the sequences in the Symposium, where Socrates become the pupil who is subjected to his own dialectic method and found to know next to nothing about love and ripe for instruction at the feet of Diotima, seeress, wise woman and teacher of the ways of love.

Secondly where Alcibiades turns from the pursued, supremely confident in his sexual allure, and is transformed into the maddened pursuer, trying everything he can to get Socrates to have sex with him - finally realising that his would-be conquest is entirely on another plane, with a concept of love and the real love of wisdom that will hurl him into a deeper frenzy and eventually blow his mind altogether.

What Socrates offers is the higher love beyond all base or mere physical loves and the key to the mysteries of existence and the soul itself. Its Plato’s theory of Forms for sure, but no dry exegesis, rather a scintillating, radiant and maddening piece of inspiration which has reverberated down the years and across continents, its slim volume containing a bewildering array of ideas, expertly woven with some fine and heart-warming dramatic scenes, as vivid now as when they were first composed. After such an inspiring work where can we possibly go next? Homer must be the only answer!

Euge and Happy Saturnalia 2015