CLASSICAL CORNER
256: COUNTING OUR LOSSES
“It’s like looking for a needle that noone ever lost in a haystack that never was” – Fort, Books, p14
I long ago ( FT164:21) surveyed Fort’s published thoughts about antiquity. Relevant here are some snippets from what remains of his autobiographical Many Parts (1901, online):
“There were accomplished girls in our kitchen; they spoke Latin fluently, which awes us. But then we picked up a little Latin ourself” – I’d have been awed, too; be hard to find such scholarly scullionesses these days...
“Learning the Latin names for birds” – on course to become a classic(al) twitcher.
“Forming a polyglot language of French words, Latin words, Arabic words, all kinds of words.”
“Roman history we had not studied in school at all. But we took exams in Roman history at High School” – Did he pass?
Jim Steinmeyer in his Fort biography says his father included in a letter (March 1912) a two-word Latin phrase “intended to tweak the high-school drop-out and supposed novelist.”
Regarding lost classical texts, Fort was interested enough to include (p670) an account of a fraudulent claim to have discovered Livy’s lost 109 books – fully discussed in FT135:24. I recall one of my school classics masters (an Anglican divine) saying he hoped he’d be dead before this happened.
Renaissance scholar Pietro Bembo (1470-1547, pictured above; the typeface is named for him) estimated only one per cent of classical literature survives. Modern speculations fluctuate between higher levels – obviously no possible precision for a lost quantity.
Of Greek literature, incidentally, it’s said that the three million words residue from the 10 million in Galen’s 500 or so books account for nearly 50 per cent.
Given that Migne’s Patrologia Græca contains 161 volumes, double-columns, each c.2,000 pages, and his Patrologia Latina 221, we may assume a higher proportion for Byzantine and Western Christian output.
Why did X survive and Y not? Ancillary factors include limited runs, thanks to expensive and often scarce writing materials – took many animal hides to produce a single text. Ancient popularity guaranteed nothing. Little remains of Sappho (nicknamed ‘The Tenth Muse’).
By common Roman consent, Lucilius was their greatest satirical poet: ditto. Likewise, the Greek tragic and comic dramas, Roman tragic plays, pioneering Roman epic poet Ennius, and – perhaps most aggravatingly – the many works (prose and poetry) by Cæsar and the emperors.
Destructions of the Alexandrian Library and the sackings of Constantinople in 1204 and 1453 are commonly invoked, albeit the famous story about Caliph Omar’s sixmonths conflagration (“If these books are true we do not need them; if false we do not want them”) has been doubted ever since Gibbon.
Christian censorship has often been blamed, exaggeratedly so. For easy instance, it’s been held guilty for loss of that section of Tacitus’s Annals that would have included his account of the Crucifixion – if he mentioned it. And, why leave in his offensive remarks ( Ann. bk15 chs43-4) about the sect? How come the ‘dirty’ poems of (e.g.) Catullus and Martial make it through? Or the religion-mocking Lucretius? Over in the East, the loss and mutilation of anti-Christian tracts by Celsus, Porphyry and Julian might look suspicious. Contrariwise, such Byzantine commentators as John Tzetzes took the erotic crudities of Aristophanes in their stride.
Bright side is, things have long kept turning up. There are current high hopes for a large trove to emerge from Herculaneum, already a source for some charred rolls of Greek philosophy. Enhanced laboratory science has facilitated the decipherment of palimpsests, on one of which the plays of Plautus were found rubbed out by a monkish transcriber of Augustine’s commentary on the Psalms. A pity modern techniques were not available to Cardinal Mai, who went blind over the Letters of imperial tutor Fronto in 1815. Especially after these turned out stylistically well below ancient critical estimation: Fronto, one might say, lost his reputation by being discovered.
Papyri from Egypt have been yielding (mainly Greek) the richest treasures for over a century, a trail blazed by Grenfell and Hunt, their story now immortalised by Tony Harrison’s delightful play (1990) The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus. Major discoveries include Aristotle’s Athenian Constitution and Greek lyric poet Bacchylides. Many rejoice also over the first finding of a Menander comedy; I felt it was well lost and spoiled a valuable gap.
A rare Latin discovery were nine lines by Roman poet and general Gallus (eventually liquidated by Augustus). Before this, only a single line survived, of which one individual daringly remarked that this was “not typical”.
Since it is estimated at least one million papyri languish unpublished, who knows what treasures lurk? Same is true elsewhere. The Lexicon of Byzantine patriarch-scholar Photios only turned up in 1959 at the Zavorda monastery in Macedonia. What might there be on (say) Mount Athos or in the dustier corners of the Vatican Library? Or, as Fort (p671) surmised in the case of Livy, in secret private collections?
Perhaps some long-overdue reward for Stoic Chrysippus, whose 705 books are all gone, not to mention Didymus (nicknamed ‘Brazen Gut’), of whose 3,500/4,000 productions only fragments remain. Volusius’s Histories may be best lost, given Catullus’s description of them as ‘Shitty Sheets’ – or maybe not...?
A few (the big names apart) of my own many desiderata: the memoirs of dictator Sulla and of Nero’s Queen Mum Agrippina; Mark Antony’s pamphlet On His Own Drunkenness; emperor Claudius’s treatise on Dice-Playing; Suetonius’s biographies of famous whores; the rest of Petronius’s novel Satyricon; the sex manuals of Astyanassa (said to be very ugly, her name translating as “Unable to Inspire Erections”). Elephantis (used as pictorial and verbal Viagra by aging emperor Tiberius), and Philænis (three scrappy fragments found in 1972, so here’s hoping – cf. my piece in Corolla Londiniensis 6 (1990), 1-7.
“Ancient wisdom drips in a patter of slimy opinions” – Fort, p396.