Category: Ancient world

For the last few days I have been reading the epigrams of Martial, in the two volume Loeb edition with parallel Latin and English.  Many of the epigrams throw a great deal of light on what it was like to live in ancient Rome.  Some are intentionally obscene, and done in order to sell more copies, as Martial makes plain.  The Loeb rightly gives an Italian version instead of an English one.  Others say how copies of the books may be obtained, and so throw light upon the Roman book trade. 

Others again describe events in the arena, and give an idea of how its religious purposes had been corrupted.  Scaevola burned off his hand rather than betray the Republic; to entertain the crowd, a criminal is forced to do the same, by threats of being burned alive.  In the process the value of Scaevola’s heroism is diminished in the eyes of everyone.  Likewise other mythological events are re-enacted, and likewise debased.  Thus did the Romans lose their own sense of identity.

But one element in the epigrams has attracted comment.  Many of the epigrams flatter Domitian.  In some cases, they ask the emperor directly for money or favours.  In many others they refer to him as Lord and God, in fulsome tones.  These grow more numerous and more fulsome as book succeeds book.  Book eight, indeed, is dedicated to Domitian and begins with a letter of flattery so thick that we can only associate it with unfree societies.

Rome was a despotism.  To incur the ire of the emperor was to risk property and exile, or even your life.  In such a society, formal expressions of loyalty become essential.  It is telling how these become more frequent as we read through the work.  Early expressions of flattery are perhaps no worse than some that Pliny the Younger uses about Trajan.  By book five, the servile note is strong.  By book six, Martial is obliged to insert epigrams disclaiming any possibility that “poems dipped in venom” against the emperor are his, and repeat it in book seven.  Each mention of the emperor is more lush than the last, each book contains more poems of flattery than the last.

Doubtless it was dangerous to do otherwise.  But perhaps this too reflects the progress of Domitian’s tyranny.  To praise the emperor for his reforms was one thing.  Martial has fun with the way in which Domitian’s revival of the lex Julia restricting the first fourteen rows of seats in the arena for the knights has affected Romans who perhaps are not as wealthy as they pretend; and we can all enjoy this.  But this note disappears after a while.  It might be disrespectful, after all; and disrespect could only be dangerous.

After the overthrow of Domitian, Martial attempts to flatter Nerva and Trajan, but his heart is not in it.  Doubtless he found that this was met with mockery.  The victors in civil discord are always arrogant, and there was no lack of people with scores to settle.  It is telling that he left Rome, and went to Bilbilis in Spain, his native country.  Perhaps he feared exile.  But he found it a poor substitute for the metropolis, and seems to have been lonely for the City.  No doubt he was.

It was Martial’s misfortune to live and write in despotic times, and to find himself in a current of misplaced loyalty that in the end swept him away.  Yet, had he not done so, who knows if he would have written anything?  Whatever his own misfortunes, he managed to write something that men have not willingly let die. 

Delightful to see Robert Harris in the Daily Mail drawing parallels between the corrupted politics of Westminister and the session of the Senate that dealt with the conspiracy of Catiline in 63 BC.  One part caught my eye:

That debate … was a turning point in history. Three of the speeches made during it – by Caesar, Cicero and Cato – survive. They read as fresh today as they must have sounded more than 2,000 years ago.

The speeches of Cicero we all know, although I’m not sure if they’re all online in English.  But where are the other two to be found?

Ghost of a Flea (Neither racked by guilt nor enslaved by passion) quotes a salient passage from the article:

… the speaker who really won the day was Marcus Cato. His is the first parliamentary speech in history that has come down to us more or less intact, thanks to the scribes who took it down in shorthand. ‘In heaven’s name, men, wake up!’ he thundered. ‘Wake up while there’s still time and lend a hand to defend the republic!

‘Our liberty and lives are at stake! At such a time does anyone here dare talk to me of clemency and compassion?

‘Do not imagine, gentlemen, that it was by force of arms that our ancestors transformed a petty state into this great republic. If it were so, it would now be at the height of its glory, since we have more subjects and citizens, more arms and horses, than they ever had.

‘No, it was something else entirely that made them great – something we entirely lack.

‘They were hard workers at home, just rulers abroad, and to the senate-they brought minds that were not racked by guilt or enslaved by passion. That is what we’ve lost.

History can teach us lessons, if we choose to listen.

While translating the 4th century attack on paganism by Firmicus Maternus, I was struck by the content of chapter eight, which begins as follows:

If the sun gathered all humanity assembled together for him to address them, he would undoubtedly attack your despair by a discourse such as this:  “So who, weak mortals, revolting every day and in every way against the supreme god, has pushed you, in your perverse taste for a profane error, to this great crime of claiming, according to your pleasure, sometimes that I am alive, sometimes that I am dead?  If only you would follow one tradition, and apply to me only one invention of your unhealthy imagination!  If only the perfidy of your wicked thought would gave itself free play without covering me with shame!  But in throwing yourselves into these abysses, you do not spare me either, and your language respects nothing, but you dishonour me while running to your death and your loss. 

2.  “Some with a mad eagerness claim that in Egypt I damaged myself in the waves of the Nile and his fast swirls;  others weep for the loss which I have suffered of the sexual parts;  others make me perish by a painful death, and sometimes boil in a pot, sometimes I have my members torn and impaled on seven spikes.  He who flatters me a little by a more balanced account says that I am the coachman of a quadriga.  Finish and reject these so disastrous follies, and take this profitable advice:  seek the true way of salvation.”

Firmicus Maternus has had nothing good to say of paganism, and has just described the frivolous manner in which the Greeks pay off their obligations to others cheaply by deifying them and superficially worshipping them.  Yet here he imagines the sun addressing them, and describes the idea that the sun is the driver of a quadriga as “a more balanced account” than the other myths. 

Of course he is right to describe this as more wholesome; but what is interesting is the more positive tone that he takes altogether towards the sun, towards Sol.  The late Roman state sun god, Sol Invictus, is frequently depicted in his quadriga.

Firmicus Maternus is addressing the two emperors.  Perhaps it is not politic to attack a cult so strongly attached to the late imperial image, a cult founded by Aurelian and patronised strongly by the emperors of the Tetrarchy, from which Constantine and his house derive their legitimacy.

But equally possible is that Firmicus Maternus recognises that solar worship in these forms is tending towards Christianity.  Paganism was syncretic.  Pagans in late antiquity were not necessarily predisposed to reject Christ, any more than Hindus are; rather they rejected his uniqueness.  Was it altogether a huge step to move in imagination from the worship of the single and unconquered Sun and adopt a mighter Sun, the Sun of Justice, Sol Iustitiae, Jesus Christ?  Perhaps not.  The use of the title Sol Iustitiae for Christ by Fathers such as Jerome himself suggests that the uniqueness of the sun predisposed some to accept monotheism.  In the transitional period no doubt all sorts of compromises were made.

However it is a mistake to presume that people can be “blurred” into Christianity.  They can “blur” out of it equally easily.  Unless there is a positive personal commitment to serve Christ ourselves, we will always psychologically be looking back.  This tendency, this failure to truly convert, is very marked in many people supposedly Christians in this period.  Perhaps this is why?

I started translating Firmicus Maternus some months ago, in what feels like a different world. But it has sat on my desktop since, looking at me, and yesterday I did some more.  It was painless, so I will probably carry on.

There is already a perfectly good English translation of this curious anti-pagan work from AD 350-ish.  But of course it is not online.  Is it worth my while translating stuff that already exists?  We all know that offline publishing is doomed.  One day it will come online.  Is it worth me using up my life in a piece of work that will be futile?

But Firmicus Maternus is important, because of how he is used online.  In the online wars, hate-filled atheists routinely sneer at the unwary “Jesus is merely Mithras repackaged” — or Attis, or Osiris, or Hercules, or whoever.  Not that they know anything about pagan mythology; they just like the psychological cosh of producing a long list of supposed deities, which it would take a lot of effort to research.  Indeed yesterday I saw listed, as a deity who lived, died and was resurrected, “pistis sophia”!  Yes, really I did — that relatively well-known gnostic text being proclaimed with the utmost confidence as a pagan deity.

People need access to Firmicus.  So… I’ll probably persist.

I’ve spent much of the afternoon working on the Wikipedia Mithras article again.  It may all be labour lost, if some stroppy so-and-so comes and reverts it all.  The challenge is to edit in such a manner that they won’t feel able to!

Two days ago I posted on a strong expression attributed to John Chrysostom:

The road to hell is paved with the skulls of bishops.

Commenters united to say that the ‘quote’ is bogus, and has long been known as such.  T.J. Buckton in Notes & Queries ser.1.V.117 (1852) p.92 (online here) writes as follows:

Hell paved with the Skulls of Priests (Vol. iv., p. 484.). — The French priest referred to in this Query had most probably quoted, at second or third hand, and with rhetorical embellishment — certainly not from the original direct — an expression of St. Chrysostom, m his third homily on the Acts of the Apostles :

“οὐκ οῖμαι εῖναι πόλλους ἐν τοῖς ἰερευσι τοὺς σωζομένους, ἀλλὰ πολλῳ πλείους τοὺς ἀπολλυμένους”

I know not if there be many in the priesthood, who are saved, but I know that many more perish.”

Gibbon has also quoted this passage at second hand (v. 399. note z.), for he says :

“Chrysostom declares his free opinion (tom. ix. hom. iii. in Act. Apostol. p. 29.) that the number of bishops who might be saved, bore a very small proportion to those who would be damned.”

It may be safely asserted that the above expression of Chrysostom is the strongest against the priesthood to be found in any of the Christian Fathers of authority in the Church.

T. J. Buckton.

Lichfield.

Well!  A fairly definite opinion, that.  Can anyone find “vol. 4, p.484” in Google books?  I’d like to see the context, as this must be a reply.

On to Chrysostom’s Sermon III on Acts.  In the NPNF translation we find this:

I do not think there are many among Bishops that will be saved, but many more that perish;

Which is undoubtedly the same sentence.  I would tend to call that a mistranslation, except that Chrysostom is definitely talking about bishops, in context, and trying to deter men from corruptly obtaining high ecclesiastical office.

A copy of Paley’s Greek wit: a collection of smart sayings and anecdotes (second series) has reached me.  Most of the sayings are from Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers, with a leavening of Plutarch’s Lives.  But on pp.64-66 are three anecdotes from a work listed as Anonymi Oeconomica.  These are all about money.

So what is this work?  I don’t really know my way around the works of Aristotle, yet a google search reveals remarkably little.  The work seems to have been falsely attributed to Aristotle in transmission.  A Tuebner edition of the text from 1887 is here.  Perhaps it is better known under some other title.  Hmm…. what could it be?  Perhaps Economics?

I find here a Bohn translation of Aristotle’s Politics and Economics.  The Economics is p.289f.  There are two books.  The work is not extant in Greek throughout; in parts only a Latin translation of the Middle Ages has survived.

I find this account in 1832:

Of the two books composing the Œconomics attributed to Aristotle, the second had by universal consent, and on the most convincing evidence been rejected as spurious, and considered as the production of a writer, later in date and very inferior in capacity to that great philosopher. ‘But there was no internal evidence to discredit the genuineness of the first book of these Œconomics : which, though somewhat meagre and unsatisfactory, might pass for a fragment or summary of a genuine Aristotelian treatise. The late publication of a treatise of Philodemus from a Herculanean manuscript has however thrown the onus probandi on those who maintain this treatise to be the work of Aristotle: as Philodemus criticizes in detail the first part of this very treatise, in the precise form in which we now have it; but ascribes it constantly to Theophrastus.

Then this work (1839) tells us:

Of Aristotle’s work bearing this name Diogenes Laertius only mentions one book ; and of these it seems quite evident that both are not by the same author. Erasmus held the first to be Aristotle’s but to be only a fragment, but Niebuhr considers that lately discovered authorities incontestably prove it to be by Theophrastus.

If the second book is Aristotle’s, it is probably a collection made by him when collecting materials for his historical and philosophical writings on government. It is chiefly a string of instances of oppression exercised by one people upon another, or by tyrants upon their subjects.

A 1902 encyclopedia tells us there are THREE books.  I find in this source, a festschrift for Paul Oskar Kristeller, p.129,  rather better information from Josef Soudek.  This tells us of an anonymous Latin translation made about 1280 of “all three books”.  A revision of two books (I and III) was made in 1295.  In the renaissance these were replaced by Leonardo Bruni’s translation (1420-1), which was extant in at least 223 manuscripts.  The article talks of a further 8 copies.

It is remarkable, tho, how difficult it is to find hard information about this work, attributed to one of the greatest minds of western civilisation.  Am I making the wrong searches?  Or is the information just not there?