The Shrunken Field of Classics

After the humanists, the study of antiquity shrank and crystallized into the discipline now called Classics. Latin and Greek remained the primary media of education and scholarship until the eighteenth century. A modern genius like Isaac Newton felt it most appropriate to write his magnum opus, Principia Mathematica (1687), in Latin. By the later eighteenth century, though, when the mastery of ancient languages retreated from its place at the center of intellectual life, scholars of Greek and Latin had to find a new and distinct role for themselves.

They redefined the field of Classics by making the languages, literatures, and cultures of Greece and Rome the primary object of study just as Angelo Poliziano had done. No longer did the classical languages serve as the prerequisite for entering the world of affairs. An education in Classics came to mean understanding the canonical writers thoroughly, not the use of ancient texts to address issues that matter in the world at large.

Although the territory of classical antiquity is theoretically vast, the literary canon makes the field quite small in practice. Classics scholars focus overwhelmingly on a handful of canonical authors—shelf upon shelf of scholarly books and articles explore all the minutiae of Homer and Vergil while secondary writers such as Nonnos and Persius get little attention. This imbalance characterizes a field more concerned with literary reputation than with pressing out into the world on as broad a front as possible in the thirst for discoveries. In this environment, writers become important, not just because their work is great, but especially because they influenced other great writers. One reads Homer because he influenced Vergil, and one reads Vergil because he influenced Dante, and so on.

Writers who didn’t influence others receive much less attention. Yet their work is just as capable of sparking our imagination as any other.  Why do we feed our imaginations on such a narrow diet?

A Triumph of Humanism

The humanists completed the recovery of classical learning, a process which had unfolded over centuries. Starting in the eleventh century, those who wanted new ideas turned ad hoc to classical authors whose works still remained available. The scholastics studied Aristotle to learn logic. In the twelfth century, the court of Countess Marie de Champagne invented the notion of courtly, or romantic, love, inspired by the erotic poetry of Ovid, Propertius, and others. In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the architects of the Gothic cathedrals based their design on Plato’s Timaeus, the only one of Plato’s dialogues then available in Latin.

In the fourteenth century, Petrarch became one of the first to search out and rescue manuscripts of lost classical texts that were lying forgotten in the libraries of monasteries. Petrarch didn’t just model some of his own lyrics on the newly recovered Horace; he adopted the role of “the poet” based partly on what Horace and other ancients tell us about where poets fit in the cultural life of ancient Rome. In 1341, Petrarch arranged a public ceremony on the steps of the Capitol in Rome where he was crowned as the first modern poet laureate—a public official placed a laurel wreath on Petrarch’s head as if he were a victor in the ancient Pythian games in honor of Apollo.

In the first half of the fifteenth century, scholars fleeing the Byzantine empire when it came under attack from the Ottoman Turks fed a ferocious appetite in Italy for learning the ancient Greek language and for collecting Greek manuscripts. Philosophers in the West suddenly had access to all of Plato and therefore had a fresh system of thought to supplant the scholastics’ by-then stuffy Aristotelianism. Poets gained access to Homer in the original. They had known that Homer was Vergil’s model, but they knew little else about him; he was only a legendary figure. Now they could read Homer for themselves and see that he might even surpass Vergil.

All of these activities spawned the new discipline of humanism, which applied critical methods to ancient texts. Using techniques that form the basis for training in Classics today, the humanists searched out manuscripts, prepared authoritative texts, and situated them in their proper period. They wrote scholarly treatises to explain the significance of the new finds.

The work of Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) on the “Donation of Constantine” furnishes a famous example. The popes had long asserted their primacy over all of Christendom, a claim based in part on this document in which the Roman emperor Constantine I in the early fourth century bequeathed the leadership of Christendom to the bishops of Rome in perpetuity. Constantine had made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire and thus represented an important authority. However, the bishops of Constantinople, who head the Eastern Orthodox Church, rejected the claim, pointing to their equally ancient lineage as one of the original seven primates of the ancient Christian world.

The dispute between Rome and Constantinople came to a head in 1054 when the pope sent a copy of the “Donation” to his counterpart in Constantinople and insisted on obedience. The bishop of Constantinople refused, and the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches split apart for good. This schism became an important issue in the fifteenth century as the Catholic West debated whether to help the Orthodox Byzantine Empire fight off the Turks. Some people feared that if Constantinople fell, the Turks would invade Western Europe next while others thought the Eastern Orthodox Church was getting what it deserved for splitting from the rightful authority of the pope. At this moment, Valla used textual analysis to prove that the “Donation of Constantine” was a forgery. It used the vocabulary of medieval Latin. The language of the document had come from a much later period than the fourth century, when Constantine lived, and therefore couldn’t have been written by him.

The church ignored Valla’s findings—in fact, it continues to perpetuate the myth of Constantine even today. But the status of the church had altered. People no longer accepted the pronouncements of the church without challenge. The humanists, many of them members of the clergy, lent their weight to those who criticized the church’s abuses, such as conflicts of interest between the church’s political and spiritual power; the disparity between the great wealth of bishops and cardinals and the poverty of the ordinary people they were supposed to serve; the sale of church offices; the fraud of selling indulgences, and so on.

Humanists such as Erasmus, himself a priest, wrote satirical dialogues and pastoral poems to expose these abuses. Moreover, the humanists could publish these texts to a much wider and more secular audience. The quickening economic pace of the Renaissance and the beginnings of capitalism created a new class of professionals who were educated and engaged in the world. They could afford to buy books because the invention of printing in 1453 reduced the cost of producing them by 90%. The first independent reading public since antiquity came into being.

The Powerful Notion of “Classics”

In applying strict standards to language, the humanists sought to elevate the discipline of literature above the attainments of the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages had distinguished its own set of auctores, that is, authors whose work exemplified principally grammatical correctness. The auctores were simply the textbooks one used in learning to read and write Latin. The list of auctores was drawn from various periods without regard to historical and stylistic distinctions. Silver Latin (1st and 2nd centuries), late antiquity, and the Middle Ages contributed auctores as well as the Golden Age of Cicero and Vergil.

Under the humanists, the canon of auctores became our notion of the “classics” in the wider sense, that is, works exemplifying the ideal in all respects: morally, intellectually, and artistically as well as linguistically. The canon collected and displayed all the virtues to which European culture aspired, and the works of the canonical authors became the standard against which people judged themselves. Vergil’s pius Aeneas, who led his people out of a defeated Troy and sacrificed the love of the Carthaginian queen Dido to go to Italy and found the Roman people, was no longer just a character in a compelling story; he implicitly reproached anyone who failed to perform his duty to family and country.

The literary canon purports to conserve our ideals and therefore to comprise “the best that has been thought and said,” as Matthew Arnold put it. However, the real cultural power comes from the idea of a literary canon, not the specific books on the list. In fact, the books that people consider timeless classics change over time. Each age grows tired of books that the previous era lauded and rediscovers other books that better fit its sensibility. The reputations of all of the great writers suffer their ups and downs: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare…

The notion of a canon itself is what endures. It endures as a style of engagement with books, and it makes the ambitious claim that it defines the culture. It represents an instinct—almost an ideology or an institution—called classicism. Classicism involves an aesthetic predisposition toward balance and restraint (think of Cicero’s sentence), along with a set of obligations for how readers and writers should fulfill classical ideals.

The Art of Language at the Center of Education

High culture maintained a continuity from the ancient world into the Middle Ages. Literary life and education had revived in the fourth and fifth centuries after the near collapse of the Roman empire in the third century. The later Roman emperors such as Diocletian and Constantine restored order and prosperity. During this time, the empire became Christian. Although some wanted to get rid of pagan learning altogether, the faction that saw value in the classical authors prevailed.

Church fathers such as Augustine and Jerome wanted Christians to be good readers so that they could get the most out of the Bible. That meant honing their reading skills by studying the best Greek and Latin writers, who were pagan: Virgil, Cicero, and the rest. Not only were these authors skillful with language, their books contained ethical lessons that the church approved of. These writers formed the auctores, a Latin word meaning not just “authors” but also “authorities”—that is, those whose work should guide us. The Greek and Latin texts that survive today largely reflect what the early churchmen in the fourth and fifth centuries picked out as canonical from the whole corpus of classical antiquity. They gave ancient literary culture centuries more life.

Martianus Capella put his stamp on the Roman style of eduction for 1,000 years with his work The Marriage of Mercury and Philology, written in the 420s or 430s. In this allegory about the education of a public speaker (the type of education that any Roman official or professional would have had), Mercury stands for the raw talent of eloquence while Philology stands for study. Her handmaidens are the seven liberal arts, which Martianus describes in two groups. The trivium consists of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; the quadrivium consists of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

From the fifth century to the Renaissance, these are the subjects that students across Western Europe studied. They did not represent different disciplines or departments; they were not studied and taught by different scholars. Rather, they formed a single curriculum that any teacher would teach. Young students would focus on the trivium, older students on the quadrivium. By the time they matriculated, students had all mastered the same set of learning. And this learning was based on the study of texts and the art of language.

 

A Unified Vision of the World Versus Specialized Knowledge

The ancients had a unified vision of the world. A sense of the unity of knowledge suffuses the ancients’ writing so that even we moderns accept it automatically whenever we read their books. No modern reader would toss aside Plato’s Ion or The Symposium, saying, “What does a political philosopher know about literature or love?” Yet readers tacitly make that kind of judgment about modern books. If we really want to know about something, we turn to an expert on the subject, and we first validate his expertise by evaluating the author’s qualifications to address the topic. By contrast, Plato writes effortlessly about a myriad of subjects because the notion of specialization did not exist in his world and thus could not stop his genius from turning in any direction it pleased.

The ancient Greeks and Romans inhabited the same rhetorical universe. A rhetorical orientation dyes ancient texts with a seemingly artificial sameness. Texts of all types consist of sentences built up out of elaborate periods as though the author were giving a speech to impress an audience rather than writing a book to inform readers in private. Authors employ the same figures of speech and refer to the same system of mythology across genres. The difference between formal and informal tones is more muted than in modern writing. Many students today find these conventions soporific when first encountered. Only after students learn to recognize the conventions, can they see beyond them to the quirks and insights of each ancient author.

However, the rhetorical conventions do serve a purpose other than imposing a stultifying tradition. They make any text on any subject accessible to any reader. Xenophon wrote Home Economics in the form of a Platonic dialogue. Here we find Socrates teaching the home owner (who will then supposedly show his grateful new bride) the proper arrangement of pots and pans in a cupboard. There is no satire here, no detectable irony that suggests the author is aware this topic is not as edifying as, say, Justice, which Socrates tackles in Plato’s Republic.

We moderns tend to impose our own labels on ancient texts based on the assumption that specialized knowledge is the norm. When we encounter Vergil’s Georgics by itself, we mentally categorize it as a work of poetic imagination about the rhythms of rural life. When we encounter Cato’s Agriculture, we categorize it as a practical treatise. Instead, we might lay out side by side Hesiod’s Works and Days (a model for the Georgics), Vergil’s Georgics, Ovid’s Calendar and Fishes of the Black Sea, Varro’s Rural Business and Cato’s Agriculture. The first four are in verse, the other two in prose.

• Hesiod’s and Vergil’s works take the form of advice-giving and show appreciation for the virtues of farmers and the countryside although they lack deep knowledge of agricultural practices.
• Ovid’s Calendar thoroughly describes the festivals, myths, and traditions of the Roman year, which was tied to agriculture.
• His Fishes follows an Alexandrian tradition to attempt a complete catalog of aquatic life in the Black Sea.
• Varro’s Rural Business combines erudition about the old Roman traditions of the countryside with a practical discussion about farming.
• Cato’s Agriculture gives more straightforward advice similar to that of Xenophon’s Home Economics though not in dialogue form.

This comparison reveals a gentle continuity from didactic poetry to prose handbook rather than sharp divisions between different kinds of knowledge. We would not discover such similarities if we juxtaposed, for example, a Robert Frost poem about the New Hampshire countryside with a technical bulletin from the local cooperative extension. The productivity of our farms is the better for specialization, but our ability to see the world as a whole is much diminished.

The Archetypes of Meaning: Tradition

Meaning is aesthetic. It comes to us as a feeling, and it follows one of eight styles or archetypes. Today I explore the archetype of tradition.

Style #8: Tradition. We experience tradition as a sense of continuity over time. Theocritus inaugurated the pastoral tradition in poetry in the third century B.C. with idylls about the simple lives of shepherds, filled with love affairs and singing contests, as a contrast to the sophisticated urban life he and his fellow poets and readers led in the Hellenistic Mediterranean. Theocritus inspired Vergil, who also wrote about shepherds although he turned his Eclogues into commentaries about contemporary Roman life and politics. Dante revived the pastoral genre at the very end of his life by writing two Vergilian eclogues but made them into allegories with obscure allusions. Boccaccio and Petrarch followed Dante’s lead by writing pastoral verse, in part as satires on modern life, in part as elegies to dead friends and lost simplicity. Giovanni Baptista Spagnuoli developed the genre further by composing eclogues to attack the abuses of the church and to give advice to young people. Spagnuoli’s eclogues gave Shakespeare material for his festive comedies, such as As You Like It, which compare the structured, corrupt life of the court with the freedom and poverty of the country. And so on.

Thus, we understand one work by looking at the work of predecessors which inspired it. In retrospect, we label this chain of influence a “tradition,” which the writers within it grasped with varying degrees of awareness. In a tradition, each person adds something to the legacy of the past. Or we may describe a sequence of writers, works, or actions that have loose connections to one another. These recent titles, The American Tradition in Literature, The American Political Tradition, The American Intellectual Tradition, The American Military Tradition, apply the frame of tradition in retrospect to describe common, often unconscious characteristics that extend across time.