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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Prosimetra
Joel C. Relihan
17.1 Introduction
How are we to interpret late antique literary works with classical affiliations when they are compounded of integrated prose and verse? My Ancient Menippean Satire (1993) defined a classical genre and traced its evolution and ultimate Christianization in late antiquity: The mixture of prose and verse, seen as fundamentally indecorous, served a cause of authorial auto‐irony. But Menippean satire is only a subset of prosimetric phenomena, which go far beyond classical temporal boundaries. Peter Dronke (1994), considering a wide range of medieval prosimetry, Latin and vernacular, found in classical truth‐testing models formal inspirations and theoretical lineages for medieval biographical and autobiographical texts. Here, the multiplicities of identity find expression in, because they are uncovered by, the contrasting habits of prose and verse. Writing about oneself in two modes is a heuristic exercise; prose and verse suggest that one’s component parts may not be integrated.
Bernhard Pabst (1994) found a different sort of unity in late classical and medieval prosimetric texts. For Pabst their combination of instruction and moralizing highlights a complementary reality: The moral authority that can be easily assigned to the elevated status of verse. (See Witke 1996 for an introduction to Pabst’s exhaustive medieval catalogue of prosimetric texts.) Ingrid De Smet (1996), writing on humanist texts, largely charted the influence of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis as a model for both political and academic criticism. The essays contained in Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl (1997) considered prosimetrum in new, more theoretically rigorous ways, and they investigated prosimetry as a range of phenomena in world literature across classical, biblical, Icelandic, African, Irish, Persian, and Chinese texts, though humanist Latin texts are not discussed.
A student of prosimetric texts in late antiquity would do well to start with these five books. But there has been no comprehensive, universal literary history either of Menippean satire (best is Koppenfels 2007) or of prosimetrum (Orth 2000 brings some aspects of medieval prosimetrum up to date). Late antique texts can be more fully integrated into such a still‐unwritten history by considering what are the traditions that these texts, like all Menippean satires, seek to subvert (see Relihan 2017, pp. 340–342). What I will propose here is a new way to think about prose and verse in late antique texts by contrasting Menippean satires and commentary traditions in their various approaches to the defense of authoritative authors and their critique of intellectual traditions.
My starting point is Boethius’s Consolation. Just as Menippean satire does not define prosimetrum, so, too, Consolation does not define Menippean satire. The Consolation is an extraordinary text, in every sense of the word, and its outsize medieval influence should not lead us to think by default that it defines a predictable practice: As John Marenbon (2014) says, speaking in general terms, Boethius is paradigmatic of nothing. Studies of the influence of Consolation as a prosimetric text are of three sorts. Foremost is the study of its themes, either as they relate to antecedent texts (Relihan 2007b) or as they relate to the texts of the twelfth century (see the dissertation of Goddard 2011 and, now, the introductions to Wetherbee’s translations of Alan of Lille’s Complaint of Nature [2013] and Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia [2015]). There is an increasing acceptance of the view that I put forward in my study The Prisoner’s Philosophy (2007b) that Consolation tests the limits of the authority figure, and that reflections of this are found throughout the later allegorical traditions (Wetherbee 2009). There is also the study of its prosimetric qualities per se (on the medieval side, see especially Johnson 2009), in which the regular alternation of prose and verse, its very ordering and elaborate patterning, exhibits the order of the universe (Blackwood 2015). But it is also a consolation, and, as such, it is tailored to the unique needs of its unique narrator; it is an exhortation to rise above history and circumstance, to accept the “philosopher’s challenge” and so find truth in the abstract and atemporal realms (Donato 2013).
By demonstrating the extraordinary ways in which Consolation exploits verse and how it stretches the boundaries of Menippean satire, the chapter will be able to define better what it is that Menippean satire does as a prosimetric genre; in the process, it will help to define, in contrast to that genre, other prosimetric traditions. In what follows I do not intend to create a list of texts and summaries of contents or to elaborate a universal typology of prosimetra (to borrow the term from Ziolkowski 1997, p. 48). Rather, I will offer as topics for future research a schematic series of arguments and assertions, both historical and literary, about the growth of prosimetrum from a popular mode of narrative to a universalizing mode of thought, in which prose plus verse, on the one hand, is positive, because it seeks to include everything and so sum up in an era of cultural change the traditions of the past, and, on the other hand, is subversive, because it seeks to destabilize this combination of contrasting modes of thought; about the struggle of sophisticated authors simultaneously to embrace and to keep at arm’s length the provocative and popular form that is prosimetrum; about the contrast between verse conceptualized as authoritative and moral, and verse exploited as a mocking intrusion; and ultimately, about the different functions of prosimetrum, both in defense of authoritative texts and in critique of authoritative genres.
17.2 Popular Origins of Mixed‐Meter Satire
At this point I will jettison the word “prosimetrum,” a twelfth‐century term for a medieval phenomenon, and use “prosimetra” to refer not to a single genre but to the broad range of texts, genres, and experiments in which verse and prose make competing claims upon a text and its interpretation, including learned symposia (Plutarch, Athenaeus, Macrobius), Lucianic dialogues and fictions, and popular prose, such as the Alexander Romance and Apollonius, King of Tyre. The “other genre” of satire that Quintilian claims as Roman (Institutes 10.1.93), the one that is not the hexametric form that Lucilius finally settles on in his own poetic evolution, is the satire of mixed meter. Varro is said on this account to add prose to the mixed‐meter form (Freudenberg 2013). It is good to remember, then, that mixed‐meter satire is the metrical substratum of Menippean satire; we should not allow the example of Boethius to mislead us into thinking that Menippean satire is alternating prose and verse. Further, mixed‐meter satire is popular in origin, as the scurrility of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis would suggest, whose every joke and insult can be explained in reference to the person and personality of Claudius (Bonandini 2010).
The Caesars of Julian the Apostate, subtitled Saturnalia and writte
n in Greek, is modeled on Apocolocyntosis and provides a bridge from Seneca to Boethius. But the most prominent and influential complex of prosimetric texts in late antiquity are all in Latin and on the academic end: Menippean satire, particularly as practiced by Boethius and Martianus Capella (the encyclopedic fantasy of The Marriage of Philology and Mercury; for its conservative championing of rhetorical over practical arts, see Formisano 2013, p. 210), though Fulgentius (the trivializing encyclopedia Mythologies; see now Hays 2013) and Ennodius (the minor Educational Exhortation) stake their claims as well. The genre has, therefore, something of a renaissance in late antiquity, but also a reimagining. Varro’s Menippean Satires, the distant model, have brought in their train Varronian encyclopedism, evident even in Athenaeus’s Deipnosophists, where the host Larensius states his affiliation to the Menippean Varro (4.160c; Jacob 2013, p. 20). Textbook learning, coupled with extensive use of verse, now embraces a sort of psychological introspection performed in the presence of authority. This transforms a genre whose historical roots are more clearly glimpsed in backward‐looking Lucian. But this is our question: How did a popular mode become the vehicle for such sophisticated and philosophical fictions? There is more at work in this transformation than the importation of Varro the polymath into Varro the satirist in late antiquity. In fact, the great changes in prosimetra – in form, in topic, and in outlook – can be traced to another event in the literary history of the second century. The contrast between Pseudo‐Lucian’s Ass and the Golden Ass of the forward‐looking Apuleius will prove instructive, documenting a parallel shift from social satire to auto‐ironic fantasy, where the author/narrator reserves for himself a reality and a heaven beyond his text.
Consolation’s practice will show us a path to this second‐century answer. A proper evaluation of means and ends in Consolation begins by admitting that Boethius the author was guilty as charged. Boethius chose Consolation to be a sort of confession. He did want to be emperor; he admits as much in his political manifesto in book 1.4. James O’Donnell 2008 is emphatic: “Theoderic was not merely paranoid: he had a real enemy. Boethius wanted to be emperor himself – or, more precisely, he wanted to be Plato’s philosopher king” (pp. 166–167). After this first step we can start to evaluate the function of prose and verse in this confession by seeing it as the end point of a trio of prosimetric texts that look at emperors and the universe in increasingly introspective ways, a Menippean line to be traced from Apocolocyntosis through Caesars to Consolation. Seneca’s attack on Claudius asks, “Where does he, who used to be emperor, fit in the cosmic order?” Its poetry is diverse and irregular: There are poetic tags in Greek and in Latin and a half‐dozen poems, mostly hexameters (one in fulsome praise of Nero), one in comic senarii, one in anapests. But when, in Greek, the emperor Julian adapts Seneca with a more Lucianic aesthetic (restrained verse, the presence of Silenus, a concilium deorum that has become more a parodied symposium), the question becomes, “Where do I, who am emperor, fit with my predecessors in the cosmic order?” Like Seneca, Julian is a person in his fantasy, more at the edges than in the middle; like Seneca, he receives the cosmic vision from an external source; unlike Seneca, he ponders his own position in the world. Julian laughs at all his predecessors and has a separate heaven reserved for himself; Mithras is his separate god. Boethius asks, “Where do I, who wanted to be emperor, fit into the cosmic order?” Julian writes an encapsulated history of Rome, a comic compendium, verse modestly deployed; Boethius is not writing a history of philosophy but an account of himself, and Consolation’s verses, of extraordinary proportions and depth, are a crucial element in Boethius’s presentation of his own relation to philosophy and to the universe – this is a world away from Seneca and Julian.
