A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  17.3 The Extraordinary Verses of Consolation

  Consolation as a literary genre mirrors consolation as a human endeavor: Each must be tailored to the individual who is addressed. The twists and turns of Philosophy’s arguments reflect her accurate understanding of the difficult task at hand, reminding the sixth‐century philosopher of the nature of sixth‐century philosophy (Donato 2013). But the text of Consolation does not describe the unbroken history of philosophy and does not describe the prisoner as a sixth‐century philosopher: The text mentions Plato, schismatic Hellenistic philosophers, and Roman philosophical martyrs (1.3.9). If Boethius the author had a Platonic longing to be the philosopher‐king, our prisoner is appealing not to the unbroken chain of philosophy but to its origins: He longs to return to the beginnings. Antonio Donato’s theme is that Philosophy wants the prisoner to rise to the philosopher’s challenge – to rise above the things of earth and find his value in the context of eternal realms. The political manifesto of 1. 4 represents to Philosophy the sorts of things that the prisoner ought to leave behind if he wants to be free; he has exiled himself from his true home, she says (1.5.3–5). But the plot structure of Consolation is a stubborn reality: Philosophy says, “Let’s rise up,” at the beginnings of books 4 and 5 (4 m.1; 5.1.4–5), and the prisoner says, “No.” The final view of the Consolation is not the prisoner’s view of the ordered universe but rather the divine view of a providential world; the prisoner's punishment is revealed as providential, and acceptance of that revelation is where his consolation lies, not in union/reunion with God. The prisoner had been offered the freedom of eternity, but finds himself accepting his place within the world of time, the failed philosopher‐king. This is what Eleanor Johnson (2013, pp. 136 and following), calls “the consolation of temporality.”

  Donato (2013) is right: Philosophy herself makes a conscious and consistent attempt to take the prisoner’s personal, historic, individual, grounded experience and to universalize it. This strips the prisoner of his particularities in order to make him abstract and eternal. Indeed, poetry is the primary medium by which she does so, because the poems are where we find at their most concentrated her exhortations to look up. The abstract beauty of the poems has often proved seductive. Peter Glassgold (1994, p. 15) claims that Consolation’s prose merely offers “a dramatic framework for the poetry’s philosophical lyricism, which seeks in translation a language transcending time, echoing and reechoing Boethius’s dream of the eternal ideal.” James Harpur (2007, p. 9 and back jacket) offers a “coherent poetic sequence” in which “the poems gain from the protracted intensity of poetic imagination carried over, uninterrupted, poem by poem.” They are imagined as reaching a sort of moral crescendo. Seth Lerer’s introduction to David Slavitt’s translation of the complete Consolation asks the first‐time reader not to worry too much about doctrine or history in the shaping of the text (Slavitt 2008, p. xv): “Instead, the reader should savor the resonances of its verse: from the ruefulness of its opening meters in Book I, through the power of its natural descriptions in Book II, the purview of its cosmology in Book III, the affecting retellings of the tales of mythic heroes in Books III and IV, to the knowing serenity in Book V.” These poems constitute a vade mecum, a tale of personal relevance, an emotional journey from sorrow to serenity reenacted by the reader, not the particular tale of the prisoner reconstituted by the reader.

  Poetry is a medium that belongs primarily to Philosophy. Of the 39 poems in the five books of Consolation, arranged 7 + 8 + 12 + 7 + 5, only three are composed and delivered by the prisoner (1 m.3, 1 m.5, and 5 m.3; the opening poem is the dictation he took from the Muses), and only two of those are substantial (1 m.5, 5 m.3). The first book begins with a poem and ends with one, while all the other books begin with prose. Every book ends with a poem, except for the last book, where the absence of a final poem has always been a problem, often seen as a sign of the physical incompleteness of the book. There is, then, a curious symmetry between the first book and the last: The first has one poem too many; the last one too few (6 + 1, 8, 12, 7, 6‐1). In fact, book 1 begins with a poem that shouldn’t be there (the dictated poem, a dismal false start) and book 5 ends with a poem that isn’t there. These bookends of Consolation are themselves statements about the proprieties and limitations of poetry: What is said in verse lies between what shouldn’t have been said and what cannot be said; the prisoner plays poet only in books where the structure is interrupted.

  The poetry of Consolation attempts to have meaning without reference to speakers, and it tries to be universal; that is, it tries to find truths beyond the specific physical circumstance of the prisoner. Poetry is not an emotional medium that stands in contrast to the rationality of prose and to discursive thought, but an abstract medium that stands in distinction to the physical circumstance of the prisoner. Part of poetry’s pattern is that it serves as a medium that suppresses the history and the experience of the prisoner. This reveals much about Boethius the author’s view of the nature of poetry. In Consolation, poetry cannot tell a life story, it cannot record personal experience, it is built only for the abstract, and this is its failing. When one compares Boethius to Maximian, the poet who most immediately uses him and his Consolation, the great gulf between them becomes apparent. Maximian in his great Third Elegy can, in fact, write about his dealings with Boethius, in which Boethius the teacher takes Philosophy’s role and Maximian the student takes the prisoner’s role, and as a poet he can make Boethius’s life part of his, Maximian’s, own life story (Relihan 2007b, pp. 101–107).

  So why write poetry at all? Poetry puts to the test Philosophy’s claim to the total understanding of human life and thought. The Consolation’s aggressive reliance on alternating prose and verse is a constant reminder of the two worlds that it lives in. Boethius the author has offered his own experience not as the subject of poetry but as the objection to poetry. The reversion of the prisoner to prayer (see Murton 2015), and Philosophy’s turning to the public audience of those whose politics put the prisoner in prison, is part of this package: Poetry tries to be universal, and Boethius writes a self‐consolation in which he makes his peace with the world, in which he finds his consolation by resisting Philosophy’s call for forgetting himself.

  17.4 Literary Shifts in the Second Century

  The glimpse of eternity and the return to earth is a Menippean staple and is easily visible in Lucian: The truth is at your feet, not in the sky. The narrator’s view of himself from on high, on the other hand, is unique; so is the use of verse, a protreptic to abandon the earth and embrace a view of eternity that the narrator fights against. Boethius has his prisoner measure himself against eternity, and verse functions as an emblem of eternity.

  This is not merely poetry’s clichéd insistence upon its ability to confer immortality on the poet. Poetry’s role as adversary has been acquired over time. Consider Satyricon, which should be dated to the second century (Henderson 2010). Here we clearly have a sort of auto‐ironic humor in the form of rogue academics who range through an immoral world as immoral agents, bemoaning declining standards while writing in a form that is itself a challenge to the high styles of serious literature: Their form belittles their pretensions and is in contrast to their lives. A different approach appears in the popular fictions, Greek and Latin, in which verse composition is employed: Apollonius King of Tyre and The Alexander Romance (Dronke 1994, pp. 70–75). Verse‐in‐prose as a popular medium suggests that there are conflicts in some prosimetric authors between a desire to be innovative, to break boundaries, to parody the conventions of literature, and caution in the presence of a popular medium. This tension is most clearly seen in Lucian, who is at pains to call himself an innovator because he made dialogue neither prose nor verse but a Hippocentaur (Bis Acc. 33) – yet his own practice shows a surprising conservatism. His use of verse is sparing, just as his willingness to involve himself in his own name in his fictions and fantasies is quite restrained.
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br />   So Satyricon raises the possibility of academic auto‐irony, and Lucian demonstrates the nervousness with which a highly literate author chooses to deploy a generic innovation. All authors who deal in prose and verse are aware that poetry judges the author. The involvement of an author as a character in prosimetra is problematic, and calls for caution. Neither Petronius nor Lucian is using his medium for a consideration of the psychology or personality of his own self as author. To invoke Gian Biagio Conte’s famous title, Petronius is the “hidden author.” Seneca and Julian have kept themselves at the periphery of their pieces. But Boethius is shown to reject this call for caution. He does so spectacularly, far beyond the auto‐ironic examples of Fulgentius, a would‐be scholar who is schooled by his Muse and revealed as a fool, or Martianus Capella, whose Muse upbraids him at the end for making a mess of the Seven Liberal Arts.

  But what pushes verse into the realm of transcendence? What has intervened is Apuleius’s Golden Ass. Its language is influential in late classical prosimetry, though it is not prosimetric itself; the decisive element is its conclusion, when the narrator is revealed to be the man from Madauros, who has a personal salvation under the tutelage of the goddess Isis. Apuleius provides a crucial moment in the history of Menippean satire, fashioning an inward, introspective turn that leads to the theme of the two worlds (Weinbrot 2005). On the one side stands the world in which the author lives and which he can describe; on the other rests the world that he believes in but cannot describe because it exists beyond the bounds of reasonable communication (Relihan 2007a, pp. xxii–xxvi). Apuleius takes the Greek Metamorphoseis, a sort of romance if we may judge by the Onos, makes it over as an anti‐romance, and in so doing changes the nature and history of Menippean satire. Indeed, after Apuleius, Lucian’s brand of Menippean satire is out of date. The Golden Ass turns away from the Roman and contemporary social world to contemplate an alternate reality, individual, abstract, and abstracted from this world – an inward turn of romance, which is not about identity lost and found in the context of family and society but about identity lost and found internally – and it is this turning away from the world that is so strangely reflected in Consolation.

  In the context of individuals set against eternity, verse plays a universalizing role. It represents tradition, summarizes culture, and speaks as the embodiment of history and authority. This distinction between text and tradition is important and proves to be useful to an understanding of late classical prosimetra. The prisoner’s Muse‐dictated opening poem in Consolation shows his distance from true traditions. But Consolation, an amalgam of arguments, of Cynic, Stoic, Platonic, Aristotelian, even Augustinian approaches, working on the prisoner through twists and turns, problems and conundrums and achieving a consolation tailored to our unique political philosopher, does not have the status of a textbook. This is important. Consider again the Apocolocyntosis–Caesar –Consolation triad, in which Caesars stands out as a comic textbook, an encapsulated Roman history, above which floats Julian himself, better than his predecessors and worthy of a separate heaven with Mithras, not this comic Olympus of wrangling unworthies. The comic Olympus appears in Martianus Capella as well, the less‐than‐glorious destination for Philology’s ascent, after she has glimpsed the Unknown Father at the edge of the universe (2.200–6), once she has jettisoned her knowledge – prayer in the form of nonsense syllables, beyond the realm of discursive thought. Here, too, we have a book, an encyclopedia, composed by an author whose frame for it suggests its less‐than‐ultimate value. Menippean satire is a medium in which authors can both create textbooks and criticize them in a fantasy setting or, in the case of Boethius, play with the notion of authority itself.

  17.5 The Evidence of Sympotic Literature

  Satyricon, Lucian, and Apuleius illustrate a range of second‐century options for keeping an author separate from the world he describes and the medium he uses to describe it. But there is a related shift in the history of symposium as well, a genre that becomes and remains highly prosimetric, though not with the regularity, or poetic invention, of Menippean texts. Plutarch’s first‐century Table Talk can be read as a sort of serious intellectual biography: The author reflects on the learned men who helped to shape him into the author that he has now become (König 2011). How different this is from Athenaeus’s Deipnosophists, where scholars by their command of the minutiae of comic texts show themselves to be comic themselves, where the sympotic has become both playful and encyclopedic (Jacob 2013). Lucian’s spectacles of philosophical hypocritical symposiasts are barely related to this genial work. Yet when Macrobius attempts to create a similar gathering, and where he might have license for levity given that the occasion is the Saturnalia, which gives his book its title, he is more modest and much more restrained. Macrobius’s Saturnalia isn’t really about Macrobius himself and, despite Evangelus and some of the other trappings of the Plato‐dominated genre, it isn’t an exercise to any degree in humor at the expense of intellectuals, and Macrobius’s authorship of the text is not nearly so important as Athenaeus’s authorship of his (Jacob 2013, pp. 9–12).

  The point most worth making in this regard is that this learned symposium is defending an author: Virgil. The speakers are not comic, even if Evangelus can be dastardly; they do not create their own poetry. Macrobius’s innovations lie in his Commentary on The Dream of Scipio, which, according to Julieta Cardigni (2013), is its own narratio fabulosa by which Scipio is established both as ideal Roman and as ideal reader. In either case, defense of a text is serious business. There are, in other words, countervailing forces that can force prosimetry into respectability. Consider also Fulgentius. His prosimetric Mitologiae is a textbook, and as a Menippean satire it makes fun of the scholar who thinks that he understands the true meanings of classical myths: Satire comes to set him straight, dispenses with his services, and proceeds in three books to wring any profundity out of mythology by a series of breezy allegorizations. The text parodies the textbook. On the other hand, the Allegorical Content of Virgil makes fun of Fulgentius the author in many of the same ways but is not prosimetric: Here Fulgentius is defending the authoritative Virgil, and prosimetrum is out of consideration (Relihan 1993, pp. 158–161).

  17.6 Conclusion: Two Pre‐Boethian, Two Post‐Boethian Traditions

  In the history of Menippean satire, the crucial late classical innovation is the exploitation of encyclopedic content. This should not be thought of as a Varronian addition to the genre so much as its appropriate topic in a textbook age. Menippean satire, itself subversive of intellectual systems, helps us to identify what is the chief intellectual system of its time. The increasingly ordered aggregation of human learning into systems, into handbooks, has a valuable function: “Encyclopedic learning had a long association with the portrayal of communal learning and shared ethical virtues in classical literature” (Bjornlie 2015, p. 292). Menippean satire in this age is a critique of the notion of cultural patrimony. Prosimetry has become a vehicle for amassing everything (in which prose with verse establishes universality) and criticizing everything (in which prose with verse establishes dissonance).

  The two most complex prosimetric texts of late antiquity are Julian’s Caesars and Boethius’s Consolation, at opposite ends of the prosimetric spectrum. The ways in which they and their authors align is instructive (Relihan 2005). I would like to emphasize the congruity of their pride: Julian is the only worthy emperor in the history of the Roman Empire, and for him is reserved a separate heaven and a separate salvation under the tutelage of the god Mithras; Boethius through his prisoner represents himself as the last Roman poet, the last true patriot, the last true philosopher. Both see history as focused on themselves and ending with themselves. Julian came to his Caesars in the course of a wide‐ranging literary career, at once satiric, belletristic, philosophical, and protreptic. Caesars does not bear that much weight in Julian’s oeuvre, and it is certainly lightweight in comparison to Consolation.