A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  Caesars lies at the intersection of many traditions, each of which thinks of prose with verse in a different way, though all point to some understanding of the mixture representing a universalization of literature and of experience, a way to move from the particular, the historical, and the earthbound to the universal, the abstract, and the celestial. Caesars shows a development of the mixed‐meter, political, naming‐names tradition of Latin satire; it shows the Varronian encyclopedic strain of Menippean satire; as a parody of a symposium, it belongs to Lucianic traditions of humor; in its sparing use of verse, it shows Lucian’s nervousness concerning the popular nature of prose with verse; and as Saturnalian writing, specifically following in Seneca’s footsteps, it plays with the seriousness of the social order in its critique of both cultural and literary traditions. It is encyclopedic in a way that Consolation is not; it does not expose Julian to criticism in the way that Consolation exposes Boethius.

  The defense of text vs. critique of tradition allows us another valuable insight into the nature of Menippean satire. Menippean satires do not actively parody an existing book; rather, they create the books that they parody. What is Caesars but a new textbook of Roman history played for laughs? Or the Marriage of Mercury and Philology but a new handbook in which handbook learning is put in its place? Cardigni (forthcoming) sees Marriage as a parody of Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche. When Mercury wants a bride, he does not get his bride of choice: Sophia is unsuitable, Mantice is unavailable, and Psyche has already been taken. Martianus’s Marriage, which does not include an actual marriage, is emphatically not the reunion of soul and source; the textbook arts are a substitute for what might have been. Boethius’s Consolation is too complex for this sort of categorization – Consolation is not a philosophy handbook squinted at through some ironic lens but philosophy in a new way. Boethius, who spent a lifetime as a translator, interpreter, and commentator, was first and foremost a defender of texts; when he came to write Consolation, he took the opportunity to become a critic of traditions, and prose and verse served him in a number of ways, ways that are ultimately too personal for us to explain as universal laws of a genre.

  Late antiquity is not best known for its humor; it is only in texts that we can call Menippean that sophisticated comic play resides, and that is humor at the expense of educational and interpretive systems (Shanzer 2002, pp. 25–26). But if we are now comfortable in saying that late antiquity is a period of intellectual and literary innovation, where we can speak of “Postmodern Late Antiquity/Late Antique Postmodernity” (Elsner and Hernández Lobato 2017, pp. 20–22), or speak approvingly of its recognition that words may not communicate as much as silence can (a “Poetics of Silence;” Hernández Lobato 2017), we can appreciate Menippean satire both as an intellectually subversive genre and as an inspiration for other works that, although not prosimetric per se, latch onto its auto‐ironic criticism of traditions. Boethius as a formal and intellectual inspiration is most prominent in the twelfth‐century Renaissance, in Alain of Lille and Bernardus Silvestris, but this line of influence has died out. The true, vital Menippean line of influence in the late classical period extends not through Boethius but through Martianus Capella to the seventh‐century Virgilius Maro Grammaticus (Latin grammar made fantastic, and Latin grammarians made ridiculous; see Law 1995) and the Cosmographia of the early eighth‐century Aethicus Ister. Aethicus Ister, drawing on the Grammaticus and other sources, writes in the person of St. Jerome, who claims to edit, translate, and comment on the cosmographical work of an unknown pagan philosopher Aethicus the Istrian. Its narrative includes verse passages, fantastic geography, and humor at the expense of saints, philosophers, and exegetes (see Herren 2011; Dronke 1994, pp. 14–19 is still insightful). Literarily, he anticipates the modern Menippean satires that work by footnotes, parodying their own texts, a tradition from Dunciad to Flann O’Brien to Nabokov’s Pale Fire to David Foster Wallace (Zetzel 1995); “for the twenty‐first century literature has become the last refuge of an encyclopaedism that can be taken seriously” (West 2013, p. 500). If Menippean satire is going to parody the book, it needs to write that book first.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  I am pleased to thank a number of colleagues who helped guide, revise, and redirect my prosimetric thoughts (though not this chapter) over a long stretch of years: Ann Astell, Stephen Blackwood, H. Christian Blood, Bracht Branham, Jeffrey Henderson, A.M. Juster, Megan Murton, Karen Ní Mheallaigh, Joseph Pucci, Eileen Sweeney, and, at the end, Julieta Cardigni, who let me see in draft form her work on Martianus Capella as a parody of Cupid and Psyche.

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  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Philosophical Commentary

  Han Baltussen

  18.1 Background

  Among the written forms of ancient philosophical discourse, the philosophical commentary was a relatively late arrival. The earliest Greek philosophers are partially preserved in the traditional poetic language of Homer using hexameter lines, as seen in the fragments of Parmenides, Xenophanes, and Empedocles – a sign of the strongly oral culture they lived in. Prose was used later, perhaps by Anaximander in the mid‐sixth century BCE (fr. 12B.1 DK), but certainly by Heraclitus in the late sixth century (fr. 1 DK = Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians VII.132). Yet even their prose style echoes the imagery and thought patterns of oral culture, which was characterized by mnemonic techniques (meter and formulaic language) and metaphor to facilitate memorization and depth of expression. In other words, at first writing philosophy was not an aim in itself but intended to support the oral presentation of ideas. Further oral interaction and polemic (Tarrant 1996 suggests they are like protreptic sound bites) was not far behind and stimulated reflection on language as a vehicle for ideas. We may well begin by clarifying two aspects of the genre: its origin and its nature.

  The question of when commentary arose has no clear answer. Early exegetical activities can be identified in the earliest polemics of the first philosophers as well as the more sophisticated close readings of texts in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE (Baltussen 2007; Cherniss 1977). A striking example is Plato’s Protagoras, in which Socrates engages in the interpretation of a poem by Simonides and makes use of hermeneutical moves that betray an existing practice of exegesis (Protag. 347a): Thus he claims to know the author’s intention (boulēsis), uses grammatical arguments to prove his point, and investigates the hidden meaning of the poem. The dialogue also reveals two further instances of hermeneutical principles (which are implicit): The one focuses on the importance of authorial consistency (341e1–2) that would eventually find expression in the phrase “clarifying Homer from Homer” (Schäublin 1977, based on Porphyry, Quaest. Homericae p. 297, 16–17 [ed. Schrader]; cf. Mansfeld 1994; Sluiter 2000; Baltussen 2004, 2007); the other principle assumes the importance of an overall purpose of the poem, rather than just focusing on individual words or phrases (see esp. Baltussen 2004, and compare Yunis 2003, Kahn 2003). Even if we allow for an element of parody in Plato’s representation of these practices, it had to contain certain realistic features to be plausible and credible to his audience.

  A further important question is this: What counts as commentary? One obvious fact about commentary, whether ancient or modern, is its “reactive” and second‐order nature, that is, a commentary needs a base text to comment on. On closer inspection, this requirement turns out to be fulfilled only when the text is considered worthwhile to engage with in the first place. And while scholars are not fully agreed on when exactly the philosophical commentary arose, it is clear that “worthwhile” in this case must mean that the text(s) commented on contained an important message and had authority. These two requirements needed very special circumstances to give rise to commentary: It required a canon and the tools to undertake textual exegesis (on informal beginnings, see Baltussen 2007). We can observe this in a formal sense from the first century BCE onward, when clear evidence survives in the Peripatetic tradition: The rise of exegetical comments on Aristotle’s Categories (Griffin 2015). The Anon. Commentary on Plato’s Theaetetus, on a papyrus dated to 150 CE, may be an exception to some extent, but its creation date is not certain (late first century BCE possible). Informally, earlier writings may have consisted of comments on a particular work, but only then the two other requirements were in place. In support of this b
road outline we may quote Alexander of Aphrodisias, who ca. 200 CE looked back at the earlier centuries and noted that, before his time, philosophical engagement was less bookish and certainly not aimed at writing commentary (In Top. 27,12–16):

  This kind of speech was customary among the older philosophers, who set up most of their classes in this way — not with reference to books, since at the time there were not yet any books of this kind. After a thesis has been posited, they trained their aptitude at finding argumentative attacks by producing attack arguments about this thesis, establishing and refuting the position through what is approved.

  (Sellars 2006, pp. 29–30)

  It should be stated at the outset, however, that “commentary” in the philosophical tradition is quite different from how we often conceive of it today. Modern scholarship tends to have a primary concern with meticulous philological comments on words, phrases, sentences, and the historical or cultural context; philosophers developed a style of exegesis that aimed at clarifying the writings of the great pioneers of Greek philosophy Plato and Aristotle, but with a focus on ideas and doctrine.

  By the second century CE both these factors (language and philosophy) had become contributing elements in the new genre of philosophical exegesis. Their expansive notes arose for mostly two reasons: First, a linguistic one (Sedley 1997), derived from the need to clarify texts considered important that were written in language no longer well understood, and second, a pedagogical one, designed to enhance the philosophical instruction by a teacher. Such learned notes could take different formats, but the most common type was what we would now call “running commentary,” which was both scholarly and philosophical (Baltussen 2008, pp. 14–15). Once established, the running commentary became common, lasting into the Middle Ages.