A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

27.1 Introduction and General Remarks

  … decem…libros…ad unum epitomae coegi, quod tibi misi, ut et facilius invenires quid quaereres, et apta semper materiis exempla subiungeres.

  I have compressed 10 books in a one‐book‐epitome that I sent to you so that you can more easily find what you are looking for, and always add appropriate examples to your subject matter.

  These are the words of Julius Paris, who in the late fourth century dedicated his epitome of the Facta et Dicta memorabilia by Valerius Maximus to one Licinius Cyriacus. According to his dedicatio, Paris has made the voluminous text easier to handle by epitomizing it into one volume (facilius invenires – so that you can more easily find). The text is therefore more useful to the reader (in this case probably the orator Licinius, who needs appropriate examples [apta exempla] for his speeches).

  The compression, storage, and organization of knowledge are hotly debated subjects in our contemporary information era, too. The changes in media and the development of technologies have given rise to at least three different strategies for dealing with information, especially with literary products: (1) Unlimited storage, unlimited production, and unlimited access to texts by digitalization and online publications. This assumes that there exists a worldwide community of responsible and sophisticated producers and of responsible and educated consumers, who are willing and able to find the texts and information they are looking for. (2) Reworking, reshaping, and selecting texts with unlimited access. The approach here is to provide a community of readers with a selection from the unlimited mass of texts and information. Selected items are meant to be accessible to everybody. By excerpting and reshaping huge quantities of text into consumer‐friendly versions, new texts emerge. These are shorter, easily found, and ready at hand for consumers who have less time, who may take less pleasure in the search, and who, perhaps, have less education and less interest in deeply pursuing subjects real or fictional. (3) Critiquing, rejecting, or neglecting technological advances in the reading, writing, and storing of texts and information. Changes in reading and in mnemonic abilities brought on by information overload are criticized (see e.g. Carr 2010) and the pros and cons of digital editions are discussed (Ziolkowski 2011, on technocriticism and technomania in classical, medieval, and modern philology).

  From the imperial period onward, books in the form of papyrus rolls were slowly replaced by parchment codices, that is, leaves bound together in book form. Important as this material change is for other contexts, mainly liturgical ceremonies, this was not a general media revolution: The production of many consumer‐friendly, and often (though not always) shorter texts during late antiquity was not necessarily a consequence of this change in the materiality of texts (contra Piccione 2003). As a matter of course, the change of material and form was connected to changes in the material conditions for the storage and accessibility of texts. The accessibility and production of new texts were linked to the existence of many larger and smaller libraries (Cameron 1998). In the west there was a tendency toward decentralization, and different important centers cultivating letters and learning developed around monasteries and the residences of notables, emperors, and kings; but in the east, the main actor was the palace at Constantinople and its think‐tank‐dominated intellectual activities. The notion of “clarity and uniformity over controversy and diversity” dominated the “rule‐based culture” of the Greek imperial bureaucracy and intellectual climate (Harries 2013, pp. 195; see also König and Whitmarsh 2007). The many existing monasteries, provincial capitals, and bishops’ seats seem to have been of secondary rank compared to Byzantium, with consequences for the dissemination of literature (see Reitz 2005). This had an evident influence on the differences in the production and proliferation of literature in the eastern and western empire (Rapp 2005; Kruse 2015), and the translatio and reception of shortened texts into the Latin Middle Ages and the Greek Byzantine period.

  As well as changes in media, shifts in the arrangement of books, and the localization of centers of knowledge during late antiquity, another current explanation (Herzog 1989; Eigler 2003; Banchich 2007) for the increase in condensed texts and collections of excerpts is that literature had lost its eminent political role in elite communication and in society as a network of common, canonical references. Furthermore, as the social, political, and cultural contexts of the pagan roots of classical texts seemed irrelevant or were even unknown in the contemporary culture of the literati, citations and excerpts could be presented as a stock of educated knowledge, detached from their original literary and historical context. Finally, it has been argued that rhetoric played a less important role in late antique society, and that late antique textual production, though diversified, was characterized by an “anti‐rhetorical bookish mode” (Formisano 2012, p. 516).

  These rather diverse modern interpretations and explanations for the increase in various modes of shortened texts reflect multifaceted ancient attitudes and make it likely that there was more than one reason to write and use abbreviated versions of texts (epitomai) or to collect excerpts that could be rearranged into florilegia and other collections. Yet preserving the tradition, albeit in an abbreviated and differently arranged manner, is a strong motivation behind the increased production of collective and condensed works. Late antique members of intellectual circles, from pagan senators in Rome to the monks and bishops in Cappadocia and Egypt, seem to have been well aware that the transmission of texts and of knowledge was fragile and at risk (see below). The desire to fight against this and to preserve the literature and ideas of the past is shared by pagans and members of the Christian church. It is notably illustrated in the demand for new editions and commentaries of canonical texts, such as Servius and Donatus for Virgil and Porphyrio for Horace, to name only the most prominent examples.

  The various mechanisms and intellectual processes of collecting, reassembling, and abbreviating texts were by no means new and were not a phenomenon of late antique culture alone (Galdi 1922; Opelt 1962). Abbreviating and epitomizing is attested as early as the fourth century BCE. Historians such as Theopompus and Philochorus and philosophers such as Theophrastus and Epicurus published works in the fourth century BCE under the title epitomai. In addition, summaries of historical texts (Schepens and Schorn 2010), hypotheses of drama (von Möllendorff 2010; Mossman 2010), and précis of philosophical writings became an important part of Hellenistic and Roman literary culture (cf. Cicero, Brut. 15, on the practice of excerpting and epitomizing). Further examples of the abbreviating impulse are the verse summaries of Roman comedy (Sulpicius Apollinaris’s of Terence) and the abbreviation of Livy’s voluminous history as early as the first century CE; however, the well preserved epitome, the Periochae of Livy was probably created only in the early fourth century (Chaplin 2010; Horster 2016), as were many other historical writings of the pagan past (Sehlmeyer 2009). Macrobius’s Saturnalia, meanwhile, follows a tradition already in place in the second century CE (cf. Aulus Gellius and Athenaios), namely that of learned discussions at a banquet; authors working in that tradition amassed information on a huge variety of subjects in encyclopedic form. So, too, when Isidore of Seville in the sixth century compiled masses of etymological material, he was following his predecessor Varro (116–127 BCE) (Henderson 2007; Cardelle de Hartmann 2016). To create such encyclopedic compilations, a significant amount of excerpting, cutting down of information, and abbreviating was necessary.

  To compose précis was a part of general education and rhetorical training (Cameron 1998). Yet abbreviation also figured in other educational contexts. When, again in the sixth century, Cassiodorus in his monastery at Scolacium organized a library and scriptorium and collected the texts for his Institutiones, his activity sprang mainly from the wish to preserve for posterity as much of the historical and literary tradition as possible. First he wanted to collect money so that he and Pope Agapetus of Rome would be able to install Christian schools in the city of Rome. But their plan failed because of the wars and violence in
Italy. Undaunted, Cassiodorus chose another path:

  I was moved by divine love to devise for you, with God’s help, these introductory books to take the place of a teacher. Through them I believe that both the textual sequence of Holy Scripture and also a compact account of secular letters (saecularium litterarum compendiosa notitia) may, with God’s grace, be revealed. These works may seem rather plain in style since they offer not polished eloquence but basic description (sed relatio necessaria). But they are of great use as an introduction to the source both of knowledge of the world and of the salvation of the soul (utilitas vero inesse magna cognoscitur, quando per eos discitur unde et salus animae et saecularis eruditio provenire monstratur)…For learning taken from the ancients in the midst of praising the Lord is not considered tasteless boasting. (Cass. Inst. 1 praef.1; trans. Halporn 2004, pp.105–106)

  As Cassiodorus demonstrates, the producers of abbreviated texts sometimes saw the need to justify themselves – and their readers. Another such justification is the topos of the important and hard‐working magistrate or emperor who, pressed for time, has to rely on all kinds of shortened texts (cf. e.g. Pliny the Elder and Aulus Gellius). This argument finds striking expression in Eutropius’s introduction to his Breviarium ab urbe condita. The emperor Valens (364–378) is said never to have had a proper education. Therefore, he does not know the names behind the stories, the exempla of Roman virtus. But because of his paramount Romanness, he follows his predecessors in virtue instinctively, due to his natural disposition and out of divine inspiration:

  Res Romanas ex voluntate mansuetudinis tuae [Valens] ab urbe condita ad nostram memoriam, quae in negotiis vel bellicis vel civilibus eminebant, per ordinem temporum brevi narratione collegi strictim, additis etiam his, quae in principum vita egregia extiterunt, ut tranquillitatis tuae possit mens divina laetari prius se inlustrium virorum facta in administrando imperio secutam, quam cognosceret lectione. (Eutr. Brev. 1 praef.)

  In keeping with the wish of your Clemency I have gathered in a brief narrative, in chronological sequence, the conspicuous achievements of the Romans, whether in war or in peace. I have also concisely added those topics which appeared exceptional in the lives of the emperors, so that your Serenity’s divine mind may rejoice that it has followed the actions of illustrious men before it learned of them from reading. (trans. Bird 1993, p. 1)

  An abbreviated version (brevi narratione) of these exempla and facta will give Valens pleasure and educate him about things that he had, by nature, already known.

  27.2 New Genres and Christianity?

  The increasing tendency toward “condensed texts” can be broadly ascribed to the changing intellectual climate of late antiquity, in which an already existent “world of words” was used to establish a new kind of metaliterary framework for reading and writing. Christianity was a crucial part of that changing climate. Danuta Shanzer (Shanzer 2009) claims that the Bible and noncanonical biblical texts, as well as the exegesis and paraphrase of the Scriptures, created a new textual framework in late antiquity. The Scriptures were the reference and the guide for texts written by the Church Fathers, for hagiography and martyr acts, for biblical epic and other Christian poetic forms, and for the narrative of a teleological Christian history of salvation (“church history”). Christian and pagan literary forms merged (Ronnenberg 2015). Biblical epic is an example: Juvencus, for instance, situated himself in the tradition of Homer and Virgil while also distinguishing his poetry from theirs. So pagan texts and practices were adapted rather than rejected. Likewise, Christian epicists reworked the Bible, by treating only selections of its content (thereby shortening the model text), by rearranging the sequence of its narrative, and by adapting individual scenes (or pericopes), including through both abbreviation and amplification (Roberts 1985).

  Most Christian authors included in their texts pagan literary material drawn from a wide range of subjects and genres (cf. Cassiodorus, cited above); they ennobled their texts with the authority of the pagan literary tradition. There is no secure evidence that the cultural and moral claims of erudite Christians programmatically excluded parts of the literary tradition and, thereby, the values of the pagan past. The selection process of citations and excerpts followed other strategies. Among these, the physical arrangement of the available texts and the choice of material for, e.g. the florilegia, may seem rather simple. Christians integrated the earlier tradition and often made use of fragmented pagan texts. This fragmentation of pagan history and the perception of the remoteness of the reality behind it, of its lived experience, made it easy to integrate the former pagan literary world into the Christian world vision. The masterful and virtuoso reuse and even recreation of pagan texts was common practice, as can be seen also in the flourishing genre of the cento (see McGill 2005; Bažil 2009; Formisano and Sogno 2010). Faltonia Betitia Proba’s fourth‐century cento Vergilianus was the first to create a Christian cosmos out of Virgil’s Aeneid by “singing” a condensed version of the creation of the world and the life of Christ in 693 lines (cf. Schottenius Cullhed 2015; Warner 2005, pp. 139–145 on “Virgil the Evangelist” from the fourth to the seventeenth century).

  To explain the more or less versatile techniques of rearrangement, incorporation, and composition of late antique texts, it is often presumed that the transformation of the pagan world into the new, Christian context demanded a parallel process of cultural adaptation as well as new forms of textual production. But a large variety of breviaria and epitomai already existed in the pagan literary tradition. It may often be doubted whether it is necessary to identify a motive altogether different from the desire for easy and reliable access to information. The same method has, in fact, become common practice for modern readers living in the information era. However, the transformation of the pagan canon and its elements into other literary forms – partly expanding, partly abbreviating their sources – did accelerate in late antiquity, and it added new content and new genres to the Christian textual corpus. Thus social, religious, and political contexts played important roles, but there was no programmatic act set in motion by Christianity and the exponents of the new faith at a certain date. Moral implications might perhaps influence the treatment of a text where real historical characters are concerned, but they did not apply to transmission in general. Over centuries, the technique of systematizing knowledge and of providing new, more easily manageable forms for the chosen material remained the same. The increased number of condensed versions of all kinds of source texts from the fourth century may be remarkable, but it is only with the success of excerpt collections (Ihm 2001) like florilegia, sententiae, or the judicial Digesta and the flourishing of abbreviating forms of Christian poetry, including the Christian cento, that new modes seem to have been created within the already existing tradition. The selection process of the core texts, however, did not spring from a fixed ideology and did not follow a firm Christian plan. Few condensed texts were commissioned by the emperors – for example, the Itineraria dedicated to Constantius II in 346 or Vegetius’s Epitoma Rei militaris (around 380; see Banchich 2007, p. 307). The emperors were not in the vanguard of literary production and of the trend toward condensation. Even Justinian’s important judicial collections of the sixth century were rooted in the systematized organization and presentation of excerpts of the material law that the great jurists Gaius, Ulpian, Papinian, Paulus, and Modestinus of the late second and early third century had started. The Law of Citations (Lex citationum) issued by the western emperor Valentinian III in 425 (CTh 1.4.3) reflected the need to permit reference to earlier texts, even if the originals were lost. Second‐hand arguments via paraphrases and verbatim citations were allowed only if approved by the authority of the five jurists named above (Harries 2013). This law expresses an awareness of how fragile and endangered the tradition and survival of texts were.

  27.3 The Range of Abbreviated and Condensed Texts

  During the fifth and sixth century, the full range of intellectual and textual approaches to the
literary pagan and Christian world became more easily accessible and available to the interested reader. In addition to the texts based on a single source, this systematization of knowledge took place via the encyclopedic combination of excerpts, hypotheseis, summaries, and reviews. All these techniques were used in the compositions of some authors. Among those writing in Latin, one might name Martianus Capella (De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, first half of the fifth century), Macrobius (Saturnalia, early fifth century), Cassiodorus (Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum, early sixth century), Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae sive Origines, sixth century), and Ennodius (Paraenesis didascalica, late fifth century). Those writing in Greek included, for example, Stobaeus (Eclogae, Florilegium, fifth century) and, much later, Photius (Bibliotheca, ninth century). They all respected the traditional aspects of encyclopedic writing, namely utilitas and ordo (cf. Codoñer 1991; Formisano 2013). But they are also testimony to imagination, creativity, and fluidity beyond such functional categories, as they crossed the boundaries of subject matter (König and Woolf 2013). By choosing and arranging examples from a large reservoir of possible options, these emerging encyclopedic texts became exemplary in their own right and served as models for late antique, medieval, and Byzantine authors.

  Less numerous and at the other pole of literary accomplishment are simple lists, being visually traceable, hierarchical arrangements of the written word. Lists present another attempt to give ordered access to the world of knowledge. The need for listing, too, is a phenomenon not peculiar to late antiquity, and it forms the basis for many cultural conditions and requirements in different ages (Asper 2007). Both methods – the encyclopedic approach as well as the bare list – dissociate the chosen part from its former context; they thus deconstruct and dehistoricize both its content and its form.