by Scott McGill
31.6 Audiences and Reception
In late antiquity literate people did read inscriptions. Emperors were readers. Constantine must have seen the names of Trajan and Hadrian on so many monuments at Rome that he called his predecessors “wall ivy” and “paintbrush” (Anonymus post Dionem (= Dio Continuatus), Frag. 15.2). Historians used inscriptions as sources of information. Eusebius of Caesarea cited Greek translations of imperial edicts displayed in Latin (HE 8.17, 9.1, 7, 9a, 10, 10.5). In the early sixth century Cosmas Indicopleustes (“the voyager to India”) quoted two ancient inscriptions still on display at Adulis in Ethiopia, one erected by king Ptolemy Euergetes in the mid‐third century BCE and the other by an anonymous king of Axum (Topographia christiana 2.104A–107D).
The most intriguing readers were the censors, the expurgators. As in the inscribed version of Constantine’s letter about Proculus, the names of discredited emperors might be chiseled off the stone. Sometimes the name of a new emperor replaced the disgraced name. Although provincial communities or senators at Rome might decide to curry favor with new emperors by updating inscriptions, emperors could order the erasure of memories. They could also permit the rehabilitation of dedications and statues. In 394 the emperor Theodosius had condemned the memory of Virius Nicomachus Flavianus as a supporter of a usurper emperor. In 431 the emperors Valentinian III and Theodosius II allowed Flavianus’s grandson to erect a new statue and dedication, perhaps by reusing the original statue base. This time the imperial letter that sanctioned the restoration was inscribed in the dedication (Hedrick 2000).
This resurrected statue, with its dedication and imperial letter, was erected in the Forum of Trajan, where it would have joined the older monuments, among them the similar monument in honor of Proculus. Who might have seen Proculus’s monument? One spectator was no doubt Proculus himself, who continued to hold more high offices. He was a consul in 340, when the emperor Constans was in control of Italy. He served again as prefect of Rome from 351 to 352, but this time under the usurping emperor Magnentius, who was responsible for the death of Constans. Proculus’s miscalculation had made the memory of his reputation vulnerable to retaliation, and his statue and dedication might have faced removal. Yet when the emperor Constantius subsequently avenged his brother by defeating Magnentius, neither Proculus nor his dedication suffered retribution. In fact, another spectator of Proculus’s statue may have been Constantius. In 357 the emperor visited Rome to celebrate his victory over Magnentius. During a tour of famous buildings Constantius studied the inscriptions: “He read the names of the gods inscribed on the pediments and inquired about the origins of temples” (Symmachus, Relationes 3.7). He also visited the Forum of Trajan, where he admired his predecessor’s equestrian statue (Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 16.10). Perhaps the senators who guided his entourage pointed out his father’s letter to Proculus.
Fortunately for us, in the medieval period visitors continued to read inscriptions. They also started collecting them. In the later ninth century pilgrims to Rome could follow an itinerary marked by inscriptions (Walser 1987); at Tours the inscriptions engraved on the walls of the Church of St. Martin were copied into a medieval florilegium about the saint’s cult (Van Dam 1993, pp. 308–317). These anthologies transformed inscriptions into a defined literary genre, worthy of safeguarding in manuscripts. They also preserved the texts of many inscriptions whose stones are now lost.
With the fading of memories of Roman rule the medium became more valuable than the words of the inscriptions. Over the centuries most inscribed bronze tablets (and bronze statues) were melted down (Eck 2015). Many stone blocks were reused, some for other inscriptions, others in construction projects. The statue base on which Constantine’s letter about Proculus had been inscribed was essentially mutilated, probably so that it could be recycled. The block was trimmed in size, the bottom was cut off, the sides were narrowed, and three holes were drilled in the lower‐right quadrant. In the medieval period used marble was often the only marble available. Bronze and stone were no guarantee of permanence after all.
Eventually, especially during the Renaissance, inscriptions were rejuvenated as witnesses to history. Towns throughout the old Roman world displayed ancient inscriptions as proof of their classical heritage, patrons collected engraved stones, and scholars published editions and commentaries (McMahon 2015). We are the heirs and beneficiaries of their antiquarian curiosity. In the great revival of late antique studies over the past 50 years the study of inscriptions has become an increasingly important discipline. The value of inscriptions as historical sources is unquestioned; their significance as literary texts and visual images should have a promising future.
ABBREVIATIONS
AE = L’Année épigraphique. Annually since 1888. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
CIL = Corpus inscriptionum latinarum, multiple volumes, second editions, and supplements. Ongoing since 1869. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. http://cil.bbaw.de/cil_en/index_en.html
ILS = Dessau, Hermann. (1892–1916). Inscriptiones latinae selectae, 3 vols. Berlin: Weidmann.
ONLINE RESOURCES
Epigraphik‐Datenbank Clauss‐Slaby. http://www.manfredclauss.de/gb/index.html
Epigraphic Database Heidelberg. http://edh‐www.adw.uni‐heidelberg.de/home
Inscriptions of Aphrodisias. http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007
REFERENCES
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Cooley, Alison E. (2012). The Cambridge Manual of Latin Epigraphy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Durliat, Jean and Guillou, André. (1984). Le tarif d’Abydos (vers 492). Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 108: 581–598.
Eck, Werner. (2015). Documents on bronze: A phenomenon of the Roman West? In: Ancient Documents and Their Contexts: First North American Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy (2011) (ed. John Bodel and Nora Dimitrova), 127–151. Leiden: Brill.
Feissel, Denis. (2010). Documents, droit, diplomatique de l’empire romain tardif. Paris: Centre de recherche d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance.
Galvao‐Sobrinho, Carlos R. (1995). Funerary epigraphy and the spread of Christianity in the West. Athenaeum 83: 431–462.
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Harris, William V. (1989). Ancient Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hedrick Jr., Charles W. (2000). History and Silence: Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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d’antiquités grecques IV. Épigrammes du Bas‐Empire. Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, Adrien‐Maisonneuve.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Translation
Daniel King
If there is any offensive statement in the author, why is this to be twisted into a fault of the translator?… I did nothing more than fit the Latin words to the Greek ideas.
Rufinus, Apol ad Anastasium 7
So, in self‐defense, Rufinus of Aquileia, who had “made a Roman” of Origen, as Jerome put it in the preface to his version of On First Principles. Jerome’s remarks raised a storm that would destroy the good names of both Rufinus and Origen – an argument over what constituted “appropriate” translation methods. Jerome contrasted his own versions of Origen with those of his opponent by pointing to a difference of intent rather than of content. Jerome aimed at unmasking the heretic lurking beneath the opaque text of On First Principles (so he claimed), while Rufinus wanted (at least following Jerome’s reconstruction of events) to uphold him.
Both the opportunities and the dangers of translation are laid bare before us in the drawn‐out conflict that ensued between the two (in)famous translators, a conflict that we can follow in their letters and Apologies. These documents afford us a rare insight into the liabilities of translation in late antiquity, an insight denied us in the vast majority of cases by the anonymity of these powerbrokers of culture and literature, by their lack of self‐disclosure, their willingness to hide behind the cloak of the “original” text, as seemingly hidden authors who merely “fit words to ideas.”
If late antiquity witnessed an explosion of activity at the boundaries of traditional cultural units, then nowhere is this truer than in the field of translation, both literary and ephemeral. Growing bureaucracies required ever‐increasing interaction across language barriers; expanding religions required proselytizing texts; and an evergreen yearning after the Greek classical canon suffused the literati of both the Latin West and Syriac East, while the emerging self‐consciousness of once “barbarian” societies encouraged the first seeding, and also the first fruits, of indigenous literatures. Texts and ideas first conceived in Greek were reaching astonishing distances by the end of late antiquity. The cattle‐herder Caedmon’s first attempt to rephrase a passage from Scripture in his native Anglo‐Saxon belongs to the same century (the seventh) as the establishment of Christian monasteries in Tang China, as commemorated on the eighth‐century Xian Stele with its bilingual Syriac‐Chinese explanation of the Christian faith. Both represent the results of impulses typical of late antiquity. Whether it be “real‐time” interpretations of the Pentateuch into contemporary Aramaic, Gallic schoolmasters recasting Hellenistic epigrams into learned Latin verse, or law students in Beirut studiously transcribing Justinian’s Institutes into Greek, late antiquity was a period of unparalleled attention to translation.
What follows will attempt to offer an overview both of the generic scope of the translational efforts of late antiquity and of the number of linguistic communities that were now beginning to partake of the traditions of classical antiquity. The term “translation” is often used in the modern literature on late antiquity in its wider sense, referring not merely to the reforming of a text in a new language but, rather, to the transference of whole ideas and genres between linguistic communities. Although this wider usage is an important conceptual category with which to analyze cultural interaction, our own overview will be concerned only with textual transfer as such. Moreover, translation was a ubiquitous activity in many walks of life, and a full study would include, inter alia, translations of legal documents such as wills and title deeds among Egyptian papyri and the Greek versions of senatorial decrees from Rome. This survey, however, will focus on texts generally deemed literary, without being unnecessarily strict in its definition.
Translation is a form of reception, and one of our prime areas of interest will be the varying reasons why certain texts and certain genres were more avidly “received” into target cultures than others. Naturally enough, the spread of the Christian churches around the Mediterranean and beyond will prove to be a major factor, and Christian texts, moreover, constitute a large proportion of all texts translated in late antiquity. Many other types of literature were also translated, however. We shall survey these genre‐by‐genre in order to identify key themes and motivations in the process of the late ancient reception of classical literature, asking to what extent these translations were themselves part of the formation of a new distinctive literature in late antiquity.
32.1 Philosophy, Medicine, Rhetoric, and Grammar
Prior to the fourth century very few Latin authors had made any translations of Greek philosophical works, the main exceptions being Cicero’s and Apuleius’s versions of some Platonic dialogues. In the days of the Republic and early Empire, Latin philosophy was barely acquainted with Aristotle, save through his lost exoteric works, and Aristotelian logic was a relative latecomer to the Latins. One early adaptation of On Interpretation and of Prior Analytics is extant, possibly from the pen of Apuleius, who also made a loose translation of Pseudo‐Aristotle, De Mundo. But it is only in the fourth century that we witness the end of the Hellenophone grip on the discipline of logic. Marius Victorinus was the first to attempt a Latin version of the full Aristotelian curriculum as it was taught in the Neoplatonist Greek schools. Only his version of Porphyry’s Isagoge (used as an introduction to Aristotelian logic in the schools) is extant now, though he probably also translated Categories and De Interpretatione (Cooper 2010). By introducing Aristotle as an ally to orthodox theology through his treatises on doctrine, Victorinus paved the way for the later tradition in the West of Christian Aristotelianism, which would last for more than a millennium.
Victorinus also translated portions of the Neoplatonists Plotinus and Porphyry. These had a different, albeit equally significant, impact. Picked up by the young Augustine, Victorinus’s Latin Plotinus was (or so he himself claimed) fundamental to his conversion and to his later syntheses of Christian theology (Confessions VII,9). Augustine offers a prime example of why translation became so important in late antiquity. Like many of his contemporaries, despite being a teacher and leader of great stature, he struggled to read Greek. Yet he craved the wisdom of the Greeks in philosophy and religion and frequently worried about the reliability of the translations upon which he was so dependent (Courcelle 1969, pp. 149–223).
Victorinus’s program did not have an immediate effect upon Western education, nor did the occasional interes
t shown in Greek philosophy by Roman worthies such as Vettius Praetextatus (d. 384) who translated Themistius’s paraphrase of the Analytics, and a certain Chalcidius (fourth century), who translated the Timaeus, together with its Middle‐Platonist commentary, a translation that was to become widely read in the Middle Ages (Reydams‐Schils 2010). But the influence of these authors was not profound. Victorinus’s true heir as translator of Greek philosophy was the renowned Roman senator Boethius, whom Cassiodorus praised for having introduced Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Nicomachus, and Euclid to Western readers (Variae I,45,3). Over the first quarter of the sixth century, Boethius translated the Isagoge (improving Victorinus’s version) together with all six books of Aristotle’s logical corpus (The Organon), as well as commentary material on the Prior Analytics. Boethius’s translations influenced the Western tradition in more ways than one. Over time he settled upon an approach to “scientific” translation that he deemed appropriate to teaching philosophy among those who could not read Greek, and his own translations opened up Aristotle to Western readers in a tradition that was never broken. His translations and commentaries formed the basis of logical studies in the Carolingian renaissance and in the twelfth century whetted the insatiable appetite of the European universities for new texts of the Greek philosophers.
