A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  Eastern readers were no less enthusiastic about translating Greek learning for their monolingual colleagues. Translations into Syriac of Aristotle’s logic appear to have begun early in the sixth century and through the work of the polymath commentator Sergius of Reshaina continued to grow thereafter (Hugonnard‐Roche 2004). The early books of the Organon were considered important reading for trainee priests, and the respect afforded them meant that a number of translations were made. By the eighth century knowledge of Greek was so reduced that these translations became the only means in the East of accessing Aristotle, and much of early Arabic philosophy was thus dependent on the by‐then substantial and mature Syriac tradition.

  Closely related was a burgeoning Armenian philosophical tradition that took off in the sixth century with a series of literal translations, originating, as had the Syriac, with the curricula of the Neoplatonist schools at Alexandria and Athens, focused on Aristotle’s logical works and the late ancient commentaries on them (Terian 1982).

  As was the case with philosophy, Latin and Syriac versions of Greek medical treatises were made on an ad hoc basis. This was partly the result of declining competence in Greek outside the core Hellenophone areas, while also being a function of a newly discovered self‐confidence and sense of literary identity within non‐Greek language communities. The full extent of cross‐linguistic interaction around the Empire and beyond was considerable; the point at which borrowing begins and translation starts cannot always be isolated.

  In the days of Cicero, Roman audiences still read their medical textbooks in Greek, written by Greek doctors such as Asclepiades. In the first century CE, Cornelius Celsus wrote extensively in Latin on the subject, developing the necessary lexicon of Latin terms but not yet needing to translate. Just as in philosophy, so in medicine late antiquity saw the emergence of a “canon” of texts that the student was expected to read under the tutelage of a master. The main center for the teaching of these curricula was Alexandria, but many other schools sprang up across the Empire, and hence translation of these canons became a necessity. In the West, the “school of Carthage” produced, in the fourth and fifth centuries, translations of Hippocrates (by Vindicianus) and Soranus (by Caelius Aurelianus), while another member of the school, Theodorus Priscianus, seems to have written a Greek textbook and then himself translated it into Latin for his African students. (For a full list of Latin medical translations, see Langslow 2000, pp. 70–74.)

  Cassiodorus, that last great patron of Latin translations from the Greek, itemized the medical texts in his monastic library, all of which were probably Latin translations rather than Greek originals (Cassiodorus, Institutions I,31,2). His list includes Dioscorides, Hippocrates, and Galen. The translators of this material are unknown to us, but their existence had a significant impact on medical and other scientific knowledge in medieval western Europe.

  In the East, medicine quickly became embedded in the Syriac world as a profession of great prestige. One of the most renowned doctors of late antiquity, Magnus, came from Nisibis, deep in Syriophone territory, and it is hardly surprising that so many translations were made into that language. For the Persian shahs, as for the later caliphs, the Syrians were renowned as the best purveyors of the Greek medical art. The first great Syriac translator of Galen was also a translator of Aristotelian philosophy, Sergius of Reshaina, whose medical works were standard reading in the East for 300 years, until the more advanced knowledge of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq was able to improve them. Ḥunayn, in turn, began the process of putting Galen into Arabic and initiated another long and glorious tradition in the reception of the Greek sciences.

  Many other medical texts may have been translated initially into Middle Persian. Persian tales later told of the process by which the great learning of ancient Babylon was first plundered by Alexander and later restored by the Sassanian kings by a process of (re)translation from Greek copies. It is quite likely that some works of astrology and Hermetica at least were translated as early as the third century (Van Bladel 2009, pp. 23–63), and probably many more translations were made under the patronage of Chosroes I (531–579), who is said to have desired to adopt all the great philosophical knowledge of the Greeks into his language. The true extent of his success, however, is not known.

  A few other branches of science may be briefly mentioned. The East, rather than the West, was the primary recipient of mathematical and astronomical‐astrological works. Syriac translators rendered a number of astronomical and mathematical texts in the seventh century for their own teaching. But Theophilus of Edessa, a Syrian working at the caliph’s court in Baghdad, translated a Greek compendium of astrology and thereby transmitted a broadly Ptolemaic system to the first Arabic astrologers (Pingree 2001). The sophisticated Arabic reception of mathematics and astrology, however, stands witness to a nexus of cultural interactions typical of western Asia in late antiquity; the astrological traditions of Hellenistic Egypt were translated initially into Pehlevi and Sanskrit before being reabsorbed into an Islamic milieu. Again the question of the needs of different target communities is in view. The Syriac translators of late antiquity translated only what the schools needed, while many were still able to read the originals and could, for example, still reference texts such as the Almagest and expect their readers to be aware of its contents. By the eighth century this was no longer the case, and even the most learned Arabs of the ninth century would need translations of these works too.

  Armenia’s experience paralleled that of Syria. What is known as the “Hellenizing school” of translators, in producing Armenian versions of many secular and educational texts, built upon the work of the early Armenian tradition that had been focused on bringing Greek theology to the Armenian church. A long list of works of grammar and rhetoric, logic, and astronomy were translated from the sixth century onwards (Thomson 1982, p. 144).

  Much of the literature of late antiquity emanated from schools of rhetoric and grammar. Hence many of the authors of late ancient literature were brought up on translations of the Greek handbooks that had been written for the Hellenophone schools. This was true even deep within the Syriophone regions, where monasteries preserved the “rhetorical” approach to education and even translated Greek handbooks (Watt 2010). From the fourth century the Syrians also built up an increasingly sophisticated tradition of studying their own grammar. Again looking to Greek models, they made their starting point a translation of Dionysius Thrax’s basic grammar. The famous work of the Arab grammarians appears to be quite independent, yet even there signs may be discerned of an unbroken intellectual tradition stretching back to the late ancient Greek grammarians (King 2012).

  32.2 Law

  Legal texts offer a quite different perspective on translation. The legal system of the late Empire was based on traditions of Roman law and was carried on in Latin even in the increasingly Hellenophone administration of the eastern provinces. Non‐Latin‐speaking students at the law schools of Beirut and Constantinople were supposed to have studied the language for a year prior to their studies, but, of course, this was never sufficient, and in the sixth century many of the professors produced translations for their classes. This appears to be in line with a decree of the emperor Justinian, that no alternative version of his Digest of laws was permitted, “except if someone wants to translate these laws into Greek in just the same order and sequence in which the Latin words are found (what the Greeks call ‘foot‐by‐foot’)” (Humfress 2005, p. 168).

  Such versions were simply student cribs, designed to assist those still struggling with the Latin originals. They were not designed to serve as independent texts, although some of them became just that as Latin all but disappeared from the Byzantine civil service in the following century. A comparable procedure was enacted upon the Greek of the Novellae, the new laws enacted under Justinian’s authority. The near‐incomprehensible Latin of this translation became a widely copied text in the West (Scheltema 1970).

  Translations of the Acts of t
he major church councils should be viewed as of a type with these legal translations. Beginning with the Councils of Ephesus (in 431) and Chalcedon (in 451), translators rendered the official versions of the Acts into Latin and Syriac for wider circulation. These translations often had the desired effect of spreading among the target communities a sense of what was the orthodox doctrine espoused by their leaders. Since translators to some degree controlled access to texts and hence access to knowledge, this process could serve to underpin localized movements – witness the widespread Syriac versions of the Latrocinium Council of Ephesus (in 449) that continued to be read with sympathy by Miaphysite Syriac speakers even after Chalcedon had overturned its decisions in favor of the imperial church.

  32.3 Poetry

  Late ancient Latin poetry continued to plough much the same furrow as it had for centuries past, taking Greek models and imitating them in a complex variety of ways, yielding “a spectrum of textual engagement that runs from verbal echo, through allusion, to the translation of the whole” (Mulligan 2016, p. 145). In these sorts of translation quite different canons are at work from those that apply to medicine, for instance. A translator might find that metrical and phonetic equivalence gives a closer translation than semantic or functional equivalence. Ausonius and Claudian were both par excellence imitators/translators of Greek models, and the latter even attempted to translate his own Greek poems into Latin. The late ancient penchant for working out variations on old themes and motifs, often in long series of seemingly unimaginative combinations, was especially suited to the art of translation, which (and in this it hardly differed from the classical age) could easily become an in‐group hobby for leisured intellectual elites.

  Other cultures known for their translations from Greek, such as Syriac and Armenian, were less concerned with poetry. There was not there the long tradition of cultural imitation that gave Latin literature its grounding. In Syriac, an entirely native poetic tradition developed that was kept consciously apart from any Greek models, especially on account of the latter’s inextricable association with religious themes distasteful to the church. So distinctive was the Syriac poetic tradition that translations tended more often in the opposite direction. Many of the hymns of the Syriac poet Ephrem were translated into Greek and then imitated in native Greek compositions that could be attributed to the Syrian. These translations varied, from being very close in word and form to being the sorts of artistic reformulations with which we are more familiar from Latin. The pioneering Byzantine poet Romanos appears to have been much influenced by the poetic genius of Ephrem and developed new genres on the basis of the Syriac tradition (Brock 1989). This “Greek Ephrem” became enormously popular throughout the late ancient world, translations being made into all the literary languages.

  The Armenians also made extensive translations of Syriac poetry, not so much as a literary endeavor but, rather, because of their theological significance. Many of Ephrem’s works, for instance, found Armenian translators on account of the theological authority attaching to their author. That some of these were written in, and rendered into, verse was less significant for their translators’ audience than was their content.

  32.4 Prose Fiction

  Stories have always been among the best traveled of human inventions, and late antiquity was a productive time for the spread of stories around the Mediterranean language communities and beyond. One of the most universally known was the Alexander Romance, a novelistic version of the life of the great king, whose adventures became more embellished with each retelling. A Latin version was made in the fourth century, an Armenian in the sixth, and a Syriac between the fifth and seventh. From Syriac, the Alexander Romance entered both the Arabic and Ethiopic worlds. The Middle Persian version may also be from the Syriac rather than, as once thought, being an intermediary between Greek and Syriac (Ciancaglini 2001).

  The ancient Jewish story of Aḥikar, known in Aramaic forms for centuries, had already been reconceived in Demotic Egyptian form in the first century BCE, and in late antiquity spread into at least Armenian, Ethiopic, Greek, Slavonic, and Arabic. Fragments in Sogdian have now also been found of this wide‐ranging and much‐embellished tale of the supremacy of wisdom (Sims‐Williams 2014).

  Many other pieces of prose fiction were circulated around the expanding world of late antiquity, sometimes from West to East, others in the opposite direction. Such was for instance the story of Kalilah and Dimnah, and that of Sindban, both tales taken out of Middle Persian (the former originally Sanskrit) that found their way into the eastern parts of the Roman Empire. The Greek novels, too, found some fertile soil in the east even before the era of a thousand and one nights. The ancient story of Parthenope appears to have become well known in Syriac regions through live performance as much as through written material; whether or not it was performed in Syriac as well as Greek we shall never know, but within a short time its retellings had spread to Persia where a written translation was made at some time (Hägg 1986).

  Closely intertwined with the cultural sharing of narrative fiction was the seemingly endless ability of saints’ and martyrs’ lives to be scattered, translated, and transmogrified throughout the late ancient landscape. The boundary between a saint’s life and a piece of prose fiction was not always clear – many of the more elaborate parts of the Alexander Romance were taken from well‐known saints’ lives, while the secular Greek tale of Parthenope was transformed into a hagiography. Jerome fashioned his three saints’ lives self‐consciously within the genre of the Greek novel. These were the only of Jerome’s works to be translated into Greek, and also thence into Syriac. For Syrian readers, Jerome was primarily an author of saints’ lives rather than a theologian or polymath (King 2009).

  Translation also fed the increasingly popular appetite for novelistic expansions of the biblical narrative. Tales of far‐flung parts of the world were no longer read only by Greeks, and their popularity attests to a broadening of horizons and the coming‐into‐view of once marginalized communities. Christ had ordered his message taken to the ends of the world, and so narratives of the apostolic missions to those ends came to encapsulate Christian claims to universality. Acta of apostles such as (Judas) Thomas and Andrew sit somewhere between our conceptions of the genre of travel novella and New Testament pseudepigrapha. That they were translated into almost every available language of antiquity attests to their popularity as well as to the Greek language’s fall from its status as sole bearer of culture.

  Many of the narratives found in the Qur’ān stem from this tradition of expanding upon biblical stories. Most likely prevalent in a variety of oral modes and forms throughout the Near East, the particular genius of Arabic poetry was able to mold them into a native idiom, where they could fuel the passions of a new religion. The Suras of the Qur’ān, as much as the Arabic translations of the Gospels, were the products of a late ancient literature that was being constantly “translated” as new peoples took up the traditions of classical and of Jewish antiquity and put them to new service.

  32.5 Scripture

  More than any other text, it is the dissemination of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures that most clearly reflects the rise of the local vernaculars at the expense of “classical” tongues. Within late ancient Jewish communities, translations into Greek and Aramaic continued their already old traditions. The known Greek versions (Septuagint, Aquila) were still used, but there were also fresh translators who ventured versions more sensitive to the changing Greek vernaculars of their day (De Lange, Krivoruchko, and Boyd‐Taylor 2009). Translation into the widely‐spoken dialects of Aramaic (the Targums) became increasingly widespread, such that it became a major concern of the rabbinical establishment to control and authorize the versions of which they approved (Flesher 2005).

  The aggressive spread of the Christian church both within and without the Empire was a particularly productive force in translation, as it was more generally in the development of vernaculars. Syriac‐speaking churches took over
a set of preexisting Jewish Scriptures, which they adapted to the dialect of Edessa before adding the New Testament from Greek. Congregations in North Africa started to write down their ad hoc Latin versions of Scripture from the second century, but new Latin variations continued to proliferate, of which Jerome’s Vulgate was but one. In Coptic, early versions in the Sahidic dialect gave way to standardization in the Bohairic dialect, although versions in the other dialects circulated as well. Elsewhere around the borders of the Empire, versions were made in Gothic (fourth century), Ethiopic (fourth century onward), Armenian (fifth century), Middle Persian (?fifth century), Arabic (eighth century, possibly even seventh), and the Sogdian of the Turkic tribes of Central Asia (Sims‐Williams 2014). Toward the end of the late antique period, the Christian Scriptures were already receiving their first Anglo‐Saxon forms through Caedmon’s verse, while upon the monk Alopen’s arrival in Chang’an, the Tang emperor found the books he brought with him to be “mysterious, right, and well‐summarized,” implying that at least an oral translation of some sort must have been offered; some portions of Scripture have survived from that era that received official sanction (Tang 2004, pp. 96,104–106). Theodoret of Cyrrhus, the bishop and Christian apologist of the fifth century, claimed that the New Testament had even been translated into Scythian and Sauromatian. This may be taken as rhetorical wishful thinking, but we must continually reckon with oral versions of Christian teaching being used in missionary contexts for people whose own traditions were primarily or wholly oral.

  In terms of approach and method, the Bible offers a unique case in the history of literary translation. As Jerome never tired of explaining, the words of God were not “literary” at all and ought to be treated more like a legal text than a novel, more like a senatorial decree than a wonder‐working hagiography. Successive Syriac translations of the New Testament, for example, took on ever more literal styles, in imitation of the style of legal documents. A mixture of respect for the Greek philosophical heritage and an almost mathematical conception of the mode of theological discourse led to a translation style in which syntactical patterns in the original had to be mimicked in the target language, and a special form of translationese was born, one that clings to translations of religious texts even today.