A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  While this cosmopolitan and intercommunal (though largely Muslim) reception of ancient Persian, Sanskrit, and above all Greek and astronomy, medicine, philosophy, science, and mathematics was going on in Baghdad, a parallel and related reception of late antique literature was taking place among Christians. Thousands of patristic works and Christian texts in general were translated into Arabic from Greek, Syriac, and Coptic. Arabic translations of works of Christian learning were made from these languages for use by the Church of the East (Nestorians), Syrian Orthodox (Jacobites), Orthodox (Melkites), and Coptic churches. This Arabic reception of late antique Christian literature was, in a sense, still more continuous with late antiquity than was the revival of the sciences in Arabic, originating largely in Baghdad. That is because it was carried out by members of church institutions that had existed continuously since their late antique origins. It did not represent so much of a revolution in the patronage of learning as the translation movement in Baghdad did. It rather indicated the social change inherent in the shift of language in use among these Christian communities. When Christians came to speak Arabic among themselves, learning to use increasingly obsolete languages of ancient Christian learning became a special effort. Translations solved that problem by sparing the ever more numerous Arabophone Christians of the need to make that effort, while preserving their literary traditions without interruption. At the same time, Christians under Muslim rule had new problems to address. While polemic between rival churches continued unabated, the dominance of Islam meant that Christian authors had to address their socially subordinate status. For Melkite (Chalcedonian) Christians, whose churches had enjoyed Byzantine imperial support before, this was an especially big change. Christians of the various churches were, as it happened, ill‐equipped to stem the tide of conversion from Christianity to Islam, lacking political, military, and economic means to retain members. The problem compelled Christian authors in each church to compose new summae of their faith and to harden the borders of their communities in an attempt to prevent exodus. When they wrote in Arabic, they continued to have recourse to their own Scriptures and church authorities, now also in Arabic translation. (See Noble and Treiger 2014 for an anthology of Chalcedonian Arabic texts.)

  According to Alexander Treiger (2015, pp. 195–196), the earliest known translations of Christian texts were carried out in Palestine, preeminently at the monastery of Mar Saba, in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. This is in parallel to the largely scientific and philosophical translations made simultaneously in Baghdad. Scholarship has not yet established what relationship, if any, linked Palestinian and Baghdadi translators, but presumably some individuals were involved in both of the two spheres of translation activity that appear to be separate both in geography and subject matter. Antioch later became a center of translations from the time of Byzantine rule (969–1084), as did other cities with Christian populations such as Damascus and Cairo. Translations of ancient Christian works into Arabic continued to be made, notably under Ottoman rule in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, in general, until today. The long duration of interest in translations differentiates the Christian Arabic reception of late antique literatures from the interest in translations of works of science and philosophy. The latter waned in the eleventh century, when Arabic scholars had digested the ancient material and began to take it in new directions.

  If we take just the period 200–600 CE artificially as representing late antiquity, then Greek Christian authors of that period whose works were translated into Arabic include, but are not limited to, Agathangelus, Alexander of Alexandria, Amphilochius of Iconium, Anastasius I of Antioch, Athanasius of Alexandria, Atticus of Constantinople, Basil of Caesarea, Clement of Alexandria, Cyril of Alexandria, Cyril of Jerusalem, Demetrius of Antioch, Didymus the Blind, Dionysius of Alexandria, Pseudo‐Dionysius the Areopagite, Epiphanius of Cyprus, Eulogius of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, Gennadius of Constantinople, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Thaumaturgus, Hesychius of Jerusalem, Hippolytus of Rome, John Chrysostom, John of Jerusalem, Nectarius of Constantinople, Nemesius of Emesa, Palladius of Galatia, Paulus Alexandrinus, Peter of Alexandria, Proclus of Constantinople, Severianus of Gabala, Sophronius of Jerusalem, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Theodotus of Ancyra, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theophilus of Alexandria, Timothy of Alexandria, Titus of Bostra, and, of course, the books of the Bible, along with countless parabiblical and apocryphal texts. (The list is drawn from Graf 1944, vol. 1). It starts to look like a scandal that the Arabic witnesses to these authors’ texts are not generally consulted in scholarship on Christian works of late antiquity.

  There can be no doubt that other fields of reception remain to be elucidated in the terms described here. Scholars of Jewish Arabic, for example, may be able to represent the Jewish Arabic reception of late ancient literature (e.g. Harvey 2005). Of course, the Arabic‐speaking peoples also preserved the poetry of late antique Arabia, the period they called al‐Jāhilīya, “the age of ignorance.” They are responsible for all of what still survives. The stereotyped formulae of these ancient Arabian songs were reworked in many new ways by later poets in the courts of caliphs and emirs who had no experience with the bedouin life idealized in song but appreciated the ancient types. Poets subverted the ancient categories with new subjects and topics for poems that no known ancient Arabic poem had treated. This engendered a ninth‐ and tenth‐century debate about the relative merits of the “ancients” and the “moderns.” If we use the period encompassed by this volume, classical Arabic literature included the complicated reception of late antique Arabic literature.

  But Arabic scholars did not see it this way. Not only did they have no idea of late antiquity; they spent little effort on the relative chronology of ancient texts. Some of them knew, for example, that Theophrastus was Aristotle’s student, and that Aristotle was Plato’s student, and that Plato was Socrates’s student, but, by and large, Arabic readers did not care how old a book was so much as whether its contents made sense and were true and useful. (For a rare example of an exception, see Rosenthal 1954.) They did not distinguish Themistius as a late antique author from Aristotle as an ancient author as we may, though they were well aware that Themistius commented on Aristotle long after him and they valued his works regardless of his dates of activity. Although there was scarcely any meaningful periodization of ancient works among Arabic scholars, it must be emphasized for the modern historian that everything that they received in translation was mediated by what we call late antiquity. If anything, of the numerous extended episodes of reception of ancient literature, the Arabic reception of ancient works is the most immediately derivative of late antiquity. This is partly because the advent of Arabic as a major source language defines the end of late antiquity as modern historians have construed it. As our modern late antiquity is defined, the Arabic reception is the immediate sequel. The Arabic Aristotle was, therefore, in a certain sense, a fully developed late antique Aristotle.

  Relying on late antiquity as a period likewise has ramifications for how one today understands the Arabic reception of ancient texts. Usually the phenomenon has been rubricated by the languages or religious traditions from which translations were derived, not by period. Scholars of Arabic today do not normally speak of the Arabic reception of late antique literature but rather of the Arabic (or Islamic) reception of Greek thought, or Indian or Persian thought, or Jewish or Christian thought. This has much to do with our living in societies characterized by the active use of such national and religious categories. By contrast, nobody today will identify himself or herself as a late antique person. All the same, the modern historian’s late antiquity is indeed the period that created the conditions for the Arabic reception of all earlier literature. This is a consequence of just how the periods are defined. Late antiquity, as usually construed, wanes with the advent of Islam, and Islam coincided with the Arabicization of many peoples. The change in major source languages (and the modern scholar’s training)
has meant a change of period for modern historians. Practically speaking, therefore, the texts that had physically survived in manuscript in late antiquity and so were available in the seventh century stood a good chance of being translated into Arabic, provided they were deemed useful to the interests of new readers. These observations aside, students of the widespread and prolonged Arabic reception of earlier texts in other languages must keep in mind foremost that the Arabic receptions – and their ongoing iterations in Arabic and its dependent traditions down to the present – were conditioned first of all by the highly varied and locally determined needs of the adopters. No single narrative will account for all of them. The References and Further Reading below are a selection from a vast quantity of scholarship, intended for the newcomer to this area of research.

  REFERENCES

  Abū Ḥātim al‐Rāzī. (1994). Kitāb al‐Zīna. ed. Ḥusayn al‐Hamadānī. Sanaa: Markaz al‐Dirāsāt wa‐l‐Buḥūth al‐Yamanī.

  Burnett, Charles. (2005). Arabic into Latin: The reception of Arabic philosophy into Western Europe. In: The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor), 370–404. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Graf, Georg. (1944–1953). Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur. 5 vols. Studi e Testi 118, 133, 146, 147, 172, Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

  Gutas, Dimitri. (1998). Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco‐Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbāsid Society (2nd‐4th/8th‐10th Centuries). London: Routledge.

  Harvey, Steven. (2005). Islamic Philosophy and Jewish Philosophy. In: The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor), 349–369. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Huyse, Philip. (2008). Late Sasanian society between orality and literacy. In:The Sasanian Era: The Idea of Iran Volume III (ed. Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart), 140–155. London: I.B. Tauris.

  Ivry, Alfred. (1974). Al‐Kindi’s Metaphysics: A Translation of Ya‘qūb ibn Isḥāq al‐Kindī’s Treatise “On First Philosophy.” Albany: State University of New York Press.

  Mavroudi, Maria. (1998). A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation: The Oneirocriticon of Achmet and Its Arabic Sources. Leiden: Brill.

  Noble, Samuel, and Alexander Treiger. (2014). The Orthodox Church in the Arab World 700–1700: An Anthology of Sources. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press.

  Rosenthal, Franz. (1954). Ishāq b. Ḥunayn's Taʾrīkh al‐Aṭibbāʾ. Oriens, 7: 55–80.

  Rosenthal, Franz. (1975). The Classical Heritage in Islam. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

  Sezgin, Fuat. (1967–). Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums. 15 vols. to date plus index volume. Leiden: Brill.

  Treiger, Alexander. (2015). Christian Graeco‐Arabica: Prolegomena to a history of the Arabic translations of the Greek Church Fathers. Intellectual History of the Islamicate World, 3: 188–227.

  Van Bladel, Kevin. (2011). The Bactrian background of the Barmakids. In: Islam and Tibet: Interactions along the Musk Routes (ed. Anna Akasoy, Charles Burnett, and Ronit Yoeli‐Tlalim), 43–88. London: Ashgate.

  Van Bladel, Kevin. (2014). Eighth‐century Indian astronomy in the two cities of peace. In: Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts: Essays in Honor of Professor Patricia Crone (ed, Behnam Sadeghi, Asad Q. Ahmed, Adam Silverstein et al.), 257–294. Leiden: Brill.

  Van Koningsveld, P.S. (1998). Greek manuscripts in the early Abbasid Empire: Fiction and facts about their origin, translation, and destruction. Bibliotheca Orientalis 55: 345–372.

  FURTHER READING

  Adamson, Peter and Taylor, Richard C. ed. (2005). The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Beeston, A.F.L., Johnstone, T.M., Serjeant, R.B., and G.R. Smith, ed. (1983). The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Endress, Gerhard. (1987–1992). Die wissenschaftliche Literatur. In Grundriss der arabischen Philologie (ed. Wolfdietrich Fischer), 2: 400–506 and 3: 3–152. 3 vols. Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert.

  Gutas, Dimitri. (1999). The “Alexandria to Baghdad” complex of narratives. A contribution to the study of philosophical and medical historiography among the Arabs. Documenti e Studi sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale 10: 155–193.

  Pormann, Peter E. and Savage‐Smith, Emilie. (2007). Medieval Islamic Medicine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

  Ullmann, Manfred. (1970). Die Medizin im Islam. Leiden: Brill.

  Ullmann, Manfred. (1972). Die Natur‐ und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam. Leiden: Brill.

  van Bladel, Kevin. (2015). Graeco‐Arabic Studies in classical Near Eastern Studies: An emerging field of training in its broader institutional context. Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 3: 316–325.

  Young, M.J.L., Latham, J.D., and Serjeant, R.B. ed. (1990). The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Religion, Learning and Science in the ‘Abbasid Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Late Antique Literature in the Western Middle Ages

  Joseph Pucci

  Owing to the disappearance of Greek from the Western curriculum after the fourth century, late antique Greek authors never gained a foothold in the Latin Middle Ages. Pockets of Greek learning existed in the Latin West: in Ireland, in southern Italy, briefly at the court of Charlemagne, and increasingly as the Middle Ages waned. But this albeit limited engagement never touched on late antique Greek authors and, instead, focused on liturgical, pedagogical, and sacred works (Berschin 1988, pp. 3–4; Ciccolella 2008, pp. 83–85).

  The reception of late antique literature in the Western Middle Ages is therefore a story of Latin authors and works and is controlled by the vagaries of manuscript transmission; pedagogical, rhetorical, and theological exigencies; and the relative attractions of individual works. A small group of writers, dominated by the church fathers, was able to resist these forces by dint of their auctoritas and, therefore, can be passed over with little comment. The most obvious in this regard is Augustine (d. 430), all of whose works were in wide circulation throughout the Middle Ages and whose universal presence in literate activity of all stripes is patent (Contreni 1999; Saak 1997, 1999; Backus 1997, vol. 1; Otten 1997; Kelly 1999; Wawrykow 1999).

  At least in the context of Jerome’s (d. 420) translations of the Old and New Testaments, the wide circulation and use of the Vulgate means that his reach was likely as wide as Augustine’s, though his original writings, especially his exegetical works, were also broadly copied, read, and quoted throughout the Middle Ages (Kelly 1975, pp. 333–334; Cain and Lössl 2009, pp. 175–252). Ambrose, too, was extensively copied and read in the Middle Ages, particularly his hymns, which gained an immediate currency upon their appearance late in the fourth century and served as models for literary and liturgical works thereafter (Fontaine 1992, pp. 11–16).

  Second only to Augustine in terms of authority in the medieval commentary tradition and cited nearly as often throughout the Middle Ages (Kuzdale 2013, pp. 359–360), Gregory the Great (d. 604) perhaps reached the widest audience of any late antique author through the translations of his works into several vernaculars, including Middle Dutch, Old English, Old French (Dialogues; Pastoral Care), Old German (Moralia), and Norse‐Icelandic (Homilies on the Gospels) (Mews and Renkin 2013, pp. 315–316). Gregory’s most popular works were the Moralia, of which over 500 manuscripts exist, and the Pastoral Care, one of the few Latin texts translated into Greek for circulation in the East (Demacopoulos 2013, 223–224). The Dialogues were also widely read and the Homilies on the Gospels were influential beginning especially in the twelfth century in medieval visual art, not least in depictions of Mary Magdalene (Mews and Renkin 2013, pp. 328–29).

  Boethius’s (d. 524) presence in the Middle Ages is more complicated than Gregory’s, because the variety of his output enabled readers to consider him, dep
ending on the work in question, a “religious” or a “secular” writer, while the Consolation of Philosophy encouraged both identities in the same work (Troncarelli 2012, pp. 537–538). Given this manifold content and the “mixed” style in which it is written, which made the Consolation an especially appealing model for Latin, it is unsurprising that by the twelfth century the Consolation was absorbed into the school canon, its words fostering a rich commentary tradition represented in the interpretations of, among others, William of Conches (d. ca. 1154), William of Aragon (fl. ca. 1275), and Nicholas Trevet (d. 1334) (Moyer 2012; Love 2012).

  Owing to the variety of his output and its summarizing nature, Cassiodorus (d. 585) was also widely read in the Western Middle Ages. The Variae were likely not known in England before the conquest but gained in popularity as the Middle Ages progressed, while the second of the two books of the Institutiones had a long afterlife, since it offers an introduction to the liberal arts that proved attractive in the classroom. The most popular of Cassiordorus’s works was the Exposition on the Psalms, which appears in continental manuscript catalogs of every century and which was used extensively as early as the eighth century by Bede and Alcuin. The only commentary extant from the patristic era on the Psalms, excepting Augustine’s, its wide currency is proven by the nearly two dozen authors writing between 750 and 1400 who make use of its words (O’Donnell 1979, pp. 235–264).