by Scott McGill
For the Amerbach edition, Erasmus composed a Life of Jerome based upon the correspondence itself and on the accounts of Jerome’s contemporaries. This was the first critical biography of Jerome (Olin 1994, p. 12; Rice 1985, p. 131). By focusing on the “mundane” aspects of the saint’s life – his education, his travel to Syria and Bethlehem, his ascetic ventures, his interactions with his contemporaries, and his mastery of Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Hebrew – rather than on the miracles attributed to him, Erasmus was pointedly rejecting the type of hagiography he saw as characteristic of the medieval Lives, interspersed with “inventions” and unnecessary miracles that would encourage veneration and imitation (Olin 1994, p. 12). Nonetheless, the Life does still function as hagiography, emphasizing Jerome’s sanctity by virtue of his piously applied scholarly gifts and holding him up as an exemplar to be imitated: Erasmus used his Life of Jerome to argue that wide‐ranging scholarship, mastery of languages, and philological acumen were necessary criteria for theologians, who ought to model their explorations of Scripture and res divinae on the vera theologia of the early church, as represented by Jerome (Olin 1994, p. 13). For Erasmus, Jerome’s restoration “was synonymous…with the restoration of theology itself,” the chief model for how the church could accomplish a much‐needed unification of eloquence and piety (Olin 1994, p. 19; see also den Boeft 1997).
Thus, Erasmus admired Jerome as a stylist, holy man, and spiritual guide, but his admiration was not distant or anodyne: It was characterized by an imperative to emulation. Like many of his humanist friends and colleagues, Erasmus believed that “you are what you read”: Poetry and literature were formative (Furey 2006, p. 89), and scholarship, ad fontes and characterized as askesis, was a sacred and salvific venture (Furey 2006, pp. 44–53). That Erasmus himself sought to live out this imitatio Hieronymi can be seen in his own peripatetic intellectual career while he was working on his edition of the letters, which were finally published in 1516. Erasmus traveled, at Aldus Manutius’s invitation, to Venice, where he spent almost all of 1508 living and working with the publisher and his community of scholars and workmen as he improved his Greek and supervised the publication of the Adagia (Olin 1994, pp. 46‐47). Indeed, it was Jerome’s knowledge of Greek that made the father indisputably superior to Augustine, in Erasmus’s view, since “all philosophy and all theology in those days belonged to the Greeks” and “Augustine knew no Greek” (Olin 1994, p. 21). He later journeyed to England and spent three years (1511–1514) teaching Greek and lecturing on Jerome at Cambridge. And it was also during this time that Erasmus produced his own critical edition of the Greek New Testament (1516), sanctioned in this venture by Jerome’s own editorial activity in constructing the Vulgate. It is easy to see why Eugene Rice reads Erasmus’s Life of Jerome as an Erasmian “self‐portrait” (Rice 1985, p. 132), and how Erasmus could have used his version of Jerome to assert his own scholarly credentials as the Father’s consummate imitator, Hieronymus redivivus (Pabel 2008, p. 2; Jardine 1993, p. 164). Jerome’s own promotion of himself as the foremost authority on the Hebrew Bible even served Erasmus well: He was able to reconcile “self‐promotion and Christian literary labor” and thus to fashion himself “as a new Christian man of letters” (Pabel 2008, p. 11). But this imitation had limits. Erasmus saw Jerome as an authority, but not one immune to criticism or error. Erasmus noted (and excused) Jerome’s lapses in orthodoxy, for instance, as relics of his passion for God or as products of his historical circumstance. Ultimately, errata were evidence of the Church Father’s humanity (Rice 1985, pp. 135–136). And yet even this is imitable, for Erasmus: His Jerome is a model of discernment, weighing ideas and coming to reasoned estimations of them.
While Erasmus used the example of the Church Fathers to criticize contemporary Christianity and what he saw as the distortion and corruption of the church (most prominently in his 1511 satirical essay, In Praise of Folly), he sought reform of the church and the individuals who comprised it, rather than a break with the church and its traditions. Despite the persistence of the adage that “Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched,” Erasmus did not see his forays into scriptural editing and his philological analysis of sacred texts as necessitating a break with Catholicism – he insisted instead on pia curiositas, “an intellectual curiosity circumscribed by considerations for the authority of the Church, and scholarship subject to the decrees of the Church” (Rummel 1995, p. 10). He was, ultimately, a firm believer in the power of the consensus fidelium, the shared conviction of the Christian community represented by the traditions of the church, and died a Catholic, having spent his latter decades embroiled in disputes with Luther and other Protestant luminaries. Against one attack from Ulrich von Hutten, who had expected Erasmus to support Luther and saw his failure to do so as apostasy, Erasmus responded that his aim was what it had ever been: “I am promoting literature and restoring that more pure and simple religion, and I intend to do that as long as I live” (den Boeft 1997, p. 570).
37.4 Conclusion
Erasmus’s reception of Jerome is in many ways emblematic of early modern receptions of late ancient literature. His approach to the text, emphasizing Jerome’s style and erudition through rhetorical and philological appreciation of his writings, highlights humanist modes of reading. The use to which he put the text – the moral aspects of what one reads and how one reads it – also reflects early modern constructions of literature’s power to shape the individual. The format of the texts Erasmus encountered, first in manuscript and later in haphazard print, are typical of the early modern reading experience, as is his effort to improve the textus receptus by producing a critical edition. And making Jerome central to his positions in the humanist–scholastic debate as well as in the Reformation context underscores the vast importance that early modern readers placed on late ancient literature amid the most profound intellectual and religious controversies of their era. In short, engaging with and responding to late ancient literature was a crucial component of early modern culture and “self‐fashioning.”
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CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Edward Gibbon and Late Antique Literature
Gavin Kelly*
Late antiquity was only called late antiquity with any frequency from the 1970s onward. Before then, one of the commonest names for the period was the “decline and fall” of the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 vols., 1776–1788) casts a long shadow over modern understanding of the history and literature of late antiquity. The Decline and Fall, of course, covers an even wider range than late antiquity “from Marcus Aurelius to Mohammed,” to borrow the subtitle of the work that popularized the latter concept, Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity (1971). Gibbon’s work outstrips the longest of the long late antiquities conceived in modern scholarship, taking its account down to the Ottoman sack of Constantinople and the city of Rome in the times of Petrarch and Poggio, on the brink of the Renaissance. However, the first four of the six volumes can reasonably be said to cover what is now conventionally called late antiquity, down to the Arab invasions.
In these volumes Gibbon offers a wonderful entrée into eighteenth‐century reception of late antique literature, for several reasons. First, his great work had an unwieldy range, far beyond conventional political history; he based his text on a correspondingly wide range of works from many genres, Greek and Latin, prose and verse; and his acute interpretation of ancient texts, implicit in translation and paraphrase or explicit in footnotes, can be found on every page. He had also absorbed the reception of these works in European scholarship and thought from the Renaissance to his own time. Furthermore, even if Gibbon is no longer read as a modern historian to be cited like any other – as he was until well into the twentieth century – his historical outlook and his attitude to literature has had an enduring influence and remains relevant to the reading of late antique literature to this day. To give a narrow example and a broad one: His epigrammatic characterizations of authors are still repeatedly quoted in scholarship on them – for instance, the suggestion that Ausonius’s “poetic fame…condemns the taste of his age,” or the dubbing of Ammianus Marcellinus as “an accurate and faithful guide” (III.xxvii.19–20n1, II.xxvi.1073). And more generally, a persistent narrative of decline is among the largest issues with which modern literary studies of late antique texts have had to struggle (see Formisano 2014).
Gibbon’s massive work is multifaceted, and it has fascinated readers and scholars both as a contribution to Enlightenment thought and as a work of deep scholarly learning – and indeed it was his aim to combine “philosophical history” with the best of recent “erudite” scholarship on antiquity. Much scholarship focuses on Gibbon in the broader context of intellectual history, including the six volumes of J.G.A. Pocock (1999–2015) or, with a somewhat more philological focus, the edition and many brilliant studies by David Womersley; there is also a tradition of work on Gibbon by classical historians (e.g. Bowersock 1977; Paschoud 1977; Matthews 1996; Cartledge 2010). The focus of this chapter is on how Gibbon read ancient literature and on his work’s status as a literary history – a less studied topic, but a no less essential aspect of the work. Starting from this question of how he viewed the connection between the study of literature and that of history, I shall move on to a sketch of how Gibbon read and thought of late antique literature (38.1), before making a case study of his reception of Ammianus Marcellinus, an author about whom Gibbon displayed interestingly mixed feelings (38.2). I shall close with some thoughts on the relationship between literary and historical perceptions of decline (38.3).
Gibbon’s history is inescapably literary. His writing is high art and tends to narrative; he cleaves more closely to his sources and engages more allusively with them than a work of present‐day historical scholarship would. Not only his explicit scholarly engagement as advertised in the footnotes but also his implicit or explicit reworking of his sources in his text can be revelatory of his interpretation and methods of reading. From his youth on he read literary texts with the eye of both the literary and historical scholar. He viewed history as arising out of the study of literary texts. A clear statement of this viewpoint can be found in his first published work, the Essai sur l’étude de la littérature (written 1758, published 1761). In it Gibbon gave a definition of criticism (section 23):
The art of judging writing and writers; what they have said, whether they have said it well, and whether they have said it truthfully. Under the first of these branches is included grammar, knowledge of languages and manuscripts, the identification of spurious works, and the restoration of corrupted passages. Under the second is comprehended the whole theory of poetry and eloquence. The third opens an immense field, the critical examination of facts.
(Adapted from the anonymous 1837 translation, with influence from Mankin 2014, p. 13)
Historical scholarship was thus on a continuum with textual and literary criticism. Gibbon lives up to this manifesto in the Decline and Fall. His footnotes move constantly between these three types of problems – including not only the historical interpretation and occasional discussion of textual interpretation that one might expect but also remarks on style and judgments of literary value. Some of these have been canonized, like those on Ausonius and Ammianus quoted above, but there are many others, ranging from the harsh to the surprisingly generous:
Christodorus…composed inscriptions in verse for each of the statues [in the baths of Zeuxippus in Constantinople]. He was a Theban poet in genius as well as in birth: Bæotum in crasso jurares aere natum. (II.xviii.598n51)
In describing the triumph of Julian, Ammianus (xxii.1,2) assumes the lofty tone of an orator or poet; while Libanius…sinks to the grave simplicity of an historian. (II.xxii.849n43)
The philosophical fable which Julian composed under the name of the CÆSARS, is one of the most agreeable and instructive productions of ancient wit. (II.xxiv.9
09)
But literary discussion is embodied not just in passing judgments but also in longer passages, such as the biographical sketch of Libanius (II.xxiv.916–917), the praises of Claudian (III.xxx.162–164) or the characterization of Boethius (IV.xxxix.550–555). While integrated in the text, such passages, with their evaluations and conscious balance, have something of the feel of the literary and historical essays, freestanding or in his journals, that the young Gibbon had produced on his reading both ancient and modern (numerous examples can be found in the posthumous Miscellaneous Works). Another form of response is the close version of a passage of text. The discussion of Germany in chapter ix ostensibly owes much to Tacitus’s Germania (though see Womersley 1988, pp. 80–88, for the more complicated truth); closer paraphrases come (to give a pair of examples) in the combined version of Ammianus’s two digressions on the Romans (14.6, 28.4 ≈ II.xxxi.175‐81), on which more below, or in Sidonius’s description of King Theodoric (Ep. 1.2 = II.xxxv.364–366). Looser summaries or citations can also act as markers within the text, often standing artfully at the start or end of chapters – like the summarized version of Julian’s Caesars that opens chapter xxiv or the story of the seven sleepers of Ephesus that closes chapter xxxiii.
