A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  39.1 Decadent and Aesthetic Late Antique Literatures

  One of the most famous libraries in nineteenth‐century fiction is the one owned by the ailing aristocrat Des Esseintes, the central character in Joris‐Karl Huysmans’s influential novel À rebours (“Against the Grain”) (1884). Des Esseintes, who became the prototypical “decadent” character for a generation of literary figures, begins the novel by retreating in disgust to his villa from the sordid banalities of urban Parisian life. Weary, impotent, and ill, he nonetheless spends his days orchestrating elaborate synaesthetic experiments of great energy and inventiveness. In one chapter, he muses upon the “sounds” of different flavors then arranges a symphony of liqueurs (2003, pp. 45–46), and in another he traces the history of perfumery in order to speak “the syntax of smells” (p. 106). Since childhood, Des Esseintes has also been an enthusiast of Latin literature (p. 4). He describes in detail the contents of his villa’s blue and orange library, which is devoted entirely to Latin works that date to the period of the “Decadence,” an elephantine historical category that turns out to extend from the first century CE to the tenth (pp. 27–39). Des Esseintes assaults conventional taste by denigrating “good” classical authors (Virgil, Horace, Cicero), but he praises at length several of those who have appeared in this Companion: Commodian, Claudian, Ausonius, and Prudentius are particular favorites (Céard 1978; McGill, 2018). These poets also become a lens through which he views nineteenth‐century French literature. He compares the style of the novelists and diarists Edmond and Jules de Goncourt to that of the fifth‐century poet Rutilius Namatianus – an “obvious analogy” (p. 168) – and claims that the changes wrought by Baudelaire and his successors to the French language epitomize, in less than a century, the transformations of Latin over the course of its “decline” (p. 184). Des Esseintes relishes not the content of late Latin texts but the experience their style conveys, their flavor and smell (he repeatedly likens the language he savors to meat; pp. 35, 150, 184). Des Esseintes is not fascinated by decay as such; when he returns to Paris, its “decayed nobility” holds no interest for him (p. 197). Rather, he fancies that he can trace the process of decline in the transformations of language. The “decaying” style bottles the lightning of historical change.

  Scholars or readers of late antique literature who wish to find in Huysmans’s character a precursor for their own enthusiasm, though, might find themselves disappointed, even deceived. Des Esseintes consumes Latin literature; he does not read it. While Huysmans demonstrated his extensive knowledge of Latin liturgy in later novels, in À rebours, he never actually quotes the late Latin poetry to which his character devotes elaborate praise. At one point, Des Esseintes concludes his reminiscences about taking a young boy to a brothel by taking up the poem in praise of virginity by the late antique poet Avitus of Vienne, but his perusal is interrupted by sleep (p. 69). Des Esseintes’s descriptions of late Latin authors also seem markedly less accurate than his venomous characterizations of classical texts. To speak of Caesar’s “pop‐gun pithiness” (p. 29) is evocative; to speak of Tertullian “calmly writing” (p. 32) or of Lactantius as “obscure” (p. 33) is less so. If Des Esseintes’s patchwork summaries of what we know as late antique literature reflect the limitations of Huysmans’s familiarity with these works, aspects of the style of the novel do nonetheless suggest something of a late antique literary aesthetic. The novel is replete with scenes of Des Esseintes cataloging and arranging precious gems and exotic flowers, and such passages seem to symbolize the “jeweled style” of the novel, its combination of intricate artistry and encyclopedism. Oscar Wilde uses just this phrase to describe Huysmans’s novel: it is written, he said, in “that curious jeweled style” of the French Symbolists (2008, p. 107). That phrase is equally familiar to classicists as the title of Michael Roberts’s 1989 study of late antique literature, in which he demonstrates the tendency in late literature to offset long lists with dazzling antitheses, parallelisms, and juxtapositions within a “grid‐like” structure also observable in art of the period. The static pictorialism of Huysmans’ style, which manifests itself in luxuriant catalogs and vivid passages of description, seems an uncanny, even an unconscious, double of a late antique jeweled style – whether Des Esseintes would recognize it from his reading or not.

  Of course, the descriptions of late antique literature in Huysmans’s novel were not written for cognoscenti. They aimed to shock, provoke, and bewilder those who clung to the importance of classicizing taste. In 1834 the critic Désiré Nisard published Études de moeurs et de critique sur les poètes latins de la décadence, which drew disparaging connections between contemporary French Romanticism and the supposed degeneracy of early imperial Latin authors (Vance 1999, pp. 116–117). From then on, French authors advocating the cause of poetic innovation over killjoy classicism could identify themselves positively with the “degenerate” poetics Nisard rejected: an over‐refined verbal subtlety, elaborate and artificial syntactic structures, an emphasis on form over plot, and a love of ekphrasis, of painting with words. Their identification with late Latin literature was a rebellion against a bland critical standard of good taste. So, Théophile Gautier, in his preface to a posthumous edition of Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (1868), likened Baudelaire’s style to the “language of the late Roman Empire, which was already marbled by the greenness of decomposition and over‐ripe” (Travers 2001, p. 140). Baudelaire himself included in Les Fleurs du mal an erotic Latin poem in imitation of a hymn (Franciscae meae laudes), and he appended a note with polemical praise of “the language of the last Latin decadence” (Stephan 1974, p. 21). A prose poem by Stéphane Mallarmé entitled “Autumn Complaint” (“Plainte d’automne”), published in 1864 and dedicated to Baudelaire, describes how, after the narrator has lost both his sister and his cat, he can console himself only with the “authors of the Latin decadence” (Cohn 1987, p. 31). Equally wryly, Paul Verlaine declared himself to be the “Empire at the end of its Decadence” in a poem published in 1883, “Languor” (Langueur). With apparent allusion to France’s defeat in the Franco‐Prussian War, Verlaine describes “indolent acrostics” being written in the face of “barbarian” armies (1948, p. 192). Most explicitly, the English critic Arthur Symons, who did much to popularize these “Symbolist” poets in England, claimed that these French poets embody “all the qualities that mark the end of great periods, the qualities that we find in the Greek, the Latin, decadence: an intense self‐consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an oversubtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity” (1893, pp. 858–859). This appeal to late antique literature was a rejection of the abiding power of proper classical taste, and the associations of manliness, morality, and decorum that still accompanied it.

  Yet as critics of these “decadent” authors pointed out, the modish glamor of Roman decay led infrequently to the actual reading of late antique literature. Max Nordau, in his vicious denunciation of nineteenth‐century aestheticism, called the French idealizing of late Latin literature a “delirium,” claiming that it would be difficult to detect in any fourth‐ or fifth‐century poet the characteristics contemporaries claim to find so charming (1895, pp. 300–301). Remy de Gourmont, himself a “decadent” poet and prose writer, observed in an 1898 essay that the popular critical comparison with late Latin authors was founded on ignorance both of late antiquity and of contemporary French literature: “Since no one – not even Des Esseintes himself, perhaps – had read the depreciated poets, it was no trick at all for any critic to compare Sidonius Apollinaris, of whom we knew nothing, with Stéphane Mallarmé, whom he did not understand” (de Gourmont 1921, p. 150). There were exceptions. In 1892, de Gourmont himself published a volume entitled Le latin mystique, which included translations and criticism of Commodian, Prudentius, and the biblical Latin epicists; the work exerted a particular influence on Ezra Pound. Nonetheless, late antique literature rose to the surface of literary consciousness in late nineteenth‐centu
ry France, despite being little read – or, perhaps, because of it. The postclassical Latin literary world remained attractively unfamiliar, while still symbolizing an exemplary subversion of classicizing ideals.

  In England, admirers and opponents of these literary trends drew parallels with the languorous style and “aesthetic” criticism of Walter Pater, the classicist and Oxford don, although Pater’s vision of late antique literature is significantly different from that of his French contemporaries. For Pater, all literature is in some sense “late antique,” haunted by the ghosts of the literatures and the layers of history that came before it. The task of Paterian criticism is not to remove this “encrustation” of prior traditions but, rather, to “celebrate syncretism, accumulation, and impurity” (Evangelista 2015, p. 649). Although Pater devoted no work of criticism exclusively to late antique Latin and Greek literature, he offers an extended appreciation of the De raptu Proserpinae of the fourth/fifth‐century poet Claudian in his influential 1878 essay “The Myth of Demeter and Persephone,” which was anthologized posthumously in Greek Studies (1895). Pater celebrates what he sees as the privileged position of the late poet, who, rather than being disadvantaged by coming at the end of a tradition, is blessed with a panoramic vision of preceding art and literature. Claudian has “his subject before him in the whole extent of its various development,” writes Pater (1895, pp. 132–133). (Seneca had argued similarly: “He who writes last is in the best position”, Ep. 79.6). Pater identifies the connection between verbal and visual art in the late antique poet and translates lines 1.245–274, the description of Proserpina’s weaving, as a reflection of the pictorial tendencies of the whole. Claudian excels at “a kind of painting in words” (p. 133); modern scholars talk in similar terms (cf. Ware 2012, p. 36: “The poet turns artist, recreating visual scenes in words”). The poem, he says, is “pre‐eminently a work in colour” (Pater 1895, p. 134). It reflects the sensibility of someone who was both artist and curator, vividly depicting – and therefore preserving – the art and ideas of the classical past.

  Pater’s only complete surviving novel, Marius the Epicurean (1885), is set in Rome under the Antonines. This is hardly “late antiquity” according to our modern definition, but Pater presents the literature of the second century as culturally late (it had “the whole world of classic art and poetry outspread before it” Pater 2008, p. 93), and his sense of chronology is fluid and forward‐looking. The past, for Pater, is always a compendium of potential philosophies and literatures that will be realized in the future. Gibbon had famously imagined Antonine Rome as the apex of human happiness, but Pater’s second‐century Rome is on “the eve of its decline” (p. 114), with the Middle Ages “just about to dawn” (p. 75; on Gibbon, see Chapter 38 in this volume). Yet the association between late Latin literature and decadence is notable in Marius the Epicurean by its absence. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Pater resisted being associated with fashionable literary decadence, and he was silent or derogatory about the leading figures of the movement in France (Conlon 1982; Huysmans he called “a beastly man”: Seiler 1987, p. 176). In his novel, he attributes a philosophical cogency to the artificiality of language that the French Symbolists were said to imitate: The mixture of archaisms and neologisms in later Latin represents not an idle ornament but an attempt to “restore the primitive power of words,” Pater says, and its beauty is symptomatic of “that deeper yearning of human nature towards an ideal perfection” (2008, pp. 64–65). Pater recasts the static pictorialism and ekphrastic digressions of later Latin literature not as languorous delay but as an expanded receptivity to aesthetic experience. In place of the autumn of Mallarmé and Verlaine, he celebrates the rejuvenescent spring of the Pervigilium Veneris, that anonymous late antique Latin poem, in which, for Pater, the awareness of lateness is balanced by a resistance to time (the poem’s playfulness “had still a wonderful freshness in old age” Pater 2008, p.74; Uden 2018). Not art for art’s sake, then, but “life as the end of life” (Pater 2008, p. 95) is the aim of the philosophized aestheticism of Pater’s novel. In Marius the Epicurean, the critic finds something of his famous “hard gem‐like flame” in later Latin’s jeweled style. In his vision, the stylistic qualities of late antique literature reflect not a degeneracy or a poverty of inspiration but, rather, an extravagant, expansive surfeit of experience.

  39.2 Modernist and “Beat” Late Antique Literatures

  If nineteenth‐century authors romanticized the idea of civilization’s slow decay, the literary aesthetics of twentieth‐century Modernism were shaped by a quickened sense of crisis. The final chapter of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, an analysis of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), influentially articulated the hallmarks of the Modernist style: The use of a fragmented “multiple consciousness,” in which events in a narrative are glimpsed through the subjective impressions of different characters; a disjunction between “exterior time” and characters’ expansive inner monologues; and a new attention to the random, chance events of everyday life (Auerbach 1953, pp. 525–553). In the wake of accelerated technological and cultural change, and under the pall of two world wars – Mimesis was written in 1942–1945, while the author, a Jew, was in exile in Istanbul – Auerbach also identifies “a certain atmosphere of universal doom” clouding Modernist literature (p. 551). Auerbach’s study traces the literary afterlife of the classical “levels of style,” according to which the humble incidents of daily life could be admitted only to “lower” forms of literature. He sees two major periods of decisive breaking away from this doctrine: one in Modernism, and the other in late antiquity, when rhetorically educated Christian writers used their powers of eloquence to express the sublime significance of the humble life of Jesus and the writings of his followers (pp. 50–76). Despite the radical difference in the literary aesthetics of the two periods, Auerbach’s book is structured in part by this unexpected parallel between Modernism and late antiquity. Of all the periods covered in Auerbach’s book, these eras are presented similarly as times of remarkable ideological upheaval. Modernism and late antiquity are usually not seen as related to one another, yet important Modernist authors and critics drew surprising connections between the two periods, viewing them as times when ideological change shook the certainty of shared beliefs and the authority of the literary paradigms of the past. In this period, late antiquity itself becomes fleetingly, but significantly, modern.

  No major Modernist figure is inspired exclusively or primarily by late antique literature; instead, it formed part of the “useable past” (Armstrong 2005, p. 10) from which authors drew. Parallels with late antique authors occur sporadically in criticism of the period. Edmund Wilson, in his landmark account of Modernist poetics, Axel’s Castle, draws a suggestive if ambivalent parallel between Modernist writers and late antique literature. “In reading Eliot and Pound,” he writes, “we are sometimes visited by uneasy recollections of Ausonius, in the fourth century, composing Greek‐and‐Latin macaronics and piecing together poetic mosaics out of verses from Virgil” (Wilson 1931, p. 111). The parallel is “uneasy” because the Ausonian cento is assumed to represent the sort of empty erudition that Eliot’s critics attributed to “The Waste Land.” But Wilson’s image of the fourth‐century poet “piecing together” fragments of classical literary culture also resonates with his earlier vision of Eliot, fashioning a psychic defense against the desolation of the postwar world out of the ruins of earlier literature (pp. 106–107; cf. Cullhed 2015, pp. 72–79 on the cento and twentieth‐century literature). A very different vision of Ausonius is offered by Edmund Gosse, the Modernist biographer and essayist, in a review article on the Loeb translation by H.G. Evelyn White. Evelyn White had disparaged his own subject as a poet who lacked the “human sympathy which should pervade true poetry” (1919, p. xxvii). In response, Gosse not only constructs a vivid picture of Ausonius’s life from his works (he pictures the poet as a comically breathless and overtaxed dinner party host), but he also attacks the “romantic fallac
y” and anachronism of White’s search for sentiment in Ausonius’s verse (Gosse 1921, pp. 29–34). In Gosse’s frank and funny essay, the aims of two distinct literary periods converge: the Modernist aversion to Victorian sentimentality comes to the rescue of a late antique poet whose “rhetorical” poetry was equally distant from the Romantic cult of the emotions.

  In the works of Modernist writers themselves, there are moments of acutely felt identification with characters from late antique literature, whose existence in a liminal period between classical culture and Christianity captured something of these writers’ own struggle to escape the inertia of Victorian ideals and realize new, modern modes of existence. Michel, the protagonist of André Gide’s L’immoraliste (The Immoralist) (1902), is a historian of Ostrogothic Italy, who is so drawn to the “crude morality of the Goths” that he wants to leave the “fireside happiness” of his marriage. The young king Athalaric, who Procopius tells us was seduced away from the classical training of his tutors to the corrupting influence of his Gothic peers (Wars 5.2–4), becomes both the imagined object of Michel’s lust and a symbol for his moral crisis (Gide 1996, pp. 65–66, 83, 126, 145). The Greek poet C.P. Cavafy (1992) also found in characters from late antique literature a means of expressing his homosexual desires and articulating an ambivalently modern identity. His use of late antique Greek and Latin sources is meticulous, particularly in his poems on the emperor Julian, 12 of which survive (Bowersock 2009, pp. 136–150). Writing in Alexandria in Egypt, Cavafy exposes the “barbarian” of Rome’s fall as a fiction against which imperial powers define themselves: “And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?/They were, those people, a kind of solution” (“Waiting for the Barbarians,” Cavafy 1992, p. 19). But Cavafy is also drawn to imagine small moments in the everyday life of the late antique world. His protagonists are often young, beautiful men, trapped between old and new belief systems. There is the Syrian student of the fourth century who is “in part a heathen, in part Christianized” (“Dangerous Thoughts,” p. 38); the shiftless young man who wanders from the philosophy of Ammonius, to the nascent Christian church, to sensuality, and maybe back again (“From the School of the Renowned Philosopher,” p. 117); and the man who grows impatient with the Greek rhetoric of the orator Libanius because, though not a Christian, he is “disturbed” and “moved” by the asceticism of Simeon the Stylite (“Simeon,” p. 204). Cavafy and Gide present quintessentially modern engagements with late antiquity, since the historical figures with whom they identify do not seem “late” at all but, rather, restlessly, agonizingly, on the cusp of something new.