A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  Late antique literature reached a far broader audience in a work of scholarship that had important connections to literary Modernism (rarely emphasized, though see Carr 2013). The ostensible theme of Helen Waddell’s The Wandering Scholars (1927) was the goliards – rambling, rambunctious medieval scholar‐poets – but she began by tracing the origins of their poetry back to late antiquity. The book was an immediate and astonishing popular success. It entered the best‐seller lists within three days of publication, and went through two new editions in 1927 alone (Fitzgerald 2012, p. 121). It secured Waddell financial security – though not a permanent academic post. Like Gide and Cavafy, Waddell finds a very human voice in a literature that was still frequently dismissed as the product of stale imitation. Even in the generally sympathetic account of F.J.E. Raby, published in the same year as The Wandering Scholars, one could still read that the literary production of the fourth century consisted largely of “trivialities in an artificial language” (Raby 1927, p. 4). Waddell, by contrast, describes the poetry of Ausonius as “enamelled fragments of philosophy, the fading of roses, the flavour of oysters,” and writes vividly of Paulinus of Nola, Prudentius, Venantius Fortunatus, and Maximianus. Her criticism of late antique literature aims, in Pound’s famous phrase, to “make it new” and, indeed, The Wandering Scholars can itself be read as a thoroughly Modernist text. Her book “does voices” by moving in and out of lyrical poetic translations, fixes attention on the chance events of the poets’ everyday lives, and draws comparisons across literary cultures in a mode beloved by Pound and others (“there is something Chinese about Ausonius,” she writes). One early reviewer of the work even disparaged Waddell’s mode of criticism by comparing it to the archetypal Modernist musical form, jazz, complaining that he was subjected to “saxophones for a thousand years of Latin poetry. The history of Latin song punctuated by syncopation, blues‐notes, and the wistful wailing of barber‐song harmonies” (Fitzgerald 2000, p. 6). But Waddell delighted readers, and the late antique Latin poets were never read so widely as they were in the translations in the opening chapters of The Wandering Scholars and in her next, much‐reprinted work, Mediaeval Latin Lyrics. Waddell’s picture of the scholar‐poets themselves as poor but vivacious writers who lived “the life of the road” (1929, p. 197) also unwittingly prefigured an important twentieth‐century literary movement that was soon to come − the Beats.

  When Berkeley professor Thomas Parkinson published the first academic account of the Beat Generation, A Casebook on the Beat, he presented the poets of the 1950s as a vital force in experimental literature: a distinctively American literary movement centered on San Francisco, which was countercultural, collaborative, and anti‐academic, and which eschewed tradition in favor of “a literature more responsive to the realities of experience” (Parkinson 1961, 289). Kenneth Rexroth, mentor to the Beats and “chief figure” (Parkinson’s words) on the San Francisco literary scene, presented their poetic project in more plangent terms, as a desperate response by youthful rebels to a suffocating American postwar disaffection. In an essay anthologized in A Casebook on the Beat, Rexroth wrote that “against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense – the creative act” (1961, p. 181). In his own poetry, Rexroth was drawn to imitate poems and periods that seemed to him to represent the struggle of art against destruction, and thus was drawn to “Hellenistic, Byzantine, and Late Roman” poetry, because it best showed “a sense of desperation and abandon in the face of a collapsing system of cultural values” (Rexroth 1944, p. 9).

  In his 1949 collection The Signature of All Things, alongside imitations of Ausonius and the late Greek epigrammatist Paulus Silentiarius, Rexroth wrote a version of a poem by the sixth‐century Latin love elegist Maximianus (1949, pp. 43–44). Maximianus’s fifth elegy describes an erotic encounter between a “Greek girl” and a central character, ostensibly the poet as an old man, while he is on an ambassadorial mission from the Roman West to the East. They are about to consummate their sexual encounter when they are foiled by the old man’s impotence. This prompts an extravagant lament from the disappointed Greek woman, who claims however that she cries not for their private turmoil but for the “universal chaos” (generale chaos, 5.110). This extraordinary late antique text suffered its own disappointing missed opportunity in the twentieth century: It was praised by no less a critic than W.H. Auden in 1966 as a moving evocation of personal and social crisis, but the essay lay unpublished until 1995 (Bowersock 2009, p. 219). Rexroth does not include the impotence detail in his adaptation. Instead, he brings to the fore what was only a subtext in the original: Its melancholy backdrop of military failure. In Rexroth’s version, the lovers’ erotic encounter is interrupted when “an airplane crosses, low down/and fills the landscape with noise.” He feels her “hurtling/away, abandoned on/a parachute of ruin” (1949, p. 44). Rexroth’s attraction to late antique literature can be seen as part of his hostility to academic poetic criticism; like Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, he is drawn to the fringes of the tradition, to the poems neglected or devalued by the academy. But he also views late antique literature through the lens of an American postwar experience, as the fragmentary records of personal life in a time of chaos. For Rexroth, the poetry of Rome’s “fall,” like the art of the Beat Generation, is a rebellion against the inhumanity of a nation that had lost itself at war.

  Equally countercultural – though not Beat – is Gore Vidal’s novel Julian (1964), which follows the “apostate” emperor from his childhood education to his military successes in Gaul and, then, his fateful attempt to conquer Persia. Vidal’s engaging novel imagines itself as a piece of late antique Greek literature, the memoir and private diary of the emperor himself. It also describes the writing of many late Greek works (the medical texts of Oribasius, Gregory Nazienzen’s invective against Julian, Julian’s Misopogon), and it uses the orations of Libanius and the history of Ammianus Marcellinus as primary sources. Vidal’s Roman emperor grows up against the backdrop of a grimly McCarthyite fourth century. “Hellenism” is blacklisted, and worship of the traditional gods has largely gone underground; “the days of toleration are over” (p. 3). Amid the “viciousness and corruption” of a newly Christianized imperial capital, “hearsay was now accepted as fact, and no one was safe” (p. 111). Julian’s trenchant attacks on Christianity and Christian politics are clearly in Vidal’s own satiric voice, as is his flouting of American sexual sensibilities (“among cavalry men pederasty is a tradition” p. 173). But Vidal resists merely romanticizing the apostasy of the last non‐Christian emperor as a kind of Roman protoliberalism. He also gives space to Julian’s own growing fanaticism, and to the contradiction between his proclamations of “universal toleration” and his ban on Christian teachers (“why if I was so tolerant of all religions did I persecute Galilean officials? For obvious reasons my answer was more sophistic than honest” p. 340). Throughout the novel, Vidal also uses the characters of the catty and eloquent Greek orator Libanius and the philosopher Priscus of Epirus to point out the absences and biases of Julian’s (invented) memoir and, therefore, the holes in the historical record itself. “For better or worse, we are today very much the result of what they were then,” writes Vidal in the novel’s preface.

  39.3 Present and Future Late Antique Literatures

  In the 1980s Thomas Parkinson, the author of A Casebook on the Beat, would himself turn for inspiration to late antique literature. In a poem cycle entitled “Unheard of Poems by Ausonius, Certainly Forged” (Parkinson, 1987; republished and expanded, 1988, pp. 77–99), Ausonius’s poetry is represented not as a dry school exercise or formal experiment; it is a poetry of melancholy, sexuality, and loss. The German slave Bissula, glimpsed tantalizingly in the extant poems, is here developed as a character. We hear for the first time Ausonius’s declaration of retirement from public life, and, most poignantly, we hear his final embittered defense of the Muses against the ascetic Christian challenge of his former student Paulinus of Nola (“You say that I gave
up the life of spirit/To know a world of power. Yes, to know/A world. Poets have no other business”). Parkinson envisions the relationship between Ausonius and Paulinus through a nostalgic lens of Beat camaraderie (“Abandons of poetry,/Girls, liquor, food, talk”), and he gives us one final recrimination from Ausonius to his former student (“You say I drink too much. Well, damn it, man,/I’m lonely”). In the preface to his forgeries, Parkinson toes an academic party line by introducing Ausonius only as an imitative versifier who had “no political opinions.” But then Parkinson reconstructs, from fragments of Ausonius’s extant texts, a vibrant inner life for the late antique poet, imagining a man who astutely critiqued the political landscape of fourth‐century Rome. By juxtaposing a critical and a creative vision of the late poet’s work, Parkinson implicitly draws attention to the gaps in every poetic text, gaps that the critic invariably fills according to his or her own ideological preoccupations or personal experiences. While there is nothing especially postmodern about Parkinson’s desire to hear Ausonius’s personal voice, a much‐cited article published soon after Parkinson’s poem cycle (Nugent 1990) makes such gaps in the texture of Ausonian verse a crucial aspect of the “postmodern” aesthetics of late antique Latin poetry. We are constantly being challenged, according to this argument, to transgress the boundary between poet and reader and invest the poet’s text with our own meaning.

  What is the future of late antique literature? Recent scholarly work has drawn valuable attention to previously neglected aspects. Queer approaches have explored homosociality and homoeroticism in late antique texts, including Christian texts; there has been more discussion of female authorship and readership in the period; and our sense of the linguistic field of the late antique period has moved beyond merely Latin and Greek. The development of new, local literary cultures in the provinces of an increasingly fragmented empire and the cultural contests over Roman identity and classical culture in Ostrogothic Italy invite postcolonial approaches. What about outside the academy? The antihero of John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer Prize‐winning A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) idolizes Boethius as “the very basis” of his “worldview” (1980, p. 324), and Jostein Gaarder’s 1996 novel Vita Brevis takes the form of a letter to Augustine by the concubine he abandoned, expressing her response to the Confessions. Peter Porter’s 2001 poetry collection Max Is Missing includes a poem in the persona of the sixth‐century administrator and exegete Cassiodorus, on the preservation of culture in the face of impending barbarism (2001, p. 26). The Italian film De reditu – Il ritorno (dir. Claudio Bondi, 2003) adapts parts of Rutilius Namatianus’s fifth‐century travel poem, dramatizing an imagined effort to restore Rome’s pagan past, and the 2009 film Agora (dir. Alejandro Amenábar) depicts the teaching and eventual murder of the female philosopher Hypatia in fourth‐century Alexandria. But these are isolated moments of contact. Late antique literature remains a reservoir of opportunity. Traditionally devalued, it offers readers the chance for genuinely new discoveries in ancient literature. There are still great pleasures to be had for those who make it to the end.

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