All this produces a dramatic view of human nature, as something precarious and unstable: man’s shape and destiny hang by a very thin thread. Several pages are dedicated to the unpredictability of childbirth: its difficulties, perils and exceptional cases. This too is a frontier zone: whoever exists might also not exist, or exist in a different form, and childbirth is the moment when everything is decided:
In pregnant women everything, for example even the way they walk, influences the child’s birth: if they eat food that is too salty, the baby will be born without nails; if they do not know how to hold their breath, the birth is much more difficult; even a yawn during the birth can be fatal; similarly, a sneeze during intercourse can cause a miscarriage. Whoever considers how precarious is the birth of the proudest living being can only feel pity and shame: often even the smell of a lamp that has just been put out can cause a miscarriage. And to think that such fragile origins can produce a powerful tyrant or murderer. You who rely on your physical strength, who enjoy the benefits of Fortune, and consider yourself not her temporary ward but her son, who think you are a god the minute some success makes you puff out your chest, just think how little it would have taken to destroy you! (7.42-44)
It is easy to understand why Pliny was popular in the Christian Middle Ages, when he produced maxims like this: ‘in order to weigh up life properly, one must always remind oneself of human fragility.’
Human beings form an area of the living world which must be defined by carefully drawing its boundaries: that is why Pliny records the extreme limits reached by man in every field, and Book 7 becomes something like today’s Guinness Book of Records. Quantitative records above all, records of strength in lifting weights, of speed in running, of keen hearing, of memory, and even of the area of lands conquered. But there are also purely moral records, records of virtue, generosity and goodness. There are also extremely bizarre records: Antonina, Drusus’ wife, who never spat; the poet Pomponius who never belched (7.80); or the highest price paid for a slave (the grammar tutor Daphnis cost 700,000 sesterces, 7.128).
Only in one aspect of human life does Pliny not feel like quoting records or attempting measurements or comparisons: in happiness. It is impossible to decide who is happy and who is not, since it depends on subjective and debatable criteria (‘Felicitas cui praecipua fuerit homini, non est humani iudicii, cum prosperitatem ipsam alius alio modo et suopte ingenio quisque determinet, 7.130). If one wants to face the truth without illusions, no man can be said to be happy: and here Pliny’s anthropological survey lists examples of illustrious destinies (mostly taken from Roman history), to prove that the men most favoured by fortune had to tolerate considerable unhappiness and misfortune.
It is impossible to force that variable which is destiny into the natural history of man: this is the sense of the pages that Pliny devotes to the vicissitudes of fortune, to the unpredictability of the length of any life, to the pointlessness of astrology, to disease and death. The separation between the two forms of knowledge which astrology held together — the objective nature of calculable and predictable phenomena and the feeling of the individual existence with its uncertain future — this separation which acts as a premiss for modern science could be said to be already present in these pages, but in the form of a question that has still not been definitively resolved, and for which one must collect exhaustive documentation. In adducing his examples in this area, Pliny seems to falter: every event that happens, every biography, every anecdote, can serve to prove that life, if considered from the point of view of the person living it, cannot be evaluated either in quantity or quality, cannot be measured or compared to other lives. Its value is intrinsic to itself; so much so that hopes and fears about an afterlife are illusory: Pliny shares the view that death is followed by another non-existence which is equivalent and symmetrical to the nonexistence before birth.
That is why Pliny’s attention concentrates on the things of this world, the heavenly bodies and the territories of the globe, as well as animals, plants and stones. The soul, which cannot survive death, if it turns in upon itself, can only enjoy being alive in the present. ‘Etenim si dulce vivere est, cui potest esse vixisse? At quanto facilius certiusque sibi quemque credere, specimen securitas antegenitali sumere experimento!’ (If it is sweet to live, who can find it sweet to have done living? Yet how much easier and safer it is just to rely on yourself, and to model your own peace of mind on your experience before birth) (7.190). ‘Model your own peace of mind on your experience before birth’: in other words, project yourself into contemplating your own absence, the only secure reality both before we came into the world and after we die. For the same reason we should also rejoice at recognising that infinite variety of what is different from us that Pliny’s Natural History parades before our eyes.
But if man is defined by his limits, can he not also be defined by the peaks of his excellence? Pliny feels duty-bound to include in Book 7 the glorification of man’s virtues, the celebration of his triumphs: he turns to Roman history as if it were the register of every virtue, and he is tempted to find a pompous conclusion by indulging in an imperial encomium which would allow him to signal the peak of human perfection in the figure of Caesar Augustus. But I would say that this tone is not typical of Pliny’s treatment of his material: rather it is the tentative, limiting, almost bitter note that best suits his temperament.
We could recognise here some questions which accompanied the setting up of anthropology as a science. Must an anthropological science try to avoid a ‘humanist’ perspective in order to attain the objectivity of a natural science? Do the men in Book 7 count all the more, the more different, the more ‘other’ they are from us, the more they are no longer or not yet men? But is it possible for man to escape his own subjectivity to such an extent that he can make himself the object of a science? The moral which Pliny repeats invites caution and wariness: no science can enlighten us on felicitas, fortuna, on the mixture of good and evil in a life, on the values of existence; every individual dies and takes his secret with him to the grave.
Pliny could end this section on this disconsolate note, but he prefers to add a list of discoveries and inventions, both real and legendary. Anticipating those modern anthropologists who maintain that there is a continuity between biological evolution and technological development, from palaeolithic tools to electronics, Pliny implicitly admits that the additions made by man to nature become an integral part themselves of nature. This is but a step away from claiming that the true nature of man is culture. But Pliny does not know how to generalise, and seeks the specifics of human achievement in inventions and customs which can be considered universal. There are three cultural facts, according to Pliny (or his sources), upon which a tacit accord has been reached between peoples (‘gentium consensus tacitus’, 7.210): the adoption of the (Greek and Roman) alphabet; the shaving of men’s faces by a barber; and the marking of the hours of the day on a sundial.
This triad could not be more bizarre nor debatable in its incongruous grouping of the three terms: alphabet, barber, sundial. In fact it is not true that all peoples have similar systems for writing, nor that they shave their beard, and as for the hours of the day, Pliny himself devotes some pages to a brief history of the various systems of dividing time. I am not trying here to underline a ‘Eurocentric’ perspective, which in fact is not typical of Pliny or his age, but rather the direction in which he moves: the intent to establish the elements which are constantly repeated in the most diverse cultures, in order to define what is specifically human, will become a principle of method in modern ethnology. And once he has established this point about the ‘gentium consensus tacitus’, Pliny can close his treatment of humanity and move on ‘ad reliqua animalia’, to the other animate beings.
Book 8, which reviews the living creatures of the earth, begins with the elephant, to which the longest chapter is devoted. Why is the elephant accorded this priority? Obviously because it is the biggest animal (and Pliny’s treatm
ent of living creatures continues according to an order of importance which largely coincides with that of physical size); but also and particularly because spiritually this is the animal ‘closest to man’! ‘Maximum est elephas proximumque humanis sensibus’, is how Book 8 opens. In fact the elephant — as is explained immediately afterwards — recognises the language of its native land, obeys orders, memorises what he learns, can experience the passion of love and the ambition for glory, practises virtues which are ‘rare even amongst men’, such as probity, prudence, fairness, and even pays religious homage to the stars, the sun and the moon. Pliny does not waste a single word (except that superlative maximum) on describing this animal, but simply quotes the quaint legends he has found in books: the rites and customs of elephants are presented as though they were those of a people of a different culture to our own but were still worthy of respect and understanding.
In the Natural History man is lost in the middle of the multiform universe, a prisoner of his own imperfection, but on the one hand he has the solace of knowing that God too is limited in his powers (‘Inperfectae vero in homine naturae praecipua solacia, ne deum quidem posse omnia’, 2.27), and on the other he has as his immediate neighbour the elephant, which can be a spiritual model for him. Caught between these two imposing but benign eminences, man certainly appears to be diminished but not crushed.
The survey of land animals moves on — as in a child’s visit to the zoo — from the elephant to the lions, panthers, tigers, camels, giraffes, rhinoceroses and crocodiles. Following a decreasing order of size, we then come to the hyenas, chameleons, porcupines, animals with lairs, and so on down to snails and lizards; pets are grouped together at the end of the book.
The main source here is Aristotle’s Historia Animalium (History of Animate Beings), but Pliny gathers from more credulous or more imaginative authors the legends which Aristotle either rejected or cited merely to refute them. This is the case both for the account of more familiar animals and for the mention and description of fantastic creatures: the list of the latter is mixed up with that of the former. Thus while still discussing elephants, a digression informs us about their natural enemy, dragons; and talking of wolves, Pliny records the legends about werewolves, though he does criticise Greek credulity. This sort of zoology contains the amphisbaena, the basilisk, the catoblepas, the crocotas, corocottas, leucocrotas, leontophons, and mantichores which will migrate from these pages to populate medieval bestiaries
The natural history of man continues into that of animals for the whole of Book 8, and this is not only because the ideas quoted deal largely with the rearing of pets and the hunting of wild animals, as well as the practical utility which man derives from both kinds; but because the journey Pliny takes us on is also a journey into the human imagination. Animals, real or imaginary, have a privileged place in the realm of fantasy: the minute such an animal is named it is invested with the power of a phantasm, it becomes an allegory, a symbol, an emblem.
That is why I recommend the reader to browse and not to dwell just on the most philosophical Books, 2 and 7, but also on Book 8, since it is the most representative of an idea of nature which is articulated consistently throughout all 37 books of the work: nature as something external to humanity, but which is also indistinguishable from what is innermost in man’s mind, his dictionary of dreams and catalogue of fantasies, without which we can have neither reason nor thought.
[1982]
Nezami’s Seven Princesses
Belonging to a polygamous rather than a monogamous culture certainly makes things very different. At least in narrative structure (the only area in which I feel competent to give an opinion), it opens up countless possibilities which are unknown to the West.
For instance, one of the most common motifs in Western folktales — the hero sees a portrait of a beautiful woman and instantly falls in love with her — is found also in the Orient, but multiplied. In a twelfth-century Persian poem, King Bahram sees seven portraits of seven princesses and falls in love with all seven at one and the same time. Each princess is a daughter of a ruler of one of the seven continents; Bahram asks the hand of each of them in turn and marries them. He then orders seven pavilions to be built, each a different colour and ‘built to reflect the nature of the seven planets’. Each one of the seven princesses has a corresponding pavilion, colour, planet and day of the week; the king will make a weekly visit to each of his brides and will hear her tell a tale. The king’s clothes will be the colour of the planet of that day and the stories told by the brides will match the colour, and the specific power of the corresponding planet.
These seven stories are folktales full of marvellous happenings like The Arabian Nights, but each one has a moral conclusion (even though it is not always recognisable as such beneath its symbolic cloak), such that the weekly cycle of the newly-wed king rehearses the moral virtues which are the human equivalent of the properties of the cosmos. (The single male king practises carnal and spiritual polygamy on his many handmaid-brides; in this tradition the roles of the sexes are irreversible, so it is pointless to expect surprises here.) The seven tales in turn contain love stories which are presented in a multiplied form compared to Western models.
For example, the typical structure of an initiation-tale demands that the hero undergo several trials to win both the hand of the girl he loves and a royal throne. In the West this structure requires the wedding to be kept for the end, or if it does take place earlier, it is the prelude to further vicissitudes, persecutions or magic spells, where the bride (or groom) is first lost then found again. Instead here we have a tale where the hero wins a new bride with each trial he overcomes, each bride more royal than the previous one; and these successive brides do not cancel each other out, but are cumulative, like the store of wisdom and experience gathered in a lifetime.
The book I am discussing is a classic of medieval Persian literature, now available in a slim volume in Rizzoli’s Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli series, and presented with commendable expertise: Nezami, Le sette principesse (The Seven Princesses), introduction and translation by Alessandro Bausani and Giovanna Calasso. Tackling masterpieces of Oriental literature is usually an unsatisfactory experience for those of us who are uninitiated, because it is so difficult to obtain even a distant glimmer of the original through the translations and adaptations; and it is always an arduous task situating a work in a context which we are not familiar with. This poem in particular is certainly an extremely complex text both as regards its stylistic make-up and its spiritual implications. But Bausani’s translation — which seems to stick scrupulously close to the densely metaphorical text and does not hold back even when it comes to puns (the Persian words are given in parenthesis)—with its copious notes and introduction (along with its essential accompaniment of illustrations) gives us something more, I believe, than the illusion of understanding what this book is about and of savouring its poetic charm, at least as far as a prose translation can do so.
So then, we now have the rare good fortune to be able to add to our library of masterpieces of world literature a work that is both of some substance and highly enjoyable. I say rare good fortune because this privilege has been granted only to Italians amongst all other Western readers, if the bibliography in the volume is accurate. The only unabridged English version, made in 1924, is inaccurate, the German one is a partial and rather free adaptation, while no French version exists at all. (What the bibliography does not say, but it should be stated here, is that this same translation by Bausani came out some years ago, published in Bari by the ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ publishing house, though with far fewer notes.)
Nezami (1141-1204), a Sunnite Moslem (at that time the Shiites had not yet gained the upper hand in Iran), was born and died at Ganjè, in what is now Soviet Azerbaijan, so he lived in a territory in which Iranian, Kurdish and Turkish peoples mixed. In The Seven Princesses (Haft Peikar means literally ‘the seven effigies’, and was written around 1200 AD, one of five poems he wrote
) he tells the tale of a ruler of the fifth century, Bahram the Fifth, of the Sassanid dynasty. Nezami thus conjures up Persia’s Zoroastrian past in an atmosphere of Islamic mysticism. His poem celebrates both the divine will to which man must submit entirely and the various potentialities of the earthly world, with pagan and Gnostic resonances (and Christian ones too: there is a mention of the great miracle worker Isu, or Jesus).
Before and after the seven tales narrated in the seven pavilions, the poem illustrates the king’s life, upbringing, love of hunting (he hunts lions, wild asses, dragons), wars against the Grand Khan’s Chinese army, the building of his palace, his feasts and drinking bouts, even his minor love affairs. The poem is thus first and foremost a portrait of the ideal ruler, in which, as Bausani says, the ancient Iranian tradition of the Sacred King blends with the Islamic tradition of the Pious Sultan who submits entirely to divine law.
An ideal ruler — we think — ought to have a prosperous rule and happy subjects. Not at all! These are the prejudices of our rather basic ideas of kingship. That a king is a miraculous mixture of all perfections does not rule out the possibility that his rule should be marred by the most cruel injustices at the hands of treacherous and greedy ministers. But seeing that the king enjoys divine favour, there will come a time when the grim reality of his kingdom will be revealed to his eyes. Then he will punish the wicked Vizier and provide recompense for whoever comes to tell him of the injustices they have suffered: so we have the ‘tales of the victims’, again seven of them, but less attractive than the other seven.
Why Read the Classics? Page 6
