Indeed, Ossian’s poems, though sublime and fiery, do nonetheless have that melancholic sublimity and that sad and solemn and, at the same time, simple and beautiful character, and the martial and heroic moods that naturally derive from the northern climate. Not indeed the excessive sublimity, the exaggerations, the rodomontades of crazed oriental fantasy, nor the aromatic flavor, nor the dazzling splendor, as the aforesaid journal puts it, nor the display, nor the voluptuousness, nor the scents (all of the above expressions feature in the same passage); nor the bright and gaudy, blazing color, nor the extreme refinement, and overwhelming exquisiteness in every genre and sphere of literature and poetry, nor the softness, effeminacy, languor, the (to us) excessive and nauseating and vile and sybaritic delicacy that derive from southern climes. And it is truly astonishing to think how one of the most northerly countries in Europe deems the poetry of the most southern and passionate countries in the world natural and appropriate and [987] suited to its temperament. A country, indeed, like England, so full of philosophy, and of knowledge about man and about physical and natural characters, etc. etc. Well and good if orientalism gains ground in France (as in Chateaubriand’s writings), a country more southern than northern. But there was no cultured people less suited to orientalism than England, where nonetheless it prevails, and whence I believe it passed to France at the end of the last century, and whence the school mentioned above1 is spreading across Europe. The fact is that the whole world is a village, and everywhere something that has an impact is believed to be natural and national when the reason is just the opposite, that is, its novelty, its being foreign, the contrast with one’s own national character and temperament; and just as poetry in Italy ran the risk (and the risk has perhaps not yet passed) of a new corruption by way of northernism, Ossianism, etc., so vice versa English poetry, by way of southern and Eastern poetry. And certainly if northern poetry in some way grates with us, it is due to its being too sombre [dark] and gloomy; and Eastern poetry, by contrast, through its being too alive, bright, joyful, clear, indeed, dazzling, etc. Look what conformity of character there is between these two poetries! (25 April 1821.)
Pleasure is always the end, and in all things the useful is simply the means. Hence the pleasurable is very close indeed to the purpose of human affairs, or almost the same as it; the useful, which we are accustomed to rate more highly than the pleasurable, has no other merit than that of being further away from that purpose, or of not attaining it immediately but mediately. [988] (26 April 1821.)
The Latins were generally δίγλωττοι [bilingual] where their own language and Greek were concerned, (1) because they spoke the one as much as the other, which was not the case with the Greeks generally, indeed ordinarily; (2) because when writing they would constantly quote Greek words and passages, in the Greek language and using Greek characters; or they would use Greek words or phrases in the same fashion; the Greeks, conversely, did not do the equivalent with Latin, on which topic see p. 981 and p. 1052, paragraph 3, and p. 2165.
(3) The memory remains of a number of translations done from Greek into Latin, even in Rome’s heyday, and by the best Latin authors, such as Cicero. And some of these translations survive, either in their entirety or in fragments, such as those of Aratos done by Cicero and Germanicus, that of the Timaeus by Cicero, those of Menander done by Terence, those done by Apuleius or attributed to him, the versions of the Odyssey done by Livius Andronicus and of the Iliad as done by Attius Labeo, by Gnaeus Matius or Mazzius, by Ninnius Crassus (Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca, 1, 297),1 etc., all prior to Constantine. See Andrés, Storia della letteratura, Venice, Vitto, tome 9, pp. 328–29, that is to say, Part 2, bk. 4, ch. 3, beginning. Yet there is no trace, so far as I know, of any translation from Latin into Greek except after Constantine, and then almost all of theological or ecclesiastical or sacred works, that is to say, scientific works or works pertaining to the science which then prevailed. Never literary (see Andrés, tome 9, p. 330, end). The translation of Eutropius by Paeanius, which we still have, and the other version, now lost, by Capito Lycius,2 cannot be regarded as a part of literature, or so it would seem, since it was a very limited historical compendium, made for the exclusive use, we can say, of schoolchildren. [989] And it may truly be said with regard to literature that the communication between Greek and Roman literature was never in any respect reciprocal, not even after Roman literature had already become very great and noble, indeed, much superior to contemporary Greek literature.
(4) The Romans very often wrote in Greek on their own account. This is what Cicero does many times in the letters to Atticus (perhaps in the others, too), where perhaps so as not to be understood by the courier, it being the habit of such people, as Cicero says, to wile away the hardship and tedium of the journey by reading the letters they were carrying,1 or in order to avoid the other danger of letters alluding to public, political, etc., matters, he often slips from a Latin context into long passages written in Greek, and intermingled with the Latin, and written in a cryptic and difficult style to boot. A good number of Greek letters by Fronto survive. We have the Greek work of Marcus Aurelius, an emperor who also used to write, as is natural, in Latin, and so very well, as may be seen from his recently discovered letters. Regarding Marcus Aurelius, you may consult p. 2166, end. Aelian, known only as a Greek writer, was from Preneste, and therefore a Roman citizen, and he hardly ever set foot outside Italy. Nonetheless, Philostratus says of him: “῾Ρωμαῖοις μὲν ἦν, ἠττίκιζε δὲ ὥσπερ οἱ ἐν τῇ μεσογείᾳ ᾿Αθηναῖοι” [“He was Roman, but spoke in Attic like a true Athenian”] (Fabricius, 3, 696, note).2 The Greeks never knew how to write in Latin in a like fashion. Indeed, when Appian was in Rome and wrote to Fronto, a Roman, though of African origin, he would write in Greek, and Fronto would likewise answer in Greek, not in Latin. And many books by Greek authors may thus be found written in Greek, though addressed to Roman or Latin-speaking [990] figures.
Much the same may be seen to have happened to us in relation to French. As long as our literature prevailed, whether through actual merit or enduring reputation and general opinion, and our language was, from every point of view, more studied, better known, and more widespread among the French and elsewhere, and our literature likewise, in the nation as a whole and among its men of letters and writers, there were French people who wrote in both French and Italian. Now precisely the opposite happens, and there are Italians, and not a few from other nations, who write and publish in the French language as in their own, and French books, words, and texts are to the fore in all the countries of Europe. Conversely, that is not the situation in France. It is hard to find a Frenchman who can write a language other than his own, and when they write to foreigners they will write in French, and will receive an answer in the same language. And in France it is more necessary than in any other educated country for the passages or words that are quoted from foreign books (and especially Italian ones) to be quoted in French, or else a translation of them is added.
I further observe the following. When the various countries of the empire had been turned into Roman provinces, all the writers who came from those provinces, no matter which language was native or peculiar to them, would write in Latin. Seneca, Quintilian, Martial, [991] Lucan, Columella, Prudentius, Dracontius and Jovencus, and other Spaniards; Ausonius, Sidonius Apollinaris, St. Prosperus, St. Hilary, Latinus Pacatus, Eumenius, Sulpicius Severus, and other Gauls; Terence, Martianus Capella, Fronto, Apuleius, Nemesianus, Tertullian, Arnobius, St. Optatus, Victorinus, St. Augustine, St. Cyprian, Lactantius, and other Africans; Sedulius, a Scot.1 See p. 1014. A number of them even achieved excellence in the Latin language. Not so the Greeks. This is as true of the European Greeks as of those who were natives of the Greek colonies in Asia Minor, or the other parts of Asia that had become Greek in language and customs after Alexander’s conquest, and also Egypt, or any other place where the Greek language prevailed in everyday use, or even simply where it was the
language of writers and literature. None of these wrote in Latin, but all in Greek, save for a very few (such as Claudian, Hyginus of Alexandria,2 Petronius of Marseilles,3 etc.) who are as nothing given the number and size of the aforesaid Greek provinces, especially when we compare them to the great abundance of other foreign Latin authors from each province, however minor. And of those very few none attained, I would not say excellence, but even mediocrity in the Latin tongue. See p. 1029. And Macrobius, who reckons himself to be one of the very few, excuses himself if, etc. (see Fabricius, Bibliotheca Latina, tome 2, p. 113, bk. 3, ch. 12, § 9, note a), and Erasmus says of him in the Ciceronianus “Graeculum latine balbutire credas” [“You’d think the paltry Greek was stuttering in Latin”]. (Fabricius, ibid.) A notion eminently applicable to contemporary Frenchmen, who for the most part stutter in the languages of others, and especially in ours. And of Ammianus Marcellinus, another of those very few, and before Macrobius, Salmasius says (Preface, De hellenistica, p. 39), etc. See Fabricius, loc. cit., p. 99, note b, bk. 3, ch. 12, § 1.4
[992] But at any rate, the Greeks, wherever they were from, even if they were Roman subjects, even if they had lived for a long time in Rome or in Italy, even if indeed they wrote in Italy or Rome, and among Latin speakers, even if they wrote to Romans, who were so very particular about the predominance of their language, as we have seen pp. 982–83, even if at a time when the Roman nation enjoyed absolute mastery and unchallenged sway, even if they held posts, and had been awarded honors, etc., in the Romans’ service, and in Rome itself, even if, finally, they had a Latin praenomen and nomen, they always wrote in Greek, and never otherwise than in Greek. This was true of Polybius, the friend, intimate, and comrade-in-arms of Scipio the Younger; of Dionysius of Halicarnassus who lived 22 years in Rome; of Arrian who had the praenomen Flavius1 (Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca, 3, 269, note b) and was made a Roman citizen, senator, Consul, was intimate with the Emperor Hadrian, and was sent as Prefect to the armed province of Cappadocia;2 of Dio Chrysostom, who was awarded the cognomen Cocceianus by the Emperor Cocceius Nerva, who lived for a long time in Rome and was intimate with this same emperor and with Trajan; of the other Dio, with the praenomen Cassius, and who also had the cognomen Cocceianus, etc.; of Plutarch, etc.; of Appian, etc., likewise Phlegon, etc.; likewise Galen with the praenomen Claudius, etc.; likewise Herodus Atticus with the praenomen Tiberius Claudius, etc.; Plotinus, etc. (see Fabricius on each of these); of Archias the poet, etc. (see Cicero, Pro Archia).3
From all of the above, one may first of all deduce just how tenaciously, and in how marked a contrast with other nations, the Greeks, [993] of whatever country, clung to their language and literature, and how little they cared about Latin, both during and after its greatest splendor. Again, when one considers that generally Greek authors of whatever period, and particularly those mentioned above and their like who, given their circumstances, would seem not only well placed but obliged to know Latin literature, never betray, one could say, the slightest sign of knowing it, nor do they mention it, etc., and if sometimes they quote some Latin author or other, they quote from them and employ them for the purposes of history, information, the sciences, theology, etc., never of literature. This is invariably the case with Greek authors.
The second conclusion to be drawn from what was said above is that the means used by the Romans to ensure that their language prevailed, as in the other nations so too in Greece, and in the very many countries where Greek was used (see pp. 982–83), although they succeeded everywhere else, were vain and unsuccessful here. And I note that the Latin language never prevailed over Greek in those countries in which the latter was established, either as a spoken or as a written language, whereas Greek had prevailed over every other in these same (very extensive and numerous) countries, and in almost half the world. And what [994] neither the Latin language nor Latin literature could do, Arabic1 and the other Mahommedan languages or dialects (such as Turkish, etc.), were able to do, or so it would seem, and in so complete a fashion, as we may still see today. But the Latin language (except in Magna Graecia and Sicily) not only did not extirpate the Greek language, but never prevailed in any way and in any place, except as the unadorned language of diplomacy. This is that same Latin language which in the two Gauls had, if not destroyed, at any rate overcome the ancient Celtic language, so varied, sweet, harmonious, majestic, and supple (Annali, etc., 1811, no. 18, p. 386, Notizie letterarie of Cesena, 1792, p. 142)2 and which to Cavalier Angiolini, who has it that some Scottish highlanders speak it, seems similar in its sounds to Greek (Lettere sopra l’Inghilterra, Scozia, ed Olanda, vol. 2, Florence 1790, Allegrini, 8vo, anonymous but by Cavalier Angiolini) (Notizie, etc., loc. cit.). A language whose purity was preserved and jealously guarded by those famous Bards who exercised so much influence over the nation and maintained it for so long, even after the Roman conquest, and particularly, indeed, over literature (Annali, etc., loc. cit., pp. 385, 386, beginning), a language that was rich, and that every day was richer in so many poems, some of which are still [995] admired today. This language and literature yielded to the language and literature of Rome, see p. 1012, paragraph 1; Greek never did; not even when Rome and Italy, having been transplanted from their territory, were transferred to Greece itself.1 Because even though the Greek language was then in the end corrupted by Latinisms, and other (scholastic, etc.), barbarisms, it barbarized, it is true, but it did not change; and ultimately conquered, subdued Greece did not become Latin and speak or write a language other than its own; and ultimately it was the Latins, though they were the victors and lords and masters, who were reduced to speaking and writing Greek every day. And now the Latin language is not spoken in any part of the world, while Greek, though disfigured, lives on in its ancient, its original homeland.2 For such is the influence of a literature that was so extended in time, and in the quantity of its records and practitioners; even though it was already declining in Roman times, and by the time of Constantine, we may fairly say, it had been extinguished. But the Greeks always remembered it, and from no one else did they learn to write the language but from their very numerous, very great writers of the past, just as no one else taught them to speak it but their mothers. See p. 996, paragraph 1. What is certain is that literature has the utmost influence upon language (see pp. 766ff.). A language without a literature, or with very little, may be extinguished without difficulty, or distorted until it becomes unrecognizable, because it had not been possible, given its immature and imperfect state, for it to be fully formed, nor as a consequence, to become too firmly rooted and consolidated. And this happened to the Celtic language, perhaps because it was so utterly lacking in written works, even though it had an abundance of compositions, which were for the most part transmitted orally. Such is not the fate of a language with an abundance of written texts. Witness the case of Sanskrit: [996] rich in writings of every kind, which are of merit according to Eastern tastes, and those of the nation, it still lives (though corrupted) after a very long run of centuries, across vast tracts of India, despite the many and different events occurring in those lands, during so long a span of time. And even though the Latins, too, had a literature, and a great one, nonetheless it is clear that this literature, when it came into conflict, so to speak, with Greek literature, had in this particular respect to yield, since not only could it not dislodge the Greek language and Greek literature from any country it had occupied, but neither Latin literature nor the Latin language could even be introduced into any of these very numerous countries. (29 April 1821.) See p. 999, paragraph 1.
For p. 995. As a matter of fact, the Greeks, even in the period of barbarism, always retained the memory, use, and knowledge of their literary riches, and veneration and esteem for the greatest of their writers from antiquity. And in this they differed from the Romans, who no longer knew, we can say, anything at all about Virgil, Cicero, etc., in the centuries of barbarism. Erudition and philology were never extinguished in Greece while they were utterly unknown in Italy;
indeed in Greece these disciplines, having displaced others of great worth, endured so long that their literature, even though it had long since been extinguished in practice, was never extinguished so far as memory, knowledge, and study [997] were concerned, up until the total collapse of the Greek empire. This is primarily to be seen in their authors from the late Empire. In many of them, indeed in almost all of them—at a time when written Latin was no longer recognizable in Italy and no one dreamed of imitating their ancients—the Greek language, even though barbarized, very evidently retains its own features. And in a number of them it is written with sufficient purity, and one can clearly recognize in some of them the imitation and study of their classics, as regards both language and style, even though both may degenerate into sophistry, which does not detract from the purity of the language. I would venture to say that in some of them, and up until the very last years of the Greek empire, there was even a degree of notable elegance in both language and style. In Gemistus, both are cause for astonishment. If one were to remove a handful of trivial little errors in the language (such as are only evident to the very learned), his works, or at any rate many of them, may safely be compared to and placed alongside all that is most beautiful in the most classical Greek literature and its best period.1 Furthermore, erudition and philological doctrine and study of the classics are manifest in the later Greek writers, by contrast with Latin writers. The ancient classics, and particularly Homer, though the most ancient of all, were constantly quoted in Greek writings for as long as Greece had someone to write. And they were very often alluded to, etc. I will not now ask if anyone can point to a Latin in the third century who could bear comparison with a Longinus or a Porphyry. I will not ask to be shown a writer of Latin in the ninth century, indeed in the whole span from the 2nd century up to the 14th who is, I won’t say equal but remotely [998] comparable to Photius, a man whose qualities in language and style were not unlike those of the ancients, and who was superior to the ancients themselves in erudition and in the judgment and criticism of literature, having in this latter respect gifts characteristic of more modern times.1 Sticking, however, to the very late period, and being in a position to adduce countless examples, I will content myself with the writings of one Tzetzes, who was active in the 12th century, and of Theodorus Metochites, who lived in the 14th century; writings full of indigestible but vast classical erudition.
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