In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
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Like so much associated with Rome, the admirable resided beside the lamentable. When Sulla died he dedicated his own memoirs to the ‘just’ Lucius Licinius Lucullus, the book collector and patron of the arts as well as praetor and great general of the East, along with the guardianship of Faustus, Sulla’s wayward son.116 Despite that, Faustus sold his father’s collection, including the library of Apellicon, to pay off his gambling debts, which is an irony since the statutes of the leges (laws) Cornelia, Titia and Publicia, designed to curb gambling on sports, had been sponsored or supported by Sulla. Caesar’s fire at Alexandria probably sealed the fate of many of the remaining manuscripts.117 If they survived that, then Aurelian’s fire in the 270s CE, the revolts that Diocletian suppressed in 272 and 295 CE, the earthquake beneath Crete that caused a tsunami to strike Alexandria in 365 CE, Bishop Theophilus’ conflagration of the Serapeum in 390/391 CE, and the Muslim conquest in 642 CE onwards, surely finished them off.118
Julius Caesar never mentioned the burning of the famous Alexandrian Library in his memoirs. He did admit to setting the fleet alight in the harbour for his own safety, and stated that some arsenals were also burnt down, a claim that appears to be backed up by Cassius Dio, but many books were stored in harbour warehouses.119 Caesar’s additional comment, ‘for Alexandria is in a manner secure from fire, because the houses are all built without joists or wood, and are all vaulted, and roofed with tile or pavement’, has the hallmark of a guilt-ridden defence when considering that Lucan’s De bello civili claimed that fire ‘ran over the roofs like meteors through the sky’.120 And that lingering sense of culpability might be why Caesar entrusted Varro with the establishment of a new library in Rome in 47 BCE,121 though the proscriptions of Mark Antony were to soon deprive Varro of his books.122
But was the Alexandrian commentary truly Caesar’s own? For the authorship of The Alexandrine War is heavily disputed; Suetonius, writing less than two centuries after the dictator’s death, told us no one knew who wrote up Caesar’s memoirs of the Spanish, African or Egyptian campaigns. Contenders are his legate, Aulus Hirtius (ca. 90-43 BCE), or perhaps his friend, Gaius Oppius, and no doubt both would have written under Caesar’s direction. The quality of its construction was praised, especially by Hirtius, but that might have been a discreet vote of self-confidence.123
A 19th century drawing reconstructing ancient Pergamum.
But time has taken its toll on the great dictator’s legacy: in all copies of Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars the beginning of the Life of Julius is lost. This along with colophons, excerpts and cataloguing data, enables us to assume that all these copies go back to a lost Codex Fuldensis (which formed part of a library at Fulda in ca. 844 CE), a singular draft stemming from an earlier lost archetype.124 Suetonius had himself questioned the authenticity of speeches later attributed to Julius Caesar, the pro Metello, for example.125
Historians are at odds over the scale of the Library at Alexandria and they even argue its origins, for there is no actual report of its founding. Aulus Gellius and Ammianus Marcellinus reported that at its height it contained 700,000 ‘books’, whereas Seneca the Younger claimed 400,000 perished in the fire Caesar started, with other sources divided on the total number housed.126 The Seneca manuscript from Monte Cassino actually reads 40,000, though this is an example of a ‘composite scroll’ that contained multiple works and so the numbers may be corrupted. A further 42,800 books are said to have been stored in a separate library (the Serapeiana) in the Temple of Serapis. What is clear is that Callimachus’ Pinakes, in 120 volumes, could not have credibly systematically listed the larger numbers of works cited, and many papyri must have been so-called ‘mixed rolls’ that contained several works.127 As a postscript to the library’s fate Athenaeus mourned: ‘… and concerning the number of books and the establishment of libraries and the collection in the Hall of the Muses, why need I even speak when they are all in men’s memory?’128
We cannot forget that Rome burned the library at Carthage which had housed a reported 500,000 volumes. It would have been a fascinating collection of Punic and barbarian works and their opposing views. Scipio Aemilianus, who later earned the agnomen ‘Africanus the Younger’, was there to oversee its final destruction in 146 BCE. He is said to have shed a tear for the fate decreed by the Roman Senate while quoting Homer’s Iliad to Polybius, the historian standing beside him: ‘A day shall come when sacred Troy shall perish and King Priam and his warriors with him.’129 Polybius, possibly present in a technical capacity, is said to have accompanied the consul-general in a testudo formation attack on one of the city gates.130 A notable philhellene and an avid reader of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, Scipio apparently foresaw the collapse of Rome itself.131
But careful as we are with the stuff of romance, we should see more of Polybius than Scipio in the general’s recorded lament – which comes from Appian’s later history – for it is distinctly anacyclotic, while ‘… to ponder, at such a moment, on the mutability of Fortune, showed a proper Hellenistic sensibility.’132 And true to that destiny, by the time Leonardo Bruni Aretino reintroduced Polybius into Western Europe in ca. 1419 (Polybius had first entered Italy as a Roman captive in 167 BCE), only the first five of what we believe were forty books of The Histories remained entirely intact, so that we have to rely on the Excerpta Antigua, an abridgement compiled in the 10th century CE for the Byzantine emperor, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos, for glimpses of their detail; in total we probably have about one-third of Polybius’ original text.133 His biography of the contemporary Greek statesman, Philopoemen (ca. 253-183 BCE), whose funeral urn he carried, and his military Tactics that must have impressed (or been inspired by) Scipio, have disappeared completely.134
The wealthy Greek port of Corinth was overthrown in the same year as Carthage; ‘The two eyes of the seashore were blinded’, lamented Cicero referring to the two maritime cities, and with the loss of the Punic library, history’s vision never fully recovered; this was, rather aptly, the point at which Polybius terminated his history.135 But perhaps Carthage had the last laugh, for she later gave Rome a Punic son, Septimus Severus, who espoused: ‘Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, and scorn all other men.’ A product of the ‘year of the five emperors’ (193 CE), he ensured the Senate was scorned, and predictably it suffered.136 Perhaps Septimus had taken Virgil’s Aeneid at face value, punishing Aeneas and his Dardani Trojan descendants for abandoning Dido, the Queen of Carthage, generations before, even if the gods had commanded it.137
Modern wars have, of course, added to the loss of books. The parental 10th century Metz Epitome manuscript (Codex Mettensis 500 D) was destroyed in an allied bombing raid in 1944, so we now rely on two editions from 1886 and 1900.138 But we might speculate that these breviaria themselves were largely responsible for the extinction of the original and far longer works they précised. The atthidographer Philochorus even précised his own work, the seventeen-book Atthis. The first known epitome of another’s books was Theopompus’ compression of Herodotus’ Histories, a unique production for its time.139 Thankfully the original survived the summary, but in Rome the opposite was more often the case; once Justin had boiled down Trogus to a fraction of its original size, the writing was, so to speak, on the wall for the forty-four volumes painstakingly compiled by the learned Romanised Gaul, while over 200 of Justin’s manuscripts survive today.140
Perhaps the Romans had simply had enough of the extended epideictic texts. Lucius Anneaus Florus’ Abridgement of All the Wars for 700 Years (possibly written 2nd century CE), otherwise known as the Epitome of the Histories of Titus Livy (in two books), is a work since termed ‘a ferociously condensed Roman history’, and the 4th century Periochae, itself probably based on an abridged edition of Livy’s books, suggests the understandable desire to make the reading of history more succinct.141
But it was probably economic pressure and production practicality in the pre-print-press age that determined the need for the epitome. Diodorus’ Bibliotheke, some f
orty books in length, and without which we would know far less of the Successor Wars, was itself a huge compression of its sources and it, too, may have helped to push the originals out of circulation. Yet Diodorus remains our central link to our knowledge of the lost histories of Hecataeus, Ctesias, Poseidonius, Agatharchides, Megasthenes, Ephorus and Hieronymus, amongst others. Hornblower proposed an epitaph: ‘They faced the sentence of oblivion or the fate of being pickled…’ in Diodorus’ volumes.142
Diodorus’ Library of World History did in fact survive intact in the imperial palace in Constantinople until the early Renaissance. The 1453 sack of the city has left us with just fifteen relatively intact books. Fifty-nine medieval manuscripts remain and they variously contain books one through five, and books eleven through twenty. Of the former, four ‘prototypes’ can be identified of the twenty-eight remaining manuscripts (containing books one through five) but they are all corrupted to some degree, although passages from the lost volumes are preserved in Photius’ Myriobiblion and in Byzantine texts – George Syncellus’ Ekloge Chronographias, for example.
The trend of précising reared its head again once the Renaissance had resurrected the ancient corpus; Jean Bodin’s 1566 Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem attempted to provide a method of easy absorption and comprehension in which the epitome was often recommended above the parental work itself. Digory Whear subsequently advised: ‘If our reader wishes to remain engaged longer and more capaciously in universal history, [the epitome of] Justin can be read.’ The dedication in Bodin’s book (surely taken from Justin too) stated ‘one should cull flowers from History to gather there of the sweetest fruits’, and so history was indeed culled.143
FRICATIVES AND PALATISATION, KOINE AND VULGAR: LINGUISTIC ALCHEMY AND NUMERICAL OBSTINACY
While the written book format was changing in response to supply and demand and to the price of raw materials, language was also evolving, and this played its part in the destiny of the book. In the late Roman Republic the literati were conscious of the progression in Greek and Latin prose style and aware of the resulting translation challenges. The first translation we know of from Greek to Latin was of the Odyssey by the Graeco-Roman poet Livius Andronicus ca. 250 BCE, and it was only a ‘partly successful’ attempt.144 Cicero, who had already created something of a philosophical vocabulary when coining the terms humanitas, qualitas and essentia as he introduced Rome to concepts he had learned in Greece under Philo of Larissa and Poseidonius the prominent Stoic, took a practical line on textual transmission. He advocated a ‘sense for sense’ approach over a ‘word for word’ translation of Greek into Latin, considering that this better preserved the intent of the original author; his methodology placed an emphasis on what we would term today ‘communication equivalence’.
The poet Horace, on the other hand, gave priority to methods that created ‘impact’ on the target language, thus a dynamic re-rendering of a text became the norm and literal fidelity suffered as a result, that is, if what we read is genuine.145 Suetonius was dubious; in his Life of Horace: he explained: ‘There have come into my possession some elegies attributed to his pen and a letter in prose, supposed to be a recommendation of himself to Maecenas, but I think that both are spurious.’146 The fine line between tight transmission and a total rewrite was often tested when translators wished their labour to acquire a literary status of its own. This explains the widening gap between the grammatical structure of the ‘linguistic arts’ – poetry, history, oratory and rhetorical pursuits – and the language of the business, diplomatic and legal worlds where there was no latitude for literary license. That gap remains markedly visible today.
Alexander’s eyewitness historians had a further translation challenge. Much of what they heard or extracted en route in Asia came from the myriad of races absorbed by the Persian Empire; it was a linguistic rainbow even though the administration of the Great Kings was probably conducted most widely in Aramaic and Parsi (and formerly in Old Persian).147 Strabo preserved Onesicritus’ meetings with the Indian gymnosophists, commenting that they translated their respective philosophical ideas through interpreters who ‘knew no more than the rabble’. So expecting clarity on doctrines was ‘like expecting clean water to flow through mud’. As one scholar pointed out, the Macedonians most likely arrived at their Indian translations through Bactrian or Sogdian interpreters, from which point a second polyglot would have turned this into Persian, with a third then rendering it into Greek.148 So the opportunity for misunderstanding and oversimplifying, or perhaps ‘Hellenising’ an alien concept, precept or word, was ever present.
The Hellenic root languages were under scrutiny in the earliest scriptoriums as they were themselves shifting and occasionally clashing head-on. Zenodotus, the first head of the Alexandrian Library (ca. 280s), inherited materials in archaic Attic script and he had to transliterate them into the new Ionian alphabet adopted by Athens in 403 BCE. Archaic Greek texts were often written boustrophedonically (the direction and orientation of letters was reversed on alternate lines) which inevitably slowed the process, as presumably would have acrostics, which would be senseless after translation.149 Orthographic decisions were complicated by three ‘E’ and three ‘O’ sounds that were not distinguished in the original alphabet.
The victory songs of Pindar, written between 498 and 446 BCE, suffered from this dilemma, and Zenodotus’ imperfect understanding of the poet’s rhythms (‘a torrent rushing down rain-swollen from the mountains’, thought Horace) violated the metrical scheme and chopped up his stanzas into irregular lines. Callimachus was confronted with the violations when he was later arranging the poems and the results were further ‘disorganised’ by Aristophanes of Byzantium (ca. 257-180 BCE), the head librarian from ca. 194 BCE.150
Zenodotus did, however, provide some standardisation to the Homeric epics in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphos, and Apollonius of Rhodes, the librarian’s successor, provided further organisational commentaries so that some order finally fell upon the heroes of Troy.151 He restricted Homer to the Iliad and Odyssey alone, though some ‘Homerists’ still believe the Odyssey is a product of a number of authors who gave it its final shape.152
Homer’s Iliad contained Bronze Age words in Mycenaen dialect that had been preserved from the earliest oral tradition against a later Ionic linguistic background;153 the antiquity of the battles being fought is apparent in that spears and arrowheads are being spoken of in bronze rather than iron.154 Moreover, in Homer’s day the Phoenician alphabet, initially termed phoinikia grammata by the Greeks, was starting to fill the void left when Mycenaean Linear B ended centuries before. How, then, were the epic Homeric tales to bridge the Greek Dark Age (broadly 1200-750 BCE) if not through oral recitation?155
The Hellenistic grammarian, Dionysius Thrax (‘Thrax’ – of Thracian descent, ca. 170-90 BCE), produced a Tekhne grammatike in a further attempt at rationalisation. He was a pupil of Aristarchus of Samothrace, another librarian working under the Ptolemies, whose harsh literary criticism gave rise to the term ‘aristarch’ to describe a severely judgmental commentator. True to Alexandrian tradition, his grammatical work appears syncretic and it’s doubtful that the technical content we have represents Thrax’s original.156 The focus of his treatise was to finally facilitate the translation, with some systematic order, of Attic Greek (which became known as ‘Alexandrian Greek’) into Hellenistic koine which was still a spoken dialect only; yet it was too late to salvage the earlier works that had undergone operations at the hands of lesser surgeons. Soon, from the 1st century CE, Egyptian itself (hieroglyphic before) was being written in Coptic script, an adaption of the Greek alphabet that included signs from the demotic script to accommodate Egyptian sounds not represented in Greek, though its use in literature was principally confined to the output of priests.
Thrax, who, in turn, encouraged the learning of classical Greek, went on to teach rhetoric in Rhodes and Rome, perhaps even inspiring a young Apollonius Molon in the process, the orator emp
loyed by Caesar and Cicero to improve their method. The adoption of koine into literature would later prompt Phyrnichus Arabius (2nd century CE), a Bithynian rhetorician, to compile a Greek lexicon of soloikismoi, solecisms or grammatical deviations from the Old Attic standard that had taken place over the previous 600 years.157
In Rome Latin was evolving too; Polybius remarked that he had difficulty in translating an account of the first official treaty between Rome and Carthage which dated back to some twenty-eight years before Xerxes invaded Greece (thus ca. 508 BCE):
I give below as accurate a translation as I can of this treaty, but the modern language has developed so many differences from the ancient Roman tongue that the best scholars among the Romans themselves have great difficulty in interpreting certain points, even after much study.158
Claudius later added three letters to the Latin alphabet to contribute to the linguistic shift. Although Robert Graves confidently gave us their names, this appears to be another modern interpolation as the identity of the letters was never revealed by Suetonius or Tacitus.159 The diaskeuastic tendency to ‘modernise’ or ‘clarify’, ‘abbreviate’ and ‘embellish’, or as Dryden put it, ‘lop off the superfluous branches’, has never departed the hand of the historian, antiquarian or copyist.160 Compare the ‘innocent’ admission by Robert Graves in his 1957 translation of Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars, which remains the popular Penguin Classics text; Graves stated he had cut out passages that seemed superfluous to the episode ‘turning sentences and sometimes even groups of sentences inside out’.161 Nietzsche admired what he termed the ‘enviable abandon of the freedom enjoyed by Roman poets making new the works of the Greeks’, and Graves was doing no less.162
Claudius was no doubt envious of Caesar and Augustus who rearranged the calendar year and inserted the eponymous months of Iulius (July, formerly Quintilis) and Augustus (August, earlier Sextilis). Faced with a replete calendar, Claudius the ‘clod’ settled for changing pronunciations instead, arguing that even the Greek alphabet did not evolve all at once.163 In hindsight, he appears very un-clod-like, for he was the inspiration behind the revolutionary new harbour and canal system at the mouth of the Tiber (Portus, as Ostia could no longer handle the scale of shipping traffic). He next relegated ‘Augustan’ papyrus behind a ‘Claudian’ grade, and compensated by having Alexander’s face replaced with Augustus’ image on the paintings by Apelles that hung in the imperial forum.164 Claudius decreed that his own literary works be read aloud every year in Alexandria from the beginning to the end; it was all in vain, for neither his Etruscan history, the Tyrrenika, nor his annals of Carthage, managed to survive.165