by David Grant
THE MASS GRAVES OF MICRO PRODUCTION
Time has lost more of Alexander and his literary heroes than it has preserved. Considering that it required thousands of hours for a skilled scribe to make a single copy of a set of papyri scrolls that constituted a modern book, the number of editions of the scrolls of Callisthenes, Onesicritus, Nearchus, Aristobulus and Ptolemy would have been initially limited to library commissions, state archives and wealthy private collectors, and from there into the damp basement of a wealthy senator to suffer the degenerative fate of Apellicon’s worm-eaten collection. Duplicates were usually only made on demand and not as part of a production line. So we might question how many copies of the Ephemerides, that enigmatic and hotly-debated collection of bematistes’ charts and measurements (via the stathmoi, ‘stages’), ordnance accounts, troop movements, requisitions, and satrapal appointments which must have originally existed in some organised form, would have been made? In the case of the genuine campaign diaries the answer is probably none; it would have been a hugely laborious task with no commercial or didactic result.
Arrian’s Anabasis has become almost the sole guardian of the very existence of the primary histories of Ptolemy and Aristobulus; some forty manuscript copies seem to have made it through, though none dating to earlier than ca. 1200. All of them stemmed from the Codex Vindobonensis (Vienna, Nationalbibliotek hist. gr. 4) so that each has a lacuna in chapter eight, the Indike, the account of Nearchus’ voyage from the Indus delta to the Persian Gulf. What we consider to be Arrian’s original wording therefore emanates from the hands of the copyist(s) behind that single manuscript. It is a wonder that we still have a corpus of Aristotle’s ‘student notes’ via the five ancient manuscripts that were copied some 1,400 years after the polymath had died, and which preserve thirty-one of the 200 treatises he wrote; Diogenes Laertius calculated they once amounted to 445,270 lines.
In comparison, we are left with nothing but rare fragments of the writing of Demetrius of Phalerum, his prolific student.203 Plato was unique; for a time it seemed that Thrasyllus, a friend of the emperor Tiberius and collector of the Platonist canon, had overdone it and assigned spurious works to the authentic, so providing Plato with a one hundred per cent plus survival rate.204 The apocryphal were later thrown out and yet the tide is once again turning to reinstatement, reminding us that truth is anacyclotic too; even when analysing fragments, the pendulum of communis opinio is never still.
The weighty volumes titled Philippika, Hellenika, and Makedonika are lost to us.205 The Sicilian historian Philistus, termed by Cicero ‘the miniature Thucydides’, has vanished without a trace even though admired by Alexander himself and possibly because Philistus had died in an epic sea battle; for all we know the Pellan court had procured the very last copy.206 Of Theopompus’ seventy books comprising his Greek and Macedonian epics, Jacoby managed to collect 115 threadbare fragments, many from Athenaeus; Diodorus was clear that five of the fifty-eight books comprising the Philippika had already been lost by his day.207
Euripides was estimated to have written ninety-plus works yet only eighteen authenticated plays survive, an eighty per cent loss despite Lycurgus’ advice to have them copied. Some won awards at the festivals of the Dionysia (‘peep-shows for fools’ according to the cynical Diogenes) and at the Panathenaia held at the Odeon situated dramatically at the foot of the Athenian Acropolis.208 A more impressive credential is Plutarch’s claim that after the military disaster at Syracuse, any Athenian captives able to quote Euripides had their liberty restored.209
Menander, whose comic drama and character portrayals Rome so loved and who counted Theophrastus, Demetrius of Phalerum and Ptolemy I Soter amongst his acquaintances, has a legacy of one play surviving (discovered in Egypt in 1957) against one hundred or more lost.210 We are left with just three tragedians (four if Prometheus Bound can be pinned on Euphorion, Aeschylus’ son), one comedian in Aristophanes (in eleven plays) and one lyric poet, Pindar (along with Sappho’s complete Hymn to Aphrodite), and only seven of Aeschylus’ ninety plays survive in complete form. The fickleness of micro production is clear for even the ivy-wreathed playwright. In the case of Aristophanes he might have sealed his own obscurity, for he was liberal in the accreditation of his works; his first three plays were staged in the names of Philonides and Callistratus, and two of his last were credited to his son, Ararus, to ensure his favourable public reception.211
Here the generosities appear to have been an open secret, yet in Rome a poet or playwright would lose all rights to his work once they had been accepted and paid for by the commissioner, and this often resulted in the complete loss of the author’s name. So an inordinate number of anonymous works were floating around, possibly explaining why Varro doubted that 109 of the 130 comedies attributed to Plautus were genuinely his.212 Varro’s own work suffered; his Imagines is said to have contained 700 illustrations of the famous men he biographed, each provided with ‘suitable epigrams’. The work was later epitomised but without the sketches, no doubt due to the labour required in their reproduction.213
What the copyists in churches and monasteries of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages did give us in return were the bold and striking illuminations, the manuscript decorations in gold (gilding), silver and vibrant inks. These were ubiquitous in the Gothic period (principally the 13th and 14th centuries) but they had been produced from the fall of the Roman Empire through to the Renaissance. The border artistry often cramped texts, the two battling for territory on the pages, until a more disciplined approach placed the texts first and adornment only where gaps permitted. Rubricators who fashioned chapter headings and paragraph openings, usually in red ink, added further textual impact, and so an ornate and expensively illuminated book was inevitably treated with more reverence than a plainly bound sibling. As demand increased in the Renaissance, professional illuminators and freelance painters finally created the first early Italian ‘mass’ production lines.
Maps were the most challenging illustrations to reproduce. Claudius Ptolemy (ca. 90-168 CE), a Romanised Greek based in Alexandria who became known as the ‘great geographer’, produced a cartographic view of the known world (Oikoumene) in his Geographia. It has survived but in a textual form only, being rediscovered in time for the compilers behind the Waldseemüller map, the Universalis Cosmographia, to shock 16th century Europe. All cartographic diagrams from Ptolemy’s work have departed from the surviving manuscripts; the last were seen sometime around 956 CE purportedly annotated with 4,530 cities and with over 200 mountains shown.
Future Ptolemaic maps were produced using the coordinates and instructions provided within his text, the first in 1295, some 300 years after the loss of the complete work. These, like the oriental names and descriptions provided in Marco Polo’s travelogue, became hugely influential in the Renaissance despite the fact that Ptolemy had erred in using 500 stadia per degree (Eratosthenes calculated 700) with a grid scheme that distorted both latitude and longitude. The misconceptions led Columbus (inspired to travel ‘east’ by Polo’s book) to assume the lands of East Asia lay where he eventually found Cuba. Over the centuries the scribal errors made when transmitting the long tables of Ptolemy’s numbers had in any case rendered the original topography unintelligible.
A 1482 engraving by Johannes Schnitzer depicting Ptolemy’s known world or Oikoumene using detail and coordinated from Ptolemy’s Geographia, though the original diagrams had by then been lost. This view of the continents completely ignored Herodotus’ report of a Carthaginian circumnavigation of Africa.214
Ptolemy, also known as ho megas astronomos, the ‘great astronomer’, had proposed that simultaneous sightings of lunar eclipses was the best method of calculating longitude, whilst his astrological treatise, Tetrabiblios (‘four books’, known as the Apotelesmatika in Greek and Quadripartitum in Latin), explained how these celestial movements affected earthly matters. But Alexander’s campaign had marked the end of the disciplined Babylonian astronomical diaries that Ptolemy might
have called upon to verify his theories, when Babylon was ravaged in the Successor Wars. The technique would not have proved accurate anyway, for Ptolemy’s kosmos was geocentric, but his astronomical treatise, the Mathematike Syntaxis, better known today as the Almagest, gave us the Ptolemaic System which was not replaced until Copernicus (Mikolaj Kopernik) published his heliocentric De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543.215
Copernicus didn’t live to see it banned by the Church and placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum for celestial heresy. He was simply reinstating the model of Aristarchus, the Greek father of ‘western heliocentric’ theory (whom he conspicuously failed to mention in his research), whose On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and the Moon was likewise not thanked for its sun-centred observations, with their attendant theory that the Earth spun on its axis along the ecliptic; Cleanthes, the Stoic philosopher who studied paradoxes and pantheism, allegedly condemned him for impiety too.216 The heavens were not to be challenged: Socrates had once been harangued for likening the sun to a stone, and Ephorus for claiming a comet had split in two.217 It is altogether not surprising, in the light of our appreciation of history’s infidelities, that Vedic Sanskrit texts had proposed the heliocentric idea half a millennium earlier.218
Despite a book’s immediate impact, or the quality of the illuminations and the contemporary influence of their author, it still needed a well-connected admirer to be preserved, copied and ultimately printed. Plato had Augustine of Hippo but others were not so fortunate. Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis, to quote his full title, is an example of how radically ideas might change in a single lifetime, and with them the direction of literary patrimony. Along his path from pagan hedonism to an austere Catholic faith (spurred on by his reading of Cicero’s philosophical Hortensius), and with a period teaching rhetoric at Carthage and Rome in between, St Augustine famously uttered: ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’219
His admiration of Platonism, with its concept of eternity and the transmigration of souls, did not fully integrate into his new Christian doctrine (though he remained an admirer and adapted Neo-Platonist ideas to Christianity where he could), and in a tone that recalls Newton and Whear, he later exclaimed of non-pious men: ‘They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents that profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not six thousand years have passed.’220 Augustine’s library in the cathedral at Hippo Regius in modern Algeria narrowly missed destruction by the Vandals in 430 CE. But by then he may have dispensed with his early collection of pagan literature in favour of biblical texts, a reminder that a work stylistically out of synchronicity with the time would see neither parchment nor posterity, a social reality that has never truly ceased.
Another example of the waxing and waning of literary favour is Pliny’s massive Naturalis Historia, one of the very first printed works. It was published fifteen times between the initial ‘distinctly imperfect’ translation of 1469 and 1500 when it was clearly in vogue in the inquiring spirit of the Renaissance.221 In contrast, the 20th century saw less than half that number of new editions.222 As for Pausanias’ Hellados Periegesis, his Guide to Greece, there is no evidence it was read widely in classical times at all, possibly because its ‘antiquarian sentiment’ highlighted how far Greece had fallen from her glory.223 A single reference to the work comes from the 6th century CE and several others from the Middle Ages; one single manuscript seems to have survived in the hands of Niccolo Niccoli (1364-1437) in 1418, and it was lost again by 1500. Three further copies survived but they are full of lacunae and errors, each loosely dated to the 15th century. It was not until Heinrich Schliemann was guided to the royal tombs at Mycenae by Pausanias’ descriptions that classicists began to consider the work reliable; finally, after some 1,600 years and with his credibility reinstated (and Polybius’ on his coat-tails), its publication widened.224
A century ago (found in 1879 and published in 1880) the sands of Egypt delivered to us what appeared to be Aristotle’s lost Constitution of the Athenians, a copy evidently prepared by four different scribes and now in the British Library. It revealed a less than objective and rather prejudiced Peripatetic polymath.225 And despite being referred to as ‘the Attic bee because of the sweetness of diction’, the reputation of Xenophon has declined since some 900 lines of the superior Hellenika of a 4th century historian known today as ‘p’ (for ‘papyrus’) were discovered at Oxyrhynchus in 1906, with further fragments published in 1946.226 Similarly, Claudius’ lucid Letters to the Alexandrians has reappeared, further regenerating his intellectual reputation. New finds are still possible; more recently an unearthed Archimedes palimpsest revealed a further ten pages of Hyperides’ speeches under the new multi-spectral imaging techniques which are being brought to bear on previously illegible Herculaneum Scrolls.227 An exhumed Egyptian mummy was even found wrapped in the entire collected works of the Macedonian poet, Poseidippus, a fortuitous embalming in original Pellan prose.
But these are rare catches, like fisherman netting coelacanths, and unless a new hoard turns up we have to assume the process of source erosion is irreversible. For rarely in history do we meet individuals like Hagesitimus who recovered the history of the Lindian shrine of Athena and uniquely had the sources cast on a stele,228 or orators like Lycurgus, whose superintendence of all things valuable bade the Athenians copy and preserve the works of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles (seven of his plays remain) in a public place for posterity.229
THE ARTFUL ACCESSORISING OF THE AUCTOR SUPPLEMENTORUM
It is Curtius who provides us with the most comprehensive detail of events at Babylon immediately following Alexander’s death, though his final chapter is lacunose. We have 123 codices of his work, all deriving from a single incomplete archetype dating back to the 9th century.230 Notes from the colophons, literally the ‘finishing strokes’ at the end of a manuscript in which the copyist detailed his work, inform us that the earliest of them, referred to as the Codex Parisinus 5716, was written in the Carolingian period by a scribe named Haimo. This dates to the second-half of the 9th century in the vicinity of the Loire in France.231 Unfortunately, Curtius’ florid style had gained him early Middle Age meddling, whereas the drier pedantic Arrian was virtually forgotten until the more disciplined Renaissance had provided a better methodology for textual recovery and transmission. The ‘base handling’ of the diaskeuasts of this earlier period was less easily deciphered, when artful rather than informed filler damaged already wounded manuscripts.
Five of the Curtian manuscripts provided the basis of all modern translations, like Hedicke’s influential 1867 edition, one of a number of informed copies to emerge.232 All of the manuscripts were corrupted and most of poor quality, and as a result the Codex Parisinus is in places significantly different from the other four (Bernensis, Florentinus, Leidensis, Vossianus), giving us two textual traditions. Large lacunae existed in the books five, six and ten, and the first two chapters are missing completely, so the single and now lost archetype must have been similarly mutilated. We are still not sure how Curtius divided his work, and editions have been variously split into anything from eight to twelve chapters.233 Whereas conscientious scribes were vigilant to the missing texts – Codex ‘P’ (Paris B N Lat. 14629) was, for example, translated by a scribe aware of the major lacuna between books five and six – others misleadingly ran the books together, often with a margin comment on ‘some missing words’, in this case creating a new edition with only nine books.234
No library in the Renaissance was considered well equipped unless a copy of Curtius sat on its shelves. The first translation from Latin to a modern language took place in 1483 by Pier Candido Decembrio in Milan and it existed in manuscript form until 1470/71 when the first editio princeps of Vindelinus Spirensis appeared in Florence (or Venice), often with spurious resurrections of the first two lost chapters.235 Unfortunately, this became a trend; Decembrio called upon his knowledge of Arrian, Just
in and Plutarch to propose a reconstruction of the missing text. One scholar recently warned on what we might consider akin to the ‘holes in Homer’ syndrome: ‘Poets, antiquarians and historians drew on heroic narrative patterns to plug these gaps, places in the tale where objects or figures disappear from events.’236
Other scholars did adopt a more disciplined approach when supplementing lost texts, and they informed us when they did so. The first recorded auctor supplementorum was Christopher Bruno, whose edition was printed at Basel in 1545; certainly the scholia – the explanatory margin notes – were informative to the followers of a growing ‘Curtiana’.237 Analysis of a Curtius manuscript at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (O 82), revealed textual supplements that appear to have originated in France along with the redactions that preserved them. Here we find a patchwork of clear emulations of Seneca, Cicero, Josephus, Horace and Virgil, alongside elements of Julius Valerius’ Romance translation, to name but a few. In this particular case margin notes were included, identifying the inspirational inserts; this was a ‘transparent’ attempt at compilatio. But the Curtius manuscripts, more often than not, became partnered by a process of ‘anonymous fluidity’, which, for example, absorbed elements of the Roman d’Alexandre by the 12th century poet Alberic de Pisancon.238 Where margin notes are absent, we are left with an ever-present danger of assuming the style was Curtius’ own, or an example of his emulation of the great literary stylists of the age.
Middle Age romance transmission was an even more difficult client itself, for its artistry was by definition anything but literal. Curtius was influential to both the romance genre and to the speculum literature of the Middle Ages, when alchemy rather than erudition walked the centre stage. The Speculum Historiale (Mirror of History) of Vincent de Beauvais was a monumental encyclopaedia that attempted to embrace the sum of all knowledge. It had relied on the similarly ambitious Chronicon of Helinand of Froidmont written sometime in the early 13th century for its references to Alexander, replicating all the mistakes therein, including extracts from the supplements of the Corpus Christi manuscript.239 The popular edition of Johannes Freinsheim (1608-1660), which came with textual supplements and voluminous explanatory notes, was in fact reprinted up until the 20th century; his infills ‘were so successful that we almost cease to lament the loss of the original’.240 Efforts were finally made to standardise Curtius’ text and highlight these interpolations: Zacher (1867), Thomas (1880) and Dosson (1887) published commentaries on these earlier manuscripts as the disciplines of Quellenforschung began to establish themselves.
