Thu, Mar 05, 2015 page11

• Book review: Classical Literature

  Richard Jenkyns’ reference work on the ancient literature of Greece and Rome is concise, knowledgeable and somewhat restrained — even, dare we say, bland

  • By Bradley Winterton / Contributing reporter
  • • 
    • 
    • 

  Classical literature, meaning writings from ancient Greece and Rome, long formed the basis of all European education. A long-running debate — the so-called “Battle of the Books” — argued for and against the idea that these ancient classics were impossible to improve on. Yet the reality is that huge amounts of this literature have been lost. We know these books existed from references to them in the ancient world, but now not a trace remains.

  Suetonius, who wrote salacious short biographies of the first 12 emperors, is a case in point. His Illustrious Men is mostly lost, while not a trace of his Lives of Famous Whores remains, or of his On Roman Shows and Competitions. Eleven of his other works we know of are also missing. As for Cornelius Gallus, generally credited with inventing love poetry, only nine lines remain. Sappho, whose reputation in her lifetime was stellar, only survives in fragments plus one complete poem, though a previously unknown poem, almost complete, was discovered last year. The Greek comic author Menander wrote over 100 plays, and won the prize at one drama festival eight times. But only one of his works survives (it was discovered in the last century), again plus some fragments.

  And who knows that the seven surviving tragedies of Aeschylus, the seven of Sophocles and the nineteen of Euripides, plus the eleven comedies of Aristophanes, are not just the best but the only Greek dramas that we have? We know from the lists of winners in Athens’s drama competitions that these authors were prominent figures, but you might have expected some lesser lights to have survived. Not a shred remains.

  

  Classical literature by Richard Jenkyns

  As for the Roman historians, only a quarter of Livy survives. Of Tacitus’s large-scale Histories, which we know covered 27 years, only the earliest part, covering a mere two years, exists today. His Annals, covering the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, is incomplete. Meanwhile, his treatment of Caligula’s reign is entirely missing and his accounts of the early part of Claudius’s reign, and the latter parts of Tiberius’s and Nero’s, are all gone.

  Why is this? Firstly, 2,000 years is a long time. Then, although there would have been a number of copies, all books were then hand-written, so numbers wouldn’t have compared with those of the later printed books. (Significantly, we have no texts penned in their author’s own handwriting — from any classical writer). And finally, preservation throughout the long Middle Ages was in the hands of monastic libraries, where pagan works from the eras before Christianity were not highly prized. Some classical texts, such as Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On the nature of things), rediscovered in 1417, survived in just a single copy.

  Lost literature is one of the two themes of Tom Stoppard’s superb 1997 play The Invention of Love (the other is the life of A.E. Housman). When the two themes come together, the loss of literature and the loss of love, the effect is heart-breaking.

  Even so, modern poets are still busy translating and re-working their ancient forebears. Ted Hughes spent his last months writing versions of Ovid, Seamus Heaney worked hard on Sophocles and Tony Harrison has produced a masterly version of Aeschylus’s Oresteia.

  This is nothing new. In 18th century England the “imitation” was in vogue, a parallel version of a classical poem set in modern times. Pope wrote imitations of Horace, while Johnson’s London and The Vanity of Human Wishes were imitations of Juvenal’s third and tenth Satires respectively.

  Richard Jenkyns is a senior Oxford classicist, and he’s just produced a concise over-view of the literature of Greece and Rome, Classical Literature. It’s both exceptionally knowledgeable and somewhat restrained, in places even bland. Nonetheless, it’s a useful reference volume, though the author opts to exclude “minor historians” (such as Suetonius, who’s only allowed one sentence). He reserves his detailed appreciation for Homer and Virgil, each of whom gets a whole chapter.

  One unusual feature of the book is that Jenkyns chooses to include Saint Paul and the four Christian evangelists as men who wrote in Greek, albeit in the period of Roman power. Writing in Greek in Roman times wasn’t that unusual — Plutarch, who was born Greek before taking Roman citizenship, did it, and went on to be, in translation, one of the two biggest classical influences on Shakespeare. The other was Ovid.

  Jenkyns’s views aren’t going to topple any reputations. He sees Tacitus as marked by a “saturnine grandeur and dark brilliance,” characteristics he shared with Juvenal. He also says Tacitus added a “newly truculent tone” to his great predecessor as a historian, Thucydides. The urbane Horace often writes “between humor and heartbreak.” Virgil is both “literary, self-conscious, controlled” and “intuitive and instinctive,” and is, all in all, possessed by a “sovereign mastery.” His praise of Italy in the second of his Georgics is “the finest panegyric of a land ever written.” Jenkyns is unusual, though, in thinking Sophocles “strange, savage and extreme.”

  He also comments that Plutarch, in his Life of Mark Antony, changes his picture of Cleopatra from one of a cunning schemer to that of a heroine. This is exactly the shift that takes place in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. There have been many attempts to explain Cleopatra’s evolution in that play, but it seems we need look no further than Plutarch, who we can be certain, Shakespeare had open on his table when writing the work.

  This, then, is a useful little book rather than a great one. I may be influenced by my long-standing love of Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition, but so be it. That book is invariably inspirational, this new one mostly when the author is quoting someone else, as when he quotes Miss Prism from Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”

  For your information

  Publication Notes

  Classical Literature By Richard Jenkyns 332 pages Pelican Paperback: UK
• Most Popular

  • 1

    Alcaraz struggles to 4th round in Paris

  • 2

    PSG crush Inter to win trophy

  • 3

    Control Yuan member quits over misuse of vehicle

  • 4

    Greek basketball finals suspended following scuffles

  • 5

    Taipei ranks 60 in ‘Global Cities Index,’ up five spots