Beyond Greek

The Beginnings of Latin Literature

Denis Feeney

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780674496040
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'antica Roma

A History Today Best Book of the Year
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the YearVirgil, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, and other authors of ancient Rome are so firmly established in the Western canon today that the birth of Latin literature seems inevitable. Yet, Denis Feeney boldly argues, the beginnings of Latin literature were anything but inevitable. The cultural flourishing that in time produced the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses, and other Latin classics was one of the strangest events in history."Feeney is to be congratulated on his willingness to put Roman literary history in a big comparative context…It is a powerful testimony to the importance of Denis Feeney's work that the old chestnuts of classical literary history—how the Romans got themselves Hellenized, and whether those jack-booted thugs felt anxiously belated or smugly domineering in their appropriation of Greek culture for their own purposes—feel fresh and urgent again."
—Emily Wilson, Times Literary Supplement "[Feeney's] bold theme and vigorous writing render Beyond Greek of interest to anyone intrigued by the history and literature of the classical world."
— The Economist

CHAPTER 1

Translation: Languages, Scripts, Texts

JUST AS STUDENTS OF ROME often think that it was more or less natural and inevitable that Rome should develop a literature in the vernacular, one might assume that it was more or less natural and inevitable that Greek literary texts should one day be translated into Latin. Yet there is no evidence that the Greek texts translated by Rome’s first translator-poet, Livius Andronicus—Homer and Attic drama—had ever been translated into any other language before he translated them into Latin. In fact, the Attic dramatic scripts had never even been adapted into other Greek dialects; according to Taplin, there is no evidence that any performances of originally Athenian tragedy or comedy occurred in the western Mediterranean “in any dialect other than Attic.”¹ The Latin project of systematically translating literary texts is not a natural or inevitable thing to happen, and analogies for it in the ancient world turn out to be hard to find.²

The Strangeness of Translation

The perspective on translation assumed by most members of modern Western societies is naturally conditioned by our everyday experience of how normal translation is in the modern world. We take it for granted that we can go into any sizeable book store and buy English translations of Russian literature, or French literature, or German and Chinese and Japanese literature. This is, however, a comparatively recent state of affairs, and an exceptional one, in terms of the longer view of history. I first began properly to grasp this point when I attended the 2006 Columbia University conference on translation organized by David Damrosch and Wiebke Denecke. The number of participants was such that all speakers were held strictly to fifteen minutes each, but when Harish Trivedi (University of Delhi) rose to speak on translation in India he handled the problem of time pressure in a novel fashion. He faced the opposite dilemma of all the other speakers, so he said, since they had so much to say and had to cram it all into fifteen minutes, whereas he had only one thing to say and had to spin it out to fill his whole time. Eventually, after glancing at his watch a number of times to see how much of his fifteen minutes he had managed to use up, he had to say his one thing: “There is no translation in India.”

Now, he immediately went on to gloss and qualify this remark. There have been periods of intense translating activity in India. Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries the literary traditions of most modern Indian languages got their initial impetus from translations of works from Sanskrit, usually the epics, Ramayana and Mahabarata, and many of the literary works of the regional languages were at that time translated into Persian or Arabic.³ But since then translation across the boundaries of the different written literatures of India has been extremely rare: “until very recently, nothing was ever translated directly between Urdu, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, and so on.”⁴ Right up until today, most of the translation that goes on in India is into and out of English, and even the vernacular literatures are for the most part accessed by users of other languages via English translation rather than via translations into another vernacular.⁵

It may appear bizarre that in “a multilingual country with flourishing literatures in at least a dozen languages, there is singularly little translation between them.”⁶ There has never been such a thing as an impermeable culture, but a group is able to represent itself as being its own knowledge-world to one degree or another, and this is particularly the case with forms of textually encoded knowledge. As Jack Goody has demonstrated, literacy’s codification of systems of knowledge and belief within a culture can in itself encourage the apprehension that there is a defined boundary between this knowledge system and the ones codified by other groups.⁷ From this perspective, it is not, on reflection, obvious that even a bilingual group will need to set up a dialogue with outside traditions of knowledge and power by importing vernacular versions of texts that matter to those outside traditions.

The example of India shows us that the practice of translation can begin, tail off, resume: it is not a mechanism that ticks along at a steady rate once activated. The example of India also vividly brings home the point that translation does not have to happen, even in an multilingual environment with mutually interpenetrating literate societies who are each in possession of a vernacular literature.⁸ The practice of translation is historically neither a necessary nor a constant feature of cultural interpenetration; translation does not automatically follow even from extensive bilingual or multilingual interaction. Instances of translation have their own distinctive rhythms and modalities, interacting variably according to differing political, social, and institutional pressures.

The Case of Ptolemaic Alexandria

A case study from the ancient world that we could put in dialogue with the Indian example is that of Alexandria under the Ptolemies (305–30). Here a Greek-speaking Macedonian monarchy presided over a very cosmopolitan society including Egyptians, Jews, and Greeks from all over the Mediterranean world, while at the same time working continuously in close collaboration with the highly literate Egyptian priestly, administrative, and scribal orders.⁹ Yet in Alexandria we see these sophisticated literate cultures living in conditions of intimacy at the élite level for a long time without a systematic translation project getting under way—and even without the Greek-speaking élite developing an engagement with the languages or writings of their new subjects.

It is, of course, regularly claimed that the Ptolemies commissioned translations into Greek of all kinds of texts, eventually including even Roman texts.¹⁰ The evidence, however, is late and misinformed, with much of it being part of a retrospective conversion of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (reigned 283–246) into a culture hero of librarianship and patronage.¹¹ As Most puts it, “it is only scant, unreliable, and late evidence that provides any support at all for the view … that the Ptolemies took care to include numerous translations from foreign works in the Library at Alexandria.”¹² We shall consider shortly the apparent exception of the Septuagint, the translation into Greek of the Jews’ Hebrew scriptures, together with the translation into Greek of Egyptian chronicles by the Egyptian priest Manetho; for now, overall, I concur with Rajak: “It is doubtful whether any other large-scale translation enterprises apart from the Septuagint were undertaken in Ptolemaic Alexandria.”¹³

Translation into Greek of Egyptian works in Demotic does occur in Egypt as early as the second or even third century BCE;¹⁴ but it develops real momentum quite a bit later than the period of the first Ptolemies, becoming suddenly especially important—for reasons that are hard to recover—in the second and third centuries CE.¹⁵ These translations appear to be the work of Egyptians translating into Greek rather than of Greeks translating out of Demotic, regularly as part of an anti-Greek impetus.¹⁶ Importantly, we do not find translation of literary texts in the other direction, from Greek into Demotic.¹⁷ Further, it is likely that Egyptian and Near Eastern animal fables and similar elements of popular culture had already been available to Greeks earlier, under the Ptolemies, in oral as well as written form, regularly mediated by non-Greeks into Greek formats; material that is ultimately of Assyrian origin, for example, will have circulated in Aramaic, and through that medium become known to Jews in Alexandria.¹⁸

The Indian case alerted us to the fact that translation is not something we should just expect to happen whenever literate cultures overlap with each other, and the case of early Ptolemaic Alexandria bears this out. The Macedonian monarchs and their advisors instituted Janus-faced ideological programs carefully designed for the comprehension of their diverse subjects,¹⁹ but the government of the kingdom depended on Egyptians learning Greek rather than vice versa. Faced with new administrative demands for the new monarchy, and with Greeks evincing “reluctance at the top for learning Egyptian,” the Ptolemies tried hard and with real success to produce a new generation of trained Egyptian scribes and administrators who were bilingual and biscripted.²⁰ It was this specifically trained Egyptian bureaucracy who produced the bilingual and triscripted inscriptions most famously represented by the Rosetta Stone.²¹ As is often noted, the first member of the Ptolemaic dynasty to be able to speak Egyptian was apparently the last member of the dynasty, Cleopatra VII (Plut. Ant. 27. 4–5), and it is highly unlikely that she could also read or write it;²² before her, the Ptolemies will have addressed their troops through interpreters.²³ In the early years of the Ptolemies’ reign, interaction at the top between Greeks and Egyptians appears to have been limited: there was no élite intermarriage in the first generations of the Ptolemaic kingdom, and Egyptians were at this stage still excluded from the Greek cultural institutions of the gymnasion and ephebeia.²⁴ This situation became much more mobile fairly quickly, as we see with the intriguing example of the Egyptians who become officers in the Ptolemaic army, learning Greek and acquiring double names, leading the way in the process that eventually makes labels of ethnicity moot by the time of the Roman Empire.²⁵

These administrative protocols go a long way to explaining the “striking asymmetry” in the “relation between Greeks and Egyptians” remarked upon by Jan Assmann: “Whereas the Greeks showed an eager interest in the culture and the land of Egypt without, however, making the effort to study the language, the Egyptians learned Greek without getting interested in Greek culture and geography.”²⁶ This is not to say that no élite Greek before Cleopatra ever learned Egyptian: some certainly did.²⁷ It is a matter of scale and reach, and of the avenues of access. Proximity and even sustained administrative cooperation do not necessarily lead to predictable patterns of knowledge transfer or of translation: we find translations from Demotic into Greek, for example, but not the other way around.²⁸ As Goldhill puts it in discussing the interfaces between Alexandrian literature and Egyptian mythological ideology: “There are different potential negotiations at each interface between cultures, and we must remain as sensitive to where the border controls are being enforced as to the apparent border crossings.”²⁹

Two Ptolemaic “Exceptions”

There are two very important cases of translation into Greek that we know of in the Ptolemaic sphere, and neither of them is, as one might perhaps expect them to be, an example of the Greeks reaching out into another culture for knowledge in translated form.

Some time early in the third century, the Egyptian priest Manetho of Sebennytus wrote a history of Egypt in Greek.³⁰ Major portions of this now lost work are said by our principal source, the Jewish priest-historian Josephus, to have been “translated” from Egyptian sources (Ap. 1. 228). Josephus uses the verb μεταφράζω, which can denote a range of practices, including paraphrase, and it is hard to know precisely what is meant here, since neither the original Greek text of Manetho nor the Egyptian sources behind it survive.³¹ Manetho’s effort is symptomatic of a widespread energetic engagement with the challenge of Hellenism on the part of peoples conquered by Alexander and his successors.³² At about the same time as Manetho was writing, a Babylonian priest, Berossus, under the rule of the Seleucids, was writing a history of Babylon in Greek; Demetrius the Jew, writing in Alexandria about fifty years after Manetho, under Ptolemy IV Philopator (ruled 221–205), composed in Greek a history of his people from Adam to his own time.³³ We observe a related phenomenon in Italy around the same time as Demetrius, for the first Romans to write histories of their own people follow in this same track, writing in Greek and not their own language; as we shall see, a crucial difference is that the Romans were the conquerors, not the conquered.³⁴

The impact of Hellenism is remarkably powerful and remarkably quick. Manetho and Berossus ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Translation: Languages, Scripts, Texts
• 2. The Roman Translation Project
• 3. The Interface between Latin and Greek
• 4. Middle Grounds, Zones of Contact
• 5. A Stage for an Imperial Power
• 6. A Literature in the Latin Language
• 7. The Impact and Reach of the New Literature
• 8. Acts of Comparison
• Conclusion: Joining the Network
• Notes
• References
• Index