Expurgating the Classics

Editing Out in Greek and Latin

Bloomsbury Publishing

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472503008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the first collection to be devoted to this subject, a distinguished cast of contributors explores expurgation in both Greek and Latin authors in ancient and modern times. The major focus is on the period from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, with chapters ranging from early Greek lyric and Aristophanes through Lucretius, Horace, Martial and Catullus to the expurgation of schoolboy texts, the Loeb Classical Library and the Penguin Classics. The contributors draw on evidence from the papers of editors, and on material in publishing archives. The introduction discusses both the different types of expurgation, and how it differs from related phenomena such as censorship.

1

Unnatural selection: expurgation of Greek melic, elegiac and iambic poetry

Ewen Bowie

Introduction

Much archaic and classical Greek melic, elegiac and iambic poetry was initially composed for male audiences, and chiefly for male singers or reciters, to be performed in symposia. To judge from vase paintings and from the erotic ballet at the end of Xenophon’s dialogue Symposium, the sympotic atmosphere could be highly sexualised, no holds barred (as it were), and some surviving poetry shows that sexual relations could be the subject of more or less explicit talk, song and propositions. The poetry that has come down to us has rather less of such material than one might expect from the vase painting, and I suspect that one reason is the filtering out of raunchier elements at various stages in transmission. This paper will indeed eventually reach twentieth-century expurgation or other modes of cleansing Greek melic, elegiac and iambic poetry, but it will begin with some sondages in these stages in transmission because they put the lyric corpus in a quite different category from, say, Attic Old Comedy. By a miracle which has little to do with the grace of the God of the Orthodox Church, eleven comedies of Aristophanes survived in continuous transmission through late antiquity and Byzantium – so far as I know without significant expurgation along the way. Consequently prudish moderns have had difficulties in addressing their rich vein of humorous but politically and theatrically well-calculated obscenity. Greek lyric, elegiac and iambic poetry, on the other hand, arrived to some extent pre-washed, and its prize exhibits had already passed certain tests of readerly acceptability. This made life much easier for sensitive modern anthologists. But life was not so easy for editors setting out to offer complete editions of fragments, because much obscene language embedded in short excerpts had passed down in the works of content-blind grammarians, lexicographers or metricians. On the whole, however, the modern scholar here proved as able to rise to the occasion as the ancient, and I have not encountered systematic expurgation in such editions.

The archaic and classical period

Let me return briefly, then, to the beginning. Countless melic and elegiac songs and countless iambic poems must have been composed and performed in the archaic and classical Greek world, then to survive only for months, days or even hours. From around the middle of the seventh century BC some were both written down and then somehow preserved until the much more bookish fourth century by a process of textual transmission to which an oral transmission sometimes ran in parallel. I do not think that we have reason to believe that at this moment of preservation by writing a moral filter operated – but of course we just do not know, and there seem to be clear indications of the operation of social and political filters.¹ Certainly a great deal was written down that would later attract censure or censorship: by Archilochus, Mimnermus, Sappho, Solon and Hipponax.

The first intimations of perceived immorality may have been manifested towards the end of the fifth century when a collection of morally and politically ‘sound’ elegiac poetry, interlaced with a number of lighter metasympotic pieces about wine, song and the symposium, was put together by the sophist and poet Euenus of Paros, perhaps in the first instance to equip his private pupils the ephebic sons of Callias for singing in symposia (see Bowie 2012). So far as we can tell from the major and central part of the Theognidea (lines 255 to c. 1002) which drew on that collection, it seems to have had little explicit erotic material – some exceptions are lines 257-60, 263-6, 993-1002 (of which 993-6 was indeed noted as erotic by Athenaeus 310a-b) and 1017-19. Admittedly the elegiac songs of one of the poets best represented in this collection, Theognis of Megara, were addressed regularly to a male figure Cyrnus (who exists for us only in the vocative

), a youth whose status as the

of the singer can be argued often to be implicit in the advisory stance of the persona cantans. But only one couplet of one poem (lines 253-4, concluding the long poem of lines 237-54) refers to that relationship more or less explicitly:

Yet I get not even a little respect from you,

but you deceive me with your words as if I were a small boy.

It is possible that the immediate recipients of Euenus’ elegiac collection, the teenage sons of Callias, may have caused him to exclude or to limit poems of overt sexual content, though it should be borne in mind that elegy does not seem to have been used for narrative of sexual adventures, even if the new Simonides papyrus (fr. 22 W²) shows that it could be used for narrative of sexual fantasies.

At the same time, however, I suspect, though it is beyond proof, that Euenus also put together another shorter collection of elegy – around 160 lines – whose erotic stance is revealed both by its content and by the address of many pieces

a collection that even has an opening poem addressing

(Eros) (see again Bowie 2012):

Theognidea 1231-4

Uncompromising Desire, it was the Madnesses who took you and fostered you!

Because of you was the acropolis of Ilion destroyed,

mighty Theseus, son of Aegeus, was destroyed, and destroyed too was Ajax,

the noble son of Oileus, through his own acts of outrage.

In the context of this paper what is interesting is that whereas the main collection of the Theognidea, drawing partly on that of Euenus for the sons of Callias, was frequently quoted in antiquity and was indeed drawn upon extensively by John of Stobi, usually called Stobaeus, for his anthology in the fifth century AD, not a single line of this shorter, pederastic collection was cited by any ancient author. One possible exception might be the couplet 1253-4, cited by Plato Lysis 212e without naming its author, but Plato probably took the view of the commentator Hermias on Plato, Phaedrus 231e that this couplet was by Solon:

Theognidea 1253-4 = Solon fr. 23 W

Blessed is the man who has dear boys, and single-hooved horses,

and hunting dogs, and guest-friends from foreign parts.

This much smaller collection is preserved for us only in a Paris manuscript of the early tenth century, where it follows the main Theognidean collection, ‘Book One’. It may be identical with the

(Erotics) attributed to Euenus by Artemidorus Oneirocritica (1.4 p14.2-5 Pack).

I should make it clear that this view of Theognis ‘Book Two’ is not the communis opinio. The hypothesis that is most often presented is that a Byzantine anthologist or scribe extracted these 160 lines of pederastic verse from a text of the Theognidea in which they had been transmitted interspersed among its non-pederastic poetry. This would be a palmary case of expurgation if such a hypothesis were correct, but there are some very powerful objections which seem to me to make it quite untenable. But this is a problem I have recently discussed elsewhere and do not wish to revisit here (see Bowie 2012).

What remains interestin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Unnatural selection: expurgation of Greek melic, elegiac and iambic poetry
• 2. ‘Seeing the meat for what it is’: Aristophanic expurgation and its phallacies
• 3. Headlam’s Herodas: the art of suggestion
• 4. Flowers in the wilderness: Greek epigram in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
• 5. Contempta relinquas: anxiety and expurgation in the publication of Lucretius’ De rerum natura
• 6. Expurgating Horace, 1660-1900
• 7. Modifying Martial in nineteenth-century Britain
• 8. Catullus and ‘comment in English’: the tradition of the expurgated commentary before Fordyce
• 9. ‘From out the schoolboy’s vision’: expurgation and the young reader
• 10. For the gentleman and the scholar: sexual and scatological references in the Loeb Classical Library
• 11. How to fillet a Penguin
• Afterword
• Index
• Imprint Page