(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
1 ODYSSEUS’ SCAR
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No sooner has the old woman touched the scar than, in her joyous surprise, she lets Odysseus’ foot drop into the basin; the water spills over, she is about to cry out her joy; Odysseus restrains her with whispered threats and endearments; she recovers herself and conceals her emotion. Penelope, whose attention Athena’s foresight had diverted from the incident, has observed nothing.
All this is scrupulously externalized and narrated in leisurely fashion. The two women express their feelings in copious direct discourse. Feelings though they are, with only a slight admixture of the most general considerations upon human destiny, the syntactical connection between part and part is perfectly clear, no contour is blurred. There is also room and time for orderly, perfectly well-articulated, uniformly illuminated descriptions of implements, ministrations, and gestures; even in the dramatic moment of recognition, Homer does not omit to tell the reader that it is with his right hand that Odysseus takes the old woman by the throat to keep her from speaking, at the same time that he draws her closer to him with his left. Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible; and not less clear—wholly expressed, orderly even in their ardor—are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved.
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…a hunting accident which occurred in Odysseus’ boyhood, at a boar hunt, during the time of his visit to his grandfather Autolycus.
…not until then, the digression having run its course, does Euryclea, who had recognized the scar before the digression began, let Odysseus’ foot fall back into the basin.
The first thought of a modern reader—that this is a device to increase suspense—is, if not wholly wrong, at least not the essential explanation of this Homeric procedure. For the element of suspense is very slight in the Homeric poems; nothing in their entire style is calculated to keep the reader or hearer breathless. The digressions are not meant to keep the reader in suspense, but rather to relax the tension.
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When the young Euryclea… sets the infant Odysseus on his grandfather Autolycus’ lap after the banquet, the aged Euryclea, who a few lines earlier had touched the wanderer’s foot, has entirely vanished for the stage and from the reader’s mind.
But the true cause of the impression of “retardation” appears to me to lie elsewhere—namely, in the need of the Homeric style to leave nothing which it mentions half in darkness and unexternalized.
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…just as, in the Iliad, when the first ship is already burning and the Myrmidons finally arm that they may hasten to help, there is still time not only for the wonderful simile of the wolf, not only for the order of the Myrmidon host, but also for a detailed account of the ancestry of several subordinate leaders… To be sure, the aesthetic effect thus produced was soon noticed and thereafter consciously sought; but the more original cause must have lain in the basic impulse of the Homeric style: to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations. Nor do psychological processes receive any other treatment: here too nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed.
Polyphemus talks to Odysseus; Odysseus talks to the suitors hen he begins to kill them; Hector and Achilles talk at length, before battle and after; and no speech is so filled with anger or scorn that the particles which express logical and grammatical connections are lacking or out of place.
…a large number of conjunctions, adverbs, particles, and other syntactical tools, all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiated in meaning, delimit persons, things, and portions of incidents in respect to one another, and at the same timbering them together in a continuous and ever flexible connection…
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…never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths.
…a syntactical construction with which every reader of Homer is familiar…
To the word scar…there is first attached a relative clause (“which once long ago a boar . . .”), which enlarges into a voluminous syntactical parenthesis; into this an independent sentence unexpectedly intrudes (… “A god himself gave him . . . “), which quietly disentangles itself from syntactical subordination, until, with verse 467 (“The old woman now touched it . . .”), the scene which had been broken off is resumed.
…had been presented as a recollection…
But any such subjectivistic-perspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background, resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past, is entirely foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.
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…sacrifice of Isaac a homogenous narrative produced by the so-called Elohist.
… God, in order to speak to Abraham must come from somewhere…
He does not come, like Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethiopians…
He has not, like Zeus discussed them in set speeches with other gods gathered in councils…
…Abraham. Where is he? We do not know. He says, indeed: Here I am—but the Hebrew word means only something like “behold me,” and in any case is not meant to indicate the actual place where Abraham is, but a moral position in respect to God…
…consider Hermes’ visit to Calypso, for example, where command, journey, arrival and reception of the visitor, situation and occupation of the person visited are set forth in many verses…
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… “early in the morning” is given, not as an indication of time, but for the sake of its ethical significance…
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By this example of the contrary, we see the significance of the descriptive adjectives and digressions of the Homeric poems; with their indications of the earlier and as it were absolute existence of the persons described, they prevent the reader from concentrating exclusively on a present crisis; even when the most terrible things are occurring, they prevent the establishment of an overwhelming suspense.
…in the Bible story too; but their speech does not serve, as does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts—on the contrary, it serves to indicate thoughts which remain unexpressed.
It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand, externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand, the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and felling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and “fraught with background.”
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…human beings in Homer; although they are nearly always caught up in an event engaging all their faculties, they are not so entirely immersed in its present that they do not remain continually conscious of what has happened to them earlier and elsewhere; their thoughts and feelings have more layers, are more entangled. Abraham’s actions are explained not only by what is happening to him at the moment, nor yet only by his character…
Any such “background” quality of the psychological situation as that which the story of Absalom’s death and its sequel (…by the so-called Jahvist) rather suggests than expresses, is unthinkable in Homer.
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…Joab in his rebellion and disregard for the consequences of his actions ; in the magnificent background is fully manifest, though the latter is never expressed. With this, compare, for example, how Achilles, who sends Patroclus first to scout and then into battle, loses almost all “presentness” so long as he is not physically present. But the most important thing is the “multilayeredness” of the individual character; this is hardly to be met with in Homer, or at most in the form of a conscious hesitation between two possible courses of action; otherwise, in Homer, the complexity of the psychological life is shown only in the succession and alternation of emotions; whereas the Jewish writers are able to express the simultaneous existence of various layers of consciousness and the conflict between them.
And this “real” world into which we are lured, exists for itself, contains nothing but itself; the Homeric poems conceal nothing they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning. Homer can be analyzed, as we have essayed to do here, but he cannot be interpreted. Later allegorizing trends have tried their arts of interpretation upon him, but to no avail.
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The story of Abraham and Isaac is not better established than the story of Odysseus, Penelope, and Euryclea; both are legendary. But the Biblical narrator, the Elohist, had to believe in the objective truth of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice—the existence of the sacred ordinances of life rested upon the truth of this and similar stories. He had to believe in it passionately; or else (as may rationalistic interpreters believed and perhaps still believe) he had to be a conscious liar—no harmless liar like Homer, who lied to give pleasure, but apolitical liar with a definite end in view, lying in the interest of a claim to absolute authority.
To me the rationalistic interpretation seems psychologically absurd…
One can perfectly well entertain historical doubts on the subject of the Trojan War or of Odysseus’ wanderings, And still, when reading Homer, feel precisely the effects he sought to produce; but without believing in Abraham’s sacrifice, it is impossible to put the narrative of it to the use for which it was written.
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…it is promised that all of them, the history of al mankind, will be given their due place within its frame, will be subordinated to it. The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us—they seek to subject, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels.
In the story of Isaac, it is not only God’s intervention at the beginning and the end, but even the factual and psychological elements which come between, that are mysterious, merely touched upon, fraught with background; and therefore they require subtle investigation and interpretation, the demand them. Since so much in the story is dark and incomplete, and since the reader knows that God is a hidden God, his effort to interpret it constantly finds something new to feed upon.
…the further our historical environment is removed from that of the Biblical books; and if these nevertheless maintain their claim to absolute authority, it is inevitable that they themselves be adapted through interpretative transformation. This was for a long time comparatively easy; as late as the European Middle Ages it was possible to represent Biblical events as ordinary phenomena of contemporary life…
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The Homeric poems present a definite complex of events whose boundaries in space and time are clearly delimited…events, which do not depend upon it, can be conceived without conflict…
The Old Testament, on the other hand, presents universal history: it begins with the beginning of time, with the creation of the world, and will end with the Last Days, the fulfilling of the Covenant, with which the world will come to an end. Everything else that happens in the world can only be conceived as an element in this sequence; into it everything that is known about the world, or at least everything that touches upon the history of the Jews, must be fitted as an ingredient of the divine plan; and as this too become possible only by interpreting the new material as it poured in, the need for interpretation reaches out beyond the original Jewish-Israelitish realm of reality—for example to Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Roman history; interpretation in a determined direction becomes a general method of comprehending reality…
The most striking piece of interpretation of this sort occurred in the first century of the Christian era, in consequence of Paul’s mission to the Gentiles: Paul and the Church Fathers reinterpreted the entire Jewish tradition as a succession of figures prognosticating the appearance of Christ, and assigned the Roman Empire its proper place in the divine plan of salvation. Thus while, on the one hand, the reality of the Old Testament presents itself as complete truth with a claim to sole authority, on the other hand that very claim forces it to a constant interpretative change in its own content…
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The greater the separateness and horizontal disconnection of the stories and groups of stories in relation to one another, compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the stronger is their general vertical connection, which holds them all together and which is entirely lacking in Homer. Each of the great figures of the Old Testament, from Adam to the prophets, embodies a moment of this vertical connection.
Even Odysseus, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development, shows almost nothing of it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing and the old man whose favorite son has been torn to pieces by a wild beast!—between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord’s jealousy, and the old king, surrounded by violent intrigues…
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Now the difference between legend and history is in most cases easily perceived by a reasonably experienced reader. It is a difficult matter, requiring careful historical and philological training, to distinguish the true from the synthetic or the biased in a historical presentation; but it is easy to separate the historical from the legendary in general. Their structure is different. Even where the legendary does not immediately betray itself by elements of the miraculous, by the repetition of well-known standard motives, typical patterns and themes, through neglect of clear details of time and place, and the like, it is generally quickly recognizable by its composition. It runs far too smoothly. All cross-currents, all friction, all that is causal, secondary to the to the main events and themes, everything unresolved, truncated, and uncertain, which confuses the clear progress of the action and the simple orientation of the actors, has disappeared. The historical event which we witness, or learn from the testimony of those who witnessed it, runs much more variously, contradictorily, and confusedly; not until it has produced results in a definite domain are we able, with their help, to classify it to a certain extent; and how often the order to which we think we have attained becomes doubtful again, how often we ask ourselves if the data before us have not led us to a far too simple classification of the original events! Legend arranges its material in a simple and straightforward way…
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…yet another important distinction from Homer: namely, that a different conception of the elevated style and of the sublime is to be found here. Homer, of course, is not afraid to let the realism of daily life enter into the sublime and tragic; our episode of the scar is an example...
…the great and sublime events in the Homeric poems take place far more exclusively and unmistakably among the members of a ruling class and these are far more untouched in their heroic elevation than are the Old testament figures, who can fall much lower in dignity (consider, for example, Adam, Noah, David, Job); and finally, domestic realism, the representation of daily life, remains in Homer in the peaceful realm of the idyllic, whereas, from the very first, in the Old Testament stories, the sublime, tragic, and problematic take shape precisely in the domestic and commonplace: scenes such as those between Cain and Abel, between Noah and his sons, between Abraham, Sarah, and Haga, between Rebekah, Jacob, and Esau, and so on, are inconceivable in the Homeric style.
Old Testament stories the peace of daily life in the house, in the fields, and among the flocks, is undermined by jealousy over election and the promise of a blessing, and complications arise which would be utterly incomprehensible to the Homeric heroes.
The sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the everyday are not only actually unseparated by basically inseparable.
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The two styles, in their opposition, represent basic types: on the one hand fully externalized description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all events in the foreground, displaying unmistakable meaning, few elements of historical development and of psychological perspective; on the other hand, certain parts brought into high relief, others lofty obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed, “background” quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation, universal-historical claims, development of the concept of the historically becoming, and preoccupation with the problematic.
Since we are using the two styles, the Homeric and the Old Testament, as starting points, we have taken them as finished products, as they appear in the texts; we have disregarded everything that pertains to their origins, and thus have left untouched the question whether their peculiarities were theirs from the beginning or are to be referred wholly or in part to foreign influences. Within the limits of our purpose, a consideration of this question is not necessary; for it is in their full development, which they reached in early times, that the two styles exercised their determining influence upon the representation of reality in European literature.
2 FORTUNATA
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[Petronius’ Banquet in Latin]
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…the banquet at the house of the wealthy freedman Trimalchio—is extant in full. Our sample is chapter 37 and part of chapter 38. During dinner, the narrator, Encolpius, asks his neighbor who the woman is who keeps running back and forth through the hall. The following translation of the answer he receives attempts to do justice to its style:
That's Trimalchio's wife. Fortunata they call her. She measures money by the bushel. Yet not so long ago, not so long ago, what was she? I hope you won't mind my putting it that way, but you wouldn't have accepted a piece of bread from her hands. Now she sits on top of the world and is Trimalchio's one and only. If she tells him at high noon it's dark, he'll agree. He can't keep track of what he owns; he's so filthy rich. But that bitch looks out for everything, even where you'd least expect it. She doesn't drink; she's level-headed; her advice is good. But she has a nasty tongue and gossips like a magpie once she gets settled on her cushion. When she likes a person, she really likes him. When she hates one, she certainly hates him. Trimalchio's estates reach as far as a falcon flies. And some money he has! There's more silver in his porter's lodge than anyone man's whole estate. And the number of slaves he's got! a my God, I don't think one out of ten knows his master even by sight. Believe me, he could stick any of these louts here in his pocket. And don't you think he ever has to buy anything. Everything is produced on the premises: wool, wax, pepper, everything; if you asked for chicken milk, I'm sure they'd have it. Once, you know, he didn't produce enough high-grade wool. So he bought rams from Tarentum and had them mount his sheep. . . Look at these cushions. Every single one has purple or scarlet stuffing. Not bad to put a man's mind at ease. But his fellow freedmen are not to be despised either. They aren't badly off. Look at the one sitting all the way back there. Today he is worth eight hundred thousand, and when he started out he had nothing. Not so long ago he carried wood around on his back. But they say-of course I don't know, except that I have heard people talk about it-they say he stole a goblin's magic cap and then found a treasure. Well I won't begrudge a fellow what God has given him. Still, he has just been freed and is planning to do a lot for himself. The other day he put a notice on his place: "C. Pompeius Diogenes offers this dwelling for rent
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as of July 1st because he is buying a house.” That one there sitting with the freedmen—he used to have a nicely feathered nest too. I don’t want to say anything against him. He had a cool million. But somehow he slipped badly, and now I don’t think even the hair on his head doesn’t have a lien on it. . . .
For obvious reasons, under all that he [Petronius’ banqueter] says, lie three convictions: that wealth is the greatest good, and the more of it the better … ; that the good things of life are simply a superfluity of articles of the best quality and the opportunity to enjoy them in the most vulgar manner possible; and that, in this sense, everyone quite naturally acts for his own material advantage. Yet withal he himself is doubtless only a small or middling man, who looks upon the truly rich with honest awe. Thus the good fellow describes not only Fortunata, Trimalchio, and their guests, but without being aware of it, himself.
As in Homer, a clear and equal light floods the persons and things…
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…what is set before us is not Trimalchio’s circle as objective reality, but as a subjective image, as it exists in the mind of the speaker, who himself, however, belongs to the circle. Petronius does not say: This is so. Instead, he lets an “I,” who is identical neither with himself nor yet with the feigned narrator Encolpius, turn the spotlight of his perception on the company at table—a highly artful procedure in perspective, as sort of twofold mirroring, which I dare not say is unique in antique literature as it has come down to us, but which is most unusual there.
…the aim is an objective description of the company at table, including the speaker, through a subjective procedure.
…the viewpoint is transferred to a point within the picture, the picture thus gains in depth, and the light which illuminates it seems to come from within it. Modern writers, Proust for example, work in exactly the same way, only more consistently within the realm of the tragic and problematic…
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…rather than an impression of historical change, Homer evokes the illusion of an unchanging, a basically stable social order, in comparison with which the succession of individuals and changes in personal fortunes appear unimportant. But our guest (and in this, as in everything that he says, his feelings are those of the type he represents) has in mind actual historical change, the ups and downs of fortune. For him, the world is in ceaseless motion, nothing is certain, and wealth and social position are highly unstable.
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But in Petronius’ book the highly practical and mundane, or what we may call the intrahistorical, concept of the instability of fortune, predominates…
…find ourselves contemplating an extremely animated historico-economic picture of the perpetual ups and downs of a mob of fortune-hunters scrambling after wealth and stupid pleasures. It is easy to understand that a society of businessmen of the humblest origins is particularly suitable material for a representation of this nature, for conveying this view of things.
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…the third and possibly most important difference from the Homeric style… it is closer to our modern conception of a realistic presentation than anything else that has come down to us from antiquity; and this not so much because of the common vulgarity of its subject matter but above all because of its precise and completely unschematized fixation of the social milieu.
Comedy indicates the social milieu much more abstractly and schematically, much less specifically as to time and place; it hardly exhibits the rudiments of individualized speech in its characters. Satire, to be sure, contains much that tends in our direction, but the presentation is never so broad, it is moralistic and concerned with branding some specific vice or ridiculous trait. The romance, finally, fabula milesiaca, the genre which doubtless includes Petronius’ work, is—in the other specimens and fragments that have come down to us—so crammed with magic, adventure, and mythology, so overburdened with erotic detail, that it cannot possibly be considered an imitation of everyday life as it existed at the time—quite apart from the unrealistic and rhetorical stylization of its language.
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This too has altered in modern times. In the realistic literature of antiquity, the existence of society poses no historical problem; it may at best pose a problem in ethics, but even then the ethical question is more concerned with the individual members off society than with the social whole. No matter how many persons may be branded as given to vice or as ridiculous, criticism of vices and excesses poses the problem as one for the individual; consequently, social criticism never leads to a definition of the motive forces within society.
Had he [Petronius] done so, that is, had he established a link between his individual events or relationships and specific political and economic situations of the early imperial period, a distinct historical background would have been provided for the reader, which he could supplement with his own knowledge; and the result would have been a historical third dimension in comparison with which Petronius’ perspective, of which we spoke above, must appear but a two-dimensional surface…
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The historicity of all these things, the fact that they are determined by an era, is not in itself of interest to Petronius or his contemporary readers. But we moderns note the fact and our historians of economics base their conclusions upon it.
Here we encounter a difficult question of principle which cannot be circumvented. If the literature of antiquity was unable to represent everyday life seriously, tat is, in full appreciation of its problems and with an eye for its historical background; if it could represent it only in the low style, comically or at best idyllically, statically and ahistorically, the implication is that these things mark the limits not only of the realism of antiquity but of its historical consciousness as well. For it is precisely in the intellectual and economic conditions of everyday life that those forces are revealed which underlie historical movements; these; whether military, diplomatic, or related to the inner constitution of the state, are only the product, the final result, of variations in the depths of everyday life.
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[Revolt of the Germanic legions after the death of Augustus, in Tacitus’ Annals, Book 1 in Latin and English]
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(Thus stood affairs at Rome, when a sedition made its appearance in the legions in Pannonia, without any fresh grounds, save that the accession of a new prince promised impunity to tumult, and held out the hope of advantages to be derived from a civil war. Three legions occupied a summer camp together, commanded by Junius Blaesus, who, upon notice of the death of Augustus and accession of Tiberius, had granted the soldiers a recess from their wonted duties for some days, as a time either of public mourning or festivity. From this beginning they waxed wanton and quarrelsome, lent their ears to the discourses of every profligate, and at last they longed for a life of dissipation and idleness, and spurned all military discipline and labor. In the camp was one Percennius, formerly a busy leader of theatrical factions, after that a common soldier, of a petulant tongue, and from his experience in theatrical party zeal, well qualified to stir up the bad passions of a crowd. Upon minds uninformed, and agitated with doubts as to what might be the condition of military service now that Augustus was dead, he wrought gradually by confabulations by night, or when day verged towards its close; and when all the better-disposed had retired to their respective quarters, he would congregate all the most depraved about him.
Lastly, when now also other ministers of sedition were at hand to second his designs, in imitation of a general solemnly haranguing his men, he asked them—“Why did they obey, like slaves, a few centurions and fewer tribunes? When would they be bold enough
to demand redress, unless they approached the prince, yet a novice, and tottering on his throne, either with entreaties or arms? Enough had they erred in remaining passive through so many years, since decrepit with age and maimed with wounds, after a course of service of thirty or forty years, they were still doomed to carry arms; nor even to those who were discharged was there any end of service, but they were still kept to the colors, and under another name endured the same hardships. And if any of them survived so many dangers, still were they dragged into countries far remote, where, under the name of lands, they are presented with swampy fens, or mountain wastes. But surely, burdensome and ungainful of itself was the occupation of war;-ten asses a day the poor price of their persons and lives; out of this they must buy clothes, and tents, and arms,-out of this the cruelty of centurions must be redeemed, and occasional exemptions from duty; but, by Hercules, stripes, wounds, hard winters and laborious summers, bloody wars and barren peace, were miseries eternally to be endured; nor remained there other remedy than to enter the service upon certain conditions, as that their pay should be a denarius a day, sixteen years bet the utmost term of serving, ; beyond that period to be no longer obliged to follow the colors, but have their reward in money, paid them in the camp where they earned it. Did the praetorian guards, who had double pay,—they who after sixteen years’ service were sent home, undergo more dangers? This was not said in disparagement of the city guards; their own lot, however, was, serving among uncivilized nations, to have the enemy in view from their tents.”
The general body received this harangue with shouts of applause, but stimulated by various motives,—some showing, in all the bitterness of reproach, the marks of stripes, others their hoary heads, many their tattered vestments and naked bodies.) The Works of Tacitus. The Oxford Translation. London: Bell, 1888.
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The grievances of the soldiers discussed in Percennius’ speech [formerly a busy leader of theatrical factions, after that a common soldier, of a petulant tongue, and from his experience in theatrical party zeal, well qualified to stir up the bad passions of a crowd]—excessive length of service, hardships, insufficient pay, inadequate old-age provision, corruption, envy of the easier life of metropolitan troops—are presented vividly and graphically in a manner not frequently encountered even in modern historians. Tacitus is a great artist. Under his hands things come strikingly alive. The modern historian, we must imagine, would proceed more theoretically (one might say, more bookishly); on this occasion he would not have had Percennius speak; he would have presented a factually objective well-documented study of pay-scales and welfare provisions, or he might have referred to such a study elsewhere in his own or in some colleague’s publications.
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Time and again he dwells upon the point that only the worst elements are ready to rebel; and as for the leader Percennius, the former chief claqueur, boasting his histrionale studium and playing the general, Tacitus feels only the most profound contempt for him.
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…the ancients’ way of viewing things; it does not see forces, it sees vices and virtues, successes and mistakes. Its formulation of problems is not concerned with historical developments either intellectual or material, but with ethical judgments. But this is most intimately connected with the prevailing view which is manifested in the stylistic differentiation between the tragic-problematic and realism. Both are based upon an aristocratic reluctance to become involved with growth processes in the depths, for these processes are felt to be both vulgar and orgiastically lawless.
An ethically oriented historiography, which also on the whole proceeds in strict chronological order, is bound to use an unchangeable system of categories and hence cannot produce synthetic-dynamic concepts of the kind we are accustomed to employ today. Concepts like “industrial capitalism” or “absenteeism,” which are syntheses of characteristic data, applicable especially to specific epochs, and, on the other hand, concepts like Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romanticism, which first of all designate epochs but are also syntheses of characteristic data, sometimes applicable to epochs other than those originally designated by them, are designed to cover phenomena in motion; such phenomena are traced from their first sporadic appearance, then as they occur with progressive density, and finally as they abate and change and vanish…
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…the ethical and even the political concepts of antiquity (aristocracy, democracy, etc.) are fixed, aprioristic model concepts.
“The question, however, arises, How are we to account for the existence of comparatively large numbers of proletarians in Italy?” such a sentence, such a question, is unthinkable in an author of classical antiquity. It reaches back behind any foreground movements and seeks the changes of significance to them in processes of historical growth which no antique author observed, still less reduced to system and coherence.
…Tacitus. If he was not at all interested in the soldiers’ demands and never intended to discuss them objectively, why does he express them so graphically in Percennius’ speech? The reasons are purely aesthetic. The grand style of historiography requires grandiloquent speeches, which as a rule are fictitious. Their function is graphic dramatization (illustration) of a given occurrence, or at times the presentation of great political or moral ideas…
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Yet even if we assume that Percennius was a gifted demagogue, such brevity, incisiveness, and order are not possible in a rebellious propaganda speech, and of soldiers’ slang there is not the slightest trace. The same is true of the soldier Vibulenus’ words in chapter 22. In the very next chapter they are discounted as lies. They are certainly profoundly moving, but they nevertheless represent the highest degree of rhetorical stylization.
And this is the second distinctive characteristic of antique historiography: it is rhetorical.
…ethical and rhetorical approach are incompatible with a conception in which reality is a development of forces.
However vast the difference between the two passages here considered—the talk of the dinner guest in Petronius and the Pannonian mutiny in Tacitus—both reveal the limits of antique realism and thus of antique historical consciousness.
…again I have at my disposal documents of Jewish-Christian literature which are approximately contemporaneous with Petronius and Tacitus. I choose the story of Peter’s denial…Mark’s version.
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A tragic figure from such a background, a hero of such weakness, who yet derives the highest from his very weakness, such a to and fro of the pendulum, is incompatible with the sublime style of classical antique literature. But the nature and the scene of the conflict also fall entirely outside the domain of classical antiquity. Viewed superficially, the thing is a police action and its consequences; it takes place entirely among everyday men and women of the common people’ anything of the sort could be thought of in antique terms only as farce or comedy.
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It sets man’s whole world astir—whereas the entanglements of fate and passion which Greco-Roman antiquity knows, always directly concern simply the individual, the one person involved in them.
…only very gradually—the Acts of the Apostles show the beginnings of this development—emerges into the foreground of history…
A Greek or Roman writer describes a popular movement only as reaction to a specific practical complex of events—as Thucydides for instance…
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What considerable portions of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles describe, what Paul’s Epistles also often reflect, is unmistakably the beginning of a deep subsurface movement, the unfolding of historical forces. For this, it is essential that great numbers of random persons should make their appearance. …random being here employed to designate people from all classes, occupations, walks of life…
The antique stylistic rule according to which realistic imitation, the description of random everyday life, could only be comic (or at best idyllic), is therefore incompatible with the representation of historical forces as soon as such representation undertakes to render things concretely…
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…whatever kind of movement it may be which the New Testament writings introduced into phenomenal observation, the essential point is this: the deep subsurface layers, which were static for the observers of classical antiquity, began to move.
A scene like Peter’s denial fits into no antique genre. It is too serious for comedy, too contemporary and everyday for tragedy, politically too insignificant for history—and the form which was given it is one of such immediacy that its like does not exist in the literature of antiquity.
46
Generally speaking, direct discourse is restricted in the antique historians to great continuous speeches delivered in the Senate or before a popular assembly or a gathering of soldiers, in which connection the reader may remember what we said above in regard of Percennius’ speech. But here—in the scene of Peter’s denial—the dramatic tension of the moment when the actors stand face to face has been given a salience and immediacy compared with which the dialogue (stichomythy) of antique tragedy appears highly stylized. Comedy, satire, and the like may not properly be adduced for purposes of comparison; but in them too one would have to look hard to find anything of similar immediacy. In the Gospels, however, one encounters numerous face-to-face dialogues.
Different as Petronius and Tacitus may be in a great many respects, they have the same viewpoint—they look down from above. Tacitus writes from a vantage point which surveys the fullness of events and transactions.
47
Petronius… His book is a product of the highest culture and he expects his readers to have such a high level of social and literary culture that they will perceive, without doubt or hesitation, every shade of social blundering and of vulgarity in language and taste.
…such refined cross-purposes, with such an array of sociological and psychological presuppositions , as no popular audience could tolerate.
…comparisons with works of modern realism are never quite to the point, because the latter contain more in the way of serious problems.
On the other hand, the story of Peter’s denial, and generally almost the entire body of New Testament writings, is written from within the emergent growths and directly for everyman.
48
Tacitus and Petronius endeavor to give us a sensory impression…
The author of the Gospel according to Saint Mark … purely through the inner movement of what he relates, the story becomes virtually concrete.
…everybody is urged and indeed required to take sides for or against it.
Yet the negative reaction which aroused Jerusalem, both among the Jewish leaders and among the majority of the people, forced the movement to embark upon the tremendous venture of missionary work among the Gentiles, which was characteristically begun by a member of the Jewish diaspora, the Apostle Paul.
The total content of the sacred writings was placed in an exegetic context which often removed the thing told very far from its sensory base, in that the reader or listener was forced to turn his attention away from the sensory occurrence and toward its meaning. This implied the danger that the visual element of the occurrences might succumb under the dense texture of meaning.
49
What is perceived by the hearer or reader or even, in the plastic and graphic arts, by the spectator, is weak as a sensory impression, and all one’s interest is directed toward the context of meanings. In comparison, the Greco-Roman specimens of realistic presentation are, though less serious and fraught with problems and far more limited in their conception of historical movement, nevertheless perfectly integrated in their sensory substance. They do not know the antagonism between sensory appearance and meaning, an antagonism which permeates the early, and indeed the whole, Christian view of reality.
3 THE ARREST OF PETER VALVOMERES
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…mob riot in Rome.
51
The following translation attempts to preserve the strangely baroque
style of the original:
While that carrion crew was causing these catastrophes of general destruction, Leontius, governor of the Eternal City, gave many evidences of being an excellent judge-speedy in hearings, most just in decisions, by nature benevolent, though he seemed to some to be severe in the matter of maintaining his authority and over-inclined toward sensual love. Now the first cause of a rebellion breaking out against him was of the basest and slightest. For Philocomus, the charioteer, having been ordered to be arrested, the whole mob following him, as if defending the most precious treasure, set upon the prefect with dreadful tumult, to intimidate him; but he, firm and erect, ordering the police to intervene, had some seized and flogged and, while not a man murdered or resisted, sentenced them to deportation few days later, when the mob, again roused to its usual heat, alleging the scarcity of wine, congregated at the Septemzodium—a much frequented place, where the emperor Marcus had erected the ostentatious edifice of the Nymphaeum; there the prefect, purposely proceeding thither, was earnestly entreated by all his officials and attendants not to risk himself among the arrogant and threatening multitude, still angry from their earlier riot; he, being hard to frighten, went straight on, so that some of his following deserted him, though he was hastening into imminent danger. And so, sitting in his carriage, with an imposing confidence, he gazed with piercing eyes into the faces of the packed crowd raging all about like serpents; he steadfastly endured many shameful words; then recognizing one who was conspicuous among the rest by his great stature and red hair, he asked him if he was not Peter, surnamed Valvomeres, as he had heard; and when the man replied in blustering tones that he was, he ordered him, as a leader of the rioters long known to him, over the protests of very many, to be strung up [for a flogging] with his hands tied behind his back. When he was seen aloft, vainly imploring the help of his cronies, the whole mob, which had only a little before thronged together, now diffused through the various arteries of the city and vanished, so that this most fervid inciter of mobs having had his sides harrowed open as if in a secret judgment chamber, was transported to Picenum; where later, having dared to rape a girl of not unillustrious family, he was sentenced by the consul Patrulinus and underwent capital punishment.
52
Much of what we said in the preceding chapter concerning Tacitus’ description of the soldiers’ revolt applies to the present passage as well…
…Ammianus is still less inclined than Tacitus to concern himself with objective problems and to give a thorough analysis of the causes leading up to the riot, or of the condition of the Roman populace. Nothing, it seems to him, except their stupid effrontery is behind the Roman mob’s unrest. It is quite possible that he is right in his attitude. The metropolitan masses had for centuries been spoiled by every government, they had been trained to idleness, and cannot have amounted to much. Yet a modern historian would have taken up the question of how such a state of affairs had come about, he would have discussed the problem of the mob’s corruption, or at the very least have touched upon it.
…as soon as the mob sees that one of their number is treated as all of them apparently deserve to be, the lose heart and vanish from the scene.
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…the soothsayer or “mathematician” Heliodorus, a professional informer who has had an incredibly successful career: he is now a gourmet, abundantly provided with money for his whores; he promenades his somber face through the city, where everyone fears him; he frequents houses of prostitution openly and eagerly…
57
...the refined reserve gives way to a somber pomp; and, against its will as it were, the style renders a greater sensoriness than would originally have been compatible with gravitas, yet gravitas itself is by no means lost, but on the contrary is heightened.
58
The choice of words is studied throughout, but in complete contrast to classical practice, which saw the choice and the studied in refined periphrases of sensory phenomena and allowed no one but the poet to depict them (though he too had to keep aloof from life in its present realities, if he wanted to avoid the low style of satire or comedy…
59
Judged by classical standards, the style, both in diction and syntax, is overrefined and exaggeratedly sensory; its effects are powerful but distorted. Its effects are as distorted as the reality it represent.
…it is also true that the horrible always engenders counterforces and that in most epochs of atrocious occurrences the great vital forces of the human soul reveal themselves: love and sacrifice, heroism in the service of conviction, and the ceaseless search for possibilities of a purer existence. Nothing of the sort is to be found in Ammianus.
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It is clear that Ammianus’ manner of presentation signifies the complete coming of age of something in the making since Seneca and Tacitus—that is, a highly rhetorical style in which the gruesomely sensory has gained a large place; a somber and highly rhetorical realism which is totally alien to classical antiquity. Such a mixture of rhetorical devices of the most refined sort with a glaring and boldly distorted realism can be studied at a much earlier period an on much lower levels of style: in Apuleius for instance…