D. The Latin Tradition 4 page

The authors discussed thus far were the principal philosophical and cultural sources that transmitted a knowledge of the intellectual world of Greece and Rome to the Latin West. Their influence was widespread and demonstrable, and we shall see when we turn to the later Middle Ages that this influence remained strong until the twelfth century and beyond. There is another body of literature, that of the mythographers, that had a comparable role in keeping alive the interpretive tradition, and here again the influence of the texts can be traced through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. This large and complex literature cannot be explored in depth here, but a sample will suffice to indicate the nature of the stories and interpretations transmitted.

The mythographer Fulgentius was in all probability a contemporary

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of Boethius's, and is probably to be identified with a sainted bishop of Ruspe in North Africa, known also through his surviving theological writings, who died in 533.^[180] Fulgentius's Mitologiarum libri tres constitutes a retelling and interpretive analysis of fifty mythological tales. It is interesting to contrast Fulgentius's attitude toward the stories of the pagans with that of Augustine. For Augustine, in an environment in which paganism still constituted a vital threat to Christian orthodoxy, the pagan stories were pernicious and distracting, and attempts to explain and assimilate them to Christian values appeared not only futile but undesirable. For Fulgentius, a century later, at Ruspe (less than 300 km. from Hippo Regius), the situation was radically different and the tools of etymology and allegory are freely applied to pagan stories to harness their esthetic appeal to Christian ends.

The majority of Fulgentius's expositions of myth turn on etymologies, and it must be admitted that these are among the most outrageous specimens of a class of speculation in which extravagant free association is the norm. It is to be assumed that Fulgentius's command of Greek was limited, and of course his historical perspective on the development of language was rudimentary and faulty, but these facts can hardly be held against him. He stands, after all, halfway between the time of Augustine and that of Isidore of Seville, in whose Etymologiae the whole of human knowledge is organized around etymologies. Fulgentius's explanations of words are seldom convincing, but in the midst of this methodological chaos, there is a single sound procedure (though even this can be misused). A considerable number of Fulgentius's etymologies for the names of mythological characters are derived from or illustrated by quotations from Homer, presented as authoritative touchstones for the meanings of Greek words.^[181] This is certainly a modest and easily defensible use of Homer as authority, and it is Fulgentius's most characteristic form of appeal to him.^[182]

[180] This is in any case the opinion of Rudolf Helm, the modem editor of Fulgentius (in the preface of his edition, pp. iii-iv), and the reasons for denying the identification seem to stem largely from the deep-seated prejudice against the ancient allegorists, rather than from any solid historical information. See for example Otto Hiltbrunner in KP (2.628): "Gegen die Identität spricht die Torheit des Mythographen, die dem Bischof kaum zuzutrauen ist."

^[181]

[182] On Fulgentius's twenty-four citations of Homer, see Vincenzo Ciaffi, Fulgenzio e Petronio , pp. 54-55. Ciaffi has calculated that Fulgentius had at hand a selection from the Iliad that probably included the whole of books 1 and 2 and at least the Glaucus and Diomedes episode of book 6.

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The stories from Homer explained in Fulgentius are not conceived of as being more authoritative than other stories. It is clear, too, that although Fulgentius retained a command of Greek unusual for his time and culture, the tales of the Greeks had reentered the oral tradition for him. He is concerned with myths, not texts, and his analyses and interpretations focus on names, first of all, and then on motifs. The predominant mode of Fulgentius's allegory is moral, but the various modes are never neatly separable. Here, for example, is his explanation of the Sirens:

THE TALE OF ULYSSES AND THE SIRENS

The Sirens' name means "attracters," for most men are attracted in various ways by the enticement of love, either by a song, or a pretty face, or a way of acting—for some are loved [lacuna] for the beauty of their faces and some for their lewd habits. Those whom Ulysses' companions pass by with their ears blocked, he himself passes bound. Ulysses' name is the Greek olonxenos , that is, "stranger to all," and since wisdom is a stranger to all the things of this world, it is ingeniously called "Ulysses." Thus he both hears and sees—that is, perceives and judges—the Sirens (that is, the enticements of pleasure), and yet passes by. And because they are heard, they are dead, for in the senses of the wise man every passion dies away. They are flying things because they quickly penetrate the minds of lovers, and they have chickens' feet because the passion of lust scatters all that it grasps, and finally that is why they are called "Sirens," for sirene

is in Greek "draw, attract."^[183]

Since stories such as this are not directly linked to Homer by Fulgentius, these interpretive exercises are of limited value in elucidating the transmission of the divine Homer. It is nevertheless true that Fulgentius cites Homer more frequently than any other Greek author and treats him as an authoritative source (albeit primarily only for the meanings of words),

[183] Fabula Ulixis et Sirenarum. Sirenae enim Grece tractoriae dicuntur; tribus enim modis amoris inlecebra trahitur, aut cantu aut uisu aut consuetudine, amantur enim quaedam . . . quaedam speciei uenustate, quaedam etiam lenante consuetudine. Quas Ulixis socii obturatis auribus transeunt, ipse uero religatus transit. Ulixes enim Grece quasi olonxenos id est omnium peregrinus dicitur; et quia sapientia ab omnibus mundi rebus peregrina est, ideo astutior Ulixes dictus est. Denique Sirenas, id est delectationum inlecebras, et audiuit et uidit id est agnouit et iudicauit, et tamen transiit. Nihilominus ideo et quia auditae sunt, mortuae sunt; in sensu enim sapientis omnis affectus emoritur; ideo uolatiles, quia amantum mentes celeriter permeant; inde gallinaceos pedes, quia libidinis affectus omnia quae habet spargit; nam denique et Sirenes dictae sunt: sirene enim Grece trahere dicitur (Fulg. Mit . 2.8 [all]).

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and that Fulgentius was read and utilized along with Servius, Macrobius, and Martianus Capella by the mythographers of the late Middle Ages, starting at least with Albricus (d. ca. 1217), whose influence on Petrarch is demonstrable.^[184]

Our survey of the use of Homer by the Latin Platonists of the third to the sixth centuries cannot claim to constitute proof that Homer was universally conceived of in the Latin Middle Ages as a visionary sage who covertly revealed a Platonic model of reality and the fate of souls in his poems. It does, however, indicate that authors such as Calcidius, Macrobius, and Boethius, whose influence on the medieval mind was enormous, referred to such a figure when they referred to Homer. The Homeric tales largely returned to the oral tradition during the Middle Ages and became thoroughly dissociated from the poetry that had been their vehicle. The name tradition associated with that poetry took on a life of its own.

If the Homer depicted by Dante resembles the Homer of Martianus Capella, it is because in the absence of a text, the fragmentarily transmitted portrait of the visionary bard that emerged from the philosophical tradition of late antiquity was the one that prevailed. This portrait could be sketched only in its general outline in 1300, and much of the detail that had enriched it a millennium earlier in the commentaries of Porphyry and Proclus had been lost. Still, it was not as insubstantial as the "divine" Homer of Plato—couched in ironies and deprived of authority—had been. Even in its reduced, transmitted form it implied a structure of meaning and a philsophical content to be found in epic poetry that were the products not of a creative but of an interpretive tradition, one that had survived the text it interpreted.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 637