4 German Novels on Classical Themes

The intense German interest in Classical culture had, by the late 18th century, extended into plays, poems and novels on Classical themes by Goethe (Iphigenie auf Tauris, for example), Wieland (Geschichte des Agathons and many other works) and others. In this post I will examine 4 German novels of the 20th century which use Classical subject matter in 4 distinctly different ways.

Lion Feuchtwanger, born 1884 in Munich, died 1958 in Los Angeles, published Der falsche Nero in 1936. An English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir, The Pretender,  appeared in 1937. Out of brief ancient accounts of several different men who claimed to be the emperor Nero after Nero had died, Feuchtwanger weaves the tale of Terence the potter, who bears a striking resemblance to the late Emperor, is used by powerful men who persuade him to lead an uprising, and then leave him to be exposed and crucified after he has served his purpose. 

 

The resemblance of Terence to Hitler, and of other characters to leading Nazis and German capitalists, is obvious, but Feuchtwanger's narrative skill and attention to historical detail make this novel fascinating.

Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil, published simultaneously in June 1945 with Jean Starr Untermeyer's English translation The Death of Virgil, is one of the most highly-acclaimed German novels of the 20th century. Broch's prose style, employing stream of consciousness techniques, has been compared to that of his friend James Joyce. 

Broch was Jewish, and was arrested by the Nazis when they annexed his native Austria in 1938. It was during this period of arrest, assuming he would die soon, that Broch developed the concept of his novel about the death of Vergil: in Broch's version, Vergil is old and very ill when the Emperor Augustus summons him to an audience, and dies on the Journey home. In Broch's version of events, Vergil's determined to destroy his copy -- the only copy a that point -- of the Aeneid, but is prevented by the Emperor from doing so. Contemporary scholars debate whether Vergil saw Augustus and his new Empire in a positive or negative light. Broch's Vergil see the new state of things as a disaster, as the end of a world, and asks whether literature makes any sense in such a time. Broch asks the same questions, by clear implication, about writing fiction while the Third Reich is waging war. He's asking: aren't there mosre important things to do than to indulge in literature's vanity and hypocrisy?

It's ironic, and Broch clearly knows it's ironic: he's asking such questions in a literary work of the highest level of sophistication and exuberance. The fact that the novel exists and is written to the end may be seen as an answer. Maybe.

Ernst Schnabel published Der sechste Gesang (The Sixth Chorus) in 1951. I do not know whether there is an English translation. The novel is a fairly straightforward prose version parts of the Odyssey (and the last part of the fifth) in which Odysseus, shipwrecked, swims ashore on the beach of Scheria, is welcomed by the beautiful princess Nausikaa, and learns the inhabitants of the island have heard of his deeds, causing him to reflect on what it means to be a man, about fame, honour, duty, and all of that. 

Sten Nadolny's novel Ein Gott der Frechheit, published in 1994, with an English translation, The God of Impertinence, published in 1997, is somewhat different than the other three described in this post. In this story, in the year 1990, Hermes, the messenger-god, the god of merchants, thieves, frivolity and other things, breaks free from his confinement within a cliff in a volcanic Greek island, where he has been chained for over 2000 years, because he finally became too frivolous even for the Olympian gods, who, most of them anyway, never were known to be humourless. 

In Nadolny's version of things, the Greek gods, being immortal, are all still around, but they tend to hide themselves from humans. The newly-freed Hermes, true to form, does not conform to this, or to much else. 

This book is wonderfully full of many degrees of humor, from deadpan irony to unrestrained slapstick and back again, as gracefully as can be. It is profoundly funny. What is its message? I don't know. Maybe Nadolny's only intention was to amuse. Maybe there are messages here which can't be easily summed up. Maybe I'm just a bit slow. Maybe experts in Hermetic literature would say Aha and... I don't know. But I'm pretty sure most of you would enjoy this book.

The Continuity of the Classical Tradition

Joel and Ethan Coen have famously said that neither of them has ever read Homer's Odyssey, and implied that the credits to their film O Brother Where Art Thou?, which say that their screenplay is "based on Homer's Odyssey," should be taken with a chuckle. And yet, even if the credits had not mentioned Homer, anyone with a passing familiarity with the plot of the Odyssey could've seen the big obvious parallels, from the protagonist being named Ulysses, to the many adventures suffered by Ulysses and his companions on their way home, to the characters clearly based on the Sirens and the Cyclops, to Ulysses' having to to defeat a suitor to win back his bride once he's home, to name but a few.

Some might see it as a sign of the collapse of Western civilization that Joel and Ethan Coen, two of the most well-respected artists in contemporary culture, have not read Homer -- but look at it another way: Homer is still so much a part of our culture that they didn't need to read the Odyssey in order to make a great film based upon it.

In 1997 Charles Frazier published his first novel, Cold Mountain, the story of a man who deserts the Confederate Army near the end of the American Civil War and embarks on a long and hazardous journey to return to the love of his life -- a novel based on the Odyssey, and perhaps the best-reviewed American novel of the past 25 years. Since then, many books based on the Odyssey have been published, notably Margaret Atwood's novel The Penelopiad, which re-tells the story from the point of view of Odysseus' Penelope. In 1922 James Joyce published Ulysses, one of the most highly-regarded novels of the 20th century, and one very self-consciously and minutely following the plot of the Odyssey.

And those are just a few of the most prominent imitations of the poem. Just to name every well-received novel, poem, film, play, ballet and other work of art made in the 20th or 21st century based on the Odyssey would fill up a longish blog post, even if I stuck to just the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, whose 20th- and 21st-century culture I happen to know somewhat better than that of the rest of the world. I'm not well-acquainted with the literature of the Caribbean, but I do know that the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, of Saint Lucia, wrote a book-length poem, Omeros, which is based on the Iliad.

Looking at the cream of recent Western culture, it would seem that the continuity of the Classical tradition is mightily strong indeed. (And by the way: in the abundance of re-tellings of Homer, recent Western civilization resembles every single earlier epoch.) But some might say that it has declined drastically, and point to academia, always closely related to ambitious fiction and poetry, but never identical to them, to make that case. But I am not so sure. It's a matter of how you look.

Up until about a century ago, Western academia was with very few exceptions the preserve of affluent white men, a fairly small club which saw itself as the inheritors and preservers of, among other things, ancient Greek and Latin literature. Since then, much greater numbers of people have been going to college, primarily from groups which had been mostly excluded from it before: women, ethnic minorities and people who aren't quite so rich. Understandably, not everyone in these groups new to academia shares all of the same opinions about what is important as the traditional core of rich white guys. Some lament a decline of the study of the Classics, and compared to academia as a whole, there's no doubt that Classics have a smaller place than they had a century ago. But in terms of the actual numbers of people studying ancient Greek and Latin, writing books about it, teaching it to others and editing Classical texts -- well, there, I don't know how the actual total numbers today compared to those of a century ago, and I don't know whether anyone else knows either. If you know, please tell me! If you think you know, well, don't feel compelled to share your opinions. I have my opinions and am familiar with those of some other people. What I don't have are actual numbers.

It may well be that there is one huge advantage enjoyed by Classical Studies today compared to a century ago: it may be that the general level of enthusiasm in Classical departments is much higher today -- when no study of the Classics is required in most universities, meaning that the Classics departments are filled with students who have chosen to be there -- than a century ago, when a certain amount of Classical study was required of every single rich white guy, in college and before college, and to many of them, perhaps most, the Classics were a loathsome chore, to be endured and then, if possible, forgotten.

The 6 Most Important Things In Western Civilization

In chronological order:

1. A garbage dump. The garbage dump outside of Oxyrhynchus, which was a city founded in Egypt after Alexander conquered the area in 332 BC and abandoned after the Arabs conquered it in AD 641. For the nearly 1000 years in between, people lived in Oxyrhynchus and threw garbage into big heaps outside of town. This garbage included papyrus with stuff written on it. Most ancient papyrus with stuff written on it has rotted away long ago, but some has survived because it was put into jars as in the cases of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library, or into coffins with dead people, or, in the case of these garbage heaps at Oxyrhyncchus, because the climate just happened to be just exactly right. A huge amount of papyrus was recovered there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A little over 5000 pieces, a small fraction of the total, have been edited and published so far, including many copies of existing and previously-lost Classical Greek texts and a few very important for the study of Classical Latin.

2. Pope Gregory the Great. Important in a bad way: on his watch (he was Pope from 590 to 604) much of Classical literature went missing. In the case one Classical author after another, we have records of their being known, such as quotes or other mentions, up until the late 6th century. Did Gregory intentionally destroy all copies of Livy which came into his grasp? I can't prove that he did, but it doesn't matter. He was far and away the most powerful man of his time. He thought that the End was Near, that Hell was full with the souls of sinners and volcanoes were places were Hell was spilling over, and a lot of Classical literature, and competency in the Greek language, disappeared on his watch. Intent or incompetency, who cares? He's guilty, case closed.

3. Petrarch. Perhaps many of you know him as one of the three first great writers in Italian, along with Dante and Boccaccio, and that's fine and all, but nevermind that because Petrarch, in the 14th century, also started the Renaissance. Many people all along, all through the Dark and Middle Ages, had made heroic efforts to preserve the great literature of ancient Greece and Rome -- mention must be made of Cassadorius, who lived around the same time as Gregory and preserved much of the ancient literature Gregory destroyed either by intent or neglect -- but Petrarch is the greatest of them all. Many of the best manuscripts of ancient Latin literature we have today are copies made by Petrarch.

4. The 19th century. There actually seems to have been an increase, in the 19th century , of the number of people who studied the Classics. Many a 19th-century author writing in a vernacular quoted copiously from the Latin Classics, and didn't bother to translate, assuming that his audience was fluent. A few even assumed the same with Greek.

The recovery of texts in palimpsest, begun in the late 18th century, really got rolling in the 19th, with Cardinal Angelo Mai, librarian of the Vatican, leading the way.

I'm sure many of you have heard of the Oxford Classical Texts, begun late in the 19th century. I wonder how many of my non-German readers realize that the Teubner series, begun in the mid-19th century, is what the Oxford Classical Texts want to be when they grow up. The Oxford series is a wonderful thing, but it was begun in conscious imitation of Teubner, and Teubner continues to be the standard, with the largest numbers of titles in print, in volumes of the highest standards of construction.

They really are nice, you should check them out.

5. The Internet. Do you remember how, in the late 20th century, so many people predicted that technology would accelerate the dying-out of the more obscure languages? It has done the opposite. Remember how, in the early days of the Internet, it was predicted that languages not written in Latin letters, such as Greek, Russian, Arabic and Chinese, would be pushed out by technology? They learned how to format those languages, though, didn't they? No change of browser required any longer.

In the case of the Classics, there are wonderful online resources such as the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, the Rheinisches Museum and What's New in Papyrology, to name just a few.

6. The relentless onward march of technology. Like multi-spectral imaging, with which texts on papyri and parchment which had been considered unreadable because of wear and tear, dirt or overwriting suddenly come forth into clear view.

Teubner, Foremost Among Classical Publishers

Before 1851 many publishers had already produced volumes of the Greek and Latin classics, but Teubner, in Leipzig, was the first to dedicate a series entirely to them. The series, called the Bibliotheca Teubneriana or the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana, started in 1851 and it's still going. People call the series Teubner, although the publisher Teubner is not confined to this series of Classical texts. In fact, the publisher Teubner no longer publishes the Classical series Teubner: in 1999 Teubner sold the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana to the publisher KG Saur, and in 2006 the publisher De Gruyter acquired Saur. But through all that, and also through a period between the end of WWII and German re-unification when some of the volumes of the Bibliotheca Teubneriana continued to be published in Leipzig while others were published in Stuttgart, the series has remained very much a unified, consistent and continuous thing.

From within a very few years after its beginning until today, the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana has offfered a greater range of Classical titles than any other publisher. It's probably also maintained the highest reputation for Classical scholarship and quality among publishers. It's true that in the cases of many individual titles, the Osford Classical Texts will offer was is considered by most to be the standard text. And within the past few decades, Loeb and Bude have begun to compete for that prestige, and in some cases one of them have offered the preferred text. Still, I think, Teubner must be considered the pre-eminent publisher in their field.

A few decades after the Bibliotheca Teubneriana started publishing in 1851, someone had the idea of giving the covers of all of the volumes the Greek texts one color, and the Latin texts another. In Teubner's case, from the late 19th century until today, it's been orange for Greek and blue for Latin.

This idea has caught on with other publishers, so that now we have Loeb volumes with green covers for Greek and red covers for Latin, and orange for Latin and green for Greek for the Medieval texts in Brepols' series Corpus Christianorum.

The Oxford Classical Texts started in the 1890's and the oldest volumes in that series, both Greek and Latin, have orange covers which make them look very much like Teubner's Greek titles.

Today, the Oxford Classical Texts, also known as the OCT, all have black covers, but the Greek titles have blue dust jackets and the Latin titles have green ones.

My main concern about Teubner is the same as with publishers of Classics in general: the volumes get thinner while the prices go up. Well, and also, as I mentioned in a previous blog post, along with getting thinner the Teubner volumes keep getting taller and wider, and therefore more and more impossible to fit into any pocket. That too is inconvenient.

My Search For The Lost Books Of Livy

[Edited 25. February 2015]

Some scholars of the Classics reading the title of this post, assuming that any such scholar ever will, might well laugh and wonder whether I'm joking or simpleminded. I hope I'm neither, but I myself smiled as I chose that title, and I know that the Classical scholars who would hear of such a search with anything other than derision might be few or non-existent. That's okay. I'm quite used to being sneered at and made fun of by Biblical scholars because they haven't convinced me yet that Jesus existed, and so being made fun of because I'm not convinced that those 107 lost books of Livy don't still exist somewhere wouldn't be an entirely new experience for me. In fact, in a way I can understand such derision, because how are academics supposed to be able to tell me apart at first glance from a fan of popular contemporary mythicists (as those who are unconvinced that Jesus existed are called) like Carrier, Price, Doherty and/or of the "History Channel"? I feel that I'm pretty unique among the non-mainstream, that I resemble an academic in many ways and that my lack of an academic career is due to my autism and not because I can't keep up with what the pros are talking about. It seems that way to me, but have I done anything so far to prove to the pros that I'm someone to be taken seriously in the field of ancient history? I have not. On the contrary, the autism, the lack of credentials, the complete lack of peer-reviewed papers, the eccentric views on Jesus and Livy's lost books are all red flags. I know this, and it's okay.

I think I respect the academic mainstream more than do most of the most popular contemporary mythicists. I don't know if there's a term corresponding to "mythicist" to describe someone looking for Livy's lost books. In fact, I don't know of anyone else at all besides me who's currently looking. And the less-than-admiring opinion of such an undertaking on the part of the academic mainstream does give me pause. I would just say to the deriders and head-shakers: a searcher doesn't have to find what he's looking for in order for his search to have been worthwhile. Successful or not, if he searches well, he will find all sorts of things he wasn't looking for.

But I must make clear, and this isn't false modesty, it's accurate, that my search for the lost books so far has been feeble and entirely amateurish. I hope that may change eventually.

The trail of the lost books goes cold in the late 6th century. There is fragmentary evidence of them up until that time:

A condensed version of the entire work, all 142 books, known as the periochae. A volume edited by Otto Jahn in the 19th century contains the periochae, 106 pages in this edition, probably about 1% as many words as the original, and then, 29 pages long, the so-called prodigies of Julius Obsequens: mentions of comets, earthquakes, famines, swarms of bees and other unusual things occuring in Livy's work. Obsequens' work itself does not survive whole: we have only his descriptions of the prodigies in Livy's books 56 through 132. Both the author of the periochae and Obsequens are thought to have worked in the 4th century.

Then there is Florus, whose history of Rome, about as long as the periochae, focusing mainly on military matters, is drawn mostly from Livy, and rarely studied today for any other reason than to learn about Livy.

11 pages of fragments from the lost books were collected and included in an out-of-print edition of books 41-45, edited by William Weissenborn and Moritz Mueller, published by Teubner.

Those 5 books, 41-45, are now known to us from a single manuscript, which was written in the 5th century, circulated for a while and then was discovered collecting dust on a shelf in a monastery in Switzerland in the 16th century. It seems that this manuscript was originally only half of a manuscript containing books 41-50. 46-50 are currently at large.

In a very famous letter from the year 401, on p 239 of the MGH edition of his works, ISBN 3-921575-19-2, the Roman patrician Quintus Aurelius Symmachus informs his friend Valerian that his entire household is engaged in an edition of Livy's works.

These are some of the clues we have to the possible whereabouts of those missing 107 books. Symmachus owned quite a number of villas in Italy. Recently an ancient villa thought possibly to be the one where that edition of Livy was made has been excavated along with its surroundings, leading to some speculation about the possibility of coming across interesting texts.

An enormous amount of writing on ancient papyrus, as well as some on parchment, has been found in Egypt since the 19th century, and some continues to be found, mostly in Egypt but some to the east. Finds like the Dead Sea Scrolls and Gnostic Gospels make a lot of headlines, but they're a tiny fraction of all of the ancient texts found. Most of the texts are in Greek, the dominant language of the eastern Roman Empire, but some are Latin. A couple of the finds were a few dozen words each of Livy, 1 from book 1 (known) and 1 from book 11 (lost!) and a third was a condensed version of books 37-40 (known) and 48-55 (lost!).

So you see, we actually are finding parts of the lost books. There's that codex containing books 41-45 recovered in the 16th century. The most spectacular find since then is a palimpsest of about 1000 words from book 91, contained among those fragments in Weissenborn and Mueller's volume mentioned above. The most spectacular find since then was that parchment containing several dozen words of book 11. That was found in the 1980's. The deriders would say that I, along with anyone else like me, in case there is anyone else like me on this subject, am ignoring a pattern of drastically diminishing returns. I would respond that they're displaying a can't-do attitude.

What can we do? We can take all of the things I have listed above and use them as clues as to where to look for more. We can think about the time when the trail went cold, the late 6th century. The darkest part of the Dark Ages in Western Europe. The reign of Pope Gregory the Great -- not so great from the point of view of Classical scholars. Did he order the destruction of the works of Livy? If so, what we possess is what survived a deliberate destruction, and we need to think about where the books currently lost may have been hidden to escape Gregory's troops. If Gregory had nothing to do with the loss, if the books disappeared from view in the general random chaos of the wars of the time, where would they have been most well-protected from all that chaos? (Just as in the hypothetical case of an anti-Livy campaign by Gregory, so too in the general-chaos hypothesis, the lost books could have been hidden by design, or merely happened to be in the right place, away from danger.) The authors who included fragments of Livy in their works, the last people we know to have possessed the lost books -- what can we learn about their lives, about their surroundings, about what could have happened to their possessions including the books they owned? What can that palimpsest of those 1000 words from book 91 tell us about where to look for similar palimpsests? Weissenborn and Mueller included another palimpsest text, which they say comes from book 136. Most scholars today say it's not from Livy at all but a passage written by Sallust. Who's right? How many libraries and monasteries and attics and studies remain in a state sufficiently disorganized to warrant their being combed through for what we're looking for?

So. If you see me with a look on my face like I'm a million miles away, chances are good that this is the sort of thing I'm turning over in my mind. This is actually much more interesting to me than whether or not Jesus existed.

Tom Paine vs the Classics, Part II

Along with new weights and measures and a new calender, the French Revolution introduced new fashions, including short hair in the style of the ancient democrats of Greece and Rome. Neither Robespierre nor Paine cut their hair in the classical style, but many younger people did, for example Napoleon. Jacques-Louis David painted very popular pictures on Roman themes. Classicism remained evident in architecture and theatre. One wonders how far the taste for classical styles was bound up with the cultivation of classical languages, or, indeed, if many of the people who dressed and cut their hair in the new way were even aware that they were copying the Romans. Presumably many people, whatever the length of their hair or their aesthetic tastes, and whatever their politics, would have rejected out of hand Paine's assertion that all the useful books of antiquity had been translated, and that therefore learning Latin and Greek was a waste of time. One of course cannot blame the decline of classical education on Paine; this decline had begun before him and continued after him, it was a gradual slipping away from one kind of learning into another. I assume that a conscious rejection of classical studies comparable in vehemence to Paine's was and remains rather rare. Among those few dull people who have read with enthusiasm the whole of The Age of Reason -- I've only read the above-cited passage and a little more, and I'm convinced that I've had enough Paine to last me my whole life. One doesn't have to drink the whole ocean to know that it's salty. A little sip will do --among Paine's actual readers, the main interest of The Age of Reason presumably has to do much more with its Deist philosophy than with specific points like language.

Apparently Thomas Edison was an enthusiastic reader of Paine, and helped to re-popularize him a century after his death. Here is Edison on Paine:

"I have always regarded Paine as one of the greatest of all Americans. Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this republic . . . It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine's works in my boyhood . . . it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker's views on political and theological subjects. Paine educated me, then, about many matters of which I had never before thought. I remember, very vividly, the flash of enlightenment that shone from Paine's writings, and I recall thinking, at that time, 'What a pity these works are not today the schoolbooks for all children!' My interest in Paine was not satisfied by my first reading of his works. I went back to them time and again, just as I have done since my boyhood days."

Paine and Edison each did a lot to improve the lot of their fellow man. It would be foolish to try to paint them in an entirely negative light. Still, I think that we have now and again had intelligences which were, in this respect or that, somewhat sounder. Let's take another example of an American widely regarded as a genius and a hero, Edison's close personal friend Henry Ford. On the one hand, for decades he paid extraordinarily high entry-level wages to his laborers, wages which changed many lives for the better and forced other companies to pay fairer wages, too; and he gave these high wages to many black employees at a time when it was quite unusual, and took some courage, to do so. On the other hand, he was an anti-semite and an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis. And he offered his famously high wages only to those of his employees who, as far as he was able to determine, led their lives in a manner of which he approved; he established a "Sociological Department" in the Ford corporation to spy upon his employees. And he opposed labor unions with especially brutal tactics.

It is not very far from Paine's "As there is now nothing new to be learned from the dead languages, all the useful books being already translated, the languages are become useless, and the time expended in teaching and in learning them is wasted." to Ford's "History is bunk." It certainly is bunk when studied and taught as Paine and Bryan and Edison and Ford did. The illiteracy in Latin and Greek which Paine advocated has as its result an inability to improve on the historical teachings of our predecessors whenever they relied on Latin or Greek texts, to correct their errors in translation, or to know that there may indeed be books in Latin or Greek which are useful and as yet untranslated. To say nothing of previously-lost texts in these languages, ancient and more recent, which are still being discovered now and then. (It makes my head hurt just to consider Paine's assertions for the very brief time it takes to refute them!) Ignorance of these two old, allegedly dead languages, and of Hebrew, allows such nonsense as "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," which Ford published in his Dearborn newspaper, to crop up relatively unchallenged. Such ignorance is in line with a reliance on the Bible as the ultimate source of truth -- as THE book, from the Greek "biblius," meaning "book," any book -- and the consequent will to attack any other line of thought which contradicts this ultimate source, just as Bryan did at the Scopes "monkey" trial. Furthermore, how well can you understand even one book if you only know that one book?

Naturally, not everyone can learn everything, and even the brightest human mind cannot understand every language. There may be or may sometime have been someone so blessed with understanding as to be truly fluent, not only in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but in Arabic and Chinese and Sanskrit and Persian, Japanese and and Mongolian and Georgian and Armenian, Nahuatl, Mayan languages, Coptic, Cherokee and Swahili as well. Even such a genius, however, would be ignorant of the foundations of many of the world's cultures. Fluency in Latin and Greek is certainly not to be confused with intellectual omnipotence. On the other hand, it's certainly not to be despised, as Paine clearly despises it. I have the strong suspicion that Paine himself was one of the schoolboys he describes, who are so cruelly tormented by the study of Greek. It seems fairly clear to me that if any effort was made to teach Paine Greek, it was in vain. Perhaps Paine had a point, when it came to the majority of schoolchildren: maybe it's wrong to force the ancient languages upon them. Maybe it's wrong to make most children go to school at all. There's so much effort expended these days just in repeating the mantra: "Stay in school," and so little reflection about the purpose of the entire educational system. As late as a century ago, only a small percentage of the population ever attended a university -- is it realistic to think that universities can do now for 60% percent of the US population what they so recently did for 3 or 4%? I think not. I don't want to turn back the clock, and re-introduce the social privileges and restrictions of a century ago. The problem with higher education back then was that it was almost exclusively for privileged, upper-class white men. And, as anyone can see by observing some past Presidents of the United States or certain chief executives of large corporations, being white, male and privileged is no guarantee of scholarly aptitude.

There are many prejudices of which we should disabuse ourselves. In the early stages of the French Revolution there was much talk of opening careers to to talent, and sometimes even more than just talk, but actual opportunity based on ability rather than social rank. This was a very good idea, and it corresponds to the very good idea here in the US, which unfortunately remains more often an idea than a reality, that everyone should have equal opportunities, in careers, and also for example in education. Much more should be done in offering equal opportunity, including improving the schools and the public libraries in poor areas.

There was also, however, a more radical attitude in the Revolution, which also lives on to this day, and which insists so utterly on equality that it denies differences in ability. This is not usually explicitly said, or probably even explicitly thought, but rather works on an unconscious level, resulting in demands which are anything but well-thought-out: Stop teaching Latin and Greek. Send everyone to college. This is a particularly complicated issue, having to do with traditional class distinctions, respect, contempt, and other factors which tend to be repressed, and which therefore express themselves the more incoherently and irrationally. Until a few centuries ago, in Western civilization, an elite made up of the aristocracy and a small group of other rich men controlled practically everything. The people in power were almost exclusively white, male, and Christian. This small elite group was also, with very few exceptions, the only segment of the population to be intensely schooled, and their education always included Latin and Greek. On rare occasions a woman would rise to power or be admitted to a university, or a Jew would be granted an aristocratic title. Apart from such rare exceptions, an exclusivity was rigidly maintained, based on preconceptions of gender and race which were clearly wrong. Just as wrong was the contempt for all the kinds of work which fell outside of the traditional education -- and the traditional education was very narrow indeed. Just as there were people from outside the traditional elite with an interest in and a talent for the traditional objects of study in the elite institutions, so there were white male aristocrats who would have been better at carpentry that at Latin, and much happier at it, if not for the traditional attitude that carpentry was beneath a man "of quality."

I suspect that Paine and Ford and other unreflective opponents of traditional education felt very keenly the contempt of the upper classes. They both worked their way up from very humble beginnings, and neither of them lost his identification with the poor, oppressed masses -- which is fine, as far as it goes. The problem is that their outlook did not expand as their power and privileges did. They did not become curious about the new culture to which they were exposed. Many people rise in social status, and then do their best to wipe out all traces of their humble origins, working with tremendous effort to change their speech, dress, habits and manners so as to blend in with others of the upper classes, if not to appear more aristocratic than any actual aristocrat. Others are very open about their past, and, while they appreciate what their new surroundings and new acquaintances have to teach them, they also continue to struggle on behalf of poor people, as they struggled to overcome their own poverty. These lucky few people are significantly free of class prejudice; having belonged to different classes personally, they can see the good in different ways of life: for example, the riches of the traditional classical education, of which the masses, unfortunately, have always been relatively ignorant; and the skill and knowledge and wit required by all forms of manual labor, of which the upper classes traditionally have been rather ignorant, and have usually quite drastically underestimated and under-appreciated. There is blindness on both sides, and it still today is nowhere near disappearing: the contempt of laborers for all sorts of cultural achievement which they do not in the least understand; and conversely the contempt of the rich for the labor of those people without whom they would be much less comfortable, labor which tends to be much more difficult, and interesting, than they assume. There are exceptions, of course: mechanics who read Vergil and Ovid, perhaps even a few who read them untranslated; and multimillionaires who can align their cars' wheels and fix their own furnaces -- but they remain exceptions.

Paine saw everywhere around him, and all the more so as he rose to ever-greater power and prominence, wealthy, privileged people who benefited from the labor of the masses without ever remotely appreciating that labor, or even acknowledging that there was any sort of skill or intelligence involved in it. He was right to condemn that ignorance. He was wrong, however, to remain ignorant of the traditional intellectual preserves of the upper classes, and to remain hostile to the classics. He himself never learned much from the classics, this much is clear. It's very unfortunate that he concluded that there was nothing there to be learned, and all the more so that such sheer ignorance is displayed in the work of such a popular and influential author.

Tom Paine vs the Classics, Part I

"The Greeks were a learned people, but learning with them did not consist in speaking Greek, any more than in a Roman's speaking Latin, or a Frenchman's speaking French, or an Englishman's speaking English. From what we know of the Greeks, it does not appear that they knew or studied any language but their own, and this was one cause of their becoming so learned; it afforded them more time to apply themselves to better studies. The schools of the Greeks were schools of science and philosophy, and not of languages; and it is in the knowledge of the things that science and philosophy teach that learning consists.

"Almost all the scientific learning that now exists, came to us from the Greeks, or the people who spoke the Greek language. It therefore became necessary to the people of other nations, who spoke a different language, that some among them should learn the Greek language, in order that the learning the Greeks had might be made known in those nations, by translating the Greek books of science and philosophy into the mother tongue of each nation.

"The study, therefore, of the Greek language (and in the same manner for the Latin) was no other than the drudgery business of a linguist; and the language thus obtained, was no other than the means, or as it were the tools, employed to obtain the learning the Greeks had. It made no part of the learning itself; and was so distinct from it as to make it exceedingly probable that the persons who had studied Greek sufficiently to translate those works, such for instance as Euclid's Elements, did not understand any of the learning the works contained.

"As there is now nothing new to be learned from the dead languages, all the useful books being already translated, the languages are become useless, and the time expended in teaching and in learning them is wasted. So far as the study of languages may contribute to the progress and communication of knowledge (for it has nothing to do with the creation of knowledge) it is only in the living languages that new knowledge is to be found; and certain it is, that, in general, a youth will learn more of a living language in one year, than of a dead language in seven; and it is but seldom that the teacher knows much of it himself. The difficulty of learning the dead languages does not arise from any superior abstruseness in the languages themselves, but in their being dead, and the pronunciation entirely lost. It would be the same thing with any other language when it becomes dead. The best Greek linguist that now exists does not understand Greek so well as a Grecian plowman did, or a Grecian milkmaid; and the same for the Latin, compared with a plowman or a milkmaid of the Romans; and with respect to pronunciation and idiom, not so well as the cows that she milked. It would therefore be advantageous to the state of learning to abolish the study of the dead languages, and to make learning consist, as it originally did, in scientific knowledge.

"The apology that is sometimes made for continuing to teach the dead languages is, that they are taught at a time when a child is not capable of exerting any other mental faculty than that of memory. But this is altogether erroneous. The human mind has a natural disposition to scientific knowledge, and to the things connected with it. The first and favourite amusement of a child, even before it begins to play, is that of imitating the works of man. It builds houses with cards or sticks; it navigates the little ocean of a bowl of water with a paper boat; or dams the stream of a gutter, and contrives something which it calls a mill; and it interests itself in the fate of its works with a care that resembles affection. It afterwards goes to school, where its genius is killed by the barren study of a dead language, and the philosopher is lost in the linguist."

This remarkably stupid passage, in which so many things are asserted as facts, hardly one of which is actually true, is taken from Tom Paine's book The Age of Reason, published in 1794. In Paine's case, as with any other person with a reputation for wisdom, it behooves one to read at least a little of the supposedly wise one's work, before forming one's opinion of him -- in other words: to have one's own opinion, as opposed to accepting someone else's. It is a commonplace that history is written by the winners. But so are sociology, paedagogy, economic theory, theology and so on.

Most people have heard of William Jennings Bryan, and accept the general view of him as a populist hero. Most have also heard of the Scopes "monkey" trial. How many people, however, know that at this trial, the primary attorney for the anti-evolutionist side, for the prosecution which wished to punish Scopes for teaching Darwin, was William Jennings Bryan? (By the way, Scopes, a high-school principal, intentionally sought prosecution by violating the state law against teaching evolution, because he and a group of businessmen cronies thought that the publicity would put their town of Dayton, Tennessee on the map. It did. It also led to the founding in Dayton of the fundamentalist Bryan College, which is still there. The prosecution won the case, and Scopes was fined $100. Bryan offered to pay the fine for Scopes. The defense appealed to the State Supreme Court, which upheld the conviction, but set aside the fine, as it had been set by the judge and not by the jury, and at the time judges in Tennessee were prohibited from setting fines of over $50.)

So was Bryan a progressive or a reactionary? He was both. Was Paine an enlightened enemy of superstition and oppression, or a class-obsessed moron who couldn't see the positive achievements of the ancien regime along with their crimes and tyranny? He was both. People are complex. If you want to think of a politician or a philosopher -- Paine and Bryan were both, each in his own way -- as 100% right or 100% wrong, and you yourself are not exceptionally dull, it helps not to be very familiar with his actual positions. Stick to a few quotations, carefully chosen for you from some other collection of quotes by someone with a similar outlook on life and a webpage. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Paine was in revolutionary France when he wrote The Age of Reason, quoted above. He was elected to the Convention. He was in many ways quite in tune with the Revolution, which was throwing out many things. Traditional weights and measures, which were often inexact and varied from place to place, were eliminated, and the metric system introduced. Other changes did not last longer than the Revolution itself, such as the new decimal-based calender, or the rejection of traditional names. The study of ancient languages, unfortunately, although it did not disappear as completely as the pre-metric weights and measures of France, did continue to decline; and it was, moreover, ever more identified with conservatism, reaction, aristocracy and the Catholic Church, in France as elsewhere. As did many other Revolutionaries, Paine rejected Christianity. The main thrust of The Age of Reason was to reject both organized religion and atheism in favor of Deism. Unfortunately, as one can see in the quote which begins this essay, Paine rejects the study of ancient languages along with traditional religion. And thus, implicitly, he rejects the study of whole millenia of the history of Europe, during which the written record is almost entirely in in Latin or Greek -- to say nothing of other ancient cultures in other parts of the world. Or, if he is not actually dismissing the importance of studying the classics, he is at the very least proposing a course which would very much hamper its study: because, no matter what the subject, no very profound knowledge can be gained while relying exclusively on translations.

Of course, one of the primary categories of things rejected by the Revolution, or at least by its self-appointed leader Robespierre, who in his own eyes was the most revolutionary among them, was other, insufficiently revolutionary Revolutionaries. Paine was one of the many former comrades condemned to death by Robespierre; Paine's offense was that he had argued against the death penalty for Louis XVI. It was in a French prison, awaiting the guillotine, that he wrote The Age of Reason. He was freed when Robespierre was finally overthrown and executed.

Livy

There are so many things I don't know. For instance: how many people could read Latin in the Roman Republic and Empire, and then in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Empire? We tend to assume that the numbers dropped drastically between the Classical era and the Dark Ages, but is this true, or is it more the case that a large illiterate demographic of Germanic peoples are more prominent in our backward historical gaze, while the actual Romans remained as literate as before, although less powerful?

Has the total number of people at any given time who could read Latin ever been in the millions? Has the number actually declined over the past couple of centuries, or does it only seem smaller because it represents a smaller percentage of the much greater number of people who now have attended universities?

For some works of Classical Latin there have survived hundreds of manuscripts, some have disappeared, perhaps never to be recovered, some are represented today by a single manuscript. Does the number of manuscripts known to us today tell us anything about the past popularity of a given text? I wonder. Books xli-xlv of Livy's ab urbe condita, his history of Rome from its mythical beginnings down to his own time during the reign of Augustus, appeared to have vanished when in 1527 Simon Grynaeus found them in a 5th-century codex in a monestary in Switzerland. Before 1527 30 of Livy's 142 books -- think of books of the Bible, Livy's books are of a roughly comparable length -- were known to the public, since Grynaeus' discovery it's been 35, plus a few small fragments which have since come to light here and there, and two compilationd from the 4th century AD, an anonymous summary or periochae, and a listing by a certain Julius Obsequens of all the "prodigies" -- natural disasters, plagues, eclipses and so forth -- mentioned in the entire work. And yet the mentions of Livy in other ancient, medieval and modern texts seem to indicate that he was consistently one of the most highly-regarded, widely read of all Classical authors.

But that's yet another speculation on my part, inferring a rough idea of the comparative size of dimensions of Livy's total readership based on some comments here and there. For all I know, some other writers in ancient Rome could've been much more popular than Livy, writers about whom no-one today knows anything, because the interest in them died out quickly, and the people who may have written mentions of them were themselves not considered interesting, and so their writings too were lost. A lot can get lost in 2,000 years, lost or destroyed or forgotten. Or just misplaced, like that 5th-century copy of Livy's books xli-xlv. The volume may have lain on that shelf in that monastery in Switzerland for centuries without so much as being touched.

How many other interesting old manuscripts are just laying around, with a race going on, a very very slow race between someone eventually finding them, by design or accident, and them rotting away?

Again: I really have no idea at all. I'd like to see Livy's work restored to its full 142 books. I'd love to discover some of the missing material myself, but there's an entire branch of a learned profession in line in front of me in terms of being likely to make such a find. How likely is it that anybody will ever find anything more of Livy's work?

Again: I. Really. Just. Don't. Know.

The authors of the anthology Texts and Transmission, ed by L D Reynolds, are very bright and learned, and have much more exact ideas about the possibilities and probabilities involved in such things than I.