The Book of Lost Books (9 page)

Callimachus

{
c.
320–
c.
240 B.C.E.}

TO BE CALLED “sophisticated” is an ambiguous plaudit. The luster of polish contains a suspicion of superficial veneer; suave urbanity raises the shadow of oleaginous artifice. Sophisticated authors may well be complex, but their cleverness is always denounced as mere cleverness. They may be charming, refined, chic, and stylish, but the hint lingers that they lack a soul. Sophistication is a taunt and a triumph, an accomplishment and a snub.

Callimachus would have easily appreciated the manifold, contradictory meanings bound up in that single word. Born in Cyrene, he rose to a position of eminence in the Alexandrian Library, which he catalogued in 120 scrolls called the
Pinakes
(or
Tablets
)
of the Illustrious in Every
Branch of Literature and What They Wrote.
His own output purportedly exceeded eight hundred volumes, and covered a polymathic plenitude of interests: as well as satires, tragedies, and comedies, he wrote
On the
Changes of the Names of Fish, On Winds, On Birds, On the Rivers of Europe,The Names of the Months According to Tribes and Cities,
and even
A Collection of Wonders of the Entire World According to Location.

All we have left of this encyclopedic oeuvre is six hymns and a collection of fragments and epigrams. Two poems, the
Aitia,
or
Origins,
and the epyllion
Hekale,
can be partially reconstructed: the fifty-eight slivers of
Hekale,
some from papyri and others preserved by commentators, make up around a fifth of the entire poem. It is enough for us to glimpse not only Callimachus' character, but also his literary ideology.

Callimachus preferred finely honed, elegant poems. Brevity was a virtue, and poetry, he wrote, should be judged by the art, not the mile. He abhorred the bombast of the “cyclic” epic writers, comparing their work to a sluggish, muddy river, and wryly suggesting that whereas Zeus might like thundering, he did not. In the “Hymn to Apollo,” he puts his partialities in the mouth of the god of poetry himself: sacrifices should be fattened animals, but the Muse was best when slender. Intellectually precocious and linguistically deft, his poetry announced itself as a break from tradition.

He not only promoted his own aesthetic, but lambasted his opponents, calling them the Telchines, after a primitive race of invidious spirits from Rhodes. A long-standing legend pits Callimachus against his onetime pupil and the future head librarian of Alexandria, the poet Apollonius of Rhodes, whose four-volume epic
The Argonautica
was presumed to be the object of Callimachus' derision. Ovid translated a poem by Callimachus called
The Ibis,
though the original Greek is lost. It is a fearsome pasquinade about the carcass-eating stork, a bird “full of filth.” Ancient scholars read the poem as another sustained attack on the author of
The Argonautica.
The sneering association between Apollonius, the Telchines, and their mutual homeland of Rhodes seems clear, but the reason why an ibis might remind readers of Apollonius is not.

“A big book is a big evil” was one of Callimachus' maxims. His penchant for the literary miniature did not, however, increase his chances of survival. The feud—even if it is a later fiction—between the modernist sophisticate and the orthodox traditionalist proved more immortal than his works.

The Caesars

Julius
{100–44 B.C.E.},
Augustus
{63 B.C.E.–14 C.E.},
Tiberius
{42 B.C.E.–37 C.E.},
Caligula
{12–41 C.E.},
Claudius
{10 B.C.E.–54 C.E.},
and
Nero
{37–68 C.E.}

FROM SHAKESPEARE TO Racine and Robert Graves to Albert Camus, we are more accustomed to the earliest Roman emperors being the subjects, not the authors, of books. But in addition to ruling the known world, Julius Caesar and the five descendants who took the title emperor all harbored literary ambitions. Most of their compositions, however, went the same way as their Empire.

For generations, the first contact schoolchildren had with a Latin author was Caesar himself, and his
Conquest of Gaul.
This was not the atrophied hangover of centuries of sycophancy; Julius Caesar's prose style was generally held by his contemporaries to be exceptional. Cicero praised it as “chaste, pellucid and grand, not to say noble,” and enthused to Cornelius Nepos that no one else had “a vocabulary so varied and yet so precise.”

Like most cultured young Romans, Julius tried his hand at drama; however, his successor, Augustus, decreed that such juvenilia as the
Oedipus,
as well as
Collected Sayings
and
In Praise of Hercules,
should not be circulated. The
Conquest of Gaul
was completed by his friend Hirtius, and other volumes of “memoirs” detailing the campaigns in Alexandria, Africa, and Spain were soon appearing from opportunistic authors. Caesar was also a poet: his lost verse travelogue
The Journey
detailed his travels over twenty-four days between Rome and Spain, and an
Essay on Analogy
was said to have been composed while he was crossing the Alps.

Under Augustus, Roman literature flourished: Virgil dedicated his
Aeneid
to the emperor, Horace praised him in exquisitely ironic, nuanced
Odes,
and Ovid entertained with risqué humor, until he overstepped the mark. Surrounded by such talents, it is unsurprising that the emperor scrapped his tragedy
Ajax,
and contented himself with a brief poem on Sicily (though it too was lost) and his thirteen-volume
My Autobiography.
This early example of a politician's self-assessment was not considered sufficiently pertinent to preserve, though his grandiloquently entitled
Actions of the Divine Augustus,
carved rather than entrusted to friable scrolls, allows us a little insight into his sense of his own achievements. No doubt
An Encouragement to the Study of Philosophy
was a very worthy endeavor; however, it has not been handed down to posterity.

Tiberius Caesar completed Augustus'
Reply to Brutus' Eulogy of Cato,
and wrote his own
Elegy on the Death of Julius Caesar.
According to Suetonius, his prose style was affected and ponderous, and his taste in literature rather limited. He preferred the works of Euphorion, Rhianus, and Parthenius, none of which have survived, even though academics attempted to outdo each other in producing editions of the emperor's favorite writing. As he declined into bloated, lecherous decrepitude, he spent more time patronizing toadies than bothering to do anything himself. Asellius Sabinus appreciated the two thousand gold coins he received for a dialogue where a mushroom, an oyster, a fig, and a thrush argue who is tastiest.

Gaius Caesar, nicknamed Caligula, was “no man of letters,” according to his biographer. He thought Virgil overrated, and dismissed Seneca: but then again, he found the idea that gods might be superior to him infuriating. In one notorious act of literary criticism, he not only burned the work of an Atellan comedian, but then had the author burned in the theater. The only flashes of eloquence conspicuous in Caligula are in his sadistic wit. “If only the Roman people had a single neck!” he screamed, when the crowd cheered for the wrong team. His uncle, the stammering Claudius, destroyed two manuscripts of Caligula's that he found in the private apartments on his accession: one entitled
The Dagger
and another called
The Sword,
detailing his insane nephew's program of conspiracies and intended victims.

Claudius, like Augustus, wrote an autobiography, which, according to Suetonius, suffered from “lack of taste” rather than “lack of style.” The work he was most proud of was a typically eccentric scheme. Claudius decided to reform the Latin alphabet, introducing three new characters: ) to represent the Greek
psi,
⊦ for a vowel between
u
and
i,
and for the consonantal
v.
Both the
Official Gazette
and state monuments adopted the new letters, and dropped them soon after the emperor's demise.

In Greek, rather than Latin, Claudius compiled twenty volumes of Etruscan history and eight volumes of Carthaginian history. His Roman history stretched to forty-three volumes, heavily censored by his family. So voluminous was his output that the Library at Alexandria had to build a new wing, the Claudian, to commemorate his historical writing. Even this testament to a state leader's literary bent was less steadfast than might have been expected.

Claudius was the first emperor since Augustus to be deified. Nero, who succeeded Claudius, ordered his tutor Seneca to mock the apotheosis in verse, as
The Pumpkinification of the Divine Claudius.
The Stoic philosopher struggled in vain to inculcate a sense of self-control and mental discipline into his wayward ward, and eventually committed suicide as Nero's murderous regime sought out new traitors. His nephew, the poet Lucan, similarly killed himself, leaving his poem about Julius,
The Pharsalia,
incomplete.

Nero fancied himself as an artist, and acted in various plays and farces, sometimes scandalizing the court by playing the female roles. His attack on Claudius Pollio,
The One-Eyed Man,
has perished alongside the rest of his oeuvre. “What an artist dies with me!” he had lamented as the troops hunted him down. History disagreed.

Gallus

{
c.
70–26 B.C.E.}

IN THE FIFTEENTH poem of his first book of
Amores,
Ovid makes a bold claim for the immortality of poetry: “
carmina morte carent,
” “songs from death are free.” To prove his point he catalogues the imperishable names of Homer, Sophocles, and Virgil, concluding with the lines

Gallus et Hesperiis et Gallus notus Eois et sua cum Gallo nota Lycoris erit.

Gallus, from the West and even to the East, Gallus will be famed and with Gallus will be famed his Lycoris.

Gallus' literary perpetuity was more precarious than that of the illustrious company in which Ovid places him; and Ovid may have had a suspicion that this was the case. Inscribing his name three times in two lines is almost laying it on a little thick, especially when Homer is only referred to as “the son of Maeonia.” Ovid's insistence on Gallus' greatness extended across his career: he is mentioned again in book III of
The
Amores,
in
The Art of Love
(where young men are advised to memorize poems by Gallus), and thrice in his
Tristia.

Nor was Ovid the only poet to commemorate the achievements of Gallus. Propertius links his name with the earliest Latin love elegists, and two of Virgil's
Eclogues
feature Gallus. In Eclogue VI, he appears with no less than Orpheus and the god Phoebus in a cantata of poetic themes. Eclogue X is both dedicated to Gallus and descriptive of him. “Who would refuse poetry to Gallus?” asks Virgil. The answer was the emperor.

Servius, the commentator on Virgil, tells us that Gallus composed four books of amatory elegies for Lycoris, whose real name was Cytheris, an actress rumored to be the mistress of Mark Antony. He was one of the
neoteroi,
or “new poets” (“modernists” might be an acceptable comparison), who drew their inspiration from the allusive, finely polished poetry of Callimachus and the Alexandrians. As well as being an eminent poet, Gallus was a soldier. He fought alongside Octavian (who became Augustus Caesar) against Mark Antony, and was rewarded for his loyalty and bravery during the capture of Alexandria by being made prefect of Egypt in 30 B.C.E. Some unspecified indiscretion or rumor of ambitions or unacceptable conduct led to his fall from imperial favor: he committed suicide in exile in 26 B.C.E.

Though Augustus could be forgiving—Horace, his panegyricist and ode writer, had fought alongside Mark Antony—he could also be implacable. Servius claims that the emperor demanded that Virgil remove a section praising Gallus from the fourth
Georgic,
but it seems as if the commentator had confused the final, fourth poem of the
Georgics
with the final, tenth poem of the
Eclogues.
Absence of evidence often being mistaken for evidence of absence, several scholars were later on embroiled in trying to hypothesize about the missing accolade, while ignoring the evidence that Virgil did not remove a reference.

We do not know if Gallus' work was actively suppressed: nonetheless, no manuscripts have come down to us. Servius claimed that the words Virgil puts in Gallus' mouth were actually Gallus' own: if so, the phrase “Love conquers all” would be attributable to him. However, the lines could as easily be completely fictitious, and given Virgil's close relationship with the emperor, it is unlikely he would flaunt the talent of someone who had incurred Augustus' displeasure.

Only one line that is without a doubt by Gallus has been preserved. In Vibius Sequester's book on geography, he quotes the line “
uno tellures
dividit amne duas
”: “it is divided by one river into two lands.” It is hardly a fitting tribute to posterity for a poet whose expressions of the pains of love had inspired a generation.