Speranza
Robert A. Kaster (ed.), Macrobius: Saturnalia. Volume I: Books 1-2. Loeb
classical library 510. Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard University Press,
2011. Pp. lxxiii, 387. ISBN 9780674996496.
Robert A. Kaster
(ed.), Macrobius: Saturnalia. Volume II: Books 3-5. Loeb classical library
511. Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. x, 475.
ISBN 9780674996717.
Robert A. Kaster (ed.), Macrobius:
Saturnalia. Volume III: Books 6-7. Loeb classical library 512. Cambridge, MA/
London: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. x, 454. ISBN 9780674996724.
‘Humiliation,’ as described by David Lodge, is a game academics play
by naming in turn the well-known books they have not read.
The overly
competitive hotshot of Changing Places wins his round with Hamlet—and then
unaccountably fails in his bid for tenure.
No Latinist will run that sort of
risk with the "Saturnalia" of Macrobio Ambrosio Teodosio.
It is not so
prominent in the curriculum, though it has much to say about works that are.
As
a repository of antiquarian lore, an anthology of lost authors, and a reflection
of ancient attitudes toward literature, science and much in between, it has long
provided grist for our scholarly mills along with recipes for its use.
It is by
its very nature derivative.
Original research was not Macrobio’s aim, but even
when immediate sources like Gellio and Plutarco survive, his work remains
important in its own right as a document in the history of reception.
Indeed,
the Loeb edition, distinguished for its fresh Latin text,
consistently readable translation, and rich annotation can also claim the less
expected virtue of making Macrobio himself an interesting, perhaps even
important figure.
Kaster does not accomplish this singlehanded.
The old
stereotype of the fifth century d.C. as a time of pedantry and cultural decline as
pagan aristocrats waged a last, losing struggle against their Christian peers
has been gradually yielding to a much more nuanced and sympathetic view of that
age.
There is now more poignancy than pity in realizing that the ‘Roma’ of the
Saturnalia, so familiar to us from its landmarks of Republic and Principate, was
itself a world nearly half a millennium in Macrobio's own past.
What kind of
world is this, where the censors’ nota still carries a charge although the
censorship itself had been defunct for 450 years, and why would it still matter
to Macrobio's readers that nearly 700 years earlier Catone disparaged Postumio
Albino for writing Roman history in Greek?
This is the world these volumes open
to us, and what we learn from spending time there is worth considering.
The
Loeb format is well suited to the task of providing a manageable Saturnalia.
Some notable features of this edition.
Introduction.
This fifty-page essay
provides both preparation for tackling the work and a skeleton key to its
contents that encourages us to take Macrobio's complexities seriously, to read
him continuously and not simply to pluck the fruits that attract us.
The order
of presentation is this:
1. Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius
2. Dramatic
Date and Dramatis personae
3. The Saturnalia as Dialogue
4. The Plan of
the Work and its Sources
5. Text and Translation
Some of these
sections are conventionally preparatory.
The biographical and cultural
information in sections one and three is squarely in line with current thinking.
Typical of Kaster’s engagement with recent developments is his specific
citation of Cameron’s "Last Pagans", a book that must have been in press almost
simultaneously with this one.
The section on text is no less contemporary in
its slant.
Kaster’s fresh inspection of the manuscripts has put the entire
tradition on a firmer footing, leading to significant improvements over Willis’
1963 Teubner.
Full details are to be found elsewhere, but enough information is
provided here to tell us where we are textually, how we got here, and why this
is the place we want to be.
Sections two and four are something more.
They
quickly prove their worth as continual points of reference for readers staying
the full course.
Macrobio's fourteen interlocutors can be difficult to keep
straight, but they are not simply names plucked at random.
Their interests and
personalities as represented in the text bear significant, though not always
straightforward, relation to their historical selves and often shape the tenor
and direction of the conversation, as Kaster’s discussion makes clear.
No less
valuable is the schematic plan of the work which makes it
possible to see at a glance the progression of its topics and the relation of
topics to speakers and topics to sources.
These sections make this first volume
an essential aid to the two that follow.
Annotating so diverse
and expansive a text demands extraordinary levels of care and an extraordinary
combination of skills.
An ideal guide would be learned but not pedantic,
meticulous but not petty, neither loquacious nor cryptic, and with an
antiquary’s passion for the arcane tempered by the scholar’s commitment to
clarity.
Kaster’s combination of virtues comes very close to that ideal, as in
this note (chosen almost at random) on Ammon (vol. 1: 286-7 n. 550 re Sat.
1.21.19).
Ammon, the chief god of Egyptian Thebes, ultimately identified with
the sun god Re (cf. Mart. Cap. 2.192); the Greeks equated him with Zeus by the
5th cent. BCE, and from the same period on he is commonly represented with ram’s
horns (LIMC 1,2:534-54): cf. Hdt. 2.42.1, 4.181.2, Eur. fr. 955h (TGrF 5,2:958),
Diod. Sic. 3.73.1, Paus. 8.32.1, Arnob. 6.12, (D)Serv. on A. 4.196, Mart. Cap.
2.157.
The annotation is equally full and equally unobtrusive whether the
topic is Latin etymology, pontifical lore, Vergil’s debt to Homer, the seven
pairs of cranial nerves, or why female flesh is spongier than male
flesh.
The translation is better than accurate.
It is readable.
Few will object when it is less flowery than the original.
Many will appreciate
Kaster’s willingness to write what an English Macrobio would have written, e.g.
de doctis quaestionibus ‘involving matters of scholarship’ (1.2.17), ante omnia
quae a Latinis scripta sunt ‘before the Romans had a literature’ (5.20.18), Post
omnia in voluptatem censura cothurnati sermonis invectus es ‘To top it all off,
you launched an attack on pleasure in a censorious aria’ (7.5.28).
Having worked
his way into Macrobio's head, Kaster saves us the trouble of doing so on our
own.
That achievement has many advantages and one rather insidious virtue.
Right-hand readers of this text will increasingly find their eyes straying to
the left — and lingering there of their own volition for surprisingly long
periods.
What, ultimately, do we gain from these enticements to sustained
reading?
What is Macrobio's testimony worth to us?
His content is often old
news.
The defense of Vergilian vocabulary at Sat. 6.7, may certainly show
ancient philology working at its best, but it is copied from Gellius 2.6, who
himself drew on Probus’ correction of Annaeus Cornutus for judging Vergil’s
diction by Neronian usage.
Yet the very foreignness of Macrobio's perspective
can be quite arresting.
Macrobio more often brings significantly different values and
priorities to the ostensibly familiar task of reading Latin literature.
Whether
an aspiring orator has more to learn from studying Cicerone or Virgilio, the opening
question of Sat. 5, is no longer a standard pedagogical gambit, and though
Macrobius is not insensitive to metrical practice (e.g. 5.14.1-4), the
contributions of meter do not figure prominently in his stylistic analysis.
However familiar he may be with the rhythms of Latin speech, Aen. 2.324-7, venit
summa dies et ineluctabile tempus/ Dardaniae… is still no more than an example
of rhetorical elaboration (copiosissime dicat, 5.1.9).
He is not inclined to
savor the words themselves as, say, Roland Austin does: ‘The rhythm of this line
in incomparable, with venit cut off from the rest and the masterly patterns of
ineluctabile; the repeated long e, each time with the ictus upon it, rings like
a knell, and the effect is sustained by the run- over Dardaniae, with the heavy
following pause’ (Austin 1964: 146-7).
Nor is Macrobius attuned to intertextual
relationships, though his collection is replete with examples of them: the
famous echo of Ennius at Aen. 6.846, unus qui nobis cunctando…, thus passes
without comment in a long series of Vergil’s ‘borrowings’.
Arguments from
context are not his province, which is hardly surprising since most, if not all,
these quotations are again secondhand.
Yet the fact that the "Saturnalia" is
a self-confessed compilation of other people’s knowledge (noscendorum congeries,
Praef. 4) does not create a license to pillage it at will without considering
the compiler’s own sensibilities.
Macrobius evidently had enough on the ball to
win Kaster’s respect, even affection, and the editor’s unselfish efforts on his
author’s behalf gently prod us into acknowledging that the work lacks neither
design nor intelligence.
This is especially important to realize when mining it
for archaic bygones, since its complex discussions require different types and
uses of evidence.
No single critical method or presupposition governs its
selection of material.
Sat. 5.13.27, for example, cites Aen. 10.360-1 (haeret
pede pes…) as if it were a direct translation of Iliad 16.214-15, but after the
conversation shifts to Vergil’s Roman predecessors, Sat. 6.3.5 acknowledges the
mediating role of Furius’ Annals (pressatur pede pes…, fr. 10 FPL3).
The
juxtaposition at Sat. 6.3.2-4 of Homer’s description of Ajax at the ships (Il.
16.102-11) with the adaptations of Ennius (391-8 Sk.) and Vergil (Aen. 9.806-14)
has become a landmark in the study of early epic, but the comparison at Sat.
5.13.28-30 of Homer’s eagle and snake (Il. 12.200-7) with (Aen. 11.751-6 ignores
the mediation of Cicero’s Marius.
In this, Macrobius is again reflecting the
wider exegetical tradition, which quickly lost sight of Cicero’s poetry.
We know
it today largely through his own fondness for self-quotation, but it evidently
exerted considerable influence on his immediate successors.
Clearly then, how
Vergil positioned himself within the Roman epic tradition is not the kind of
question to entrust exclusively to Macrobius, but only by spending time with him
in Kaster’s company do we start to understand the significance of this
limitation.
And so, too, with the Saturnalia’s many other subjects.
This
edition may be no more likely to change its place in the canon than to alter the
scoring of ‘Humiliation’, but Kaster’s success in making it so accessible puts
in our hands an invaluable tool that will certainly make us better at our work.
We are all in his debt.
References
Austin, R. G. 1964. Virgil: Aeneid II.
Oxford
Cameron, A. 1966. ‘The Date and Identity of Macrobius.’ JRS 56:
25-38
——. 2011. The Last Pagans of Rome. Oxford
Courtney, E. 1993. The
Fragmentary Latin Poets. Oxford
Goldberg, S. M. 1995. Epic in Republican
Rome. New York
Kaster, R. 2010. Studies on the Text of Macrobius’s
‘Saturnalia’. New York
Wigodsky, M. 1972. Vergil and Early Latin Poetry.
Wiesbaden
Notes:
As Cameron 1966 showed, we have for
centuries put ourselves on a first name basis with this man, who should more
properly be addressed as Theodosius. See also Cameron 2011: 231-9 and Kaster
1.xiv-xvii.
2. Details are in Kaster 2010 and the apparatus to his
forthcoming OCT. For the former, see now Welsh, BMCR2011.08.09.
3.
Contrast Serv. ad Aen. 6.845, ‘sciens enim Vergilius quasi pro exemplo hunc
versum posuit,’ a thought completed by Wigodsky 1972: 72, ‘It is not because of
what Fabius did, but because what is said of him is said in Ennius’ words, that
he becomes a symbolic figure…’
So Cameron 2011: 408, ‘For all his pleas
in favor of the old writers, there is no indication that Macrobius himself ever
read or even consulted (say) an original text of Ennius’ Annales, a play of
Accius, a speech of Cato, or even, more remarkable, given his professed
enthusiasm for the minutiae of pagan cult practice, a text of Varro.’
Though not, as Kaster notes, the no less significant mediation of Enn. An.
584Sk. ‘premitur pede pes atque armis arma teruntur.’ Kaster’s corresponding
cross-reference at 5.13.27 mistakes Ennius for Furius, one of precious few
errors in his long and necessarily complex annotation of sources, echoes, and
cross-references. Occasional typos do not rise above the level of a missing ‘of’
(‘out of’, vol. 1 p. 83.6) or ‘faith’ for ‘face’ (rendering faciem, vol. 3 p.
243.22). In vol. 2 p. 105, n. 125 should read 124, while the following n. is
125, not 126. Given the complexity of the task, the editing standard throughout
is very high.
The Marius fragment, no. 17 in Courtney 1993, is
preserved at De div. 1.106. For its mediating role, see Goldberg 1995: 141-4,
and more broadly Wigodsky 1972: 109-14.
Sunday, November 23, 2014
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