A most useful Old Book

 

I have a suspicion. In a letter, the Byzantine scholar and cleric Arethas presented Demetrios, the metropolitan of Heraclea in Pontus with, as he says, “the most useful old book of the Emperor Marcus.” This is the first mentioning ever of the Meditations by Emperor Marcus Aurelius. All our manuscripts go back to this one archetype, the now lost copy Arethas allegedly made of the book in 907 AD, before he gave it away. The book is mentioned again half a century later in the Suidas, a Byzantine encyclopedia from the 10th century.

It was a time when the Byzantine Empire was just emerging from a rough stretch. In an orgy of cultural vandalism the two iconoclastic controversies (730 – 787 AD and 814 – 842 AD), although mainly aiming at the images in the churches, had destroyed irretrievable objects of Hellenistic art. The upheavals came at a time when the empire could barely hold out against the expansion of the Arabs. The warlords on the throne grabbed for every straw keeping them afloat. Then the Macedonian dynasty slowly turned things around. Under Emperor Michael III, his regent, the financial wizard Theoktistos Vriennion, restored the gold reserves and the Byzantines regained their position as the world’s foremost trading power. A new model army provided the muscle, levying mounted yeomen from a new class of agricultural small holders who could provide for their own subsistence and equipment. Theoktistos put an end to the iconoclastic nonsense; he reformed education and the law. The Byzantines went on the offensive against Russia and the Saracens, their fleets regained full control over the Adriatic, Sicily and the south of Italy. Despite setbacks the situation continued improving. After Constantine the Great and in the 5th century the Prefect Anthemius, the Logothetes Theoktistos had become the third founder of Constantinople. He was rewarded the Byzantine way; in November 20, 855 AD, the emperor engineered his assassination. The Meditations came to light fifty years later under the rule of Emperor Leo VI, “the Wise” (886 – 912 AD).

In a tyranny the subject addresses the monarch only when spoken to, or as a supplicant. Even the trusted councilor dispenses his advice in some form of backhanded flattery, and if pressed for it, will hold up to the throne the mirror of an allegedly virtuous ruler of the past as the model to follow. The Meditations by Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121 – 180 AD) is fitting this bill to a “T” with the added bonus of providing an inconspicuous vehicle for heretical opinions – after all, the ancient emperor, although noted for his wisdom as a ruler, had been an ignorant old heathen. The circumstances of the Meditations’ recovery, however, are rather mysterious.

In 160 AD the regime in Iran made the unwise attempt to test the new emperor’s resolve and called off all treaties with Rome. Marcus Aurelius was a civilian to boot, but his predecessor had left him an empire on the peak of its economy and military power. For the emperor’s generals the campaign against Persia was a walk in the park. Yet among the spoils of victory the army brought back the smallpox. It ravaged the empire for fifteen years. The army was reduced to a mere skeleton force and the Germanic tribes across the border took notice. Marcus Aurelius was forced to rebuild the army virtually from scratch, even recruited professional fighters from the arena. He personally took charge of the campaigns and after early setbacks learned on the job how to select suitable commanders and fight a successful war. His most brilliant campaign was a combined action of several armies, simultaneously operating along 700 miles of frontline. The emperor may not have been a strategist, but he understood communication. His physique, however, was frail. The emperor’s doctor was Galen (129 – 216 AD), even now a great name in the medical profession. Yet after thirteen years of incessant campaigning, even Galen could not prevent the emperor’s death from his ailments. He signed the death certificate on March 17, 180 AD in Vienna on the banks of the Danube. The emperor died just a few days shy of his 59th birthday. His successor was Commodus. Despite the myths of Hollywood, Commodus was already the incumbent co-emperor in Rome for four years. He called off the campaign by messenger. So, somebody from the late emperor’s retinue in the camp collected his commander’s personal papers and handed them over to – well, whom? The Roman senate? To Emperor Commodus? And if handed over to Commodus, who in the family or among his retainers was taking care of the papers after his assassination in 192 AD? Who among the elite was secure enough in his station to weather the turmoil and preserve the legacy during decades of war and recession? And how did these papers find their way from Rome to Constantinople, a city that didn’t even exist when Marcus Aurelius had been campaigning on the Danube?

Was there anything to be handed over anyway, other than the Emperor’s dispatches to his commanders? Forgeries have occurred. François Nodot (1651 – 1710) quietly amended the fragments of Petronius’ novel and the pundits applauded his “discoveries,” before they found out. In 1422 a “restored” manuscript of Tacitus’ Annals changed hands for 500 sequins in gold and to this day the majority of scholars will insist that it is genuine.

I am told Voltaire was the first to suggest that Tacitus’ Annals, could be a forgery. Even carbon dating a manuscript’s vellum would be inconclusive because such forgeries were done on old parchments with the former content bleached away. Until 1469, the work of Tacitus had been mentioned quite frequently – with the exception of the Annals. Only Sulpicius Severus in 420 AD paraphrases a passage although written in a much better Latin than the “original,” and without actually referring to the Annals as the source. The now lost testimony from the 9th century, by the monk Rudolphus of Fulda, may or may not testify for a fleeting acquaintance with the first two books of the Annals. Apart from this, there is an eerie silence and only since the 16th century the commentaries suddenly proliferate.

If Tacitus is indeed the author, the Annals are unusually devoted to biographical presentation. In Tacitus’ old age the public began developing a new taste for the moral example, catered to by the works of Suetonius and Plutarch. It was the period when the gospels began to appear. Tacitus, however, produced only one genuine biography, the funeral eulogy on Agricola, his father in law.

In his own introduction, Tacitus praises the good old times when good men did great deeds and then wrote about them, while under Emperor Domitian, the time of Agricola’s services, to do so would lead to charges of treason. Tacitus therefore did not refrain from shifting the actual order of events, when it served his premise. For the circumnavigation of Britain in 79 AD, Emperor Titus had accepted his 15th acclamation as imperator in recognition of General Agricola’s achievement, but Tacitus moved the event to the end of Agricola’s term after the decisive victory at Mons Graupius in 83/84 AD. By then Domitian was already emperor and Tacitus created a suitably happy ending to a successful career, with a suspicious emperor frowning on the scene.

The Annals, on the other hand, are a different matter.

If held against Suetonius, Velleius Paterculus, Lucius Annaeus Florus und Cassius Dio Cocceianus, the testimony of the Annals (I. 65: 2-4) is completely confused about the Roman actions in Germany. I have a hard time to accept that the same Tacitus, who was so well informed about the affairs in Britain, and depicted battles and public gatherings with unsurpassed immediacy, should suddenly have become so inadequate and cryptic when it came to the events in Germany. He is, after all, the author of a monograph on the Germanic tribes, the first of its kind.

Not only compare the thousands of stylistic and grammatical blunders in the Annals unfavorably with the concise and versatile mastery of Latin prose in the Histories, the Agricola, and the Germania, even great admirers of Tacitus did not fail to notice in the Annals the “many violent metaphors and audacious uses of personification without parallel, often substituting poetic styles. The description of Germanicus’ search for the destroyed legions of Varus follows Virgil's description of Aeneas’ descent into the underworld (sic!). The style is shifting, from the 13th book on, Tacitus, in choosing between synonyms, changes from the pointed bon mot to commonplace expressions” (Woodman).

The sentences in the Annals are punctured with lacunae, and what is one to think when scholars identify a battle scene in the Annals, which “Tacitus” had “copied from himself?” It is because of the Annals, that Tacitus the military writer is held in low esteem, undeserved as everybody can tell who read the Histories and the Agricola.

Tacitus has a way to involve the reader; we march with the first line of the soldiers, see the enemy falling back, but receive orders not to rush forward and instead hold positions, because the commander “recognizes the enemy’s stratagem” (Histories). (After the disaster at Cannae, Hannibal’s stratagem had become textbook in the Roman military manual.) In the end it is the language giving away the game. It is always the language. Even the untutored eye can see that the real Tacitus fine-tuned his idiomatic figures according to the occasion. To be a high-ranking officer is brought across as “leading the van” – “primum pilum ducere” – a military term. To get on with business is “girding the loins” – “accingi.” The author of the Annals, on the other hand, barely ventures into military jargon, even when appropriate. Instead the figures of speech are all over the place, chosen haphazard from the workshops, accountancy and seamanship; a hallmark of Livy’s easygoing style of writing, but very unlike Tacitus. The digressions in his genuine narratives are called for by incident and situation; we learn about the history of the capitol on an occasion when people stand in line, passing from hand to hand pails of water, fighting a fire in the building. The writer of the Annals on the other hand is all giddy and can’t wait for his cue to jabber just about everything that tickles his fancy, from the deluge to the laws of Lycurgus or the wars of the Amazons. The Annals make absurd claims about the finer points of the “jus Romanum, Latinum” and “Italicum,” when in fact Italians from the province did not have the same civil rights as urban Romans and therefore were "non eos esse cives Romanos" (Livy, XXXIV: 42). And this is supposed to be written by a barrister and elder statesman, practiced in the law?

Are we expected to believe that Tacitus did ascribe legislation on usury to the Twelve Table Law, when it had passed the floor of the House centuries later under the consulate of Lucius Manlius Torquatus and Caius Plautius (Livy XVI: 27)? In fact the Annals make the preposterous claim that after issuing the Twelve Tables, legislation virtually ceased altogether (Annals III: 27). The Annals deny that there was a shrine of Fortuna the Equestrian” (Annals III: 71) in Rome, when Livy, Vitruvius, Valerius Maximus, and Publius Victor are telling us that there was such a temple (Livy, XL: 42). How could this have eluded a man who was not only an augur by profession, but also a superintendent responsible for the maintenance of public buildings? The Annals want us to believe, that somebody consulted the Colophonian Oracle of Apollo Clarius under Emperor Claudius (Annals XII: 22), when the geographer Strabo, living in the time of Augustus, is informing us that it had long expired (Strabo, XIV. I: 27). Had the Latin translation of Strabo from 1472 come too late to the forger’s attention?

The Annals is an unrelenting libel. The real Tacitus had his pet peeves – especially about Emperor Domitian – but nowhere in his genuine work does he stoop to personal insult, not even in the case of such unsavory character as the usurper Vitellus. Tacitus is presenting us with a protective father of his children who with timely abdication is attempting to shield his aged parents from retribution. Suetonius speaks of Tiberius as an emperor who officiated with clemency; Cassius Dio confirms that Tiberius never evicted anybody, nor confiscated any man's possessions, or exacted money by force. Compare this with the conceited tyrant in the Annals. Suetonius is speaking of no more than twenty executions in the tumultuous aftermath of Sejanus’ fall; the Annals revel in “uncounted corpses of all sexes, age, and rank, piling up in heaps.” The Annals is the only testimony speaking of a prosecution of Christians under Emperor Nero, a flawed testimony by any standard. No imperial document of the period would ever refer to Jesus as the "Christ." The ancient historian could only go by private memoirs, collections of correspondence, funeral eulogies, public speeches and the “acta senatus” – the recorded minutes of the sessions in the House. There was the “acta populi” or “acta diurna,” a kind of gazette, the first ever to inform the public. It was pasted on the walls of the forum and washed away by the first rain. So, for the years under Emperor Nero, Tacitus would have depended only on recollections from his childhood, a childhood he had spent growing up in France. This makes it a complete mystery how the Annals possibly could speak of Christians in Nero’s Rome as a “vast multitude,” when even in Judea and the East the small number of Christians made them virtually invisible. Seneca (BC. 4 – 65 AD.) was Nero’s Prime Minister and should have been a witness to the event. He wrote a stinging attack on religion in every form, Gentile and Jewish. Yet St. Augustine, who still had access to this essay, acknowledged that Seneca “did not as much as mention Christians, either for praise or blame” (City of God, X: 1ff).

One telltale sign for the authenticity of an ancient document are the loose ends, references now lost to us. The Annals are problematic in this respect, but even more so are the Meditations by Emperor Marcus Aurelius. With the exception of the portrait of Emperor Anthony Pius in the first chapter, even a modern forger could have written the Meditations. Marcus Aurelius is a well-documented personality; the author’s considerable learning in the Meditations is fully accessible to us; we still possess the works of Epictetus and of all the Greek sources the Emperor or his alter ego from the 10th century had consulted for reference. No loose ends. In fact the text is not even exploiting all the references available: there is not a single mentioning of the emperor’s own correspondence in Latin with Marcus Cornelius Fronto (100 – 170 AD), a Roman grammarian – could it be, because the forger didn’t know Latin? Why was the Meditations written in Greek? It is true; Greek was the language of the educated, like French in the European countries of the 18th century, King Frederic II of Prussia spoke German only with his horses; nevertheless Marcus Aurelius was born in Italy and grew up with Latin as his first language. His tutors were Alexander of Cotiaeum, a noted scholar on Homer whose influence on the emperor’s style is supposed to be detectable in the Meditations, and the teachers of Latin Trosius Aper, and Tuticius Proculus. Latin was the language of Roman administration and of the law. Why should Marcus Aurelius have written Greek in his private papers, intimate thoughts not meant to see the light of day? Then again, why should he not: Diognetus, a Greek painter, had been his preschool companion and apparently left a deep impression when Marcus Aurelius was still a little boy. The fact remains that nobody from the 10th century in Constantinople knew any Latin.

On the other hand the alleged date of the book’s composition cannot be faulted; it was under Marcus Aurelius that the first personal memoirs and diaries began seeing the light of day: Aelius Aristides (117 – 181 AD) has left us his Sacred Stories, a very private record of his dreams and the anxieties of a neurotic hypochondriac.

So, I don’t have a smoking gun, the Meditations may very well be genuine, but I wonder.

© – 4/20/2009 – by michael sympson, 2,750 words, all rights reserved