C
CHALCENTEROCITY
On Wednesday, 14 January 1998, a man called Jeffrey Gibson sent an email to the Classics Listserv registered at Washington University in Seattle. He had a simple and modest request:
‘I’ve probably asked this before, so please forgive duplicate postings: Is there an English translation of the Suda?’
Later that day, the list received a reply from Peter Green.
‘The answer, alas is “no”. Why? Were you thinking of filling the gap? A lot of people would be grateful, I suspect.’
The following day Bill Hutton added, ‘Since translating the Suda would be a task requiring greater chalcenterocity than most individual classicists possess, perhaps we should make it a group project.’ Hutton thought it would be just the sort of thing the global academy did best: ‘Each of us could send in our favourite entries by e-mail.’
An hour later Elizabeth Vandiver emailed: ‘Sounds good to me – I claim ikria.’
This conversation went on for a while, years in fact. If one wasn’t a classicist, and one came across this open conversation by chance, one might have several questions. Why did Professor Vandiver choose ikria? And what actually was the Suda?
Before any of these could be answered, there was another keen outpouring online; it seemed, in fact, that enthusiasm was boundless from all quarters of the United States and Europe.
‘I cannot think of a better collaborative enterprise,’ wrote Professor Joe Farrell from the University of Pennsylvania, ‘nor of a better way to create and distribute the product than via WWW. May I suggest that there is also an opportunity to organize a number of graduate seminars around this objective? This would speed the work and lend excellent focus to the training of young scholars.’
The next day, several other contributors began to consider how HTML text would be unified on the site, and how much time such a translation project would cost, and what sort of cross-referencing there would be. Almost immediately the project had a follow-up project with a name – Suda On Line – and someone proposed a logo reflecting its acronym: a shining sun.
‘I think all these suggestions are terrific,’ wrote Kenneth Kitchell, a classics professor at Louisiana State University. ‘I would like to add one cautionary note, however. Such a project is likely to be done once and once only. Quality control is of great concern so that the project becomes a vehicle for fostering the dissemination of information and not mis-information.’
James Butrica sounded another word of warning. ‘The original suggestion, for people to translate their favourite entries, is not going to work, since it would require too much supervision to make sure that everything got covered and some entries might languish untouched (not everybody is as interested in Iophon as I am, for example). But if each letter were taken by one translator, with additional translators for the letters like alpha that have many entries, it could be done in a relatively expeditious manner. Si monumentum requiris …
And in this way was a monumental project born. It took sixteen years to complete (or at least to arrive at what its editors called a ‘usable standard’), and some of its founders, such as Professor Butrica, did not live to see its full online publication. The Internet was a very different place in 2014 to when the translation had begun, but a small community had managed to produce a work that spoke only of its best attributes – namely, the collaborative dissemination of information and ideas. And it was no small irony that the work of translation (co-ordinated by two of its founders Bill Hutton and Elizabeth Vandiver, and based at the University of Kentucky) reflected the aim and methodology of the original cohort of writers who had worked on it more than 1000 years before. And this time it had footnotes and a bibliography, and was keyword searchable.
The Suda (or Fortress/Stronghold) was a vast tenth-century Byzantine Greek historical encyclopaedia combining material on classical antiquity with biblical and Christian sources. It had been edited and published several times since the end of the fourteenth century, but it had never previously been fully available in English. It was compiled no later than 1000 CE, but its compiler or compilers remain unknown. The entries are arranged in alphabetical order, and appear as a combination of dictionary and conventional encyclopaedia: grammatical points and philosophical concepts blend with biographies of ancient authors and lines from ancient texts. Sources range from Aristophanes, Homer and Sophocles, as well as Pliny’s Naturalis Historia and other classical abridgements. More than 200 people worked on its modern peer-reviewed translation, an extraordinary display of scholarship and erudition producing 30,000 entries on history, literature and biography that might otherwise be lost to us.
What may we see through this looking glass? At random: that the ancient Greek word Galeagra (in its Latin transliteration) means ‘weasel trap, a device for punishment’ and is accompanied by an unsourced quote: ‘As a finale they threw [him?] into a weasel-trap all shut up with iron bolts and rolled it on rough ground,’ which may refer to a specific cruelty practised by Caligula.
We find that Gallos translates as ‘eunuch’, as in the quip from Greek philosopher Arcesilaus that ‘Galli come from men, but men do not come from Galli’. Another example cites a cunning military ploy: ‘He sent out youths whom he had prepared as Galli – with pipers, in women’s robes, and having drums and figurines – against those besieging the territory.’
And we learn that the verb Gastrizesthai means to be gorged or ‘nourished rather magnificently’, but also to be hit in the gut. And that the noun Galasinois translates as ‘dimples’, specifically the lines that derive from laughing (the philosopher Democritus was nicknamed Dimple when he laughed at the hollow ambition of mankind).
And of those special entries earmarked by the founding editors of Suda On Line in their first tentative emails, Ikira means ‘benches or planks’, and may be used to define the earliest form of theatre seating. Iophon was an Athenian tragedian, the son of Sophocles. He is credited with some fifty plays, although authorship is disputed, and many of them may have been the work of his father. And what of Bill Hutton’s consciously pretentious use of the word chalcenterocity? It derives from chalcenterous, meaning the possession of ‘bowels of brass’, a gender-neutral equivalent of balls of brass, or ‘possessing a tough, indomitable and possibly foolhardy nature’.
CAMPFIRE TALES
We may ask what the monk of 1010 or the squire of 1050 was really learning here. Even if they could read Greek or Latin and had access to such a manuscript as the Suda, how much use was it to know that the Greek word Angopênia, which meant ‘woven vessel’ derived from the honeycomb pattern in a beehive? Or that Ankôn denotes an elbow both in the biological and architectural sense (the latter describing a small room or enclosed area where a tyrant may throw someone undesirable)? This is indeed the ultimate expression of ‘knowledge in the round’, as ancient tutors had intended for their school curriculum; it borders on trivia, and is no less fascinating for that.
We may logically ask the same question of all medieval collations. The Cambridge professor Peter Burke has noted that what may pass for knowledge today would carry quite another definition a few hundred years ago. One can make a valid distinction between ‘raw’ information (something practical and specific), and ‘cooked’ knowledge, something that has been processed and analysed. Even this varies over time: early medieval knowledge would certainly incorporate witchcraft, angels and demons. We know that wisdom is not a cumulative accretion of facts, but something to be learnt, perhaps through experience. But even an individual’s gathering of knowledge may not always be progressive; increasing specialisation may produce a more limited range of knowledge, and when encyclopaedias are updated we may lose ‘old knowledge’ to make way for new.*
We know of several distant manuscripts composed between 1050 and the first literary glimpses of the Renaissance and printing press in the fifteenth century. We may read these encyclopaedias as vault-like repositories of information, an early inky storage and retrieval system, and perhaps a slightly desperate one. They were a form of intellectual harvesting, a resistance against the disintegration of wider learning (and the wider world) in the face of restrictive religious uniformity and the application of reason to faith. There was no room for scepticism. Writing and reading these rare volumes was almost a political act, although it’s unlikely the studious compilers from A–Z would have seen it that way. The encyclopaedist’s notions of science (the cosmos, biology) were still linked largely to theology, and the category of ‘science’ was mostly understood as practical craftsmanship. The wider world was almost a myth, with one’s nearest cathedral city and Jerusalem the only two destinations worth consideration; the Age of Exploration that would later transform our geographical appreciation of the world was still several centuries away.*
Most of these Latin manuscripts survive in fragments alone, but of the handful that exist in their entirety by far the most appealing is the Otia Imperialia by Gervase of Tilbury – all 196 chapters of it. Despite his name (in the twelfth century Tilbury was a marshy manor on the north side of the Thames and possibly a former Roman village), Gervase spent his adult life in Bologna, Naples, Venice, Arles and Rome; his education derived as much from experience as academia. A well-connected lawyer, once in the service of Henry the Young, the son of Henry II, he composed his great medieval text between 1210 and 1214 for his patron Otto IV of Brunswick, the Holy Roman Emperor. The translated subtitle suggests it was intended as an ‘entertainment’ and ‘relaxation’, although there was certainly also much instruction; the original title was Liber de Mirabilibus Mundi (Book of the Wonders of the World). One rarely read alone in the Middle Ages, and the manuscript was most likely read to Otto at night by his clerks as he struggled with insomnia.
The encyclopaedia is divided into three parts. The first twenty-five chapters examine the world from Creation to Noah, beginning with the storied flow of the Ganges, the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates, ‘the four rivers that flow from Paradise’. Gervase then examines the conditions necessary for the formation of clouds and rain. The second section, in twenty-six chapters, is concerned with history and topography, and the current rulers of the known world; and the remaining 145 chapters assume a more spiritual and mythological tone, describing folklore, miracles and the supernatural (or as Gervase has it, ‘marvels of every province, not every marvel, but some from each province’). One review of the project concludes that ‘it looks as though the author, in some hurry to present his book to the emperor, did not expand his notes as he had intended’. We may balk at the contents of this dominant section, being so far removed from the more sober ambitions of Pliny and Isidore, but taken as a whole Otia Imperialia provides a comprehensive survey of the fearful world slowly emerging into a modern one. Gervase relied both on classical and oral traditions, his many biblical allusions combining with contemporary Christian theology and what one might call witches’ tales (or what one eighteenth-century editor called a ‘bagful of foolish old woman’s tales’); no one source was treated with more weight than another. Gervase himself stated in his dedication that many of his entries ‘may be dismissed as idle chatter, but they ought to be given a hearing, because they can provide no trifling instruction or warning with regard to many things’.*
As was common with such a personal endeavour, there was also a prominent smattering of opinion on current affairs: Gervase supports a German claim to the throne of Constantinople and weighs in on papal abuse. In other news, ‘The Isle of Man is quite densely populated, and the way of life there is more refined than is the norm.’
The first full English translation wasn’t published until 2002. The volume runs to more than 1000 pages, and it opens with a summary of previous attempts: an earlier translator at the University of California, ‘laboured strenuously’ on the Latin manuscripts during the 1950s and ’60s, but had his work ‘sadly interrupted’ by his death. The first complete edition provides extraordinary insights into the medieval mind.*
From Part 2, a view of Asia: ‘It starts to the east with the region of paradise, a secure place, remarkable for its possession of every delight, but inaccessible to human beings because it is surrounded by a wall of fire reaching right up to heaven. Within it is the tree of life: whoever eats of its fruit will remain in the same state forever and will never die.’
A few pages on, a description of India: ‘There are … various kinds of monstrous creatures there … There are some, for instance, whose feet point backwards, and they have eight toes on each foot. Others have a dog’s head and hooked claws; their skin is like the hide of cattle, their voice like the barking of dogs. There are … women who give birth five times, but their offspring do not live beyond their eighth year. There are also some creatures with no head: their eyes are set in their shoulders, and they have two holes in their chest to serve as a nose and mouth. There are others near the source of the Ganges who live just on the fragrance of a particular kind of apple. If they travel any distance they take some of these apples with them, because if they were to breathe bad unhealthy air they would die at once.’
And just as you’re thinking, ‘I’ll have what he’s having,’ consider the fate of Indian animals. ‘There are snakes so huge that their diet consists chiefly of stags; they even cross the ocean … The beast called the manticore is found in India too: it has a human face, a triple row of teeth, a lion’s body, a scorpion’s tail, and blazing eyes; it is the colour of blood, and has a voice like a snake’s hiss; it feeds on human flesh, and can run faster than a bird can fly.’*
Campfire tales, ghost stories, unsettling tales of inexplicable occurrences – Gervase’s Otia was full of them. His readers must have fallen upon such wonders as he describes, of mermaids and storm-inducing dolphins, not just with glee, but some degree of nodding familiarity. These were not tales of the gullible, but tales of the everyday. Not to believe them might be the greater sin.
About thirty manuscript copies of Otia Imperialia survive in their entirety, which is about twenty-eight more than Speculum Maius, the mid-thirteenth century work of Vincent of Beauvais. There is a simple reason for this: size. Speculum Maius (The Great Mirror) was an immense gushing river of a work: eighty books in all, divided into 9886 chapters. There are more than 4 million words. It made Gervase of Tilbury’s effort look like homework scribbled on a bus.*
Vincent of Beauvais is widely regarded as the most important educator of the thirteenth century. We know roughly when he died (1264), but not when he was born (somewhere between 1184 and 1194). He became a Dominican friar in Paris before 1220, and he became a ‘lector’ (a specialised reader and educational adviser) in the monastery of Royaumont founded by Louis IX in 1228. He began writing his great encyclopaedia under the king’s patronage in 1235, and didn’t put down his quill until twenty-nine years later; he almost certainly received help from a team of scribes, for no one could have realised this project on their own.
As was the pattern, Speculum Maius was a compendium, a collection of all writing its editor considered cogent, commendable and creditable. It was certainly comprehensive. There are 171 chapters on herbs, 161 on birds, and 134 on seeds and grains; about 900 chapters mention the lives of the saints, and about half this amount allude to chess. It was also contradictory: with about 350 cited sources, from Pliny the Elder to contemporary French scholars, from Cicero to Helinand of Froidmont, it would have been extraordinary had it not been. Entries disputed many things, not least whether a deer’s tail was poisonous, and whether the black poppy was edible.
But what, in the grand scheme of things, did Vincent’s Great Mirror reflect? It showed its readers everything of themselves. It shone a light both pagan and Christian, its author expressing a preference for neither. Vincent spoke of his work as valuable ‘for preaching, for lecturing, for resolving questions, and generally for explaining almost any sort of matter from every art’. It also reflected the late-medieval desire for ordering, for the organised setting down of a universe. The work was divided into three parts: Speculum Naturale (science and natural history, including chapters on astronomy, anatomy, agriculture, light and colour); Speculum Doctrinale (medicine, the mechanical arts, theology – based on the resurrection of man after banishment from Eden); and Speculum Historale (from Creation to the Last Judgement). A fourth section was added after Vincent’s death and appears in printed versions from the fifteenth century: Speculum Morale was largely copied from the work of Thomas Aquinas, and was an attempt by Vincent’s followers (and later printers) to attune the work to a more modern philosophy and Christian theology.
Vincent’s own moral instruction continues to excite debate. He was a modest editor, claiming little credit for his vast encyclopaedia (indeed apologising for its shortcomings in its preface, a recurring theme), crediting instead the vast army of writers upon which he drew. But his modesty was inherently false: while he very rarely adopted the outspoken role of ‘auctor’, or learned scholar expressing his own views, his selection from his sources was nonetheless pointed, politically and morally.
Vincent was particularly intrigued by the role of women, although he may not quite fit the role of medieval progressive some have assigned him. He made an educational distinction between the sexes, but it was very much the traditional one. ‘You have sons?’ he quotes from the Book of Ecclesiasticus. ‘Train them and care for them from boyhood. You have daughters? Watch over their bodies and do not show yourself joyful to them.’ But Vincent also displayed a rare acceptance in the Middle Ages of the view that women might be worthy recipients of his collation of knowledge. In France he was exposed to several instances marking the ascendancy of women, not least the regency of Blanche of Castile, and the chivalrous concept of courtly love. There are sections in his Great Mirror highlighting specific crafts suitable for women (all non-physical, all domestic as one might expect), and he places much emphasis on the value of women reading (albeit for religious guidance). The education scholar Rosemary Barton Tobin has observed that while another of Vincent’s works, De Eruditione Filiorum Nobilium (The Education of Noble Children), had the last ten of its fifty-one chapters devoted to young women, the instruction he suggests concentrates on the promotion of abstinence and the protection of chastity. Vincent opposed all forms of cosmetic beautification, for this would deflect focus from the soul. Moreover, Professor Tobin notes, a woman would always be required to uphold more virtuous standards than a man: ‘The girl is responsible for both her own behaviour and whatever interpretation others may place upon that behaviour. It is a severe burden which only adds to the heavier responsibility Vincent gives to girls as opposed to boys in the sphere of moral action.’*
COOK’S TALE
But Chaucer was a fan. He once referenced ‘Vincent, in his Storial Mirour,’ and he may have drawn on his Great Mirror for The Canterbury Tales.*
Chaucer’s great work is in itself encyclopaedic, his twenty-four tales covering all manner of occupations and daily pursuits – the Physician, the Monk, the Prioress, the Friar, the Merchant. But his range of fictional forms also suggests a catalogue, spanning, in the words of one middle-English specialist, every possible style: ‘Romance, moral prose allegory, the comic and bawdy fabliau, penitential manual, beast fable, Breton lai, sermon, fictional autobiography, parody, dramatic monologue, tragedy, exemplum, satire and hagiography, to name but a few.’*
Professor Helen Cooper compares The Canterbury Tales to the compendiums of Vincent of Beauvais, not least in its fully rounded exploration of human character: strengths and weaknesses, reality and imagination, abstract thought and intellectual rigour. She believes the work was intended to be read as an entire literary expression of life, with some narrative cross-referencing, and to address one story alone would be to miss the point, ‘like reading the Murder of Gonzago without Hamlet.’*
The characters in the tales are broadly divided into three social groups – those who fight, those who work and those who pray – while the range of the stories would indeed have been familiar to anyone versed in the thematic groupings of a medieval encyclopaedia, for they form a complete presentation of the world: the exotic world of romance and chivalry, the everyday practical world and the spiritual and cosmic world. And in a similar vein to many religious entries in early compendiums, the tales are morals: the stories test the extent to which the pilgrims live up to or fall short of an ideal. The main difference between Chaucer’s work and the encyclopaedia is that there is no attempt at universal or empirical ‘answers’. Every character strives for their own truths.
* A Social History of Knowledge (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000).
* The earliest universities in England, Italy, France and Spain (Bologna and Oxford in the eleventh/twelfth century, Modena in the twelfth century and Paris at the start of the thirteenth) evolved from cathedral schools and monastic schools, all of which followed the Latin Catholic theistic tradition.
* ‘Gervase of Tilbury’ by H.G. Richardson, History, 1961, vol. 46, no. 157. ‘The age of scepticism was not yet,’ Richardson observes. The Otia being billed as ‘an entertainment’ now comes into focus: though convincingly told, Gervase did not necessarily believe all the more fanciful stories in his work, but included them as one might use Shakespeare to describe the monarchy – history as drama.
* Otia Imperialia edited and translated by S.E. Banks and J.W. Binns (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2002).
* There is much debate in medieval scholarship over whether Gervase’s work was intended as a textual accompaniment to the famous Ebstorf map, the 12ft-square, thirty-goatskin mappa mundi made sometime between 1234 and 1240 (and destroyed by the Allied bombing of Hanover in the Second World War). The controversy hinges on whether Gervase of Tilbury was the same Gervase as Gervase of Ebstorf. There is convincing evidence either way; the more extreme examples of fiery paradise quoted above, for example, are certainly redolent of some of the more fearful descriptions on the map.
* Although there may be as many as 300 manuscripts with portions of the whole.
* See ‘Vincent of Beauvais on the Education of Women’ by Rosemary Barton Tobin, Journal of the History of Ideas, July–September, 1974, vol. 35, no. 3. Also Astrik Gabriel, The Educational Ideas of Vincent of Beauvais (Notre Dame, 1956).
* The line appears in the Prologue, The Legend of Good Women, c.1386.
* Ian Johnson of the University of St Andrews.
* The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (Duckworth, London, 1983). As if to repay the compliment, Vincent of Beauvais includes a collection of fables in his Speculum Doctrinale, attempting to impose a coherence on them.