Emperor Whisperers: Lives of Famous Whores, Physical Defects of Mankind & Other Classical Books Lost
My new book is out, and is free for paid subscribers to this Substack
To check all previous newsletters in the History of Mankind, which is pretty long, you can click here.
Like I said a few times before, my new “Emperor Whisperers: a Comparative History of Ancient Western and Chinese Philosophy,” published last year, is available at Amazon here and also at a much cheaper price and straight from the publisher, which you can contact here.
Just as a reminder, I’m sending a free electronic copy to all paid subscribers, existing and those who become paid subscribers throughout this year. Anyway, here’s another extract, this time from the very first chapter, on the loss of classical books, an issue that pains me still, to this day.
Daniel Graham, an expert on pre-Socratic thought[1], is among those to have derided the traditional focus on the pre-scientific exploits of the ancient Greeks. Contra most high-school and college teachers who give courses in ancient philosophy, Graham notes that none of the Milesian philosophers was a Material Monist (a believer that there's only one material in the universe); Heraclitus did not transgress the law of non-contradiction; the empirically-minded Parmenides did not usher in a new era in astronomy; and Anaxagoras and Empedocles were not opponents of Parmenides' views on the stars.
These confusions and fake comparisons, and many others, have been easily sustained during centuries partly because the original sources are extremely paltry for many of the authors we will discuss in this book. We only have some quotations and comments from later writers when it comes to examining the thought of the pre-Socratics, most of whom didn't actually write any books.
The extent of the loss when it comes to the books that ancients did write is mind-boggling. Take, for example, a look at ancient bibliographies like Athenaeus' Doctors at Dinner (also translated at ‘Dinner-Table Philosophers’ or ‘Learned Banqueters’) which survives in fifteen books, some of them only in summary. A vast compendium of information on matters of dining, Athenaeus' work contains remarks on music, dance, games, courtesans, and luxury. Athenaeus refers to nearly 800 Greek writers and 2,500 separate works, almost all of them gone entirely.
One of Athenaeus characters boasts to have read 800 plays of Athenian Middle Comedy. Of plays from the 5th century BC, only about 25% of those by the celebrity author Aristophanes survive, while less celebrated works are, of course, disappeared for ever. We have, for example, a mere seven plays by Sophocles, yet we know that he wrote 120; Euripides wrote 90 plays, of which only 19 survive (we only have fragments and incomplete plot summaries of his Phaeton play, for example); Aeschylus wrote between 70 and 90, of which we have just seven.
There are forty or more other poets of the period known only by name and scattered fragments discovered in papyrus out of Egyptian rubbish dumps or references in literary theorists, historians and grammarians. Similarly, one could make long lists of Chinese authors referenced in classic Chinese books from whom only a few lines or no material at all survives.
We would very much like to be able to comment on the rare book written by Augustus, the first Roman emperor, called “Exhortations to Philosophy,” but it's gone too. We have some fragments that let posterity know that there once was a Sicilian response to Homer, an author of epics called Stesichorus, whose works would surely be of great interest.[2] Of Sappho, the most influential and heavily commented upon poet of all Greek history, we only have a few poems left, estimated to represent perhaps one percent of her output. The aforementioned Megasthenes, Greek authority on ancient India, wrote an extensive book detailing what he saw there that is now lost, albeit several classical authors cite it in their own works.
Sulla's autobiography in twenty-volumes, and Suetonius' works like Lives of Famous Whores and Physical Defects of Mankind were not thought worth conserving by Middle Ages antiquarians and copyists. Fabio Pictor's first large-scale history of Rome, Aristotle on Comedy and on The Pythagoreans, Varro on Roman religion, all of Menander's 108 comedies save for one, Claudius on the Etruscans, Philinus' pro-Carthaginian history of the Punic Wars, Sallust's version of the Catiline conspiracy, the works by the Group of Sixty comedians of Athens[3], Melissus' one hundred and fifty Classical joke anthologies[4], Cato the Elder's Origines, Pytheas' narration of his circumnavigation of ancient Britain, Naevius' epic on the First Punic War, the anti-Roman tracts by Timagenes of Alexandria, Gorgias' “On Nature or the Non-Existent,” Xanthus' contemporary biography of Empedocles, the works of Diogenes of Babylon[5], almost all the works of Livius Andronicus[6], most of Naevius work including practically all of his epic poem on the first Punic War, Crates of Thebes' letters on philosophical subjects, Rome's famous Sybilline Books: all of these are gone, most without a trace.
[1] Explaining the Cosmos: The Ionian Tradition of Scientific Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. viii, 344.
[2] Sicily, a backwater for most of history after its conquest by the Romans, was a hugely relevant part of Greater Greece and the Hellenic world, as we'll discuss in this book.
[3] Much beloved by Philip of Macedonia, Alexander's father.
[4] As Mary Beard explains in “Laughter in Ancient Rome” (2014), there was a significant difference between laughter in ancient Rome and Greece: the Greeks had lots of words for different kinds of laughter (kichlizein – to giggle – is surely her favorite), but only two words for joke. Latin, on the other hand, mostly uses variants of one verb – ridere – to laugh. But it has a huge number of words for different kinds of jokes and witticisms.
[5] Who, as a member of a famous Athenian embassy in 155 BC, introduced stoicism to the Romans.
[6] A former Greek slave, and the first literary writer in Latin, who had his first play performed in Rome in 240 BC, and made the first literary translation known, that of the Odyssey.