On June 22 I wrote on my blog: ‘I wrote the last entry on my blog two months ago; I have decided to end my work on Plato for the time being. How do I spend my break? I have decided to improve my Latin.’
(Incidentally, the last entry on my
blog was the ‘Digression 5, Meno and the Meno, Xenophon and the Meno’,
published on April 22. I don’t know how it happened that it now figures as
published on July 7. Perhaps I looked at it and made some correction on that
day.)
I decided to devote my time to Latin
poetry, and so I began to read Lucretius’ De rerum natura. It was lying
on my bookshelf for some thirty-seven years, untouched. As I opened it, a
little envelope fell out, with a note from Professor Ackrill:
‘Oxford Aristotelian Society
Fortnightly meetings will take place as
usual at 8.30 p.m.in LR IX at Brasenose College. The first meeting this term
will be on Tuesday 18 October. We continue with Lucretius: I. 449-482, then IV.
722-906.
October 1983 J.L.A.’
I finished reading the third book of De rerum natura when
I was thinking of returning to Plato, but then I came across the video presenting a conversation on Lucretius
with Margaret Graver, Professor of Classics, Dartmouth College. Margaret Graver
led me to Stephen Greenblatt. I ordered Greenblatt’s The Swerve HOW THE RENAISSANCE BEGAN, and realised
that I cannot leave Lucretius before reading his poem in its entirety, thinking
him through and discussing him on my blog.
In the meantime, yesterday, in the middle
of Greenblatt’s Swerve I came across a text that compelled me to send
him an email: ‘May I ask you a great favour? Would
you send me the Latin text of Poggio's letter to Leonardo Bruni on Jerome of
Prague, and of his letter to Leonardo Arentino concerning his find of the
manuscript of Quintilian. I would like to put the Latin text of these
letters on my website with Czech translation, and with your permission, the
text with which you link the two together in The Swerve, in English
and in Czech.
I have a great time with The Swerve.’
Professor Greenblatt replied: ‘Thank you for your letter. I am sorry to
say that I do not have access, because of the pandemic, to my office or to the
library. I wish you success in your search.’
I therefore
decided to put the relevant texts in English, as they stand in Greenblatt’s
book. But I must say a few introductory words concerning his book.
The
main hero of Greenblatt’s book is Poggio Bracciolini, who discovered Lucretius’ De
rerum natura in 1417. Poggio became a secretary of Pope John XXIII, who was
deposed by the Council at Constance. There were three popes at that time, and ending
the schism was the council’s most important item of business. But another major
issue was the repression of heresy: ‘The correspondence that the secretaries
copied out for their pope attempted to turn the focus away from the schism and
from papal corruption and towards someone whose name Poggio must have begun to
write in official documents again and again. Forty-four-year-old Jan Hus, a Czech
priest and religious reformer, had been for some years a thorn in the side of
the Church’ (Greenblatt, p. 165-166).
What Greenblatt
writes on Hus will warm every Czech’s heart, for I hope his book will be
translated in Czech. But concerning Hus he writes little, if anything, which is
not known in my country, at least by specialists. On Hus I shall therefore quote
just a few things I knew nothing of: ‘The Bohemian nobles who
accompanied him rode ahead to meet with the pope and ask whether Hus would be
allowed to remain in Constance free from the risk of violence. “Had he killed
my own brother,” John replied, “not a hair on his head should be touched while
he remained in the city.” (p. 167) … Wycliffe had died in his bed, much to the
disappointment of his ecclesiastic enemies, but the council now ordered that
his remains be dug up and cast out of consecrated ground. It was not an
auspicious sign for their reception of Jan Hus … Notwithstanding the assurances
that the pope, the council, and the emperor had given him, Hus was almost
immediately vilified and denied the opportunity to speak in public. On November
28, barely three weeks after he arrived, he was arrested on order of the
cardinals and taken to the prison of a Dominican monastery on the banks of the
Rhine. There he was thrown into an underground cell through which all the filth
of the monastery was discharged … In the face of protests from Hus and his
Bohemian supporters about the apparent violation of his safe-conduct, the
emperor chose not to intervene. He was, it was said, uncomfortable about what
seemed a violation of his word, but an English cardinal had reportedly reassured
him that “no faith need be kept with heretics” (p.168) … There is no direct
record of what Poggio personally thought of these events in which he had played
his small part … and he was, after all, in the service of the papacy whose
power Hus was challenging. (A century later, Luther, mounting a more successful
challenge, remarked: “We are all Hussites without knowing it.”) But when, some
months later, Hus’ associate, Jerome of Prague, was also put on trial for
heresy, Poggio was not able to remain silent.
A
committed religious reformer with degrees from the universities of Paris,
Oxford, and Heidelberg, Jerome was a famous orator whose testimony on May 26,
1416, made a powerful impression on Poggio. “I must confess,” he wrote to his
friend Leonardo Bruni, “that I never saw any one who in pleading a cause,
especially a cause on the issue of which his own life depended, approached
nearer to the standard of ancient eloquence, which we so much admire.” Poggio
was clearly aware that he was treading on dangerous ground, but the papal bureaucrat
could not entirely restrain the humanist’s passionate admiration:
It was astonishing to witness with what choice
of words, with what closeness of argument, with what confidence of countenance
he replied to his adversaries. So impressive was his peroration, that it is a subject
of great concern, that a man so noble and excellent a genius should have
deviated into heresy. I cannot help entertaining some doubts. But far be it from
me to take upon myself to decide in so important a matter. I shall acquiesce in
the opinion of those who are wiser than myself.
This
prudent acquiescence did not altogether reassure Bruni. “I must advice you
henceforth,” he told Poggio in reply, “to write upon such subjects in a more
guarded manner.” (p.172-173)
It was
the dream of persuading an audience through the eloquence and conviction of
public words that had drawn Hus and Jerome of Prague to Constance. If Hus had
been shouted down, Jerome, dragged from the miserable dungeon where he had been
chained for 350 days, managed at least to make himself heard. For a modern
reader, there is something almost absurd about Poggio’s admiration for Jerome’s
“choice of words” and the effectiveness of his “peroration” – as if the quality
of the prisoner’s Latin were the issue; but it was precisely the quality of the
prisoner’s Latin that unsettled Poggio and made him doubt the validity of the
charges against the heretic. For he could not … disguise from himself the
tension between the bureaucrat who worked for the sinister John XXIII and the
humanist who longed for the freer, clearer air, as he imagined it, of the
ancient Roman Republic. Poggio could find no real way to resolve this tension;
instead, he plunged into the monastic library with its neglected treasures.
“There
is no question,” Poggio wrote, “that this glorious man, so elegant, so pure, so
full of morals and wit, could not much longer have endured the filth of that
prison, the squalor of the place, and the savage cruelty of its keepers.” These
words were not a further lapse into the kind of imprudent admiration of the
eloquent, doomed Jerome that alarmed Leonardo Bruni; they are Poggio’s
description of the manuscript of Quintilian that he found at St. Gall:
He was sad and dressed in mourning, as people
are when doomed to death; his beard was dirty and his hair caked with mud, so
that by his expression and appearance it was clear that he had been summoned to
an undeserved punishment. He seemed to stretch out his hands and beg for the
loyalty of the Roman people, to demand that he be saved from an unjust
sentence.
The
scene he had witnessed in May appears still vivid in the humanists’ imagination
as he searched through the monastery’s books. Jerome had protested that he had been
kept “in filth and fetters, deprived of every comfort”; Quintilian was found “filthy
with mold and dust.” Jerome had been confined, Poggio wrote to Leonardo
Aretino, “in a dark dungeon, where it was impossible for him to read”;
Quintilian, he indignantly wrote of the manuscript in the monastic library, was
“in a sort of foul and gloomy dungeon … where not even men convicted of a
capital offence would have been stuck away.” “A man worthy of eternal
remembrance!” So Poggio rashly exclaimed about the heretic Jerome whom he could
not lift a finger to save. A few moths later in the monastery of St. Gall, he
rescued another man worthy of eternal remembrance from the barbarians’ prison
house.
It is
not clear how conscious the link was in Poggio’s mind between the imprisoned
heretic and the imprisoned text. At once morally alert and deeply compromised
in his professional life, he responded to books as if they were living, suffering
human beings. “By heaven,” he wrote of the Quintilian manuscript, “if we had
not brought help, he would surely have perished the very next day.” Taking no
chances, Poggio sat down and began copying the whole lengthy work in his
beautiful hand. It took him fifty-four days to complete the task.’ (p.177-179)
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