The Book of Lost Books (10 page)

Ovid

{43 B.C.E.–18 C.E.}

BEING A POET in ancient Rome was a perilous business. Catullus had lauded his friend C. Helvius Cinna for his epyllion
Zmyrna,
sure it would be read by future generations. The poem has not survived, and Cinna met an exceptionally sticky end, when a mob mistook him for his namesake L. Cornelius Cinna, the conspirator against Julius Caesar, battered him to death, and paraded his head on a spear through the city. A century later, Petronius would be driven to suicide at the hands of Julius' descendant, Nero. Publius Ovidius Naso, called Ovid, was luckier—although his career too was blighted, “by a poem and a mistake.”

Ovid's first book of poems, the
Amores,
opens with a dedication telling the reader that he has slimmed it down from five volumes to three. He was candid about the necessity of reworking and revising, mentioning “the flames which emend.” The
Amores
is a waggish take on the Roman love elegy, in which he praises, pleads with, and vilifies his mistress Corinna. Unlike Lesbia, whom Catullus alternately hated and loved, or Propertius' Cynthia or Tibullus' Delia, all of whose noms de plume have been unraveled by commentators, Corinna is a mystery. While the earlier elegists had struggled to convey, convincingly, their earnest passion, Ovid, with delicious glee and urbane wit, confutes expectations and winks at the audience. There is no “real” Corinna at all; she exists only because a love poet needs an object for his affection.

Ovid was a virtuoso, also composing a tragedy on Medea (which Quintilian thought best displayed his talents, but which has not survived) and a gloriously abundant compendium of myths,
The Metamorphoses,
and inventing the dramatic monologue, in his
Heroides,
where he gives a voice to legendary heroines. The poem that blasted his fortunes, however, was the
Ars Amatoria, The Art of Love.
In debonair and sardonic fashion, he advises the youth of Rome how to flatter, avoid suspicion from jealous husbands, deport themselves at the chariot games, and variously wheedle their way into the beds of Rome's women. It is a cosmopolitan extravaganza, conjuring up the alleys and banquets of the city. As a manual for seduction, it earned the ire of the emperor.

Augustus, whose impatience at the moral laxity of his subjects was manifesting itself in strict legislation against extramarital affairs, was less than amused.
The Art of Love
was the poem, but the error that accompanied it is shrouded in speculation. Suggestions range from the idea that Ovid was conducting an affair with the emperor's granddaughter, or that he had seen the empress naked, or had defiled the rites of Isis: whatever it was, Ovid was discreet enough, and perhaps humbled enough, never to make the charge specific. All he would let slip was that he “had eyes.”

His punishment was severe. Ovid was banished from the Rome he so lovingly described to Tomis, on the Black Sea, the outermost edge of the empire. The suavest of poets would live with barbarians. He continued to write, sending letters and regretful poems back to his friends. The gravity of his sentence has often been heightened by comparison: imagine Byron in Saskatchewan, or Oscar Wilde in Iceland. During his ostracism, he started to compose a celebration of the Roman calendar,
The
Fasti,
commemorating the way time used to be governed in a place where it was fixed by the flow of tides, seasons, and equinoxes. He completed only six months of his evocation of the etiquette and mythology of the holidays and holy days in Rome.

In the
Epistulae ex Ponto,
however, Ovid tells us of one remarkable feat he accomplished in exile. He learned the Getic language of the savages, and even composed poems in it. His subject was a eulogy for Augustus, and the tribe were impressed enough to call him a bard. But, they insisted, since he sang the praises of the emperor, surely he would be restored to civilization? He never was, and the lines in which he celebrated the divine Caesars in the rough tongue of his despised compatriots were left unpreserved. As, for that matter, was the entire Getic language.

Longinus

{
fl. first century
C.E.}

THE TREATISE ENTITLED
Peri Hypsous
or
On the Sublime
is not only a reliquary for lost books, but is itself a lost book. The Paris manuscript has pages missing; it ends on a remark about another literary discussion the author wrote called
On the Emotions.
The author is about to summarize its contents, when the pages suddenly cease. Its lacunae create weird disjunctions: Alexander's retort to Parmenio, “I would have been content . . . ,” segues into “the distance between heaven and earth; it may be said this is the stature of Homer.”

Almost every aspect of
On the Sublime
flickers with a sense of instability. The opening page names one Postumius Florentianus as the dedicatee of the essay; he is not mentioned again, and it is to one Terentianus that the subsequent points are addressed. The author is called Dionysius Longinus, though on the contents page this becomes Dionysius
or
Longinus. Earlier scholars presumed Longinus to be Cassius Longinus (
c.
213–73), the Neoplatonic philosopher and rhetorician, who advised Queen Zenobia to secede from the Roman Empire and was executed by the Emperor Aurelian when he quashed the move toward independence. Most critical opinion now gravitates toward
On the Sublime
being rather earlier, and the author is given the clumsy title of “Pseudo-Longinus.”

Pseudo-Longinus defines the sublime as “the echo of the greatness of spirit,” and quotes widely, and sometimes wildly, to prove his definition. It is thanks to
On the Sublime
that we have fragments of Aeschylus'
Orithyia,
Sophocles'
Polyxena,
and Euripides'
Phaethon.
Conversely, there are lines that cannot be attributed to any known author. Whoever wrote, “His field was smaller than a letter,” or, “Immediately, along the beaches, a countless crowd called out Tuna!” was once so famous he or she did not need to be named.

The most remarkable preservation in
On the Sublime
is an almost completely intact poem by Sappho. Indeed, of her nine volumes, the only complete poem is contained in the Longinus manuscript. Though the book itself was to inspire aesthetic theories by Pope, Burke, Kant, and Coleridge, its conservation of these priceless lines would guarantee its readership.

But this stroke of luck should not obscure those shivering uncertainties in the text. Longinus elsewhere quotes Homer, but inaccurately. A description of the god Poseidon splices together lines from books XIII and XX of
The Iliad;
another account, of the Olympian gods in battle, conflates parts of books XX and XXI. In an extremely curious throwaway line, Longinus also claims that the “lawgiver of the Jews” displays the characteristics of the sublime; he quotes the opening of Genesis, which apparently reads, “God said Let there be Light and there was Light, Let there be Land and there was Land.”

Pseudo-Longinus has safeguarded our sole intact poem by Sappho; however, given his other discernible errors and misquotations, the awful specter rises that our one poem might not be as genuine and immaculate as we might have hoped.

St. Paul (Saul of Tarsus)

{
first decade–c.
65 C.E.}

AROUND 200 C.E., an unknown Christian bound together a codex containing ten epistles by St. Paul (known to us as p
⁴⁶
, the “Chester-Beatty Papyrus,” the earliest extant manuscript of Paul's work). It includes Romans, Hebrews, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians. Did the compiler pause as he or she inscribed the text of 2 Thessalonians 2:2, where the saint warns the church at Thessalonica to be troubled “neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us”? Since Paul himself had been vexed by forged letters purporting to be his, the scribe's task took on the onerous responsibility of regulating divine revelation. Unfortunately, 2 Thessalonians is not by Paul.

Saul, born in Tarsus, the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia, was a Jewish Roman citizen. He was educated by the Pharisee Gamaliel and came from a family of tent-makers (though given the importance of canvas shelters to the Roman army, “military procurement” might be a more apt description of his profession). He tells us in the Epistle to the Galatians that he was “exceedingly zealous” in his faith, to the extent that he persecuted the apocalyptic sect founded by a Nazarene called Jesus, which his followers called “the Way.” When Stephen, the first martyr, was stoned to death by a mob, the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of Saul. According to the Acts of the Apostles, this Saul “made havock of the church.”

The convert Marcion, whose heretical beliefs were subdued in the middle of the second century, knew of Paul's letters, but did not include in his canon the Second Epistle to Timothy. An alert reader, Marcion believed only Luke's Gospel was necessary for salvation (though even that benefited from some judicious pruning), and he must have been struck by the contradiction between the letter supposedly by Paul and the accounts of Paul's travels in Acts, Luke's continuation of the history of the earliest church. In 2 Timothy, the author impersonating Paul says that he has left Trophimus sick at Miletus: nonetheless, a perfectly healthy Trophimus is with Paul in Jerusalem after the saint's departure from Miletus in Acts of the Apostles. Was it this inconsistency that suggested to Marcion that the letter was not, in fact, by Paul? Or was it the overly vehement assertion that “All scripture
is
given by inspiration of God”?

On his way to Damascus to continue the extirpation of the Jesus cult, Saul was confronted with the object of his hatred. In a blinding vision, the risen Christ asked, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Saul's sight was restored by a follower of the Way in Damascus, and the erstwhile intimidator performed the most famous volte-face in the history of religion. Saul's name did not immediately change; it was only when he struck the sorcerer Elymas blind through the power of the Holy Spirit that we learn he was now also called Paul.

Paul's mission was not to convert the orthodox Israelites whose rejection of Christ he had so recently enforced, but to proselytize among the Gentiles. His evangelical itinerary took him to Antioch, Athens, Ephesus (where he burned “books of curious arts” worth fifty thousand pieces of silver), and eventually Rome. He was mistaken for the god Mercury in Lystra, and was told by the Roman governor Festus at Caesarea that “too much learning doth make thee mad.” He was whipped thirty-nine times on five occasions, beaten thrice with rods, stoned once, and shipwrecked three times. Although the Book of Acts informs the reader of numerous miracles, including even the raising of the dead, his own Epistles are remarkably coy about supernatural powers, preferring instead a catalogue of his physical sufferings.

In 367, Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, decreed that the New Testament had twenty-seven books. Paul, of course, had not been writing a testament, and would have been surprised that his letters dealing with specific crises in various churches now had universal relevance (though he would have been equally surprised that the world still existed). Although Athanasius commanded, “Let no one add, let nothing be taken away,” the newly crystallized “Bible” still retained the traces of its less than monolithic conception. In 1 Corinthians 5:9, Saint Paul had said, “I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators.” The “0 Corinthians” letter is lost, presumably because its antilibertine agenda was adequately dealt with elsewhere (or, an admittedly remote possibility, because it was rather too specific about the sexual proclivities of the Corinthians; the demotic expression “to corinthicate”—κορινθιαζεσθαι—meant to whore around).

Paul hoped to preach the gospel as far as Spain. Conflicts and tensions between converted and traditional Jews, however, meant that he was forced to return to Jerusalem and defend himself against a charge of sedition. A conspiracy of forty men loyal to the Sanhedrin had sworn an oath not to eat before they had murdered Paul, and it was therefore in Paul's own interests to allow the Roman overlords to decide his case, rather than the Jewish Temple authorities; moreover, being a Roman citizen, Paul had the right to appeal to the emperor himself. Unluckily, in this case the emperor was Nero.

Agrippa, the client-king, and Festus, the Roman overlord of Judaea, agreed to Paul's request, ruefully noting that if he had not invoked this right, they were minded to set him free anyway. Paul was transferred to Rome, and while the boat was buffeted by tempests and stymied in doldrums, he impressed the crew by prophesying that none of them would come to harm, for it was decreed that he would stand before Caesar. They safely reached Rome, and, practically at that point, the Acts of the Apostles unexpectedly ends. The whole narrative has been moving toward this encounter, yet the final climactic showdown between Nero and Paul is either lost or was never even written.

We do not know how Paul died. One tradition asserts that he did reach Spain, but, given the emperor's notorious sadism and insanity (he used Christians dipped in pitch to light the streets), it would be nothing short of miraculous for Paul to have persuaded Nero to let him go free. But miracles had been known to happen, if we trust the author of Acts.

Paul disappears from the narrative like Enoch or Isaiah ascending into Heaven. One ingenious speculation reads the text of Acts of the Apostles as a kind of legal briefing for the lawyer who would defend Paul: it insists, for example, that he has always been deferential to political authorities. The ending was not written because it had not yet happened. This hypothesis cannot, however, explain why no later writer appended the details of what transpired, the arguments for faith put forward by Paul or the emperor's retort. There is no ancient account of the death of St. Paul.

The very fact that Paul's name was later used to bolster missives by other authors attests to his phenomenal standing among his peers. Never having met the physical Jesus, never even using the word “Christian,” Paul invents Christianity. If the whole of philosophy is merely footnotes to Plato, then the entirety of Christian theology is an attempt to unravel the insights of Paul.