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By the time Rome became the unquestioned dominant power in the Mediterranean over the course of the next century, its citizens could boast of having a distinct vernacular literature, as well as a historical tradition and mythology, that put them in a unique relationship with Greek culture. Faculty Bookshelf. Main page content. Author s Denis Feeney. Like Naevius he was trilingual in Greek, Oscan, and Latin; he memorably asserted that because he knew three languages he had three hearts. In addition to translating tragedies he wrote an epic, the Annals , which covered the whole course of Roman history down to his own day. In it he made one crucial innovation. His two predecessors had used a native Italian verse form for their epics, the so-called Saturnian. None of these works survives intact. In most cases we have only brief quotations in later writers, particularly grammarians who were attracted by their archaic language. From the surviving twenty or so lines plus the title we can deduce that the girl in question was a courtesan, that she had some connection with two free-spending young men, and that the play was probably not set at Tarentum. But even his longest fragment runs to only eighteen lines, and most are much shorter. Cleopatra was the first—and last—Greek ruler of Egypt who knew any Egyptian. One would expect the Romans to show similar indifference. And for the most part they did. Sabines and Oscans, Spaniards and Gauls, Britons, Illyrians, and Dacians—all had to learn Latin, and most of their descendants still speak a language recognizably related to it. Yet the Romans did learn Greek. Indeed, they ran the eastern half of their empire in it, from Egypt all the way to the Black Sea, as well as Greece itself. This striking phenomenon has a traditional explanation. How natural, then, that the first recognizable works of Latin literature should be translations from Greek. No other people in the ancient world did this: not the Egyptians, not the Phoenicians or their colonists at Carthage, not any of the other Italian peoples, the Oscans, Umbrians, or Etruscans. And certainly not the Greeks. The one apparent exception, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint, was carried out by Alexandrian Jews for their own Greek-speaking community. The legend that it was commissioned by one of the Ptolemies has no foundation. The nearest real parallel seems to be the Akkadian translations of the Sumerian Gilgamesh epic, which were certainly not known to Livius Andronicus. Was Greek literature simply too appealing, too powerful to be ignored? But in that case why did the Romans not simply write in Greek? This, after all, was a path followed by a number of non-Greek writers, including the Egyptian chronicler Manetho, the Jewish historian Josephus, and the Alexandrian Ezekiel, who composed an account of the Exodus in the form of a Greek tragedy. Indeed, the first Roman historian, Fabius Pictor, did write in Greek, as did one or two of his immediate successors. Greek was widely spoken on the Italian peninsula, including at Rome itself. Far from bursting upon the Romans in the third century, Greek culture had always been there. In the late Republic, elite Romans were effectively bilingual; one can imagine Catullus writing poetry in Greek just as the aristocrats of Heian Japan did in Chinese. The first Roman translations are unusual in other respects too. L2 is what produces the assembly instructions for your new baby stroller. But Livius and his colleagues are literary L2 translators, moving from their first or second language Greek to their second or third Latin. This is not normal. In thinking about these issues Feeney acknowledges a considerable debt to the work of David Bellos. Rather, translation involves movement between a language of lower status defined by prestige, popularity, or both to one that is comparatively higher. Translation UP generally tries to elide the foreignness of the source—to produce a text as much like one composed in the target language as possible. Translation DOWN tends to preserve linguistic features of the source language, since these carry cachet in and of themselves. Yet for Livius it had been UP. What does that imply? But in an ancient Mediterranean world made up of many multilingual societies with no equivalent to the text-based literature of the Greeks, literary translation was unusual if not unprecedented. Feeney shows how it allowed Romans to systematically take over Greek forms of tragedy, comedy, and epic, making them their own and giving birth to what has become known as Latin literature. The growth of Latin literature coincides with a period of dramatic change in Roman society. The powerful but geographically confined Roman city-state of BCE had conquered all of Italy just fifty years later. By the time Rome became the unquestioned dominant power in the Mediterranean over the course of the next century, its citizens could boast of having a distinct vernacular literature, as well as a historical tradition and mythology, that put them in a unique relationship with Greek culture. Fall Reading List. Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature - Denis Feeney - Google книги

Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, and other authors of ancient Rome are so firmly established in the Western canon today that the birth of Latin literature seems inevitable. Yet, Denis Feeney boldly argues, the beginnings of Latin literature were anything but inevitable. The cultural flourishing that in time produced the Aeneid , the Metamorphoses , and other Latin classics was one of the strangest events in history. Beyond Greek traces the emergence of Latin literature from to BCE, beginning with Roman stage productions of plays that represented the first translations of Greek literary texts into another language. From a modern perspective, translating foreign-language literature into the vernacular seems perfectly normal. But in an ancient Mediterranean world made up of many multilingual societies with no equivalent to the text-based literature of the Greeks, literary translation was unusual if not unprecedented. Feeney shows how it allowed Romans to systematically take over Greek forms of tragedy, comedy, and epic, making them their own and giving birth to what has become known as Latin literature. It is easy enough to write a novel in which Livius Andronicus is commissioned for the special peace games because his former master, or his patron, L. Livius Salinator, is on the committee planning the games. In reality there is nothing inherently implausible in such a scenario. A translation is an assemblage of words, and as such it can contain as much or as little poetry as any other such assemblage. The Romans can make some claim to have done this too. Our fullest insight into Roman adaptation of Greek drama is provided by the comedies of Plautus, working in the late third and early second centuries BC , a generation or so after Livius, and those of Terence a generation later still. Both based their work on the so-called new comedy of fourth-century Athens whose best-known playwright was Menander. Here we have more than fragments, but the loss of most of the Greek originals had made it hard to evaluate them as translations. Some help came in when the sands of Egypt yielded up a papyrus codex with remains of three plays by Menander, though none of them turned out to underlie an extant Latin play. Yet it is also perfectly descriptive. Since the original publication, more Menander has come to light. Plautus retains the plot of his originals but adds references to Roman institutions, puns that only work in Latin, slapstick humor, and the elaborate aria-monologues known as cantica. In Roman comedy this is the Woosterish young man around whose frustrated amours the plot typically revolves. It may be that Livius and Naevius anticipated some of these elements. Certainly they prepared the way for them, and for a progeny that runs from The Comedy of Errors to Noises Off. Roman writers continued to exploit this device well into the imperial period. Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest. June Faber and Faber, As he notes, participants in the First Punic War could not know that there would be a Second and Third. Read Next. Link Copied! Submit a letter: Email us letters nybooks. Menander; Roman fresco, Pompeii, first century AD. This Issue June 22, Martin Filler. The Male Impersonator. Marcia Angell. The Abortion Battlefield. News about upcoming issues, contributors, special events, online features, and more. The New York Review of Books: recent articles and content from nybooks. I consent to having NYR add my email to their mailing list. From Hercules to Hamlet. Kirkus Reviews. Mary Beard. Gustave Flaubert , translated by Geoffrey Wall. James Fenton. Adam Michnik. Matthew rated it liked it Sep 23, August rated it it was amazing Feb 17, Mark rated it it was amazing Mar 25, Ophion marked it as to- read Dec 30, Aleksandr is currently reading it Jan 20, Rafa Rodriguez marked it as to-read Feb 05, Gavin marked it as to-read Feb 05, Dominik marked it as to-read Feb 06, Daniel Wright marked it as to-read Feb 09, Terry Kuny marked it as to-read Feb 09, David marked it as to-read Feb 09, Joe marked it as to-read Feb 09, Matthew Raketti marked it as to-read Feb 10, Eric marked it as to-read Feb 10, Alix marked it as to- read Feb 11, Don Heiman marked it as to-read Feb 11, Henry marked it as to-read Feb 12, Natalie marked it as to-read Feb 15, Konrad marked it as to-read Feb 17, Kat marked it as to-read Feb 25, Shweta added it Feb 26, Charlie marked it as to-read Mar 18, Peter marked it as to-read Mar 21, Sarah marked it as to-read Mar 21, Nancy marked it as to-read Mar 23, Jonathan Griffiths marked it as to-read Apr 08, There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Readers also enjoyed. About D. Books by D. Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature by D.C. Feeney

The growth of Latin literature coincides with a period of dramatic change in Roman society. The powerful but geographically confined Roman city- state of BCE had conquered all of Italy just fifty years later. By the time Rome became the unquestioned dominant power in the Mediterranean over the course of the next century, its citizens could boast of having a distinct vernacular literature, as well as a historical tradition and mythology, that put them in a unique relationship with Greek culture. Faculty Bookshelf. Main page content. Author s Denis Feeney. Publisher Harvard University Press. They did so, however, uniquely in the case of Greek. Where Livius sought out Roman cultural and Latin syntactical equivalents to replace the Greek originals, removing as best possible those signs that would have marked his text as foreign to his Roman audience, official translations of Roman decrees, treaties, etc. The Greek audiences of these official translations thus had to endure a Latinized form of their language including phenomena such as datives absolute in place of properly Greek genitives absolute that is best read as a gesture of dominance over a now subject people. Chapter 4 focuses on the question of what was at stake for Rome in definitively appropriating postclassical production of Greek drama, since after all Hellenising dramatic production was rife throughout the central and southern Italian peninsula in the fourth and third centuries, in a variety of hybrid forms. The chapter also explores what stage performances at the Ludi Romani might have looked like before Such evidence as we have resides in the well- known passage at Livy 7. Feeney handles this both imaginatively and carefully, adding descriptive and anthropologically convincing detail to our sparse evidence, the limits of which he properly acknowledges. In this chapter too he confronts what changed in the year Greek cultural influence is far from new at this point, but what intervenes is fidelity to specific, classicizing and now canonized i. Chapter 5 continues these themes while emphasizing their international political and ideological dimensions, beginning from an account of the impact of Roman victory over Carthage in , in its crucial relationship to the changes at the Ludi Romani that immediately followed. These attributes allowed the texts to transcend time and space, as conditioned by initial production and reception. This allows Feeney again to highlight the isolation of the development of a textual vernacular literature at Rome, one that explicitly modeled itself on a pre-existing canon. Thence the chapter turns to the hotly debated topic of what kind of culture of song, poetry, drama besides the previously discussed ludi scaenici and oratory the Romans had in the period from their early acquisition of literacy until , to try to identify continuities across that moment. Feeney finds the possibility of such continuity especially in those songs for the gods that have their analogues in Greek cult—songs that professionals such as Simonides, Pindar or, on their model, Livius Andronicus the latter in with his state- commissioned Carmen to Juno Regina might transform into the distinctively crafted artifacts that ultimately did not need the cultic context to which they alluded to sustain them. This is a book that looks to engage non-specialists in Roman literature, as well as to contextualize for specialists their subject-matter within a broad perspective on the ancient world. Cultural historians, for example, and students of antiquity in all their guises, will find much of interest here. To suit this broad audience, the book addresses little of the surviving Latin in question directly, and it can at times feel as though the book operates at some remove from the phenomena it re-contextualizes for us, as is common with comparative studies. Where short passages of Latin surface, the interpretations of them presented will not be new to specialists in the material.

Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature | Princeton Classics

Author s Denis Feeney. Publisher Harvard University Press. Publish Date Description Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, and other authors of ancient Rome are so firmly established in the Western canon today that the birth of Latin literature seems inevitable. Thanks JC. Ah, I see. That applies to China too, which systematically assimilated its conquerors as well. The Mongols could not be fully assimilated, because they had a population base outside the empire, but the Manchu did not, and as a result there are essentially no Manchu-speakers today. Do we also need to reconsider the relationship between the Greeks and the older civilisations to their east? I am sure there are various similar or similar but different situations throughout history. The way the Turks were assimilated to the culture of the Arabs and the Persians… Each situation was, of course unique, which makes things interesting. The analogy that is often made, that Chinese is to Japanese what Latin is to English as a source of roots for modern vocabulary is possibly only true in a fairly general kind of way. One that comes to mind is the Torah, which was translated from Hebrew into Greek in the 3rd cen. Other parts of the Jewish scriptures came later in the following centuries. It depends on what counts as a work, I suppose. All those government documents dictated in Persian, written down in Aramaic, and retranslated at the receiving end, for example. John, David :- had in mind literary works. I wish I knew more about the Ilias Latina. Long after the fall of the Roman Empire, documents were written in Latin, not only in the former Empire but in countries that were never part of it. However, this information dates from and may no longer be usable, as Kennedy is now 90 years old. Still, worth a try. But they were apparently close enough to assimilating that they found a need to erect psychological and cultural barriers to the threat. M-L, the use of Latin in Germany and Scandinavia comes to mind, with academics even latinizing their surnames. A vast amount of Sanskrit stuff was translated into Tibetan from the ninth century on, especially Buddhist texts. No wonder they assassinated him. At last I was getting a paycheck and was able to afford cheap digs at what we called the Babson Arms! Found it; it begins here , and the quoted line is in part VI. Emperor Caracalla made all subjects of the empire Roman citizens. The subject of Roman taxes is more than a bit knotty. Citizens paid inheritance tax and sales tax esp. Caracalla was a flighty sort of emperor…. The whole thing is on her SoundCloud page. Well, the historical figure seems to be a late first millennium Turkic ruler styling himself Rome Caesar with slightly modified phonology. But the name is from July, of course. Clarum et duraturum cum aeternitate mundi nomen , with Festus. Tibetan, Mongolian, Buryat, Balti, Ladakhi and Monguor singers maintain the oral tradition and the epic has attracted intense scholarly curiosity as one of the few oral epic traditions to survive as a performing art. In Croatian we have an oral tradition of king Norin Nero , though he actually ruled over what is now Croatia, as opposed to the Tibetans, Mongolians etc. Not that much weirder than a romance of King Arthur identifying the isle of Avalon as Sicily and the fires of Mt. We happen to know how that worked: Breton storytellers accompanied the Normans in their rule of Sicily, , and the story spread out until it became part of Sicilian folklore. They also seem to have been contaminated with native mythological accounts of the Otherworld. The name Troyan may echo Trajan or not Diocletian remains indeed present in South Slavic folklore as tsar Duklyan but certainly the personage has many features of a chthonic deity akin to Veles and Triglov perhaps just different names of the same god. Could be anything in the Tale alone but I think it unlikely the three-headed, goat-eared creature melted by sun rays we hear about in Serbian folk tales was begotten due to people reading the Iliad. That would be fitting indeed but there are actually more than that, as far as I know that is, Slavic earth god names with various degrees of certainty. This is not normal. In thinking about these issues Feeney acknowledges a considerable debt to the work of David Bellos. Rather, translation involves movement between a language of lower status defined by prestige, popularity, or both to one that is comparatively higher. Translation UP generally tries to elide the foreignness of the source—to produce a text as much like one composed in the target language as possible. Translation DOWN tends to preserve linguistic features of the source language, since these carry cachet in and of themselves. Yet for Livius it had been UP. What does that imply? It is tempting to regard the early dramatic translations as a natural response to audience demand. Like spectators at the English National Opera, Roman viewers wanted to see the show and understand the words. But the notion that the first play in Latin just popped up like a mushroom is difficult to reconcile with what we know of Roman society and Roman theater. Throughout its history the Roman state was concerned to monitor and control public displays of all kinds, and theater in particular. No permanent theater was allowed in Rome itself until the first century BC ; seating restrictions were designed to keep the social classes apart. The Ludi Romani were a state festival supervised by magistrates; the stage performances would have been closer to a Super Bowl half-time show than to street theater. The staging of a Greek tragedy, in Latin, as part of the proceedings can hardly have been a spur-of-the-moment initiative. By producing Greek tragedy in Latin, the Romans were asserting parity with the Hellenistic Greek kingdoms that had long treated drama, like triumphal parades and religious ceremonies, as a form of politics by other means. It is worth noting here that the Manhattan Project was not originally called the Manhattan Project. A Greek visitor to the Ludi Romani —say, an ambassador from one of the Hellenistic rulers—might have found himself nervously wondering what other kinds of substitution the Romans proposed to make. The translation project, then, is merely one component of a larger program. This question in turn mirrors a larger debate over the nature of Roman expansion. Feeney reads the Ludi Romani of as part of a high-level and high-stakes dialogue between Rome and other Mediterranean powers. And perhaps they were. But Roman festivals were also vehicles for one-upsmanship by individual magistrates. When Cicero went off to govern Cilicia in the late 50s BC he was bombarded with requests from his younger friend Marcus Caelius, who was running for aedile a lower-tier office something like a commissioner of public works and putting on games as part of his campaign. He thought it would be nice to have panthers. Could Cicero get him panthers? Cicero was dubious; there was a panther shortage, but he would do his best. Feeney has some gentle fun with such reconstructions:. It is easy enough to write a novel in which Livius Andronicus is commissioned for the special peace games because his former master, or his patron, L. Livius Salinator, is on the committee planning the games. In reality there is nothing inherently implausible in such a scenario. A translation is an assemblage of words, and as such it can contain as much or as little poetry as any other such assemblage. The Romans can make some claim to have done this too. Our fullest insight into Roman adaptation of Greek drama is provided by the comedies of Plautus, working in the late third and early second centuries BC , a generation or so after Livius, and those of Terence a generation later still. Both based their work on the so-called new comedy of fourth-century Athens whose best-known playwright was Menander. Here we have more than fragments, but the loss of most of the Greek originals had made it hard to evaluate them as translations. Some help came in when the sands of Egypt yielded up a papyrus codex with remains of three plays by Menander, though none of them turned out to underlie an extant Latin play. Yet it is also perfectly descriptive. Since the original publication, more Menander has come to light.

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