Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire

P O P U L A R M O R A L I T Y I N T H E E A R LY RO M A N E M P I R E Morality is one of the fundamental structures of ...

Author: Teresa Morgan

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P O P U L A R M O R A L I T Y I N T H E E A R LY RO M A N E M P I R E

Morality is one of the fundamental structures of any society, enabling complex groups to form, negotiate their internal differences and persist through time. In the first book-length study of Roman popular morality, Dr Morgan argues that we can recover much of the moral thinking of people up and down the Empire. Her study draws on proverbs, fables, exemplary stories and gnomic quotations to explore how morality worked as a system for Roman society as a whole and in individual lives. It analyses the content of sayings and stories to show which ideas and practices were central to Roman morality, which peripheral, which widely accepted or contested. It explores the wide range of authorities (natural and socially constructed, absolute and negotiable) which were invoked in support of moral ideas and actions, and shows how different ethics appealed to different authorities. It traces the relationship between popular morality, high philosophy, and the ethical vocabulary of documents and inscriptions. The Roman Empire incorporated numerous overlapping groups, whose ideas varied according to social status, geography, gender and many other factors. Nevertheless it could and did hold together as an ethical community, which was a significant factor in its socio-political success. t e re sa mo rga n is University Lecturer in Ancient History at Oxford and a Fellow of Oriel College. She is the author of Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (1998).

POPULAR MORALITY IN T H E E A R LY RO M A N EMPIRE T E R E SA M O RG A N

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521875530 © Teresa Morgan 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2007 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Morgan, Teresa, 1968– Popular morality in the early Roman Empire / Teresa Morgan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-521-87553-0 (hardback) ISBN-10: 0-521-87553-6 (hardback) 1. Ethics–Rome. 2. Rome–Moral conditions. 3. Philosophy, Ancient. 4. Rome–History–Empire, 30 B.C.-284 A.D. I. Title. BJ221.M67 2007 170.937–dc22 2007003518 ISBN 978-0-521-87553-0 hardback Transferred to digital printing 2009

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information regarding prices, travel timetables and other factual information given in this work are correct at the time of first printing but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee the accuracy of such information thereafter.

In Memoriam Madge Jones (1909–2004) Florence Kendall (1912–1990) Harry Kendall (1912–1986) Kathleen Morgan (1915–1997) Donald Watson (1910–2005)

Contents

Preface List of illustrations List of tables List of abbreviations

page xi xiii xiii xiv

1 Introduction

1

The popularity of morality Proverbs, fables, gnomai and exempla Classics, philosophy and anthropology Outline of chapters On interpretation

3 5 9 13 15

part on e

23

2 Proverbs

23

Map of the ethical landscape 1 Gods, the metaphysical and humanity 2 Bad social relations: strife 3 Faults of the powerful and powerless, untrustworthiness, carping, inappropriateness and cowardice 4 Good social relations: friendship 5 Justice, honesty, helpfulness and bravery 6 Intelligence and foolishness 7 Wealth 8 Speech, truth and lies 9 Doing well 10 Women, family and love 11 Varia Conclusion

3 Fables

31 31 35 37 39 40 43 47 48 49 50 51 53

57

Map of the ethical landscape 1 Social relations: the strong and the weak 2 Friends and enemies

vii

63 63 68

viii

Contents 3 Intelligence and foolishness 4 Overambition and failure 5 Truth, honesty, lies and deceit 6 Gods, the metaphysical and humanity 7 What goes around 8 Women, family and love Phaedrus’ ethical landscape: distinctive features Ethical anomalies? the bon mot fables Conclusion

4 Gnomai Map of the ethical landscape 1 Wealth 2 Good social relations: the more and less powerful 3 Friendship 4 Intelligence and foolishness 5 Speech and lies 6 Women, family and love 7 Justice and the law 8 Gods, the metaphysical and humanity 9 Varia Conclusion

5 Exempla Map of the ethical landscape 1 Gods, the metaphysical and religion 2 Good social relations: justice and fides 3 Courage and endurance 4 Military and civil discipline 5 Self-confidence, conviction, unconventionality and severity 6 Friendship, generosity, humanity, mercy and gratitude 7 Pietas, family affection and chastity 8 Self-control 9 Intelligence 10 Speech 11 The message of the past 12 Bad social relations: the vices 13 Law, work and leisure The landscape of ethics in other authors Conclusion

6 Patterns Being good: the shape of a system Strife Against strife: social virtues and individualistic virtues Justice, law and cultural capital

70 73 74 75 78 78 79 80 82

84 90 90 95 98 102 105 106 109 111 116 118

122 129 131 135 137 138 140 141 143 145 147 148 148 149 151 153 157

160 161 163 166 169

Contents Qualities variously evaluated Genre and social self-positioning Significant absences Phase rules, situational ethics and executive ethics Core, periphery and gravity Morality and the individual

part t wo 7 The language of morality Statements and commandments The interior world of the moral agent

8 Moral authorities The gods Nature The social group and its institutions Myth, history and geography Poets, philosophers and other heroes The authority of fables: a problematic case Consequences What lies within Metaphor as a moral authority Conclusion

9 Time and morality Still world with moving figures Time past and time future The right time Conclusion Coda: beginnings and ends

part three 10 The importance of being miscellaneous The reading of ethical miscellanies Conclusion

11 Popular morality and high philosophy Philosophers and philosophy in popular wisdom High philosophy and popular morality in literary texts Seneca: To Marcia, on Consolation Plutarch: On Tranquillity of Mind Maximus of Tyre: Oration 32 Epictetus: Against Vicious and Aggressive People Conclusion

ix 171 175 177 179 183 185

191 191 200 204

207 207 211 213 216 222 225 228 230 230 231

235 236 243 248 252 253

257 257 258 272

274 277 285 286 290 294 296 297

x

Contents 12 Morality inter alia

300

The language of morality at Ephesus Virtues in public life and death The worship of virtues Moral vocabulary in papyri and individual inscriptions Conclusion

301 304 311 313 321

Conclusion

324

Appendix 1 The political and literary connections of Babrius Appendix 2 The definition of a miscellany Appendix 3 Popular morality and philosophical doctrine List of papyri Bibliography Index

326 331 333 341 345 377

Preface

Early versions of some of the material in this book were delivered as papers in Cambridge, Charlottesville, Helsinki, Jerusalem, Oxford, Princeton, Salamanca and Yale, and published in volumes edited by Leofranc HolfordStrevens and Amiel Vardi, José-Antonio Fernández Delgado and Antonio Stramaglia. Warmest thanks are due to the participants in all those seminars and conferences for their lively discussion of ideas and helpful suggestions. Various chapters were kindly read in draft by David Charles, Anna Clark, Alison Cooley, Miriam Griffin, Robert Kaster, Geoffrey Lloyd, Katerina Oikonomopoulou and Malcolm Schofield. Between them they suggested numerous improvements and saved me from many mistakes. Malcolm Schofield transformed my understanding of what it meant to be a philosopher in the early Roman Empire, for which I am especially grateful. Many Oxford colleagues have contributed to the project in informal conversations, and it is a continuing pleasure to work among so many stimulating colleagues. Among those with whom, internationally, it is a pleasure to share an interest in ethics are Catalina Balmaceda and the economist Vivien Foster, who over the years has made me think harder and more constructively about more topics than anyone else. Wishing the book to be accessible to those without Greek and Latin, I have translated primary sources throughout. Unfortunately, to include the many thousands of texts cited in the original as well would have made the text hopelessly bulky, so with considerable regret, they are omitted. I hope that readers will accept my apologies as they pursue the sources to their diverse original publications. I was fortunate enough to be brought up in a family where what it means to live well – to live rightly – was a subject of constant and passionate debate. This book remembers Harry Kendall, a man of radiant loving kindness and integrity, who taught us to garden, maintain a bicycle and fill in a tax return, and used to say that ‘life is not a highway strewn with flowers’. It honours the exemplary lives of Madge Jones and Kathleen Morgan, who nursed xi

xii

Preface

patients in hospital and their relatives at home, and Florence Kendall, who preserved her family through bad and good times into prosperity and taught us to cook and clean. It remembers Donald Watson, pioneering vegan (he coined the word in the 1940s) and anti-nuclear campaigner, who in old age made a collection of several hundred English proverbs which he thought people should take more seriously. Millions of ordinary Greeks and Romans like them must have used the sayings and stories that make up this study, and are forgotten.

Illustrations

1 2 3 4 5

Distribution of main topics in proverbs Distribution of main topics in fables Distribution of main topics in gnomai Distribution of main topics in exempla Number of exempla from different historical periods

page 54 83 121 159 233

Table Number and distribution of stories about or sayings of philosophers in wisdom texts (with distribution of references in Aelian’s VH )

xiii

277

Illustrations

1 2 3 4 5

Distribution of main topics in proverbs Distribution of main topics in fables Distribution of main topics in gnomai Distribution of main topics in exempla Number of exempla from different historical periods

page 54 83 121 159 233

Table Number and distribution of stories about or sayings of philosophers in wisdom texts (with distribution of references in Aelian’s VH )

xiii

277

Abbreviations

In addition to the standard abbreviations for ancient and modern works, the following abbreviations are used: B BS

D LDAB P Perotti Ph PS VM Z

Babrius, Fables O. Bouquiaux-Simon (1989) ‘Additamenta pour une anthologie mutilée (P. Berol. inv. 21312 + P. Schubart 27)’, Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Papyrology (2 vols.). Cairo: 461–79 Ps.-Diogenianus, Popular Proverbs Leuven Database of Ancient Books Ps.-Plutarch, Proverbs of the Alexandrians Perotti’s Appendix of Fables Phaedrus, Fables Publilius Syrus, Sententiae Valerius Maximus, Memorable Words and Deeds Zenobius, Epitome of Zenobius’ Proverbs

xiv

chap t e r 1

Introduction

How should we live? What kind of people should we be? What is it good or bad, necessary or right, sweet, absurd or impossible to do? Who decides for us, and on what grounds? These are fundamental human questions, and few people or societies pass a day without asking them. For a historian or an anthropologist, the question is framed in slightly different terms: what role does morality play in helping any group of people to create or maintain a society? This book takes as its premise that morality matters. Like political, social and economic behaviour, moral behaviour is endemic in human societies. Like them, it helps groups to organize themselves, to negotiate their inevitable differences and to survive. Like them, it has a grammar, a structure, which is as distinctive of the group as is its language or religion. Unlike them, however, it is often overlooked as a constituent of history. The focus of this study is what I shall call the popular morality of the Roman Empire in, roughly, the first two centuries of the common era. The early Empire has a number of attractions for a historian of ethics. More of the Greek and Roman world was then united (at least nominally) under one ruler than at any other time, giving us a vast field in which to work while remaining within the boundaries of one state.1 It is a period outstandingly rich in all kinds of evidence, literary and documentary, making a manysided study possible within a manageable chronological scope. Surprisingly, in view of these advantages, the popular morality (as opposed to imperial virtues, for instance) of the early Empire has not attracted as much interest as that of some other parts of antiquity. A period so remarkable in other respects, however, seems likely to be interesting ethically, and I hope to show that it is. By ‘popular morality’ or ‘popular ethics’ I mean ethical ideas which were in wide circulation around the Empire and widely shared up and down the 1

Insofar as it is appropriate to talk of boundaries, a question to which we shall return (pp. 183–4, Ch. Twelve).

1

2

Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire

social spectrum.2 These ideas are not, as we shall see, completely separate from ethical theories which were developed by philosophers, but I shall leave consideration of ‘high’ philosophy and its relationship with popular morality until the penultimate chapter. Meanwhile, I shall try to show that ‘popular’ is no misnomer. We can plausibly identify certain genres of ethical material as either originating in, or percolating to, the lower reaches of Roman society, even when our evidence for them comes from higher-level sources.3 Not every moral value or practice will have been equally applicable to everyone, nor equally appealing. The Roman Empire – vast, patchwork and multicultural – was no more one indivisible community in ethics than in social structure, language or religion. We shall do better to think of multiple overlapping communities with overlapping moralities. I shall try to show, however, that the degree of common moral ground between socially and geographically different groups is considerable, and that we can often talk meaningfully of the ethics of the Empire as a whole.4 I shall examine both the content and the structure of moral material and argue that they are remarkably coherent (about as coherent as one might expect a language or religious system to be, allowing for occasional anomalies).5 We shall see that Roman popular morality has well-defined areas of interest which are not identical to those of other societies, and that (in sharp contrast, for instance, to most modern systems) executive ethics predominate in Roman thinking, while ‘being good’ tends to mean being good of your kind.6 The language of ethics tells us not only about the 2

3

4

5

6

There is no general agreement as to when one should use the word ‘ethics’ and when ‘morality’. Some scholars prefer to use ‘ethics’ of the classical world, feeling that ‘morality’ has too many modern religious overtones. Others feel the opposite, and others again use both indistinguishably, in keeping with their semantic origins. I shall use both indistinguishably. This study was conceived as the first of two, the second of which would focus on early Christian ethics. It does not, therefore, deal with religious minorities – most distinctively, Jews and Christians – but confines itself to the mainstream, which means not only the popular, but the ‘pagan’ (though I shall try to avoid using this unsatisfactory word). In a few cases, the ethics of separate groups, such as Romans and Spartans (below, pp. 153, 174), converge substantially, and as it seems coincidentally (though we cannot rule out the possibility that by the imperial period, the portrayal of one group influenced that of the other). Since both groups are the subject of many sayings and stories, this gives an even stronger impression of ethics being shared across the Empire than is perhaps justified. I shall try to allow for such potential distortions of the evidence in drawing my conclusions. Many of the ideas of the early Empire are not, of course, unique to it, since it is part of the wider Graeco-Roman world which is in continuous evolution over a long period of time. Nor is there room in this study thoroughly to compare the first and second centuries with the fifth century bce or the fifth century ce, to see what changes occur. I shall, though, from time to time indicate what I think is distinctive about the shape of ethics at this period. Below, pp. 179–90.

Introduction

3

content of the system, but about its authorities and aims, both of which I shall investigate and connect to content and structure. From all this I shall draw a number of conclusions about the overall shape and significance of popular morality and what it tells us about its time and place. It will emerge that in various ways the ethics of the early Empire and its social and economic structures suited each other. What I shall not try to do, however, is to show that ethics were designed to support (or problematize, or comment on) any particular political, social or any other structure. There is still a tendency among historians (not to mention archaeologists and literary critics) to treat cultural phenomena as ancillary to political, social or economic phenomena. I doubt that this is often justified, but in the case of ethics, it certainly is not. Ethics must, for the most practical reasons, be among the first systems to evolve in any developing human society. People cannot live together until they have agreed not to murder each other (and agreed what counts as murder); they cannot farm until they have agreed not to steal from one another; they cannot decide who belongs to an ongoing group without deciding who can legitimately breed with whom. There is as much justification for speculating that political and social structures come into being to encode, protect and enforce ethical structures as the other way around. We should therefore treat morality as an aspect of ancient society in its own right, to be assessed on its own terms. It contributes to the continued existence of its society, and interacts with other aspects of it in many ways, but it does not depend on them, and does not exist simply to shore them up.7 the popul arit y of moralit y ‘Popular’ is a word which makes classicists nervous, and with good reason. In a world with probably no more than 20 per cent male literacy, maybe much less, and certainly much lower female literacy, the written sources on which we depend so heavily can never be trusted to refer to the great majority of people.8 The high literature from which we mainly construct our picture of 7 8

Making me in anthropological terms a culturalist or symbolic-culturalist (Geertz 1973: 142–6, Bell 1997: 61–2). Harris 1989: 3–24 prefers an even lower estimate which is now widely felt to be too sceptical. Morgan 1998: 39–42, 50–89, 120–51 is not much more optimistic than Harris, but I am now rather more optimistic, at least about the Roman Empire, where at least minimal literacy was needed in a wide range of occupations, was regularly taught in the army and is evidenced by a vast body of graffiti Empire-wide. Horsfall 2003: 20–30 helpfully summarizes the difficulties of identifying Roman popular culture in literary sources, and this study as a whole shows how much can be done despite the difficulties.

4


Greek and Roman culture was written and read by a far smaller proportion of the population than that. Documentary and archaeological sources relate to a much wider range of people, but mainly to their social and economic lives. Of their beliefs, their attitudes, their language or culture, only scattered fragments of evidence survive, and their own voices are almost completely lost to us. It would be premature, however, to despair. It is clear that some ‘literary’ works, though written by members of the social and cultural elite, had a mass audience from at least the sixth century bce well into late antiquity. Foremost among them is Homer, followed by new comic playwrights, especially Menander, Plautus and Terence, farces and mimes. Oratory of all kinds was delivered to mass audiences in lawcourts, public assemblies and town councils. During the principate, epideictic oratory, delivered on behalf of a town in honour of visiting dignitaries, to honour local benefactors and politicians, or to mark a special occasion of almost any kind, by rhetors who were often paid by cities or emperors themselves to practise and teach their skill, was a prime form of public entertainment. In at least some places and times, it was common for the works of historians to be publicly read and honoured in their native or adopted towns. Even philosophers could become local celebrities. Nor was the flow of culture all one way. Proverbs are a case in point: described by Aristotle as the earliest surviving form of philosophy and the particular property of ordinary people, proverbs were an object of interest to philosophers and scholars from the fourth century bce to the end of antiquity and beyond.9 It is thanks to them that several collections of proverbs survive, as well as numerous individual proverbs scattered through literary works. Fables, too, were regarded as the special form of speech of slaves and the oppressed, but that did not stop authors of higher social status collecting and retelling them and inventing more of their own in the same style.10 Both fables and proverbs are widely described in literary texts as popular, vulgar, primitive or suitable for children as well as useful, moral and educational; evidently contemporaries regarded them as what we should call ‘popular’ morality.11 Mimes and farces, like much comedy, occupy an ambivalent position between the vulgar and the sophisticated: the examples that survive may have been written by the relatively highly cultured, but they derived from popular entertainment and continued to draw on it. 9 10

Synesus Encom. calv. 22 p. 229 Terzaghi = fr. 13 Rose. Cf. Rh. 2.21.12, 15. See pp. 26–8. 11 Below, pp. 26–7, 58–9. Below, pp. 57–62.

Introduction

5

We should not underestimate, therefore, the degree to which groups up and down the social scale shared and exchanged aspects of their culture. More than that, we can, I think, identify certain sources of ethical material which are more likely than others to be widely shared, and sometimes to have risen from the ranks of popular culture to be enshrined in the writings of the elite. It is on four such groups of material that this study is based: proverbs, fables, gnomic quotations from famous authors, and exemplary stories. proverbs, fables, gnomai and exempl a 12 Chapters Two to Five will have more to say about the definition and terminology of these genres.13 A gnomic quotation (gnômê in Greek, sententia in Latin) is a moralizing fragment taken from a well-known author. It usually consists of a line of verse, less often a sentence of prose, and is complete grammatically and in meaning. Closely related to proverbs and gnomai are moralizing riddles, of which a few examples (and one short collection) survive on papyrus or embedded in other texts. I shall include these, too few to merit a chapter of their own, in discussions of proverbs and gnomai.14 An exemplary story (chreia in Greek, exemplum in Latin) is the short, pithy account of a saying or action of a famous man (or less often, woman). The heroes of exempla may be philosophers or ‘wise men’ such as the Seven Sages of archaic Greece, rulers, military commanders and occasionally orators or poets. Proverbs, fables, gnomai and exempla are as widely distributed across our written remains as it is possible to be. They appear not only in independent collections and embedded in works of literature, but on papyrus in formal, scholars’ and school hands, and in inscriptions. Collections which consist only of gnomai, proverbs, fables or exempla are easily identified. Embedded 12

13 14

I use the Greek term for a gnomic quotation and a Latin term for an exemplary story, not because those genres are distinctive of those languages (below, pp. 123–5), but because the largest body of each genre to survive to us in this period happens to be in that language. Since our sources are divided between both languages, it also seems reasonable to borrow terms from both. The words gnômê and exemplum are so common throughout this study that I have not italicized them (nor chreia and sententia), nor marked the long syllables. Pp. 23–31, 57–60, 84–7, 122–5. Kindstrand 1978: 76 notes the relationship between proverbs and riddles, observed in antiquity at least by Clearchus (Ath. 10.86 457c = fr. 63, Wehrli III); Kindstrand suggests that Clearchus took this from Aristotle. Cf. Milner 1970 on the close relationship between proverbs and riddles across cultures and Hasan-Rock 1974 on the relationship between proverbs and riddles in Aramaic. In the Life of Aesop, Aesop solves a riddle (78–9) as well as telling fables and offering advice in proverbial style.

6


in other literature, all four typically stand out: they are colourfully expressive, and have a strong, short form, with (if a story) a clear beginning and end. Proverbs and gnomai, in particular, appear repeatedly in exactly or virtually the same form, though there is some room for variation even in these genres, and rather more in the form of fables and exempla. Proverbs quoted in other texts are frequently flagged with expressions like ‘as the proverb says’ or ‘as they say’.15 All four genres are not, however, ‘popular’ in quite the same sense or to the same degree. As I indicated above, there are good reasons for regarding fables and proverbs as socially lowly in origin, even though many of the fables which survive were certainly not composed by slaves or the poor. Gnomic sayings have a more mixed heritage: composed by members of the elite, often for a broad listening public, they find their way not only into other literature but also into proverb collections, which suggests that many became embedded in oral tradition. (There are many parallels for this among modern proverbial sayings in English, many of which have literary origins long forgotten by those who learn and deploy them orally.) The most surprising genre, on the face of it, to find its way into this study is the exemplum, especially in the form of the collection of Valerius Maximus. Exempla, by definition, are about exceptional men and women, most of them of high status, and most of the examples which survive to us were probably composed by men of high culture. Scholars tend to associate exempla particularly with oratory, and Valerius’ Memorable Words and Deeds has been taken to be a source book for orators, and not therefore as a reliable guide to Roman ethics in general. I shall argue in Chapter Five that the association of exempla with oratory is only part of the story, that there is no reason to suppose that Valerius’ book was particularly aimed at orators, and that exempla in general, and the Memorable Words and Deeds in particular, are an invaluable source for early imperial morality. To call exempla elitist, moreover, is an oversimplification. Some exemplary stories, such as those about Aesop, may in fact be popular in origin. Others, surely elite in origin, make their way into proverbs and gnomai, and in that way become accessible to a much wider range of society. Almost all the names in Latin eponymic proverbs, for instance, appear among Valerius’ stories. Yet others will have been heard by large, mixed audiences in public performances. Exempla must be included in a discussion of popular ethics because even when not popular in origin, they often achieved popularity. In 15

Otto 1890 quotes numerous examples.

Introduction

7

addition, even the relative elitism of an author like Valerius can be turned to advantage. Sometimes we shall find that his ideas fit well with those of proverbs, fables and gnomai, and sometimes not, which will help to refine our sense of how far ethical ideas were shared up and down the social scale. The last point but one hints at yet another reason for focusing on these four genres: they form a loosely interactive group. Proverbs are rewritten more epigrammatically by poets, and poets’ formulations become proverbial.16 Stories and gnomic sayings of famous men also become proverbial: so, for instance, ps.-Diogenianus explains the proverb ‘See the end of life’ with reference to Solon’s advice to Croesus that one should not count a man happy until he is dead, which appears elsewhere as both an exemplum and a gnome.17 Fables become compressed into proverbs and proverbs expanded into fables: so, says ps.-Diogenianus, if you want to say that something is impossible, you can say that the tortoise will overtake the hare first.18 Exempla enshrine sayings which have an independent life of their own in anthologies and gnomic school texts: ‘He died on the point of my speech’ or, ‘If you are lazy when you are rich, you will become poor.’19 This kind of cross-fertilization seems to be a universal characteristic of popular wisdom; numerous studies demonstrate the same phenomenon in many different cultures.20 Last but not least, these four are genres which are very widely attested across ancient and modern cultures as being vehicles of popular morality. Small, discrete, mobile sayings, quotations and stories, which make statements about the nature of the world or tell us how to behave in it, are a staple of ethical thinking all over the world.21 If we had no other evidence 16 17 18 19 20

21

E.g. the English proverb ‘God is where he was’, which is now completely superseded by Robert Browning’s version, ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.’ (Pippa Passes 1.227–8) D8.51. D7.57. Given that in the fable the tortoise does overtake the hare, the proverb may be even older than the fable. Both hares and tortoises feature in other proverbs and fables. P. Mil. Vogl. 6.263; Boyaval 1975 no. 3. E.g. Taylor 1931: 25–8, 32–3 on the relationship between proverbs and stories across cultures, Shippey 1977 on proverbs and proverbial language in Old English literature, Russo 1997 on proverbs, maxims and apothegms in Greek prose, Coats 1981 on parables, fables and anecdotes in Greek, Kjärgaard 1986 on metaphors and parables, Carnes 1988 on proverbs and fables in Greek, Theissen and Merz 1998: 324–30 on proverbs, riddles, sayings and parables in the Old and New Testaments. On the stability (usually) and mutability (sometimes) of sayings and stories see Crépeau 1981, Anderson 2000: 19. Abrahams 1972: 121–2 notes the relationship between proverbs which are statements about the world and those which tell us how to behave: ‘[Not] all proverbs attempt to produce an action immediately. Many proverbs rather attempt to produce an attitude toward a situation that may well call for inaction and resignation. This is the usual use for proverbs like, “Such is life,” and, “Don’t cry over spilt milk”.’

8


that the material of this study was the stuff of popular morality in the early Roman Empire, comparative evidence alone would create a strong presumption that it was.22 Proverbs, gnomai, fables and exempla, therefore, have good claim to be included in an investigation of Roman popular morality. It may seem less obvious why other things should be left out. There would, one might think, be a case for paying equal attention to inscriptions, especially on tombstones, dedications or honorifics, which have much to say about the goodness (usually) of their subjects, or court records on papyrus in which plaintiffs revile their neighbours as wicked law-breakers. I shall from time to time, and especially in the final chapter, make comparisons between the sayings and stories which are my main focus and other material, including tombstones, honorific and dedicatory inscriptions, court records, dice oracles and dream books. There are several reasons, however, why I have not made all these a central part of this study. Their language is, on investigation, rather less rich and their ideas less diverse than those of the sayings and stories I explore. They are also, in the main, well studied in their own right, while much of the material I discuss here has been studied by historians little or not at all, or not in recent years, and especially not as a source for popular morality. Finally, it is not clear that such material is better, or in many cases even as good as sayings and stories as a source for popular morality. Tombstones or dedications elaborate enough to display ethical vocabulary, for instance, are likely to have been erected by wealthy families. It is leading members of their community that receive honorific inscriptions. Speeches in lawcourt records are not generally made by the plaintiffs and defendants themselves, but by lawyers to magistrates, who, if they were wealthy enough to have received a rhetorical education, belonged to the higher ranks of society.23 Such materials do add something to the study of ethics, but not perhaps as much as one might hope, and they rarely have as good a claim as sayings and stories to be regarded as popular.24 22 23 24

Prantl 1858 and Todesco 1916: 424 on proverbs as ‘the philosophy of the people’ in every culture. Crook 1995 ch. 3; Morgan 1998: 61–3. One could also attempt a history of early imperial morality by means of a grand survey of all the literature of the period, but even if one drew (as one can) a number of common ideas and attitudes from the works of different authors, one would be a long way from a study of popular morality. To identify what is popular about any author, we need to if possible excavate the popular material from his work, distinguishing it from the influence of philosophical schools and from the author’s own ideas. This has not been done systematically for the early Empire, and in effect, it is what I have done here.

Introduction

9

cl assics, philosophy and ant hropology The study of ethics has often been regarded as the special concern of philosophers or theologians. In the past century or so, however, ethics have increasingly attracted the interest of historians and anthropologists, who have hoped to discern in the structure and content of ethical systems either what is common to humanity as a whole, or what is distinctive and constitutive of a particular group of people. Classicists have contributed a good deal to this developing literature, and not only philosophers, but literary critics and historians have found it fruitful territory. Early inspiration came from the vast nineteenth-century project of identifying and publishing subliterary Greek and Latin texts, as part of which first Gaisford, then Leutsch and Schneidewin published editions of the Greek paroemiographers.25 The earliest of these, the proverb collections of Zenobius, ps.-Diogenianus and ps.-Plutarch, date from the early Roman Empire, and form some of the material of this study. Latin proverbs, of which no ancient collection survives, were explored in the eighteenth century by Serz, but for an attempt at a systematic collection scholars had to wait for the work of August Otto in the 1880s and 90s.26 The twentieth century saw more work on proverbs, and also collections and explorations of other kinds of ethical literature and sub-literature, notably gnomic quotations from Menander and other poets and Aesopic fables.27 A body of ethical material had begun to emerge which was at least not dominated by philosophy or theology, if it was indebted to them at all. The identification of this material, which could not exactly, in itself, be called literary any more than philosophical, or at any rate certainly could not be called high literature, but which cropped up continually in literary texts, led scholars to consider its role in literature as traditionally defined. Von Scala pioneered the study of proverbs in Polybius, and since then Lucian, Strabo, Plautus, Menander and Plutarch are among the authors whose use of ‘sub-literary’ ethical material has been investigated.28 A number of authors 25

26 27 28

Gaisford 1836, Leutsch and Schneidewin 1839–51, cf. Graux 1878, Crusius 1883, Crusius and Cohn 1891–3. Serz 1792 worked by tracing as many of Erasmus’ proverbs as possible back to both Greek and Latin originals; his production is fascinating in its own right, but does not attempt to be comprehensive. On the strengths and weaknesses of this collection, additions to it and discussions of it, see below, pp. 29–30. On Greek proverbs see especially Strömberg 1954, 1961; on Latin proverbs Häussler 1968; on gnomic quotations Jäkel 1964 and Liapes 2002; on fables especially Perry 1936, 1952 and van Dijk 1997. Von Scala 1891, cf. Rein 1894 on Lucian, Keim 1909 on Strabo, Beede 1949 on Plautus, Arnott 1981 on Menander, Fernández Delgado 1991 on Plutarch.

10


have attracted studies of their ‘moral vision’ as a whole, notably Pliny the Elder, Phaedrus, Menander, Sextus, ps.-Phocylides, Valerius Maximus, Polybius and Livy.29 The twentieth century also saw an increasing interest in trying to capture the main moral concerns – the distinctive shape and most important elements of morality – in ancient society as a whole, or significant parts of it. Horrald and Ferguson were among the first to trace the evolution of a small number of central ethical ideas throughout antiquity. Mondolfo, Pearson, Adkins, Ferguson and Bryant took a similar approach but concentrated on the archaic and classical Greek worlds (where Schmidt had already marked out the ground in 1882).30 Earl and Edwards have focused on the Roman Republic and early Empire, while in a series of studies Lind investigated the foundations of Roman morality in Republican writings. Some scholars have preferred to limit their geographical and chronological scope still further: Dover and Dillon to classical Athens, Charlesworth and Fears to the Roman principate.31 At the same time, interest was growing in genres of popular morality themselves. Proverbs, fables and gnomic sayings have all attracted significant studies in recent years.32 Exempla have developed perhaps the highest profile of all: a plethora of studies in recent years have examined both exemplary stories in their own right and their role in a wide range of authors, frequently connecting their moral ideas with their function in rhetoric.33 Another fruitful trend has been the examination of a single term or theme in Greek or Roman ethics. The Greek andreia and its Latin equivalent virtus, ‘virtue’ or ‘manly virtue’, have profited from the attentions of McDonnell, 29

30 31 32

33

Chadwick 1959, Carlini 2004 (on Sextus), cf. Azzarà 2004, Giannarelli 2004 (on patristic citations of other early imperial pseudonymous anthologies), Burns 1963–4, Marchetti 1991 and de Oliveira 1992 on Pliny, Alfonsi 1964 on Phaedrus, Arnott 1981 on Menander, Horst 1978 on ps.-Phocylides, Bloomer 1992 and Skidmore 1996 on Valerius Maximus, Eckstein 1995 on Polybius and Moore 1989 and Chaplin 2000 on Livy. The phrase ‘moral vision’ is borrowed from Eckstein. Horrald 1925, Ferguson 1958, Schmidt 1882, Mondolfo 1960, Pearson 1962, Adkins 1972, Ferguson 1989, Bryant 1996. Earl 1967, Edwards 1993, Lind 1972, 1979, 1989, 1992, Dover 1974, Dillon 2004, Charlesworth 1937, Fears 1981. Langlands 2006 focuses on sexual morality in late Republican and early imperial authors. E.g. on proverbs Solari 1898, Reichert 1957, Dalitz 1966, Tzifopoulos 1995; on fables La Penna 1961, Nøjgaard 1964, Gual 1977, Adrados especially 1979–87, Karadagli 1981, Jedrkiewicz 1989, Arnheim 1979–80, Cascajero 1991, 1992, van Dijk especially 1997, Zafiropoulos 2001; on gnomic sayings Kalbfleisch 1928, Barns 1950–1, Klinger 1961, Grilli 1969, Liapes 2002. On the comparative importance of gnomic sayings in Near Eastern and Mediterranean culture, see Tosi 2004. E.g. Klotz 1909, 1942, Litchfield 1914, Kornhardt 1936, Helm 1939, Nordh 1954, Ronconi 1966, Guerrini 1981, 1994, 1997, Maslakov 1984, Mayer 1991, Goldhill 1994, Gazich 1995, Hölkeskamp 1996, Roller 2004. Fables, gnomic sayings and even proverbs are also components of rhetoric, and the first two are also part of rhetorical education, on which see below, pp. 57–8, 84–5.

Introduction

11

Eisenhut, Balmaceda and the collection edited by Rosen and Sluiter.34 Attitudes to women have attracted a number of studies,35 as have tychê (‘fate’ or ‘fortune’), kairos (‘the right moment’), and pistis/fides (‘faith’ or ‘trust’).36 Most recently, Kaster has explored some of the principal emotions which shape and express aristocratic Roman morality.37 Last but not least, many scholars in recent years have investigated the ethical ideas of authors who, though not themselves philosophers, show clear traces of philosophical ideas, or who, though philosophically educated, aim their writings at a wider audience.38 The impact of philosophy in general and ethics in particular on Greek and Roman high culture is not in doubt; the relationship, if any, between philosophical ethics and popular morality is much less clear, and we shall return to it at the end of this study. This burgeoning range of historical and literary studies of ethics varies in the strength of its historical claims – how far the material under consideration is regarded as evidence of ideas at large in some part of the Greek or Roman world. At one end of the spectrum is Dover, who argued that the material on which he based his analysis of classical Athenian ethics had a sufficiently wide audience to justify calling it ‘popular morality’. At the other are studies of individual authors whose main concern is not whether the author represents a wider culture (though some indicate in passing when they think the author is in tune with tradition or contemporary attitudes).39 There is no absolute opposition, of course, between ideas at large in society, of which texts are our evidence, and ideas distinctive of certain texts and authors and perhaps adopted by readers and listeners. Texts are products of societies as well as individuals, and writers, readers and listeners contribute to society as well as to their immediate circle. There are, however, significant differences of degree. Plato’s moral ideas are probably not representative of fourth-century Athens. Valerius Maximus’ ideas are much more likely to be representative of early first-century Rome. Proverbs are more likely still to reflect the thinking of a significant sector of the population. In what follows, I shall be making strong historical claims, but always with an eye to the genre and context of the material. 34 35 36 37 38

39

McDonnell 1990 and 2006 (which unfortunately appeared too late to be used in this study), Eisenhut 1973, Balmaceda 2005, Rosen and Sluiter 2003, see also Müller 1994. Thissen 1984, de Maria 1987, Ibrahim 1992, Oberg 1997. Gasparro 1997, Moutsopoulos 2002, Gruen 1982; among earlier studies see especially Wilkins’ study of the phrase ‘Know thyself’ in Greek and Latin literature 1917. Kaster 2005. E.g. (for the early Roman Empire) Bodson 1967, Brunt 1973, 1975, 1977, unpublished, Griffin 1976, Puiggali 1980, 1982, Dillon 1986, Griffin and Barnes 1989, Rutherford 1989, Barnes and Griffin 1997, Clark and Rajak 2002. E.g. Beagon 1992: 26–36, Eckstein 1995: 282–3, Duff 1999: 68–71.

12


In addition to previous scholarship on classical history and literature, I am indebted to modern philosophers, not only for information about ancient philosophy, but also for pointing to some of what have proved to be particularly interesting and important aspects of popular material. Philosophers are interested, among other things, in the language of ethics, the process of decision making and whether ethical ideas are presented as absolute, universal, negotiable or specific to persons or situations, and all these have proved fertile areas for investigation in sayings and stories too. Historians of Greek and Roman ethics have also learned much from anthropology.40 Since the mid-twentieth century, some anthropologists have been concerned to map the overall shape of moral conventions within societies. As Ruth Benedict put it, societies may be seen as ‘oriented as wholes in different directions’.41 Others have preferred to confine themselves to studying a single ethical idea in one or two cultures, like the authors of the classic study of moral luck versus deserved good fortune, Oedipus and Job in West African Religion.42 The seminal work for the modern anthropology of ethics was, significantly, a joint production by the anthropologist May Edel and the philosopher Abraham Edel.43 Edel and Edel attempted to define all the main questions and considerations which anthropologists of ethics should take into account.44 Under the influence (ultimately) of Kant, they distinguished between ‘ethics wide’ – the moral part of all human action, which is too wide a category to be useful to the scholar – and ‘ethics narrow’, which limits enquiry to matters of obligation and duty. The latter is too narrow a definition to be useful in the Greek and Roman world, where concepts of duty and obligation regularly appear in texts side by side with the good, the beautiful, the necessary or the disgusting.45 Many of Edel and Edel’s 40

41 42 43

44 45

The study of ethics begins with a number of large-scale studies which were aimed to chart ‘moral evolution’ or ‘moral progress’ from ‘primitive’ societies to more complex ones. See especially Lecky 1877, Hobhouse 1923, Westermark 1932. Kenrick 2003 gives a concise and useful summary of developments. The mid-twentieth century brought a greater interest in the comparison of moral codes between societies, opening a number of anthropologists to the charge of ethical relativism: e.g. Benedict 1934, Champion 1938, Barnsley 1972, Herzfeld 1980, Pocock 1986; Hatch 1983 criticizes what he regards as the relativism of this approach. Benedict 1934: 200, cf. MacBeath 1952, Ladd 1957. Benedict, following Durkheim, linked the overall ethical orientation of social groups with their other social arrangements. Fortes and Horton 1959. Including what behaviour is required or approved, what character traits or attitudes praised or blamed, what goals of conduct regarded as acceptable, who decides what should or should not be done, what sanctions are placed on code-breakers, what people say about judgements and how the structure of the moral code related to the rest of the community’s life. Edel and Edel 1959. Pp. 16–17. Ladd 1957: 77–8 emphasizes the importance of using a society’s own moral categories; MacBeath 1952: 31 notes that most societies employ both notions of ‘right’ and ‘good’.

Introduction

13

questions, however, inform this study, as they have informed a great deal of more recent anthropological work.46 They recognized that moral ideas are transmitted in many different forms: notably, in their view, injunctions, statements of fact, proverbs, metaphors and parables; other studies have expanded the list to include myths, fairy tales, fables and other related genres.47 More recently, the anthropology of ethics has expanded its range, taking a particular interest in the role of time and place in morality, and in the dynamic of power between those who nominally take responsibility for the moral structure and security of society and those who depend on them, and these lines of enquiry too I have tried to take into account in what follows.48 outline of chapters Part One focuses on the ‘what’ of popular morality. Chapters Two to Five deal thematically with proverbs, fables, gnomai and exempla in turn, setting out what I have called a ‘map’ (a term that goes back to Edel and Edel) of their ‘ethical landscape’.49 This includes human relations with the gods, the natural world and other people. We shall discover which qualities and behaviours make for good or bad social relations; which are discussed most; which generate most agreement or disagreement; which are specific to the rich or poor, the more or less powerful, and which are common to all. We shall examine the tensions between individualistic virtues and group virtues, between social aspiration and social realism or pessimism, and consider the evidence for regional variation and variation in social perspective within genres. Treating each genre separately enables us to see how its probable social origin affects its content. We shall also see that generic differences encourage slightly different presentations of ideas. Fables, for example, whose action is generally propelled by conflict, emphasize the inevitability of conflict more than any other genre. Proverbs, whose pithy brevity makes them an 46

47

48 49

They emphasized that different terms and ideas are central in different ethical systems and that levels of codification vary enormously (114, 124–5). They doubted that many common ethics could be identified across societies, but allowed that ‘common needs, common social tasks, common psychological processes, are bound to provide some common framework for the wide variety of human behaviour that different cultures have developed’. (31) Pp. 120–1, cf. von Fürer-Haimendorf 1967: 52–3, Anderson 2000. This focus on what one might loosely call ‘popular’ genres interacts productively with the mass of scholarship by anthropologists and others, especially on proverb and fable (below, pp. 23–5, 59–60). Below, Chapters Eight and Nine; on ‘the power of weakness’ see Sharp 1994; cf. Melhuus 1997, Cohen 2002. Edel and Edel 1959 ch. 14.

14


excellent tool of invective, are particularly rich in offensive images for the stupid. Each chapter is set out thematically, to make it as easy as possible to compare themes across genres while capturing the distinctive features of each genre. These chapters, especially those on proverbs and gnomai, present a large amount of material, which demands a certain forbearance from readers. So much of the material, however, is unfamiliar even to classicists that it is worth presenting in some detail. Moreover, my first major claim is that popular morality is broadly systematic, and to substantiate this claim it is necessary to present a substantial proportion of the evidence.50 Chapter Six draws all four genres together to examine the ethical landscape as a whole. We shall see how far ideas are shared across genres, how far they are not, and the significance of their differences. I shall seek both to explain how all the qualities and behaviours we have seen commended create a viable ethical system for the Roman Empire, and what, in popular moral thinking, makes life good for an individual. The second part of the book turns to the ‘why’ of ethics. Chapters Seven to Nine examine the language of praise and blame which tells us a good deal about the basis on which different qualities and behaviours are recommended, and about why some are more important, or less negotiable, than others. We investigate the wide range of authorities which are cited as reasons to think or act in certain ways, and look at the role of time as an authority, an incentive and an opportunity for good. Part Three widens the focus to incorporate the broader society in which popular ethics operated. In Chapter Ten I argue that even the privileged and highly cultured took popular morality seriously, and that when it was presented to them, as it often was, in gnomologies and miscellanies, genres which to modern eyes often look trivial and ill organized, the evidence is that people read them carefully and learned from them. Chapters Eleven and Twelve compare popular morality first with high philosophy, and then with documents on papyrus and on stone. I shall argue that popular morality had more influence on high philosophy than is usually assumed, but that any influence the other way was very limited. We shall see (without surprise) that mentions of virtues and vices in documents are strongly tailored to context; even so, we can make some comparisons which both confirm the broad appeal of ‘popular morality’, and show where it overlaps with the ideas of elites with whom we are more familiar. Finally, I shall argue that 50

Between text and footnotes in these chapters, I have cited the great majority of proverbs etc., to make this point as convincing as possible.

Introduction

15

understanding Roman popular morality helps to make sense of a wide range of other phenomena, from the choice of vocabulary in lawcourt speeches and funerary inscriptions, to divine personifications in Roman cult. on interpretation I have mentioned what I regard as the broadly systematic nature of popular morality more than once, and to some readers, even looking for system in this material will require justification. It is a ‘commonsense’ assumption that popular ethical material is so bitty, diverse and contradictory as to defy codification and interpretation. To take the first example that springs to many English-speaking minds: ‘Many hands make light work’ and ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’ are a classic case, many think, of contradictory proverbs. In fact, they are an excellent example of systematic thinking. In the first place, they do not conflict because one would not apply them to the same situation. Second and more interestingly, cooks are in charge of kitchens; they have intelligence and intention, and it is their intentions that are liable to conflict. ‘Hands’, in English, is widely used of those who execute a task without being the planning intelligence behind it (‘deck hand’, ‘farm hand’ and ‘hired hand’ are familiar forms). ‘Many hands’ are there to carry out orders, so there is no reason for them to conflict with each other or with the ‘cooks’.51 This kind of analysis can be repeated on any number of superficially contradictory sayings. It is, though common, an odd assumption that popular moral sayings and stories are incoherent and contradictory. Societies generate all kinds of complex but coherent social and cultural phenomena, from languages to religions to social hierarchies. They need to be coherent because they have work to do, and the same is true of ethics. A completely disorganized collection of moral sayings and stories would be no more use to its society than a structureless language. As we shall see, the charge of incoherence was raised against our sources in antiquity and refuted, and numerous anthropological studies have confirmed cross-culturally that ethical systems do generally make sense. I hope to show beyond doubt that ancient moralists and modern anthropologists are right. Popular culture of all kinds is complex and diverse, and popular morality is no exception. However well structured it is as a rule, there will be the odd contradiction, irregularity and loose end, just as there is in any language. 51

This use of the name of a function or profession to indicate intelligence and intention, and of parts of the body to indicate co-operation and execution, occurs in other proverbs, and signals that these two groups of people are not going to conflict.

16


This is obvious, but worth stating because it affects the kinds of argument we can make. I shall not in what follows be painting a picture of a perfectly tidy system, drawing hard and fast lines round it or claiming that what is so within it, is always so. I shall talk of trends rather than truths; most generalities will have the odd exception and few if any arguments will be watertight in a formal logical sense. Conversely, the odd exception will not invalidate the general picture. To give just one example: courage is widely and highly rated as a virtue in sayings and stories, but one proverb and occasional gnomic sayings recommend cowardice.52 It would be an overreaction to conclude that courage is not a popular virtue after all. We cannot conclude that courage is a virtue of the elite, say, and cowardice of the poor, because texts of the same provenance say different things. There are texts on both sides in both Greek and Latin, so this is not a regional difference either. We can conclude that courage is generally highly rated but there is room for cowardice occasionally. Does this mean that popular morality is hopelessly unsystematic and impossible to codify meaningfully? It means rather that popular thinking about courage and cowardice is complex, with a clear tendency in one direction but circumstances in which the other is preferable. We may ask how, if texts recommend now one thing and now another, the user decides which recommendation to follow, and we address that important question in Chapter Six. We may also wonder whether there is anything very culturally specific about this collection of jottings. Does not English popular wisdom, for instance, recommend the same mixture of courage and cowardice, depending on circumstances? This too is a good question – not because it is a stumbling block to the study of popular ethics, but because it shows how difficult it is to view either one’s own or another culture’s popular ethics impartially. English proverbs and gnomic sayings prove upon investigation to be much more ambivalent about courage than Greek and Latin ones. Most recommend it not straightforwardly, but as the lesser of two evils: ‘Attack is the best form of defence,’ ‘Nothing venture, nothing gain,’ ‘Faint heart never won fair lady.’ Several are notably ambiguous: ‘You never know what you can do till you try.’ No other shares the view of the Sultan of Mysore, whose dictum arrived in English in 1800 (but has never been widely used): ‘Better to live one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep.’ The ‘common sense’ of English popular wisdom is therefore more culturally distinctive than we might think, and so is that in Greek and Latin; 52

Zen. 3.89, P. Oxy. 2661.3, PS3, 594.

Introduction

17

indeed, the popular preference for courage as indicated in our sources is quite remarkably strong. If we turn to other societies, even micro-societies within the Greek and Roman world, we find that they too vary in the relative value they place on courage and cowardice. For a Spartan warrior, no doubt, courage is the only option. Plautine slaves favour cowardice relatively often. In the early Church, courage is not a virtue of everyday life in the community at all, and only becomes an issue under persecution, in which situations it is the only option, and cowardice is never praised. (One might argue that what one person calls cowardice, another calls prudence or self-preservation, and there is plenty about self-preservation in our sources. But as I hope will become clear, that juxtaposition of courage and self-preservation, so common in English, is not the norm in Greek and Latin wisdom. Greek and Latin texts recommend prudence (often to the poor and weak) when courage would be pointless (unproductive or too dangerous), and so is not a good option. When courage is an option, they almost always recommend it.) In short, it is far from a matter of common sense, even within the ancient world, that courage should be recommended nearly all the time, but not quite all. If we find ourselves saying that that or any other aspect of Greek and Roman popular morality is simply ‘obvious’ or ‘common sense’, then we are falling back on what are probably inadequately examined notions of our own moral values, and failing to look with impartial eyes at Greek and Roman ones. This brings us to the question, how far the four genres of material we shall be examining represent the ideas of particular micro-societies or subgroups within the ancient world, or how far we can genuinely regard them as ‘popular’ in the sense of widespread as well as pertaining to non-elites. Later chapters will address this question in more detail, but it is worth noting here that given how widely our sources are distributed, across many kinds of written material, literary and documentary, in two languages, and in many cases doubtless orally as well, it will usually be safer to assume that the ideas they promote are widespread than that they are communityspecific. While one or two groups were probably all in favour of courage, for instance, and others all in favour of cowardice, we can say with some plausibility that courage-nearly-all-the-time was the dominant moral value in the early Empire. Related to this question are two more general methodological issues. In the first place, should we assume that sayings and stories deal with topics of widespread social interest and/or agreement, or do they focus rather on marginal or disputed topics? No Greek or Latin proverb or gnome, for instance, says that one should not do murder. Perhaps that is because

18


everyone knows one should not do murder, so it is not worth talking about. The absence of proverbs and gnomai against murder is an interesting case to which we shall return.53 The general proposition that sayings and stories deal with marginal and disputed subjects rather than central and undisputed ones, however, is hard to defend. Many of the topics we shall discuss are of obvious, widespread importance in ancient society: the gods, fortune, wealth, friendship, family and mortality, to name only a few. On the other hand, it is clear that not all topics of widespread social importance are equally well represented: patriotism and farming, for instance, are both rare. At the same time, a few topics (overeating, ugliness) appear a number of times despite seeming of relatively low social importance. I shall argue that the appearance and distribution of topics in sayings and stories reflect neither their social importance nor their marginality nor their disputability, but what one might call their ethical ponderability: the degree to which they are felt to require ethical advice and consideration. Requiring ethical consideration does not necessarily mean being controversial: not all topics which are ethically significant generate conflicting views. Nor does it imply much about the social importance of the topic. Ethical ponderability simply means that a topic is felt to need to be thought about in ethical terms. This may sound vague, but I hope that by the end of Chapter Six, it will have become clear that what is ethically ponderable in popular sayings and stories has shape and coherence and can be interpreted. The last methodological issue which my argument so far raises is considerably more controversial. Are we justified in reading sayings and stories in as functional a way as I have been suggesting? Do they really make definite ethical statements and claims which people heard, read and used to help them make ethical decisions, to think and act in certain ways? Or should we rather focus on the complexities and ambiguities inherent in the material? That there are ambiguities cannot be denied. Even proverbs and gnomic sayings may be given different interpretations in different circumstances, and fables and exemplary stories are much more obviously multivalent. Plutarch, for instance, is particularly fond of quoting the Delphic maxim, ‘Know yourself,’ but he does not always use it with exactly the same meaning. In A Letter to Apollonius he describes it as virtually tautologous with the other Delphic maxim, ‘Nothing in excess’: each maxim, he says, is contained in the other.54 In the Dinner of the Seven Sages, ‘knowing yourself ’ means knowing what you are well suited to doing, as Hector knows that 53

Pp. 181–2.

54

116d.

Introduction

19

he is suited to fighting.55 In How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend, knowing yourself means knowing what is good or bad about yourself, which flattery makes impossible, but which the god demands and which makes it possible to progress in virtue.56 In On Talkativeness Plutarch quotes the saying simply to show that real wisdom requires few words.57 Plutarch is not unique in using the same quotation more than once in slightly different senses. In another respect he is much more unusual: he not infrequently comments, when using a gnome, that it is not quite right or needs adapting to circumstances. In How to Profit from One’s Enemies, for example, he says, adapting Hesiod, that ‘a potter must not envy a potter, nor a singer a singer’.58 In another essay, he says that Hesiod was not quite precise when he wrote, ‘potter struggles with potter and carpenter with carpenter’, because people envy those who are different from them as well as those who are the same.59 Elsewhere, Plutarch quotes Hesiod with approval and does not seem to think that by emending him in these passages, he is damaging Hesiod’s gnomic authority. Fables, too, are variously interpreted in different contexts. In Babrius’ Fable 72, a jackdaw is stripped of his borrowed plumage by the other birds. Babrius’ moral seems to be that what the group regards as faked beauty won’t be accepted by them. The moral attached to Aesop’s version of the same fable says that people who contract debts may seem very fine while they are living on borrowed money, but later, they will revert to their old selves.60 Babrius’ Fable 88, the lark in the cornfield, is told from the lark’s point of view and concludes that you can tell a man means business when he comes to do his work. Gellius tells the fable from the farmer’s point of view, to make the slightly more pessimistic point that you cannot trust your friends and relatives. He also quotes the epimythium to Ennius’ version of the story, which he told in his Saturae, and which is slightly different again: ‘Don’t ask of friends what you can do yourself.’61 It is not only tellers of stories who can change their meanings. Readers may do the same. Take, for instance, Valerius’ story of M. Porcius Cato, who on one occasion filibustered in the senate against the tax farmers, contrary to the wishes of the consul C. Caesar, for so long that Caesar had 55 56 58

59

164b. In How to Study Poetry (36a) the meaning is the same but in the negative: the saying makes one think about what one is not suited to doing. 57 511b. 49b, 65f. 92a; Hes. Op. 25. Pliny (ep. 3.7.15) quotes the same passage to make the point that rivalry between friends, when it spurs them to seek greater fame, is a good thing. Philostratus (Vit. Soph. 544) records that Herodes used the same line to ridicule his teacher Secundus, implying that Secundus was a less good orator than he. 60 Chambry 162. 61 Gell. 2.29.3–19. 473a.

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him taken to prison.62 The entire senate followed him without hesitation, defeating even Caesar’s ‘superhuman spirit’. Valerius tells this story as an example of maiestas. But the reader could equally well take it as an example of aristocratic competition damaging the process of government, highhandedness by Caesar, or the bravery, docility or foolishness of the senate. What value do sayings and stories have as advice, if they can be so variously interpreted and everyone can adapt them to suit themselves? Should we be thinking of this material as delivering definite instructions at all, or should we rather think of it as expressing the endless debatability, the infinite ambiguity, the final elusiveness of morality? It would be possible to make these observations the basis of a theory of morality which would run something like this: ‘Popular morality of the early Empire exists not to tell people what is right and wrong, good or bad, but to raise questions and possibilities – to problematize or to provoke. Their essence is not simplicity but multivalency, not the resolution of moral dilemmas but the expression of probably insoluble tensions. They map a landscape which can be read from many directions in many configurations, and whose communities commit only to engage, not to agree with one another.’63 This type of approach is currently popular in some areas of classical scholarship, and especially among scholars of the literature of the early Empire, from which much of our material derives. There is some room for it in my analysis: we shall see, for instance, that on some subjects sayings and stories cannot agree, and I shall argue that they express an ethical problem which Roman society at large recognized but could not at that time solve. But it will not form the main thrust of my approach, for two reasons, one drawn from the evidence and one methodological. Sayings and stories are invariably, in our sources, told to make a particular point. Where the point is in doubt, as it might well be in a fable or exemplum, either the teller makes clear from the context how he wants the story to be taken, or he draws a moral explicitly so that there is no mistake.64 62 63

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2.10.7. This approach would mirror that of some recent scholars of parables, one of the most intensively studied of all wisdom genres and a fairly close relative of our material. Parables have been seen as making a single point (Dodd 1961: 18–21), or many points (Scott 1989 ch. 1, Via 1967: 2–3, though neither supports allegorical readings). It has been argued that the parable ‘is in itself what it is talking about’, and finding points of correspondence with the outside world is beside the point (TeSelle 1975: 5, cf. Via 1967: 198). Some scholars have seen the impact of the parable as coming from the way we identify with characters and follow their stories (and sometimes find we have identified with the wrong character). Many have emphasized the multivalence and ambiguity which refuse to allow us to draw simple conclusions, and stimulate us into thinking for ourselves (e.g. Funk 1966: 133–5, Hendrick 1994: 4). E.g. Max. Tyr. 15.5, the fable of the unco-operative body in which it is clear that the audience should identify with the co-operative organs, not the rebels. Valerius makes clear from the thematic organization of his work how he wants his stories to be read, while fables in collections tend to acquire epimythia to ‘explain’ them.

Introduction

21

Plutarch, to give just one example, in Precepts for Ruling the State (806e) says that young men should attach themselves to older men if they want to be successful in public life. They should not be like Aesop’s wren, which hitched a ride on an eagle, only to jump off and get ahead of the eagle at the height of his flight. If Plutarch had told this story without pointing up his moral at the outset, it could easily have been taken the other way, as saying that to hitch a ride on a more powerful politician and then get ahead of him at the crucial moment, is a clever thing to do. Indeed, since the wren does not seem to suffer for his behaviour, that is arguably the natural way to read it. Since he is using the fable in a slightly surprising way, Plutarch makes his intended moral very clear.65 Sayings and stories are certainly capable of making different points on different occasions. But they are only used to make one point on any one occasion; they are not, at least in the literature of this period, used to make insolubly conflicting points; and all the interpretations of a single text that survive fall within the field of attitudes which we shall be mapping. Those in the early Empire who use them agree with those who analyse them,66 that they are designed to be useful, and this requires that their interpretation is not, on any given occasion, impossible to deduce or even ambiguous. That being the case, to analyse sayings and stories as inescapably multivalent, as purely problematizing or expressing insoluble tensions, would not do justice to the care with which our sources use them, and would not capture their meaning in the society that employed them. It will serve the evidence better to put together, as I have done, all the actual meanings that are given to sayings and stories in different contexts in the early Empire, and see what kind of moral system they map out. The second methodological point is closely related. There is an important, and in recent scholarship too often neglected, difference between a text having several possible meanings in different contexts, and its being intrinsically ambiguous or multivalent. The latter is a literary judgement based on a certain style of reading, but it does not meet the needs of historians. In discrete historical situations, people believe, communicate and try to persuade others of one thing and not another, to promote one course of action and not another. They take views, make decisions and act. They do not live in a perpetual consciousness of ambiguity and refuse to come to 65

66

If this procedure seems na¨ıve, one could in fact argue that sayings and stories are deployed in less sophisticated ways in our sources than in some other literature. I know of no parallel in this period to the parable which the prophet Nathan tells King David, about the rich man with many flocks who takes his neighbour’s one ewe lamb. The story is told in such a way that David indignantly sympathizes with the poor man, only to be shocked by being told that he is the rich man (2 Sam. 12.1–7). See below, pp. 27, 58, 85, 124.

22


conclusions; if they did, they would hardly be able to act at all. Historians, therefore, need not focus on the theoretically infinite potential of the text, but on what it is reasonable to believe it may have meant in context.67 There will still be disagreements between texts and between interpretations of texts, and it is not our business to iron them out. They show where the early imperial world suffered from disagreements and dilemmas in its ethical thinking. But a disagreement is not the same thing as a shared acceptance of multivalency, and cannot be treated as such. In what follows, I shall try to show that popular morality is broadly systematic, socially functional and rather different from the more familiar ideas of either high philosophy or high literature. Its distinctive features include a strong focus on public social relations and a strong sense of conflict between certain moral aspirations (justice, for instance) and the social institutions (like the law) which attempt to enshrine them. Popular morality emphasizes executive virtues, which enable people in different circumstances to practise the same virtues by doing quite different things, and its understanding of ‘goodness’ is highly socially embedded. To be good means above all to be good of one’s kind, whatever that is and however it changes over time. One result of this is that the ‘good life’ of a ‘good man’ is seen as the sum of a series of appropriate actions and attitudes, rather than the external manifestation of an internal state of goodness, and there is little sense that coherence or consistency either of personality or of behaviour is desirable. A limitation and an irony of popular sayings and stories is that the more popular we take them to be, the less we know about most of the people who used them. When we study Stoic ethics, or the moral lectures delivered to emperors, we have other information about Stoics and emperors in which to embed them; we can put ethics into their wider historical context. We know so much less about people below the level of the elite that it is difficult to recreate the wider social context as we should wish. (On the positive side, our material is not distorted by coming from any one pen or addressing any particular reader.) For that reason, this study remains, regretfully, strongly focused on the texts with relatively little of the social background even sketched. It would be highly desirable to know more about their context, but what follows is, I hope, in itself a contribution to reawakening the voices and representing some of the people of the Greek and Roman world who are all too little heard about, let alone heard. 67

A similar argument is made by Gellner 1985.

part one chap t e r 2

Proverbs

The best things come in small packages. English proverb

The study of proverbs has been of only intermittent interest to classicists, which is surprising given that several useful collections and editions were made in the nineteenth century, and that across other ancient and modern cultures, proverbs are the subject of a vast and expanding body of scholarship. It would be possible, and might be highly instructive, to base an entire study on a comparison of Greek and Latin proverbs with those of surrounding societies, or with the societies, European and Arab, which inherited them.1 I shall make a few such comparisons in Chapter Six, but in this chapter I confine myself to some influential modern discussions of the nature and definition of the proverb, by way of establishing some working parameters for our collection in Greek and Latin. Modern proverb scholarship began with the work of Archer Taylor in the 1930s. Taylor early recognized the special difficulty of the field, which is that while everyone knows a proverb when they hear one, and among any group of people (even scholars) there is a high level of agreement about whether a given saying should be counted as a proverb, it remains very difficult to say precisely what a proverb is. For this reason Taylor resisted detailed definitions, offering tersely in The Proverb, ‘A proverb is a saying current among the folk.’2 This minimalist definition conceals a cluster approach which Taylor used in practice. He analysed proverbs by vocabulary, metre, rhyme and alliteration, wordplay, imagery, structure and 1

2

The five volumes of Boissonade’s Anecdota graeca 1829–33 testify to the rich variety of proverbial, gnomic and related material surviving in early Byzantine anthologies, while Gutas 1975 shows how much of it finds its way into Arabic. Studies of European proverbs too numerous to note (but see Mieder 1978, 1982–2001) show how Greek and Latin proverbs persist in every part of Europe, becoming part of the differently shaped moralities of its changing states. Taylor 1931: 3.

23

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ideas. He distinguished dialogue proverbs, epigrams, proverbial phrases and proverbial comparisons, and coined the term ‘wellerism’ (after The Pickwick Papers’ Sam Weller) to refer to sayings which tack an example on to a proverb. (‘Anything for a quiet life, as the man said wen he took the sitivation at the lighthouse.’3 ) Taylor accepted almost any combination of these qualities, together with recognition of a saying as proverbial by users, as identifying a proverb or proverbial expression. The half-century after the publication of The Proverb saw a spate of attempts to improve on Taylor’s definition. G. B. Milner proposed a sevenpoint definition: proverbs are traditional, concise and easily remembered; they are vivid, homely and sometimes coarse; they create an abstract, universal observation from practical experience; they sum up a situation by appealing to common sense; they are often linked with contrary sayings, both of which are held to be true; they aim to urge, teach, praise, convince, warn, blame, restrain or discourage; and they are symmetrical in form and content.4 He was promptly offered numerous examples which did not fit his scheme, and many scholars concluded that one cannot make a single list of features which all proverbs possess.5 The most widely accepted definitions of proverbs in general or a body of proverbs within one culture still tend to be the most general and inclusive ones.6 Some ethnographers have taken a cross-cultural approach to definition. In his monumental (though unfortunately named) Racial Proverbs, S. G. Champion offered literal definitions of the word most closely approximating to the English ‘proverb’ in thirty-six languages, to show how they varied in concept. They include the Arabic mathal (‘likeness’), Russian poslovitsa (‘by-word’), Chinese su-hua (‘common talk’), Estonian vanasona (‘old word’), Lettish sakamvârds (‘sayable’ or ‘repeatable word’), Malay umpama-an (‘illustration’), Sanskrit su-bhâsita (‘well-spoken word’) and Welsh dihareb (‘affirmation’ or ‘assertion’).7 Others have doubted that the proverb exists as a cross-cultural entity at all: ‘Features that may not be distinctive in some conditions become so in others,’ Nigel Barley observes.8 Barley also notes that in all cultures, 3 4 5 6 7 8

Ch. 43. Greek and Latin do not favour wellerisms, but see e.g. Liv. 23.47, Plu. Mor. 467c, Quint. 5.11.21, Theocr. 15.77, Plato Theaetet. 200e, Z6.42, Laberius fr. 63; Taylor 1931: 200–20. Milner 1969: 199–202. Liver 1977 gives a useful account of attempts at definition up to the time of writing; cf. Blehr 1973. E.g. Holbek 1970, Abrahams 1972: 119 (which Russo 1997 borrows to define Greek proverbs). Champion 1938: xv–xvii. Barley 1974: 880, though Barley also offered the general definition that proverbs are metaphorical, have a fixed form, take the form of a statement and manipulate logical relationships.

Proverbs

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proverbs, riddles, fables, stories, fairy tales and so on breed endlessly with each other, producing every imaginable form of hybrid, with the result that riddles, maxims and proverbial phrases all share some of the features of proverbs.9 Taylor’s was essentially a language-based approach. Others have preferred to focus on structure. M. Kuusi, in an influential study, analysed proverbs as binary structures, which contrast one/two, one/all or part/whole.10 Arvo Krickman preferred to emphasize the varied and sometimes complicated structure of proverbs, some of which make statements, which may or may not be normative, some prescriptions and some evaluations.11 Others again, like A. Szemerkényi, prefer a semiotic approach. Proverbs appear as ‘signs of definite situations, or definite relations between the things’.12 Even Szemerkényi, however, accepts that one must look at the ‘pragmatic function of the proverb’ too. It is on the social context and function of proverbs that there is the largest measure of agreement. Iver Kjaer suggests that most people would accept that proverbs are ‘anonymous, traditional sayings about life’.13 The influential American paroemiologist Roger Abrahams emphasizes the context in which proverbs arise: ‘Proverbs “name” situations in which social stability is repeatedly threatened, the potentially disruptive forces coming from within the group.’14 ‘From a rhetorical point of view . . . proverbs are best seen as economical and self-conscious names for recurrent problems situations of a group, with a group-orientated suggestion for resolving the dilemma.’15 Taylor had already summed up the function of proverbs as well as anyone: ‘As a guide to life’s problems, the proverb summarizes a situation, passes a judgement, or offers a course of action. It is a consolation in difficulties large and small and a guide when a choice must be made. It expresses a morality suitable to the common man. It is cautious and conservative in recommending the middle way. Virtus in medio, nequid nimis. It is not a call to high adventure.’16 We shall see many of the features of that definition emerging in Greek and Latin proverbs. Definitions and discussions of the proverb in classical sources are few and far between, and we must look back to the fourth century bce for some of the more helpful.17 In general, as one might expect, ancient commentators 9 12 14 17

10 Kuusi 1972. 11 Krickman 1974: 866. Barley 1974: 880. 13 Quoted in Holbek 1970: 470. Szemerkényi 1974: 935, citing G. Permjakov. 15 Abrahams 1970: 425. 16 Taylor 1939: 7. Abrahams 1968: 47. The most helpful general modern (though not very recent) discussions of the definition of the (mainly Greek) proverb are those of Todesco 1916, Bieler 1936, Rupprecht 1949, Whiting 1932, Kindstrand

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worry less than their modern counterparts about precise definition. The most common word in Greek for a proverb is paroimia, and in Latin, proverbium.18 Greek and Latin sometimes, but not always, distinguish between proverbs and gnomai or sententiae.19 Aristotle, for instance, says in the Rhetoric that some proverbs are also gnomai.20 The Demetrian essay On Style follows Aristotle and makes a distinction between paroimiai and those who write gnomai.21 Plato several times refers to proverbs as old and/or true sayings.22 Aristotle describes proverbs as the earliest surviving form of philosophy and says that ordinary people and old men like them.23 Demetrius calls proverbs popular sayings in common use (demotikon ti . . . kai koinon), allegorical in style, which have an authoritative, ex cathedra feel to them.24 In the early Roman Empire, Quintilian calls some kinds of proverbs ‘a kind of shorter fable which is interpreted allegorically’, and observes that, ‘Widely known sayings become common property precisely because no-one knows who coined them, like: “Where your friends are, there your treasure is,” “Conscience is worth a thousand witnesses,” and in Cicero, “Like flock with like, as the old proverb says.” Sayings like these would not have lasted forever, if everyone had not thought they were true.’25 Seneca’s Letter Ninety-Four contains a defence of popular wisdom in general, and proverbs in particular. Seneca addresses the objection of Ariston the Stoic that proverbs are just old wives’ teachings which are not fundamental, systematic or general enough really to teach people how to behave.26 On the contrary, says Seneca, proverbs have an impact on even

18 19

20 22 23

24

1978 and Poccetti 1989. Kindstrand 1978: 71 suggests three points to the definition of a proverb, based on Greek sources: it is popular in character, has a definite form and is an expression of wisdom. He points out that it is remarkable how little Greek authors discuss proverbs (though some cite a great many), and suggests that proverbs were regarded as vulgar and so worthy of little attention; in support, he notes the density of proverbial expressions in popular genres such as comedy and mime; one might add novels. See further Rupprecht 1949. Modern commentators have done ancient ones a little less than justice here. Whiting (1932) conflates proverbs with gnomai and Kindstrand 1978: 71 says that proverbs, gnomai and apothegmata are often indistinguishable. Formally this is true but authors do seem to use the terms with some care: see Russell 2001 n. 26 ad Quint. 5.11.21. Hermogenes, discussing gnomai (chh. 3–4) gives only literary examples. Some gnomai and exemplary stories circulate in abbreviated, proverbial form (see below) and many gnomai are wrongly attributed, so we cannot be sure of their origin. A certain amount of crossover and blurring of boundaries, however, is endemic in this kind of material. 21 De eloc. 232. 2.21.12. Cra. 384a, Resp. 1.329a, Leg. 5.741d, Lys. 216c, Phlb. 59e, Sph. 231c, Mx. 248a. Synesus Encom. calv. 22 p. 229 Terzaghi = fr. 13 Rose, from the lost work On Philosophy. Cf. Rh. 2.21.12, 15. Frr. 1–4 Rose indicate that the Delphic maxims and sayings of the Seven Sages were among proverbial material Aristotle included in this work, which suggests that like Plato he saw them as proverbial rather than as gnomic sayings. 25 5.11.21, 41. 26 94.1–2, 5–6. De eloc. 232; cf. Var. L. 7.31.

Proverbs

27

the most untutored mind and emotions, because they are self-evidently true. Their truth is so obvious that faced with a precept like ‘Nothing in excess’ we never even think to question it. The reason is that the soul carries within itself the seed of good conduct, and proverbs stir this seed into growth.27 Seneca does not distinguish explicitly between proverbs and sententiae in this letter, but his examples are all proverbs and Ariston’s objection to them shows he too has popular sayings in mind. The essential features of proverbs, in all the authors I have quoted, seem to be that they are traditional, popular, anonymous and instructive. Ps.-Diogenianus prefaces his second-century collection of proverbs (paroimiai) with a rare and welcome account of the subject: Proverbs, they say, are so named from the word oimos, which means a way: so they are called roads (hodoi). For whatever men discovered that was of common utility, they wrote down to act as ‘highways’, on which others (the majority) would find help. They say that the sayings of the wise men came to be known in the same way, and the pronouncements of Pythagoras. Some say that proverbs are so called from some ‘likeness’ (ti homoion), on the basis of which they say it is clear that proverbs come about. The proverb is a form of what is called allegory. It is related to the Aesopic saying or fable (ainos), Carian fable, Sybaritic saying, Kyprian and Libyan fable, and the Maisonikan proverb: the poultice. For ainos is a mythical story about speechless animals or plants which is applied to human beings for their instruction.28

At this point, ps.-Diogenianus is diverted into giving examples of fables and an account of their origins. In his description of the proverb, however, all its most commonly agreed features are present. Proverbs are traditional, popular and anonymous. They are not the same as sayings of wise men or fables, but they are related. Above all, they are useful: they are ‘roads’ which help people to travel through life. Ps.-Diogenianus belongs to a long and distinguished line of Greek and Latin philosophers and literati who collected and analysed proverbs. Aristotle’s interest expressed itself in a work called Proverbs (Paroimiai), which may have been a collection or a study (or both); he was followed by the Peripatetic Clearchus and the Stoic Chrysippus.29 Cynic philosophers have a reputation for liking proverbs, though direct evidence is scanty.30 Around the end of 27

28 29

94.27–30, 43. In ep. 95 Seneca modifies this position, saying that although proverbs were all people needed to live a good life in the old days, nowadays people are worse and need the stronger medicine of systematic philosophy (4–6, 13, 34). In ep. 33.7 he says that proverbs and chreiai are suitable for children, but adults should be making their own maxims, not memorizing other people’s. Note that ps.-Diogenianus seems to distinguish between proverbs and gnomic sayings; he also recognizes the close relationship between these and fables. 30 Kindstrand 1978: 77. D.L. 5.26, 7.200.

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the fourth century bce Aristotle’s successor at the Lyceum, Theophrastus, and the antiquarian Demon both wrote studies On Proverbs.31 In the Alexandrian library two scholars, Aristophanes of Byzantium around the end of the third century bce and Didymus Chalkenteros in the first, made proverb collections, and so did Lucillus of Tarrha in Crete.32 None of these studies or collections survives, but around the early second century ce two authors made epitomes of Didymus and Lucillus. One was a sophist called Zenobius and the other is claimed (probably wrongly) to be the lexicographer Diogenianus. Alongside them in mediaeval manuscripts survives an early imperial collection of Proverbs of the Alexandrians attributed to Plutarch.33 The collection of ps.-Diogenianus is the largest (and one of the largest collections of ethical material of any kind from antiquity), containing nearly 800 sayings to Zenobius’ 600 or so, if one counts variants. There is a substantial overlap, with some 350 sayings appearing in both collections. Ps.-Plutarch’s collection contains only 131 proverbs, of which only 30 do not appear in either of the other two.34 All three collections cover the same wide range of topics, and I have not been able to discover any significant differences in the material they cover or the proportions in which they cover it.35 Zenobius, though, offers more and fuller explanations of the meanings of proverbs than either of the other two, together with accounts of their origins, which is helpful when it comes to interpreting their often very compressed and allusive phrasing.36 As in other ancient proverb collections, often only the bare bones of the proverb are set down: ‘Skyrian goat’, for 31 33

34 35

36

32 Crusius and Cohn 1891–3, Rupprecht 1949: 1735–78. D.L. 5.45. An intelligent guess, though wrong, since Plutarch was a keen collector of sayings, making compilations of the sayings of kings and generals, Romans, and Spartan men and women, as well as preserving numerous proverbs in his essays. Under Plutarch’s name there also survives a collection of ‘images of the impossible’. Such as has been identified in Stobaeus (Hahm 1990: 2935). Nothing indicates on what principles the paroemiographers selected or rejected proverbs for their collections; one can imagine many possibilities, but I do not think it takes the discussion forward to canvass them. Though some of his explanations are unnecessary, as when he explains that ‘the god lacks nothing’ (Z1.17) is a proverb about the fact that the god lacks nothing, while others are suspiciously counterintuitive, such as when he glosses ‘Don’t despise a country orator’ (Z1.15) as, ‘It is never necessary to despise what is worthless.’ Occasionally, too, he dismisses as ‘obvious’ a proverb whose meaning is not obvious to a modern reader. We cannot, of course, be sure that the paroemiographers’ glosses are always right, nor that there were not other understandings of proverbs current. There are, though, grounds for optimism. Proverbs are described as in popular use, which suggests that their meanings were widely known. The paroemiographers often cite places in earlier literature where a proverb is used, from which we can check their meanings. A number of proverbs (as footnotes will indicate) occur with the same meanings in collections and in contemporary (and later) literature. Where paroemiographers know of more than one interpretation, they give it. All this suggests that we are not likely to be much misled if we accept the paroemiographers’ interpretations.

Proverbs

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instance, or ‘Good men [are] tearful.’37 Modern (and apparently at least some ancient) readers need to have it explained that Skyrian goats had a reputation both for giving lots of milk and for kicking over the pail, so that the phrase can be used either of someone who is helpful or of the destructive, while good men cry because they sympathize with the misfortunes of others.38 Zenobius, ps.-Diogenianus and ps.-Plutarch are most accessibly collected in the Corpus paroemiographorum graecorum. Graux, Crusius and Cohn added to this comments and proverbs which they had identified in other sources.39 In the twentieth century yet more proverbs were identified by Strömberg, while a monumental and presently unfinished new edition of Zenobius was begun by Winfried Bühler.40 Latin proverbs are a little harder to identify, since no collection survives from antiquity to indicate what contemporaries classified as a proverb. The first systematic modern attempt to cull the proverbs from Latin literature was made by August Otto.41 Working before the bulk of modern proverb scholarship, and with little to guide him, Otto took the widest possible definition of the proverb as his starting point, including not only many phrases which have reasonable claim to be proverbial, but a number of eponyms, metaphors, common adjectival phrases and clichés. I have excluded most of these – metaphorical uses of black, white or bronze, for instance, or clichés like ‘swifter than the wind’ and ‘lighter than a feather’. Otto also includes a number of what I classify as gnomic quotations, which I have grouped in the next chapter with gnomai. More trickily, Otto often gives a number of quotations on a theme, whose wording varies too much for them plausibly to be regarded as versions of the same proverb, and these too I have eliminated. A good example is the sentiment ‘love conquers everything’, which is very common in Latin literature (Otto gives several examples), but which does not have a single sufficiently stable form of words to count as a proverb. There are also proverbs in Otto’s collection which are translations from Greek, and if these only appear once in Latin literature (as many do, 37 38 39 40

41

Cf. Gordon 1959: 10–12 on Sumerian proverbs, which are often so compressed that their grammar looks quite eccentric. Z2.18, 1.14. CPG = v. Leutsch and Schneidewin; Graux 1878, Crusius and Cohn 1891–3, Crusius 1883, 1910. Strömberg 1954, 1961, Bühler 1982–. If a proverb occurs in Zenobius (who comes conveniently first in CPG, is most generous with his explanations and is most fully assessed and cross-referenced in the existing volumes of Bühler), I give its reference in Zenobius (Z). If it occurs in ps.-Diogenianus but not Zenobius, I give it the reference D; if in ps.-Plutarch and neither of the others, P; if in Strömberg or elsewhere, I refer to it by the collector’s name. Otto 1890. Some of Otto’s preparatory work was published, with comments, in a series of articles 1887–9.

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particularly in Cicero, but also in other authors), one may doubt whether we can properly call them Latin proverbs, and I have noted them only as Greek proverbs. Finally, I include here only proverbs which are attested in the first and second centuries, or both before and afterwards.42 A number of paroemiographers have added to Otto’s collection (or occasionally subtracted from it) in subsequent years, using criteria similar to Otto’s, and I have added their contributions to the list where appropriate, using the same criteria.43 The best indicator that a phrase, in Latin or Greek, is a proverb, is the introduction ‘as they say’ or ‘as the proverb says’ in a passage of literature in which it occurs, and fortunately, this is very common. (It also suggests that our sources, while far from averse to using proverbs, felt a certain self-consciousness or embarrassment in doing so, and wished the reader to be aware that they were not peddling popular wisdom unwittingly or uncritically.) We have seen that evidence both ancient and modern confirms that proverbs can be seen as traditional, anonymous, instructive and popular, even the epitome of popular ethical material. We may still wonder whether we can be sure that what ps.-Diogenianus and Zenobius (or their predecessors) collected were truly popular expressions, coined, as it were, by the people, for the people; all the more so since both collectors often quote literary versions of them. Taylor emphasized how difficult it is to recognize for certain a proverb in a language other than one’s own, and pointed out that in literary texts, in particular, one cannot always be sure that a proverbial-looking phrase is not of the author’s own coinage.44 He thought that although generally associated with popular styles of speech and thought, individual proverbs could be coined at a high level of society and filter downwards. He also recognized that an author may give a particularly memorable form to an already well-known sentiment, which later becomes the proverbial form of the saying.45 For all these reasons, when meeting a proverbial-looking phrase in a text, even in a collection, Taylor thought that we cannot be sure whether it is genuinely popular. More recent studies have gone further, pointing out that not all literary cultures are as snobbish about proverbs as contemporary ‘high literature’ in English, and both incorporate and coin 42 43 44

This probably cuts out a few proverbs – quoted by Cicero, for example – which were still in use in the early Empire, or in use but not attested until later. Especially Seyffert 1891, Crusius 1891, Szelinski 1892, 1904, Weyman 1893, 1904, Sonny 1893, 1896, Manitius 1896, Sutphen 1901, Kocevar 1929. 45 Taylor 1931: 35–8. Taylor 1931: 3, 6.

Proverbs

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them freely – and that as a result, not only can it be hard to tell which are the incorporated proverbs and which the author’s own, but the distinction may cease to have much meaning.46 Many Greek and Latin authors have a gnomic turn of phrase, occasionally if not habitually, and some genres – novels and moralizing epistles are obvious examples – incorporate large numbers of proverbial-sounding phrases. Where such phrases do not have twins or very close relatives elsewhere, however, I have treated them with scepticism – more scepticism than might some scholars of more recent literature. So, for instance, I have not identified any proverbs proper in Achilles Tatius’ notoriously gnomic Leucippe and Cleitophon. My reason is that Achilles Tatius never calls his otherwise unattested, proverbial-looking phrases proverbs, nor do they appear in (nearly or exactly) the same form elsewhere. My definition of a proverb, in sum, depends on its identification as such in an ancient source, or on repeated attestations of it in identical or near-identical form. If a saying is identifiable as a gnomic quotation from a known author, I have counted it as a gnome. What Taylor called dialogue proverbs and epigrams do not appear in Greek proverbial collections, and where they appear in other literature I have counted them, as seems more natural in classical terms, as exempla. The resulting corpus contains around 2,000 proverbs. It includes proverbial phrases and comparisons, eponyms and wellerisms, and even the occasional riddle and joke. (‘Sikelos was a fig merchant. Looking at the sea becalmed one day, he said, “I know what it wants: it wants figs!”’47 ) Thematically analysed, these proverbs cover some ninety topics, most of which can be grouped for convenience into the following composite categories: the gods, the metaphysical and human life; good social relations; bad social relations; intelligence and selfpreservation; foolishness and self-destruction; wealth; family; speech, truth and lies; goodness and happiness; badness. A few more or less miscellaneous topics remain, which nevertheless have some internal relationships, and which we shall come to last. map of the ethical l an dscape 1. Gods, the metaphysical and humanity To begin with the metaphysical: a common theme is the innate power and self-sufficiency of the gods. ‘The god lacks nothing.’48 ‘Together the gods 46 47

E.g. Shippey 1977: 42–6 on Beowulf; Richter 1974 on sixteenth-century German literature. 48 Z1.17. Z5.51.

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are happy [or ‘blessed’, makares].’49 They are also, however, interested in humanity. They see that justice is done, particularly Zeus.50 Those who meet a sudden change of life are said to have met ‘the justice of the gods of Olympus’,51 while ‘Nemesis outstrips feet.’52 The gods are also associated with trustworthiness and immutability: an unbreakable oath, an unavoidable fate or an irreversible judgement is called ‘Rhadamanthian’.53 To do something ‘Minerva unwilling’ is to do it against nature or good judgement.54 It is often said that the gods in Greek and Roman religion do not teach or sponsor ethics in the way that God or the gods do in many modern religious traditions – an idea which has always been somewhat at odds with the much-discussed role of the gods, for instance, in didactic literature and drama. We shall often find the gods playing a role in popular ethical thinking, and I shall argue for a strong view of their morality and moral authority over human beings.55 There are, however, powers even greater than the gods. ‘Nothing is stronger than terrible necessity.’56 ‘The gods do not fight necessity.’57 Proverbs display considerable interest, tinged with scepticism, in omens and prophets.58 A good prophet is a ‘Eurycles’. ‘What did Apollo play for you?’59 is asked of those who think they can see into the future. On the other hand, ‘many are soothsayers, few are prophets’, just as ‘many carry a wand, but few are bacchanals’.60 Despite the rather ambivalent tone of some proverbs, about religion, being religious and getting one’s religious behaviour right, is regularly seen as a good thing. The religious are said to be ‘starting from the hearth’,61 because tradition has it that the first part of a sacrifice is to Hestia. Those who get something wrong in a ritual, blaspheme, have dirty hands or act despite ill omens may be insulted as Cretans, Rhodians or Lindians.62 It is important to pray, provided that one does it properly.63 No-one can cheat or manipulate the gods, and only the foolish would try.64 Other divinized abstracts do not play as large a role in proverbs as in some other genres, but time, though not presented as a god, is worth a mention as a power. We shall see in Chapter Nine that proverbs have much of interest 49 53

54 57 61 63

50 Z4.11. 51 D3.20. 52 D6.80. Z5.99. Z5.81, Z5.82, D7.98. On the Muses, see below, p. 52. Proverbs contain a vast range of references to people, places and events, the majority still comprehensible (thanks in many cases to the paroemiographers’ explanations), on which see below, Chapter Eight. 55 Below, pp. 61, 207–11. 56 Z3.9, P2.22. Hor. AP 385, cf. Cic. Off. 1.31.110. 58 Z3.63, D3.93, D7.90. 59 Z6.14. 60 Z5.75, Z5.77. Z1.85, Z4.61. 62 Z5.50, D7.96, Z4.95, cf. D1.43, D2.92. Z1.40, Plu. Mor. 549e. 64 D7.78. D5.90, D6.55.

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to say about the value of both past and future, and about the interesting doctrine of the ‘right time’ (kairos).65 Gnomai and exempla also take a lively interest in the divine power Tychê/Fortuna (fate or fortune) which intervenes randomly in human life and dramatically changes it. Proverbs do not personify fortune (as gnomic sayings and exempla often do), but they occasionally mention it and are very interested in sudden, dramatic changes of life for better or worse. ‘First one thing then another, as the countryman said when he lost his spotted pig.’66 ‘What a turn of the horses!’ can apply to good or bad fortune.67 ‘Another life, another way of life’ is said of those whose lives change for the better, and ‘they have met better birds’, ‘he has swapped the oar for the platform’ or ‘he dug a horse from a slow-legged ass’.68 ‘Heracles the strong was saved by a quail’ and others have equally unexpected stories of good fortune.69 Those whose lives change for the worse are said to have gone from horse to ass, or to have suffered an ‘Adrastan nemesis’.70 ‘The mountain labours and bears a mouse’ they say when someone hopes for great things and gets small ones.71 A few unhappy people suffer continual change, when ‘one day is a stepmother, the next a mother’.72 Others are just unlucky: they are the ones who get to ‘measure out water’ (apparently the least desirable job in a lawcourt), inherit ‘Seius’ horse’ or touch ‘the gold of Tolosa’.73 Change happens at ‘the turn of the ostraka’, from a game, a form of heads or tails, which was played with potsherds or oyster shells.74 In general, people are at its mercy, though some people manage to change their own lives: someone who changes his custom is said to be trying ‘another type of handle’.75 Some even improve their own lives: ‘I fled evil and found something better.’76 We saw above that one proverb associates change with the gods, but usually it appears as a random impersonal power in its own right. When sudden changes of life occur, it is equally often that someone who is bad does well contrary to their deserts, like Mandron, who had a fig-wood ship and somehow managed not to sink in it.77 A number of proverbs use the gods as images for something else.78 If you are called a ‘heavenly goat’ or ‘the horn of Amaltheia’ (after the goat whose horns dripped nectar and ambrosia and fed the baby Zeus), you 65 67 70 73 74 77

66 Petr. 45. Z2.43, D2.71, D8.46, cf. D1.69, D6.96, D7.40; on kairos: e.g. Z3.72, Z5.33, D7.81. 68 Z1.22, D1.98, Z2.5, cf. Z6.38. 69 Z5.56, Z1.28, Z1.65, D2.84, D7.59. P1.83. 71 D8.75, Hor. Ars 139. 72 D2.76. Z2.33 (cf. Z2.57), Z1.30. P2.17, Gell. 3.9.6, 7. Every owner of this horse died soon after acquiring it, while anyone who touched the temple gold of the Gallic town of Tolosa died in agony. 75 D2.57, from the handle of an oar or tool. 76 Z3.98, cf. Z1.28. D6.95, cf. Z1.65, P2.16. 78 E.g. Z2.26, Z4.11, D2.91. Z3.44, cf. Z3.31, Z4.15, D2.78, D3.33, D8.60.

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are generous.79 ‘Amaia came to Azesia,’80 using the Troezenian names for Demeter and Kore, refers to those who search for something until they find it. A ‘Lykeian drink’ is something delicious (after the springs of Apollo which were supposed to run with wine and honey), while the ‘Heracleian disease’81 is another name for epilepsy. Someone who unexpectedly helps another may be called ‘a god from the machina’.82 ‘Shamelessness is a god’83 is said metaphorically of those who do well by it. In other cases doing well is attributed more seriously to a god. ‘The dice of Zeus always fall well.’84 Those who are fortunate are said to be ‘in the head of Zeus’; their desires ‘come to the ears of the gods’, and ‘the god sends forth spontaneous (or unbidden) goods’ on them.85 These sayings nearly all testify to one of two things: that the gods are powerful, and that they are good, in the sense that they are associated in people’s minds with good things, or because they sponsor or help to bring about states of affairs which human beings regard as good.86 In the face of all these forces beyond their control, human beings are fragile creatures. ‘Man is a bubble’, and numerous proverbs refer to the fact that we all die.87 ‘It is best for mortals not to be born’ echoes a sentiment common in literature, while the span of life is proverbially short.88 Sometimes the best we can do is to ‘choose our tree to hang from’.89 Proverbs exhibit a tragicomic ruefulness about the shape of human life. Old age outlives its usefulness; old men are ‘weak as tow’ and ‘nothing is any use to an old man’, so it is not worth helping him.90 ‘The head of an old man is a raisin.’ ‘There’s never anything to see in the buttocks of an old man’ and ‘the old are twice child’.91 Old age does not necessarily bring happiness or tranquillity: think of Tithonus.92 The death of the old is no matter for grief – you don’t grieve the old ox when it dies – though one proverb testifies that one does grieve untimely death.93 All the beauty, hope and busyness of youth, all the power and success of men in their prime, come to foolishness, feebleness and unlamented death. This is not an uncommon view of human life elsewhere in classical culture, but it is not especially common in other cultures, and it is worth 79 82

83 87 88 90 91

80 Z4.20. 81 Z4.99, Z4.26. Z1.26, Z2.48. D2.84. Being ‘like Heracles’ can mean many things in different contexts, including being strong, hardworking, long-suffering and not sycophantic: e.g. Juv. 10.360, Stat. Silv. 2.1.124, Ael. VH 12.22, Z5.48, Z6.7, P1.80. 84 Z2.44. 85 Z3.41, Z3.49, D3.15. 86 See further pp. 207–11. Z4.36. Petr. 42, cf. Var. R. 1.1.1, Z3.100, Z6.11, Z6.13, Z6.15, Z6.31, Z6.41, Z6.45, D5.37, D8.68, D8.69. 89 Plin. HN pr. 29. D3.4, D8.17. D3.70, D8.14, D3.86, D3.89. ‘Old age is a disease’ (Sen. ep. 108.28). 92 Z4.41, Z6.18. 93 Z2.97, Z3.3. Z1.96, Z1.97, cf. Z5.65, D4.18.

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stressing how very pessimistic it is. All the other activities of life and all the other ethical ideas which we shall be analysing, take their place against this framing sense that human life is a long road to failure and negation. Having said that, not all men fail in the same way or to the same extent. ‘The old age of the eagle beats the youth of the lark’ and an old camel can still carry more than an ass.94 Some people remain superior to others. Some even manage to preserve the habits of youth into old age. Solon’s maxim, ‘I grow old learning many things,’ is a gnomic quotation which becomes a proverb, and presents an optimistic view of old age in comparison with the other proverbs we have seen.95 Wise men achieve much that ordinary men cannot, but perhaps the fact that this saying has become proverbial suggests that they can be a model for the rest.96 Finally, in this section, we may note a number of proverbs which say that life is hard and human choices limited. ‘We live not how we want, but how we can’, ‘willy nilly’. ‘The victor mourns, but the vanquished is destroyed.’97 There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip, and many a life is lived on the ‘Sarpedonian shore’, or else ‘between the rock and the [sacrificial] knife’. We cling to what we want like a child to a lump of ice, and it melts in our hand.98 Occasionally you get a break and something goes ‘with one flick of the whip’,99 but the dominant tone is one of existential pain. 2. Bad social relations: strife To turn to what is within our control, good and bad social behaviour are the subjects of two large groups of proverbs, and there is a particularly long list of ways in which social relations can go wrong. This comes as no surprise, as we should expect to find ethical material much interested in articulating and negotiating social problems. Strife is endemic among human beings: ‘However many men, so many opinions!’ ‘One thicket does not nurture two robins.’100 When you have 94 96 97

98 99 100

95 Z3.4; Seneca too calls it a proverb (ep. 76.3). Z2.38, D5.81. The old age of women seems to be more vigorous than that of old men: see below, p. 51. Z4.16, Mart. 8.44.16, Petr. 71, Plin. Paneg. 20, Gaius, 2.153 etc. (volens nolens, which became ‘woly noly’ in early modern English, is the ancestor of the modern English ‘willy nilly’), Z4.78, cf. Livy’s ‘woe to the conquered’, which became proverbial according to Festus (Liv. 5.48.9, Flor. 1.7.17, Festus p. 372 M). Z5.71, Z5.86 (the Sarpedonian shore is in Thrace, and is notoriously weatherbeaten), Apul. Met. 11.28, Z5.58, cf. Z2.82, Z5.79, D7.71, Petr. 47. D6.65. Hor. Sat. 2.1.27, Ov. Ars 1.759, cf. Cic. Fin. 1.5.15, Z5.1. ‘Eurymnos’ is the proverbial name of a character who tried (but failed) to set Castor against Pollux (P1.74).

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fallen out with someone, you can tell him to ‘Go to the ravens!’ or ‘Chuck yourself in the water!’ People bring different weapons to the struggle: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’101 ‘Evil needs only an excuse.’102 Some people fight over such trivial things that they are said to be beating ‘the shadow of an ass’.103 Of quarrelsome people it may be said, ‘the pig stirs itself’, ‘he is putting forward the lamb’ (from a ritual connected with going to war), ‘he’s tunny fishing’, or ‘he’s plundering the Muses’.104 ‘Histiaeus took the sandal and Aristagoras bound it under’ is said of those who spread the blame for strife around. Strife is destructive: ‘Many generals destroyed Caria.’ If you win a battle but in the long term the results are bad you are said to have won a ‘Cadmeian victory’. Worse still in times of strife worthless men rise to the top of society and ‘even Androcles can be polemarch’.105 It is notable that proverbs which are explained as referring simply to ‘bad men’ typically refer to social situations and especially to social strife.106 One is not a generically bad man in isolation but in relation to other people (which is not true of all ethical qualities). According to Plutarch, the boldness and aggression of vice are proverbial.107 ‘Agamemnon sacrifices’ is said ominously of those who do something ill advised or evil.108 Somebody planning evil is compared to a ‘Cretan going to Aegina’.109 Evil attracts evil. ‘I know Simon and Simon knows me’ says the proverb of those who recognize their fellow travellers in crime. Or, more savagely, of their hangers-on, ‘The dog mimics the mistress.’110 Bad behaviour alienates good friends: ‘His friends get out of the way of a man doing ill.’111 Those who suffer the attentions of the evil are said to be ‘under the plough’, an ‘ox under the yoke’ or an ‘ass among bees’.112 Some people do not help themselves, and of them it may be observed in exasperation, ‘You beat the fire.’ ‘To Skolos one neither goes oneself, nor follows another’ advises the proverb of avoiding evil.113 Proverbs are aware that some people are a mixture of good and bad, like the octopus, whose head contains both good and evil. ‘The mouse has tasted pitch’ is said of those who have tried evil and been put off.114 Others, though, are incapable of good: ‘There’s no straightening a crooked billet.’115 Of the thoroughly wicked it is said, ‘You would not be praised even at a 101 105 106 108 111 114

102 D7.87, D5.78. 103 D7.1. 104 D8.64, D2.96, D5.22, Z5.15. Z5.90, Z2.72, Z5.68. D8.49, D7.72, Z4.45, Z3.77. Some people seem to be born to struggle, and of them it is said that their affairs ‘go backwards’ (P1.3). 107 Mor. 554f. For the range of words for ‘bad’ see below, pp. 191–3. 109 D5.92. 110 Z5.41, D5.93, cf. D6.89. Z1.13, cf. Z1.33, Z3.34, Z4.60, Z4.77. 112 Hor. Sat. 1.9.73, D3.54, D7.32, cf. Z2.31. 113 Z5.27, D4.93, cf. D3.10. Z1.90. 115 P1.18, D6.92, cf. Z1.16. D2.64.

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funeral feast.’116 Just one proverb acknowledges that who is good or bad may be a matter of perspective: Syrians are always fighting Phoenicians, because each group thinks the other is bad.117 Evils often come in spates, by the bowl-full, ‘fire on fire’, and one breeds another, like a ‘bad egg from a bad crow’.118 But doing wrong does not always accomplish anything. It may even happen that, ‘Little evil (leads to) great good’, despite the worst intentions of the evil-doer.119 3. Faults of the powerful and powerless, untrustworthiness, carping, inappropriateness and cowardice Apart from general bad behaviour, proverbs portray a wealth of more specific ways in which social relations fail. There are the failings of the powerful, notably arrogance (hybris), scorn and oppression. Rulers are warned not to be too overbearing. If they are they can be accused of ‘Colophonian hybris’ or being a ‘goat with an outrageous horn’.120 Those who exalt themselves are said to be ‘taking the shield in Argos’, after the name of the senior Argive army corps, while if you taunt me you can be said to be ‘laughing at me from on high’.121 Hybris can be dangerous, especially in conjunction with softness: if you behave like the Samians or the Sybarites, who were as hybristic as they were immoderate, you may get yourself conquered.122 Some proverbs express contempt or scepticism for the self-aggrandizing claims of others. ‘The owl says one thing, the crow another,’ is the proverb’s dry verdict on those who dispute each other’s greatness. To poke fun at an arrogant man you say, ‘He doesn’t spit in the bay.’123 Then there are the failings of the less powerful, notably sycophancy and importunateness. ‘Go and shake acorns from another oak!’ is said to those who ask repeatedly for money, or ‘Get help from someone who doesn’t know you!’124 Sycophants are ‘Abydenians’; they ‘play the ape’ and lack any sense of appropriate behaviour, and those who accept their attentions are as bad.125 If you see through someone’s flattery, you may tell them they’re ‘asking for a fig’, after Athenians who try to flatter farmers into giving them 116 120 122

123 124

117 D8.19. 118 D3.22 (corrupt), Z5.69, cf. D4.66. 119 D6.62. Z5.28. 121 Z6.52, D3.24. D6.84 (this is also applied to the forgetful), D5.79, D5.61. P1.61, Z5.19. The latter proverb: ‘Drinking water with a measure, eating bread without one’ derives, according to Zenobius, from an oracle given to the Sybarites, cf. Z5.88. Contrast ‘Oitaios the daimon’, who became a byword for hating hybris (Z5.44). Z1.69, D4.82b, that is, he thinks he’s better than the rest of us. Cf. Petr. 45 (‘dunghill cock’). 125 Z1.1, Z4.50, Z3.20. Z2.41, Quint. 6.3.98.

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their first figs.126 Sycophants are cowards: like the fox, the sycophant will slink away from the place where he has been exposed.127 Most qualities damaging to social relations, however, can apply to a wide range of people. Lack of trust, for instance. The treacherous (doleroi) are more poikiloi (varied, multicoloured, changeable or artful) than a water serpent. An ‘Attic neighbour’ is the sort who throws you off your land and settles it himself.128 When dealing with the untrustworthy, it is safest to ‘give and take at the same time’.129 When someone insists on carping at others, you say, ‘You can see the other man’s louse, but not your own great big tick.’130 ‘The withered bramble is the most unbending’ deplores stubbornness, while ‘to sing the songs of Tellen’ is said, after an infamous flute player and singer, against those who scoff.131 Even dullness, unperceptiveness and ill temper come in for criticism. ‘He’s no salt in him.’ ‘He’s got a Boeotian ear.’ He is ‘rough as a hedgehog’, cross as an ‘Areopagite’ or ‘harsher than Hippomenes’.132 When someone is trying to persuade a stubborn man to co-operate, they say, ‘The ship supplicates the rocks.’133 More ambiguously, ‘the elephant never quarrels’ is said of the thick-skinned.134 At the worst, someone may simply be labelled ‘wild’, like an Antronian ass – not fit for civilized society at all.135 Behaviour which is simply inappropriate is equally open to comment: if you ‘frock the cat’ you are doing something wrong, as is an ‘ass coming to the mysteries’, ‘an old woman dancing as a bacchanal’, or anyone dancing a ‘Surbenian dance’ or dancing a chorus when unemployed.136 (On the positive side, what is appropriate can be said to be ‘water to a frog’, ‘suet to a cat’ or ‘a horseman to the plain’.137 ) When ‘the wagon drags the ox’, someone is doing something the wrong way round, as they are too when they ‘feed the dogs and not themselves’.138 When ‘the hairy-foot [i.e. the hare] desires to be king’, he desires something inappropriate, as do those who put a knife in a child’s hands.139 Shame should be hidden; if possible, keep it indoors, as you would an adulterer. If it gets out it will put you ‘into the fire’.140 Last but not least, cowardice, that definitively antisocial failing, is the subject of many proverbs. ‘The elephant is scared of the mouse’ is said of 126 131 133

134 137

127 Z1.67. 128 D7.69, Z2.28. 129 D2.77a. 130 Petr. 57. Z5.91. 132 Z1.63 (cf. Quint. 6.3.18), D3.46, D2.91, D3.1, cf. D3.50, D6.57. Z1.16, Z1.45. D6.79. Related to this, perhaps, is a riddle of which Plutarch says the first line has become proverbial: ‘They fought amid stones, but could not lift a stone’ (Mor. 660d). Athenaeus (10.457b) gives the whole riddle; the answer is, a shipwreck. 135 D1.26, D2.87, cf. D7.52, D8.56. 136 Z2.93, D6.98, Z2.96, Z6.1, D3.6. D4.43. 138 D3.30, D3.17. 139 D4.12, D6.46. 140 Z4.67, Z4.72, D4.52. D3.58, D3.83, D5.28.

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those who overreact to small and trivial things.141 The fearful are ‘scared by a hide’ or ‘shy at wicker shadows’.142 One who returns home with more enthusiasm than he set out with is called ‘a man of Attica making for harbour’.143 Cowards are likened to deer and hares, to Epeios (a character in comedy), women or the people of Rhegium or Arcadia, and are called ‘white-livered’ or ‘son of a white cock’.144 ‘Lions at home, foxes at Ephesus [or, more generally, abroad]’ is the contemptuous epigram reputedly coined by the famous prostitute La¨ıs about the Spartans, but much used of other people too.145 Just one proverb seems to see the upside of cowardice and exhorts us to ‘stay out of the way of weapons’, while another expresses the wish not to be put to the test.146 4. Good social relations: friendship We have already seen that several types of antisocial behaviour have positive correlates: trust (pistis), for instance, and bravery (andreia). There are not as many such pairs as one might expect or could concoct, an indication of how far this material is from the tidy organization of philosophical systems. The prime positive social value in proverbs is friendship (philia), and doing good to one’s friends and harming one’s enemies are equally praiseworthy.147 Everyone needs friends. ‘One man, no man’ the proverb says, meaning that no-one can accomplish anything on his own.148 ‘Friends are a treasure,’ a ‘pearl’.149 ‘Small things grow in concord; the greatest things are destroyed by discord.’150 People should imitate the adaptable polyp (which takes on the colour of the rock it clings to), the well-co-ordinated octopus or the cooperative Arabian flute players who kept the watches of the night, passing the tune from man to man.151 ‘Part does not choke,’ says the proverb, meaning, it’s good to share.152 Good men tend to band together: a crowd of good men is called a ‘sea’.153 ‘Birds of a feather flock together,’ ‘A rook always sits with a rook.’154 They also sympathize with those in the same plight – ‘You and I are pulling the same wagon.’155 ‘Friends hold all things in common’ (after a saying of Pythagoras) and they ‘need no invitation to make merry’. They are naturally sociable, like the proverbial Corinthian Kydon, and ‘When the pot boils, friendship boils.’156 141 144 145 147 150 154 156

142 D2.65, D5.88, D7.92, cf. D7.36. 143 Z2.10. Z3.67, cf. Z3.72, D2.45. Z3.66, Z4.85, Z3.81, D4.1, Z5.83, D3.42, Z4.87, Juv. 13.141. 146 Z3.89, Z5.10 (literally, a ‘black-bottom’). E.g. Petr. 44, Epict. Ench. 4.5.37, Ael. VH 13.8. 148 Z3.51. 149 Quint. 5.11.41, Petr. 62. Z1.64 (doing good to friends). 151 Philostr. Vit. Soph. 486, D7.73, Z2.39. 152 Z5.23. 153 Z1.9. Sen. ep. 94.46. 155 Z3.43, cf. Z3.56, Z4.96, D3.56. Quint. 5.11.41, Z2.47, cf. D5.16. Z4.79, Z2.46, Z2.42, D8.42, Z4.12, cf. Z1.62.

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Hospitality is a virtue: one should always ‘keep a fish in reserve’, ‘leave something for the Medes’ or ‘leave something for unexpected guests’.157 Some friends are faithful even to death, like Naera and Charmonie, the attendants of Cleopatra who stayed with her till the end.158 Friendship is not only natural and agreeable; it is also politically expedient. ‘Wise tyrants make friends of wise men.’159 Friends sympathize with one another, and feel pity and grief at each other’s suffering.160 If one should do anything one can to help one’s friends, one should also do anything possible to hurt one’s enemies. Someone who does the opposite is as perverse as a river giving water far away but not near to hand. ‘Anything bad goes to Pyrra,’ says the proverb, meaning that it is natural to try to pass on your troubles to your neighbours.161 If you can’t hurt your enemy openly, do it secretly.162 Naturally, for those on the receiving end, ‘the gifts of the hostile are no use’.163 Just once, rather greater complexity in relations is expressed: ‘goodwill differs not at all from hostility’, as Hippolytus told Phaedra when she said she loved him.164 5. Justice, honesty, helpfulness and bravery Good social relations also depend on justice. ‘Let Attius be the same as Tettius’ says the proverb, meaning that they should, in principle, have the same rights.165 It is just to punish the evil: ‘Justice gave birth to justice and harm to harm.’ Injustice is the cause of wars.166 One compliments the just by calling them ‘more just than justice’, ‘more just than a balance’, ‘milder than a dove’.167 A just man is called a ‘Bokchoris’ after an Egyptian famed for the wisdom of his judgements.168 Justice is usually described as if it were one simple, universal concept, but one proverb does recognize that ‘law and land’ go together, and every tribe has its own laws.169 Though very keen on justice in principle, however, proverbs (like popular morality in general) are rather sceptical of judicial systems, and nearly all proverbs dealing with actual institutions are rather negative. Jurors leak; one’s opponents fail to turn up; people are unnecessarily litigious. The justice of kings, too, is corruptible by gifts.170 Honesty too is central to good social relations. Honesty is an oldfashioned virtue, and the honest may find themselves being called ‘older 157 161 164 167 170

158 Z5.24. 159 Z5.98. 160 Z1.14, cf. Z1.7, Z1.18, D7.47. Plu. Mor. 703e–f. 162 Z1.93. 163 Z4.4. D6.70a (on doing good to friends), D7.70, Z4.2, Z5.21. 165 Gell. 3.16.13. 166 D5.99, Z3.28, D3.5. Z1.50. 168 Z2.60. 169 Z5.25. D4.22, Z3.16, D7.64. Z2.86, Z3.84, Z3.88, cf. Z5.2, D2.79 (of the Argives), D4.70 (of the Ephesians), D7.54 (of an old woman called Ptolemais), D4.21.

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than Ibycus’.171 This seems to be a case of that anxiety that the world is getting worse which is so characteristic of ‘high’ moralizing literature; it is in fact rare in proverbs (and other genres of popular wisdom) which seem, as we shall see in Chapter Nine, to see the world as stable rather than as in decline. Where there is honesty, there can be trust, and a trustworthy man is one with whom ‘you can play morra in the dark’.172 Trickery is liable to be found out – like ‘the ape in purple’ – especially if you try to ‘play the fox to another fox’.173 If you can’t hide your deceit, you are said to be ‘trying to hide at sea’,174 and the result is likely to be disaster.175 It is, in general, good practice to be generous and to help those in need. If you give to someone a second time you may be said to be giving ‘good cake too after bread’.176 Not everyone likes to accept gifts, and there is such a thing as misdirected generosity, like giving ‘wine-jugs to frogs’.177 Not to be generous, however, is a bad thing.178 If one receives help, it is appropriate to feel gratitude, and if possible to repay one’s debts.179 Numerous proverbs commend courage, and assert that ‘fortune favours the brave’.180 As we shall see, in other genres bravery is sometimes especially associated with the social elite, and a few proverbs too seem to commend great men, greatness of spirit (megalopsychia), great works, nobility (eugeneia) and other qualities which are particularly associated with social elites. Great works are called ‘Agamemnonian wells’, after the wells which Agamemnon reputedly dug all over Greece. The works of Akeseus and Helicon are proverbial of things to be marvelled at.181 Great men think on a large scale.182 ‘More noble than Kodrus’ is a proverbial compliment.183 We might also put honour (timê) in this class of qualities, though proverbs about honour seem to serve more to put down aspirants than to congratulate 171 172

173 174 175 176 177 178 180 181 183

Z3.71. Petr. 44, Fronto Ad M. Caes. 1.5 (Naber p. 13). Morra is the modern form of a game here called micare which involves one player flashing up a random number of fingers and the other having to guess the number. D7.94, Z1.70. To be a ‘buskin’ and behave inconsistently is bad (e.g. Amm. Marc. 20.1.2); if you make false claims and are found out you are called ‘a hero in Temesa’ (P2.31). Z3.74 (i.e. in plain sight, which in English, contrarily, is proverbially possible). E.g. Z1.5, Z1.41, Z4.9, Z4.97, D7.38 (‘Nothing bad would have happened to him, had he not pretended’). Z1.12. Z1.71, Z2.78. Z3.42 observes drily that ‘each man praises the gift he gives’: not all generosity is disinterested. 179 Z1.36, Z1.81, Z1.94, Z2.11, Z4.63. Z4.44. E.g. Virg. Aen. 10.284, Liv. 8.29.5, 34.37.4, Sen. ep. 94.28, Plin. ep. 6.16.11, cf. Tac. Hist. 4.17. 182 Z5.20. Z1.6, Z1.56. Z4.3. D4.87 says that if someone is ‘freer than Sparta’ they are noble indeed, which perhaps attributes nobility to the whole body of Spartiates.

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those who have it. Only an ass, says the proverb, would be jealous of his honour when he had none to guard.184 More proverbs, as we might expect, seem to address the ‘children of the earth, as the saying is’ – the lower ranks of society.185 ‘The nature of the rule shows the nature of the man,’ and if your ruler is very harsh, you may want to keep out of his way. One wants to be as far away from a tyrant as ‘from Zeus and the thunderbolt’.186 The poor or lowly do sometimes even the score a little. ‘There is anger even in the ant,’ so beware of despising the small.187 ‘The beetle delivers [i.e. acts midwife to] the eagle,’ is said of those who capitalize on a position in which they find themselves placed by others, as when beetles which are brought into their nests by eagles, roll the eggs away.188 As ‘the fox drives the ox’, so the clever can drive those stronger than themselves. Self-reliance may serve the poor well too, as in the proverb ‘I shall draw my own bath.’189 Proverbs have a strong sense of appropriate social hierarchy. Of a man who criticizes those above his station it is said, ‘the flute is passing judgement on the trumpet’.190 The proverb ‘listen to those who rule you both justly and unjustly’, is attributed to Solon.191 The man who aspires above his station is likened to ‘an ass coming to the mysteries’. Better, ‘being a deer I won’t go into battle with a lion’, though it is not good to be ‘more slavish than a Messenian’.192 The man whose low birth causes him to keep his mouth shut is said approvingly to have ‘a narrower mouth than a jar’.193 At the same time, the high-up should not despise the lowly. ‘The yoke of a plough can be made of any wood,’ and even those whose appearance is despicable may come in useful.194 There are excellent reasons of self-interest for behaving well in society, above all because what we do comes back to us, often with interest: ‘what goes around, comes around’. This, which I shall call ‘expanded reciprocity’, is a broader concept than that of ‘strict reciprocity’, which I shall keep for the (at least theoretically) balanced, symbiotic relationships which human beings arrange between themselves. What ‘comes around’ may relate to actions which did not involve any other human being. It may come from 184 186 188 189 190 191 194

185 Fronto Ad Ant. Imp. 2.16 (Naber p. 37). Z6.28, D1.42. 187 Z3.70. D2.94, D.7.77b, cf. Z2.53. Z1.20. Cf. a saying of Bette Reese, which is currently so popular that it is becoming proverbial: ‘If you think you’re too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.’ D2.73, Z3.58. D1.15, cf. Z4.30; ps.-Diogenianus is explicit about this interpretation, though the English equivalent of the pot calling the kettle black is used of equals. 192 D6.98, cf. D4.12, D6.59, Z3.39. 193 Z5.95. D2.99. Z4.7 to kuphon refers to any (naturally) bent piece of wood and specifically to the bent-wood yoke of a plough.

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the gods or fortune or any other non-human agency, as well as human ones, and it may be quite different from and often disproportional to what instigated it. Proverbs observe and commend both strict and expanded reciprocity. ‘What you give, you receive.’ ‘One good turn deserves another.’ ‘Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’ ‘You roll my log and I’ll roll yours.’ ‘One hand washes the other.’195 ‘Don’t wish for what you’ll wish you hadn’t got.’ ‘You can expect what you wish on others to happen to you.’ ‘Who says what he likes hears what he doesn’t like.’ If you misbehave, you can expect to suffer a ‘bolt of lightning’ in retribution.196 6. Intelligence and foolishness Intelligence and foolishness, in their many forms, are the subjects of another large group of proverbs. Intelligence is good, foolishness is bad, and there are virtually no exceptions. Practical wisdom (usually phronêsis or sôphrosunê in Greek, prudentia in Latin, all words with strong connotations of practical know-how and ‘prudence’ in the English sense) is always a good thing; good counsel (symboulê) is even holy.197 ‘All things come easily to the wise,’ and phronêsis overcomes even those who wish you ill.198 If you are wise you may be said to have ‘the wisdom of the Thessalians’, and if you are both wise and good you may be called a ‘living Bouthos’.199 The intelligent may be said to have ‘the skill of an owl’ (the emblem of Athena).200 One should appreciate one’s own limitations and trust the wise: ‘Trust the expert.’ ‘Anyone can be a pilot in a calm sea.’201 Part of wisdom is planning ahead. Don’t wait until you get to the altar to plan your sacrifice, says the proverb. Be prepared.202 ‘Gladiators plan their fight in the arena.’ Part is good organization.203 Whatever your area of expertise, practise it: ‘No day without a line.’ Do not stray beyond your area of competence: ‘let the shoemaker stick to his last’.204 Thoroughness in any activity is a virtue – ‘moving every stone’ – and 195 196

197 198 199 201 202 204

All strict reciprocity: Petr. 46, Petr. 44, Sen. Apocol. 9. Sen. ep. 95.1, D3.22, Sen. ep. 94.43, Donatus apud Ter. Phorm. 22 (who says it has become proverbial), Gell. 6.17.13 = Disticha Catonis 10, Z2.8. According to one proverb, this is even true if one hurts an animal (Z2.94). Z4.40, cf. Z2.46. Z2.9. (Could this be the origin of St Paul’s phrase ‘all things come together for good to those who love God’? Rom. 8.28.) 200 Z2.91, cf. D5.95. Z4.29, Z2.66, cf. D5.32. Virg. Aen. 11.283, Ov. Ars 3.5.11, Sen. Thyest. 81, Sen. ep. 85.34. 203 Sen. ep. 22.1, Z3.36, cf. Z1.95, P1.85. Z1.66, Z4.49, cf. Z2.36. Plin. HN 35.36.84, 85.

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someone who follows an action through properly is said to be ‘purer than an oar’, or to be ‘opening all the stops [as on a flute]’.205 Don’t ‘look for the knot in the bulrush’, though, and over-complicate things.206 Overdoing anything is also bad – ‘weeping blood’, or ‘overshooting the landing place’ (in the long jump) or getting into the pot to learn how to be a potter.207 The over-enthusiastic are ‘oilier than a lamp’, ‘oilier than an oil-jar’ or are ‘feeding the whetstone’ (which, as we know, never gets any fatter).208 The wise do not rush into things. ‘Everyone hates delay, but it leads to wisdom.’209 A surprising number of proverbs deal with the dangers of speed. ‘You go muddily’ is said of those who rush at an activity rather than standing firm. Those who are in a hurry are said to be ‘drawing water with both hands’ or ‘singing the encomium before the victory’. If haste brings you to shame and disaster you are told ‘you have come into the fire’.210 On the other hand, if you do something slowly you are likened to a ‘quiet ox’ or said to be ‘riding with Nebros’; the second seems to have negative force, though the first may not.211 Overall, it is best to behave in as measured a way as possible. ‘Mean is best,’ says Pliny. ‘Nothing in excess.’ Heed ‘the warning given by all cautious people, and when in doubt, do nothing’.212 Wisdom may come from many sources. Poverty is one (‘poverty gained wisdom’ and ‘poverty is sister to good sense’ because the poor have to learn many skills) and age another. The old fox is not caught in the trap.213 Familiarity with one’s environment helps too: ‘natives know the channel’ and you should take their advice when bringing in your ship.214 It is important to know your limitations: it is wisdom to be persuaded by the gods, as by reason; it is unwise to try to persuade the foolish.215 A large part of practical wisdom is self-preservation and protection. ‘The knee is nearer than the shin’ is said, approvingly, of those who put their own interests before those of their neighbours. Keeping oneself out of trouble is called ‘keeping your feet out of the clay’ or ‘throwing off the plough’ like a goat.216 ‘The Leontinians are always round the wine-bowl’ is said wryly 205 206 207 209

210 211 213 216

Z5.63, Plin. ep. 1.20, D1.11, Quint. 11.3.50. Ter. Andr. 941, proverbial according to Festus p. 330 M. 208 D6.31. Z6.23, Z1.34, Z3.65, cf. Z1.33, Z5.73, D84, cf. P1.100. Ov. Fast. 3.394, cf. Publ. Syr. 311. Only when wisdom is allied with unscrupulousness does the proverb seem to cast doubt on its goodness, and such a person is said to ‘wrestle like Phrynichus’ (D8.29). Z4.31, Z1.98, D7.56, D4.52, cf. Z2.22, Z4.25, Z4.28, D2.98, D5.20, D5.91, D7.82. 212 Plin. ep. 1.20, Sen. ep. 94.43, Plin. ep. 1.18. D3.9, D6.81. 214 D4.80. 215 D6.75, D2.90. Z5.72, Petr. 84, Z2.90, cf. D3.97, Z3.4. Z3.2 (cited by Sen. Apocol. 10), Z3.62, Z3.69, cf. Z3.22, Z4.33, Z4.45, cf. Quint. 5.11.41–2 (‘The burden is not mine to carry: the ox is carrying panniers.’)

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of those who keep an eye on their own interests, ‘nothing fattens the horse like the eye of the king’ and ‘he plays for himself’.217 The foolish (môroi) are said to be sillier than Praxilla, Koroibos or Morychos, to come from Abdera, Megara or Keskos, to have the mind of a woman or (if they are also old) the rump of Kronos, or to be indulging in Aianian laughter.218 Some people vie with each other in stupidity and others repeat their mistakes and ‘knock against the same stone twice’.219 A foolish man is like the Lydian thief who locked the door behind him, the man who hunted the wind with a net, the man who tried to flay an animal alive, the man who tried to milk a he-goat or the man who tried to catch the milk in a sieve.220 If you’re playing the fool, you may be dubbed ‘Akko’ after the woman who cried out at her own reflection in the mirror.221 If you mistake one thing for another based on some trivial similarity, you are like the person who mistook the cat for Athena, because both were grey eyed, and if you are frankly deluded you are like the man who thought a heap of coal was a treasury.222 Someone who does not realize that they are sailing into danger is said to be ‘singing as if sailing to Delos’.223 Foolishness takes many forms. It includes counting your chickens before they hatch (‘the goat has yet to give birth, and the kid is playing on the housetop’) and teaching your grandmother to suck eggs (‘you’re teaching a dolphin to swim’).224 The foolish are bad with money (‘I can’t carry the goat, so give me the ox’225 ). They are unperceptive about their surroundings and they are negligent of what they do perceive, ‘going to sea in their sleep’.226 They exercise bad judgement, take bad advice or ‘dance in the dark’.227 As a result, they ‘hole the boat they’re sailing in’.228 They initiate silly lawsuits ‘from the peeping of an ass’.229 They find themselves at a loss, ‘more naked than Pettalos’, ‘mother-naked’.230 (The image of nakedness suggests that foolishness is not only damaging, but shameful.231 ) They put themselves in danger, like the ‘ox making himself dusty’, ‘running through spears’ getting 217 218 219 222 225 226

227 230 231

D2.50, Plu. Mor. 9d, D3.16. Vitr. 7.5.6, Mart. 10.25.4, Juv. 10.48, D5.12, cf. Z4.21, Z4.58, Z5.13, D6.57, Z4.51, D4.3, D5.64, Z1.43, cf. Z2.85. 220 Z4.98, Z3.17, D3.3, D7.95. 221 Z1.53. Z3.19, Z3.29. 223 Z2.37. 224 Z1.42, Z3.30, cf. Z2.49. Z2.25, Z2.1. Plu. Mor. 830a, referring to people who, already in debt, take on a loan at interest. Z5.42, D3.46, D3.50 (unperceptiveness), Z1.23, cf. Z2.20, D2.75, D4.79, D7.9 (negligence). Overcarefulness is not necessarily a good thing, either: if one is overcareful one is said to be getting a ‘Rhodian oracle’ (D8.4). 228 Ph5.6.6, Quint. 8.6.47. 229 Apul. Met. 9.42, Lucian Asin. 45, 55. Z4.27, Z1.13, Z3.71. D3.98, D4.2, cf. D4.25: ‘He has the wings of Daedalus’ is said of someone who extricates themselves from a condition of aporia. Cf. D3.62, ‘A cough instead of wind’, of those in aporia who pretend their situation is other than it is, and Z3.29, where to make the same mistake twice is said to be shameful.

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themselves ‘hung by the hair’, ‘drawing down the moon’, ‘shaving the lion’ or ‘rousing the eight-legged scorpion’.232 They are then liable to meet the fate of the ‘moth in the flame’ or the ‘ass among bees’ and lose what they have, like the man who ‘seeking meat lost his cloak’.233 ‘The wolves gape’ round such men, ‘destruction waits’234 and they cannot help themselves. Even ‘the oak is overcome by many blows’; what hope is there for the broken reed?235 Above all, human foolishness is expressed in trying to do something that is pointless, fruitless (akarpos) or impossible (adunatos). There are so many proverbs on this topic that they merit a manuscript collection of their own, Plutarch’s Selection. Popular wisdom evidently had an extremely strong sense of how many things were impossible for most people: ‘You are writing on water.’ ‘You are talking to the seashore.’ ‘You’re combing the clouds.’ ‘You are debating with the wind.’ ‘You are farming the wind.’ ‘You hunt the wind with a net.’ ‘You’re trying to steer a dolphin.’ ‘You are shooting at heaven.’ ‘You are sowing the water.’ ‘You’re looking for ass’s fleece.’ ‘You’re trying to transplant an old tree.’ ‘You’re screaming at wood.’ ‘You’re drawing water from earth, washing a brick, cutting a lentil.’ ‘You’re trying to cut up the Hydra.’ ‘You’re trying to rub an Aethiopian clean.’ ‘You’re trying to move what can’t be moved.’ ‘You’re trying to measure Ammon.’236 You can compare somebody doing something that is pointless or impossible to a river fighting the sea, a wolf fleeing an eagle or a wolf dancing round a spring, to somebody guarding the door of Phanios or filling the unfillable jar.237 ‘Boeotian riddles’ are impossible to understand, ‘acts worthy of the Lesbians’ impossible to accomplish, ‘Cheironian wounds’ impossible to cure, and shepherdless sheep impossible to guard.238 The talk of old women and the plans of the foolish are equally pointless.239 And if you think that something will never happen, you can say that it won’t happen till the tortoise overtakes the hare, till the wolf turns shepherd or till wolves grow wings.240 This wealth of pessimistic sayings vividly illustrates how difficult 232 233 234 236

237 239

Z2.69, Z3.13, Z3.47, Z4.1, D6.25, D8.8, cf. Z1.27, Z1.35, Z1.87, Z1.92, Z2.55, Z3.19, Z3.59, Z4.48, Z4.55, Z5.18, Z5.29, Z6.37, D3.18, D6.53, D6.54, D7.62, D8.24. Z5.79, D7.32, Z4.13, cf. Z2.23, Z4.64, Z3.50, D2.43, D3.10, D6.28, D6.89, D8.45. 235 D8.77a. D6.20, D6.96. D5.83, Z1.38, D6.83, Z1.39, Z1.99, Z3.17, Z3.38, Z3.46, Z3.55, cf. D7.67, Z5.38, cf. D4.85, Z3.1, Z6.21, Z6.48, cf. D7.50, D8.33, Z6.26, Z1.46, Z1.55, Z1.80, cf. Z1.29, Z3.45, Z6.25, D3.7, D5.85, D5.96, D6.22, D7.54, D7.60, D7.61, D7.68, cf. Ploutarchou eklogê passim. Canter 1930 discusses some of these in his analysis of six types of impossibility to be found in Greek poets. 238 Z2.68, Z4.88, Z6.46, D7.58. D7.74, D6.19, Z4.100, Z4.24, D7.27, cf. Z1.72, Z2.50. 240 D7.57, cf. D8.44, D7.63, D6.1. Z3.5, D5.100.

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much popular wisdom felt life to be for human beings and how much of what we do, we do in vain. 7. Wealth A large class of proverbs concerns wealth, gain, relations between rich and poor, and vices of wealth like greed and luxury. There is no doubt of the power of wealth: ‘Fight with silver spears and you will conquer everyone.’241 If you want to be, or remain, rich, you must act: ‘Some hope, some reap.’242 Proverbs have a conservative attitude to sources of wealth. ‘Better to be poor on land than rich at sea’, while those who are ‘noble from the purse’ are looked down on.243 Even to be an ordinary person in a wealthy city, like Corinth or Tenea, is desirable,244 while wealth has certain advantages coyly alluded to in the proverb ‘not everyone can afford to go to Corinth’.245 The connection between wealth and virtue is less clear. If you are rich you may be said to be ‘rich as Croesus’ or have the ‘talents of Tantalus’, two phrases of considerable ambiguity since both Croesus and Tantalus came to famously bad ends.246 ‘Wealth makes cowards’ states another proverb,247 while one meaning of ‘the mullet fasts’ is that some people are too honest to make money.248 Several proverbs recognize that some people become rich by stealing from others and express both fear and disapproval of theft.249 It can be dangerous to expose oneself to those with money, especially by borrowing at interest: ‘The offspring runs faster than the father.’250 Greed is always a bad thing: ‘the life of a gull’. ‘Like vultures’ people say of those who hang about the wealthy hoping for an inheritance. ‘The greedy mind is never satisfied.’ ‘The Attican holds out his hand [even when he is] dying’ – because Athenians love money.251 ‘You live the life of a flautist’ means that you live, contemptibly, on other people’s money, though this is evidently not a path to wealth, since another proverb calls the poor ‘piped out’.252 Greed may even bring down cities: ‘Love of money can take Sparta, nothing else.’253 On the other hand, if you find an unguarded field, you may make a ‘sweet harvest’.254 Poverty is never good, and to be avoided if at all possible. 241 245 246 247 249 251 252

242 D2.62, cf. D3.8. 243 D4.83, Z2.88, cf. D6.22. 244 Z3.96. D2.81. Gell. 1.8.4, Z5.37. The famous (and famously expensive) prostitute La¨ıs worked in Corinth. E.g. Stat. Silv. 2.2.121, Juv. 14.328, Z6.4. 248 Z4.52. Z3.35 because the rich spend money making their homes safe. 250 Z4.35, i.e. borrowed money runs away even faster than one’s own. Z5.15, Z5.36, Z6.32. Ael. ep. 18 p. 22.3 (Hecher), Sen. ep. 94.43, D2.88, D3.12, cf. Z1.31. Chalcidians also love money (P1.84). 253 Z2.24. 254 D3.95. D3.14, Z2.64 (i.e. worn out as if with piping for a living), cf. Z2.30.

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The saying ‘sleep comes unexpectedly to the hungry fox’ recognizes the grim reality of hunger and fatigue that come with poverty.255 Proverbs call the hungry ‘the unfillable jar’ or ‘the whetstone’; cities are said to suffer from a ‘plain of hunger’ or ‘Melian hunger’,256 and ‘the beggar’s pouch is never full’.257 Many people, however, are stuck with poverty, and ‘if you lack meat, you must get to like jerky’.258 Whatever your situation, it is no good ‘kicking against the goad’. If one is poor, one can always practise being happy with it, for instance by living ‘the life of the jar’ (after Diogenes the Cynic).259 Partly, no doubt, to make the poor feel better about being poor, proverbs strongly associate wealth (especially foreign wealth) with softness, luxury, gluttony and sexual perversion. Among those proverbial for luxury, softness or unmanliness are Agathon the flautist, Habron the wealthy, Bakelos the unmanly, Clitus the lover of boys and ‘undisciplined women’, the Lydians, Corinthians, Milesians, Sybarites, Syracusans, Ionians (as catamites), Medians, Sicilians, Campanians, Samians, Massiliotes and white mice.260 8. Speech, truth and lies ‘As a man lives, so he speaks.’261 The importance of speech, especially true speech, and of identifying and not being taken in by boasting, lies or trickery, is attested in a number of proverbs. ‘The truth is simple speech.’262 ‘Attic witnesses’ are particularly truthful and trustworthy, while Spartans have a reputation for evasiveness, especially when summoned to battle.263 Words are powerful: they set up and pull down cities.264 They are valuable, and can be bought and sold.265 In general, fools do not speak well, but ‘even a fool may sometimes say something worth hearing’.266 Not speaking or not being able to speak is a matter of comment: you ‘have an ox on your tongue’, are ‘dumb as a thrush’ or ‘dumb as Torone harbour’.267 Boasting is frowned on. ‘Don’t boast.’268 ‘You praise yourself’ with ‘words big enough for a wagon’ and ‘make an elephant out of a mouse’ are said sceptically to those who talk big.269 Those who swagger over small successes are called ‘Philip’s Alector’, after one of Philip II of Macedon’s generals, 255 257 260 261 262 265 268

256 Z2.6, Z1.58, Z4.93, Z4.94. D7.91. 258 Z1.84. 259 Z5.70, Z4.14. Z5.66. Z1.2, Z1.4, Z2.62, D5.77, Z5.1, Z5.3, Z5.37, Z5.57, Z5.87, Z5.88, D6.18, Z5.94, D3.87, D6.37, D8.7, D6.45, cf. Z1.68, D1.55, D1.78, D6.100, Plin. HN 18.11.11, P1.61, P1.60, D7.17. Quint. 11.1.30 (cited as a Greek proverb), cf. Sen. ep. 114.1–2, ps.-Sen. De mor. 72–3. 263 D3.11, Sen. ep. 49.12. 264 Z2.99, D6.30. E.g. D2.83b, D2.85, Sen. ep. 49.12. 266 Gell. 2.6.9. 267 Z2.70, Z4.66, Z4.68, cf. Z2.63. Z5.6. 269 Z5.100, D3.41, Z3.68. D6.70b, cf. D5.46.

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while those who promise a lot and can’t deliver are said to be making ‘promises of Chares’, after a boastful but unsuccessful Athenian general, or ‘setting guard with a naked man’.270 Babblers and loose-tongued meddlers are particularly disliked: ‘more talkative than the turtle dove’ or ‘the breakers on the seashore’, they toss out ‘headless words’.271 ‘To some tongues, to some teeth’ means that some eat while others waste time talking.272 Not all free speech, however, is foolish: gossip from the crossroads is notoriously reliable.273 Slander and abuse are always bad.274 So is deceit, though proverbs are realistic about the prevalence of lying: ‘Nothing is easier than a word.’275 ‘Leucon says one thing, Leucon’s ass bears another’ is said of those whose words do not match their actions.276 You insult someone as a liar by calling him Cretan or Locrian, and as an oath-breaker or deceiver by calling him Thracian.277 Whether you mean to lie or not, ‘There’s truth in wine,’ ‘what’s in the heart of a sober man is on the tongue of a drunkard’, and ‘wine and truth go together’.278 Few proverbs are jokes, but here is one in which not strictly truthful speech counts as a witticism rather than a lie: ‘enough oak’ is what you say if you are asked whether you enjoyed a bad meal, referring to the fact that the very poor eat acorns.279 9. Doing well The aim of practical wisdom and self-help is variously to ‘do well’ (eu prattein), to be eudaimôn (a word sometimes translated ‘happy’ but closer to ‘fortunate’ and meaning literally something like ‘having a good divine backer’) and to avoid doing badly (kakôs prattein). Many proverbs attest to the desirability of these rather vague but compelling goals.280 Eudaimonia is called ‘a heap of good’ or ‘ant-hills of good’.281 Someone who is having a good day is called ‘Daktylos’ after a particularly fortunate Athenian, or said to have a ‘white vote’ or be ‘going with the flow’.282 Perhaps in line with 270 271 272 275 276 279 280 282

Z6.34, Z2.13, Z2.98, cf. D5.18, D6.52. Z1.59, Z2.58, Z6.8, Z5.40 (meddlers), cf. Z6.5, D2.48, D2.61, D6.48, D7.99, D7.100. 273 Z6.3. 274 D2.95 (‘Archilochus’ is the proverbial slanderer), Z4.70, D7.3. Z1.73. A liar needs a good memory: Ter. Phorm. 22, proverbial according to Donatus ad loc., Quint. 4.2.91, Apul. Apol. 69. 277 Z4.62, Z5.4, Z4.32, Z4.37. 278 Z4.5, D7.28, D8.43. Z1.74, cf. Z3.12. Z2.40, cf. Plu. Mor. 645b, where Plutarch has a character ‘reproach’ Aesop for trying to find windows into other men’s minds when wine reveals us. 281 Z1.10, Z1.11, cf. Z4.34. E.g. Z1.100, Z3.33, Z3.57, Z3.86, Z5.16, D5.29. Z3.10, D6.9, D5.82, cf. Z3.11, Z3.22.

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their conservative view of wealth, proverbs recommend that ‘to be really fortunate a man should stay at home’,283 while those who do not want to risk mixing good with bad are said to want ‘neither honey, nor bees’.284 A few proverbs indicate robustly that human beings make their own good fortune, and even indicate how. ‘Man is the daimôn (guiding spirit) of man.’285 If one is going to be good (for instance, at a craft), one needs to be good ‘from the starting post’.286 ‘Before catching fish, you must stir up the sea.’287 Interestingly, ‘I am not one of these heroes’ is explained by Zenobius as referring to those who want to do good, because some say that heroes are readier to do ill.288 10. Women, family and love Women and the family are not synonymous but as most women are treated as wives or mothers, they can be taken together. They form another relatively small topic. The family is a locus and symbol of devotion.289 Demeter’s grief for the lost Persephone is proverbial, as is that of Admetus for Alcestis.290 ‘[Even?] Polycrates loves his mother.’ Women as mothers are good; Chalcidicean women are proverbially good because they are fertile.291 Stepmothers, on the other hand, are always bad for you, while incest is forbidden.292 Marrying a socially unacceptable woman for money is frowned on.293 Love is not treated quite so seriously, though ‘he is least human who loves the least’.294 If you want to attract a lover you can ‘throw the apples’. ‘From looking comes loving for men’, but ‘an aphrodisian oath may be broken with impunity’.295 Still, young women are proverbially chaste and, if they die, tragic.296 (Old maids are just old maids.297 ) Beyond the family context, women are of little use: ‘Women don’t take up the sword.’298 They are also proverbially silly.299 ‘You would wash Peleus’ 283 289 290 291 292 293 295 298 299

284 D6.58. 285 Z1.91. 286 Z2.7. 287 D7.93, cf. Z5.62. 288 Z5.60. D7.35. So is the family home: ‘It’s a good house to live in.’ (Sen. ep. 100.6) The home is the basis of one’s education (Ter. And. 413, proverbial according to Apoll. Sid. ep. 7.9.19). Z1.7, Z1.18, cf. Z5.24 (the devotion of Naera and Charmonie to Cleopatra), D4.20, D7.88. Z5.64, Z6.50, cf. D4.2. D2.76, D7.66, [D5.7]; Otto 1890: 245–6 gives numerous references to evil stepmothers. 294 Sen. ep. 108.11 = Publ. Syr. 286. D6.22. 296 D1.46, Z3.3. 297 Z2.94. D3.63, D4.49, D3.37, cf. D5.77, D6.63. D6.72, unless they are Prokris, who was proverbial for her darts (D7.55). D4.3, Z4.21, D5.12. Praxilla wrote a song in which she compared Adonis with the sun and moon and cucumber and apples; alternatively, on being asked what the most beautiful thing was, she said, the sun, and figs. ‘Old women’s superstitions’ are proverbially foolish (e.g. Cic. De nat. deor. 2.28.70, Lactant. Instit. 1.17.3).

Proverbs

51

(like his daughters) is said of those who allow themselves to be fooled into hurting people they should look after.300 At the most extreme, ‘don’t trust a woman till she’s dead’.301 Nevertheless, men run around after them: ‘we pee warm and drink cold’.302 Occasionally, proverbs use women as an image with no apparent special significance: ‘many carry wands, but few are bacchanals’ is parallel to ‘many are soothsayers, but few are prophets’, the first referring to women, the second to men.303 A certain wariness of old women runs through proverbs. Old women are notorious gossips, can stir things up with the skill of a lifetime’s dusting, and are capable of inappropriate behaviour like dancing and initiating lawsuits.304 Zenobius glosses the proverb ‘farewell, dear light’ as what the old woman said as she put out the light before being debauched.305 Perhaps women who survive their childbearing years achieve a new energy and lease of life in old age. If these proverbs do not express approval, though, their disapproval is relatively mild. Slaves are all but invisible in proverbs. We find ‘more slavish than a Messenian’, ‘so many slaves, so many enemies’ and ‘there is no city of slaves’, but in general slaves seem to be of even less interest within the household than the household is in the world of proverbs as a whole.306 11. Varia Something over a hundred proverbs in our collection do not fit comfortably into any of these groups. Some form little clusters of their own. Good health, for instance, is something to celebrate: ‘sound as a tick’ means the same as the English ‘fit as a flea’, while ‘he needs parsley’ is said of those who are prone to fall sick.307 Physical oddity is a matter for comment: a hairy man 300 301

302 303 304 305

306 307

Z4.92. D4.4. Proverbs are very little interested in children. Z5.58 (the child holding ice) is about the fact that human beings in general cannot keep hold of everything they want. D6.46 (children are not to be trusted with knives) is about the irresponsible. Petr. 67. Z5.77, Z5.75. Prienian women swear by ‘the darkness round an oak’ (Z6.12) from an ancient military disaster, but there seems no reason why women in particular should say this. Z3.5, D3.97, Z2.96, Z6.42, D4.10, D7.53, cf. D3.96. Z6.42; cf. D4.10 (on the lechery of old women). Old men debauching young women are no better, we may note, than the reverse (D2.72), and D6.61 recommends men to treat old men, women, malignant children, dogs and tradesmen equally (badly). Z3.39, Sen. ep. 122.2, P1.22. Z6.27, D8.57. The latter is ps.-Diogenianus’ explanation and is one of many where the paroemiographer seems simply to be extrapolating from the proverb. But on this interpretation, why is this proverbial, and not something one says when someone is actually ill? Perhaps it is used of people who look sick, or are metaphorically sick?

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is called a ‘Cilician goat’, a lame one has ‘Perdix’s leg’; short-sightedness or a stammer are proverbial of foolishness, and some people are just ‘uglier than Korydeus’.308 Vanity, however, is not admired. The vain swagger as if they’re wearing ‘Syloson’s cloak’ and ‘munch mastich’ (to whiten their teeth).309 Most users of proverbs are not likely to have been literate or formally educated, but even so, we find a few proverbs which sneer at the uneducated. Quintilian says that ‘far from the Muses and Graces’ was a Greek proverb for the ignorant.310 Those who are ‘voiceless and museless (amousos)’, says Zenobius, are known as ‘thorn cicadas’ (notoriously dumb) or ‘an ass listening to a lyre’. The uneducated are said to be ‘more museless than the Leibetherians’ (a tribe of Pieria, which is ironic since one of the Muses’ springs of inspiration rises there), or to know ‘neither how to swim, nor their letters’, while ignorant foreigners are said to have a ‘Carian muse’.311 ‘Tydeus born to a swineherd’ you say of an uneducated man who aspires to heroism.312 ‘They speak to govern money’ is said of those who are uneducated but because of their wealth, speak freely.313 These proverbs echo that snobbery of the aristocratic and highly cultured towards the uncultured and nouveaux riches, which is so common in literary texts, and may be examples of proverbs originating in the higher levels of society and filtering down.314 Several proverbs concern hope: it may be human but one should not rely on it.315 Similarity and difference are sometimes a matter of remark. ‘Like as two Cretans’, ‘liker than two figs’ or ‘like as two eggs’.316 On the other hand, ‘what do dolphins and cattle have in common?’ or Heracles and the 308 309

310 311 312 314 315

D5.54, P2.24, D5.63, D3.68, Z4.59. (But, ‘the lame man copulated best’ (D2.2).) D5.14, Z5.96, cf. Z3.92, D3.92. That health is a good is widely shared across societies. There is less consensus about beauty, but a much more positive view of it overall than in e.g. English proverbs. Plutarch (Mor. 607a) notes that ‘bald’ and ‘short’, along with ‘pauper’, ‘foreigner’ and ‘metic’ (resident alien) are common terms of abuse (of which he disapproves). (Against this Kaster 2005: 34–5 argues that the prevalence of Roman aristocratic nicknames which refer to physical defects (Calvus, Naso, Flaccus, Strabo) suggests that these were not a source of shame to Romans. One can equally see this as expressing the competitive self-confidence of the Roman ruling class, like the insulting nicknames English public schoolboys give each other.) We cannot explore here the perceived connection between looks and character which was so important, especially to rhetoricians (e.g. Quint. 6.2), but this interest may account partly for the generally high value placed on good looks. (Other factors include the association of beauty with wealth, aristocratic birth and divine favour.) Quint. 1.10.21. Conversely, those who make use of ‘the best things in culture’ go through the ‘Muses’ open door’ (Z1.89). Z1.51, D7.33, Z1.79, D6.56 (these were the two things, says ps.-Diogenianus, that everyone learned at Athens), D5.86, cf. Z1.89, D8.14. 313 D2.93. P1.5. Taylor 1931: 35–6 notes that proverbs may occasionally (though he thinks they do not regularly) filter downwards in this way. 316 D7.31, D7.37, Quint. 5.11.30, Sen. Apocol. 11. Z2.43, cf. Z5.56, D2.65.

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53

monkey?317 Many more proverbs have only the most tenuous connections with each other, or none at all. (At least a score are no longer understood.) ‘Again the road to Pytho?’ refers to someone doing something repeatedly. ‘He’s either dead or teaching letters’ sneers at schoolteachers. ‘He’s gone the way of the pine,’ means that someone is completely destroyed. ‘Cyzican staters’ are well stamped. ‘Akessaios’ was a lazy steersman who would plead the wrong kind of moon to avoid having to sail, and ‘the gardens of Tantalus’ are full of illusory pleasure.318 ‘Even a goat can bite a bad man.’ ‘She can bear a bull that bore a calf.’ ‘It’s not worth three little figs.’ ‘There is always something new [sometimes, ‘bad’] out of Africa.’ ‘The finger fits the ring.’ ‘A dog will bite a stone thrown at it.’ ‘There’s no smoke without fire.’319 Such miscellaneous proverbs are entertaining, but there is little we can do with them by way of analysis. conclusion It is clear from this analysis that the often-made claim, that proverbs (and popular ethics in general) are irreducibly incoherent and mutually contradictory, is far from true. Most proverbs fall into relatively few categories and cohere rather well. Where they do not agree, we will do better to assume not that the genre is defective but that the subject is problematic, and that conflicting proverbs express ethical dilemmas for their users. My analysis followed the main categories of proverbs I have identified in roughly descending order of size (see Fig. 1). The outstanding feature of Greek and Latin proverbs is that they express overwhelmingly the ethics of the public, social sphere, and of the relationship between the human and the divine. These, evidently, are the areas of life that need ethical attention. In contrast, the natural world seems not to invite moralizing. In particular, there are remarkably few proverbs about agriculture or the weather – compared, for instance, with most European languages. (Where agriculture and livestock do appear, they are as metaphors for other things.) This is all the more striking since there is a strong tradition of moralizing high literature about agriculture in Greek and Latin from Hesiod onwards, which therefore begins to look like a distinctively aristocratic phenomenon, rather than a simple expression of widespread Graeco-Roman ethical concerns.320 For 317 318 319 320

Ael. ep. fr. 209, Lucian Timon 37. D3.34, Z4.17, Z5.76, D5.87, D1.57, Philostr. Vit. Soph. 595. Petr. 25, 44, Plin. HN 8.17.42, Z2.51, Apul. Met. 6.22, Plin. HN 29.102, Plaut. Curcul. 53 (proverbial according to Amm. Marc. 14.11.12). Could this indicate that surviving proverbs do not come from agricultural communities? I doubt this inference would be justified. Farming, fishing, hunting etc. feature as metaphors at least as often as do civic and religious institutions and offices. Anyway, it is difficult and probably undesirable to draw sharp distinctions between ‘town dwellers’ and ‘country dwellers’ until later in antiquity.

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Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire 5%

3%

gods, metaphysics, humanity

20%

strife

14%

faults of powerful/powerless friendship justice, honesty, helpfulness, bravery

4%

intelligence/foolishness

16%

wealth speech, truth, lies women, love, family

21%

5% 3%

doing well

9%

Figure 1 Distribution of main topics in proverbs

proverbs, the language of good and bad belongs to the world of human and human–divine relations. The domestic sphere, too, is only weakly represented. However socially important, the household, family and slaves do not seem to be thought of as generating many moral issues or problems. This attests to what is abundantly clear throughout the genre, that the perspective of proverbs is that of free men. Proverbs express general agreement about the gods, who sponsor justice and are associated with diverse good things. There is less agreement about how well human beings understand the gods or practise religion, though strong agreement again that people should fulfil their religious obligations. The interest of the gods, however, does not shield people from the intervention of powers like change and necessity, to which we are wholly and catastrophically vulnerable. The frailty and destruction of all human life is a pervasive theme. In human relations, proverbs take conflict to be the norm. This is a pessimistic view and also a challenging one, because it places a negative quality at the root of human society and then demands that we do all we can to mitigate it. Proverbs’ intense interest in conflict and its mitigation is vividly expressed in the many specific forms of good and bad social behaviour which they name and evaluate, among which the bad predominate. Many causes of social conflict can occur between both social equals and unequals, but proverbs have a particular interest in conflict between the more and less powerful. Though their generally pessimistic tone makes it tempting to associate them especially strongly with the poor, they do not

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describe the poor only as victims. There are faults distinctive of power, but faults of powerlessness too, of which the worst involve trying to get some kind of purchase on the powerful. The best thing the powerless can do in relation to the powerful is to be as little beholden to them as they can. Having said that, a number of proverbs take the perspective of the poor by attacking wealth, refusing to associate it with virtue and calling the wealthy soft, immoral or weak in war. Good behaviour, good social relations and intelligence all help to combat social conflict. Group solidarity, expressed in friendship, trust and generosity, is vital. (That being so, it may surprise Greek and Roman historians that proverbs do not have more to say about ‘strict reciprocity’, which is not a strong theme.) The aims of good behaviour are limited: avoiding trouble or keeping hold of what one has rather than dramatically improving one’s lot. Even intelligence is limited in scope. It is reactive to its environment and its aim is self-preservation; there is no sense that one might use one’s intelligence significantly to improve one’s life. A strong sense of the inevitability of hierarchy runs through proverbs. Intelligence is something of a two-edged weapon. Unlike friendship, trust or helpfulness, it is a strongly individualistic quality. The absence of links in proverbs between intelligence and other virtues is marked and significant; intelligence has the potential to do harm and cause conflict, as well as to avoid or solve it. On the other hand, foolishness is always bad and likely to be disastrous, so intelligence is at least the lesser of two evils. Proverbs are aspirational in one important sense. They express a strong belief in certain qualities, especially justice, alongside doubt that human beings will often get justice in practice. This is a particularly interesting conflict. It reveals a society whose aspirations have run ahead of its effective institutions, and which desires a kind of social order which it cannot yet negotiate. It is significant that Greek and Roman proverbs have little to say about institutions – again in comparison, for instance, with those of modern Europe. Above all, justice, that vital ingredient of social negotiation, is still mostly located in the realm of the gods, not in human power, and within their lifetimes, therefore, human beings have limited and uncertain access to it. Finally, we should consider briefly whether there is evidence of regional variation in proverbs. Even discounting proverbs which seem to be derived from Greek, there is nothing to suggest that the concerns of Latin proverbs are measurably different from Greek ones. Four-fifths of the so-called ‘proverbs of the Alexandrians’, the only proverb collection which claims to be regionally specific, are found in other proverb collections, and the

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rest share all the other collections’ main concerns.321 If we look at places and peoples who are characterized negatively, for one reason or another, we see a strong bias towards the perspective of ‘old Greek’ states, especially on the mainland; this no doubt relates to the cultural dominance of Athens from the fifth century onwards, which by the early principate is shared by Greek speakers everywhere, and many Latin speakers too.322 Some proverbs seem to show a certain social bias, especially towards the bottom end of society. Beyond that, there is little sign that proverbial morality of the early Empire showed much in the way of social or regional variation. 321

322

Plutarch’s Sayings of the Romans, Sayings of the Spartans and Sayings of Spartan Women, where we might have hoped to find more regionally specific proverbs, are titled apothgmata and are quotations and stories (chreiai) rather than proverbs. See below, pp. 217–22.

chap t e r 3

Fables

The shell of a nut, though it be hard and tough, affords delight because it holds the kernal; in the same way there lies a doctrine of substantial wisdom, full of fruit, within a fictitious fable. Robert Henryson, The Moral Fables of Aesop, Prologue 15–181

Like proverbs, fables are an unexpectedly elusive genre: while everybody knows one when they hear it, they remain difficult to define beyond dispute. The problem was already recognized in antiquity, and it does not help that neither Latin nor Greek has a single word for ‘fable’, that all the words they use have other meanings and that none can be tied to certain types of fable and not others. They include in Greek, mythos, ainos, ainigma and logos, and in Latin, apologus, apologatio, fabula, fabella and affabulatio. In many ways, however, the study of fables is easier than that of proverbs, especially in the first and second centuries ce. In addition to fables themselves, there survive several contemporary discussions of the nature of fables. Better still, scholarly study of fables in recent years has familiarized classicists with international fable scholarship, collected and assessed the ancient material, and offered a range of definitions by which to approach it. In the first century, the rhetorician Theon, dealing with fables as a preliminary exercise in the study of rhetoric (progymnasma), defines the fable (which he calls mythos but explains that other people call ainos or logos) as ‘a fictitious story giving an image of truth’.2 He continues, however, ‘One should know that the present consideration is not about all fables but about those in which, after stating the fable, we add the meaning of which it is an image; sometimes, of course, we bring in the fables after having stated 1 2

Transl. Gopen. Transl. Kennedy 2003, Prog. para. 4. Van Dijk 1997: 5 argues that the translation ‘truth’ (alêtheia) is better rendered here ‘reality’, but given what I shall argue is the dominant view of the fable as a moralizing genre, ‘truth’ with its ambiguous reference to reality and morality captures Theon’s meaning best. Other authors, e.g. Max. Tyr. 36.2, contrast mythos with logos, meaning a story as opposed to a reasoned argument.

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the meaning.’ In other words, Theon is interested for rhetorical purposes in stories with meanings, and specifically with epimythia, ‘morals’ placed at the beginning or end to explain the point. Theon notes that epimythia are often not unlike gnomic sayings or proverbs in form, and also points out that one fable can generate several plausible epimythia, and conversely, one epimythium can generate many fables.3 There are different genres of fables, he says, attached to different names or places: ‘Aesopic, Libyan, Sybaritic, Phrygian, Cilician, Carian, Egyptian and Cyprian’.4 These are all distinctive in one way or another, but ‘all the specific features [such as whether they involve people or animals] are found in all those [genres] mentioned’. One striking omission from Theon’s discussion, given his rhetorician’s interest in the structure of the speech as a whole, is any structural analysis of the fable. The second-century rhetorician Hermogenes puts fable first among his progymnasmata, on the grounds that ‘it can bring [students’] minds into harmony for the better. In this way [teachers] think to form students while still tender.’5 Fables are ‘fictitious, but in all cases . . . useful for some aspect of life’. They should also be plausible: ‘for example, someone is arguing about beauty; let him become a peacock’. Fables can be expanded, for instance with speeches, or compressed. ‘The statement explaining the moral will sometimes be put before the fable, sometimes after it.’ Several other first- and second-century authors contribute in passing to the definition of the fable. They are charming, cheerful stories, meant to make you laugh,6 though they are only superficially non-serious.7 They are variously an ancient, primitive form of speech,8 or one which has come up from the slave classes,9 and they remain especially appealing to rough and uneducated minds.10 They are also particularly suitable for children, and follow on easily from the stories nurses tell.11 Despite these social handicaps, 3

4 6 7 8 10

Proverbs and fables are widely associated in rhetorical theory. In the Rhetoric (which includes the first surviving discussion of the nature of fables), Aristotle divides the fictional exempla which form one of his instruments of persuasion into parabolai, comparisons, and fables (1393a23–1394a18). Quintilian says that fables are very close to paroimiai, allegorical proverbs, and quotes an example in which a man refusing a burden compares himself to an ox (5.21). Turning proverbs into fables and vice versa was a standard, elementary rhetorical exercise (e.g. Theon Progymn. 3), and the Byzantine author Lucillus Tarrhaeus is credited with defining the fable as ‘an unfolded proverb’ (fr. 1). In another not unrelated tradition, parables are commonly seen as expanded similitudes, or metaphors which have been developed into narratives (Theissen and Merz 1998: 324–30). 5 Transl. Kennedy 2003, para. 1. Cf. ps.-Diogenian. pr. (above, p. 27). Sen. Cons. Polyb. 8.3–4; D. Chr. 72.13. Ph1 prol. 3–4, 2 prol. 2–7; Plu. Mor. 14e. Fables contain a balance of benefit and pleasure: Gell. 2.29.1. 9 Ph3 prol. 43–7. Liv. 2.32.9. 11 Philostr. Im. 1.3, VA 5.14–16, Quint. 1.9.2. Quint. 11.19–21.

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59

fables are a useful source of wisdom and morality for life in general, teaching great moral lessons from small things. According to Pittacus in Plutarch’s Dinner of the Seven Sages, Aesop’s fables seem to contain all the maxims of the Seven Sages, while in Lucian’s A True Story Aesop appears in the Elysian Fields alongside the great philosophers.12 In Plutarch’s Life of Demosthenes, Demosthenes, prevented from speaking to a political issue in the Athenian Assembly, tells his countrymen a fable which neatly encapsulates how useful a fable is.13 One summer, he says, a young man hired an ass to travel to Megara. When noon came and the sun was blazing fiercely, both he and the ass’s owner made to lie down in its shadow. Each tried to prevent the other from doing so, the owner saying that he had hired out the ass but not its shadow, and the youth that he had full rights over what he had hired. At this point in the story, Demosthenes stopped. The Athenians demanded to know the end of the story. ‘You listen willingly enough when I talk about the shadow of an ass,’ said Demosthenes, ‘but when I talk about serious matters, you ignore me!’ When one has something serious to say, nothing captures attention like a fable. Recent scholarship, whether about Greek and Latin or other fables, has been concerned with both form and function. Some scholars emphasize fables’ function as veiled speech for the weak.14 Within this general definition, scholars differ over how strictly allegorical a fable needs to be, and how clearly didactic.15 Others prefer to analyse fables structurally, as presenting a situation, a choice, an outcome and a moral,16 or a character, action and conclusion.17 Some definitions, such as those of Adrados and Jedrkiewicz, seek to include just about everything which has been called a fable by its own or any other author, while others, such as those of Meuli or Nøjgaard, exclude large numbers of soi-disant fables as aetiologies, anecdotes, fairy tales, myths, legends, novellae or fabliaux.18 A few scholars have 12

13 14 15 16 18

Philostr. VA 5.14, B119.11–12, Hermog. Prog. 1, Vit. Aes. 1GW, Plu. Mor. 164b, Lucian VH 2.18. All these are concerned with the function rather than form of fables, which does not seem to be a matter of concern at this period. Jul. Or. 7.3 opens up what will become another debating ground for definitions among modern scholars when he distinguishes between fables (which are for adults) and fairy stories (for children). 848a–b. Meuli 1954 thinks that fables always originate in a specific situation to make a specific point; Perry 1965: xi–xii, xxi–xxii is less convinced. Perry substantially follows Theon’s definition. Gual 1977 is unusual in holding that fables should be allegorical. In favour of didacticism see e.g. Janssens 1955, Vandenberghe 1950: 17. 17 Jedrkiewicz 1989: 219–94. Nøjgaard 1964 vol. I: 11–16, 76–80; vol. II: 142–54. Adrados 1999a: 11, Jedrkiewicz 1989: 292, cf. Holzberg 1993: 21–4, Meuli 1954, Nøjgaard 1964: 55–65, 86.

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tried to restrict fables to stories about animals, which has met with general scepticism: too many non-animal stories which otherwise look and behave like fables survive, even within paradigmatic corpora like that of Aesop.19 Like proverbs, fables are best given a fairly wide definition. Van Dijk, whose survey of both ancient and modern material makes his book the natural starting place for any study of Greek fables, suggests that we define a fable as ‘a fictitious, metaphorical narrative’.20 Good starting point as that is, we can in practice narrow it down a little. I follow the tradition of Perry, Adrados and Jedrkiewicz in regarding as a fable anything that is called a fable, or a story from the Phrygians et al., in our sources.21 I follow sources of the first and second century in seeing function as a crucial part of the definition of a fable, and its function generally as moral and educational. A great many fables survive from the first two centuries ce. In pride of place stand the two fairly complete manuscript collections of Babrius and Phaedrus, together with several dozen prose paraphrases and references to those parts of them which have not survived. Numerous fragments of fable collections, and a number of single fables, survive on papyrus; some of these are labelled Aesopic, others fables of Babrius or Phaedrus, while a few are anonymous; they include several fables which do not appear anywhere else. We also find fables embedded in a wide range of other literary texts, including letters, essays, speeches, novels, biographies, histories, works of rhetoric and works of philosophy. The earliest versions of the Life of Aesop, which includes a number of fables, almost certainly date to this period, although we cannot, regrettably, include any surviving recension of the Aesopic corpus itself (the earliest collections, though they may go back to classical Greece, are known only from late antiquity). Fables on papyrus (like gnomai) are often written in school hands, sometimes quite inexperienced ones; most of them come from Egypt, and they come from all over the province, two factors which together make it clear that fables are part of elementary education.22 Fables in scholarly or book hands are likely to belong to a smaller and higher social group of students of Greek literature. To judge by the literary survivals, for instance of early 19 20 21

22

So e.g. Leibfried 1982: 22. Van Dijk 1997: 113, and see the following discussion. His study of actual fables ends at the end of the Hellenistic period, but ch. 3 translates and discusses accounts of the fable throughout antiquity. Adrados 1999a: 28–44 offers a helpful cluster definition: a fable is a relatively short, complete, closed story, couched in the past tense, narrating a unique, concrete event which may be true or fictional. It may have an epimythium. It is symbolic, often comic, often aetiological, often agonal and often offers veiled criticism. It overlaps substantially with the simile and proverb. Cribiore 1996: 46–7, 226–7, 250, 253, 282, 283. The best-preserved sequence is MPER NS 15.122–31, dating from rather later (sixth–seventh century).

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imperial Oxyrhynchus, which include fables among a wealth of other literature, many of the authors who occasionally cite fables counted such provincial readers among their audiences, along with literati in the cities of the Empire. Like proverbs and exempla, moreover, fables are as often described as being spoken as read, so we can assume their circulation was not restricted to those who could read. We may still wonder whether the two literary fable collections to survive in manuscript can be analysed as examples of popular morality. Both Babrius and Phaedrus address their works to patrons whom we can assume were of high social status. Babrius, at the beginning of Part Two of his work, addresses the son of a King Alexander (who has been tentatively identified as a client king of Rough Cilicia under Vespasian23 ). At the same time he claims (107.9–12) that his first book has already gained imitators, which suggests that he is already well known. Even if true, that would not necessarily put Babrius’ readership outside a fairly small group of literati, but as it happens, there are indications that he was already being more widely read by the end of the first century. Quintilian may be referring to him when he says that children ought to read Greek fables in verse (Babrius says himself that he was the first to put Greek fables into verse, and there is no hint of any other Greek versifier of fables in the first century).24 More concretely, we have a number of fragments of Babrius on late first- or second-century papyri, in both literary and school hands.25 It seems clear that Babrius’ boast was justified, and that he was indeed widely known and read (and perhaps told) within the period that interests us. That he continued to be popular is attested, among others, by Suidas, in whose lexicon Babrius appears several times.26 Two main manuscript traditions preserve the bulk of the fables: Codex Athous of the tenth century; and Codices 397 from the Pierpoint Morgan library, Bodleianus and Vaticanus, of respectively the tenth, thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. For a work by a minor author writing in a non-canonical genre, this is a very respectable tally and one which confirms Babrius’ ongoing popularity. Phaedrus is reputed to have been a freedman of the Emperor Augustus. He claims to be a Greek, but has a well-attested interest in imperial affairs at Rome. His third and fourth books of fables address two patrons, Eutychus 23 24 25

26

Jos. Antiq. Iud. 18.140. See Appendix 1 on the political and literary connections of Babrius. 1.9.1. The earliest date to within a generation or two of his death, which is very quick for a reputation to spread to Upper Egyptian towns (P. Oxy. 1249, P. Lugd. Bat. 25.5). See also P. Amh. 2.26, Hesseling 1893, Sijpesteijn 1968. Babrius does not, perhaps surprisingly, appear in Stobaeus, though several fables of Aesop do.

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and Particulo, and the fifth addresses a man called Philetus. Phaedrus, however, indicates in his later prologues that he anticipates reaching a wider audience: Book Two prol. 11 addresses an anonymous reader, and the epilogue to that book hopes that Latium will like his work (8–9). In the prologue to Book Three (61) he talks of the ‘solemn glory’ which he hopes will be his, and in the prologue to Book Four (15–19) he talks of both the envy and the glory which are already his. His confidence too seems to be justified: a second-century papyrus preserves a version of his fable 1.19, and he survives in seven manuscripts dated to between the ninth and the sixteenth centuries, and three collections of prose paraphrases of the tenth and eleventh centuries which date back to a book of the fourth or fifth century.27 We may also note, though it is only negative evidence, that nothing in Babrius or Phaedrus would seem to limit their appeal to the audiences they address.28 On both internal and external evidence, then, even what we think of as ‘literary’ fables were accessible to a wide range of people. Because Phaedrus has sometimes been seen as the most distinctive of the fabulists, however, I shall analyse him separately, to see how individual his ethical ideas are. In the Introduction, I argued that it would be wrong for a historian (though not necessarily for a literary critic) to focus on the ambiguity and multivalency of fables, as of sayings and stories in general, at the expense of assessing what they were intended to mean in specific contexts in the early Empire. It remains true, however, that not all fables are easily interpreted. Some have more than one original epimythium, in which case I have included both. Some have lost their original epimythium (or may never have had one), and some have had epimythia added by later scribes. I have ignored examples of the latter, on the grounds that they are not evidence for this period. When a fable has no epimythium (almost all our examples of this are in Babrius’ collection), I have made what I hope is a plausible analysis and noted other possibilities in footnotes. The art of analysing fables as a corpus lies in striking a balance between an analysis which is so broad and general that it tells us little that is distinctive, 27 28

P. Köln 2.64, Perry 1965: xcvi–c. To see whether their morals could be linked to any particular political situation, I looked for specific political references in both authors and compared their genuine epimythia with those of surviving Aesopic versions of the same fables. More of Babrius’ and Phaedrus’ epimythia are different from their Aesopic equivalents than are the same, which encourages us to think that the morals presented in these collections are the authors’ own, and not simply inherited ones. Specific political references, however, are undetectable in Babrius (though the theme of circumspection when dealing with the powerful would no doubt have served a client king, as well as many other people); in Phaedrus, they are thin on the ground. The best example is 2.5, a story about Tiberius Caesar and an obsequious atriensis which says that it aims to reform the type (1–6).

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and one so detailed that one cannot draw any general conclusions at all. Zafiropoulos, for instance, in his thematic analysis of the Augustana recension of Aesop, tends towards the first: he emphasizes the themes of conflict, toil and the need for survival, which are undoubtedly present, but which are so general that they tell us little we could not have guessed, and nothing that differentiates the Augustana from any other body of ethical material.29 Cascajero, in his analysis of the anonymous Aesopic fables as a whole, sees a greater plurality of major themes: his analysis is both nuanced and capable of showing the overall shape of these texts’ ideas and the relative importance of their themes, and the result is very satisfying.30 In what follows, I shall try both to do justice to the multiplicity of possible readings of the fables, and to draw out what can defensibly be seen as their major concerns. It should be emphasized, however, that the nature of fables means that no two listeners or readers will ever see or hear them in quite the same way. As a result, no one analysis is definitive (and it is hard for anyone to be absolutely wrong). map of the ethical l an dscape 1. Social relations: the strong and the weak The largest group of surviving fables deals with relations between the strong and the weak, or the more and less powerful. Their main burden is that hierarchy is natural and inevitable in nature. B114 tells the story of a lamp drunk on oil in the evening. It boasted that it outshone the morning star and all the stars in the heavens. ‘Just then a sighing breeze blew up and the lamp was quenched. Relighting it, a man said to it, “Shine, lamp, and keep silent. The light of the stars never dies.”’31 This assumption forms the basis for all other conclusions about social relations. In some fables hierarchy is more than natural: it is good. ‘A crooked camel’, says B40, ‘was crossing a swift river when he defecated. When the dung appeared in front of him, he said, “I’m doing badly indeed. What was behind me is now going in front.”’ (The spurious epimythium applies this to a state in which the worst or poorest citizens are in power.) Many fables take the perspective of either the more or the less powerful, while a few make apparently detached observations about both. Among the latter is prose paraphrase B299, in which a farmer resolved to cut down a tree on his land which was not bearing fruit. The birds and cicadas living in the tree begged him not to, and promised to sing for his pleasure, but he ignored them. As he was chopping the tree down, however, he came upon 29

Zafiropoulos 2001: 45–80.

30

Cascajero 1992.

31

Cf. B48, B90, B129, B134, B137, B139.

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a hive of bees, so he spared the tree in order that it might provide him with honey.32 The moral seems to be that people who can, act for profit rather than pleasure, and certainly not for the pleasure of everyone else. The powerful, however, are not at liberty to behave in any way they like. They cannot behave insolently, unless they want to bring war and disaster on themselves, and they must not get too attached to their possessions, which may have to be abandoned in times of crisis.33 B18, the fable of the north wind, the sun and the traveller’s cloak, illustrates that force is not always the best way to get even someone relatively powerless to do what you want.34 B83 tells of a groom who used to sell off his horse’s ration of barley to provide himself with drinking money, and then spend all the next day making the horse look beautiful with grooming. ‘If you want me to be truly beautiful,’ admonished the horse, ‘stop selling my fodder.’ Other fables make the point that in order to get the most out of people in one’s power, one can fleece them, but one cannot flay them.35 The powerful also have to accept that they will attract parasites, and find a way to live with them. Plutarch quotes Aesop’s fable of the hedgehog which would not let a fox remove her ticks, on the grounds that these were sated with blood already, and removing them would only make room for hungry ones.36 The powerful must beware of those who depend on them: ‘Often,’ says Phaedrus, ‘those whom you yourself have nurtured turn out the most hostile.’37 And when their strength is circumstantial, the powerful should be careful not to boast. ‘A wolf was passing a wall, from where a ram, popping his head over, shouted out insults to him. Gnashing his teeth, the wolf replied, “It was the place that insulted me; you’ve no cause to boast.”’38 Despite operating under these constraints, the powerful are encouraged to maintain their dignity and not to allow their inferiors to insult them or impose on them. In B116, a husband catches his wife in an affair with a young boy who had attracted her attention by singing under her window. The husband persuades the boy to come in and reasserts his status by starting an affair with the boy himself. ‘The meaning of the fable’, says the original epimythium, ‘is that it is bad to be taken advantage of, when you are in a position to take your revenge.’39 32 33 36 39

cf. B106, B124, Vit. Aes. 99, where a man allows an insect to live because it makes a pleasant noise and does no harm to the crops. 34 Cf. Plu. Mor. 139a. 35 E.g. B51. Perotti 30. 37 Ph4.11.16–17. 38 B96. Mor. 790c–d, cf. Ph pr. 564. B pr. 39, cf. B82, P. Ryl. 3.493. This papyrus contains versions of Aesop fables from the first century ce, which are slightly different from ms versions, with different morals. The insolent are frequently often also cowards: so the expanded similitude compares tyrants to a pig which squeals when people approach it, because it knows it is only worth anything dead (Ael. VH 10.5).

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Far more fables address the weak than the strong. Some advise the weak to cultivate the powerful, like the story of the swallow who, because she became a suppliant of men and built her nest on their houses, became the only bird not to be caught in men’s snares and killed.40 It is wise for the weak to bend with the wind and not try to influence the strong, like the reed in B36 who survived a high wind which uprooted a mighty oak. According to B84, it is ludicrous for the weak to imagine they can influence the powerful. ‘A gnat settled on the curved horn of a bull. After lingering there for a moment he said with a buzz, “If I’m weighing you down, I’ll go away and sit on that poplar over there.” The bull said, “It doesn’t bother me whether you stay or go; I didn’t feel you arrive.”’ This gnat got away with his impertinence, but Achilles Tatius tells the cautionary tale of another gnat who enjoyed teasing a lion. Eventually it got caught in a spider’s web, and discovered the real measure of its power.41 In general, the weak do well not to put themselves in the way of the powerful, because the powerful will find a reason to attack them. B89 tells the sinister story of the wolf who came upon a lamb straying from the flock and tried to find a plausible complaint with which to justify his aggression. ‘Last year, when you were young, you insulted me.’ ‘Last year? I wasn’t even born!’ ‘And haven’t you been eating my grass?’ ‘I haven’t eaten any grass yet; I haven’t started to graze.’ ‘Well, haven’t you drunk from the stream where I drink?’ ‘I still drink from my mother’s teat.’ Whereon the wolf, bested all round, ate the lamb anyway.42 Even among the oppressed, hierarchies exist and the lesser are likely to do less well. B55 tells of a man who, owning just one ox, yoked him to an ass for ploughing. At the end of the day, the ass asked who was going to carry the tools home, since they had been doing equal work. ‘The same one as usual’, retorted the ox. Even to aspire to what is above you is a mistake, as the turtle discovers in B115. He yearns to fly like the gulls and swallows. An eagle, mockingly, offers to teach him and the turtle offers him all the proverbial riches of the Red Sea for the privilege. The eagle picks him up, carries him higher than the clouds, and drops him on a stony mountainside. ‘I die justly,’ says the turtle with his last breath. ‘What were the use of clouds and wings to me, who have difficulty making progress even on earth?’43 Two similar fables 40 42 43

41 2.22. Cf. B pr. para. 275, Max. Tyr. 19.2. cf. B67, Ph1.1, Ph1.5, Ph2.6, Ph4.4, Ph4.8, Ph4.14, P. Lugd. Bat. 25.5. Cf. B72, B98, B129, B137, B139.

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tell variants of the story of the toad who blew herself up, trying to be as big as an ox.44 This order of things is not only natural in the world of the fable; it is often explicitly said to be just or deserved (dikaios). A wolf robbed by a lion of his stolen sheep complains of injustice and is told he deserves what he got; a wolf who steps out of character to help a donkey which then kicks him in the teeth says he deserved it for behaving like the doctor he was not; a jackdaw who tries to act like an eagle gets his just deserts when he is caught and tortured.45 Though in general fables counsel the weak to be prudent, occasionally fables indicate that they can defend themselves and even do some damage to the powerful. B112 tells the story of a mouse which bit a bull. The bull felt the sting and gave chase to the mouse, which disappeared down its hole. The bull dug out the hole with his horns until, having tired himself out, he lay down and went to sleep in front of it. The mouse, emerging, bit him again, and when the bull jumped up, stayed just long enough to deliver the moral: ‘It is not always the big man who has the power; there are times when being small and humble has more force.’46 Such opportunities are rare, even in fables, but the idea that to be small and weak has some advantages appears several times elsewhere, generally in the form that in times of political or other danger, it is the prominent members of society who get killed. When the fisherman drew in his net, the larger fish were caught and hauled in, while the smaller ones slipped through the meshes and escaped.47 ‘Whenever a people faces a dire situation,’ says Phaedrus, ‘its leaders are in the greatest danger; ordinary people find safety in obscurity.’48 B64 tells of the fir tree which boasted of its size and good looks to a nearby bramble. ‘When you recall the axes which always cut you down,’ replies the bramble, ‘even you might choose to be a bramble.’ The original epimythium observes, ‘Every famous man experiences not only more glory than the masses, but also more dangers.’ Despite the dangers of strength and power, however, no fable suggests that, given the choice, anyone would prefer to be poor or weak. On the 44

45 46 47 48

B28, cf. B41, also B73 (how the kite lost his voice), Ph1.24, Ph1.27, Ph2.5, Ph3.6, Ph3.19. That those who cannot do better should be content with their lot is probably the original meaning of the fable of the fox and grapes (B19), where the fox decides that he doesn’t want, anyway, what is out of reach. B105, B122 (cf. B129), B143, cf. B137. Cf. Ph1.28, Vit. Aes. 134–5, where a beetle takes revenge on an eagle by rolling its eggs out of its nest. Z1.20 is a proverbial version of this story. B4, cf. B5, B31, pr. para. 228, pr. para. 329. Ph4.6.11–13. On the other hand, Ph1.15 tells the story of an ass which refused to flee at the sound of his master’s enemies approaching, on the grounds that they would not make his life any worse than it was already.

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contrary, when one is feeling weak, it is cheering to discover someone feebler or less important than oneself. In B25 the hares resolve to commit mass suicide on the grounds that they are the feeblest creatures alive, cowardly and fit for nothing but flight. But on the banks of the pond where they plan to drown themselves, they meet a crowd of frogs, and are so braced to discover that there are creatures even more wretched than themselves that they decide not to commit suicide after all. These fables paint a picture of mostly hostile and fearful relations between the more and less powerful, tempered by advice to the powerful to be circumspect in exploiting the poor and to the poor that their position is at least relatively safe, that there may be people even worse off than themselves, and that they may occasionally succeed in either wooing or stinging the powerful for their own benefit. The extent to which the poor can exert influence, however, is very limited and unpredictable. Phaedrus is not being abnormally pessimistic when he tells the poor to make the most of the tyrant they have, lest they get a worse one.49 Just occasionally, fables hint at a better order, in which concord takes the place of this relentless jostling for advantage. B102 tells the story of the lion who ruled by gentleness and justice. During his reign, the animals came together in a general assembly to solve their disputes and every animal was called to account for his deeds. ‘I have prayed for this day always,’ says the hare, ‘when even the strong would fear the weak.’ This fable is unusual, however, in implying that everyone does well (even equally well) out of the situation. Far more often, concord demands that the weak know their place and be content with it. In B134, a snake’s tail once decided that it wanted to lead for a change. But without eyes or nose, it simply dragged the rest of the body into a pit and hurt itself on the sharp rocks. Whereon the tail apologised for having such a bad idea with such bad results, and submitted itself to being led again.50 A few fables stress the value of unity between characters of similar status. B47 tells how an old man on his deathbed sends his many sons to bring a bundle of rods. Then he set them to trying to break the rods, bound together in a bundle. When they could not, he told them to take one at 49 50

Ph1.2. He also says that ‘a change of government is no more than a change of master; nothing else changes for the poor’ (1.15.1–2), though in 1.6 he suggests that the weak should ideally be defended. Cf. Ph1.3, Ph1.24, Ph1.27, Ph3.7, Ph3.18, Ph4.4, Ph4.23, Ph5.4, Perotti 20, 21. Justice through the law is one of the defining goods of society (e.g. B102, where in an ideal society differences are settled by law); B118 shows how undesirable it is to live outside the law, and perhaps also how the law does not really protect everyone it should. A swallow made her nest on a courthouse wall and hatched seven chicks, which were all eaten by a snake. ‘Alas’, mourned the mother, ‘for my fate. Where the laws and judgements of men are passed, I, a swallow, flee from injustice.’

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a time and break them, which they easily did. In the same way, he tells them, no-one will be able to harm them as long as they hold together, but if they disagree, someone will be able to break them as easily as the rods.51 In B44, there were three bulls who constantly kept one another company. A lion plotted to prey on them, but dared not attack them all together. With cunning words and slanders he set them against each other and turned them into enemies. Then he attacked each one of them separately and killed them all. ‘If you want to live in safety,’ says the original epimythium, ‘do not trust your enemies, but always stick to your friends.’52 2. Friends and enemies This brings us to the subject of friends, who in fables may be of similar or dissimilar status, but whose relationships are distinguished from other social relationships by being positively reciprocal.53 When it works, friendship is a thoroughly good thing; fables, however, have more to say about its difficulties. Offers of friendship, as the story of the lion who demanded the eagle’s wing-feathers as a pledge of the friendship he was offering, makes clear, are to be received cautiously. Enemies may pretend to be friends by expressing concern for you, offering hospitality or claiming to tell you what is in your interest.54 Untrustworthiness is so dangerous to friendship that if it is discovered even in an established friend, one should sever the relationship. Prose paraphrase B35 tells the story of a man who made friends with a satyr. The satyr saw him one day blowing on his hands – to warm them up, the man explained. Later, the satyr saw him blowing on hot food – to cool it down, explained the man. The satyr was so disturbed by a creature from whose mouth both hot and cold air issued that he broke off the friendship.55 Inconsistent behaviour – sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly – is not to be trusted. B87 tells of a dog which started a hare in the mountains and pursued it, alternately biting at it and patting it. ‘Be honest (haplous),’ said the hare. ‘Are you my friend? Why do you bite me? Are you my enemy? Why do you fawn on me?’56 Not only inconstant, but thoughtless friends may be more trouble than they are worth. In B46, an elderly stag who can 51 53

54 56

52 Cf. B99. Cf. B85, pr. para. 338. That is, both parties get something positive from the relationship, as distinct from the negative reciprocity of many of the relationships above, in which either one party is rewarded for behaving in a certain way by not getting hurt, or both parties agree not to interfere with each other. 55 Cf. P. Ryl. 3.493.35, against those who harm their friends. B99, B121, B97, B93. Cf. B27, pr. para. 323 (in which one should not trust someone who has wronged someone else in the past).

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no longer move about lies down in a patch of green grass, where there is plenty for him to eat. One by one his friends call on their neighbour. Each one has a bite to eat while he is there, until the stag starves to death.57 Any friendship involves trust, and trust is more often seen failing in fables than succeeding. B130 begins with a fox contemplating a trap, wondering how to get the bait out of it without springing it. Along comes a wolf, who asks if the fox minds his taking the meat. ‘Take it and welcome!’ says the fox. ‘You are one of my best friends.’ The wolf rushes in, springs the trap and is hit violently on the head and snout. ‘If these are the kinds of gifts you give your friends,’ he protests, ‘how are you going to make any?’58 Some creatures are natural enemies, and one should not trust them in any circumstances. In B97, for instance, a lion invites a bull to dinner. On arriving, the bull notices that although there are pots boiling and knives set out, there is no sign of food apart from a meagre chicken trussed up on the floor. Deducing that he himself is to be the dinner, the bull flees. ‘Once upon a time, a hen fell ill. The cat leant over her and said, “How are you? Do you need anything? I will get you anything you want. You just look after yourself.” The hen said, “If you go away, I shan’t die.”’59 Trickery is characteristic of enemies. In B33, a farmer and his boy conspire to outwit a flock of starlings which is eating their seed. ‘Beware the wicked (ponêros) race of men,’ say the starlings, retreating: ‘they have learned to say one thing to each other and do something else.’60 Two fables take the counterintuitive line that it is better to cultivate not one’s natural friends, but one’s enemies, or at least one’s less friendly friends. An Oxyrhynchus papyrus preserves the story of the shopkeeper who in handling his jars of wine and pickled fish, took particular care of the cheaper fish. [When a neighbour asked him why he took such care in handling] the inferior and cheaper jars, the shopkeeper replied, ‘Because even if quite a number of the wine jars were smashed, there isn’t much damage done; but if even one of the jars of pickled fish gets smashed, we shall die of the stench!’ So I must ask you too, 57 58

59

60

Cf. Vit. Aes. 133, the frog who inadvertently drowns the mouse (and then is carried off by an eagle). Cf. pr. para. 275, 342, 348. B50 warns against trusting someone not of one’s own kind (the fox wrongly trusts the woodman), cf. Max. Tyr. 32.1 (where the characters are a deer and a shepherd). Friendship cannot save one from the consequences of one’s mistakes. A goatherd tries to persuade a disobedient goat down the mountain by shying stones at her. He hits one of the goat’s horns and breaks it. In terror, he begs the goat, as a friend and fellow slave, not to betray him to their master. But she said, ‘How shall I hide something so obvious? My horn shouts, even if I am silent.’ (B3). B121, cf. B77, B93, pr. para. 157, 342 (Vit. Aes. 96 gives a very similar version of this), Plu. Mor. 490c. O. Claud. 2.413 gives a version of pr. para. 199 where a scorpion warns a child not to pick it up, and offers the moral: one should not behave the same to good and bad people. Cf. B17 (the honest had better be shrewd).

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friend, to handle your acquaintances in much the same way that the shopkeeper handles the jars, and to treat the difficult ones more carefully than the amiable ones. The amiable ones take it easily, even if they are neglected, <whereas the difficult ones . . . rage> terribly and exactly resemble stirred-up mud.61

Prose paraphrase B275 concerns an eagle who was caught and had his wings clipped. Depressed, the eagle refused to eat. His owner sold him to a second man, who let his wings grow again, whereon the eagle took flight, caught a rabbit and presented it to his new master. A fox looking on told him to give the rabbit rather to his first master: if that man caught him again, the eagle would need to be in his good graces. 3. Intelligence and foolishness Like the theme of power and powerlessness, that of intelligence and foolishness runs through most fables in one form or another, and a number make it their explicit theme. Practical intelligence is the thing which most enables people to learn how to deal with their environment. Wise characters assess their situations shrewdly, and act on their findings, generally with success. Foolishness can lead to anything from losing face to losing one’s life. It is always good to be clever.62 Practical intelligence (phronêsis, phronimotês, sôphrosynê, dianoia) is the quality which most reliably protects the weak from the strong. In B132, for instance, a wolf tries to inveigle a sheep out of its fold by pointing out a nearby altar and asserting that sheep are what are sacrificed there. The sheep refuses to be drawn, saying that it would rather be a sacrificial victim than a meal for a wolf. In this fable, intelligence is a matter of understanding someone else’s motives and their consequences for oneself. B21 tells a similar story to make a slightly different point. A group of oxen planned to revolt and destroy their butchers, on the grounds that these men were their enemies. An old and experienced ox, however, advised them not to. Butchery comes to all oxen, he said, and these men are experienced and kill humanely. If you fall into the hands of unskilled butchers, your death will be much worse. The calm and objective comparison even of two bad situations, can help someone choose the less bad option. The intelligent agent understands the nature of others as well as their behaviour and intentions. B143 reports, ‘A farmer picked up a snake that 61 62

P. Oxy. 3007, editor’s translation. E.g. Ph1.13, Ph2.4, Perotti 22, 25. According to pr. para. 12, cleverness is better than beauty. Ph4.9 suggests, though, that cleverness at someone else’s expense may not be a virtue.

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was almost dead from cold, and warmed it up, whereon the snake uncoiled itself and bit him fatally. As he died, the man spoke these memorable words, “I suffer justly for pitying the wicked.”’63 Intelligence is not only desirable, it seems; it is right in a world in which only the clever can survive. Intelligence can also be a matter of accurate deduction. In B131, a young gambler who has only one piece of clothing left, sees a swallow which had left Egyptian Thebes unseasonably early, and deduces that spring is on the way. He rushes out, sells his garment, loses the money, a snowstorm comes on, and as he shivers naked on his doorstep, he sees the swallow lying dead outside. ‘Wretched creature,’ he said. ‘If only I hadn’t seen you: you misled both yourself and me.’ Clever characters observe others’ mistakes and learn from them. In B103, for example, an elderly lion which could no longer hunt, lay down in a cave and pretended to be dying. As the other animals came, one by one, to pay their respects to their king, the lion seized and killed them. A clever (sophos) fox came and stood some distance off to enquire after the lion’s health. When the lion asked him why, the fox observed that many other tracks led into the cave, but none seemed to lead out again. ‘He is a happy man’, says the original epimythium, ‘who doesn’t make the first mistake and can learn from the misfortunes of others.’ Several fables concern characters who when danger threatens, recognize it and know when (and how) to quit. In B26, for instance, a flock of cranes is grazing on a wheat field. They ignore the farmer’s attempts to frighten them off until he starts to attack them with slingshot, at which point they recognize that he has exchanged threats for action, and leave.64 The intelligent are difficult to fool. B17 tells the story of the cat which hung itself up from a peg hoping to pass for a bag and catch one of the household’s domestic fowls. A clever (pinutos) cockerel who saw him, however, pointed out that he had never seen a bag with teeth. The intelligent are also highly self-reliant. The virtue of self-reliance is an underlying theme of many fables, and it is also implied in the idea that fables give advice to the reader or listener which he may take to improve his life. Occasionally, 63 64

Cf. P. Köln 2.64, which gives a version of Ph1.19 (one bitch lends another her kennel and then cannot get it back) with the moral, do not do good to the mean. Cf. B88, also told by Gell. 2.29.3–16. Gellius reports that Ennius told this story in his Saturae and gave a moral from the perspective of the farmer: do not ask of friends what you can do yourself. See also B1, B95, D. Chr. 72.14 (the owl advises the other birds not to build in the oak, which harbours mistletoe) and P. Ryl. 3.493, which gives a very similar version (though this fable is not in Aesop). Parássoglou 1974 edits a new papyrus version of the fable of the swallow who recommends the birds to destroy all flax, which men use against them; the other birds refuse, the swallow makes her peace with men and is the only bird not hunted.

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self-reliance is the explicit theme. B20, for instance, tells us that the gods help those who help themselves, and in B49, Fortune complains that she does not want to be blamed for human beings’ mistakes. In most fables, intelligence is used to get characters out of trouble: appropriately enough, since the world of fables is one of endemic conflict and danger. Occasionally, however, intelligence can simply get you what you want. Prose paraphrase 309 is the fable of the crow and the pitcher of water. A thirsty crow, finding a pitcher of water and unable to overturn it to get a drink, drops pebbles into the jug until the water is high enough to reach. Foolishness can lead to characters misjudging or dismissing their assets, or damaging them by carelessness.65 B113 describes how a man enfolding his sheep one evening was about to enclose a wolf with them. His dog, seeing the wolf, said, ‘How can you intend to save the sheep, when you put this creature in with us?’ Along with one’s interests, it is foolish not to understand one’s own position accurately. In B37, a young ox who was living a life of ease in a field, taunted an older one who was being made to pull a plough. When the country people wanted to make a sacrifice, however, they chose the young ox. The old ox, seeing him being led to the altar, pointed out that luxurious as his life had been, he was going to die first. Nor should one fail to understand one’s nature. The jackdaw of B137 who imitates an eagle and tries to carry off a lamb from the flock, gets his claws entangled and gets caught by the shepherd boys, while the ass in Fable 139 who dresses up as a lion to frighten another group of shepherds, gets roundly beaten when the skin falls off and his true identity is revealed. Just as the intelligent character plans for the future, the foolish one fails to foresee the future accurately. B140 tells the well-known story of the ant and the cicada. All summer, the cicada sang while the ant busied himself storing up food for winter. In the depths of winter, the starving cicada asked the ant for help. ‘Dance through the winter,’ said the ant brutally, ‘since you piped through the summer.’ In the world of the fables, nobody is encouraged to hope for more than they deserve. The foolish man does not even take advice when it is offered him. Prose paraphrase B186 tells of the ass who left the road he was travelling on and half-fell over a cliff. His driver hung on to his tail and tried to drag him back, but the ass, not recognizing his mistake, continued to pull forward. Eventually the driver had to let him go. When someone does deserve something from you, however, it is equally foolish not to understand their needs. The mother ape of B35 who coddles 65

B43, cf. B76.

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one baby and neglects the other, ends up smothering her favourite while the child that is left to its own devices survives.66 Foolishness has diverse consequences, some of them simply humiliating, many leading to loss, some leading to danger, disaster or death.67 In B101, an unusually big wolf was nicknamed ‘lion’ by the other wolves. It went to his head, and he left his pack and started to hang around with the lions. A fox, seeing him, told him how foolish he was. In the company of real lions he soon looked like a wolf again. In general, characters have no-one but themselves to blame if they act foolishly or let themselves be made fools of.68 Along with intelligence, we may group the few fables that have something to say about self-knowledge. It would not be impossible within the structure of fables for characters to ruminate and express their inner life, but they seldom do so. B66, however, makes the point that people see others’ faults much more clearly than they see their own, while Phaedrus tells us explicitly that ‘we cannot see our own mistakes, and when other people make the same ones, we criticize them’.69 B62 suggests that mixed ancestry may lead to mixed feelings about one’s worth,70 and B104 shows that it is foolish to take pride in something that is in fact a disgrace. In all these fables, self-knowledge is a good thing, though uncomfortable. 4. Overambition and failure Another group of fables concerns overdoing it or overreaching oneself and failing. This is a highly mythogenic topic, which may be why it is more prominent in fables than, for instance, in proverbs or gnomic sayings. The ways in which characters overreach themselves and come a cropper in fables divide into fairly clear types. The first is through greed. Greed may be physical gluttony or the love of various other kinds of gain. B60 tells the story of the greedy mouse who falls into a pot of soup and is killed. In B86 a fox (ancestor to Winnie-the-Pooh) finds a goatherd’s pocket full of food in the hollow of a tree. After eating it, he is too fat to crawl out; another fox who finds him tells him jeeringly that he will have to wait until he has slimmed down enough to leave. B79 is the story of the 66 67 68 69

Cf. B83 on the theme of giving dependents what they really need. Humiliation, e.g. B104; loss, B6; danger, disaster or death, B23, B24, B13, Ph1.207, pr. 186. Cf. Ph1.29, Ph5.7, Perotti 18, pr. para. 570, 576. Cf. pr. para. 333. In B80, a camel shows how to avoid being made a fool of, by refusing to dance for his drunken owner. 70 Cf. Plu. Mor. 150a. Ph4.10.4–5.

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dog who stole a piece of meat from a kitchen. Running along by a stream with it, he saw his shadow in the water, which exaggerated the size of the meat, so he dropped the meat he was carrying to lunge for the shadow – and lost what he already had.71 A similar moral is drawn from the slaughter of the hen who laid the golden eggs.72 Several fables urge readers not to overreach themselves by risking a small, certain profit for a larger, speculative one. The original epimythium of B67, the story of the lion and ass who hunted together, runs, ‘Take your own measure: do not form an alliance nor go into any kind of partnership with a man more powerful than yourself.’73 The idea that if you do overreach you will fail, humiliate yourself and even be killed, ties in with the idea we explored before that a life of privilege or luxury is also a life of danger, and may not be worth the risk; there is much to be said for contentment with one’s own lot.74 It also links with another, less prominent theme: boasting. Boasting is always a bad thing: all too often you may find that the thing you boast of is purely contingent (B29, B96), subject to sudden changes of fortune (B5), not in fact to your credit (B104) or ultimately to your harm (B37). Boasting may cause you to come a cropper,75 or it may anger the gods (B15). At the very least, it is not civilized behaviour towards one’s associates (B135). 5. Truth, honesty, lies and deceit A smaller group of fables deals with truth, honesty, lies and deceit. Lies and deceit are a consistently bad thing. If you try to deceive someone, you deserve to suffer for it, is the theme (and the epimythium) of B122.76 There is no suggestion in fables that the world might get along without lies and deceit; the aim of decent characters is to minimize their effects and avoid being tricked.77 Liars will always lie when they can get away with it, like the ape in B81 who claimed that a particular tombstone was erected in memory of his father and grandfather. On a note of pessimism, Phaedrus recognizes that though, in principle, nothing is more profitable than truth, in practice this may not be the case.78 It is intrinsically wrong – inappropriate or indecent – to practise the particular form of deceit that is hypocrisy. In B14 the bear boasts that he 71 72 75 76 77

Cf. P. Oxy. 1404 (a Latin version), B45, pr. para. 100 (luxury leading to slavery). 73 Cf. B6, cf. B108, B140. 74 B28, B39, B64, cf. pr. para. 329, 357. B123. Ph1.10, Ph5.2, Perotti 6, 13. Only strangers are impressed by the bragging of a coward: Ph1.11. Cf. B72, pr. para. 348, 567, 573. 78 Ph4.13, Perotti 17. Ph1.16, Ph1.19, Ph1.23, Ph2.4, Ph3.10, Ph3.13, Perotti 6, 23, 28.

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is a friend to human beings because he never mauls a dead man. It would be better, says the fox, to maul the dead and not touch the living. ‘Let the man who harmed me while I was alive not weep over my corpse,’ says the original epimythium. On the same theme, prose paraphrase B51 tells of the farmer whose son was killed by a snake. The farmer tried to kill the snake, but on failing, proposed that they live in peace instead. The snake refused: in the circumstances, neither side could feel genuine friendship for the other. Prose paraphrase B210 acts as a warning for the would-be deceitful: it may lead to disaster, as in the case of the boy who cried wolf. But, B126 concludes gloomily, in the present age Truth has fled to the desert and falsehood is everywhere. ‘In the old days falsehood only existed among a few, but now it has spread to all men.’ 6. Gods, the metaphysical and humanity The gods play a less substantial part in fables than in proverbs, but still a significant one. B117 attests their supreme power over human life. Several times they appear as authors of human goods.79 Prose paraphrase 274 makes the strongest claim along these lines, describing how good things descend from heaven, while bad things are native to earth; this is why good things take so much longer to reach us than bad ones. In a similar strain, B63 tells us that the gods give good things, heroes only bad things.80 B58, a variant of the Pandora myth, tells how Zeus put all good things in a jar and set the jar down among human beings. But people could not resist looking in the jar, and when they took off the lid, everything except hope flew out, leaving hope as the only good that remains with humanity. A more equivocal gift, prose paraphrase 311, credits Zeus with giving humanity the power of speech. In several fables, gods are sponsors of justice. B127 tells us that Zeus does enact justice, though not necessarily in the order in which bad people (ponêroi) commit injustices.81 According to prose paraphrase 163, Zeus punishes selfishness, while Hermes appears to a man who has complained of the injustice of the gods to point out that he makes similar judgements himself.82 79 80 82

Max. Tyr. 34.3 (Zeus’s two jars), cf. Plu. Mor. 473b, D. Chr. 64.26 (here the jars contain good and bad fortune); see below, pp. 164–5. 81 Cf. Plu. Mor. 549d. Cf. the related proverb Z5.60. B117, cf. B75, B142. In Ph4.26 the gods reward a pious poet and in Ph1.17 they punish liars. Ph4.11, though, claims that it is the fates, rather than the gods, who punish crimes.

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Several fables involve characters praying to the gods and imply that prayer appropriately performed may be successful. In B23, a herdsman who had lost an ox prayed to the mountain nymphs to find the thief. When he found the ox, however, it was being eaten by a lion, whereon the huntsman hurriedly prayed just to get away safely. ‘A young raven who fell ill,’ says B78, ‘said to his grieving mother, “Do not cry, mother: pray to the gods to save me from this terrible disease.” “And which of the gods will save you, child?” she replied. “Whose altar have you not plundered?”’ Dio Chrysostom tells the story of the Phrygian who, riding along on an ox, saw a crow (an ill omen), and threw a stone at it. Hitting it, he decided his own ill fortune had been turned back on the crow, and went on his way, pleased. The crow, however, recovered, took flight and frightened the ox, which threw the man, who broke his leg. This is what happens, concludes Dio, to people who ignore omens.83 In other fables, the gods help those who help themselves. In B20, an ox-driver’s cart fell into a ravine. Instead of getting it out, the driver prayed to Heracles for help. The god appeared before him and told him to go to work. ‘Unless you are doing something to help yourself when you pray to the gods,’ says Babrius, ‘you will pray in vain.’84 Though they sponsor justice, it is not the gods’ role to stop people doing wrong. According to B57, the Arabs became liars when Hermes broke down with a wagon full of lies while travelling through Arabia, and the locals plundered it. (This fable is an aetiology, and as such often regarded as a different type of fable from the moralizing kind, but like many aetiologies it also has an ethical dimension.) The Arabs became liars, it seems, because they were already thieves; the god did not intervene either to encourage or to prevent them. A number of other fables indicate the gods’ lack of concern for human behaviour or control over it. Hermes is the doubtful hero of B119. A craftsman had a wooden image of Hermes to which he sacrificed regularly. It brought him no luck. One day, in a rage, he seized it by the leg and smashed it; the head burst open and poured gold all over the ground. The craftsman was hardly mollified: ‘Hermes, you are unjust and contrary to your friends. When I paid my respects to you, you never helped me, and when I treated you with disrespect, you replied with many good things.’ B2 is more outspoken still: since the gods do not even know who steals from their own 83 84

34.5–6. Cf. B32. In B10, Aphrodite appears and rebukes a slave girl for believing that Aphrodite has made her beautiful; on the contrary, says Aphrodite, she is angry with the girl’s master for mistakenly thinking her beautiful. Stob. 4.28.13 preserves a fragment of Dio Chrysostom to the same effect.

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temples, runs its punchline, what is the use in appealing to them for help in finding any other lost property?85 The gods, then – particularly Zeus – are conventionally presented as powerful and on the whole good: sponsors of justice, sometimes answering prayer, but sometimes acting in their own interest rather than that of human beings and not active to help them unless they help themselves. Relatively little is heard in fables of fate or fortune (tychê). The moral of B136 is that one cannot avoid fate.86 In B49 Tychê speaks to a man who has fallen asleep unknowingly by the side of a well. ‘You, wake up! If you fall, I shall be blamed and get a bad reputation! For men hold me responsible for everything, including all the misfortune that falls on a man through his own fault.’ On a related subject, B141 tells us rather bleakly that ill luck can persist even after a character’s death.87 Proverbs and gnomic sayings are fond of making generalizations about the nature of humanity. By the nature of fables, it is usually hard to tell whether characters are the way they are by nature or circumstance. It is tempting, for instance, when one character is a predatory wolf and another is a fearful sheep, to assume that their different characteristics would be innate if they were human in the way they are presented as being in the animals, but the inference is probably unjustified. Occasionally, though, the point of a fable is to show that a character has a certain nature that is not changed by circumstance. In B32, for example, a weasel falls in love with a man, and Aphrodite changes her into a woman so that she can marry him. At the wedding feast, however, a mouse runs by the table and the bride cannot resist leaping up to chase it. Nature, the fable concludes, had defeated love. The rather similar cautionary tale of B98 concerns a lion who wanted to wed a human girl. To make himself acceptable to her father, he allowed his teeth to be extracted and his claws to be clipped. When the household saw him, they beat him to death with clubs, ‘having learned’, the fable concludes, ‘that when it comes to love, men and lions do not mix’. The point about nature in these fables seems to be that what is fixed, is 85

86 87

Cf. P. Ryl. 3.493 (Ploutos argues he does not cause trouble for men). B30 is a bon mot fable about Hermes, while in B68 Zeus defeats Apollo in an archery contest whose moral belongs better in the previous section: one should recognize when someone is more powerful than oneself. Cf. Perotti 14 on fortune, 16 (fortune sometimes favours men beyond their wildest dreams). Time makes an occasional explicit appearance in fables, though it is most important as the framework in which actions happen and closure is reached. B127 assures us that though the justice of the gods may happen in random order, in the course of time it will happen. The mouse who dies in B60 says that it is his time (kairos). Ph5.8.1ff. personifies time: ‘Swift in flight, balancing on a razor’s edge [Perry’s translation of an opaque phrase], bald, with a hairy forehead and naked body – if you take him in front, you may hold him, but once he has passed not Jupiter himself can catch him again . . .’

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fixed, but we cannot deduce much from most fables about what human characteristics are fixed. A rare fable about old age (B29) is also a rare generalization about human life as a whole. ‘Do not glory too much in the pride of your youth,’ runs its original epimythium. ‘Many men’s old age is spent in suffering.’ A fable told by Aesop in the anonymous Life of Aesop about the road to freedom and the road to slavery, is also capable of interpretation as being about life as a whole. The first is rough, narrow, steep, overgrown, waterless and dangerous but leads to paradisial rest; the second begins luxuriously, amid parks and flowers, but ends up as a hard, narrow cliff.88 More conventionally, Phaedrus remarks that it is foolish to complain when all life is a mixture of grief and joy. And in the end, all go to Hades.89 7. What goes around A few fables concern strict or expanded reciprocity. If you try to help the wicked, says Phaedrus, or even allow wickedness to happen when it is not harming you, you will end up suffering yourself.90 Several authors in this period tell the story of the fox who invited the stork to dinner. He set before her some thin soup on a marble slab, which she could not eat. In return, she invited him to dinner and gave him solid food in a narrow-necked jar (this fable also says, interestingly, that it is intrinsically wrong to wrong others).91 In B7, a horse which has refused to share his master’s burden with his ass, is forced to carry the whole load, and the ass’s skin and harness too, when the ass drops dead.92 B11 is the story, familiar from Roman myth, of the fox whose tail was set on fire by an angry farmer and who then ran through the farmer’s crops, destroying them.93 In B34, a boy who has overeaten of a bull’s entrails at a sacrifice, ends by vomiting them up. Thieves can expect to be stolen from, tricksters to be tricked and unjust judges to be unjustly judged.94 On a more positive note, a good deed sometimes returns with interest to the giver, as in the story of Androcles and the lion.95 8. Women, family and love On the subject of women, marriage and the family, fables have relatively little to say. Women are dangerous, untrustworthy, inconstant and lustful,96 88 91 92 93 94 96

89 Ph4.18, Ph4.21. 90 Ph4.20, pr. 575. Vit. Aes. 94. Cf. Plu. Mor. 414e, Ph1.26, pr. para. 384, 567, 568. Cf. Plu. Mor. 137d, where the characters are an ox and a camel. E.g. Ov. Fast. 4.19.679–712, P. Amh. 26. B105, B111, cf. B117, B142, Ph3.2, pr. para. 279, 296, 384, 401. B16, Ph2.2, Ph4.15, Perotti 11, 15.

95

Pr. para. 563a.

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but other family relations are good and benign.97 B22 tells how men suffer at the hands of their womenfolk (though in this case the reader’s sympathy may be tempered by the fact that both the women concerned are mistresses of a man who is said to be behaving like a youth in middle age). Love too is dangerous, and frequently turns out badly, as in the story of the amorous ferret or the lion.98 B56 describes how Zeus held a baby show with prizes for all the animals. Among the entrants was the (famously ugly) ape, who despite the laughter of the gods was convinced that her child was the most beautiful of all. B47, as we have seen, commends solidarity among brothers, while B38 shows that to be betrayed by one’s own kin is the unkindest cut of all. Last and interestingly, B109 suggests that children cannot be blamed for characteristics they have picked up from their parents and teachers. A mother crab told her child off for walking sideways over a wet rock. ‘You walk straight first,’ replied the child, ‘and I’ll do it by watching you.’ phaedrus’ ethical l andscape: distinct ive features Among surviving collections of fables, that of Phaedrus is sometimes said to have the most distinctive world-view, reflecting in particular his presumed contact with Roman Stoicism and Cynicism.99 I have argued elsewhere that Phaedrus is not as distinctive as some have thought, but one unusual feature of his fables is worth noting.100 Phaedrus regularly describes characters as ‘wicked’ (improbi) without specifying what is wrong with them. He is also much more given than most fabulists to saying or implying that a certain behaviour is intrinsically wrong, rather than that it will have bad consequences or is disapproved by the gods. This implies a concern with absolute values which adds a new dimension to his ethical landscape. Improbi are undeserving (1.7) and regularly (not just sometimes) bring ruin on others (1.16, 31). If you help them, you will suffer for it (4.20). The good should not share anything with the wicked (4.11). It is wrong to injure people (1.26) and bad to be brave in words but not deeds (5.2). Phaedrus’ absolutist language in these fables is all the more striking because at other times his language is rather cautious, avoiding general statements (such as ‘pride leads to a fall’) where other fabulists might use them. So, for instance, he says that something one does not value often 97 99 100

98 B32, B98. Though according to Ph3.15, kindness rather than shared blood makes true kin. E.g. Oltramare 1926: 226–32, Adrados 1979–87 vol. I: 635–41; vol. II: 164, 167–9, see below, pp. 337–9. Morgan 2007.

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(saepe) proves more useful than something one does (1.12). Liars tend (solent) to get punished by the gods (1.17). One who has learned from experience is commonly (vulgo) regarded as a more reliable prophet than a prophet (3.3). Those who show no consideration for others usually (plerumque) get punished (3.16, in contrast to improbi, who always do). Phaedrus’ care in distinguishing what tends to be the case from what is always the case makes instances of the latter stand out all the more as to be taken seriously.101 et hical anomalies? the bon mot fables Within fable collections, a number of stories end not with an obvious moral but with a witticism or a bon mot. B9, for instance, tells the story of the fisherman who plays his flute to the fish in the hope that they will jump into his boat without his having to catch them. When they do not, he lets down his net and brings in a haul. Seeing them flapping on the deck, he taunts them, saying, ‘Dance now without a flute. It would have been better for you to have danced before, when I played for you.’ A somewhat laboured epimythium has been added to the effect that one cannot get anything without working for it, but when one has worked, one can indulge in banter and play. Like other later epimythia, this seems to miss the point of the fable’s savage joke. Another fable, B8, does not even try to draw a moral. A camel, loaded up by an Arab, is asked whether he would rather take the high or the low road. ‘Is the straight road shut then?’ he quips. Fables like these do not seem to draw straightforward moral conclusions, and the most successful analysis of them to date has perhaps been that of psychologists. L. S. Vygotsky, in an influential study, tells the fable (= B140) of the ant who collects food all summer and the grasshopper who sings; when the grasshopper goes to the ant in mid-winter to ask for food, the ant tells him to dance. It is the ambiguity between dancing and dying, Vygotsky argues, and the catastrophe by which the grasshopper’s song has led to his dance/death that create the impact, and so the meaning of the fable.102 101

102

A number of Phaedrus’ other fables do not easily fit our categories above, such as that no-one likes to revisit a place that has brought him injury (1.18); pearls on dungheaps won’t be appreciated (3.12); one should let one’s mind play occasionally, in order to be fitter for work later (3.14); if lions could sculpt, we would see more pictures of lions killing men (pr. 284); one should do nothing which is not profitable (4.25); a miser does not give away even what he does not need (Perotti 1); one should not try to teach one’s elders (5.9). These themes are all more familiar from collections of gnomic sayings and proverbs than from fables, and perhaps Phaedrus is deliberately drawing on other genres. Vygotsky 1971: 89–117.

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Vygotsky’s approach works equally well on the fable of the fisherman. The fish who would not dance in the water now ‘dance’ in the net as they die, and the fisherman, whose piping was rejected, reasserts his power and his amour propre by telling the fish that they are ‘dancing to his tune’ after all. Part of the impact of the fable comes from the horror of the parallel, and part from the way that the fisherman’s advance to the fish, rejected, has escalated into violence. The Arab and the camel is a happier story, with no death or disaster at the end, but it too yields to a Vygotskian interpretation. The Arab asks the camel which road he prefers, but does not offer him the only choice he would actually like; the camel, by appealing to a non-existent middle way, points out that all the options open to a beast of burden are unappealing. At the same time, by seeming to answer the question (and not, the fable says, without the inspiration of the Muses), the camel demonstrates that behind the Arab’s spurious offer of a choice and his response that a pack animal has no choices worth the name, there is a genuine dialogue going on between the two. The Arab, in fact, has to negotiate with the camel at some point to make him take any road at all (and given the notoriously unbiddable temperament of camels, this point has real force). The camel may recognize that at this moment he has no real choices, but he reinforces the point which the Arab has implicitly conceded by speaking to him at all, that at other times, he may have. Rather than providing an alternative to moral interpretations, however, these examples show that the psychological approach can be seen as opening up certain fables to expose a moral which lies more deeply buried than usual. If you anger someone more powerful than you, the fable of the fisherman suggests, without being able to protect yourself, you may find yourself the victim of even more violence: a theme which we have met in other, more explicitly moralistic fables. The fable of the camel, meanwhile, suggests that if you want even a beast of burden to co-operate with you, you have to treat it with a minimum of consideration – a point which we have also seen in other fables. A slightly different kind of moral, and one neatly applicable to fables as a whole, may be found at the end of B30, which tells the story of a sculptor who had just carved a statue of Hermes. Two clients were interested in it: one for a grave monument to his son, and the other because he wanted to dedicate an image to the god himself. At the end of the day, they had not made up their minds and agreed to meet the next morning. In the night, Hermes himself appeared to the sculptor, saying, ‘So I am being weighed in the balance, then: you’re either going to make me a corpse or a god.’

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This fable plays on a series of paradoxes: that Hermes is a god associated, among other things, with death (he conducts souls down to the underworld); that within the conventions of Greek statuary, there might be little or nothing (apart from where it was placed) to indicate whether a young male figure was human or divine, living or dead; that human beings, whatever their beliefs about the gods, create how the gods are seen and thought about by the way they represent them. When the sculptor sees Hermes in his sleep, moreover, we do not know whether what he is seeing is a divine epiphany (of a kind which were thought common enough in the Graeco-Roman world) or a projection of his unconscious. The moral, if there is one, is perhaps that the attitude of the gods towards human beings, and whether or not they choose to intervene in human affairs, is highly unpredictable, a theme which again we have seen in other fables. But it also makes a point which we may make about fables too. How you interpret a statue – what you get out of it – may have more to do with your own preoccupations and the context in which you find it, than with the intrinsic nature of the piece. conclusion Fables paint a picture of a society dominated by inequality, hostility and fear. Hierarchy is natural and inevitable. The more powerful may be slightly constrained by the knowledge that it is only practical to attack or exploit your inferiors so far, and the less powerful may be consoled by the thought that they are relatively safe if they keep a low profile, but on the whole, conflict is the norm and conflict is zero-sum: one side wins and one loses, absolutely. The best hope of the weak is to be clever, and fables describe many kinds of cleverness. Successful cleverness means living to plot another day, while foolishness leads predictably to disaster, and often to death. Intelligence, however, is essentially individualistic. The social virtues – friendship, trust, reliability, honesty – are recommended with less confidence. Most stories which involve such virtues also involve characters failing in them, or suspecting one another of failing, or fearing that they will fail in the future. It is notable how few fables show the weak helping themselves by co-operation. A sheep may sometimes protect the flock as well as himself, by seeing off a wolf, but sheep never organize to defend themselves against wolves. The gods play a significant but limited role in this world. Ultimately they ensure that justice is done and sometimes they act as benefactors of human beings, but sometimes they let them do as they please for good or

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ill, sometimes they only help those who help themselves, and sometimes they seem indifferent to human troubles. It is far from clear that they can be relied on to be helpful. Fables take a pragmatic view of the good: on the whole, the good is what is; the usual state of affairs. It is in this spirit that hierarchy can be said to be good, and the many characters who come to a bad end because they have done something inappropriate, can be said to have suffered justly. Having said that, fables do occasionally show signs of aspiration, to social unity and to a justice which gives the powerless some protection from the powerful. These are weak themes, however, compared with the weight of stories which show justice simply as the consequences of your actions, and unity and harmony as utopian dreams. 3%

7%

25% 15%

strong/weak friends/enemies intelligence/foolishness overambition/failure truth, honesty, lies, deceit

7% 13%

gods, metaphysics, humanity what goes around women, family, love

17% 13%

Figure 2 Distribution of main topics in fables

chap t e r 4

Gnomai

Life is not a highway strewn with flowers. English popular song

In English, the term ‘gnomic saying’ has a wide scope, including proverbs, riddles, mottoes, legal axioms and even the epimythia of fables.1 Gnômê in Greek and sententia in Latin are used of both proverbs and moralizing quotations, but for clarity, I am restricting them to the second group.2 The boundary, as we have seen, is occasionally hazy, as poets give memorable form to common sentiments or attributable quotations become proverbial. As usual, when in doubt I follow the sources’ own view of whether a particular saying is popular and anonymous (i.e. proverbial) or has a known origin. The most famous example of a borderline case in this chapter is the Sayings of the Seven Sages. These, which should probably, properly, be regarded as anonymous and proverbial, overlap both with the Delphic maxims and with some proverbs, but they were so generally attributed to the Sages in antiquity that it seems perverse not to count them as gnomai.3 Despite overlapping vocabulary and some borderline cases, Greek and Latin speakers could and did distinguish between quotations and anonymous proverbs, and the overlap of identical material between anthologies of proverbs and gnomic sayings is tiny (a fraction of a percentage point).4 The definition of a gnome was of particular interest to rhetoricians. Hermogenes of Tarsus offers this in his second-century Progymnasmata: 1

2 3 4

Roberts 1971: 53 records some of the gnomic mottoes on display in English slum homes at the turn of the twentieth century: ‘East, west, home’s best,’ ‘Bless our home,’ ‘Home is the nest where all is best.’ Sen. ep. 94 is a good example of a discussion of sententiae which deals mainly with quotations but includes a few proverbs, without noting a distinction. On their transmission and wide distribution, including on inscriptions, see Maltomini 2004, Funghi 2004. The overlap of shared images and allusions to people and stories is much larger, of course.

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Gnome is a summary statement, in universal terms, dissuading or exhorting in regard to something, or making clear what a particular thing is. Dissuading, as in the following (Il. 2.24): ‘A man who is a counsellor should not sleep throughout the night’; exhorting, as in the following (Theognis 175): ‘One fleeing poverty, Cyrnis, must throw himself/Into the yawning sea and down steep crags.’ Or it does neither of these things but explains the nature of something; for example (Demosthenes 1.23): ‘Undeserved success is for the unintelligent the beginning of thinking badly.’5

Theon, writing his Progymnasmata a century earlier, does not give gnomai a section to themselves, but treats them alongside chreiai, distinguishing the two as follows: A chreia is a brief saying or action indicating shrewdness, attributed to some specified person or analogy of a person, and gnome and apomnêmoneuma (reminiscence) are connected with it. Every brief gnome attributed to a person creates a chreia. A reminiscence is an action or a saying useful for life. The gnome, however, differs from the chreia in four ways; the chreia is always attributed to a person, the gnome not always; the chreia sometimes states a universal, sometimes a particular, the gnome only a universal; furthermore, sometimes the chreia is a pleasantry not useful for life, the gnome is always about something; fourth, the chreia is an action or a saying, the gnome only a saying.6

Function is as important as form for these authors when discussing the gnome (and for that matter the chreia, reminiscence and fable), and the function of a gnome is explicitly ethical: it is useful; it tells you something about the nature of the world, or about what to do or not to do. This view is expressed as a commonplace in other authors. Dio Chrysostom, speaking on how to prepare oneself for public speaking, urges his listeners to read Euripides and Menander; among the virtues of Euripides is that he scatters his plays with gnomai which are useful for all occasions.7 For Plutarch, no-one is more instructive than Menander, while Quintilian, whose analysis of the sententia runs to thirty-five paragraphs, a formidable range of sub-types and an exhaustive discussion of when it is and is not appropriate to use them, calls sententiae lumina, lights which illuminate the nature of things or persons.8 Gnomai or sententiae are meant to be taken 5 6

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Para. 4, transl. Kennedy 2003. This definition goes back ultimately to Aristotle Rh. 1394a21–32. Para. 3, transl. Kennedy 2003, substituting ‘gnome’ for ‘maxim’ in some places, for clarity. When he says that a gnome is not always attributed to a person, Theon means not an author but a character: chreiai are put in the mouths of characters, and often set in a scene, while gnomai are not. Theon goes on to distinguish the reminiscence from both chreia and gnome: the reminiscence can be extended, and is not always put in the mouth of a particular character. 18.7. On Euripides as gnômologos see Most 2003. Plu. Mor. 854a, Quint. 8.5. In addition to the standard sources, Quintilian recommends Archilochus for his many gnomai (10.1.60).

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seriously, heard, read, marked, learned and inwardly digested, and then put to use.9 From the first and second centuries, well over a thousand gnomic sayings survive in anthologies, in manuscript or on papyrus, while hundreds more are embedded in almost every kind of literature. From Menander, the single most popular source of gnomai in either language, no fewer than 866 lines in Greek (to say nothing of Latin versions) have been collected, many of which are attested several times; many of these are collected in anthologies but most are embedded in other works of literature.10 Such embedded gnomai are often produced with something of a fanfare, complete with their source. So, for instance, Seneca the Younger, discoursing on anger, says, ‘What of the fact that fear always rebounds on its authors and that no-one who is feared is safe himself? That line of Laberius may occur to you at this point, the one which (spoken in the theatre in the middle of a civil war) captured the whole populace as if the voice of public feeling itself had spoken: “The one whom many fear must fear many.”’11 On other occasions, a gnome is introduced but the audience is left to supply the author. So Paul of Tarsus, in The Acts of the Apostles, woos the Athenians with their shared knowledge of Aratus: ‘From one man, [God] made every race of men to inhabit the whole face of the earth, and he set out when and where they would live, so that they would seek God and perhaps grope for him and find him – though he is not far from any of us. For “in him we live and move and exist”; as some of your poets have said, “for we are also his offspring”.’12 Paul, in his own writings, is capable of an even subtler use of the gnome, as when he slips a fragment of Menander’s Tha¨ıs into his advice to the Christians of Corinth, ‘Do not stray: “Bad company destroys good morals.”’13 Most quotations in literary works are not moralistic, and of those that are, most are grammatically incomplete – a few words or a clause from a well-known passage – or they are simply alluded to or invoked in passing, with an image or a familiar turn of phrase. These I have excluded from the analysis, on the grounds (parallel to those on which I excluded some proverbial phrases from Chapter Two) that a gnome proper is a grammatically complete sentence as well as a complete thought. Quotations of more than two lines (which are much rarer) I have included if they express a single, coherent moralizing idea, like the paradigmatic monostichs and distichs. 9

10

Quintilian (8.5.17–18) also says that it can be clever to adapt a gnome to make it more appropriate to the context, of which we see many examples, particularly within other texts but occasionally in anthologies too. 11 De ira 2.11.3. 12 17.26–8 (Aratus Phaen. 5). 13 1 Cor. 15.33. Liapes 2002.

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This five-line quotation from Euripides in Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights, for instance, qualifies: ‘What more do mortals need than these two things, the fruits of Demeter and the cool water of the spring, which are to hand and exist to feed us? All this does not satisfy us, but we hunt for other ways of eating in luxury.’14 Within anthologies, gnomai are easier to identify but often harder to date. Two important Latin collections, which have survived in manuscript and have some claim to have existed in the first or second century, are a case in point. The Dicta Catonis form a collection of sayings, some very brief and apparently modelled on the Sayings of the Seven Sages, some monostichs or distichs in hexameter verse, which was widely copied in late antiquity under the name of Cato the Elder. Some of these sayings were known in the first and second centuries,15 and a collection was in existence by the fourth. How far back we can trace them is harder to tell. Cato, consul and censor in the second century and a byword for moral probity since at least the first century bce, was an obvious figure to whom to attach gnomai. (Plutarch, in his Life, attributes many more to him, some of which are translations of Menander monostichs; Seneca too quotes a ‘saying of Cato’ which does not appear in the distichs.16 ) There is no indication, however, that he wrote verse on a scale to produce this many gnomic quotations (though he left a number of prose works). There is, moreover, a suspicious absence of quotations from the Dicta in authors of the first and second centuries. Worse still, whatever the collection’s original form, it is clear that the versions which have come down to us are heavily Christianized. For all these reasons, I doubt we can convincingly identify any part of the Dicta Catonis as a collection in circulation in the first and second centuries, so I have not included it here.17 We are on firmer ground with the collection of Publilius Syrus. Publilius came to Rome in the mid-first century bce as a slave.18 At some point he was freed and made his reputation writing Latin mimes which, like Greek and Latin comedy, periodically made use of a highly gnomic style. There is good evidence that he was known, quoted and admired in the first and second centuries ce. Seneca the Elder comments on his gift for apt expression; Petronius imitates him, and Gellius quotes a number of his sententiae.19 In 14

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6.16.7 (Eurip. fr. 884, Nauck). I have included a number of relatively long passages from ps.Isocrates. These, which evidently circulated as whole works (or substantial parts of works), as well as in anthologies, are moral miscellanies in their own right. They are by far the most copied prose gnomai in Greek or Latin. E.g. 2.3 appears in inscription CIL 6.11252 (around the end of the second century). 17 Except e.g. below, p. 91. 18 Plin. HN 35.58.199. Sen. ep. 94.27. Sen. Contr. 7.3.8, Petr. 55, cf. Gell. 17.14. Giancotti 1992 argues that Sen. ep. 8.8 suggests that Seneca knows a large number of Publilius’ sententiae. Haltenhoff 2003: 195 argues that Publilius adapts the

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the fourth century, Jerome learned his maxims.20 Like the Dicta Catonis, Publilius’ sayings were adapted for Christian audiences, prose material was added and the collection circulated in the Middle Ages in diverse forms. Over 700 sententiae, however, have been identified as original, and it seems plausible that they were in circulation in the first and second centuries ce.21 Gnomic anthologies in Greek present slightly different problems. Here we do have a large number of fragmentary texts, on papyrus, clearly written under the early Roman Empire, some in professional literary hands, while others are scholarly compilations or school texts. In this case, however, I have allowed myself to stray beyond my usual chronological bounds and include material which may date to as late as the fourth century. This is partly because it is not always easy to date papyri to one century, especially in literary hands, and many of the texts I shall be using are dated to, for instance, the second or third century, occasionally even the second, third or fourth. It is also partly because the accidents of survival and excavation mean that notoriously few papyri of any kind survive from the first century ce, and many of the best-preserved gnomic anthologies are possibly or certainly later than the second. Many date from even later than the fourth, and a few from earlier, but one can defend the inclusion of material from the first to the fourth centuries in a way in which one might not want to defend earlier or later material. If we consider the whole range of literature surviving on papyrus during the Graeco-Roman period, we notice that across Egypt, a much wider range of literature seems to have been read under the Ptolemies than under the Romans. By the second century ce (outside one or two pockets of intense scholarly activity), a relatively narrow range of authors and texts survive in any numbers.22 Reading habits then seem to have been relatively stable until the fourth century, when the number and range of Greek and Latin secular literature begin to fall again (while Christian, especially biblical, material rises sharply). To include gnomic anthologies from the Ptolemaic period, therefore, in this analysis would be to include material which might well

20 21

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morals of the Roman socio-political elite to a wider audience; cf. Hamblenne 1973 on their political origins. Giancotti (27) notes the importance of pudor to Publilius: Kaster 2005 ch. 2 regards this as particularly an aristocratic virtue, but here it is perhaps popularized. Other important themes – humanity, justice, conscience – are equally important in other collections and genres. Ep. 107.8, 128.4. Ps.-Phocylides, a similar collection of gnomic material which has been Judaized, probably dates originally to the first century bce or ce (Horst 1978: 81–3). On Publilius’ connections with philosophy and the gnomic tradition in general, see Giancotti 1967 and Lucarini 2003. I follow the numbering of Duff and Duff 1935, based primarily on the Teubner edition of 1880, omitting lines whose authenticity the editors doubt. Morgan 1998: 94–119, 2003a, 2003b. LDAB gives the data in easily manipulable form.

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have gone out of circulation by the early Empire. To include collections from later than the fourth century would be to give too much statistical weight to their contents and potentially to distort the earlier picture. (One sixth- or seventh-century anthology, for instance, includes many gnomai about death (reflecting perhaps a Christian influence), which makes it rather different from earlier collections.23 To include it in the analysis would make death look a much more important topic in the early Empire than other collections suggest.) We can fortify first- and second-century material with texts from the third and fourth centuries, however, without serious danger of distorting the picture they create. From the first to the fourth centuries, some ninety-five more or less readable texts of gnomic anthologies survive, together with a handful too fragmentary to yield more than odd words. Between them, they contain around 300 decipherable gnomic sayings. Most are not attributed in the papyri as we have them (though we rarely have the beginning or end of a text, where attributions most often occur). Around half, however, can be firmly attributed to an author and usually a work. The largest number come from Menander (or other new comic poets, whose gnomai tended to be dubbed ‘Menandrean’). The most popular prose works are ps.-Isocrates’ Ad Demonicum, Ad Nicoclem or Nicocles. Five texts can be firmly attributed to Euripides. Three survive from Plutarch’s Sympotic Problems and one each from (or attributed to) Hesiod, Philemon, Hermarchus, Moschion, Antiphon, Potamon, Aristotle, Aristippus, Diphilus, Pythagoras, Favorinus, Antisthenes, Chares, Chaeremon and Diogenes the Cynic – as eclectic a range of authors as was read anywhere in Egypt at the time. Between them, they are widely distributed across the province, showing that gnomic material was, geographically at least, more widely spread than any literature other than Homer in the Roman period. It is common now – when fragments of gnomologies survive only on papyrus, in the monumental, but more admired than studied compilation of Stobaeus, in the little-read late-antique manuscripts collected by Boissonade,24 in what are classified as minor Latin poets or in Arabic and modern European translations – to underestimate their importance in the Hellenistic and especially the Roman world. To judge by the number of surviving papyrus fragments, however, the number of mediaeval manuscripts of some collections and the frequency with which certain gnomai were quoted by other authors, gnomai and gnomic collections were among the most widely familiar literary material in the Roman world – quite likely, 23

Hagedorn and Weber 1968.

24

Anecdota graeca 1829–33, Anecdota nova 1844.

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after Homer (and possibly, in the west, Virgil), the most familiar material.25 Gnomai were among the first texts people read and copied when learning to read and write, so everyone with even the most basic level of literacy read some. Professional scribes made fair copies of them for wealthy patrons, and scholars copied them in informal hands. Where they were read, no doubt they were also quoted and so spread through parts, at least, of the non-literate population.26 Gnomai were familiar to anyone who read or had contact with someone who read. They helped to form the mindset of Greek and Latin speakers across the Empire, oiled the wheels of their thinking and coloured and vitalized their speech. map of the ethical l andscape 1. Wealth Two subjects individually form the two largest groups of gnomic sayings, and together dominate the landscape: wealth, and relations between rich and poor, and, often linked with them in individual gnomai, good and bad social relations in general. No text sets out its views more baldly than the first surviving quotation on a papyrus of the second or early third century published by Bartoletti.27 As we have it, the papyrus begins with a series of gnomai about wealth (to plouton), before moving on to aretê (virtue), tychê 25

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Boissonade’s collection includes numerous gnomologies from Greek poets and prose authors, sayings of the Seven Sages and other philosophers, and biblical material. Stobaeus, writing probably in the early fifth century, collects gnomai of more than 500 authors under 200 headings. This labour of love eclipsed all others at the end of antiquity, but to the modern gnomographer, not the least remarkable thing about it is that it does not overlap more with other surviving fragmentary collections. Evidently the repertoire of quotations considered collectable was vast and readers’ appetites equally so. Gutas 1975 demonstrates the wealth of Greek gnomic literature from the fifth century which found its way into Arabic translations; see too d’Ancona 2004. This wealth includes sayings attributed to Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, gnomai of Isocrates, Menander and Democritus, quotations from Greek history, rhetoric and novels and from many other authors of the Roman Empire. No one surviving Arabic collection corresponds to a surviving Greek collection, though there is much overlapping material. Scattered among the gnomai are many chreiai and apothegmata. Brock 2003 and Bettiolo 2004 trace the translation of Greek gnomologies into Syriac; S. Pernigotti 2003 discusses Coptic translations. C. Pernigotti 2003 looks at lines of transmission of sententiae through antiquity; Piccione 2004 sketches the transmission of sententiae from late antiquity, through the neglected dark ages, into the early mediaeval period; cf. Taylor 1992, but this is unreliable on the ancient side. As a very young child, I remember being put to sleep with the words, ‘May flights of angels sing you to your rest.’ When I learned to read and write and began to read poetry, it came to me that this was probably a line of verse. Later still, I found it in Hamlet (slightly adapted in transmission). My mother, questioned, did not know where the line came from, nor why she always said it, but thought on reflection that perhaps she had heard it on a school trip to Stratford-upon-Avon. 1966. This is an unusual example (in a papyrus anthology) of a more than two-line gnome, though Stobaeus, for instance, includes many longer passages.

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and evil speech. The first column of fragment A reads: ‘Of Euripides. “I know and have tested well how all men love having; for no-one pursues what does not provide sustenance, but what provides wealth and wherewithal; the man who lacks wealth would do well to die.”’ Wealth is both necessary and, it seems, universally desired by human beings. ‘Money rules the world,’ says Publilius.28 ‘All animals fill themselves with food, but the race of men is insatiable of profit (kerdos).’29 An ostrakon from Narmouthis puts it even more bluntly in one of a series of Delphic-style axioms: ‘Seek wealth.’30 ‘Gold, the most beautiful thing that comes to men,’ rhapsodizes Lucian in the words of Euripides, and, ‘Water is best, but gold outshines proud wealth like a blazing fire at night.’31 Bartoletti’s third quotation reads, ‘Of Euripides. “This man who sets up for us altars of the gods in heaven and beautiful images with cunning blows of life-making skill, neglects one thing, it seems to me: he has not set up an altar nor a garland to the greatest and highest of gods, Wealth.”’ This reinforces the idea that human beings value wealth above everything else, even to the point of worshipping it. The speaker is presumably speaking sardonically, and the idea that wealth is something to be worshipped does not come up elsewhere in gnomai, but it is paralleled in the many cults of wealth (Ploutos and Ops) in Greek and Roman cities. The wealth one seeks is not necessarily vast. Papyrus Bouriant 1 records, ‘I say that of all possessions, the best is wealth’ and ‘O greatest of all benefits, money’, but also, ‘Life without a livelihood is no life,’32 which suggests that wealth may be only what is needed to support life. When you have money, hang on to it: ‘When you buy what you don’t have, make sure you don’t have to sell what you do.’33 ‘Buy not what you need, but what you must have,’ says Seneca, quoting the Elder Cato.34 (This, though, is the ostentatious frugality of the rich. Publilius surely speaks for poorer members of society when he says roundly that, ‘Frugality is a euphemism for misery.’35 ) The second quotation in Bartoletti’s papyrus reads, ‘Of Hesiod. “Virtue and kydos go with wealth.”’ It is not hard to imagine how kudos goes with wealth. It is more striking that virtue is seen to go with it.36 We need not assume that wealth is being said to make people virtuous (in other gnomai, 28 31 33

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29 P. Ross. Georg. 1.13. 30 Pintaudi and Sijpesteijn 1989 ostrakon 5. PS506. 32 Gnomai 12, 13, 2. Timon 41 (Eurip. Danae fr. 326, Nauck), Gall. 7 (Pi. O. 1.1–2), cf. 14. PS730, cf. Vit. Aes. 110. The series of gnomai put into the mouth of Aesop in the anonymous Life is not a traditional collection like that associated with the Seven Sages, but, just as Aesop is often pictured in company with the Sages in this period, these gnomai are obviously meant to affirm his status as a wise coiner of maxims as well as a teller of fables. As such, they seem to fit better here than anywhere else, and they echo many other gnomai in content, as other references below show. 35 PS223. 36 Op. 313 (Hesiod is urging the reader to work). Ep. 94.27.

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and elsewhere in wisdom literature, it clearly does not): it may be that, as in the third-century riddle, both wealth and virtue are seen to be the business of life.37 Equally, the compiler may mean that a rich man ought to be virtuous in order to use his wealth well. Parallels for that thought can be found, for instance, in the many gnomai of ps.-Isocrates’ Ad Demonicum.38 Or the quotation may mean that it is hard to be virtuous when one is poor, relying on the close association in Greek (and Latin) between virtue, good fortune and happiness.39 Several quotations survive on the topic, ‘If you are lazy [sometimes adding, when you are rich], you will become poor.’40 ‘Skills [or ‘crafts’] do not age well unless the man who practises them is a lover of money,’ says Maximus of Tyre, quoting Menander.41 On a similar theme, a thirdcentury riddle reads, ‘What harms one’s wealth? Wasting of means,’42 and perhaps the same idea lies behind the one-word command: Philoponei, ‘love work’, which appears, among other places, in several school texts.43 One way at least of wasting one’s means is indicated in an ostrakon from Narmouthis, which commands tersely: ‘Flee loans.’44 ‘Debt is bitter slavery for the free man.’45 (Gnomai also recognize, though, that one may win or lose wealth not through one’s own fault, but through the designs, for instance, of tychê.46 ) Another quotation in Bartoletti’s papyrus is a fragment of Menander: ‘It is the mark of a wise man (phronountos) to bear loss [or punishment] rightly; of a rich wise man (ploutountos eu phronountos) not [to speak his business?].’ Criticism of unjust gain runs strongly through these texts. It appears in a rather garbled set of Menander monostichs from the first century (MPER 3.25). Another very gappy papyrus of the second century presents us tantalizingly with the phrases, taken from a series of authors, ‘. . . almost the head of evil . . . love of silver (philarguria) . . . evil profits . . . a greater evil for men . . . love of silver . . .’.47 P. Oxy. 3004 threatens those who pursue unjust gain with future pain (l. 10), and P. Bour. 1 commands the reader, ‘Flee the wicked habit and evil profit.’ ‘Better to lose your last as 37 38 40 41 43 44 47

Kenyon 1909 col. 3.5: ‘Wealth and virtue. What is the business of life?’ 39 But see below, pp. 199–200. cf. Ad Dem. 6, 19, 28. MPER 3.24; Boyaval 1975, attributed to Thales; P. Bour. 1, gnome 14. Cf. PS317 (‘It is lazy to excuse oneself from working’). 42 Kenyon 1909 col. 3.17. Fr. 408 Koerte, Max. Tyr. 5.7. Nachtergael 1991; P. Ross. Georg. 1.13 l. 3; Bonner 1977: 61 plate; cf. [Isoc.] Ad Dem. 40. 45 PS11. 46 Below, pp. 111–13. Pintaudi and Sijpesteijn 1989 ostrakon 5. P. Harr. 2.170. The authors, whose names frustratingly survive better than their quotations, include Apollodorus, Philippides, Alexis, Antiphanes and Philemon.

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than make a dishonest profit,’ says Publilius, idealistically. ‘Gain with a bad reputation counts as loss.’48 Publilius Syrus has a particular dislike of misers and those greedy for wealth. ‘The miser is the cause of his own misery.’ ‘The miser lacks what he has as much as what he lacks.’49 ‘The poor lack much; the greedy man lacks anything.’50 He is suspicious of rich men’s heirs, especially if they show grief: ‘There’s a smile under the mask of a weeping heir.’51 Quintilian quotes Virgil in a similar vein: ‘To what will you not drive mortal hearts, cursed rumour of gold?’52 With Publilius’ interest in the abuse of wealth goes a shrewd grasp of economics: ‘What many people want is most dangerous to be looking after.’ Also of the pressures that unequal wealth puts on social relations: ‘A debtor does not love his creditor’s threshold.’53 Several texts offer a version of the sentiment, ‘Remember, being rich, to do good to the poor,’54 and this takes us to the theme of social relations in the context of wealth. Publilius is much interested in gift-giving and says several times that it is good to give, to have pity on those in need and to give without moralizing about it. The generous even invent reasons for making gifts.55 He recommends those in need to look to people with a record of generosity.56 ‘Your gift will be twice as pleasing if you offer it spontaneously.’57 Some care is needed, however: ‘If you keep giving, when you refuse you encourage someone to steal’ (though if you do it kindly, a refusal can almost count as a kindness itself).58 Not to be able to help is frustrating and to have sometimes to hurt people when you would like to help them, is wretched.59 On this subject, no author was half so popular as ps.-Isocrates. Among his maxims, many of which appear in several different fragments or anthologies, we find, 48 49

50 51

52 54 55

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PS527, PS158, cf. Vit. Aes. 110. PS14, PS694 (quoted by Quint. 8.5.6, 9.3.64, Sen. Contr. 7.3.8), cf. PS21, PS23, PS26, PS35, PS46, PS47, PS55, PS136, PS273 (quoted by Sen. ep. 108.9), PS276, PS342, PS418, PS431, PS438, PS560, PS618, PS672. PS275 (quoted by Sen. ep. 108.8), cf. Max. Tyr. 12.14. PS258, cf. PS259, PS583 (‘It is foolish to save for you don’t know whom.’). Also, connecting scarcity and desirability, ‘What you would want to hold dear for a long time, must be a rare thing’ (PS630, cf. Juv. 11.208, Sen. Ben. 1.14.1). 53 PS367, PS585, cf. PS453. 9.2.10. P. Oxy. 3004 l. 121, cf. PS650 (‘Generosity thinks herself always blessed’), Vit. Aes. 110. PS68, PS78, PS581; PS90, PS143, PS243, PS370, PS570 (on pity; several of these imply that pity is a form of insurance, either because it pacifies the poor or because it counters hybris); PS147 (moralizing). 57 PS57, PS591. 58 PS103, PS517. 59 PS563, PS571, PS578. PS225.

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Desire not to acquire too many good things, but to enjoy what you have in a measured manner. Look down on those who pursue wealth but cannot make use of what they have: they are like a man who buys himself a fine horse but cannot ride. Try to make money something you use as well as something you own . . . value your possessions for two reasons, because it means you can afford a large loss, and because it enables you to help a friend in need.60

The enduring popularity of quotations from Ad Demonicum, Ad Nicoclem and Nicocles raises the interesting question what readers were expected to learn from gnomic anthologies, given that no-one reading such an anthology in an upstate Egyptian town or village was likely ever to find himself (let alone herself ) in the position of an Isocratean ruler. We shall return to this question in Chapter Six, but it seems evident that the author’s picture of the intimate relationship between wealth and social relations struck a chord with a wider readership. Ps.-Isocrates has no doubts about the importance of wealth – he assumes that his audience has much more than most readers of papyri can have dreamed of – but he is equally certain that it cannot create good social relationships on its own. It can be enjoyable; it can be usefully deployed; it can be a bargaining tool; of itself it brings a certain amount of power and prominence. But it has to be used, and used well, to be enjoyed; it has little to be said for it in itself, and other things remain more important: power, reputation, security. All these are ideas which make sense even if one is not among the wealthiest in society. Security, indeed, could be said to be the overriding concern of almost all ethical material – the theme behind every other theme. One thing on which gnomic texts up and down the Roman social scale could agree, is that it is hard ever to be as secure as one would like, in wealth, position, reputation, relationships or prospects. In contrast to the large number of texts which discuss giving by the rich to the poor, one text gives some advice to the poor which would make it hard for the rich to patronize them: ‘When you are poor, do not associate with the rich, for you will seem to be flattering them.’61 No doubt another reason why the poor might be wary of associating with the rich is the fear that the rich might take what little they have, rather than giving generously of their wealth. ‘I hate to see the poor give to the rich,’ says Papyrus Bouriant, warningly. 60 61

Ad Dem. 27–8. Lenaerts 1975: 95–6. Cf. Ad Dem. 38 (P. Köln 7.308), Ad Dem. 49 (Müller and Poethke 1980), Ad Nic. 1 (PSI 11.1198, Keil 1884: 596), Nic. 49 (PSI 1.16). PSI 2.120.

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2. Good social relations: the more and less powerful The next group of gnomai focuses on relations between the more and less powerful. ‘Pursue glory and virtue . . .,’62 ‘Courage brings glory.’ ‘Fortune favours the brave,’ says Seneca the Younger, quoting Virgil.63 ‘Praise is the sweetest thing to hear,’ avers Pliny, quoting Xenophon.64 ‘A good reputation keeps its glory even in dark times.’ ‘A good reputation is a second patrimony.’65 ‘Honour shows off the honourable but shows up the dishonourable.’66 Honour, kudos, good reputation (doxa, kydos, gloria, bona fama) and bad make several more appearances in papyri, though most of them happen to be too fragmentary to contextualize.67 For ps.-Isocrates, doxa, along with wealth and friends, is what fortune gives great men,68 and although he does not use the word as often as one might expect, the whole thrust of his hortatory discourses is to teach his readers how to rule with doxa and aretê. It is striking that two gnomai which can be read also connect glory with virtue (and in one case, with wealth as well). ‘Virtue and kudos go with wealth.’69 ‘Pursue glory and virtue, avoid blame.’70 Glory is a virtue of social prominence – one cannot be glorious and unknown – so it is not surprising that it goes with wealth. More interesting is the insistence that it goes with virtue. Ad Dem. 49 makes clear that it does not have to go with virtue – one can be glorious, as one can be rich, and a bad man. But these texts prefer that it should. It may have been some consolation to those who were not members of the elite, who nonetheless heard or read gnomai and aspired to their values, and who, if they could not make themselves glorious and rich, could at least try to be virtuous. A text which seems to begin with a reference to Alexander the Great (perhaps attributing the sentiment to him) says, ‘Do nothing mean (tapeinos) or 62 63 64 67

68 69

70

PSI l.12. PS590, ep. 94.28 (Aen. 10.284), cf. Liv. 1.9.3, 4.37.7, 5.19.8, 8.29.5, Ov. Fast. 2.782, Plin. ep. 6.16.11, Tac. Hist. 4.17. 65 PS83, PS96, PS546. 66 PS263. Ep. 7.32 (Xen. Mem. 2.1.31). Notably four instances of adoxia and eudoxia in P. Oxy. 3004. The same text preserves all our mentions of charis in the gnomic papyri, all but one, which I cited above, too fragmentary to put in any context. Ad Dem. 49 (Müller and Poethke 1980). Bartoletti 1966 fr. A no. 2, Hesiod. PS75 prefers glory to wealth: ‘Men’s good opinion is a safer thing than money,’ cf. Ov. Am. 1.10.48. Money must be used wisely: PS82, PS86, PS96, PS158, PS254, ps.-Sen. De mor. 58. MPER 3.24.12, cf. PS304; PS240 complains that maintaining one’s reputation is hard work, while ‘unless one gains new praise, even the old disappears’ (PS333) and ‘he whom reputation has once destroyed can hardly be restored’ (PS572).

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low-born (agenês) or disgraceful (adoxos) or weak (analkimos).’71 Alexander would also have sympathized with the answer to the riddle, ‘what makes good out of evil? Boldness. Force’, and with Publilius’ claim that ‘the noble mind does not accept an insult’.72 The only trouble with aristocratic virtues like these is that they can spill over into arrogance or recklessness: ‘The boast of pride soon turns to ignominy.’ ‘Hate recklessness.’73 ‘The greatest power is thrown away by being badly exercised.’74 Ps.-Isocrates’ perspective when advising Demonicus and Nicocles is frankly that of the powerful, and the advice he gives is a blend of the utilitarian and the philosophical. It places a high value on virtue. ‘Manage your affairs so that you are in a position of power, then lay off when you have a fair share, so that you may be seen to work for justice, not out of weakness, but from a sense of what is right.’75 ‘You must apply your mind, so that as far as you outstrip others in honour, so far you surpass them in the virtues.’76 ‘Nothing is as popular as goodness of heart,’ says Quintilian optimistically, quoting Cicero.77 Imitation is an important theme for ps.-Isocrates and society in general. We imitate what we admire, and admire what we imitate. ‘Believing that those who strive for reputation (doxa) and are eager for education should imitate the good and not the bad, I have sent you this treatise as a gift . . .’ ps.-Isocrates begins his letter to Demonicus.78 ‘Do not envy those whom I value most, but compete with them . . .’79 Conversely, what we do not approve of we should not imitate, as a third-century gnome from Oxyrhynchus tells us.80 By identifying good men and imitating them, says ps.-Isocrates, one can become like them and form friendships with them. His idea of imitation all takes place within the highest level of society, but his advice would work equally well for any man interested in improving his social status. Good, powerful men, in many of these quotations, are those who succeed in pursuing glory, reputation, authority or virtue while keeping the poor 71 72 73 74 76 77 78 79

P. Oxy. 79. Nobility is a virtue with which one bears whatever happens to one in P. Oxy. 3006.7. Cf. PS263, PS268. Kenyon 1909 col. 3.19, PS279, cf. PS272, PS322. PS109, Pintaudi and Sijpesteijn 1989 ostrakon 5, cf. PS542. 75 Ad Dem. 38 (M¨ PS380. uller and Poethke 1980). Ad Nic. 11 (P. Erl. 8, P. Goodspeed 1, P. Köln 6.253, Lenaerts 1989a: 210–15). 8.5.3 (Cic. Pro Lig. 12.37). Ad Dem. 2 (P. Köln 7.308). Cf. Ad Dem. 11 (P. Rein. 2.79, P. Ross. Georg. 1.16); Nic. 58 (P. Rainer Cent. 22 breaks off just at the beginning). 80 P. Oxy. 3006.11. Nic. 60 (P. Erl. 10).

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and powerless on their side.81 ‘Everyone co-operates happily when worthy men rule.’ Sometimes keeping the less powerful on side means giving them something (other than money). ‘The man who practises clemency wins every time.’ ‘The man who yields to his people is not conquered, but conquers.’82 There are sound prudential reasons for this: ‘The highest place is safe for no-one unless he watches his step.’83 For their part, the less powerful are encouraged to trust their rulers: a third-century papyrus even advises: ‘Trust a ruler whether just or unjust.’84 Texts addressed to the less powerful are not homogeneous. Some are optimistic: ‘Cultivate those more powerful than you . . .’85 Publilius sees advantages even in servitude. ‘An inferior knows all his superior’s mistakes.’ ‘The clever slave has a share in power.’ ‘To do wrong for one’s masters counts as a virtue.’86 Others are resigned: ‘The ignorance of the powerful must be borne.’87 A number of quotations are less enthusiastic than we might expect about help given by the more powerful to the less. ‘The saved man is always ungracious (acharistos) by nature’ observes one text from Oxyrhynchus.88 Publilius too attests that being offered help can wound people’s pride, make them feel slavish and is no benefit when it is accompanied by fear.89 Some gnomai are pessimistic: ‘Injustice easily becomes powerful over the poor.’ ‘To die at another’s command is to die twice.’ ‘An inferior seeks what his superior is hiding, at his peril.’ ‘How painful is a wound you dare not complain of!’90 A few are not resigned: ‘A worthless man doing well is not to be borne.’91 One gnome can even advise, ‘Do not honour those in power, for it is unseemly.’92 If all else fails, the powerless can console themselves by practising contentment. ‘When the poor man starts to imitate the rich, he’s done for.’93 ‘What is wicked in life? Envy’.94 On the verso of a second-century school text from Tebtunis we find written out eleven times, ‘Do not be eager to be rich, lest envy cause you grief.’95 ‘Neither exult in wealth nor bemoan 81 82 84 85 88 89 91 92 93 94 95

Plu. Mor. 778c quotes an unknown comic poet, ‘Gracious kindness brings men the greatest joy.’ Cf. PS635, PS690. 83 PS476. PS488, PS548, PS443, cf. PS436, PS519, PS523, PS637. P. Oxy. 3006.10, cf. Sen. ep. 108.11: ‘The man who desires little, needs little. He who can desire only what is enough, gets what he desires.’ (Pall. Incert. Fab. 65, 66 Ribbeck). 86 PS269, PS596, PS534. 87 P. Oxy. 2661.14. P. Oxy. 3004.8. P. Oxy. 3004.6, cf. PS462. Publilius says that ‘the ungrateful teach people to become mean’ (350). 90 PS315, PS63, PS140, PS246, cf. PS170, PS250, PS413, PS531, PS604. PS44, PS61, cf. PS308. P. Oxy. 2661.2, cf. PSI 2.120.48–9 (with comments on the text by Messeri 2004: 341–53 and especially Funghi 2004: 381–401), PS332. PSI 2.120.47. PS58, PS714, cf. PS324 (quoted by Sen. ep. 108.11), Hor. ep. 1.2.46, ps.-Sen. De mor. 45.46. Kenyon 1909 col. 3.9. Cribiore 1995, editor’s translation, cf. PS287 (‘envy is silently but hostilely angry’).

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poverty.’96 The poor man has few enemies, and ‘The lowly have not far to fall,’ while ‘the higher they stand, the more easily fate hurts them’.97 One heavily reconstructed quotation seems to say that it is not a safe course of life to try to control many things: one should mind one’s own affairs and not other people’s.98 There are unexpected compensations for being unimportant. It is hard to imagine those at the top of society being encouraged to cowardice in any circumstances, but in one papyrus collection we find, ‘The man who flees will fight again.’99 3. Friendship Perhaps the most significant way in which people protect themselves against the conflicts of wealth and power, or poverty and powerlessness, is by making friends (philoi, amici). We cannot do without friendship: ‘Seek philia,’ as one of the Delphic-style maxims tells us.100 ‘United we stand firm.’101 ‘Nothing distinguishes good and bad men so much as their friendships’ proclaims ps.-Isocrates.102 ‘Be pleasant to all but cultivate the best.’103 The Bartoletti papyrus with which I started the last section, later quotes from Euripides’ Phoenissae: ‘If the same thing seemed beautiful and wise to everyone, there would be no disputatious strife among men; there is no need to make a truce with weapons, mother; for reason [or ‘the word’] decides everything the sword of one’s enemies could.’104 It is the difference between people that makes for conflict; unfortunately, a world without difference is hardly imaginable, let alone attainable. Philia is not, it seems, the normative state of human relations; conflict is. One of the most quoted gnomai in literature (frequently emended slightly to fit different contexts, but always recognizable) is Hesiod’s ‘Potter envies potter and carpenter carpenter.’105 Philia is a remedial measure, but one which must be practised with caution. One must not rush into it; one must test one’s friends thoroughly before committing to them; once committed, one must be absolutely loyal. ‘Do 96 98 99 101 103

104 105

97 PS356, PS267, PS189. Vit. Aes. 110. BS: 33–4. See Dorandi 2004 on the Epicurean affiliations of this papyrus and related inscriptions; Messeri 2004: 359–61 makes some helpful comments on the fragmentary text. 100 Pintaudi and Sijpesteijn 1989 ostrakon 5. P. Oxy. 2661.3. 102 Ad Dem. 1 (P. Lugd. Bat. 25.15). PS4. Ad Dem. 20 (P. Köln 7.308, Müller and Poethke 1980). In the mid-twentieth century, the similar English sentiment, ‘Be civil to all, but familiar with few,’ could often be found hanging on the walls of homes and shops. Bartoletti 1966 fr. F, Phoen. 499–500, 515–17. Op. 25. E.g. Philostr. Vit. Soph. 544 (substituting ‘rhetor’ for ‘carpenter’), Lucian Pisc. 1, Plu. Mor. 92a (as an example of bad behaviour), 473a. ‘How fortunate the life which passes without hatreds,’ says Publilius (599).

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not make friends with everyone who wants to, but with those who are worthy of your nature.’106 ‘The tenth hour finds you with more friends than the first,’ says Publilius cynically, meaning that lots of people will call themselves friends when there is a chance of a free dinner.107 So, ‘Be slow to make friends, but once you have become a friend try to make it last, for it is equally disgraceful (aischron) to have no friends at all and to keep changing friends.’108 PSI 2.120 includes a series of gnomai on friendship which capture its complexity well.109 ‘What you don’t know about, throw yourself into examining, and you won’t make a mistake.’ ‘Do not laugh at jokes, for you will become an object of hate to those joked about.’110 ‘Do not interfere, either, in things that do not concern you.’ ‘Do not acquire either friends or enemies quickly.’ ‘Ward off the hostile man without hurting yourself.’ ‘Think yourself the comrade (hetairos) of people, not of things [or ‘money’].’ ‘Work gladly for the good fortune of your friends; in their ill fortune offer of yourself freely.’111 Trust is essential between friends,112 and friendship is a matter of deeds, not just words.113 ‘So trust your friend that there’s no place for your enemy.’114 ‘Trust your friends even in respect of what is not trustworthy, and do not trust the hostile even in respect of what is trustworthy.’ One text encourages us to be wary even of established friends: ‘Do not trust the appearances of all your friends.’115 On the other hand, it does not do to be too suspicious: ‘The man who fears his friend teaches his friend to fear.’116 Suspicion is a common human quality, but no better for that.117 Threats of physical or metaphysical retribution encourage readers to be trustworthy. ‘Whenever a man speaks fair while doing evil, and does not escape his neighbour’s notice, he will get double evil back,’ say three fragments.118 Once forfeited, trust cannot be regained.119 Philostratus quotes Homer: ‘Hateful as the gates of hell to me is the man who says one thing and hides another in his heart.’120 106 108 109 110 111

112 115 118 120

107 PS173, cf. PS549. Ad Nic. 27 (Keil 1884). Ad Dem. 24 (Müller and Poethke 1980), cf. PS41, PS134. I quote them in what I hope is a logical order rather than the order in which they appear, to capture their train of thought. On the significance of the (dis)order of texts like this see Chapter Ten, below. Inappropriate laughter is chastized elsewhere, e.g. P. Oxy. 2661.10: ‘Untimely laughter leads to weeping.’ Cf. PS54. [Isoc.] Ad Dem. 26 goes further, advising Demonicus to ‘consider it equally disgraceful to be outdone by your enemies in doing injury and to be surpassed by your friends in doing kindness’, (Müller and Poethke 1980). 113 P. Iand. 5.77.3. 114 PS300. PS209, PS27 (the untrustworthy). 116 PS576, cf. PS592. 117 PS7, PS687, PS688. P. Lond. Lit. 253. 119 PS211, cf. PS356. Goodspeed 1905, Pap. Flor. 21.28, Pap. Flor. 21.30. Vit. Soph. 542 (Il. 9.312).

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Ps.-Isocrates urges Demonicus to value his friends above his kin, on the grounds that they display his character better, and tells him to be generous (koinos) to them.121 ‘Think, having friends, that you have treasuries’ says Papyrus Bouriant 1, emphasizing again the connection between human and material resources in Graeco-Roman minds and the possibility that friends to whom one is generous may respond in kind.122 The same text offers us no fewer than three quotations on the subject of strict reciprocity, which is so important among friends: ‘Having taken, give back so that you may take whenever you want.’ ‘Look after strangers lest you should sometime become a stranger.’ ‘A timely good to friends in part returns.’123 Publilius too has an interest in reciprocity: ‘Expect from one man what you have done to another.’ ‘He who can’t give help shouldn’t ask for it.’124 ‘He who knows how to return help, gets more.’125 He goes further and expresses outrage at people who seek help without returning it: ‘Those who think that help is a gift are either bad or mad.’ ‘To take what you can’t return is fraud.’126 ‘It is best to help someone who will remember what he has received.’127 Not only the recipient benefits from the gift, however: the giver gets benefit from the act of giving, too.128 Expanded reciprocity is less of a theme in gnomai, but there are a few examples: ‘When you give help to the worthy you put everyone in your debt.’ ‘Whatever you give to the good, you give partly to yourself.’ ‘When you suffer much, much you could not suffer will come to you.’ ‘An impatient patient makes a cruel doctor.’129 Patriotism is not a common theme in gnomai, but it does occasionally appear as a force for social unity and harmony. ‘Nothing is sweeter than one’s native land,’ says the Odyssey, and is quoted by both Dio Chrysostom and Lucian.130 Plutarch quotes Simonides: ‘The state teaches a man.’131 For Publilius, the theme of patriotism is closely related to that of friendship. If you do not support your own people, you open the door to your enemies, and ‘conflict between citizens is the enemy’s opportunity’.132 Everyone can do their bit to safeguard their community: ‘He who wants to preserve the 121 123 124 125 126 127 128 130 132

122 Gnome 8. Ad Dem. 10. (P. Rein. 2.79, P. Ross. Georg. 1.16) cf. PS175. Gnomai 11, 17, 22; cf. [Isoc.] Ad Dem. 14 (P. Lund. 1.3, Müller and Poethke 1980), Nic. 49 (PSI 47–51). PS2 (and Sen. ep. 94.43), PS59 (literally, ‘unjustly asks for it’). PS64, cf. PS71, PS73, PS245 (cited by Gell. 17.14.4, cf. 1.3.30). PS93, PS202, PS631. Reciprocity can be of harm too: ‘The remedy for harm is to harm the doer’ (PS334, cf. PS379, cf. Sen. De ira 2.11.4, ps.-Sen. De mor. 61). PS491, cf. PS515, PS551, PS683 (where remembering is called the ‘interest’ on the gift). 129 PS91, PS582, PS535, PS104, cf. PS65, PS351 (?). PS541. 131 Sim. fr. 67 (Bergk), Mor. 784c. Od. 9.34, D. Chr. 44.1, Lucian Patr. enc. 1. PS664, PS680.

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commonwealth, looks after his own,’ and ‘everyone is safe where one is defended’.133 It is taken for granted that exile is bad: an exile is like an unburied corpse.134 Along with doing good to your friends and fellow citizens goes doing ill to your enemies. ‘Who wants to do ill can always find a reason.’135 ‘Evil demands injury.’136 Friendship and enmity are, indeed, two sides of the same coin: the man with many friends must accept having enemies too.137 ‘There is no room for tears when your enemy is destroyed.’138 Publilius is unusual among gnomic collections in including a number of quotations about war and about how victors should behave to their enemies. ‘Prepare for war in peacetime.’ ‘Prepare for war for a long time that you may win quickly.’139 Some at least of his sayings are ostensibly directed at generals, and the quality of the general is important.140 So is his behaviour: ‘It is honourable to win, cruel to oppress, seemly to forgive.’141 You should be fair even to your enemies; you should also, however, be prudent and not make friends with your enemies, unless you think it will convert them into friends without cost to yourself.142 Within friendship, even a certain amount of conflict can be contained: ‘Rivalry is good’ says Pliny, quoting Hesiod, when it spurs friends to do better than each other.143 So is plain speaking: ‘If you bear with your friend’s vices, you make them your own.’144 Publilius’ collection, as the largest single gnomology of the period by far, promotes a number of other qualities by which good social relations are maintained, or bad ones avoided. Good people have a responsibility to see that evil does not prosper. ‘The man who lets a sin go invites blame.’ ‘The evil of a few men is the destruction of many.’145 Nor is it enough to look after one’s own interests: ‘The man who is good on his own behalf should be called bad.’146 To that end, it may be better not to get too used to good things lest one become blasé.147 A quality which may or may not contribute to social harmony, depending on the way it is used, is anger. Publilius’ view of anger is complex. Anger is frightening, especially when the angry man has power.148 The angry must 133 134 138 140 143 145 146

PS685, PS696, cf. PS185 (on the desirability of helping one’s patria), PS732 (injustice to the innocent puts the whole state as it were in exile). 135 PS377. 136 PS674. 137 PS621. PS705, PS182. 139 PS513 (cf. Veget. De re milit. 3 pr., D. Chr. 1.1), PS148. PS326, cf. PS334, PS407, PS665. 141 PS733. 142 PS142, PS106. PS159. 144 PS10, cf. PS522. Ep. 3.8 (Hes. Op. 24). PS277, PS533, cf. PS113, PS205. By way of disincentive, Publilius claims that what bad men do soon fails (117). 147 PS192. 148 PS214, cf. PS184. PS357.

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be careful that their emotion does not outrun their control, nor that they pick a fight with someone stronger than themselves.149 To fight the law or one’s own children, too, brings nothing but grief, while ‘When the angry man comes to himself he is angry with himself.’150 ‘Slowly but terribly the wise mind grows angry’ sums up the positive side of Publilius’ view. ‘The wrath of an upright man is weightiest,’151 but ‘anger is quick to die down in the good man’.152 Until it does, however, ‘avoid the angry man for a while . . .’.153 4. Intelligence and foolishness Apart from friends, what the reader of gnomai most needs to pilot him through the tricky seas of human interaction is practical wisdom – in Latin prudentia or sapientia, in Greek, phronêsis and its cognates, euboulia or sophia. He needs to be able to use his mind, his reason – mens, ratio, nous, phrên, logos or logismos. Many gnomai commend practical wisdom. ‘Phronêsis is the greatest good always.’154 It makes men good: ‘A man who looks at all these affairs with reason (to logismos) rejects evil and chooses good.’155 Sometimes reason is regarded as making virtue better: ‘It is right that we should praise and admire men who are good (kosmious) by nature, but those who are good by reason (logismos) are more worthy still.’156 It is a short step from there to: ‘The mind is a most prophetic god in us,’157 and, ‘Phronêsis in a good cause is a blessing.’158 Reason is essential to life: ‘What is more than enough? Phronêsis . . . What is more necessary than wealth? Phronimotês.’159 One should therefore ‘take advice from a wise (sophos) man’.160 The wise watch other people to avoid making their mistakes.161 They play safe, make plans, take precautions, and are careful not to initiate projects which they may later regret.162 ‘Caution is always hateful, but it makes for wisdom.’ ‘The plan that cannot be changed is a bad plan.’163 In uncertainty, the wise man takes counsel, though when truth is at stake, he acts decisively.164 Even if as a result of dealing with one’s affairs with wisdom, for some reason they go wrong, ‘it is the mark of a 149 151 152 153 154 156 158 161 163

150 PS344, PS345 (the law), PS514 (one’s children), PS311. PS643, PS531, cf. PS241, PS319. PS695, PS230, cf. PS66, PS127, PS550, PS624. PS87, PS88, cf. PS289 (quoted by Sen. ep. 94.28). PS288 (the quotation ends, ‘. . . but your enemy for a long time’). 155 Bartoletti 1966 fr. F no. 18, Philemon. P. Oxy. 3006.16. 157 P. Bour. 1 gnome 6. [Isoc.] Nic. 46. Conversely, intelligence makes bad men worse (PS33). 159 Kenyon 1909 col. 3. ll. 10, 12. 160 P. Lond. Lit. 253, cf. PS70. P. Iand. 5.77. 162 PS320, PS124, PS151, PS155, PS162, PS163, PS624, PS130, PS125. PS60, PS177. 164 PS141, PS575, cf. PS579. PS352, PS403, cf. PS390, PS651.

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wise man to bear loss rightly . . .’.165 We have already come across a reason why the wisest of men may fare badly: ‘I want a drop of tychê or a cask of phrênôn’ sums it up.166 For Publilius, prudentia encourages one always to be alert and ‘to watch whatever you can lose’.167 ‘By being cautious even the blind walk in safety.’168 ‘The unlucky had always best do nothing.’169 This leads Publilius to connect intelligence, courage and cowardice in an unusual way. ‘No-one ever got to the top through fear,’170 but for ordinary people, a judicious blend of courage and prudence, not to say fearfulness, facilitates social life. ‘The mind which knows how to fear knows how to progress safely.’ ‘The man who fears every ambush falls into none.’171 Fear usefully restrains the wicked.172 Having said that, on balance it is better to have more courage than fear. ‘Courage doesn’t know how to give in to catastrophe.’173 ‘Courage grows with daring, fear with delaying.’174 ‘By patience and courage a man makes himself happy.’175 ‘The man who is always fearful is damned every day.’176 Educational papyri are particularly keen to emphasize that phronêsis can be acquired in school. ‘Letters are the beginning of understanding (tou phronein).’177 ‘Letters are a treasure, and what you learn never dies,’ as Trimalchio sentimentally expresses it.178 ‘. . . Above all, train your intellect (phronêsis), for the greatest thing in a small space is a sound mind (nous) in a sound body,’179 says ps.-Isocrates at the culmination of his letter to Demonicus. The best ornaments of a man, he assures his pupil, are modesty, justice and sôphrosynê,180 and they are also his greatest safeguard: ‘Believe that your staunchest bodyguard lies in the virtue of your friends, the loyalty of your citizens and your own phronêsis . . .’181 (Another teacher of wisdom, in gnomai as in proverbs, is poverty: ‘Poverty makes a man try all sorts of things.’182 Age too may bring wisdom, though not always: ‘Sense, not age, discovers wisdom.’183 ) 165 166 168 170

171 174 177 180 182 183

Bartoletti 1966, Epangellomenos, cf. PS84 (good ideas may fail but they do not die, cf. Liv. 22.39.19), PS76. Though one must not delay too long (PS140, cf. Liv. 35.12.3). 167 PS7, cf. PS102, PS167, PS520. P. Oxy. 2661.15, cf. PSI 4.280. 169 PS422. PS697. PS471. Valerius Maximus is unusual among authors of wisdom literature in attributing it explicitly to the whole Roman people, and this (ironically) is probably one of his less ‘popular’ features. Below, pp. 137–8. 172 PS398. 173 PS447. PS3, PS594, cf. PS459, PS555. 175 PS512. 176 PS112, cf. PS187, PS425, PS458, PS500. PS43, cf. PS227, PS298, PS547. 178 Petr. 46. 179 [Isoc.] Ad Dem. 40 (P. Oxy. 1095, 1812, Shelton 1981). Brashear 1986. 181 [Isoc.] Ad Nic. 21 (Keil 1884). [Isoc.] Ad Dem. 15 (P. Köln 7.308). PS247 (close to Z5.72, cf. Apul. De mag. 18, Ov. Ars 2.43). PS649, cf. PS722 (one can be born wise), PS605 (take advice from a senior), PS703.

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Phronêsis is usually applied to the outer world and human relations, but the related theme of examining oneself, understanding oneself and being intellectually in control of oneself also makes a regular appearance in these texts. ‘Know yourself,’184 the bald advice of the Seven Sages, appears several times in gnomic papyri and is probably the most quoted gnome in all literature.185 ‘It is necessary to know yourself, if you would understand your affairs and what you should do,’186 says a gnome of the second or third century, amplifying the famous dictum. A number of quotations encourage people to regulate themselves with a view to making friends and impressing people. Even more common is a stronger demand: ‘Rule yourself.’187 ‘[Restrain yourself?], if you have a bad temper,’188 and the same theme appears numerous times with minor variations. ‘Being a man, learn how to conquer anger.’189 Anger (along perhaps with love) is notoriously the passion which most disastrously darkens and leads astray the mind (another gnome, a fragment of Plutarch’s Quaestiones convivales, includes the same idea, saying that one of the things that makes a bad person bad is that their deliberative faculty is as if drunk190 ). Even when one is not angry, self-control is worth practising. An unfortunately incomplete gnome advises a child ‘ . . . to all, if you would do well (hyperechês) in life’.191 Yet another advises the reader, ‘Do not hear or see what is not to your advantage.’192 We shall return to the inner life of ethical agents in Chapter Seven, but it is worth noting here that it is a significant presence among gnomic sayings, and that the rationale for restraining anger is largely utilitarian. 184 185 186 187 188 189

190 191 192

PSI 9.1093. E.g. Lucian Salt. 81, Plu. Mor. 36a, 49b, 65f, 116d, Epict. Ench. 1.2.5–11, 2.10.10–13, 3.22.108; Wilkins 1917. BS l. 16. BS l. 18, cf. PS40, PS77, PS110, PS137. Versions of this very common saying appear at Liv. 30.14.7, Sen. ep. 71.36, 90.35, 113.30, ps.-Sen. De mor. 82. Milne 1922 l. 7. P. Oxy. 3006.22, BS 1.17, PS290. Cf. PS290, cf. Plu. Mor. 233d: you must rule yourself before you can rule anyone else; PS50, cf. PS51, Brashear 1986; P. Bour. 1, gnome 16; P. Ross. Georg. 1.12. See further below, pp. 204–6. 714d–16c (Messeri Savorelli and Pintaudi 1997: 174–7). Milne 1922 l. 8. P. Oxy. 2661.4, cf. Vit. Aes. 109. According to a gnome from second-century Oxyrhynchus, ‘The farmer tames the earth, the philosopher, nature. It is necessary for men who intend to become good to exercise the body with gymnastics, the mind (psyche) with words (logois).’ A link is implied here between education in words – above all rhetoric, but also perhaps literature – and the mind. Ps.-Isocrates too is concerned with the contribution of education to regulating the mind and temper (Ad Dem. 21 (P. Köln 7.308); cf. Nic. 29).

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Foolishness is always bad.193 The foolish do not understand themselves or know their own ignorance.194 They are malleable and complaisant, lack foresight, fail to choose between options or make hasty judgements they later regret.195 ‘It is too late to take advice when one is in danger.’196 Only when they feel the pain of a mistake do they listen to advice, and that is too late.197 Pessimistically, ‘If you are not wise, there is no point in your listening to the wise,’198 says Publilius. 5. Speech and lies Closely related to intelligence, because it takes intelligence to know when and how to use it, is speech. The word is a powerful force in human affairs. ‘What’s strong in life?’ asks the third-century riddle collection. ‘Man. Word’.199 ‘A man’s stamp (character) is known by his speech,’ says a text of the second or third century, optimistically, though Plutarch, quoting Menander, says, ‘the speaker’s nature, not his speech, persuades’.200 Quintilian would have agreed with both of them, concerned as he is with the orator’s ethos, the character he projects, as an important part of his persuasive power.201 Often enough, however, words are misused, and then they become both evil and dangerous. ‘O tongue, an evil hard for men to wrestle with, who love to decorate foul things with beautiful words . . .’202 ‘O Zeus,’ asks another quotation, ‘why did you give . . . wicked men a good tongue and good men no power of speech?’203 Several texts exhort the reader directly or by implication not to follow the path of evil speech: ‘O Phania, do not heed vain slander, for a lie dirties life . . .’204 ‘A lie dirties life’ agrees a fourth-century school text,205 while a papyrus from Karanis also indicates, through a sadly fragmentary text, that cursing or evil words are a bad thing.206 It is not out of place to threaten potential malefactors with the consequences of lies or evil speech.207 It may also be prudent to warn the virtuous 193 196 197 199 200 201 204 205 207

194 PS193, PS416, cf. PS451. 195 PS437, PS316, PS670, PS309, PS266, PS32. PS122, PS210. PS684 (close to the proverb cited by Sen. ep. 22.1, ‘for a gladiator to take advice in the arena’). 198 PS472. PS558, PS684. Kenyon 1909 col. 3.4. Free speech is an index of freedom in a state, according to Publilius (PS724, cf. PS165, ‘The tongue of a condemned man can speak, but has no force’). BS l. 26, Plu. Mor. 801a. Cf. Quint. 11.1.30 (‘A man speaks as he is,’ cited as a Greek proverb). 202 Bartoletti 1966 fr. F no. 16. 203 Bartoletti 1966 fr. H no. 20. Quint. 6.2. MPER 3.24.1–2, cf. O. Claud. 184–7, four writing exercises with the same line written on them (= Men. Kith. fr. 10). 206 P. Mich. 7.430. P. Bour. 1, gnome 24, cf. PS74. Goodspeed 1905: 181–2; Pap. Flor. 21.28 (editor’s translation), Pap. Flor. 21.30, cf. PS150 (evil speech, even of an enemy, is wrong), PS216.

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not to assume that other people’s words are as reliable as their own: ‘Do not assume an accusing [prosecution?] speech is trustworthy.’208 Another form of lying speech is more of a problem for the wealthy and powerful: ‘Abhor flatterers as you would deceivers,’209 ps.-Isocrates warns Demonicus. In one quotation, suspicion of accusing speech spreads to become a general injunction against frequenting the agora, with its many possible kinds of public speech, commercial, forensic and deliberative: ‘Do not hurry to the agora, nor babble with outstretched hands, for it is mad.’210 Another gnome, however, seems to favour rhetorical persuasion as a better method of gaining co-operation between people than the alternatives: ‘Seek to persuade, not to compel, for the compelled man is hostile, the persuaded one wise.’211 A number of texts content themselves with recommending the reader to, ‘speak, if it is right; if not, keep silence’.212 Speak ‘in right measure’, and not if you do not have to, suggests another text from fourth-century Hermoupolis.213 Ps.-Isocrates says the same at characteristically greater length.214 This is all the more true since, as Quintilian says, quoting Terence, obsequiousness makes friends, telling the truth enemies.215 ‘Say the sweetest things,’216 suggests a text from Oxyrhynchus, while Publilius is particularly against people offering rebuke or well-meaning advice to people when they are down.217 A rare voice in favour of speech, and not particularly weighty speech at that, comes from Publilius: ‘A talkative companion carries you along the road.’218 Ps.-Isocrates, of course, has his own objections to the rhetoric of his own day, and sometimes contrasts the virtues engendered by his own philosophical school with the shallow accomplishments of other people’s students.219 We may wonder whether to a reader in Roman Egypt, the passage read as an injunction to reject rhetoric for philosophy, or as encouragement to quietism – staying out of the public arena altogether. 6. Women, family and love From social relations in general, we move on to gnomai about women and the family. A fragment of Plutarch’s Quaestiones convivales discusses why it is 208 211 214 215 216 218

209 [Isoc.] Ad Dem. 30 (P. K¨ 210 PSI 2.120.53–4. Milne 1922: 11. oln 7.308), cf. Ad Nic. 28. 212 Milne 1922: 10, cf. Vit. Aes. 109–10. 213 Nachtergael 1991. PSI 2.120.50–1. [Isoc.] Ad Dem. 41 (P. Oxy. 1095, 1812, Shelton 1981). 8.5.4 (Ter. Andr. 68), though (PS348) if you ask for an opinion, you must let someone speak freely. 217 PS101, PS486. PSI 2.120 l. 57. 219 E.g. [Isoc.] Ad Dem. 3–4 (M¨ PS116. uller 1996).

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customary to invite so many people to wedding suppers, and concludes that on such an important occasion it is partly for fear of leaving anyone out, and partly to cement the union by spreading goodwill as widely as possible.220 Another fragment of the same work discusses what constitutes the best home. Solon says that it is one where the head of house shares his worldly goods with family and friends who have good sense and discretion. Bias says that it is a home where the head, because of his own character, maintains the same character inside it as the law compels him to maintain outside it. Thales says that it is where the head of the household can have the greatest leisure; Cleobulus, that it is where the members of the household love its head more than fear him; Pittacus, that it is the home where nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous, and Chilon that it is like a monarchy.221 In these passages, the household is both an important social nexus in its own right and a meeting place for other social networks. There is nothing at all surprising about this to Roman historians: what is surprising is that this view is so rarely aired in wisdom texts, which in general have little to say about the household and family, and even less that links them with the wider social world. Gnomologies on papyrus are almost universally negative about women.222 ‘What is sweet in life that we must flee? Woman’, says the third-century riddle collection.223 According to another third-century text, published by Reitzenstein, when you want to take a wife, the ugly ones disgust you and the beautiful ones make you fear adultery, and choke you with simultaneous desire and grief.224 A fragmentary text of the fourth century hints at a similar attitude with a mention of ‘marrying troubles’.225 ‘Don’t trust a woman with your livelihood,’ says a third-century gnomology from Oxyrhynchus,226 ‘for a woman knows nothing but what she wants.’ The same text avers a few lines further on, ‘sea and fire and woman are a triple evil’, a sentiment echoed twice in a later school text.227 A school text from second-century Luxor commends Euripides for calling the face of a woman the greatest of all evils.228 In context, the gnome, ‘a sympathetic wife is a man’s best possession’229 comes as a surprise: its language may be that of ownership, but at least it thinks there is something good about a woman. One other text makes a practical suggestion rather than 220 222

223 227 228

221 Mor. 155c–d (P. Oxy. 3685). Mor. 666d ff. (Andorlini 1996). Stobaeus makes an interesting comparison; his picture is mixed but he includes many more positive quotations about wives than earlier Greek gnomologies. He quotes, for instance, a fragment of Dio Chrysostom: ‘Piety for a wife is to love her husband.’ (Stob. 4.23–59). 224 Reitzenstein 1900. 225 P. Freib. 4.45. 226 P. Oxy. 2661.12–13. Kenyon 1909 col. 3.8. P. Oxy. 2661.20, cf. P. Bour. 1, gnomes 9 (‘women and lionesses are equally savage’) and 23. 229 P. Oxy. 3006.13. Milne 1923: 41.

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a judgement, though again it is not, in implication, markedly favourable to women: ‘Marry from among your equals. For those who marry above them acquire a slave-mistress in the house.’230 Publilius’ view of women is mixed. He too thinks there are good marriages: ‘Mind, not body, makes a lasting marriage.’ ‘A wife faithful to her husband rules her home through submission.’ ‘An accommodating wife soon makes you hate prostitutes.’231 On the other hand, women are vain, manipulative, exploitative, scheming and generally troublesome.232 ‘A woman either loves or hates: there is no middle way,’233 while prostitutes are ‘instruments of shame’.234 In much of this women are much like men. Publilius’ many dicta about love could be applied equally well to both sexes, and are usually couched in the masculine. Plutarch, quoting Menander, agrees: ‘No lover [of either sex] likes being neglected.’235 ‘Death and love can’t be evaded,’ even by the gods.236 Only time (or the beloved) can cure it.237 Love blazes like a torch and falls like a tear; it is painful even when it is sweet.238 When you are in love, intelligence and willpower fall by the wayside.239 Lovers are angry (until they reconcile), suspicious, tearful240 and often untruthful: ‘A lover’s oaths can be broken with impunity.’241 In general, the picture painted in gnomai of relations between parents and children is rosy. ‘Honour your parents,’ commands a second- or thirdcentury papyrus and also a quotation from ps.-Isocrates;242 ‘Respect your parents,’ says a maxim, perhaps of the Seven Wise Men,243 and another says, ‘Revere your parents like the gods.’244 A little more circumspectly, ‘Love your father’, says Publilius, ‘if he is just; if not, tolerate him.’245 A more extensive but fragmentary gnome from first-century Oxyrhynchus says that it is just to love one’s mother, who bore one and nurtured and worked for one.246 In this context, another quotation strikes a warning note: ‘Who fed you, not who bred you, is your father.’247 230 231

232 233 236 237 239 240 241 243 246 247

PSI 2.120.33–5. Cf. the proverb D6.22. PS529 (cf. PS36), PS108, PS492. This is not necessarily a difference between Greek and Latin texts: the Life of Aesop also recommends maintaining good relations with one’s wife, though it also calls women ‘rivals’ to their husbands (109). PS584, PS392 (vanity), PS153, PS384 (manipulativeness), PS381, PS365, PS376, PS217. 234 PS394. 235 Mor. 491c (Men. fr. 757 Kock). PS6. PS478, PS22, cf. Liv. 9.4.16, Plin. Paneg. 40.3; D4.49 is also close in spirit. 238 PS38, PS252, PS306, PS312, cf. PS16 (and very similar, Virg. Ecl. 8.108). PS18, PS42, PS31. PS5 (will), PS15, PS131, PS307, PS314 (wisdom). PS121, PS284, PS154 (angry), PS13, PS16 (suspicious), PS19 (tearful). 242 P. Ross. Georg. 1.12, Ad Dem. 16 (P. K¨ PS37. Cf. the proverb D3.63. oln 7.308). 244 Milne 1922 ostrakon 5. 245 PS8. Oikonomides 1980, cf. PS659. P. Oxy. 3004.4–7. P. Bour. 1, gnome 10. This was not legally the case either in classical Athens, where it was coined, or in the Roman Empire, which raises the possibility of disputes between the law and family feeling.

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‘The company of parents and children is sweet’ attests another secondor third-century gnomology – twice.248 ‘To kill an infant’, says Publilius, ‘is barbaric, not brave.’249 A quotation from ps.-Isocrates has some germane advice: ‘Treat your parents as you would have your children treat you.’250 Gnomai have little to say about siblings, but Plutarch does once quote Hesiod: ‘It is wrong to treat a friend the same as a brother.’251 Like all wisdom genres, gnomai have little to say about slavery. Slaves are to be kept in their place: ‘The master who fears his slaves is lower than a slave.’252 A papyrus from third-century Oxyrhynchus preserves three quotations from Euripides, all of which claim that the condition of slavery is not incompatible with having a free mind or being a good man.253 Quotations from Publilius indicate the opposite: here slavery is a metaphor for a shameful and unpleasant condition of life.254 Unusually, among Aesop’s gnomic instructions to his Egyptian pupil Helios in the Life of Aesop, is an injunction to ‘look after your slaves, and share what you have with them, so that they may not only obey you as their master, but honour you as their benefactor’.255 In comparison with gnomai about friendship and other social relations, a good deal of whose advice is highly realistic when it is not grimly pessimistic, gnomai about the family are largely positive. This may be because families are less of a concern to readers of gnomologies: they are surely not seen as less important than other types of relationship, if only on practical and legal grounds, but perhaps they are seen as less complicated. 7. Justice and the law One factor which might be expected, ideally at least, to palliate social conflicts arising from inequality, is the law. Gnomai (like exempla) have more to say about the law than either proverbs or fables; like every genre, they also have much to say about justice. Their ideas are less easy to weave into a coherent set of ideas, however, than those on any topic we have examined so far. Dikê in Greek, iustitia in Latin and related words, have three broad ranges of meaning: those to do with divine or ideal justice; those to do with the law; and those to do with social harmony or balance: ‘normal’, ‘balanced’, ‘conventional’ and the like. Justice as an ideal, sponsored by the 248 251 254 255

249 PS123. 250 Ad Dem. 14 (P. Lund. 1.3). P. Iand. 5.77.7, 9. 252 PS363, cf. PS366. 253 Maehler 1967 no. 7. Mor. 491a (Hes. Op. 707). PS11, PS61, PS114, PS489, PS537, PS616, PS641. 109 (transl. adapted from Daly’s in Hansen 1998: 154). Aesop himself, of course, is a slave, but such an unusual one and so far from being oppressed by his state, that his dicta read more like the impartial advice of a wise man than the plea of an interested party. On the connection between the Life of Aesop and gnomai, see Luzzato 2003.

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gods, appears several times: ‘What is pleasing to the gods? Justice’.256 ‘The gods are saviours of just men.’257 ‘The divine brings the bad to justice.’258 On the human level, ‘It is a just thing to love one’s mother.’259 One gnome hints at metaphysical retribution for the unjust (presumably, since in this life the unjust tend to do rather well): ‘[All] unjust gain brings harm to the one who gains it.’260 In the same spirit, rewards are predicted in another gnome for the just: ‘The fruit of just men does not perish.’261 On the other hand, tychê, if not the other gods, is seen as capable of acting in what humans see as unjust terms: ‘Alas, what an injustice it is when tychê takes away a man’s position while his way of life remains.’262 Ps.-Isocrates is strongly of the view that the good ruler establishes and practises good laws for his people.263 Justice is better than wealth, brings glory to its practitioners even (sometimes only) after their death and is thoroughly virtuous.264 He offers the reader a nice blend, typical in these essays, of idealism, political pragmatism and self-interest, salted by occasional, frankly cynical observations which make it obvious that ps.Isocrates thinks that in the real world, injustice occurs in the best-regulated societies. Publilius provides more gnomai about the law than any other collection, and the quotations that survive are notably diverse, sometimes in direct conflict with each other. It is at least not in doubt that the law is important: ‘To take away the laws is to take away one’s first aid.’265 ‘Where the law is strong, the people are strong.’266 ‘If you didn’t punish misdeeds, you would encourage crime.’267 The law keeps order when people forget themselves: ‘The law sees the angry man; the angry man does not see the law.’ ‘Anger tends to forget the law.’268 There is a certain amount of advice to judges. ‘In judging it is criminal to be hasty.’269 ‘A judge is condemned when he acquits the guilty,’270 or terrifies the innocent. On the other hand, a judge showing pity does the law no good.271 ‘Obey the law,’272 is the bottom line for any ordinary citizen who wishes to stay out of trouble. A number of quotations express confidence in the benignity of the law when faced with the genuinely innocent. ‘A good case will not be afraid of any judge.’273 Others are not so sure. ‘Do not assume 256 260 262 263 264 267 269 271

257 P. Oxy. 3006.21. 258 P. Oxy. 3006.17. 259 P. Oxy. 3004.4. Kenyon 1909 col. 3.18. 261 P. Oxy. 3006.12. P. Oxy. 3006.3. Cf. PS183, ‘Even those who do injustice hate it.’ Bartoletti 1966 fr. D no. 12, Antiphanes. [Isoc.] Ad Dem. 18 (Müller and Poethke 1980), cf. Ad Nic. 17 (Schubert 1997). 265 PS663. 266 PS329. [Isoc.] Ad Dem. 38–9 (Shelton 1981), cf. PS292. 268 PS344, PS345. PS439, PS516, PS587. 270 PS296. PS293, cf. PS518, PS673, PS698 (‘A judge judges himself as much as the case.’). 272 Oikonomides 1980, [Isoc.] Ad Dem. 16. 273 PS98, cf. PS455, PS474, PS661. PS171.

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an accusing [prosecution?] speech is trustworthy,’274 perhaps indicates that someone doubts the practice of law is always beyond reproach. ‘When the man who accuses, judges, force not law rules,’275 and ‘it’s a good use of coin to bribe the judge’, add to that impression; in the circumstances, it is perhaps harsh to say that ‘he who flees justice admits his guilt’.276 There is some disagreement about whether the innocent or the guilty are more likely to be eloquent on their own behalf,277 which in turn casts doubt on the gnome ‘you wrong yourself when you do not vindicate yourself’.278 Publilius has a quietist streak, advising the reader not to get involved pleading another person’s cause.279 ‘He who does no injustice does not need the law’ goes further, and is capable of sinister interpretation.280 8. Gods, the metaphysical and humanity The subject of justice brings us to another centrally important theme of gnomic sayings: the role of the metaphysical in human life. The gods play a greater role in Publilius and elsewhere in literature than they do in papyrus gnomologies. But the most talked-of metaphysical power everywhere is tychê or fortuna, fortune. The twin themes which most often emerge are that fortune is wholly uncontrollable by human beings and that it can radically change your life. The fourth-century P. Harr. 2.174 is very fragmentary, but it is clear that it contained a long and pessimistic quotation about tychê: the whole cosmos is nothing without fortune; the sailor, the farmer, the army, the city, the rich man, the ordinary people, are all equally powerless before it. ‘Taunt no man with his misfortune, for tychê is common to all and the future is a thing unseen,’ says ps.-Isocrates.281 A third- or fourth-century papyrus puts it differently: ‘The man to whom tychê has not granted victory in his sleep [i.e. without effort], will run in vain, even if he run faster than Ladas.’282 ‘There is only one way to guard against fortune – not to risk it too often,’ says Seneca the Elder, quoting an epigram by Diocles of Carystus.283 If Fortune seems to be flattering you, beware: she is probably about to make a fool of you, and not just once. ‘Fortune is glass: as it shines, it breaks.’284 ‘You will find fortune faster than you will keep it,’ and ‘you will 274 275 278 281 282 284

Milne 1922: 12, cf. PS237 (‘A grave charge, even when lightly made, is damaging’). 276 PS85, PS204. 277 PS455, PS557. PS709, PS729. 279 PS48, cf. PS466. 280 Milne 1908 ostrakon 7. PS323, cf. PS291. Ad Dem. 29 (Müller and Poethke 1980), cf. P. Oxy. 3006.4. In quotations about fortune, it is often hard to be sure whether or not it/she is being treated as a deity. 283 Contr. 1.8.16. Pap. Flor. 21.27. PS219 (fortune like glass), PS197, PS203, PS213, PS671, cf. PS255, PS280, PS335, PS602.

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lose least when you have gained least’.285 ‘There is no worse punishment for a man than misfortune,’ except perhaps remembering better times. But while you have it, nothing else can help you so much.286 ‘Whoever thinks through wisdom (phronêsis) to fare well is a fool; for all things in life come about not through wisdom, but through tychê,’ reports a fourth-century papyrus. ‘Man thinks one thing, Fortune another.’287 The third-century riddle collection asks, ‘What’s better than knowledge? Tychê ’.288 The power of Tychê to render the mind useless is emphasized in another third- or fourth-century text: when Tychê strikes, good intentions and experience disappear and everything a man has created is destroyed.289 A text from Bartoletti’s papyrus agrees: ‘Tychê, weakening reason and forethought in mid-process, not finishing but changing its purpose, makes everything an orphan.’290 Another quotation from Bartoletti is more ambiguous, and may leave room for rational planning as well as tychê – or it may simply reaffirm that however much one plans, ultimately it is tychê that will decide what happens: ‘Commit yourself to fortune, after you have deliberated well.’291 Whatever happens, ‘the stupid fear fortune, the wise bear it’.292 A small number of quotations suggest that there was some room for debate about the power of tychê. ‘It is not enough only always to have hope in the face of tychê, child, for those things that one wants, but also oneself to seize tychê.’293 On the other hand, ‘faith, when one is poor, means fortune is returning’.294 And again, ‘learning carefully, wise young man, never blame me, Tychê, for I have no strength’.295 The best thing we have from the gods, says ps.-Isocrates, is good fortune (eutychia), while the best thing we have in ourselves is good judgement (euboulia).296 Not even the gods, however, reliably control fortune: ‘Even the god has hardly any power over the fortunate man.’297 Tychê was sometimes worshipped as a divinity in her own right: according to Publilius, the 285 286 287 289 291 294 296

297

PS456, PS393, cf. Hor. Carm. 1.34.12–16, 3.29.49–52, Juv. 7.197–8, Ov. Trist. 3.6.41, Ov. Ex Pont. 4.3.35–6. PS446, PS545 (remembering better times), PS222, PS525, though ‘There’s no fortune so good that you can’t complain about it’ (PS429). 288 Kenyon 1909 col. 3.11, cf. PS699. PS253, cf. Curt. 6.6.27, Liv. 44.40.3, Petr. 82. 290 Bartoletti 1966 fr. E no. 14, Auletrides. P. Schubart 20. 292 PS648. 293 Bartoletti 1966 fr. C no. 11, Philemon. Bartoletti 1966 fr. D no. 11, Potamon. 295 Pintaudi and Sijpesteijn 1989 no. 7. PS656. Ad Dem. 34 (Müller and Poethke 1980). More mysterious is this from Bartoletti’s papyrus (a slightly garbled quotation from Euripides’ Hypsipyle): ‘O foolish mortal men, in vain they say that tychê exists but not the gods . . . for if tychê exists, there is no need of gods, but if the gods have strength, tychê is nothing.’ PS135, cf. PS169.

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complaints of human beings were what elevated her.298 Ps.-Isocrates treats Tychê as a divinity and says that men who do wrong transgress against themselves and Tychê, who gave them wealth, reputation and friends.299 Tychê, by definition, hands out good and bad fortune at random.300 ‘I hate good fortune (tychê) in a luckless (atychês) body.’301 ‘Hapless man, whose reason plans great things but to whom the god (daimon) has given a weak tychê.’302 ‘High above us all, Fortune directs our lives,’ says Trimalchio, in one of the many gnomic ‘quotations’ invented for him by Petronius.303 Fate (moira, fatum) is a more straightforward power than tychê, if in some ways a more sinister one, since when it is invoked in Greek and Latin literature, something bad is generally going to happen. It makes few appearances in gnomic quotations from Egypt, but when it does, it is, like tychê, universal and ineluctable: ‘O Fate, so hard for men to wrestle with . . .’ says a quotation in Bartoletti’s papyrus.304 ‘A bad death is an insult from fate,’ says Publilius, in a similar mood, and, ‘What you can’t change you must bear as it happens.’305 The gods also, for the most part, attract relatively straightforward and conventional mentions in gnomologies. ‘Follow the god . . . Honour the gods.’306 ‘Honour the god.’307 ‘Show devotion to the gods, especially in public . . . Fear the gods.’308 ‘Follow your ancestors in the worship of the gods.’309 One fragmentary text preserves the epithet ‘Zeus to be many-times honoured . . .’.310 The gods remain mysterious, however: ‘Few understand what the god gives.’ ‘It is foolishness to complain about the man whom the gods love.’311 The gods are all-powerful in human life: as one school text says, rather surprisingly (and probably under Christian influence), ‘It is Zeus that sends your daily bread.’312 A fragmentary quotation begins, ‘. . . in heaven the deathless foreknowledge of the gods . . .’.313 298 299 300 302 304 305 306 307 308 309 311

PS180. Ad Dem. 49 (Müller and Poethke 1980, missing from the middle of P. Amh. 2.25, Bingen 1966: 340). 301 Bartoletti 1966 fr. D no. 13. Bartoletti 1966 fr. D no. 12. 303 Petr. 55, cf. 120, 123. Bartoletti 1966 fr F. no. 19. 1966 fr. E no. 15. Necessity also makes an occasional appearance (e.g. Kenyon 1909 col. 3. ll. 13, 20), as the teacher of men or nature. PS415, PS411, cf. PS360, Hor. Carm. 1.24.19, Ov. Am. 1.2.10, Sen. ep. 107.9, ps.-Sen. De mor. 6, Virg. Aen. 5.710 (of fortune), also Sext. Pythag. 111. Oikonomides 1980, Vit. Aes. 109 (this continues, ‘honour the king, whose power demands the same honour as the god’s’). Pintaudi and Sijpesteijn 1989 ostrakon 5. Ad Dem. 13, 16 (P. Lund. 1.3, Müller and Poethke 1980). 310 P. Oxy. 3004.20. Ad Nic. 20 (Keil 1884, Schubert 1997). 312 Waddell 1932: 10. 313 P. Schubart 20. PS528, PS682.

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As we have seen, the gods are several times praised as the ultimate sponsors of justice.314 ‘Do not praise an unworthy man for his wealth; for the god changes all for the good . . . Do not forget the gods.’315 A third-century quotation from Oxyrhynchus perhaps warns of what you can expect if you do wrong: ‘Being a man, you cannot guard against the hostility of the gods.’316 ‘He who wrecks his ship twice should not blame Neptune,’ says Publilius.317 Very occasionally, the gods seem to be reproached for behaving unjustly, or at any rate incomprehensibly to human beings: so a quotation in Bartoletti’s papyrus asks why Zeus gives wicked men good tongues and good men a poor power of speech.318 In general, though, these texts’ picture of the gods is consistent and rather benign, provided that human beings treat them with the respect they demand. Complementary to these texts’ understanding of the divine is their understanding of humanity and mortality.319 ‘What is strange and paradoxical in life? Man . . .’.320 Divided in so much else, human beings are united in mortality.321 Terence’s line, ‘I am a man; nothing human do I think foreign to me,’ is one of the most popular gnomic quotations in Latin literature.322 Occasionally, we glimpse the grand side of humanity: ‘Nothing as proud as man exists,’ says Dio, quoting Euripides.323 Plutarch quotes Simonides to make the same point: ‘On every lark a crest must grow.’324 In general, however, the consensus seems to be that human beings are poor, fragile creatures. ‘Earth breeds nothing feebler than human beings,’ says Maximus of Tyre, quoting Homer.325 The commonest theme is that man is born to suffering, which he can neither predict nor avoid. ‘Many things hurt mortals.’326 ‘Man knows nothing of what he is going to suffer.’327 ‘Being a man, think about the sufferings of man and do not anticipate your tychê . . .’ says a papyrus of the third or fourth century which I quoted above.328 ‘[It is necessary?] to bear what befalls a man nobly.’329 Death comes to everyone sooner or later. ‘Whom the gods love dies young.’330 ‘Alas for us, the sum of humanity is nil,’ sighs Trimalchio.331 ‘Man is lent to life, not given.’ ‘Life is short except in evils.’ ‘Death is good 314 315 317 319 321 322 323 324 325 327 330

Kenyon 1909 col. 3.18, cf. PS702 (‘Only the god brings punishment, though many plan it’); P. Oxy. 3006.17, 21. 316 P. Oxy. 3006.8. PSI 2.120.49, 57. 318 1966 fr. F no. 20. PS331 (quoted by Gell. 17.14.4), cf. PS343 (very close to Z3.29). 320 Kenyon 1909 col. 3.1. BS 1. PS336 (‘It is a universal law which orders us to be born and die’), PS478. Ter. Heaut. 77, e.g. Plin. ep. 5.3, Sen. ep. 95.53, Juv. 15.140. 52.12 (fr. 788 Nauck), cf. Plu. Mor. 779d. Mor. 10a, cf. 809b (fr. 68 Bergk); Plutarch goes on to say, though, that this leads to strife. 326 P. Oxy. 3006.2. 41.3 (Od. 18.130). 328 P. K¨ 329 P. Oxy. 3006.7. P. Iand. 5.77.2. oln 6.246.1–2. 331 Petr. 34. Men. fr. 124 Kock, quoted by e.g. Plu. Mor. 119e, transl. Plaut. Bacch. 816.

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for a man when it ends the evils of life.’332 A few texts admit the possibility of a good death. ‘It is not death, but the approach to death, which is bitter.’ ‘Is it so bitter, then, to die?’333 ‘We men die nowhere better than where we have lived happily.’334 ‘Do not grieve for the dead, for death is necessary, but for the shamefully dead.’335 On the whole, though, we are caught between fear of death and the misery of existence.336 Perhaps surprisingly, given their mixed view of human life, gnomai are rather positive about old age. One should honour the elderly in general. ‘Revere the old, the image of the god,’ says one gnome.337 The only two lines legible on an ostrakon of the second century say, ‘Child, it is reasonable that Nestor the thrice-elderly is so wise, since he has lived three generations of human years.’338 ‘Experience speaks with a wiser tongue than youth,’ agrees Lucian, quoting Euripides.339 Ps.-Isocrates goes further, and sets up his father, an older man, as an ideal for Demonicus to imitate, for his vigour, hard work, frugality, enjoyment of his possessions, love of beauty, generosity and open-handedness, and devotion to his friends.340 Occasionally we hear of the source of human evils: ‘Being a man, remember the common tychê . . . being a man, you cannot guard against the hostility of the gods . . . remember always that you are a man.’341 ‘Many are the ways in which leisure makes evil for mortals.’342 (This pessimistic attitude to leisure perhaps fits with the exhortations to work hard which I mentioned above. This is a long way from the traditional ethos of either the Greek or Roman upper classes, and perhaps represents a lower stratum of society making a virtue of necessity. On the other hand, the idea that the wealthy should work on behalf of others, as a kind of noblesse oblige, does appear from time to time in authors of the early Empire.343 ) Human beings are not without responsibility for their own sufferings, either, whether through foolishness, greed or some other vice. ‘Everyone prefers what someone else has,’ is a common comment on human nature.344 A scattering of other quotations, together with a couple of riddles, add a few other ideas, though unsystematically: ‘Cultivate the thoughts of an 332

333 334 337 339

340 342 344

PS257, PS95, PS67, cf. PS120, PS157, PS283, PS401, PS465, PS475. On the shortness of life (a very common theme) see also Hor. Carm. 1.4.15, Hor. Sat. 2.6.97, Juv. 9.126, Sen. Contr. 7.3.8, Sen. De brev. vit. 1.1, ps.-Sen. Mon. 112, Virg. Aen. 10.467. Quoted by Quintilian (8.5.4), the first unknown, the second from Virg. Aen. 12.646. 335 PSI 2.120.29–31. 336 PS405, PS556. PS430, cf. PS675. 338 O. Claud. 184–7. P. Bour. 1 gnome 3. Am. 25 (Eurip. Phoen. 529–30), cf. Plu. Mor. 73c (Eurip. Phoen. 528) ‘Not everything about old age is bad.’ On a more ambivalent note, Publilius says that a playful old woman is death’s darling and it is wrong to be greedy in old age (PS30, PS35). 341 P. Oxy. 3006.4, 8, 18. Ad Dem. 9–10 (P. Rein. 2.79, P. Ross. Georg. 1.16). 343 E.g. Plin. ep. 7.3. P. Iand. 5.77.6. PS28, cf. Juv. 14.142, Ov. Ars 1.349, Sen. De ira 3.31.1.

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immortal, by being great in soul, but those of a mortal by enjoying in due measure the things you possess.’345 For Publilius, the man who thinks big and applies himself can do almost anything. ‘Whatever you attempt, think how you are going to succeed.’ ‘The biggest things must have small beginnings.’346 It is worth enduring a good deal in order to succeed: nothing is more satisfying than hard-won success, while idleness will get you nowhere.347 The pseudo-Plutarchan letter of consolation to Apollonius appears in fact to be the draft of a letter, and, as it stands, consists largely of dozens of gnomic quotations strung together. The author tells us that life is brief and fortune is careless: we are its playthings and no-one’s luck holds forever. Wealth and happiness are only two of the blessings that time sweeps away. There is no use in mourning, though, for death is nothing to be afraid of: it is just like sleep. Much worse would be to live in such fear of death that we were not really living. The best life is one which is well and fully lived, full of achievement. Anyway (in one of the letter’s more breathtaking voltes-face) the earth is full of evils and those who die young are luckiest. If we ‘know ourselves’, do ‘nothing in excess’ and trust in the fatherly care of the god for the human race, we will be able to live well and contemplate death calmly. A logical train of thought is not this letter’s greatest strength, but it does convey the ambivalence of gnomic texts in general towards human life and death. Life is short, precarious and frequently unpleasant. Nevertheless, our instinct is to cling to it and to dread death. An important part of our human journey is to learn to overcome this fear, by whatever means, and at the same time continue to enjoy and reap what good things come to us, without breaking our hearts over those that evade our grasp.348 9. Varia As we have seen, gnomic anthologies on papyrus, many of which come from educational contexts, are unusual in giving a certain prominence to education as a theme. Some of these texts clearly refer to formal education, and these are the ones written in teachers’ or children’s hands. ‘Letters are the beginning of understanding (tou phronein).’349 ‘Begin, good hand, beautiful letters, and a straight line, and imitate.’350 ‘What is free from 345 347 349 350

346 PS561, PS435. Ad Dem. 32 (Müller and Poethke 1980). 348 Mor. 101f–122a. PS111, PS220 (endurance), PS573, PS310. Brashear 1986 (three times), P. Bour. 1 gnome 1. Cribiore 1995, written six times; editor’s translation.

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envy in life? Philosophy’.351 (Presumably this means that philosophers do not suffer from envy, rather than that no-one envies philosophers.) ‘Honour your teacher,’ advises the Life of Aesop.352 Other gnomai (the second, at least, ironically from a school text) take a less optimistic view of formal education: ‘Pay teaches all men, not teachers.’353 ‘What is the teacher of things? Experience’.354 At least one other uses learning in a more general sense, as something that is part of all life: ‘Learn well, young man, never to blame me, Tychê, for I have no strength.’355 Imitation is an important part of formal education, and it makes many appearances in ps.-Isocrates’ advice to Demonicus and Nicocles.356 Ps.Isocrates obviously believes that they can learn from written precepts too – his own, and also, for instance, the gnomai of the poets.357 On the most general level, learning is clearly important in the world of popular wisdom: how else does one acquire wisdom and understanding of the world? We may further ask how important learning to read and writing is in the world of Greek and Roman popular wisdom, where the maxims of the poets and famous prose writers, the histories of wise men and famous ancestors are such an important source of advice. One answer is that it depends on how many people we imagine acquiring this material by reading it, and how widely it was passed around in speech. Given the likely low percentage of literates in the Roman Empire, even in so bureaucratic a province as Egypt, if we are to believe that this material is popular in any real sense, we must assume that it was widely orally disseminated. And indeed there is no reason to assume it was not, and every reason, when we compare the way sayings of literary origin spread through other societies, to assume that it was. What does seem likely, however, is that the fact that much widespread wisdom was recorded and passed on in written form as well as orally, made a difference to the way it was regarded in the Roman world. This is an environment in which reading was symbolically associated with wisdom and the dissemination of wisdom, even if many people did not acquire it that way. If this is so, we may see another gnome as putting the commoner’s point of view: ‘Less learning and more clarity (in your speech)’.358 When all else fails, human life may be sustained by hope. ‘What’s sweet in life? Hope’.359 ‘What doesn’t loathe life? Hope’.360 ‘An unfortunate man 351 352 353 356 357 359

Kenyon 1909 col. 3.7. 109 (even more than your parents, for whom your affection should be natural). 354 Kenyon 1909 col. 3.2. 355 Pintaudi and Sijpesteijn 1989 ostrakon 7. MPER 3.25.l. E.g. Ad Dem. 11, 36, Ad Nic. 12ff., Nic. 58–9, 61. 358 Gell. 12.5.6. Ad Dem. 43 (P. Oxy. 1095, 1812, Müller and Poethke 1980). 360 Kenyon 1909 col. 3.14. Kenyon 1909 col. 3.3.

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is saved by hope,’361 is the last surviving line of a third-century gnomology from Oxyrhynchus. Although a number of other gnomai, such as those which assert that bad men will be punished in time or by the gods, seem to encourage hope by implication, direct references to hope are rather muted in tone – rather commenting on the phenomenon that ‘hope springs eternal in the human breast’ than vigorously endorsing it. One quotation goes further and takes a tone of grim fatalism: ‘It is not always enough only to have hope in the face of tychê.’362 Finally, it is worth noting the wide scatter of qualities which appear once or twice in collections or elsewhere in literature. Drunkenness is several times mentioned as a bad thing.363 Physical health and beauty, the subject of several proverbs, make an occasional appearance in Publilius: ‘Don’t think anything foul that conduces to health.’ ‘A shapely face is a silent testimonial.’364 Other gnomai relate to all human beings impartially: ‘Sleep brings a pause to all evils.’365 ‘Be gentle (praus),’ says a second- or thirdcentury text from Philadelphia, and follows it with, ‘there is nothing more useful in life than the pursuit of gentleness’.366 conclusion The world of gnomai is the richest, the most complex and nuanced we have yet encountered. It is a world of glory and opportunity as well as fragility and danger. We are urged to think like gods and aim high, to imitate the best men and to rule ourselves in order to rule others. In this world, education can transform one’s prospects, intelligence is like a god inside us and foolishness is largely ignored. Old age can be a time of achievement and respect instead of hardship and ridicule, and death need not eclipse one’s reputation. Most of this material is most naturally seen as addressing the higher, if not the highest, levels of society, but what is interesting is that it is copied and used so much more widely than that. It seems to indicate that middling social ranks (such as the readers of elementary school texts in Egyptian villages) are aspiring to aristocratic values, and perhaps even (if gnomai were spoken as well as read) the poor. Some of the material more obviously addresses the more lowly, and here we find the fear of poverty, wariness of power and encouragement to be content with what you have, that we have seen in proverbs and fables. 361 363 364

362 Bartoletti 1966 fr. C no. 7. P. Oxy. 3006.26. Plu. Mor. 714d–716c (Pintaudi 1997: 174–7), MPER 3.24.8, P. Iand. 5.77.4, Vit. Aes. 109. 365 P. Oxy. 3006.5. 366 BS: 19–21. PS468, PS199, Vit. Aes. 109.

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This is a notably materialistic world. Wealth (not necessarily great wealth, but at least a living) matters a great deal and is much discussed. People are told under every heading to rely on themselves, and the gods play little role in helping human beings, though they are the ultimate sponsors of justice. Most gnomai about the gods tell us to honour them without telling us much about why. In striking contrast, Tychê/Fortune plays a large role in gnomai. Her overwhelming power is frequently asserted, but it is also clear that many people look for ways to use, defuse or evade her, and that occasionally (whether through luck or cleverness) someone succeeds. ‘Let us never cease from doing good to our fellow human beings,’ says Plutarch, quoting an unknown tragedian, but ‘it is easy to harm, hard to do good’, says Quintilian.367 Like other wisdom genres, gnomai attest that conflict is endemic in human society, and is always in danger of becoming a zero-sum game, one side losing disastrously to the other.368 Gnomai encourage us to palliate conflict in various ways – through the rich helping the poor, the poor cultivating the rich, through friendship, reciprocity (a stronger theme here than elsewhere) and, not least, the law. Gnomai have a good deal to say about the importance of the law, though it is somewhat mixed. Good laws are a responsibility of good rulers. For everyone else, it is essential to obey the law. At the same time, one cannot be sure that it will produce justice, or help one, and the safest course is to live a good (and, presumably, unprovocative) life. Gnomai reflect the cognitive dissonance of a society which aspires to values which its institutions cannot yet reliably deliver. One of the distinctive features of gnomai is their thematic complexity. Many treat two or more themes at the same time, and it is worth noting which subjects are connected with which. Wealth, for instance, is connected by many sayings with friendship, the household, power, virtue and the metaphysical world. Wealth is evidently such a consuming concern of the world of the gnomai that it impinges on all their other main areas of interest. Not all these links are of the same kind, however. Friends are frequently described as a form of wealth and wealth as aiding friendship. The two have some degree of identity – they both go together and help each other. But wealth is never described as a form of virtue nor virtue as wealth. The rich are often told they should be virtuous, but these remain separate qualities; virtue is sometimes stated to be the more important, wealth never. Friendship is clearly of great importance in its own right but it is related to surprisingly few other areas of life, though self-rule is said to make one 367

Mor. 791d (Trag. Graec. Fr. ades. 410), Quint. 8.5.4.

368

PS337, Sen. De ira 2.8.1.

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more attractive to others and friendship is closely related with speech and honesty. Friendship and the family do not overlap – these are evidently quite distinct types of relationship. Tychê is linked with almost every other area of life, but in almost every case negatively. Wealth, friends, virtue, wisdom, power – none of them can guard the human being from tychê; the most virtue or wisdom can do is help you accept whatever tychê brings. Even so, one or two texts suggest that there may have been some debate about the power of tychê over human life. The debate is potentially an important one, because the structure, stability and success of any society depends to some extent on people being able to feel that they can control the world they live in, both individually and, even more importantly, collectively. To do so people need both to understand the world around them and to have some power of self-determination. If everyone were wholly at the mercy of tychê, one would be forced to wonder why anybody bothered to construct societies at all. The gods and time, on the divine scale, are more positively linked with human life, in particular with justice. The gods are the only guarantors of justice in these texts and time brings both justice and virtue to light, even if the just or virtuous people concerned are dead. Phronêsis has surprisingly few links to any other subject, considering how often it appears in its own right. It is consistently said to be a good thing, but it is never said to make one rich, or virtuous, or get one friends or power or help one avoid the slings and arrows of tychê. What it mainly does, it seems, is help one to survive. Gnomai tend to distinguish linguistically between what people do and what they should do. That people seek wealth, for instance, is presented as a fact. But it is also something they are told to do – we are not generally told why, but since we have already seen that wealth is not intrinsically good, the next most likely reason is that it is necessary.369 In contrast, that the rich should do good to the poor is something that gnomai tell people to do, but not something they say people do. To seek wealth is both natural and right; to use it to help others is right but not natural. Friendship is both something people do naturally and something they are encouraged to do. Friendship may be between equals or unequals – and it is noticeable that more overt attention is paid in these texts to friendships of inequality. But cultivating friendships with people of higher or lower social status is not presented as happening naturally; it is something which gnomai either recommend you do or recommend you don’t do. Finally, it is worth briefly considering whether individual collections contain biases which might distort the overall analysis. Publilius, as I noted, 369

See below, pp. 171–2.

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has a particular dislike of misers and a particular interest in romantic love. Neither of these is a major theme overall, though the latter, at least, is well paralleled in contemporary genres such as novels (both Greek and Latin), which, if they do not quite count as wisdom literature, have a highly gnomic style.370 More significant, perhaps, is Publilius’ rather strong sense that ‘the end justifies the means’. ‘The unworthy is worthy in a good cause.’ ‘You can legitimately spare the bad if it means you can spare the good.’ ‘Even a thorn is pleasing if a rose comes out of it.’ ‘A lie in a good cause is true.’371 This is not paralleled in other collections and we shall return to it below.372 Bouquiaux-Simon’s papyrus contains several quotations about kairos. Bartoletti’s preserves sections on wealth, aretê and tychê. P. Harr. 2.170 seems to be all about wealth and evil profit. All these, however, are themes which are plentifully attested in other texts, so there is no reason to regard these collections as distorting the picture. P. Oxy. 3004 contains nearly all our quotations on charis, eudoxia and adoxia, but as it happens they are all too fragmentary to read, so I have left them out. There seems no reason to think that any one collection has badly skewed the overall picture. Nor have I been able to detect any significant shifts in subject matter between papyri of the first and fourth centuries, nor between Latin texts and Greek. 16%

14% wealth good social relations: more and less power

7% friendship intelligence/foolishness

21% 8%

speech, truth, lies women, family, love justice, law

7%

gods, metaphysics, humanity

12% 15%

Figure 3 Distribution of main topics in gnomai

370

371 372

E.g. Chariton (1.4) echoes Menander fr. 290 (‘A man in love is naturally easily led’), changing its gender, and at 1.3 he may echo another saying of Menander. Romantic love is an important theme in Menander’s plays and it is probably coincidental that more of his gnomai on the subject do not appear in texts of this period. PS244, PS261, PS669, PS706, cf. PS347, PS469, PS553, PS605, PS680, PS700. Pp. 173, 228–30.

chap t e r 5

Exempla

Example is always more efficacious than precept. Dr Johnson

The tradition of using the sayings and doings of famous men and women of the past as examples to be imitated or avoided goes back at least to classical Greek literature.1 Fifth-century Athenians heard the glories of their ancestors recited in funeral speeches.2 By the fourth century, Attic orators referred regularly to characters of the past and invoked the past as a guide to the future.3 The idea of the example as a ‘gold standard’ of behaviour can be found in Plato, and other fourth-century authors explicitly encouraged the reading of their own works in this way.4 Xenophon, for instance, recommends the virtue of King Agesilaus of Sparta, as illustrated in Xenophon’s own biography, as a guide for others, while Isocrates provides exemplary stories in his essays and commends them to his students.5 The collecting of stories began in the classical period and became increasingly popular in the Hellenistic world. Metrocles the Cynic was among those credited with inventing the philosophical collection, and Cynics proved particularly good subjects, famous as they were for their outrageous statements and behaviour.6 A series of chreiai about Diogenes the 1

2 3 4

5 6

Stories, for instance, of the Seven Sages and early philosophers probably have archaic origins; the use of heroes as exempla may go back further still. Diogenes Laertius mentions collections of chreiai of several fourth-century, as well as Hellenistic, philosophers (2.85, 5.81, 6.32, 6.33, 6.80, 6.91, 7.36, 7.163). Gow 1965: 12–15 discusses the uses of these, including in education. E.g. Thuc. 2.35–46. E.g. Andoc. 3.2, 29, Lys. 25.23, Isoc. Ad Dem. 1.34, Isoc. Ad Nic. 2.35, though they rarely use full chreiai (Perlman 1961: 155). See Gelley 1995: 1–2 on Plato. Pownall 2004 discusses how fourth-century historians use ‘lessons from the past’, often distorting them (110–14) to make them fit the moral point they are making. For a comparative study of the use of exempla in Mongolian culture, see Humphrey 1997. Xen. Ag. 10.2, Isoc. Antid. 277, cf. Isoc. Panath. 136–7. Fiore 1986: 27–33, Skidmore 1996: 3–21, 35–50 and Chaplin 2000: 5–31 give concise outlines of the history of the theory and collection of exempla. (Skidmore, though, has too narrow a concept of ‘moral’ (e.g. 59).)

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Cynic survives in a papyrus school text of the fourth century ce: ‘Seeing a fly on this table, he said, “Even Diogenes nurtures parasites.” Seeing a woman learning her letters, he said, “What a sword is being sharpened!” . . . Seeing an Aethiopian munching bread, he said, “The night is consuming the day.”’7 Some of these collections were a farrago of anecdotes; others came to be arranged more or less coherently into biographies, like the anonymous Life of Secundus, which also appears in a school-text papyrus,8 Lucian’s comic Life of Demonax and the biographies of Diogenes Laertius. Machon’s scandalous collection of stories about Athenian courtesans and other notorious characters, from the early third century bce, offered an early example of the comic potential of the chreia. The double misconception that exempla are more a Roman than a Greek genre, and that they are mainly to be found in oratory, is probably derived from Cicero.9 Cicero uses scores of exempla – far more than most orators in Greek or Latin. Such speeches and fragments as survive of other Republican orators make much less use of them, while under the Empire, the orators who use them most are Greek, and they use them less than writers in some other genres. Even in declamations, practice speeches for the lawcourts, exempla are relatively uncommon.10 Cicero’s use of exempla, moreover, is not by any means confined to his speeches; his letters and philosophical works are almost equally thick with them, along with numerous proverbs and gnomic sayings. Cicero’s fondness for moralizing genres is no doubt partly his own. There may also be a case for seeing it as an aspect of his Hellenism. There is little evidence that it is something distinctive of Roman culture, and none that it is distinctive of Roman oratory. By the beginning of the Roman Empire, chreiai were endemic in both Greek and Latin, in everything from epic poetry to encomium via history, biography, oratory and educational theory.11 Orators as diverse as Aelius Aristides, Dio Chrysostom and Maximus of Tyre included them in speeches.12 Livy and Tacitus could describe themselves as educating their readers through examples of a wide range of Romans of the past, as if it 7 9 10

11 12

8 P. Ross. Georg. 1.17. P. Bour. 1. Brinton 1988, d’Arms 1972, Gaillard 1978, Hölkeskamp 1996. Declamations are normally based on fictitious and frequently fantastical lawsuits, or else the deliberations of a character such as Caesar or Alexander, but we should not expect exempla not to appear because of that. The fact that they are used occasionally shows that they can be, and the fact that progymnasmata are preparative exercises for all kinds of rhetoric means that if exempla were an important part of speechmaking, we should expect them to feature. M. Pomponius Rufus, Cornelius Nepos (Gell. 6.18.11) and C. Iulius Hyginus (Gell. 10.18.7) are credited with making collections something like that of Valerius before him (David 1998a: 11–16). Favorinus, for instance, is particularly fond of examples and references to wise men of the past.

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were an uncontroversial element of historiography.13 The natural history of Pliny,14 the political biographies of Suetonius, Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, the historical miscellanies of Aelian and the letters of Pliny and Seneca, all drew heavily on exemplary stories.15 There were themed collections such as Daimachus’ On Piety, Plutarch’s Sayings collections and his essay On the Bravery of Women. Mini-collections were embedded in other works: in the Attic Nights, for example, Gellius tells a series of stories about people who died on hearing happy news.16 Dozens of chreiai survive on papyrus (nearly all of these have lost their original settings, or are part of school texts). We have already encountered Theon’s combined account of chreiai and gnomai, in which chreiai are described as brief stories of the sayings or doings of wise and famous people, told for their usefulness to life.17 Hermogenes adds that some chreiai are mixed, including both saying and action, and that the chreia additionally differs from the gnome in often taking the form of a question and answer.18 Quintilian too characterizes chreiai as related to gnomai, involving a question and answer, or describing an action.19 It is equally difficult to draw a hard and fast boundary between chreiai and other kinds of instructive saying and anecdote. Apothegms often come with a brief sketch of the situation in which they were delivered, while improving stories can be longer or shorter. The examples Quintilian gives during his discussion of exempla are very short: ‘When Crates saw an illeducated boy, he beat his paidagôgos . . . Milo, having accustomed himself 13 14 15

16 18

19

Liv. 1 pr. 10, 1.58.10, Tac. Hist. 1.3, 2.38, 3.51, Tac. Ann. 3.55, 4.33, cf. Tac. Ag. 45; see especially Chaplin 2000 who calls Livy’s an ‘exemplary history’ from the density and importance of his stories. Both Pliny and (even more) Aelian in On Animals use animals as exempla of human virtues (e.g. Plin. HN 8.56 (gratitude), 9.8 (affection), 10.96 (friendship)). See below, pp. 153–7. Litchfield’s 1914 study of ‘national exempla virtutis’ in Roman literature is still very useful. Of the 200 names in his list of exemplary characters (taken from Latin writers to Claudian) which Valerius could have known, fewer than a dozen, remarkably, do not appear in Valerius’ collection. Grilli 1991 analyses the remarkable range of exempla – philosophical, historical and mythical (though not all moral) – in Plutarch’s Moralia. Mayer 1991 gives a helpful analysis of Seneca’s use of exempla. Roller 2004 traces the fortunes of two famous exemplary characters through a range of authors. Gibson 2004: 110–11 notes the presence of a few illustrative chreiai in progymnasmata and points out how little history one would need to know to make use of anecdotes about, for instance, Alexander, Croesus or Aristides. 17 Section 3, transl. Kennedy (2003), above, p. 85. 3.15. Section 3. Hermogenes goes on to say that ‘Much is said by the ancients about different kinds of chreia, that some of them are declarative, some interrogative, some investigative.’ But he is not very interested in these distinctions, and moves straight on to the use of chreiai as rhetorical exercises. It is worth noting that the reference to question and answer relates chreiai to yet another genre we have touched upon, the riddle; riddles, however, are anonymous and never tell a story, though they may be moralizing. 1.9.3–5.

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to carrying a calf, carried it even when it had become a bull.’20 Most of Valerius’ exempla are considerably longer. The importance and moral authority of chreiai are abundantly attested. Dr Johnson, whom I quoted at the head of this chapter, was consciously or unconsciously echoing Pliny’s Panegyricus: ‘We need example more than we need rule. Fear is an unreliable teacher of what is right. Men learn better from examples, which are particularly good because they prove that what they teach can actually be done.’21 Quintilian writes, It is not only the content of [philosophy] which we should know and constantly turn over in our minds; even more important are the records of the notable sayings and actions of the past. Nowhere is there a larger or more striking supply of these than in the history of our own country. Could there be any better teachers of courage, justice, loyalty, self-control, frugality, or contempt for pain and death than men like Fabricius, Curius, Regulus, Decius, Mucius, and countless others? Rome is as strong in examples as Greece is in precepts; and examples are more important.22

Seneca also attests that chreiai, like sententiae, are given to children to learn, while Dio says that a useful moral added onto even a pointless story makes it worth hearing.23 In the first century, Valerius Maximus could produce an anthology of the sayings and doings of well-known Romans and foreigners, thematically arranged, largely by moral, without feeling that the idea needed any defence.24 Just as exempla have been taken to be primarily part of oratory, Valerius’ collection has been taken to be solely or primarily for orators.25 As we have seen, this assumption does not bear much weight. No doubt orators used the collection, but there is no internal or external evidence that it was intended for orators alone, while the way it is organized is equally useful for moralists of all kinds. The only authors in the first or second century 20 21

22

23 24 25

1.9.5. 45.6, cf. Fronto Ad Ant. Imp. (Naber p. 217) 2–3 etc. gives exempla of past emperors from which to learn; Ad Luc. Ver. (Naber pp. 119, 202) give exempla of generals. Cf. the Mongol saying, ‘If you follow sayings, you become clever; if you follow an exemplar, you become wise.’ (Humphrey 1997: 37). 12.2.29. Quintilian’s quae sunt tradita antiquitus dicta ac facta praeclare . . . echoes Valerius’ facta simul ac dicta memoratu digna and suggests that Quintilian, like Pliny the Elder, may have known and used Valerius. Sen. ep. 33.7, D. Chr. 5.3. See Eyben 1972 on this as a praxis in Roman culture in general. Lehmann 1998: 20–6 discusses the ‘standard’ Roman virtues covered by Valerius. 1 pr. Above, p. 122. Cf. Taylor, Duffell and Burnett 1998: 359 on Proverbia Senecae, which in the Middle Ages were used primarily by lawyers, rhetoricians, poets, preachers and bellettrists.

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who clearly use or cite Valerius are Pliny the Elder and Plutarch, neither writing as an orator.26 Even if Valerius had intended his work for orators, there would be no reason to assume that its arrangement did not reflect key categories of contemporary ethics. Rhetoric deals with as wide a spectrum of human life as any genre, and we can safely assume that Valerius thought he was including material for all common occasions. It is all the more odd that so many commentators confine Valerius’ intentions to the rhetorical and doubt the general applicability of his ethical categories, when they describe exempla as an essential part of Roman education.27 Of Valerius himself, almost nothing is known.28 He addresses his work to the Emperor Tiberius (1 pr.) and to Sextus Pompeius (who was consul in 14 ce and of whom 4.7 ext. 2 includes an obituary), and the composition of the work has been dated on the basis of internal references to around 30 ce.29 Like other writers on exempla, Valerius regards them as useful. ‘I have undertaken’, he says, ‘to select from distinguished authors those deeds and words, of Romans and other races, which are most worthy to be remembered but which are too widely scattered among diverse authors to be easily found, so that those who wish, may find examples without the labour of a long search.’ (1 pr.) His collection is by far the largest we know of in this period. It is also the largest single collection of ethical material in this study, and it is distinctive in other ways. Valerius’ language of praise and blame, and his ethical terminology, are much more explicit than those of fables, proverbs or even gnomai. There is no difficulty deciding to what categories to assign his stories: the text offers them to us.30 There is rarely any difficulty in deciding whether the examples under a particular heading – bravery, for instance, 26

27

28

29 30

E.g. Plu. Brutus 53.5, Plu. Marcellus 30.5. Klotz 1942 argues that one can detect the use of Valerius in works by Pliny, Lactantius, Frontinus, Seneca, Macrobius, Ammianus and Apuleius too. Of these, only Apuleius’ Apology is a speech. Two ancient epitomes and around thirty manuscripts from the ninth century onwards attest Valerius’ continued popularity, while in the Renaissance his work was seen primarily as a source of ethics and history. E.g. Litchfield 1914, Eyben 1972, Lind 1972, 1979, Gaillard 1978, Fiore 1986, Mayer 1991 (who (140) points out that exempla have twin moral and rhetorical functions), Hölkeskamp 1996, David 1998a, Gibson 2004, Roller 2004. The importance of the exemplum for teaching morals is confirmed by its ongoing importance in the Byzantine, mediaeval and early modern worlds (Engler and Müller 1995) and in early Christian sermons (Gelley 1995: 4). The name Valerius Maximus (the praenomen is missing) is found in the gens Valeria in the early Republic and under the Empire, but that does not prove that our Valerius was a member of the family. Shackleton Bailey 2000: 1–3. The chapter headings themselves are probably not original, but they are usable, being derived usually from the first sentence or two of the chapter.

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or generosity – are meant to be favourably or unfavourably viewed. In comparison with the range of ideas which sometimes appears under a single topic in other collections, there is little nuance in Valerius’ views: usually, all the examples he gives of a particular quality are evaluated in the same way. Nor do we find the same imbalance of representation between topics here as in other collections. The ethical landscape, so to speak, looks rich but comparatively flat.31 This is not to say that Valerius’ stories have nothing in common with other collections. Much of their content, as we shall see, matches that of other genres. Exempla also share some of the formal features of fables, in particular, notably that, despite their assigned moral, they nearly always have more than one possible interpretation, and could be used to illustrate a number of different points. For example, exemplum 5.2.1a reports: When Marcius was mustering to attack his native land, and, after moving a huge force of Volscians to the gates of the city, was threatening Roman power with death and destruction, Veturia his mother and Volumnia his wife, by their prayers, prevented him from carrying out his wicked plan. In their honour the senate lavished the order of matrons with the most generous decrees: for it sanctioned that men should give way to women in the street . . . and it added the new distinction of a fillet to the historic one of earrings. It also allowed them to wear purple clothes and gold decorations.

Valerius tells this story as an example of gratitude, but one can equally well imagine it being used to explain the origin of the custom of women wearing a fillet, or to show how even men of no public spirit can be moved by private affections, or to demonstrate the bravery of women, or their patriotism, or to contrast the luxuries of the past, which women only wore when voted them by the senate, with those of the present which nothing can stop them wearing, or to illustrate the proposition that the senate sometimes passes decrees which it later regrets, or equally well that it never regrets its decrees . . . and the possibilities would not be exhausted.32 Like a fabulist, Valerius not only tells his stories to make a point, but often tailors them to fit, and many of his anecdotes appear elsewhere in 31

32

If we abandoned Valerius’ categories and analysed his stories in our own categories, as I have done in preceding chapters, we should end up with a rather different ‘map’. War, politics, the law, friendship and rivalry, fortune and the gods would emerge as the dominant themes, with women and family also prominent. Interesting as it is, I have not presented that analysis here because Valerius chose his stories to illustrate his own categories. We could not be sure that the same stories also formed a representative range of first-century stories and topics; they could not tell us, therefore, what topics ‘Romans in general’ thought important. In the circumstances, what Valerius thought his readers, and their audiences, would want to tell stories about, is better evidence for first-century ethics. See further below, pp. 142–3.

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a different form, or to illustrate a different point. Among his examples of enemies who buried the hatchet and became friends, for instance, Valerius describes (4.2.4) how Cicero defended A. Gabinius and P. Vatinius in the courts, despite the fact that they had been his political enemies. He ascribes this to Cicero’s good nature, but Cicero’s letters show that he thoroughly disliked both men and defended them only under pressure from Caesar and Pompey.33 In his section on poverty (4.4.9) Valerius claims that the Aelii were very poor, possessing no silver at all until Quintus Aelius Tubero was given five pounds of it by his father-in-law Lucius Aemilius Paullus, who had won it as part of his loot when he defeated Perses, the last king of Macedonia, in 168 bce. Pliny the Elder’s version of this story (33.50.142) stresses Aelius’ continued poverty, saying that his father-in-law gave him just two silver bowls, the only silver he ever owned, and that to the end of his life he ate off earthenware.34 The similarities between exempla and fables, those ‘fictions told to illustrate a truth’, vividly illuminate the role of history in Roman morality. In exemplary stories, it is what one might call the ‘moral truth’ that matters, not ‘what really happened’. No doubt, to some extent, oral tradition, documentary record and shared memory ensured that at least more recent or more famous historical events were not distorted out of all recognition, but otherwise there were few constraints on the way moralists presented the past. Roman writers of exempla, even highly educated ones like Valerius writing for the highly educated, have much more in common with fabulists and quoters of proverbs and gnomai than they do with modern historians. If their casual attitude to interpretation worries the modern historian-reader, as it is almost bound to do despite our best efforts at cultural empathy, we can remind ourselves that the tendency to manipulate the past to make a point or convey a perceived truth is, in fact, the norm when human beings tell stories – as everyone can testify who has been involved in a family argument. There is no doubt that of all the genres in this study, exemplary stories are, at least in the early Empire, the least ‘popular’. Valerius’ patrons were an emperor and an aristocrat; his known readers were upper-class Romans; his work is not one that we can easily imagine being performed to large (or even small) audiences as poetry, history and rhetoric were regularly 33 34

E.g. Ad Att. 10.8.3, 11.5.4. Maslakov 1984 and David 1998b: 119–30 discuss other examples of this. David notes, however, the consistency with which Valerius treats characters across stories, which suggests that he is not using stories opportunistically to make each point, but that he wants to create a moral view of characters as a whole.

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performed. Collections of anecdotes, however individually charming, do not make appealing listening in large numbers. Some of those who used Valerius will have had wider audiences than he himself, especially the orators. There is also evidence that exempla were used in education, not only rhetorical education but also at a more elementary level. Exemplary stories are part of popular culture and ethics in so many societies that it is perhaps more likely a priori that they played a role in the Roman world than that they did not. Nevertheless, we cannot make a strong case that exempla were as widely diffused as proverbs, fables or even gnomic sayings. By that token, however, Valerius makes a valuable comparison with earlier chapters. In what follows we shall see how distinctive, if at all, the ethical ideas of upper-class Romans were in the first century, which will add to our sense of how far ethical ideas were shared across the Roman Empire and up and down the social scale. It will also begin to show whether most upper-class Romans shared more of their ethical ideas with their social inferiors or with professional philosophers. To keep the overall shape of Valerius’ views clear, I have kept exempla on the same topics, from other sources, to the footnotes, until the end of the chapter, where I point out some differences between the ethical landscapes of Valerius and three other authors of exemplary collections, Pliny, Plutarch and Aelian.35 It is more than usually tricky to be sure what should be included in this chapter, apart from Valerius’ collection. Sayings and anecdotes are thickly scattered through other literature, and allusions to historical characters are more abundant still, though (as in the case of quotations from poetry) many are not obviously ethical.36 If, however, we rule out passing allusions,37 stories told in the course of a history or biography (which are best analysed as part of that author’s project and ethos), and stories from which no obvious moral can be drawn (as is the case, for instance, with many of Plutarch’s Sayings), the field becomes manageable. map of the ethical l an dscape Valerius’ collection is a multi-thematic anthology with a good dash of miscellaneity. It consists of over a thousand exempla38 in ninety-five categories, 35

36 37 38

Cf. also e.g. Moore 1989 for an analysis of virtues in Livy, nearly all of which also appear in Valerius. I have not noted all the parallels to Valerius’ stories in other authors; they are noted by Shackleton Bailey in his Loeb edition. Chaplin 2000: 3 – unless one takes all human action as ethical, but this is the ‘ethics wide’ discussed and dismissed by Edel and Edel as too broad to be useful to scholars (above, pp. 12–13). Though not stories proper, these do show what stories the author expects his audience to know (in some form), which is informative in itself, though outside the scope of this study. A few survive only in epitomes. They are divided into nine books, evidently on the basis of rolllength, not logic. Friendship and generosity at the end of Book Four are explicitly linked with mercy

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many of which are virtues or vices but some of which are institutions or social situations: enemies who became friends, for example. Most subjects comprise, first, a number of Roman examples, and then rather fewer foreign ones.39 Few topics attract more than twenty stories or fewer than seven, though courage (fortitudo), for instance, has as many as thirty-five, wonders (miracula) thirty-four and wisdom (sapientia) thirty-one.40 One might expect Valerius to have distributed his stories more evenly still, since he intends his creation to be used as a source book. How can he be sure that self-restraint will be so much more popular a topic among users than fidelity or good fortune? In a few cases, we may guess that not many more examples were available than he gives (how many more women than the three he mentions (8.3) are likely to have pleaded in the Roman lawcourts?). Sometimes (e.g. 7.1 pr.) Valerius says explicitly that he is giving only a few examples because the phenomenon concerned is a rare one. Occasionally (as in section 9.3 on anger), reluctance to dig up discreditable stories about great men conflicts with the importance of the topic.41 In most cases, however, there is a wide range of examples to choose from, and the number he chooses reflects the importance of the subject.42 Further contours are added to Valerius’ ethical landscape by his practice of linking chapters to make larger sections. Book Three, for instance, features a string of virtues and Book Nine a string of vices. The last section of Book Six, on changes of fortune, is linked by Valerius to the beginning of Book Seven, on good fortune, which is followed by linked sections on wisdom and cunning.43 We shall use these links throughout the chapter to help structure the analysis.

39 40

41 42

43

and gratitude at the beginning of Book Five, and Fortune at the end of Book Six with good fortune at the start of Book Seven; three sections on wills at the end of Book Seven should probably go with the six sections on the law at the start of Book Eight, and conjugal love in Book Four might go better with other family relations in Book Five. About two-thirds of examples overall are Roman, and under most headings Roman examples outnumber foreign ones. It will have been no surprise to Roman audiences that the largest single section is on courage. See the discussions of McDonnell 1990 and 2003 and especially Balmaceda 2005 on virtus, with Lind 1992: 25–40. Courage is also the most widely acknowledged and admired virtue of foreigners, as many chreiai of Alexander, Hannibal and other military heroes show. Seneca (ep. 77.14) refers to the well-known story of the Spartan boy who allowed a fox he should not have been carrying to eat him alive. In this case, he swallows his distaste and gives twelve examples. It is interesting that Valerius feels the need to defend the number of examples he gives of wisdom (7.3 ext. 18: it is a common quality); cf. 1.8 pr. Sometimes (e.g. 6.7 pr. on the fidelity of wives to husbands) Valerius says that he is deliberately taking only a few examples from a wide field, implying that he does not think the topic important in this context. Some sections are linked with rhetorical flourishes which are not substantive links: e.g. 4.5–6.

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1. Gods, the metaphysical and religion Despite Valerius’ observation that poets and orators tend to begin by invoking the gods, the focus of Book One is less the gods than religion.44 It makes a striking contrast with the collections we have already analysed, which have a certain amount to say about the gods but rather less (explicitly, at least) about how human beings should behave towards them, and very little about the practicalities of religion at all. Religion begins with the enthusiasm of people in the past for religious observance.45 Three examples (1.2–4) show individuals, or the College of Augurs, making some mistake in a ritual and being disciplined, and other high-placed priests or officials calling attention to them on behalf of the state. Three examples rolled into one (5) recall individuals who laid down or were deprived of their office because something went wrong, not through their own fault, in a ritual. Given Romans’ attentiveness to ritual and to the purity of their priests, says Valerius, ‘It is no wonder . . . if the favour of the gods has remained constant for the guarding and increasing of that power . . .’ (1.1.8).46 The story of how M. Atilius Regulus was captured by the Carthaginians in 255 bce, was sent to Rome to barter his life for that of a number of young Carthaginians, counselled the senate against it and insisted on being sent back to Carthage to die, is told to demonstrate both his piety, and that the gods allowed him to die in order to increase his glory. Finally, in this section Valerius tells how, after the disastrous battle of Cannae in 216 bce, the senate made the women of Rome end their mourning after thirty days so that they could celebrate the festival of Ceres. These stories show that piety of a kind which preserves and strengthens the state, is seen as a matter both for private individuals and for officials. If an individual is discovered doing something wrong, others draw attention to it on behalf of the whole community. The condition of the individual and that of the state are symbiotic: Regulus’ piety reflects well both on himself and on Rome. They may even be identified with each other. Some of the next section’s examples of what happens when religion is not properly practised suggest the same. The Roman disaster at the battle of Cannae, for instance, is attributed to the wrath of Juno against the consul 44

45

Müller 2002 chh. 1–3, looking at Jupiter, Juno and Vesta throughout the work, finds that the gods are ‘living deities, who concerned themselves with the moral conduct of human beings’ (108). This reveals Valerius’ view of the gods as being even better in line with that of proverbs and gnomai than my analysis, following Valerius’ own themes, suggests. 46 Cf. 1.1.12, on Romans’ efforts to preserve the purity of their religion. 1.1b.

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Varro (though for something he had done when aedile, so whether the wrath is against him personally or him as an officer of state Valerius leaves unclear) (1.1.16). In the foreign section, the Athenians are said, out of piety, to have exiled the philosopher Protagoras for writing that he did not know whether the gods existed or what they were like, and executed Socrates for ‘seeming to introduce a new religion’ (1.1 ext. 7). Apollo, Aesculapius, Proserpine and Ceres are all said to have revenged themselves on individuals for impieties they had committed, Juno and Hercules on whole families for impieties committed by individuals.47 In both types of case, there are also implications for the state: losses to the army at war or to the city.48 We notice that so far the gods have appeared in a reactive role, something which we shall see throughout the work. The onus seems to be on human beings to worship them in the right way; the gods respond as prompted by human behaviour. One might think that a chapter headed ‘on the simulation of religion’ (1.2) would be another collection of cautionary tales, but in fact they are all success stories. Here we find King Numa pretending to meet the goddess Egeria at night for advice in setting up religious rituals and Sertorius claiming that his advice came from a white doe whom he took with him on campaign. Since this section survives only in epitome, we cannot be sure whether Valerius is trying to show here that the pious are successful, or that the appearance of piety makes people more successful; either way, it is again striking that in no case is it indicated that the god instigated or directed the relationship. Section three concerns rites which have been rejected, and includes the bacchanalia (notoriously banned in Rome in 186 bce), the lottery of Praenestine Fortune, astrology in general (banned in Rome in 139 bce) and the cult of Isis and Serapis, which was spasmodically persecuted from the 50s bce onwards. All these cults and practices have in common that they are foreign, that they were received in Rome before being thrown out again and that it was a decision of the senate to throw them out, and not, as far as we know, at the bidding of any god. Here again, we see the community acting on its own initiative and the gods apparently acceding to the action. ‘It is a fact that Rome was founded with auspices,’ says Valerius (1.4 pr.), and this sets the tone for the next few sections. Augurs, as Valerius says, 47 48

Müller 1998 discusses Juno’s sponsorship of chastity, and argues convincingly that she comes across as a live and powerful force, and a subject of genuine devotion. The gods take a different revenge on the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius I, who committed all sorts of impieties without punishment: instead of punishment, disgrace fell on his son after his death (1.1 ext. 3).

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enjoy great trust and authority in Rome (1.4.1). Auspices are not simple things, however. They sometimes help to change the course of events; sometimes, they seem simply to indicate that something (usually bad and always humanly caused) is going to happen. Some of the people to whom bad things happen are wrongdoers, and some are not. Moreover, successful auspices depend on good augurs, and the signs are notoriously tricky to interpret. The case of Alexander the Great described here is a case in point. ‘When King Alexander wanted to establish a city in Egypt, the architect Dinocrates, since he did not have any chalk, drew the outlines of the future city in barley grains. A huge flock of birds flew up from the nearest lake and ate the barley, which the Egyptian priests interpreted as meaning that the city would have enough food for a large population.’ (1.4 ext. 1). One can equally well imagine those birds being taken for an augury that strangers would swoop down and destroy the city in the future. But, as history reports it, the successful always get favourable auspices and the unsuccessful, unfavourable ones. Although auspices are always seen by Valerius as genuine, it is hard not to read them backwards as well as forwards: if you are good and successful, you will get favourable auspices, just as if you are pious, the gods will favour you. Here again is a hint that human beings have a surprising degree of purchase on the metaphysical world. Omens, prodigies, dreams and miracula (wonders) are more straightforward phenomena, lacking the need for specialized interpretation. They are simply described by Valerius as coming from the gods or (in the case of omens) the work of Providence (divina Providentia).49 They indicate the future, but observing them does not change it. Here for the first time are metaphysical forces over which human beings have no control – fittingly so, given that they can also be said to be the work, not of the gods, but of Fortuna, an altogether less malleable power.50 Valerius also gives space in the section on miracula to a number of simple oddities, like the story of the man who was swept off a ship by one wave only to be swept back on board by the next (1.8 ext. 11), the princess who had two rows of teeth (1.8 ext. 13) or the Messenian whose heart, on his death, was found to be full of hair (1.8 ext. 15). Even stories like these, bizarre and trivial as they seem, tell us something about Valerius’ ethical 49

50

1.5 pr; 1.6 pr. 3, 11, 12; 1.7 pr. 2; 1.8 pr. ext. 9. Many dreams result from the dreamer’s previous relationship with the gods, e.g. 1.7 ext. 3 in which the pious poet Simonides is warned in a dream not to make a voyage. The limits of dreams are shown in 1.7 ext. 2, where Alexander chooses to ignore a dream. E.g. 1.5.8.

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landscape. They indicate that his world contains a great deal that human beings cannot, and cannot hope to, understand; things which may not be explicable at all. The other metaphysical powers are scattered through the work. Book Six chapter nine concerns changes of character or fortune. The first few examples (in both Roman and foreign sections) portray statesmen like Manlius Torquatus who led ill-regarded early lives only to win glory later.51 The career of L. Lentulus was more up-and-down. ‘Fortune switched him alternately between honour and shame, following his consulship with disgrace, his conviction with the censorship, and allowing him neither consistently to enjoy the good things of life nor to groan under perpetual evils.’ (6.9.10). Valerius calls C. Marius ‘Fortune’s greatest struggle’ (6.9.14), which suggests that Marius fought his fortune and sometimes won. Alcibiades’ situation was even more complex: ‘two Fortunes seemed to divide him between them . . . varying, intertwined, like the ebb and flow of the sea’ (6.9 ext. 4). ‘We have given plenty of examples of unstable fortune; but very few can be given of her being consistently favourable. Which shows that she loves to bring trouble, but only rarely bestows favour.’52 Valerius offers just two examples of men on whom fortune consistently smiled, one Roman and one Greek. Fortune gave Q. Metellus Roman birth, nobility, intelligence, physical strength, a modest and fertile wife, the consulship, military commands, a triumph, a large family, old age and a happy death. To Aglaus of Arcadia, a poor farmer, Fortune gave security and contentment.53 The most alarming thing about this picture is the suggestion that not only worldly goods, but also qualities of mind which philosophers, for instance, fondly imagine to be in their control, are actually gifts of Fortune. We have seen this picture of Fortune in other genres: all-powerful, largely malignant, striking at random, but allowing just a suspicion that occasionally an individual may be able to fight back.54 One of the most disturbing 51 52

53

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6.9.1, cf. 6.9.7–9. 7.1 pr. It has been argued (e.g. Kajanto 1981: 509–30) that Roman Fortuna was originally a benevolent power, close to the genius of a man and often associated with the epithet felix, which tended to bring good luck, but that she was adulterated by the much more fickle and unpleasant Greek power Tychê. Valerius’ account, like that of popular morality in general (and also most later Latin authors), is closer to the Greek version. The paradoxical happiness of the poor man is a common theme and takes various forms. Cf. a chreia told by Maximus of Tyre (25.1): Anacharsis wandered all over Greece and the only wise man he found was Myson of Chenae, a small farmer and good householder. Chreiai of human beings outwitting fortune by remaining content whatever their circumstances belong to Stoic contexts: so e.g. Sen. De prov. 3.5–14 gives a string of chreiai of Roman generals and magistrates who remained happy despite changes of fortune.

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things about Valerius’ examples is that Fortune’s activities are wholly unconnected with piety. It is only after Fortune elevates C. Valerius Flaccus to the flaminate, for instance, that he becomes religious (6.9.3). Fortune does not co-operate with the other gods to reward virtue or punish vice, and because there is no sign that the other gods can control her, she makes them and conventional religion look impotent. She also makes human goods look cheap. ‘How tottery and fragile the so-called strength and wealth of humanity are – fit for children’s rattles. They flood in suddenly, they slip away again, they stand fast on fixed roots in no person or place, but driven hither and thither by the uncertain wind of Fortune they unpredictably abandon those they have made great and plunge them miserably into the depths of disaster. And so those things should neither be thought nor be called good . . .’ (6.9 ext. 7). This is a bleak view: even the qualities of mind, Valerius suggests, which help us cope with life’s ups and downs, may be in the gift of malevolent Fortune. If fortune has a rival for unpleasantness, it is necessity. ‘The most bitter laws and most brutal powers of hateful necessity have also forced both our city and other races to suffer many things terrible not only to understand but even to hear.’ (7.6 pr.). Necessity is often the result of fortune, and it brings disaster, humiliation, sacrilege and dehumanization. During the civil war it led the consuls to melt down images of the gods to pay the army.55 During the siege of Munda in 45 bce it reduced the garrison to shoring up the city’s defences with piles of enemy corpses, while the Cretans besieged by Metellus in 67 bce resorted to drinking their own urine, and the Numantines besieged by Scipio in 133 bce ate human flesh. ‘Here necessity is no excuse,’ comments Valerius unexpectedly. ‘For people who were free to die, there was no need to live like that.’56 This is a significant comment, implying as it does that in the face of brutal and amoral metaphysical powers, human beings retain the choice to act ethically, even if the only way they can exercise the choice is by dying. Human beings, in other words, are a location of ethics: an ethical authority. Since they are also at the mercy of higher powers, however, their capacity to realize their ethics in individual lives and communities is limited. 2. Good social relations: justice and fides Valerius’ chapters on Fortune are preceded by four chapters more weakly linked to them by the theme of divinity. ‘The time has come to approach 55

7.6.1b, 4.

56

7.6.5, ext. 2.

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the sacred shrine of Justice (Iustitia).’57 Justice is taken in a wide sense, and most of these stories concern war or politics rather than the courts. Several link Roman justice with good faith: P. Claudius, for instance, raised doubts about his good faith when he sold the captured inhabitants of Cameria into slavery. To restore justice, the Roman people ransomed them, restored their properties and gave them land to live on in Rome (6.5.1c). In legal cases, Valerius prefers to report examples of justice on the margins of the case. When L. Crassus was prosecuting Cn. Carbo, a slave brought him a case belonging to Carbo and containing incriminating material. Rather than use evidence unjustly acquired, Crassus returned the case, still sealed, along with the slave, in chains, to Carbo. ‘How do we imagine justice flourished between friends, then, when even between prosecutors and defendants it had such strength?’ asks Valerius rhetorically (6.5.6). As in other forms of popular wisdom, justice is less strongly linked with the law than with social relations in general; it is a quality which guards individuals and communities against unnecessary conflict. Fides, a difficult word to translate whose meanings include ‘honesty’, ‘trustworthiness’ and ‘good faith’, is like justice a divinity.58 ‘The venerable power of faith, when we see her image, stretches out her right hand, the surest pledge of human well-being. All nations have observed that she has always flourished in our state, and we acknowledge it with a few examples . . .’59 Like justice, fides is widely distributed through the community’s activities, and like other qualities both human and divine, it is sometimes at the mercy of Fortune. The people of Saguntum in Spain, for example, showed their good faith towards their Roman allies when Hannibal was about to take their city, committing mass suicide on a communal pyre. ‘I could have believed that Fides herself . . . wore a sad face, seeing her most steadfast cult condemned by . . . cruel Fortune . . .’ says Valerius (6.6 ext. 1). Fides is a quality of those devoted to someone or something higher than themselves. Valerius gives us a section on the fides of wives towards husbands, and one on that of slaves towards masters, but nothing on that of husbands towards wives or parents towards children. Despite the alleged connection between them, iustitia, like fides, differs from most divine qualities in being something human beings can control. The gods may in theory 57 58

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6.5 pr. See below, p. 208. Lind 1989: 5–11 discusses various views of the range of meaning of fides and notes its frequent connections, as here, with amicitia, iustitia, constantia, pax and other public virtues. See further below, p. 312 n. 41. Boyancé 1972: 91–152 stresses the particular importance of public good faith to Romans and Valerius reflects this, devoting the whole of 6.6 to public fides. 6.6 pr., cf. 4.5 ext. 1.

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sponsor justice or good faith, but Valerius makes nothing of it: as far as this work goes, these qualities are the product of human decision and action. 3. Courage and endurance No single conventional virtue in Valerius’ collection is provided with as many exempla as courage, fortitudo. Here we find favourite stories like how Horatius kept the bridge and how the old men of Rome outfaced the invading Gauls, along with the Spartans at Thermopylae and the death of Epaminondas at Mantinea.60 Very nearly all Valerius’ examples of bravery occur in war and on behalf of a city (even three of the four about women); the others are about bravery in the face of death. They occur in both victory and defeat, and include both winners of the spolia opima and battlefield suicides. Courage is perhaps the most clearly and definitively communal of all the virtues, and Valerius wants us to believe that it is more important than life itself.61 Endurance (patientia) and natural temper (indoles) are linked with courage. Natural temper is an indicator in childhood of a quality of the future man, and though it often involves bravery, it does not always, nor is it always unambiguously good. Endurance, ‘so like [bravery] that she seems to be either her sister or her daughter’ (3.3 pr.), is always good, and again all the Roman (though not all the foreign) examples are military.62 Unexpectedly, Valerius then turns to philosophy, which he calls ‘soldiering of the mind’, and gives several examples of philosophers with exceptional powers of endurance. Indian philosophers, he reports, have such powers of endurance that, ‘there are those who pass their whole lives naked, sometimes hardening their bodies in the freezing harshness of the Caucasus, sometimes thrusting them uncomplainingly into fire’ (3.3 ext. 6). Even slaves can show endurance, and Valerius makes this the occasion to say that virtue is equally available to all. ‘She values the passion you bring 60 61

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3.2.1, 7, ext. 3, 5. Courage is a democratic virtue for Valerius: any Roman can exhibit it in the service of the state. Richardson 1978: 244–5 notes how the special connection of virtus with Rome and Romanness is exhibited in a different medium: the type of Virtus on coins is almost identical with that of Roma. Barton 2001: 34 notes that virtus is often described in literature as bright, shining, glittering or splendid. Valerius’ foreign examples are of generals and aristocrats (though the Spartan Leonidas led a detachment of equally brave Spartans). The idea that virtue is particularly the quality of kings, military leaders and aristocrats is common elsewhere (e.g. Dio’s Discourses on Kingship, with many examples); Spartan bravery is also axiomatic: Stob. 3.7.28 preserves a chreia from Dio of the Spartan woman who told her battle-lamed son that his disability would remind him every day of his courage. Cf. PS433: ‘Bravery cannot leave an ugly scar.’ E.g. 3.3 ext. 1.

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her more than the status, and she lets you decide for yourself what weight of goods you can carry, so that you take away with you only as much as your mind can bear.’63 4. Military and civil discipline Warfare permeates the whole work and also merits a section of its own, prominently placed after the virtues of ancient institutions in Book Two. Valerius praises the Roman army which has always been so willing to take up arms (2.3.1), but his main section on the army focuses on its leaders. P. Cornelius Scipio, Metellus, P. Rupilius, C. Cotta and Q. Fulvius Flaccus provide examples of ‘the foundation and chief ornament of the Roman Empire’: discipline. They are followed by cases where commanders punished family members or other office-holders for disobeying orders, even though in some cases their actions were successful, and punishments meted out for surrender, cowardice or desertion.64 The senate also takes part in enforcing military discipline: so, for instance, when Hannibal offers 6,000 Roman prisoners for ransom, the senate refuses, ‘mindful that such a large number of armed young men, if they had wanted to die honourably, could not have been disgracefully captured’ (2.7.15e). And if you think the Romans are harsh, says Valerius, consider the Carthaginian senate, ‘by whose decree generals who made bad decisions in war, even if good fortune had followed, were executed on a cross’ (2.7 ext. 1). It is all worth it. ‘Military discipline, keenly preserved, brought Roman power the leadership of Italy. It gave her the rule of many cities, great kingdoms and the strongest peoples, it opened the jaws of the Pontus, handed over the ruined gates of the Alps and Taurus mountains, and brought it from its origins in the little house of Romulus to being the summit of the whole world.’65 Valerius goes on to give examples of triumphs and triumphal law to emphasize how high Roman standards of military success are. He ends, however, by noting that triumphs are never given for civil actions; it would not be appropriate to celebrate the disunity of the community (2.8.7). The importance of the community as a whole, far above individual lives or glory, is central to Rome’s ideology of military success. 63 65

64 2.7.1–5, 6–8, 9–14. 3.3 ext. 7. 2.8 pr. Lind 1972, 1979 argues that this heavily moral interpretation of Roman success may only go back to the first century bce, in which case Valerius is not only reiterating it but helping to establish it. In 1972: 241–5 Lind credits Cicero with establishing it, followed by Sallust and Livy; in 1979: 7 he adds Posidonius as an early influence.

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From military discipline Valerius turns to the censorship, ‘the mistress and guardian of peace’ (2.9 pr.). ‘What is the point of strenuous activity abroad, if one lives badly at home? Cities may be taken, peoples conquered, hands got on kingdoms; unless duty and decency are established in the forum and senate-house, the heap of acquisitions teetering to the sky will have no firm basis.’ Part of the basis is the censorship, which Valerius shows fining bachelors for breaking the ‘law of nature’, expelling a senator for getting divorced, stigmatizing a man who let a private passion influence his public duties, condemning luxury, punishing equestrians for neglecting their duties, and persecuting cowards.66 The whole section is rounded off with a section on maiestas, greatness, which Valerius strains slightly to define as ‘a kind of unofficial censorship’, on the grounds that it is a condition of great men whereby they have enormous status, authority and admiration without holding any particular office (2.10 pr.).67 Rome’s greatest generals acquire the greatest maiestas: Metellus, Scipio Africanus, Aemilius Paullus, C. Marius among others. Cato the Younger was as famous for his strict morals as for his bravery; he could turn an issue around in the senate by speaking on it (2.10.7).68 One of the duties of censors was to inspect and if necessary reform the morals of the senate, so it comes as no surprise to find a broad range of ethical issues exemplified under this heading. The dominant themes – family, wealth, bravery – are among those most widely addressed by Valerius and other ethical collections. The existence of the office makes plain that social ethics were seen in Rome as the state’s concern, and Valerius shows that he sees it as the foundation of the state and its success. Ideally, however, individuals internalize the state’s interests so thoroughly that virtue is just as much a private and individual as a public and communal matter. That is why maiestas has such glamour. ‘Greatness’ is not only recognized and granted to individuals by the group, it leads and imposes itself on the group; and as we saw in the section on self-confidence and persistence, individuals 66

67 68

2.9.1–5, 7, 8. Humm 1998 presses the importance of the censorship to Valerius as the epitome of Republican glory – perhaps too much considering that Valerius gives it relatively little space, but he clearly values it. Gloria, magnitudo animi, dignitas, auctoritas and gravitas are all concepts related to Valerius’ view of maiestas and discussed by Lind 1979: 16–38. Closely related to this theme is the section (8.15) on distinctions (magnifica) falling on those who deserved them. These are cases where great men are singled out for honours by popular or senatorial acclaim. They illustrate not only the outstanding virtue (as Valerius specifies it) of the individual, but the shared values and common purpose of those who acclaim him or her, and so make a happy advertisement for the virtue of the Roman people as a whole. Although he does not explicitly link them, Valerius places, just before this chapter, a chapter on the desire for glory (cupiditas gloriae), which he declines to categorize as either good or bad (8.14 pr.).

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can lead it in unexpected directions. That is a price worth paying, Valerius seems to indicate, for the existence of people who so thoroughly defend what the state sees as its own good. 5. Self-confidence, conviction, unconventionality and severity Our next group of qualities is equally distinctive of the great. Several examples illustrate the proposition that great men can be highly unconventional in their behaviour. When P. Scipio, for instance, was in Sicily planning how to attack Carthage, he spent much time wandering about the gymnasium in a cloak and sandals.69 The great can get away with such idiosyncrasies because they have great self-confidence (fiducia sui). P. Scipio took his army from Sicily to Africa, against the senate’s orders, because he trusted his own judgement more (and was vindicated),70 while the painter Zeuxis had such confidence in his talent that he wrote himself a congratulatory couplet and appended it to his picture of Helen of Troy.71 Along with self-confidence goes the conviction to see things through, ‘For the order of nature is such that whoever is sure that he has decided on something with a rational and right mind, will defend it keenly against criticism if it is already done, and if it is not, will do it without any hesitation, even if he is hindered.’ (3.8 pr.). The policy of Fabius Maximus Cunctator, who refused repeatedly to engage Hannibal in battle, is a favourite Roman case (3.8.2). Even self-confident women stand fast, as did Sempronia, sister of the Gracchi, when a tribune of the people tried to force her to acknowledge an impostor as her nephew (3.8.6).72 A related sequence later in the work concerns people of passionate temperament who speak or act more freely than is conventional. Valerius calls this neither a virtue nor a vice: in the right context it can be a good thing, but it is not always. What makes this different from the freedom of expression or self-confidence of the great is that the people in this section are not, on the whole, great; they are not-particularly-famous Romans, provincial magistrates, an actor, a woman: ordinary people. The only really distinguished contributor to this section is Cato the Younger, but Valerius negates his 69 70 71 72

3.6.1, cf. 3.6.4, 6. 3.7.1c. In peacetime, the Elder Cato had such self-confidence that when put on trial he asked for one of his enemies to preside (3.7.7). 3.7 ext. 3. Pliny (HN 15.20.74) tells how Cato the Elder, during his campaign to persuade the Romans to destroy Carthage, produced a ripe fig in the Senate. When its freshness was admired, he said that it had been picked two days before at Carthage – ‘so close to our walls is the enemy!’

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example by reminding us of his greatness: ‘what would have seemed audacity in another man, in Cato is recognized as self-confidence.’ In other people, speaking out or pushing oneself forward is not encouraged. There follows a quality much more characteristic of the great, with a set of examples to match: severitas, severity. Both individuals and the senate and people of Rome can be severe: when Sp. Cassius was suspected of aspiring to monarchy, for instance, he was executed and his house pulled down on his dead body (6.3.1b, cf. 1c). Finally, ‘The important sayings or doings of famous men form a large and good part of their reputations . . .’ (6.4 pr.). Manlius, on being elected consul, memorably said: ‘Citizens, look for someone else to whom to give this honour, for if you make me take it up, I shall not be able to stand your behaviour and you will not be able to stand my authority.’ (6.4.1b). When Darius sued Alexander the Great for peace, Alexander’s general Parmenio advised that if he were Alexander, he would accept it. ‘And so should I,’ said Alexander, ‘if I were Parmenio.’ (6.4 ext. 3). Here too is reported the saying of an aristocratic and virtuous Spartan on being defeated in an election: It was a great joy to him, he said, that the country had some better men than himself.73 The theme of these examples is that great men make their own rules and define virtue in their own way, and in so doing steer their communities. These chapters, which are unparalleled in other wisdom genres, are important for our understanding of Valerius’ ethics, because they diverge so sharply from his usual view that either the gods or (more often) the community, past and present, determine what is good. Here we see great men remoulding the community’s views around their own convictions, and being praised for it. Where, usually, service and devotion to the community are paramount, here, devotion to one’s own views is better. Granted that all the examples given here are of people whose aim is to serve the state, and to do it better than others can, there is no arbiter for their views but themselves, and Valerius’ ethics are nowhere else so individualistic. 6. Friendship, generosity, humanity, mercy and gratitude This sequence of chapters begins with the chapter on friendship (amicitia), which attracts an unusually long preamble. Friendship, says Valerius, is 73

6.4 ext. 5, cf. Plu. Mor. 191f, which, unusually, is less epigrammatic than Valerius’ version. Electoral defeats get a section to themselves (7.5) in which Valerius recommends everyone to bear defeats with fortitudo (here something like ‘fortitude’ in English). Having to be elected to office prevents young aristocrats from becoming arrogant and helps them to become ‘great and useful citizens’, while the authority of office (essential for the smooth running of the state) is increased by the fact it cannot be taken for granted (7.5.2).

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as powerful as the ties of blood, if not more so. It is a necessary part of life, most evident and most valued in misfortune (because the gods look after success and prosperity, so those who are doing well need their human friends less).74 People put such value on friendship, that to have had loyal friends in adversity is in itself almost enough to give someone a lasting reputation.75 Damon and Phinthias, Alexander and Hephaistion . . . and Sextus Pompeius and Valerius Maximus, are among the bywords for friendship whom Valerius mentions. Generosity (liberalitas), which follows, must proceed from both sound judgement and genuine good will (4.8 pr.). It is another quality which belongs to both individuals and groups.76 Among the latter, Valerius singles out the freeing of the Greek cities at the Isthmian games of 188 bce by T. Quinctius Flamininus (4.8.5). Nearly all Valerius’ examples of humanity and mercy (humanitas et clementia) concern acts of mercy by Rome towards its enemies. A number of foreigners, though, are credited with individual acts of mercy, like Alexander when he rescued an elderly Macedonian soldier from freezing to death and gave him Alexander’s own place by his fire.77 It befits those who are shown mercy and humanity to be grateful: we hear of the gratitude of the senate to individuals, the Roman people to its leaders, the army to its commanders, commanders and magistrates to the people, Rome to its allies and allies to Rome. ‘By these and similar examples,’ says Valerius, ‘the kindness of the human race is fed and increased . . . And without a doubt, the greatest and most lovely riches are to be able to be widely credited with happily giving benefactions when they were sought.’ (5.2 ext. 4). The last is a sentiment familiar from other sources: the best wealth is the ability to help people and earn their gratitude. It is striking in this section, however, that gratitude flows in all directions, particularly within the Roman state. It is not simply a matter of leaders leading and everyone else being grateful: everyone is bound to those above and below them, as well as to their friends, to make the whole stronger. Conversely, ingratitude is not only bad in itself but disastrous for the state, and Valerius provides an even longer list of cautionary examples of ingrati, beginning with the first senate of Rome which murdered its first king. He ends on a 74 77

75 4.7.1–2, cf. 4.7.3. 76 See e.g. Borsanyi 1938, Manning 1985. 4.7 pr. 5.1 ext. 1a, cf. 2a. This is a rare example of a classic chreia of the verbal type; most of Valerius’ examples are of deeds rather than words. Epictetus (Stob. 3.19.13) tells a striking Spartan chreia about mercy: Lycurgus was blinded in one eye by another Spartan. The boy was given to him to punish as he wished. Lycurgus looked after him, educated him until he became a good man and presented him in the theatre, saying, ‘When I took this man from you he was hybristic and violent; I give him back to you gentle and citizenly.’ On clementia see also Bux 1948.

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note of approval for Athens, where, he says, ingratitude was a legal offence, and a sideswipe at the city for its ingratitude towards its mistress Rome nowadays.78 7. Pietas, family affection and chastity Pietas, an attitude towards family, country and gods which encompasses loyalty and devotion and something not too far from the English sense of ‘piety’, is another well-advertised Roman virtue which we should not be surprised to find playing a prominent part in Valerius’ work.79 Pietas is always a good thing, but it does not always express itself straightforwardly. Valerius’ first example (5.4.1) concerns Coriolanus, who, unjustly exiled from Rome after a distinguished career, joined the Volsci and nearly destroyed Rome at the head of their armies. As the Volscian army camped at the walls of Rome, Coriolanus’ mother, wife and children went to beg him to retire. Overcome by his sense of familial piety, he did. One might expect a Roman’s pietas towards Rome to eclipse all other kinds, but this is not the case, nor is pietas necessarily expected to survive unjust treatment by the community. As Valerius presents it, it is a delicate negotiation between different and potentially (though as it turns out, not here) contradictory claims. Pietas does, however, override purely personal considerations, as in the case of L. Manlius Torquatus and his son (5.4.3). Torquatus, a successful general, had, ‘with more harshness than was just’, forced his son into farm labour, interrupting his public career. Nevertheless, when his father, on the point of concluding a successful military campaign, was summoned to trial in Rome by a troublemaking tribune, Manlius junior took his sword, broke into the tribune’s house and forced him to withdraw the charge. The younger Manlius’ piety, says Valerius, was all the more remarkable for not having been encouraged by any parental gentleness. In this story we see a quality characteristic of many Roman exempla: what one might call a macho or even martyr’s approach to virtue, which glories in being virtuous in the least promising circumstances.80 The power of pietas makes even the unnatural or uncanny appropriate. A foreign woman called 78 79

80

5.3 ext. 3f. Lind 1992: 5–6 calls pietas ‘probably the oldest of all Roman ideas’. He distinguishes external pietas (respect for the gods) and internal (a ‘deeper, more subtle emotion’); Valerius’ stories typically combine the two. Cf. Guerrini 1997 on pietas towards parents. Wagenvoort 1980 traces the changing emphasis on pietas as meaning piety towards gods or human beings, showing that both meanings are present in Latin literature but their relative importance often depends on context. Cf. 5.4.5.

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Pero, whose elderly father was starving in prison, fed him at her breast, while Croesus’ mute son, when Sardis fell to Cyrus of Persia, suddenly found his voice to beg for his father’s life (5.4 ext. 1, 6). In the middle of his sequence on piety, Valerius inserts a section on a special form of it, brotherly love.81 There is, says Valerius, no stronger bond except that between parents and children; it epitomises the importance of horizontal as well as vertical relationships in the creation of a society. Last but not least comes pietas towards one’s native land (patria). ‘Even the authority of parents, which equals the powers of the gods, subordinates its strength to the sovereignty of one’s native land, and brotherly love also cedes to it freely and happily, and with the best of reasons, because it is possible for the state to stand whole even when a house is overturned, but the ruin of a city of necessity drags everyone’s household gods down with it. But how can one speak of these things, whose power is such that men have attested them by giving up their lives?’ (5.6 pr.). Patriotism is not limited to individuals: the whole citizen body displayed it during the Second Punic War, offering all their wealth and refusing pay to finance the defence of Rome’s territory. Valerius makes one of his looser links to move from patriotism to the love of parents for children, which he calls a ‘pious and placid feeling’ (5.7 pr.). Here we find fathers serving their sons on campaign, refusing to disown them under threat of political censure, going to their death in a son’s place, giving up wife or even kingdom to their sons.82 The next chapter concerns fathers who acted against their sons when their sons committed treason or some other major political offence. (It is notable that in this section Valerius only admits stories where fathers acted in the interests of the state with clear legal justification, though Roman history provides plenty of more ambiguous cases.) He follows it with fathers who behaved with clementia towards sons who were under suspicion, as if to emphasize that fathers would only act against sons under the direst and most unambiguous provocation. It is a measure of how important he feels family bonds to be, that the only occasions when Valerius admits to tension between fathers and children are when a child has committed a crime or threatened the state.83 Finally, Valerius gives a number of instances of fathers who, though grief-stricken over the deaths of children, bore up in public. They make 81 83

82 5.7.1 ext. 2. Especially 5.5.1, 2, 4. In one of his non-sequential chapters, Valerius offers exempla of children whose lives took very different paths from those of their fathers. Some of them rose to glory from humble circumstances, which he does not condemn but attributes to fortune (3.4); others degenerated from great families, which he disapproves of very much (3.5).

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a nice summary of the proper balance and relative importance of pietas towards one’s family and towards one’s country.84 Section 6.4 on chastity (pudicitia) is also largely about family matters. Chastity is another quality which is frequently regarded as more important than life itself – a status which reflects the importance, for Romans as individuals and the state as a whole, of men being able to be sure that their children are legitimate, their honour secure and their memory safeguarded for posterity. A number of examples concern Roman fathers who killed their daughters rather than allow any suspicion of unchastity to attach to them.85 Ideally, chaste women who fear or suffer attack kill themselves, like Lucretia or the Greek woman Hippo.86 Unchastity is so dangerous that even holding office does not prevent people being taken to trial for it (6.1.7); one can be imprisoned for even threatening to treat a Roman citizen unchastely (6.1.9), and a soldier who killed a tribune in Marius’ army was vindicated when he explained that the man had propositioned him (6.1.12, cf. 10, 11, 13). Sexual, like military, order is one of the pillars of Roman virtue and the state. 8. Self-control In discussing the reaction of some Romans to the election of Cn. Flavius to the praetorship in 304 (9.3.3), Valerius refers to their anger as a lack of selfcontrol, and various kinds of self-control, all highly desirable, form another large group of connected examples. He begins with ‘the most health-giving part of the soul’ (4.1 pr.), moderation (moderatio). Moderation prevents the mind being carried away by passion, and no fewer than twenty-seven examples demonstrate what a good thing that is. Several concern Romans to whom the people wanted to give more power than they wanted or believed they should hold, and how they persuaded the people to change their minds.87 Others concern moderation towards enemies or rivals at home or abroad.88 84

85 86

87

Wives do not feature in this sequence of chapters, although they appear in section 4.6 on conjugal love. Women in general appear far more regularly in this work than in any other collection of ethical material, reflecting the considerable use that Roman stories of the past make of women. 6.1.2–3, 6, though in example 4 it is only the freedman who kissed P. Maenius’ daughter who is killed. In 6.1.5 an unchaste son is banished from his father’s sight. 6.1.1, ext. 1. Occasionally, they kill their attackers (6.1 ext. 2), and in one instance, being denied the chance to live with the vestal virgin leads a group of captive Teutonic women to mass suicide (6.1 ext. 3). 88 4.1.7, 8, 12, cf. 4.1.6b, 10a. 4.1.3–6a.

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Moderation enables people not to be buffeted by success or failure. When Numidicus Metellus was in exile, he received a letter during a theatrical performance allowing him to return to Rome. Until the show was over he did not move, nor reveal by look or gesture how happy he was.89 Moderation is never described as a gift of the gods, but always put down to the credit of the practitioner. In most of Valerius’ examples, there is also a benefit for the community as a whole, which becomes more law-abiding or harmonious. A special case of moderation is exampled by enemies who became friends. Enmity itself, even violent enmity, is not described as a vice, but good people put it aside in certain special circumstances. M. Aemilius Lepidus and Fulvius Flaccus became friends when they were elected censors at the same time, ‘thinking that it did not become people who publicly shared the highest power to be engaged in a private feud’ (4.2.1). Others give up hostilities when elected consuls together (4.2.2), eating together or making marriage alliances (4.2.3, 6), or when enemies are in need of help (4.2.4, 7). In all these cases either the good of the state is put before private feuds, or material difficulties experienced by one party eclipse other considerations. Both types of example show the importance of the solidarity of the Roman group (this is one of the rare sections without any foreign examples). Lust and greed, two forms of madness, are held at bay by abstinence and continence (abstinentia et continentia). Material and sexual continence are the dominant themes of this section, especially on campaign. So frugal was Fabricius Luscinus that when he heard that in Athens a celebrated philosopher recommended doing nothing except for pleasure, he was shocked (4.3.6b). Valerius adds the comment that that is the difference between a city that loses an Empire and one that gains one. Notwithstanding, he includes three anecdotes about Athenians in his foreign section, including the famous dictum of Sophocles, when he was asked as an old man whether he still had sex: ‘Heaven forbid! I have escaped from that as gladly as I would have escaped from any other insane domination.’ (4.3 ext. 2). The theme of poverty (pauperitas) follows naturally from abstinence. Here we find the mother of the Gracchi boasting that her children are all the jewellery she needs (4.1.1), Roman magistrates with little or no silverware to their names and military heroes who, while adding thousands of square miles to the Roman Empire, were content to farm a few iugera themselves (4.4.5–7). ‘From poverty, it seems the right moment to pass on to modesty,’ 89

4.1.13, cf. 4.1.2.

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says Valerius (4.5 pr.). Modesty is a mixed bag, encompassing the reluctance of the Roman people to watch the games in the presence of the senate (4.5.1), magistrates who declined to accept or run for office (4.5.2–3), Pompey’s modesty in military defeat (4.5.5), Caesar’s in covering his body even as he was stabbed to death (4.5.6) and a youth who mutilated himself rather than excite lust in strangers (4.5 ext. 1). As in all these chapters, nothing indicates that poverty and modesty do not arise within an individual, but they benefit both the individual and the community. 9. Intelligence Intelligence or wisdom (sapientia) is linked with prudence (prudentia) and cunning (vafritia).90 Valerius begins with wisdom in warfare. Scipio Africanus, for instance, said that the words ‘I had not expected’ were a disgrace to a military commander. Q. Metellus’ wisdom lay in knowing what he did not know: in this case, whether the defeat of Hannibal and subsequent peace had brought Rome (on Ap. Claudius’ principle) more harm or good.91 Wisdom or prudence sometimes has a distinctly devious dimension, as when the senate had Ti. Gracchus killed before introducing his land law, thereby removing the person who would have benefited politically from a measure which was badly needed by all. Foreign wisdom is expressed more often in words than deeds, and Socrates, Solon, Plato, Xenophanes, Aristophanes, Thales, Themistocles, Aristotle, Anaxagoras and Demades all appear along with Philip II of Macedon, Agesilaus and Hanno. Some of these wise sayings are classic chreiai of the short variety: ‘When the Athenians did not want to vote divine honours to Alexander, “Look out,” [Demades] said, “that in defending the heavens you do not lose the earth.”’ (7.2 ext. 13). The difference between wisdom and cunning is that the latter is always deceitful. Q. Fabius Labeo, for instance, having agreed with the defeated King Antiochus to take half his ships, crippled his fleet by dividing every ship down the middle (7.3.4b). Craftiness is never criticized and frequently has excellent results; indeed, it is a virtue of which the results are generally reported, which suggests that its virtue, unusually for Valerius, consists in its consequences. The same is true of his section on military stratagems (7.3), which are always applauded and always, as reported, successful. 90 91

Valerius treats sapientia and prudentia as slightly different qualities; in other authors, they seem to be synonymous, and either could translate the Greek sophia, sôphrosynê or phronêsis. 7.2.1–3.

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Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire 10. Speech

Valerius introduces eloquence by saying that although we have already seen its power in other contexts, it deserves a section to itself (8.9 pr.). Its importance lies, as every example illustrates, in its ability to change minds, courses of action and ultimately the course of history.92 Valerius emphasizes his point with a section on the power of the arts in general: Pericles, for instance, saved Athens from mass panic by being able to explain the nature of an eclipse, while Praxiteles’ statue of Aphrodite at Cnidos was so beautiful that ‘it was not safe from libidinous embraces’.93 Even so, in case human beings should become arrogant, Valerius ends by reaffirming that the force of nature is more powerful than any art; art only succeeds where nature allows it to (8.11 ext. 5). Despite the force of eloquence Valerius seems to be warning the reader that other forces, including those of virtue, are more reliable and more important. 11. The message of the past One of the longer sequences of chapters takes the past as its subject. ‘It is our business to understand how this happy life we lead under the best of leaders, came about,’ he says, ‘so that a look back at the past may contribute something to current mores.’ (2.1 pr.). This statement nicely encapsulates the ambiguity of this section, which lies in the relationship between the past and present. Flattery of the emperor requires Valerius to present the present as the culmination of the past. His examples tend rather to suggest that things were better in the past than they are now.94 Valerius says of numerous good practices that they happened in the past, with the implication that they do not happen now. These range from not marrying more than once or committing adultery (women), not feuding within the family, not poisoning family members, not drinking (women again) and respecting the elderly, to taking auspices. Senators in those days behaved with discretion and magistrates with dignity and a proper sense of duty. As for the mass of the people, they were modest and bellicose.95 92

93 94 95

Cf. P. Mil. Vogl. 6.263: ‘Demosthenes the rhetor, hearing that Aeschines had died, said, “he died on the point of my logos”.’ Plutarch (Mor. 809c) tells a witty chreia of the early fifth-century general Thucydides. Asked by King Archidamus of Sparta whether he or Pericles was the better wrestler, Thucydides replied, ‘Nobody knows, because whenever I throw him, he says I have not, and persuades the audience, and wins.’ 8.11 ext. 1, 4. Maslakov 1984: 449–53 argues that Valerius has a sense of ongoing moral decline down to his own day. 2.3.1, 2.

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Only when we reach the theatre do we hear criticism of the past. It was a mistake, for instance, for the younger Scipio Africanus to offend the people by segregating the senate from them at the games (2.4.3).96 A number of foreigners also attract praise for their customs, and in contrast to the Roman examples, some of their customs are said still to be practised. The Massilians, in particular, have a number of highly praised practices, which include relieving every man of his weapons as he enters the city, and keeping two coffins at the city gates, one for free men and one for slaves, who are buried alike without mourning.97 Death in the service of the community or as a result of the community’s just judgement is always praised, as is death at the point when one realizes that the best of life is past.98 This more than usually miscellaneous chapter nevertheless has some detectable themes. The family, the army, the theatre and attitudes to death predominate. All of them say a great deal about the temper of a community. When families are chaste, continent, respectful and harmonious, armies willing and religious ceremonies not buried under their festival trappings, a society is working well. When people recognize that though life is good, it is not worth having at any price, they are even better. That many things are more important than the individual’s life is a recurrent theme in Valerius’ ethics. 12. Bad social relations: the vices Book Nine is largely devoted to fourteen types of vice which make ethical lives difficult to lead. First come luxury and lust (luxuria et libido), and individuals and communities, men and women, Romans and foreigners come in for equal criticism. Their activities make an exciting read, and prompt some of Valerius’ most vivid prose, whether they are dissolving pearls in vinegar, wearing offensive quantities of gold jewellery, decorating their houses with marble columns, draping their walls with cloth of gold, selling sexual favours to jurors, kitting out an army with gold-hobnailed sandals and silver cutlery, or marrying or murdering family members.99 The 96

97 98 99

Valerius lists (2.4.6) a series of luxurious ‘improvements’ made to the games in the first century bce, and though he does not comment on them, it seems likely that he disapproves of awnings or streams of water cooling the crowds, or stages serially decorated with paint, silver, gold, ivory, costumes and props and made to revolve. 2.6.7d, 9. The Thracians, Lycians and Indian widows are all praised for their attitude to death. E.g. 2.6.8, 14. For other examples of ‘how much braver and wiser it is sometimes to desire death than life’ see 9.13. Pliny (HN 36–7 passim) makes his sections on precious stones and marbles an occasion for criticizing luxury, with occasional exempla and many historical references.

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implication must be that such behaviour does no-one any good; evidently this is so ingrained in Roman thinking that Valerius does not feel the need to point the moral explicitly. Cruelty (crudelitas) is a slightly different matter, because it is often practised by people who are admirable in other respects. Sulla and C. Marius, for instance, both hero-figures in many ways, sometimes behaved with unforgivable cruelty (9.2.1–2).100 Cruel foreigners, too, are often people who appear elsewhere in the work as figures to emulate, like Hannibal, or the Athenians.101 Anger and hatred (ira et odium) follow. According to Valerius these have two interesting qualities: they torment those who experience them as well as their victims,102 and they are often caused by the gods.103 Even if it is caused by the gods, however, anger is to be deplored, and even when it arises in noble men (9.3.3) like Alexander or Hannibal: it is too dangerous. It not only damages individuals; it can divide the generations and the emotions of a community.104 The idea that people can be blamed for qualities which may originate with the gods is food for thought; once again it suggests that even in difficult or impossible situations, human beings should take moral responsibility for themselves. Avarice (avaritia) is another vice which torments those who have it as well as their victims (9.4 pr.). In the stories Valerius reports, it is not always punished, but it is always bad. The same is true of arrogance and lack of self-control (superbia et impotentia): Valerius’ examples – Pompey, Mark Antony, Alexander, Xerxes, Hannibal – indicate that, though always deplorable, these vices are not always punished. Nor is treachery (perfidia), nor violence and sedition (vis et seditio), though Valerius calls them variously vesanae, cruentae, scelera, nefariae, pravae, taetrae: crazy, bloody, crimes, nefarious, wicked, foul.105 Presumably they are bad either intrinsically, or because they damage the solidarity of communities, which is the one sure result of all the stories in these sections.106 Valerius is rather less worried about rashness (temeritas) and error (error). Rashness seems always to originate in a person or community – sometimes to the detriment of the gods’ plans for them, as when the divinely protected 100

101 103 104

Seneca the Elder (Contr. 9.2.19) praises a speech by Montanus in which he described the vices which Romans tolerated in generals who were in other respects admired, including cruelty (Sulla), alongside luxury (Gurges and Lucullus), lack of self-control (Manlius) and avarice (too many to mention). 102 See below, pp. 205–6. 9.2 ext. 2, 8. E.g. 9.3.1–2. ‘There are sure images of their peculiar nature which the gods themselves have wished to be visible in famous personages through some passionate speech or act.’ 105 9.7.3. 106 cf. Sen. Contr. 2.1.7–8. 9.3.4.

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C. Caesar nearly got himself killed trying to cross the Adriatic in a small boat (9.8.2). Rashness can be harmful, but is not always. Error, Valerius says, is equally dangerous but less culpable, being the result of misunderstandings (9.9 pr.). Revenge (ultio) is a more ambivalent quality still: it can be just, when people are provoked (9.10 pr.), and sometimes it is a moot point whether it is just or not, as when Jason of Pherae was murdered by a group of young men whom he had dishonoured by condemning them to be flogged (9.10 ext. 2). Finally in this section, Valerius gives some examples of improper words or wicked deeds. They range from the tasteless to the criminal or impious; one is said to be the result of madness (9.11.4) but most are attributed to the wickedness of the individuals. In one case, Fortune punishes the impiety of a young man who insists on fighting his brother in the arena at Carthage to decide who should inherit their father’s throne (9.11 ext. 1) – a rare case of Fortune sponsoring justice. Vice affects both individuals and communities. It can be metaphysically caused or arise in human beings, but either way, human beings are criticized and held responsible for it – something which Valerius thinks is rather hard on us. Sometimes it offends, and is punished by metaphysical powers. Sometimes it leads to bad consequences, but not by any means always. Its most consistent power seems to lie in damaging individuals and communities in which it occurs, and, as we shall see, this reflects a central concern of Valerius’ ethical thinking.

13. Law, work and leisure On the face of it, Valerius differs from other wisdom genres in having both a significant interest in the law and a relatively positive attitude to it. It soon becomes clear, however, that much of his interest is in the tricky relationship between the law, justice and ethics in general. M. Horatius, though convicted of his sister’s murder, was rightly acquitted on appeal because she was unchaste (8.1.1). On another occasion, a jury was moved by pity to be too lenient (8.1.2), reminding us how human sympathies affect ethical judgements and may modify their legal expression. The gods may intervene and thwart human justice, as when Ap. Claudius was saved from certain conviction by a sudden rainstorm (8.1 absol. 4). They may also intervene to thwart human injustice, as when the vestal virgin Tuccia, accused of unchastity, prayed to the gods to vindicate her by letting her hold water in a sieve, and was vindicated (8.1 absol. 5).

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As Valerius sees it, the law is constantly modified in negotiation with ethics and other factors in the wider society (and even by divine intervention). Sometimes what is felt to be right goes against strict law; sometimes the law is used less than strictly to bring what is felt to be justice on someone who is not strictly guilty of any offence. Powerful men have their (accurate) testimony in court discounted because the jury does not wish to give the impression that the great man’s influence overwhelmed it (8.5.1). In one case, a jury acquitted P. Clodius of impurity on the basis of an alibi by Cicero which was not believed, because they admired Cicero and did not want to damage his career with the accusation of perjury (8.6.5). A whole section (8.6) is devoted to those who committed actions which they had punished in others – a sign of how much circumstances may affect people’s view of right and wrong behaviour. That Valerius does not regard any of these cases as examples of injustice or bad behaviour marks the real point where his view of the law diverges from that of other genres. Rather than seeing the law as a threat to justice, he sees the two as in creative interaction: the law, magistrates and juries collaborating with common sense and popular morality to arrive at the right decision. Even the section on wills (7.7) has a surprisingly strong ethical slant. Wills, then as now, are a rich source of social disruption. The issue in each story is where real justice lies: whether a parent’s wrath is reason to disinherit a child (7.7.4); whether a eunuch, who is a monstrosity, or a pimp, who is immoral, should be allowed to inherit like a normal respectable person;107 whether craziness in the testator is reason to overturn a will; whether if one brother has made another his beneficiary, he has a moral right to demand the same in return.108 These cases, too, are solved by a negotiation between individuals and public opinion, between popular morality and law.109 107 108

109

Valerius approves of the rulings of consul and praetor respectively, which are both that they cannot. A papyrus from second-century Thebes (Jouguet and Lefebvre 1904) deals with a dispute between father and son before death. ‘A father had a rich son, who would give him nothing. He approached the Scythian Anacharsis for judgement. The son said that he was not willing to support his father. Has he not [said the son] his own household, goods, quantities of gold? What kind of tyrant therefore, what judge or ancient lawgiver would justly say . . .?’ Unfortunately, Anacharsis’ judgement has been lost. Cf. P. Oxy. 2944: ‘. . . Philiscus of Miletus has written, on the subject of the child, which two women each claimed was theirs, that when both of them were pretending to be its mother, he gave orders to cut it in two, and to give half to each of them.’ Although judgement is deferred to a single man here, the principle that justice may diverge from the strictly legal is the same as that of many of Valerius’ examples where judgement belongs to the Roman people. Cf. the very last section of the work (9.15), which deals with impostors who tried to insinuate themselves into other people’s families – behaviour as outrageous and as heavily punished as insinuating oneself inappropriately into a will.

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From the law Valerius moves briefly on to work and leisure (studium et otium).110 Work, as Valerius says, relates to almost every subject: ‘By her keen spirit military service is strengthened, forensic glory is fired; in her trusty bosom studies begun are nourished, and whatever is admirable of mind, hand and tongue is brought through to the highest praise. By work, even the most perfect virtue is strengthened by being hardened.’ (8.7 pr.). From Cato the Elder in old age, prosecuting his enemies and reading Greek literature with equal vigour, to Roscius rehearsing every role he played exhaustively, Romans of diverse status demonstrate the virtue and rewards of hard work.111 No-one, however, should work all the time, says Valerius, and relaxation can be a virtue too. One of the most appealing images in his work is that of Scipio and Laelius, long-time friends and partners in office, relaxing together by wandering along the beaches of Caieta, picking up pebbles and shells (8.8.1). the l a ndscape of ethics in other authors How does the range of qualities illustrated by Valerius in his exempla compare with the qualities exemplified in other authors? The nearest equivalents of Valerius’ collection in Greek are the collections of famous sayings and doings by Plutarch. Only one of these, On the Bravery of Women, has an overtly moral theme. It is notable not least because although Plutarch begins by saying that the bravery of women is different from that of men (243a–b) – running to chastity, marital devotion and peacemaking – most of his examples are of women acting bravely or wisely in war or politics, activities not unknown in other authors’ exempla of women but far less well represented.112 Perhaps the next most obviously moral of Plutarch’s collections are the Sayings of the Spartans, Sayings of Spartan Women and Ancient Customs of the Spartans. The qualities for which Spartans were admired were so well established that we should expect these sayings to attest Spartan courage, continence and patriotism, and their aversion to luxury, culture and long speeches, and they do. They also record that Spartans admire friendship, justice, respect for one’s elders, marital fidelity and good management.113 The distinctiveness of the Spartan state, we conclude, so far as ethics goes, is only partial. 110

111 112 113

Valerius does not share the interest of gnomic sayings in education, but many chreiai of philosophers explicitly or implicitly commend it, e.g. the sayings of Diogenes in P. Bour. 1 or SB 1.5730 (see text at n. 130 below). 7.8.1–2, 4, 3, 5, 6, 7. Admittedly, women are rarely actually fighting, and only once ruling a state (Mor. 263c). Mor. 209e–f, 212e (friendship), 213c (63), 213d (67), 215b, 215f (10) (justice), 237d (10) (respect), 242c (27) (fidelity), 242c (28) (good management).

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The most interesting of his state-specific collections to compare with Valerius is Plutarch’s Sayings of the Romans. Not all of these can be assigned a moral, but those that can give a somewhat different picture of Roman virtue from that of Valerius. Predictably, courage, patriotism and military discipline dominate, and patriotism is twice said to be more important than life itself.114 Frugality and disdain of luxury come a close second, but the third dominant theme is self-confidence, which frequently, in these examples, looks indistinguishable from arrogance.115 One wonders whether the prominence of this quality, which Valerius attributes only to a handful of great men in exceptional circumstances, in a Greek author betrays the perspective of the vanquished. Another pair of qualities of which Plutarch makes more than Valerius are Roman strategic cleverness and ruthlessness in war.116 On the other hand, Plutarch makes hardly anything of the piety and justice of the Romans, themes beloved of Valerius.117 With selfcontrol, honesty, modesty, honour and the responsibility of good men to act to limit evil, we are back with a picture of the Romans which Valerius would approve.118 The quality of not yielding to entreaties, however, hints at the subaltern perspective once again.119 The overall impression Plutarch’s essay leaves is of a more relentlessly aggressive and self-confident state than Valerius depicts, and one much less concerned with piety, justice, clemency or generosity. Only his section on Cato the Elder has much to say about civil virtues at all.120 Most informative of all is Plutarch’s Sayings of Kings and Commanders. This collection, like those above, is organized not under moral qualities but by state and character, and many stories either have too many possible meanings to classify for certain, or are not obviously ethical jokes or bon mots.121 Many more seem to serve mainly to illustrate the greatness of great men – especially their eccentric behaviour and spectacular self-confidence. This raises the question whether greatness is itself a virtue – a strong possibility in a world which sometimes refers to aristocrats as ‘the beautiful and the good’, and equates good fortune with happiness. We have seen, however, 114 116 118 119 120 121

115 E.g. 195a (2, 3), 198f (9), 201e (22); only 199b (21) is against arrogance. 196c, 204c (11). 117 200b (6) (piety), 200e (12) (justice). 196c ff., 202f (cleverness), 196e (8) (ruthlessness). 198f (8), 207c (7) (self-control), 195b (honesty), 198e (6), 198f (10) (modesty), 198f (12) (honour), 198e (5) (responsibility of good men). Mor. 198f (13). Domestic virtues (wives should be faithful) feature at 205a (6), 206a–b (3); Cato the Elder, though, criticizes Romans for being ruled by their women (198d (3)). E.g. 186d (1): Alcibiades, as a boy practising wrestling, got caught in a hold and bit the other boy to make him let go. ‘You bite like a woman,’ said the boy. ‘No, like a lion,’ retorted Alcibiades. 188a (6): Demosthenes once said to the Athenian general and politician Phocion, ‘If the Athenians go mad, they will execute you.’ ‘Yes,’ said Phocion, ‘me if they go mad, you if they stay sane.’

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that Valerius picks his examples of greatness and self-confidence rather carefully, limiting them to individuals who have a long record of service to the state and situations where self-confidence turns out to be justified. The implication seems to be that Valerius does not identify greatness and selfconfidence automatically with goodness. We cannot be sure what Plutarch intends us to deduce from his collection, but we may note that in other works Plutarch thinks that it is possible for great men to be either good or bad: tyrants, for instance, are frequently great but bad. Another consideration is that exempla of virtue are intended to be useful and imitable by others. It is far from clear, however, that anyone, even another great man in the making, is supposed to imitate the greatness of great men – their eccentricity and self-confidence – as opposed to their wisdom or courage. The essence of that side of great men is that it is unique and idiosyncratic. It therefore seems likely, on balance, that greatness in itself is not meant to be seen as a virtue by Plutarch any more than it is by Valerius. Many of the Sayings of Kings and Commanders, however, clearly are ethical in intent. Sometimes the moral is even given in the story: ‘Brasidas [the Spartan general] caught a mouse among some figs and, when it bit him, let it go. Then turning to the people with him, he said, “Nothing is so small that it cannot save itself, if it dares to defend itself against its attackers.”’122 The most popular themes of the sayings are friendship and justice,123 followed by courage, fortune, self-control, generosity, frugality and the treatment of one’s enemies.124 Also in evidence are chastity, trust, clemency, pride, wealth, leisure, beauty and the idea that the end justifies the means.125 These are all themes familiar from Valerius’ collection; they are represented in rather different proportions from those of Valerius, but since Plutarch’s is not an explicitly ethical collection and many of the sayings cannot easily be classified, we cannot give his distribution of subjects any great significance. A few other works of the period, or parts of works, are so full of exempla that they almost qualify as exemplary collections in themselves. Book Seven of Pliny’s Natural History, for instance, deals with the nature of humanity. After distinguishing between races and describing the process of reproduction and the growth of children, Pliny turns to the ways in which 122 123 124

125

190b (1). 175e (4), 178c (17), 181d (29), 186c (3), 191b (8) (friendship); 185d (9), 190a (Telechus), 190f (2, 3) (justice). 190b (1), 190c (1), 190f (3), 194d (2) (courage; a strategic retreat is not necessarily incompatible with courage: 183d (3)), 176e (5), 177c (3) (fortune); 174e, 177c (1), 190f (2) (self-control); 173d (1), 173e (4), 182d (11) (generosity), 180a (9), 185f (17), 192d (4) (frugality), 174b–c, 191a (6) (enemies). 175e (3) (chastity), 178f (23) (trust), 191a (4) (clemency), 193a (11) (pride), 185f (17) (wealth), 176a (9) (leisure), 190a (Theopompus) (beauty), 185a (3) (end justifies the means).

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adults can deviate from the norm (in strength, speed, keenness of sight or hearing, endurance, memory, intelligence and achievement). Each category is illustrated with anything up to twenty exempla (Greek, Roman and others). These become particularly interesting to us when Pliny says that the exceptional qualities of Pompey the Great should really be credited to the Roman Empire, indicating that he regards personal and social virtues as intertwined.126 After this, he begins to talk in general of virtues which do credit to one’s society, which include military success, courage and being an outstanding orator and senator.127 From there he turns to intellectual achievement, in poetry, oratory and philosophy (citing first Greek examples, then Roman), divination and science.128 Female modesty and filial piety are among the virtues which are said to make the Romans the most virtuous and fortunate people in the world, despite the vagaries of fortune, which has a longer section than any other devoted to its unstable and destructive behaviour.129 Pliny shifts to and fro between qualities which characterize human beings in general, those which make for a good or impressive human being and those which make for a good society. He is more interested than Valerius in the contributions of poets, philosophers and scientists to a good society. (In this he is in line with chreiai in other, especially Greek sources: so for instance, ‘Diogenes the Cynic was asked where the Muses live. “In the spirits (psuchais) of educated men,” he said.’130 ) Proportionally, Pliny spends more time, too, on family virtues, though like Valerius he regards family virtues as contributing to the virtue of the state. In other ways the two are close, emphasizing the importance of courage, military success and devotion to the state and the power of fortune over even good men.131 Aelian’s Historical Miscellany is a loose collection of moralizing, historical and ethnographic anecdotes. Many of his main themes echo those of 126 127 128 129 130 131

7.26.95 (50.168–70 discusses the shortness of human life). Pliny also notes examples of exceptional longevity (48.153–9). 7.27.11–28.106. His examples include Julius Caesar, Cato the Elder, Scipio Aemilianus, L. Siccius Dentatus and M. Sergius. 7.29.107–5.120, 37.123–38.128, 56.191–209 (on important inventions). 7.35.120–36.122 (modesty and piety), 40.130 (Roman virtue), 41.133–50, 49.165–8 (fortune). SB 1.5730. Two studies of Pliny’s moral vision across the whole of the Natural History confirm that his ideas overlap substantially with those of Valerius. De Oliveira 1992 shows how Pliny characterizes a good state as one in which pietas, temperantia, virtus, cura (care for others) and devotion to the common good thrive, and a bad state as one in which people are selfish, cruel, arrogant and lovers of luxury (122–9, 213–20, 246–69 (good state), 25–66 (bad state)). Marchetti 1991: 49–67 argues that Pliny has an optimistic view of the universe, according to which it is orderly and informed by divine reason, progresses in virtue, and in which human society is a model of the cosmos. This seems to me to underestimate his view of the random, amoral power of fortune. Marchetti is surely right, however, to emphasize (81–4) that Romans have a moral language.

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Valerius: courage and boldness are to be commended, as are endurance, greatness of spirit, good sense, self-control, generosity and contentment with one’s lot.132 Loyalty is particularly desirable in women.133 Other themes echo more strongly what we have seen in other wisdom genres, such as that it is better to be poor and unimportant, because that way one is less likely to be attacked or murdered.134 Among the more unusual qualities to which Aelian is attracted are modesty and praotes, mildness of temper.135 Among the qualities he attacks are luxury, excess, gluttony, pride, vanity, fomenting civil strife and being jealous of one’s friends.136 Like all wisdom genres, Aelian has a lively interest in fortune, and he warns against impiety and treating the gods flippantly.137 He also warns that glory and reputation are unpredictable, fickle friends and less desirable to the right-thinking man than philosophy.138 Even animals can serve as exempla, and Aelian’s On Animals is in part a series of illustrations of virtues and vices from the animal kingdom. Not only humans have good qualities, as Aelian says in his preface (and again in his epilogue): animals too can be wise, just, prudent, brave, affectionate and pious. Among the qualities he particularly admires in animals are courage, wisdom, intelligence and prudence, continence, justice, piety, trustworthiness, hard work, devotion to one’s family and helping other members of the group.139 Pride and inappropriate love are ambivalent qualities, which can lead to good or ill.140 Among the qualities he disapproves of are gluttony, incontinence, jealousy, spite and sheer savagery and badness.141 All these are close enough to the values illustrated by Valerius, but perhaps even closer to the range of concerns in other genres we have looked at, especially gnomai. Either way, Aelian is clearly drawing on popular ethical ideas. conclusion Because they deal in historical characters and specific contexts, it is easy to imagine that exempla might be culturally specific: Roman stories applicable to Romans, Greek to Greeks, and so on. The layout of Valerius’ work implies a certain ambiguity on this score. On the one hand, stories about Romans and foreigners are separated; on the other, both Romans and foreigners 132 133 136 137 139 140 141

6.3, 9.1 (courage), 3.2–5, 9.6 (bravery of fathers when sons die), 9.33 (endurance), 3.21 (greatness of spirit), 1.30 (good sense), 7.8, 9.7 (self-control and its absence), 9.1 (generosity), 9.29 (contentment). 134 2.11, 2.43, 4.20, 11.9. 135 4.9 (modesty), 2.20, 9.16 (praotes). 14.45. 1.19, 5.1, 9.3 (luxury), 6.1 (excess), 1.27, 14.20 (gluttony), 3.28, 4.29, 9.34 (pride), 11.4 (vanity), 14.25 (civil strife), 14.47 (jealousy). 138 1.23, 2.10. 3.23, 2.19, 4.28. 3.28 (courage), 1.59, 2.11, 3.10, 4.60, 5.54 (wisdom etc.), 1.3, 3.44 (continence), 1.4 (trustworthiness), 4.43 (hard work), 2.40, 3.9, 5.6 (family devotion), 5.22 (help). 2.10, 5.21 (pride), 4.30, 4.56 (inappropriate affection). 2.41 (gluttony), 4.1 (incontinence), 3.17 (jealousy), 4.17 (spite), 3.26 (savagery), 4.14 (badness).

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are included, and there is nothing to indicate that any one group was not expected to read the exempla of another. Nor are foreigners distinguished from one another. A handful of topics have no foreign examples,142 but apart from the fact that some are about distinctively Roman institutions, they have no obvious significance as a group (and include both good and bad qualities). It seems likely that Valerius did not regard virtues and vices as culturally specific, and that, though he differentiated between Romans and the rest, he thought everyone could make use of others’ exempla. His attitude is not atypical of Roman imperialism, with its admiration of Greek and, to a lesser extent, other cultures, and it can be seen too in the many proverbs and gnomic sayings which Latin speakers adopted from elsewhere. Just as Greek speakers, however, do not adopt Latin proverbs nor make reference to things Roman in their own, Greek authors (with the exception of Plutarch in his Lives and orators addressing Rome) avoid Roman exempla. To the conquered, their conquerors made unappealing role models. The world as Valerius’ exempla sketch it is one in which the gods are in control, sponsoring in particular justice and good faith. The gods are also highly responsive, however, reliably favouring those who make the right religious observances. Other metaphysical powers are present but relatively unimportant, apart from Fortune. Fortune has her usual dramatic and terrifying power over human beings, but some great men do ‘wrestle’ with her and even win. Strong emphasis is put on the moral responsibility of human beings for themselves, as individuals, groups and states (three spheres which are imagined as conflicting only in extraordinary situations). The state is usually the most important sphere and individuals are both responsible for and subordinate to it, though individuals of great ability and self-confidence, if they act in the state’s interest, may lead the state where they want to go. The virtue of a people is measured largely by its state’s success – especially by conquest abroad and peace at home. The state’s institutions are seen as loci of morality and moral authority, especially the army, the censorship, the magistracies and the lawcourts. They do not, however, impose morality unilaterally on the mass, but negotiate with popular opinion. This vision of a positive, productive relationship between individuals, groups, popular morality and the institutions of state is highly distinctive. 142

Observed religion, superstition, triumphal law, censorship, the famous who degenerated, selfindulgence of the great, enemies who became friends, poverty, brotherly love, severity and moderation of parents towards children, fides of wives to husbands and slaves to masters, good fortune, electoral defeats, wills, the legal sections of Book Eight, violence and sedition, and error; suspicion of domestics attracts only three foreign examples.

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Good qualities pertain to groups, states and individuals, and often to individuals of every status. Courage is the paradigmatic example; Rome’s success depends on the courage of all her people, and even slaves can have it in the form of endurance. Valerius makes some distinctive connections between virtues. Friendship, for instance, is treated with generosity, mercy and gratitude – that is, with various forms of patronage. Pietas pertains to spouses, family, fatherland and gods – making women and the family more important and more integrated with public ethics than they are in any other wisdom genre. Self-control is linked with poverty, and intelligence with military cunning. No-one will be surprised to find some well-attested interests of the Roman upper class emerging in Valerius’ world-view. His work represents in some ways the clearest micro-society we have yet been able to identify. Other themes, like what I have called the macho approach to virtue, are distinctive not of Romans but of exemplary stories of great men and women in general. Beyond his local assumptions and concerns, however, the range of qualities and behaviours which Valerius discusses overlaps substantially with the range in our other wisdom genres. And this gives us one clue to the way popular morality may have worked across the nominally unified, practically diverse early Roman Empire. Shared values – or values with shared names, at least – could be quite differently configured in different places and by different groups, giving a sense of community which may have been no less powerful for resting on equivocal foundations. gods, metaphysics, religion, humanity

6%

justice, fides

16%

8%

courage, endurance military, civil discipline

5%

4%

3%

self-confidence, conviction etc. friendship, generosity etc.

10%

8%

pietas, family etc. self-control

2%

intelligence speech

9% 11% 8%

message of past vices

10%

law, work, leisure

Figure 4 Distribution of main topics in exempla

chap t e r 6

Patterns

For man is in this world as in a ship that is crossing the great ocean and seems to be breaking apart. Zohar

In this chapter we draw together the main threads of the argument so far, in order to see more clearly the shape of early imperial popular morality. A number of topics have emerged as important in all four genres. Most of them can be divided broadly into two spheres: the relationship between human life and the metaphysical, including the gods and forces like fate and fortune, and the relationship between human beings in ‘public’ (i.e. not domestic) life. In these spheres, ethical agents find the greatest potential for moral conflict, debate and action. Between them, they describe what we can call with some confidence a system – a system informal, largely unintellectualized and less than wholly watertight, but nevertheless discernible and accessible to analysis. The degree of agreement across the range of sayings and stories is striking and significant, and allows us to talk of a genuinely popular morality in the early Empire – popular in the sense that it travelled widely both up and down the social scale, and across place and time. At the same time, there are differences of opinion and emphasis within and between genres, which are significant in two ways. First, they allow us to see how morality alters incrementally up and down the social scale. Second, given that sayings and stories were capable of travelling and being used far from the environments in which they originated, they give users a wide range of social positions in which to situate themselves in relationships with others. These positions need not have anything to do with a user’s absolute status, but they help him or her to establish relative status in the context of particular interactions. In the second part of the chapter we move on from the content of sayings 160

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and stories to the structure of popular morality as a system, sketching how it may have worked in society as a whole, and as a tool in individual lives. being good : the shape of a syst em We begin with topics about which there is a high level of agreement both within and between genres. The gods are universally acknowledged as important in the world of ethics. They are powerful and just. Numerous sayings tell us to honour, fear and follow the gods – so many that we should probably class honouring the gods as an ethic in its own right – and warn us that the gods punish impiety. The gods sponsor what are perhaps the two most important virtues for any society’s internal stability, justice and (more rarely) good faith; they also help societies to defend themselves and defeat their enemies. This view of the gods, though not inconsistent with views expressed in high literature, is more consistently positive than most, avoiding portrayal of the gods as amoral, self-interested, aggressive, manipulative or indifferent to human beings.1 Much of the interaction of gods with human beings, however, at least in post-mythical times, is reactive rather than proactive: they do not engage in unilaterally hostile actions, but neither do they shower people with unsought blessings. Popular morality is more sceptical about religion, all four genres recognizing that wonders and omens are not always easy to interpret and not all priests and soothsayers are honest. That being so, they have surprisingly little to say about superstition, which attracts so much criticism in high literature and philosophy. This may reflect a sense among the vulnerable that it is safer to revere the powers that be too much than too little. It may also fit with our sources’ strong sense that the rightness of ideas and actions is confirmed by their outcome: if what some might regard as too nice an attention to the gods sometimes appears to work, then who will denounce it? Prayer, as an expression of respect for the gods, is widely approved. Only Valerius, though, comes close to claiming that appropriate religious observance can persuade the gods to co-operate with human plans. Fortune represents a more problematic and more controversial aspect of the metaphysical. Sayings and stories agree that fortune’s interventions are random and, for good or ill, life-changing. Only rare gnomai and exempla 1

This fits well with Lloyd-Jones’ picture (1983) of ‘traditional’ Greek religion of the archaic and classical periods. Cf. White 2002: 101; popular texts of this period, however, have little interest in other qualities ascribed to Zeus and relatively little in other gods, especially their attributes and epithets. (The role of gods in ethics is far from uniform across cultures, as Edel and Edel 1959: 158 and MacBeath 1952: 336 point out.)

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suggest that one might be able to fight back against an unfavourable fortune, and even occasionally win. Since these are the genres most likely to have originated in the higher ranks of society, they perhaps reflect the relative self-confidence of elites that they can hope, at least sometimes, to manage their environment to their advantage. The idea of expanded reciprocity, in which a limited investment of good or evil returns with interest, often from an unexpected source, features in every genre, but is especially popular in proverbs and fables. In its positive form, it is these genres’ nearest equivalent to self-secured good fortune in gnomai and exempla: if one is lucky, a measure of good behaviour may lead to disproportionate success. In both positive and negative forms, it further attests the involvement of extra-human forces in human morality. We shall see below and in Chapter Eight that not only the gods but nature too is sometimes described as a moral authority, and people are called good when they act in accordance with nature.2 Though nature is never explicitly identified as the source of the goods or evils brought about by expanded reciprocity, it seems a likely candidate. If so, we can see forming the outlines of an implied cosmology, in which the universe as a whole, including both nature and the gods, is moral and acts morally, and into which human beings, as part of the universe, must fit. Against this broadly, if not wholly positive picture of the metaphysical world, human life appears as fragile, harsh and short, and not necessarily to be preferred to death or never having been born. Human beings have to battle for existence itself: ‘We get rid of one lot and another comes in,’3 as the proverb says, imagining life as a boat which we are constantly bailing out as the sea comes over the side. Perhaps this is why hard work, which in high literature is very variously evaluated, is consistently regarded as a good thing in popular morality. We can never stop making an effort if we want to continue to live, let alone to live well. Our physical fragility is never linked explicitly to our moral fragility, but the parallel is suggestive. Many of the failures which are classified as moral, such as foolishness, greed or ambition, can also be seen as ‘natural’, in the sense that they are endemic in human beings.4 Human beings, for instance, often fail through foolishness to identify their own best interest or the appropriate thing to do, bringing disaster on themselves and everyone around them.5 Valerius Maximus tells the cautionary tale of the Potitii, who, when they were awarded the ritual 2

3 5

This is ‘nature’ in the double sense defined, for instance, by the Oxford Latin Dictionary as ‘the power which determines the innate character and feelings of human beings’, and, ‘the power which governs the universe and directs all natural processes’. 4 On moral qualities as natural see further below, pp. 211–13. Z1.75. 1.1.17. The impiety of Q. Fulvius Flaccus (1.1.21), in contrast, was due to madness.

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care of a cult of Hercules by Hercules himself, fecklessly handed it over to public slaves, with the result that all the adult males of the family died within a year and their name with them. Even the gods, it seems, cannot help some people to help themselves. This contrast between a relatively harmonious and moral universe, and human physical and moral fragility, creates the first in a series of cognitive dissonances which punctuate Roman popular morality. Morality may be natural and universal, sayings and stories seem to say, but some people seem naturally incapable of it. How can this be? How can it be good? The plangent tone of much wisdom material attests how strongly this dissonance was felt. The only exception to our sources’ widespread agreement about the nature of human life is old age, which provokes disparate sayings and stories within each genre, being presented variously as useless, foolish, irresponsible, unconventional or wise. Only once is virtue seen as independent of age: ‘Virtue is the one possession that stays with you in old age,’6 says the Ad Demonicum. Usually, age is described as the dissolution of virtue. Occasionally, wisdom is said to increase with age, though this is only ever attributed to men of high social status. An obvious explanation is that only the wealthy could afford to view old age in a positive light, while for the poor the elderly were simply a non-working mouth to feed.7 The idea that old age may be useless or foolish, however, is applied to every social stratum, and even an old lion, according to Phaedrus, can become an object of ridicule, insult and abuse.8 In the light of the cognitive dissonance we have just identified, an alternative explanation is equally attractive. Death comes to everyone, and need not prevent a man’s good reputation living on. But if even before death, old age dissolves human life into uselessness and idiocy, what is the point of all our hope and effort towards goodness? Contradictory sayings and stories about old age express in stark form the paradox of human aspiration, both moral and physical, and human fragility, which pervades wisdom material. strif e As we have seen, ethically significant relationships in the Empire occur overwhelmingly in the public sphere, and their hallmark is strife. Many 6 7 8

Ad Dem. 48, P. Amh. 2.25, cf. O. Claud. 188. The idea that old age is an unresolved problem, generating conflicting feelings and values, is carefully explored by Parkin 2003: 57–89, 239–72. 1.21.

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stories and sayings comment simply on the fact of strife; some describe its causes, from the arrogance and cruelty of power to the chiselling of the poor, from the pursuit of glory to the pursuit of money, from greed to lack of trust to sheer stupidity. In every genre, the number of sayings and stories that concern strife indicates another locus of cognitive dissonance in popular wisdom: strife is seen as both endemic in human life and acutely problematic.9 Most, though not all social strife is presented as the result of inequality between agents. At the same time, inequality is presented as inevitable, and even approved as part of the natural order. Proverbs and fables hold this view as strongly as gnomai and exempla: all four genres, for instance, tell the poor to be content, to appreciate the relative safety of an obscure life and not to seek advancement by sycophancy towards the rich. The early Roman Empire is often seen as a period both of increased social mobility, and of relative peace and prosperity, but through the eyes of popular morality it looks a world both inequitable and turbulent. Unfortunately for the poor, being content with their low status is unlikely to keep them out of trouble, if that is their aim, because strife is usually described as originating at the top of society. Those who can, further their interests by attacking others, and the majority of vices which cause strife – greed, arrogance, anger, cruelty – are vices of power. Having said that, the poor and lowly do what they can to sting, tease and parasitize the rich and powerful, while the popularity of Hesiod’s line about potter envying potter and carpenter carpenter, shows that competition between those of similar status generates conflict too. The vices that cause strife nearly always have human origins. The human community, it seems, is largely responsible for its own bad behaviour. No fewer than three second-century authors criticize the Homeric fable of the two jars which stand on Zeus’s threshold, from which the god is said to dispense good and evil to human beings. The jars are Zeus’s, says Dio; they are administered by Fortune, but men are responsible for the way they use her 9

Societies vary a great deal in how much they acknowledge and discuss strife, and whether they focus on battles with external or internal enemies. Spartans and early Christians are examples of groups which deny that, in principle, strife occurs internally at all. Edel and Edel 1959: 157 claim that, among Pueblo Indians, it is axiomatic that both gods and human beings must at all costs avoid conflict. Von Fürer-Haimendorf 1967: 19 observes of the Chenchus of Andhra Pradesh in India that, ‘the human qualities most highly valued are helpfulness, generosity, courage [against external enemies] and an amiable temper’. To support these values, he says (151), they have much more rigid rules for interpersonal relations than Western societies. He compares them (24) with the Andaman Islanders, who are similarly peaceful, while being less regulated. Our sources have less to say about external enemies, but we have noted that Greek proverbs include a rich repertoire of insulting stereotypes for both other Greek cities and non-Greek states.

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gifts. Plutarch and Maximus of Tyre agree that virtue and vice originate not in the jar, but in human souls.10 I suggested above that it makes sense to see moral frailty as a kind of natural frailty in our sources, and we shall see that it also makes sense to see virtue as a kind of natural strength, but there is no suggestion that this relieves agents of moral responsibility; rather the reverse. If there is an external factor which directly affects human vice and virtue, it is, as Dio says, fortune. Fortune can change not only people’s material circumstances, but their moral ones. Crassus, for instance, as Valerius reports, once so rich, went bankrupt and was branded with shame. Shame came too to Q. Caepio, who, after a glorious career, ended his life at the hands of the public executioner.11 We shall see in Chapter Eight that both shame and social degradation are so closely associated with evil as to stand often as metaphors for it. Attracting shame is not merely undesirable; it defines someone as bad. Fortune is like nature in that we are forced to take responsibility for its results without being able to control the cause. Crassus and Caepio both suffer from what Bernard Williams called bad ‘moral luck’, by which an agent is placed in a position where it is impossible to do good.12 In popular morality, however, bad moral luck operates only where fortune is involved. It is not, for instance, bad moral luck to be presented with an ethical dilemma, and here we see the positive side of our sources’ attitude to moral responsibility. When a character is presented with a dilemma, either he is already in the wrong, having done something he shouldn’t, or he is not criticized for whatever decision he makes. In Babrius’ fable (50), for instance, a fox, fleeing a hunter, hides in a woodpile and begs a nearby woodcutter not to betray him. The hunter arrives and asks the woodcutter whether he has seen the fox. The woodcutter says he has not, but points in the direction of the woodpile; the hunter, however, not understanding the sign, goes on. The fox emerges, but refuses to be grateful to the woodcutter on the grounds that the woodcutter simultaneously saved and tried to betray him. What the fox does not do, and Babrius does not do either, is to blame the woodcutter.13 The reason seems 10

11 12 13

Il. 24.527–33, D. Chr. 64.26 and passim, Plu. Mor. 473b, Max. Tyr. 34.3. Plato (Resp. 379c–d) objects to this passage on the grounds that the gods can only dispense good (Trapp 1997: 270 n. 7). Plutarch and Maximus have Platonist affiliations, but their interpretation also fits the mood of other sayings and stories. 6.9.12–13. B. Williams 1981: 20–2. The same concept is known in non-Western cultures: see especially Fortes and Horton 1959 on the Dahomeans, Yoruba and Tallensi of West Africa. Later readers were evidently worried by this story. The later epimythium says, vaguely and hopefully but without much basis in the fable, ‘God is wise and never errs. No-one escapes punishment, though he may think he has hidden his treachery.’

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clear: the woodcutter’s nature pulls him two ways. He owes something to the fox for not refusing, at least, to hide him, and something to the hunter as his natural ally against foxes. A decision either way would have been defensible; a decision both ways simultaneously, though frightening for the fox, is also defensible. If sometimes, according to popular morality’s view of nature and moral responsibility, there is no good action possible, sometimes two, contradictory good actions are possible. This makes sense in a system in which being good means above all being good of one’s kind, and where any action, so long as it is compatible with one’s kind, is acceptable. It also implies that one’s kind may be different in different circumstances. We shall return to both these ideas below.14 against strife: social virt ues and individ ualistic vi rt ues Against the prevalence of social strife, stories and sayings share a range of defensive weapons. These, however, are never as strong as their users might like, and there is no suggestion that any of them can root out strife completely. Nearly all virtues are social, in the sense that they are practised in relation to other people, recognize common interests and aim to create some kind of solidarity between agents, however temporarily. Even qualities like abstinence or modesty in Valerius (4.3, 5), which in theory might be practised in solitude, prove in his examples to be highly communal. When Scipio Africanus, for instance, captured a beautiful Carthaginian girl in Spain, he displayed abstinence by handing her back to her parents with a dowry, thereby securing the devotion of the Celtiberians to Rome.15 Popular wisdom never suggests that (like a Cynic sage, for instance) one can live well independently of society; it assumes that there will always be people to whom one will have to relate and on whom one will have to rely. Texts which deal with social virtues have a strong sense of what is sometimes called ‘the prisoner’s dilemma’: both parties will flourish best if both are virtuous, but if one party deceives the other, the deceiver will do better than the deceived (at least in the short term), while if both try to deceive each other, both will lose out. The dilemma is whether to risk being virtuous, knowing that if the other party lets you down, you will suffer badly. Stories like Babrius’ fable of the three bulls and the lion illustrate the dire fate which awaits those who make the wrong decision.16 The prisoner’s 14

Pp. 179–90.

15

4.3.1.

16

B44.

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vulnerability ensures that the presentation of virtues is never simple. We are told not only that friendship is a good thing, but that we should be cautious and slow in making friends, test them thoroughly before trusting them and make sure to keep them sweet by helping them in need. Trust is a virtue, but most sayings and stories are cautionary tales about how hard it is to be sure that people are trustworthy and the disasters that ensue when they prove not to be. All four genres share this nervousness about practising virtue, but some are more nervous than others. The golden rule of reciprocity, for instance, though not as common in any genre as one might expect in a world where exchange and patronage permeated everyday life, appears more often in gnomai and exempla than proverbs and fables. Gnomai and exempla in general have more to say about specific forms of social co-operation than proverbs and fables, and are more optimistic that it can occur.17 (Fables barely raise the possibility of co-operation except as a utopian dream.) If the relatively privileged origins of many exempla and gnomai are the reason for their optimism, it suggests that the higher levels of Roman society felt more confident of the solidity of their social relationships and less vulnerable than the lower. The origins of many gnomai and exempla are also attested in the particular interest which both genres show in virtues which are practised by the rich on the poor, such as the giving of money, mercy or protection. Most examples take a rosy view of these practices. Ps.-Isocrates and Valerius, for instance, think that generosity to the poor is an excellent thing, as both virtuous in itself and encouraging gratitude and political support among its recipients. ‘When mercy rules the public are happy,’ is Publilius’ cheerful assessment of societies where the rich are kind.18 Proverbs and fables are more sceptical, observing that the rich must treat the poor with a minimum of consideration in order to secure their labour and obedience. They are wary of gifts, knowing that no-one gets anything for nothing in this world, and fearful of debt. The genres which are most optimistic about co-operation across social groups are also most optimistic about the possibility of virtues crossing the boundaries between states. Valerius, for instance, tells many stories which show Romans (and sometimes others) exercising trust, generosity, honesty or justice towards honourable enemies in war (sometimes with the happy 17

18

This suggests that historians’ emphasis on reciprocity as a social mechanism in classical antiquity may be more influenced by elite written sources than is usually assumed and be less applicable to the less privileged. The same genres also occasionally describe competition between peers as a virtue. PS523.

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result that the other party, impressed by Roman virtue, willingly capitulates to Roman rule).19 Few other sayings or stories, though, take any interest in the behaviour of states; their focus is on smaller and usually less formal groups. One of the most prominent of all virtues in stories and sayings is wisdom or intelligence: all four genres place a high value on wisdom, and many different forms of it are identified and described. Any differences between genres on this subject are only of nuance, though there is more on good sense and less on foolishness in gnomai and exempla, in line with their tendency to greater optimism.20 To make a virtue of wisdom is not unusual cross-culturally,21 but the aims of wisdom, as sayings and stories describe them, are highly unusual and quite different from those of most other virtues. Far from being a social or problem-solving virtue, wisdom in our texts is an embattled and lonely quality, typically individualistic and selfinterested, rarely acting on behalf of others.22 Wisdom establishes another cognitive dissonance at the heart of popular morality. Because it regularly puts individual goodness above the good of the community, it is constantly in danger of creating as much conflict as it avoids or solves. With wisdom go the large number of sayings and stories about what is foolish and its close relatives, the pointless and impossible. Foolishness attracts some of the most colourful imagery in proverbs and gnomai, as well as some of the most memorable fables and exempla; the most withering scorn and criticism are heaped on it. The close connection between foolishness and the pointless and impossible emphasizes the cautious, conservative nature of wisdom. (The exception is wisdom in war, which frequently goes hand in hand with courage and daring.23 ) The aim of wisdom is almost always avoiding trouble or conserving what one has, a fact which makes its antisocial nature easier to sustain. As a conservative virtue, wisdom is also described as helping people to exploit their native qualities in their existing 19 20 21

22

23

E.g. 5.1.4, 5, cf. 5.1 ext. 3a. See further below, pp. 214–15. There is also more on wisdom in Greek texts than Latin, which may reflect the concept’s long history in Greek culture and literature; it may, though, be coincidental. Babylonian, Egyptian and Israelite wisdom literature all have much to say about the wise man. Twenty-three of the eighty-eight poems of the Hávamál concern wisdom, which is linked to almost every other major topic: wealth, speech, travel, food and drinking, friendship and moderation. Two exceptions are maternal love, which makes mothers clever, like the lark in the cornfield in Babrius’ Fable 88, and military necessity, which makes commanders clever, like Agathocles of Syracuse, who invaded Africa when the Carthaginians had taken Syracuse, and frightened them into withdrawing unnecessarily (VM7.4 ext.). Ladd 1957: 302–3 shows with reference to the Navaho that self-interest need not cause conflict but can lead to altruism, because everyone wants to live in harmony, a step our texts do not seem to have taken. But they are usually presented as a response to necessity, e.g. VM3.2, passim, 37.1c, 7.4.4.

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situation. This makes a further contribution to the idea that being good means being good of one’s kind. justice, l aw and cultural capital Justice is among the most important qualities discussed in every genre, a paradigmatic example of a social virtue. It is also more intimately involved than any other virtue in the Roman world with an institution of state, the law, to the point where the vast majority of sayings and stories which deal with justice are set in legal contexts or use legal imagery. This makes justice particularly interesting for us, as it deals explicitly not only with the problem of defusing strife and creating social relationships, but with the potential tensions between agents and institutions in doing so. The relationship between justice and the law is problematic in every genre, though not in quite the same way in each. Appropriately, since justice is attributed to the gods, the relationship is analogous to that between the gods and religion; the human institution sometimes fails to live up to that which inspires it. Even Valerius, whose view of the law is the most positive of any of our sources, finds justice more often in complex negotiations between laws, plaintiffs and defendants, orators and juries than in the law itself. ‘A strict interpretation of the law is often strictly wicked,’ says the Latin proverb.24 Greek proverbs recognize that civilization depends on laws and that, without them, wars are inevitable,25 and many proverbs praise just men, but proverbs which combine justice and law do so negatively, commenting on the incompetence or corruption of juries. One gnome urges us to obey the law, but both Publilius and a Greek gnomic ostrakon offer variations on the more ambivalent theme, ‘he who does no injustice needs no law’, and like proverbs, gnomai about just men are distinct from gnomai about the law. There is widespread doubt that people of unequal status have equal access to justice, as Babrius’ fable (118) about the swallow who built her nest in the courthouse wall and had her young eaten by a snake, attests. Popular morality, it seems, would like to trust the law to resolve conflicts justly, but fears that it does not. The institution of the law, which exists to mediate conflicts, has developed faster than the public belief and confidence in institutions which it needs in order to function well. The result is yet another cognitive dissonance in our material. When such a dissonance 24

Cf. Ter. Heaut. 795, Ter. Andr. 214, Cic. De off. 1.10.33, Hieron. ep. 1.14.

25

Z5.25, D2.47, D3.5.

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creates a mistrust of social or political institutions, it is known to economists by another name: as a crisis of social and cultural capital.26 In recent years, economists have become increasingly interested in what is termed ‘common social capital’, or ‘cultural capital’, referring to a wide range of resources not taken into consideration by classical economic theory, but now seen as vital to the development, stability and success of societies.27 Social capital has three categories, of which one is ‘institutional capital’.28 This may include vast, complex institutions like medical services and education, judicial and police systems, or smaller, simpler cultural organizations from state-sponsored arts to voluntary organizations. Institutional capital depends on ideas like community mindedness, common interest, a sense of equity and justice, of trust, honesty, friendship and the value of helping others: the belief that it is worth individuals’ while to invest not only some of their material resources but some of their personal, psychological and emotional resources, their creativity, time and energy, in society, for the general good. These ideas are ‘cultural capital’.29 The most politically, socially and economically developed and successful societies, it is argued, enjoy the highest levels of cultural capital and the greatest investment of it in their institutions. The difficulty for any society is to acquire it. To develop from a situation in which there is limited trust between individuals or in institutions, in which justice is not expected routinely to be done, in which friendship is not expected always to be honoured or self-sacrifice to be repaid with gratitude, to a situation in which all those things are taken for granted, is a long and difficult road. We have seen in popular sayings and stories from the Roman world that many of the values – justice, trust, honesty, friendship, helpfulness – which create cultural capital are very highly regarded. At the same time, they are constantly undermined by expressions of fear, uncertainty and mistrust, both of the qualities themselves, and especially of institutions like the law which are supposed to embody them. 26

27 28 29

The state provokes a similar response. Only Valerius and the Spartans (reputedly) make the state a locus of moral authority and value it so highly that they think it is always worth dying for. Other genres occasionally praise patriotism, but they express no confidence (and little interest) in the state; their focus is the individual and the group. The term ‘social capital’ was coined by Jacobs 1961 and popularized by Coleman 1988. See e.g. Throsby 2001, cf. Putnam 1993, 1995, 2000, Dasgupta and Serageldin 2000, Sen 1987. The other two are natural capital (including all the earth’s resources) and social infrastructure such as public transport systems, water and electricity. Fukuyama 1995: 10–12, 23–41, 43–8 and passim. Economists tend to talk of cultural capital as an contributor to social capital, but as I argued in the Introduction, we can just as well see them the other way round, and cultural capital as the most important factor in the creation of viable societies.

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The Roman world has therefore reached a stage in its development at which it knows what qualities it values and is aiming for, and has developed some institutions to embody them, in the process transferring at least part of the responsibility for some virtues, notably justice, from individuals to institutions. At the same time, it is not yet able to sustain its cultural capital at the level to which it aspires, so its institutional capital lacks the popular confidence it needs to succeed, leaving justice stranded between individual and state, satisfactorily achievable by neither, while other qualities, such as helpfulness or generosity, lack institutions to embody them all.30 The concept of a crisis of cultural capital can, in fact, be applied to other cases where largescale institutions are not involved. Many of the qualities recommended in popular morality, from trust and friendship to generosity and gratitude, are undermined by the fact that there is insufficient pre-existing investment of cultural capital to convince agents that they will have the effect they desire. qualities variously evaluat ed So far we have been discussing ethics about which our sources are broadly in agreement, or where some genres consistently evaluate them one way and others another. Some ethics, though, are so thoroughly morally ambiguous, or subject to such radically varied assessments, that they cannot be so neatly classified. Popular morality is more thoroughly vexed on the subject of wealth than almost any other. Wealth is widely agreed to be necessary, powerful, desirable, even an object of worship (though we are never instructed to worship it). It is equally widely said to be corrupting; exemplary stories praise people who refuse to acquire it, while proverbs and gnomai advise us to give it away, not to mind losing it and to be content with poverty. Hercules goes so far, in Phaedrus’ fable, as to refuse to greet the god Plutus in heaven, on the grounds that he is a friend to bad men and corrupts them with the temptation of money.31 The best use of wealth is that recommended by ps.-Isocrates, giving it away to friends in need. Stories and sayings about 30

31

It perhaps reflects this tension that so many sayings and stories praise hope as a virtue, if one all too likely to be disappointed. Vivien Foster points out to me that the use of the word confiabile (trustworthy) in Latin American societies indicates a level of development of cultural capital not wholly dissimilar to that of the Roman Empire. To introduce someone as confiabile, means that you know him or her well and that he or she can be trusted. People seek help and support from networks of such trustworthy people more readily than from public institutions which they do not automatically trust. 4.12. The fact that such an ambiguous quality can be divinized (by both Greeks and Romans) is problematic in itself; popular morality offers no explanation.

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wealth go against the grain of popular morality in general, by accepting that it is an inevitable part of Roman society, useful and widely desired, but almost never calling it good. We shall see in the next chapter that ethical language discriminates between ‘natural’ goods and things which are good because they are valued by society, but wealth rarely attracts even that qualified praise. The conflict in popular morality’s evaluation of wealth has something in common with the conflict in its attitude to the law. Though wealth is not an institution in the same sense as the law, and it does not claim to resolve conflicts in the same way, it has some of the qualities of an institution: it gives people a place in a social hierarchy, expresses and mediates social relationships. In principle it could therefore be used to distribute goods, help the vulnerable and promote social harmony, but there is not enough trust, justice or friendship in society at large to encourage people to give much, or discourage them from taking everything they can get. The impossibility of abolishing wealth and the inevitability that where there is inadequate cultural capital, wealth will generate conflict, produce an insoluble problem for popular morality. Subject to equally diverse evaluations are women. There are heroic women, clever women, dangerous and desirable women, pious, loyal, silly and evil women. There are both good and bad, chaste and unchaste wives (though mothers are consistently good).32 Love is sweet, but makes everyone, male and female, mad (though not, apparently, dangerously so). Most attitudes to women are represented in most genres, but there are differences of emphasis between genres and languages which may be significant. Sayings and stories in Latin are mostly more positive than those in Greek, suggesting that the relatively emancipated position which historians see women as having held in Roman law and high society is part of a wider culture.33 In Greek proverbs, women are more often silly or useless, where in gnomai they are vicious or savage, and proverbs are markedly more favourable towards marriage than gnomai, suggesting that the negative view of women so pervasive in Greek literature originated in high, rather than in popular culture. The variety of attitudes to women, and the fact that not all sayings and stories about women place them in a domestic context, suggests that 32

33

It is hard to overestimate, and hard for modern Westerners even to imagine the range of attitudes to love, marriage and the opposite sex in diverse cultures. Benedict 1934: 53–6 describes love, marriage, adultery and divorce among Zuñi Indians as matters of little social interest and no deep feeling, in comparison, for instance, with theft, which is both socially scandalous and emotionally traumatic. Roman marriage and attitudes to women in popular ethics are paradoxical: both fiercely possessive and often fiercely negative. E.g. Gardner 1986, 1998, Evans Grubbs 2002.

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the presence of women in the public sphere was acknowledged, if not, in ethical texts, much liked. Still, women do not feature in public roles in sayings and stories nearly as often as other evidence for the early Empire suggests they did in fact: in the mentality of popular wisdom, both the public sphere and the morality which arose in it were still overwhelmingly male.34 That is perhaps why women, unlike wealth, though perceived as a potential social problem, can usually be dismissed with humour or disdain. Last but not least among important qualities of ambiguous virtue is speech. Evaluating speech is especially difficult because speech represents people themselves, expressing what they think, their natures, relationships, intentions and desires, and just as the goodness of a person is complex and circumstantial, so is that of speech. It is a powerful force for good and evil. It is bad when it boasts, babbles, lies, flatters or enters the marketplace, but makes a journey go more pleasantly. Like intelligence, speech is both essential for living well and inescapably problematic, as often a tool of self-interest, conflict and competition as peaceful exchange or conflict resolution.35 According to a number of sayings, speech is less to be desired than silence. Nothing makes clearer popular wisdom’s sense that to act at all – to think, intend or even exist – is to stir up moral dilemmas and difficulties. 34

35

These views are in some respects strikingly out of line with those of neighbouring societies. Greek and Latin texts have less to say about women in general than many wisdom collections, and no wisdom text of this period except Plutarch’s Bravery of Women deals with women specifically, as do the late Ptolemaic(?) Ninth Instruction of Papyrus Insinger and Chapter 31.10–31 of the fifth century(?) biblical Book of Proverbs. We may also note that our texts have nothing to say about male adultery, while those of adjacent societies condemn male and female adultery equally. Papyrus Insinger warns men not to be foolish and misbehave with women, and especially not to consort with bad women or be unfaithful to their own wives; it also warns against bad women and beautiful women but praises good, wise and loyal wives, especially as housekeepers (Lichtheim 1980: 191–2). Probably a little earlier in date, the Instruction of Ankhsheshonq praises good, wise, loyal women as housekeepers, though it also warns against telling gossiping women one’s business, disapproves of adultery and worries about the power of beauty. (This Instruction is unusual in giving advice about how to marry off either one’s son or daughter advantageously (Lichtheim 1980: 163–80).) The Book of Proverbs describes the good wife at some length (31.10–31). Good wives are a gift from God (19.14, cf. 12.4, 18.22); rebellious, quarrelsome, adulterous ones are a curse (11.22, 21.9, 30.20), while prostitutes are a danger to the young man (6.20–35, 23.27–8). Adultery is equally bad in a husband (6.20–35). Earliest of all, the Babylonian Counsels of Wisdom (c. 1500–1200 bce) and the Dialogue of Pessimism (possibly as late as 600 bce) both contain sections on women, counselling against marrying a slave or prostitute; only one comment by the pessimistic slave of the latter text is negative about women, calling them a sharp dagger to cut the throat. The popular sayings collected by Lambert 1960: 213–21 include several about women, rather fragmentary, but not negative as far as one can tell. Ladd 1957: 203–5, studying the Navaho, notes their unusual love of talking, which they describe, along with listening, as the best way of thinking and solving problems. It is intriguing that the genres of popular morality, whose language is by nature veiled and figurative, are so much concerned with truth and lies. There is the hint of an attempt to reassure about their loud disapproval of deceit.

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We saw in the Introduction that courage is widely, but not universally praised in sayings and stories, and that differences of opinion probably reflect differences of circumstance: soldiers, for instance, must be courageous, but slaves may not be. A number of other qualities are rated differently according to circumstance. Mercy is often praised, especially by Valerius, and especially when the Romans are dealing in war either with those who are not a threat to them, or with honourable enemies. Babrius, however, urges us not to be merciful to our enemies if they are naturally wicked, as they will only take advantage of us.36 Anger, to Valerius, is always a bad thing, not least because it damages the angry man as well as his object. Publilius Syrus, in contrast, thinks that provided one is a good man, one’s anger is just or one stays in control of it, anger is not necessarily bad.37 A few virtues, vices or institutions are particularly interesting to certain groups. Valerius attests that upper-class Romans place particular value on the state as a locus and arbiter of virtue. The same group suffers more than any other from envy and shame as they compete for power, authority or admiration.38 Frugality holds a special place in both Sparta and Rome, where patriotic upper-class Romans and Spartans are encouraged to be content not with absolute poverty (like the really poor) but with less than one might expect men of their status to own. Frugality in this context is not just a virtue in its own right, but a symbol of Romans’ and Spartans’ exceptional devotion to their state, beside which personal enrichment means nothing. Like the Roman and Spartan commitment to courage,39 this is an example of what I have called the ‘macho’ approach to virtue, in which qualities which are generally admired, but not necessarily regarded as absolutely always good and desirable, are turned into absolute goods 36 38

39

37 VM9.3, PS230, PS695, PS643. VM5.1, B143. Only in exceptional circumstances can we link an unusual interpretation of a quality, or a body of sayings or stories to a specific city, state or group of people. (Even when we are offered such a link, as in the case of ps.-Plutarch’s Proverbs of the Alexandrians, the material is not always distinctive.) Plutarch’s Sayings of the Spartans and Sayings of Spartan Women are two exceptions, and these collections do suggest that Sparta’s ethical system was in many ways unusual. This is no surprise, as the Spartans were notoriously eccentric; they were so atypical, however, that we cannot use them as evidence that local ethical systems were the norm around the Empire. It is, moreover, wholly unclear how far this picture was realistic by the time Plutarch was writing and how far, if it was in practice, it was part of the periodic, artificial reconstruction by Spartans of their own culture. Plutarch’s Sayings of the Romans, with its emphasis on Roman aggression, ruthlessness and indifference to appeal, is also a warning to those comparing such bodies of material to ascertain differences between micro-societies: what outsiders identify as distinctive about a culture may not be what insiders recognize as such; what a Roman calls clemency may look like arrogance to a Greek; what a Greek calls patriotism may look like treason to a Roman. When comparing the ethics of different groups, therefore, we must wherever possible compare like with like, insider with insider view and outsider with outsider. Pp. 137–8.

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and practised much more stringently than is usual.40 In both cases, this machismo attests the exceptional nature of these groups, at once the cause and symbol of their success.41 Such cases are exceptional, however, and in general few broad differences are detectable between sayings and stories from different sub-groups, or between Latin and Greek material in general, suggesting that the eastern and western halves of the Empire at this period were largely ethically coherent.42 g enre and social self-positioning It is clear from the preceding four chapters that as the genres of wisdom originate (broadly, if not always) in different sectors of society, so they retain differences of tone and emphasis. Gnomai and exempla, many of which originate in relatively high social strata, are more optimistic, emphasizing the virtues of power and the possibility of solving social conflicts, at least temporarily. They have a stronger sense of controlling at least some aspects of life than do most proverbs and fables, and more faith in the state and its institutions. It is especially worth noting, given the widespread assumption that exempla belong to very high society and high rhetorical culture, that exempla have overwhelmingly more points of similarity to gnomai than difference from them. Since the popularity of gnomai across a wide social spectrum is not in doubt, we can take exempla too as expressing many popular moral ideas.43 Proverbs and fables are more pessimistic and more individualistic, keenly aware of the vulnerability of the socially lowly. On individual topics, all four genres occasionally differ even more from one another. When proverbs 40

41

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Not only the degree to which the virtue is practised changes here, but the grounds on which it is practised: instead of being good because it has good effects, it becomes good in its own right, which is otherwise (see below, Ch. Eight) a rare type of justification. A few virtues, such as greatness of spirit, glory, reputation and ‘majesty’, are consistently praised, but because they are particularly associated with the highest ranks of society, there is room to wonder how well they were regarded by the majority. ‘Great men’, for instance, are widely cited as moral authority figures. At the same time, numerous proverbs and fables celebrate the fall of the proud, ambitious or self-aggrandizing who did not merit the position to which they aspired. The situation is even more complicated when it concerns an Empire, one part of which has pursued glory by subjugating the others, including their aristocracies. In these cases, qualities seem sometimes to have been given opposite values by different social groups. Though a large number of surviving Latin sayings and stories are translations from Greek, and there is no way of telling whether or how far they are distorting our sense of the similarity of culture in east and west. Many gnomic quotations originate in fifth- and fourth-century Greece, many of their ideas have been in circulation for a long time. It does not follow, though, that the overall shape of ethics has not changed; it is, I think, more likely that it has. We shall see in Chapters Eleven and Twelve that exempla are closer to all other wisdom genres than to much other high literature.

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mention wealth, for instance, it is usually in the context of strife between rich and poor, or to tell the poor to be content with what they have. Gnomai are much more interested in the power and (problematic) virtue of wealth, while exemplary stories emphasize the frugality of those who could be wealthy but choose not to be. Proverbs have more than other genres to say about foolishness, exempla about self-confidence, fables about pride coming before a fall. When we have identified what is distinctive about each genre, we have a clearer sense of what is common to them all, which we can identify as the core of early imperial popular morality. It includes the benign power of the gods; the fearful power of fortune; human physical and moral frailty; the focus of morality in the public social sphere; the prevalence of strife; the importance of friendship, justice, trust, honesty and wisdom. Just as significant are the points of cognitive dissonance we have identified in every genre. In an implicitly moral universe, we are naturally and morally frail, so our nature sometimes conflicts with the wider nature. We are morally responsible for things we cannot help, so that if they destroy us, justice both is and is not done. Some virtues which are essential in addressing strife, like wisdom and speech, are also agents of strife. We both rely on and fear we cannot rely on qualities like justice, honesty and trust, and institutions of state like the law, to mediate our conflicts. It is hard to overstate the emphasis which Greek and Roman popular morality places on conflict and on these points of cognitive dissonance, and hard to exaggerate how unusual they are in doing so. One possible explanation, though speculative, is temptingly near to hand. By the early Empire, Greek and Roman society, especially urban society, had been evolving continuously, quickly and repeatedly in new directions for the better part of a thousand years. It would not be surprising if such a rapid pace of change generated ethical problems, a sense that society, especially urban society, was where strife and other ethical problems tended to arise, and a sense that society’s solutions were inadequate. What we can identify as popular morality, however, does not stop with what was common to all four genres, because all were widely diffused across the social spectrum, interacted and interbred with one another. Any proverb, gnome, fable or exemplum could therefore potentially be heard or read and used by someone from any social group. We cannot be sure how far people outside the literary elite recognized certain sayings or stories as more characteristic of one group or another, so we could conclude simply that, put together, they added to the subtlety and complexity of the moral system that was available to everyone.

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That is no doubt true to a degree, but it overlooks the extent to which the material displays its particular social perspective. It is hard to read any saying or story without forming an opinion about its social viewpoint. We shall see in Chapter Eleven that philosophers and literati were well aware of this and able to manipulate it, using different stories and sayings, for instance, to appeal at one moment to common humanity, at another to Romanness and at another to the obligations of nobility. There is no reason to suppose that those lower down the social scale could not do the same. Ps.-Isocrates, for example, makes his aristocratic and elitist, even monarchical perspective abundantly clear. Nevertheless, he was very popular in Roman Egypt, in towns and villages most of whose inhabitants were socially greatly inferior to his intended audience. Perhaps, like the hares of Babrius’ Fable 25, the middle-ranking inhabitants of Tebtunis or Oxyrhynchus liked to identify people more lowly than themselves, and practise on them the grand virtues of high aristocracy. When they needed instead to flatter a superior, there were exempla of the great and good to draw on, while if they wanted to criticize a neighbour, they could position themselves as a wise man using the words of the Seven Sages. Most people in the early Empire will have held many subtly different social positions in relation to other individuals and groups. In the constant jockeying for status and advantage which both popular morality and other sources attest as part of everyday life, they will have needed to position themselves differently in different interactions, sometimes emphasizing their ordinariness, sometimes their extraordinariness, sometimes their inferiority, sometimes their superiority. As the analysis of the past four chapters has shown, popular moral material, in its diverse genres, offered a number of different social registers for users to employ as circumstances demanded. The social diversity captured by the repertoire of popular wisdom not only tells people what is good or bad, right or wrong, and not only indicates that right and wrong behaviour are often socially specific, but allows agents to identify their own social position relative to those around them, and express it through the particular sayings or stories they choose to articulate. significant absences I argued in the Introduction that the topics discussed in wisdom texts are not all those of interest to society in general, nor all those which are controversial, but those which have ‘ethical ponderability’. There is plenty of evidence, for instance, that the family was important in Roman life, and it plays an appropriately large role in Roman law, religion, literature and

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art. It is relatively under-represented in popular morality, and the likely explanation is that it was seen as relatively morally unproblematic. We shall see in Chapter Eight that love between family members is regularly described as ‘sweet’ and ‘dear’, words which imply that it comes naturally. We may also note that (in common with all ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean moral codes) our sources nearly always address men and, where they specify, householders. It may be that householders were seen as principal guardians of the morals of a household in the same way that they were principal guardians of its other resources, with other members of the family taking their lead from the head. The head of the household, too, was the household’s main link (at least in principle) with the world outside, and so the one in most need of ethical advice and examples relating to the public sphere.44 This attitude to the family is not unparalleled in neighbouring societies, but it is not the norm either. Ancient Sumerian, Egyptian and Hebrew wisdom literatures, for instance, all have more to say about the family than Greek and Latin,45 while some ethical codes have more to say about the family than about any other relationships.46 Literature, inscriptions, documents of all kinds and material evidence attest many other areas of keen interest and activity in Roman society which are represented little or not at all in wisdom texts: farming, trade and all kinds of culture, to name only three. If we compare our sources’ range of interests with that of another work of the period which was designed to address the main everyday interests and activities of a wide range of people, we can see how different a picture it is possible to draw of the primary concerns of second-century life from that of popular morality. The Oneirocritica of Artemidorus is the only surviving complete example of what at this period was a popular genre, the handbook of dream interpretation. In the first two books, dreams are organized thematically to reflect a rough order of life, beginning with birth and education, the adult body, 44

45 46

It is notable that virtually no sayings or stories of this period concern hospitality, an important ideal in Greek and Roman high society and literature. Compare e.g. the Hávamál, which is thought to have Latin roots but which, with its emphasis on travel, hospitality, company and solitude, and its rather positive view of human life, has a very different feel from our texts. On hospitality, it offers such advice as, ‘The newcomer/ needs fire/ his knees are numb./ A man who has made/ his way over mountains/ needs food and fresh linen.’ Or, less optimistically, ‘To many a place/ I made my way late/ and far too soon to some./ The ale was drunk/ or yet unserved/ the unwelcome guest is untimely.’ (Jónasson 1992: 20, 80). Above, n. 32. Radin 1957, in a classic study, compiled a list of ethical generalizations gleaned from Winnebago texts. There are twenty-three in all, of which four concern kindness to children (one’s own and other people’s), four, marital ethics (‘Marry only one person at a time.’ ‘Do not abuse your wife: women are sacred.’ ‘Do not be haughty with your husband’), two, relations with in-laws, and four, the importance of being friendly towards everyone but loving your family best. Other themes include hospitality at home, kindness to all and helping the elderly.

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clothing and climate, various aspects of daily life, trades and professions, including hunting, fishing, sailing, farming, the law, office, liturgies, military service and the worship of the gods, and ending with death.47 Dreams mean different things according to one’s circumstances, and Artemidorus provides interpretations for a vast range of dreamers, including men and women, old and young, free and slaves, rich and poor, literate and illiterate, sick and healthy, and men engaged in all kinds of profession and activity.48 In the process, Artemidorus has much to say about some of the most important themes of ethics, notably wealth, friendship and fortune. In some respects, though, Artemidorus’ picture of the everyday concerns of the inhabitants of the Empire is very different from that of popular morality. He is happy to adopt the perspective of all sorts and conditions of dreamers. About birth, death, health, education, women, love and the family he has much more to say, in more detail, than sayings and stories, while professions and ways of life are incomparably more important to him and, presumably, his readers than to wisdom texts. The Oneirocritica shows that inhabitants of the Empire were capable of pursuing interests and expressing perspectives other than those we find in ethical material.49 Not everything that happens every day, though, and not everything that matters, is ethically ponderable or problematic. Popular morality addressed only the areas of life where good and bad, right and wrong most mattered. phase rules, situational ethics and executive et hics So far we have had a good deal to say about popular morality’s view of its own precariousness and its inherent tensions. Ironically, from the outsider’s viewpoint, the system looks both more coherent and more robust. In the section on genre and social self-positioning we considered one way in which our material, however superficially disjointed or dissonant, may have worked for users in practice. In the second part of this chapter, our focus is on how popular morality functioned successfully as a system in its society and in individual lives. Most of the virtues we have been discussing are what are sometimes called ‘phase rules’: rules which generally hold but which can be broken 47 48 49

The last three books are miscellaneous, containing extra material which Artemidorus collected later. See Price 1986: 15 on the importance of status to the interpretation; Price puts Artemidorus helpfully in cultural (mainly medical) context. On Artemidorus’ context, see Weber 1999. From the first century, the Carmen astrologicum of Dorotheus of Sidon illustrates a range of interests similar to those of Artemidorus and again slightly different from those of popular wisdom; they include property, business, marriage, sickness and death, love, disease, power, intelligence, speech and trickery. See discussion by Konstan 1997.

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occasionally, with regret.50 Closely related to the fact they are phase rules is the fact that most of our virtues are what have been called ‘situational’: they do not apply equally to everyone in every situation, but have more or less force depending on circumstances.51 A modern reader is likely to be struck, early on, by the rarity in our sources of instructions which apply to everyone equally. In the modern Western world, heavily influenced as it is by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, we are used to the idea that there are a few specific things which, in principle, everybody who belongs to a particular community should always do or never do. Hans Küng, in an influential study of ethics across the six largest contemporary world faiths, goes further and identifies four such commandments which are common to all of them: do not kill, do not steal, do not lie and do not exploit people sexually.52 In principle, these actions (along with others which vary from tradition to tradition) should never be performed by any Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim or Sikh, ever. They are universal and absolute. Such rules do not emerge from Graeco-Roman popular wisdom. A small number of universal absolutes – qualities which are always good for everyone – do emerge from our sources, including justice, trustworthiness, honesty and intelligence. Unlike the universal absolutes of modern world faiths, however, these are all what are often called ‘executive virtues’. Executive virtues tell people not what to do or not to do, but how to behave, and most of the non-universal virtues we have been discussing are also, in fact, executive.53 A preference for executive ethics is closely related to a preference for situational ethics.54 To tell everyone not to kill leaves no room 50 51

52 53

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Edel and Edel 1959: 55. These are sometimes held to be more characteristic of primitive societies, which is evidently not the case here. After a flurry of writing in the 1960s, situation ethics have been of interest mainly to theologians. Fletcher 1966 gives a good general overview. According to situation ethics (26), people enter each situation armed with the maxims etc. of their community, a sense of natural law (using reason as a tool of moral judgement) and some general principles. One could call it, he says, (31) ‘principled relativism’. It is characterized, in addition to relativism, by pragmatism, positivism and ‘personalism’ (putting people at the centre of ethical questions) (40–52). Küng and Kuschel 1993: 24–34. Seneca (ep. 95.36–46) in his discussion of the use of precepts, recognizes the potential difficulty of this, which is that precepts tell one how one should behave, but not what, specifically, to do to get there. This is all right, he says, if one has a natural tendency to virtue, but if one has a tendency to vice, being told to love one’s country or help one’s friends is not enough by itself to create virtue. Seneca’s solution is that we must always keep the ultimate good in mind and measure individual precepts against it, and he gives an example of piety practised on this basis. Sometimes regarded as characteristic of primitive societies (e.g. MacBeath 1952: 376–8), which cannot be right. MacBeath also argues that such societies derive their ‘core’ ethics from their particular social arrangements, not from first principles, but the values which command most agreement here are far from specific to the shape of Roman society.

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(in principle) for appropriately different reactions to different situations. To tell everyone to be just, leaves what constitutes just behaviour to the individual and the social group to define in specific cases. As Plutarch puts it, ‘Achilles was brave in one way and Ajax in another, and the wisdom of Odysseus was not the same as the wisdom of Nestor, nor the justice of Cato the same as that of Agesilaus . . .’55 Where executive and situational ethics are dominant, who you are or the position you hold strongly affects what it is good or bad for you to do. In such a system, actions which are acceptable for a man may be anything from abnormal to outrageous for a woman. Generosity may be a good thing coming from the rich to the poor but a bad thing coming from the poor to the rich. Self-confidence allied with greatness or intelligence is commendable; allied with stupidity it is not. Plutarch, in the Dinner of the Seven Sages, makes Aesop tell a fable very much to the point. ‘A wolf, seeing some shepherds eating a lamb in their tent, came up to them and said, “What a fuss you would be making if I were doing that!”’56 Executive ethics are extremely adaptable. ‘Friendship’ is a term which notoriously covers many different kinds of behaviour. ‘Wisdom’ in wisdom literature embraces everything from practical know-how to book learning to military stratagems. One could confine a whole study to one or two such terms in all their multiplicity of meaning.57 From our perspective, focusing on the larger pattern into which they fit, the important point is that the equivocation involved in calling many fractionally, sometimes substantially different behaviours by the same name is very useful, because it allows agents to claim that they share values and practices without their having to behave in exactly the same way. One might think that any society must employ at least some nonexecutive ethics. Surely, for instance, it would be both wise and uncontroversial to ban murder. Why does no fragment of Greek or Roman popular wisdom tell us not to murder our neighbours? Is it too obvious to be worth mentioning? That would imply that popular morality does not deal with the large, central issues over which there is the most agreement in Roman society, but with minor, marginal issues about which diverse views are possible, but that picture, as we have seen, does not fit our sources. Does popular wisdom not tell us not to do murder because murder is covered by the law? That would imply a degree of symbiosis between the development of popular ethics and the law which is hard to envisage. Other subjects of 55 57

56 Mor. 156a. Mor. 243c–d. Cf. Kaster 2005, McDonnell 1990, 2006 (which unfortunately appeared too late to be taken into account in this study).

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law, moreover, do appear in popular wisdom, so that explanation too is unsatisfactory. In fact, executive ethics and situational ethics together are able to be as specific about subjects like murder as non-executive commands. When a text such as Deuteronomy 5.17 says, ‘Do not murder,’ it implies a considerable further body of information and discussion about what murder is. Killing an enemy in war, for instance, in most societies does not count as murder; neither does judicial killing by the state. In some societies, killing an attacker in self-defence, or the man who killed your brother, or an adulterer whom you find in bed with your wife, does not count as murder. Our sources make no general statement about murder, but they reach comparable views about when it is or is not acceptable to kill, by different means. Killing is ubiquitous in fables, whether as a law of nature, the result of bad luck, the reward of foolishness, a punishment for treachery, or simply the lesser of two evils, and the individual circumstances of the death tell us how to evaluate it.58 Gnomai too refer to a wide range of circumstances in which people may be killed or not killed, making clear in each case whether they approve of the death or not. Valerius tells self-explanatory stories like the one about M. Horatius, who killed his sister: he was acquitted of murder by the people because his sister had been unchaste, so his severity was felt to have been justified (8.1.1). Killing in our sources may be bad, good, justifiable, inevitable, a regrettable necessity, or just but inadvisable. If they do not promote the simple principle, ‘Do not murder your neighbour,’ it is not because they are not thinking about killing, but because their thinking is more detailed, nuanced and specific than can be expressed in a simple general rule, and because when it comes to enunciating a general rule, they prefer to express it as an executive ethic such as ‘be just’. An ethical system built on executive and situational ethics is a sophisticated one. ‘Do not behave unjustly to your neighbour’ implies that a wide range of behaviours has already been discussed and general principles agreed. It also expresses a high level of confidence in the community to work out its problems. If the central themes of our material paint a picture of a harsh, combative world, the importance of executive ethics shows its positive aspect: that those who live in it can aspire, on the whole, to discuss and settle, or at least to contain their differences. 58

E.g. Ph1.1, B141, B140, B138, B124.

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core, periphery and gravit y Popular sayings and stories display a relatively small ‘core’ of ideas which, to judge by the level of consensus they attract, everyone who regarded themselves as member of the Roman Empire was expected to share. It was made easier for everyone to share them by the fact that they are all executive ethics, susceptible of a wide variety of practical interpretations depending on one’s identity and situation. Surrounding these was a much wider periphery of ideas which one might or might not hold. Some peripheral values may have been a matter of personal choice, like mildness of temper or devotion to one’s wife. Some were undoubtedly tied to class, region, gender or other markers of identity. Some of these may have been locally so powerful as to constitute a core of their own. So, for instance, chastity, not a core value for Romans as a whole, was a core value for women. Forgiveness, not a core value for most, became a core value for Christians. It was probably more common for members of the Empire to derive their ethical ideas from several different sources, than from just one. I shall call this a ‘multi-gravitational’ model of morality, imagining each core value as exerting something like a gravitational pull on people’s ideas and emotions. If this sounds like a recipe for conflict, sometimes it surely was. But people must often have responded to the pull of different ethics at different times or in different places. Paul of Tarsus played with three identities, Jewish, Roman and follower of Christ, all of which had rather different ethical codes which he invoked at different times. At home in Smyrna, Aelius Aristides no doubt felt that Smyrna was the centre of the world. When in Rome, he felt, or pretended to feel, that Rome was; during his frequent stays in the Pergamene Asclepieum, he may have felt that piety mattered more than patriotism. A multi-gravitational model of ethical affiliation discourages the drawing of strong boundaries between communities within the Empire, and even beyond it.59 Instead, I suggest that the Roman landscape encouraged people to think of themselves as more or less strongly oriented to one particular social group, or more than one, depending how many of its 59

Boundaries are less often invoked by anthropologists than in the past, but anthropologists of ethics still occasionally find them a helpful concept. Nigel Rapport 1997: 74 shows how ‘insiders’ in an English village used a discourse of morality to distance themselves from ‘offcomers’, or uninvited recent arrivals. ‘What is “moral” in Wanet is for local people to defend their landownership against outsiders.’ Morals stop at the edge of the community: on one occasion, the author reports being asked whether he’d like, if he hadn’t any morals (in respect of offcomers – the question itself being an earnest of trust and community between the author and the questioner), to spend the summer cheating tourists at darts.

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core values they shared. A man who saw himself as a traditional Roman would want to share all the core values of traditional Romans, whatever he perceived those to be (they would surely include courage, frugality, piety and patriotism). A man who saw himself as both Roman and Smyrnaean, or more Roman at some times than others, might feel less obliged to share all the core values of Romans, replacing some with local patriotism and other locally valued qualities. In so far as being Smyrnaean generated boundaries, for instance between oneself and one’s neighbours at Ephesus, they were moveable boundaries, capable of being extended, say, to include Ephesians but not the people of Pergamum, or all the cities of Asia Minor but not the Greek mainland, or all Greek-speaking cities but not Latin-speaking ones. All the time, enough virtues were common to popular wisdom from all over the Empire, to ensure that all Romans, in the most elastic sense, could, if they wished, feel they all belonged to the same society. In this respect, ethics work like many other markers of identity in the Roman world. In other respects, they do not. Ethical systems either hold people together by means of shared behaviours, or fit them together by means of complementary behaviours. Executive ethics do the first to a limited degree, but even those values which are supposed to be shared by everyone, like justice, because they do not specify the content of just behaviour, leave ample room for variety and complementarity.60 Situational ethics do the second. The stability of the Roman Empire, insofar as ethics contributed to it, depended not only on certain kinds of behaviour, but on its members fitting in with one another and taking complementary roles in a kind of vast social jigsaw puzzle.61 This is not as easy a project as it might seem, and if we add the dimension of time, it becomes harder still. To maintain something recognizable to a social group, over even short periods of time, as justice, for instance, or frugality, while adapting to individual and collective circumstances, is no small achievement. That Greek and Latin speakers were able to feel any sense of ethical continuity in community – and the number of historical references, eponyms and exemplary stories in circulation shows that they were – attests that along with great flexibility, the system we are describing had remarkable cogency and powers of endurance. 60

61

Compare the ‘biologically based concept of state and society’ exemplified by the fable of the parts of the body (Liv. 2.32.9, B134), in which the different orders complement each other; on this in Greek and Latin literature in general, see Havas 1989. Hatch 1983: 134 points out in a timely caveat that anthropologists (and historians) tend to present the society they study as working well – which it may not, in fact, be doing.

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moralit y and the ind ividual If popular ethics were like a vast jigsaw puzzle, how did each moral agent decide where he or she fitted in? How did the moral system, which we have been viewing as a whole, enable individuals to decide what was good or bad, necessary or useful for them to do? It is a vital question, because if what is good or bad for one depends on one’s situation, then to miscalculate that situation is to court disaster. An explanation emerges if we imagine every reader as a key which unlocks the material in a unique way. He brings to it his own history, circumstances, hopes and expectations; he brings his understanding of himself, his environment and the relationship between them; he brings a willingness to take the ethics of a saying or story seriously. He takes from it whatever strikes him as helpful, challenging, reassuring or improving. There are guidelines implicit in the material, but within limits, everyone can and often does take away from it something different. There are obvious difficulties with such a scenario: any user of any text can decide for himself with whom he identifies, but that does not necessarily create a solid basis for ethical action. Most people are capable of a good deal of self-deception, when they are not actually ignorant of their own nature. When we read literature of any kind, we identify as often with characters we admire, those we should like to be like, as with those we are like, while if the character most like us is unattractive or unsuccessful, for whatever reason, we are even less likely to identify with him or her. The capacity of readers or listeners not to take the relevant lesson from a saying or story, therefore, would seem to be limitless. But if that were so, the material would be useless as ethical instruction; it would have no regulatory force at all. Since people in the Roman world evidently did not think it was useless, there must have been some way of ensuring, or at least making likely, that it was used fruitfully. A recent and radical theory of ‘natural goodness’ offers some support to this interpretation of our material, and an account of how it may have worked. In her monograph Natural Goodness, Philippa Foot has argued for a ‘naturalistic theory of ethics’, one which breaks with much moral philosophy of the past sixty-five years.62 Foot says, ‘I want to show moral evil as a kind of natural defect.’ She criticizes in particular forms of subjectivism developed by Ayer, Stevenson, Hare, Mackie and Gibbard, which hold that the language of evaluation expresses the feelings and attitudes of the speaker. 62

Foot 2001: 5.

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Meaning was thus to be explained in terms of a speaker’s attitude, intentions, or state of mind. And this opened up a gap between moral judgements and assertions, with the idea that truth conditions give, and may exhaust, the meaning of the latter but not the former. Thus it seemed that fact, complementary to assertion, had been distinguished from value, complementary to the expression of feeling, attitude, or commitment to action.63

Foot argues that acting morally, giving value to a certain set of beliefs or behaviours, is better seen as part of practical rationality. This is not necessarily to say that action should be determined by pleasure or selfinterest. Rather, there are certain forms of behaviour which are necessary for human society – human life as we know it – to be sustained. They may include, for example, not killing others at random, looking after your children, defending your group from attack, keeping promises, placating potentially dangerous gods. These are what Foot calls natural goods, natural because they are as necessary for human beings who want to survive in what we think of as our distinctive natural fashion – in society – as water is for plants or food for animals, and people who keep them are good people because they are good for the survival of human beings in society. For all the enormous differences between the life of humans and that of plants or animals, we can see that human defects and excellences are similarly related to what human beings are and what they do . . . In that we are social animals, we depend on each other as do wolves that hunt in packs, with cooperation such as our own depending on special factors such as conventional arrangements . . . I am therefore, quite seriously, likening the basis of moral evaluation to that of the evaluation of behaviour in animals.64 Human good is much more complex than animal good because human lives are much more complex, but they are not fundamentally different in kind. As to the relationship between fact and value: ‘the grounding of a moral argument is ultimately in facts about human life. In my view, therefore, a moral evaluation does not stand over against the statement of a matter of fact, but rather has to do with facts about a particular subject matter, as do evaluations of such things as sight and hearing in animals, and other aspects of their behaviour. Nobody would, I think, take it as other than a plain matter of fact that there is something wrong with the hearing of a gull that cannot distinguish the cry of its own chick, as with the sight of an owl that cannot see in the dark . . . Why, then, does it seem so monstrous a suggestion that the evaluation of the human will should be determined by facts about the nature of human beings and the life of our own species?65 63 65

64 Foot 2001: 15–16. Foot 2001: 6–8 (author’s italics). Foot 2001: 24. Foot notes the Aristotelian derivation of this idea, and that Elizabeth Anscombe called things that each species needs to make them flourish ‘Aristotelian necessities’. Foot’s theory is a development of virtue ethics, on which see e.g. Hursthouse (1999).

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I have quoted Foot at length because her argument is highly original and not widely familiar to historians. Among philosophers it is controversial, but whatever its technical problems, it is illuminating as a perception about how ethical ideas do in practice work in societies at large. In her study Situating the Self, another philosopher, Seyla Benhabib, also has much of interest to say about how ethical ideas work in practice among ordinary people. Benhabib argues that in assessing the grounds of moral action we should see ourselves not as detached intelligences or decontextualized agents, in the tradition of Descartes and Kant, but as embedded and embodied in our social contexts and individual histories. Our judgements and decisions are affected by the way we see ourselves and our environment, and becoming an ethical agent is a process of growth in which our instincts interact with the world around us (though our ethical ideas are not confined to what we pick up from the environment; Benhabib is strongly committed to the possibility of change).66 Benhabib sees women living mostly outside the mainstream of Western intellectual history as having a stronger sense of this kind of identity than men. For the same reason, women are more attuned than men to stories and examples as ways of explaining the nature of the world and how we should live.67 ‘How one should live’ is not for women a metaphysical question with an answer which theoretically works for everyone, or even a whole class of people. It is a practical, individual, context-dependent question, with no rules, but with a wealth of stories and examples of how other people have lived, to give us ideas and guidance. I suspect that this way of approaching ethics is not so much distinctive to women as true of most people outside philosophical elites, and it may explain why stories, histories, chreiai and collections of often disparate maxims, are all widespread forms of wisdom literature. Most people do not look for advice to a system of ideas that coheres in the abstract, nor do they expect detailed instructions for every moment they live. At the same time, it is certainly not the case that every human experience and situation is totally different from anything that ever happened before. A collection of sayings and stories about behaviours and attitudes that worked well in particular (real or fictional) situations gives a reader a repertoire of ideas, examples, analogies and horrible warnings, things to bear in mind, cast aside as irrelevant, adapt to one’s own situation, or take over wholesale. ‘What can happen to one man’, as Seneca says, quoting Publilius, ‘can happen to anyone.’68 66

Benhabib 1992: 5–8.

67

Benhabib 1992: 14.

68

Ad Marciam de consol. 9.5.

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What is particularly helpful about both these theories, is their emphasis on the idea that what it is good for someone to do depends not on any abstract theory of the good, but on that individual’s (or group’s) general situation and immediate context. What is good for one person may not be good for another, and what is good for one person at one time may not be good at another time. This is precisely what we find in popular sayings and stories. Foot’s ‘natural goodness’ covers both what in the next chapter I shall call ‘natural goods’ and ‘elective goods’, or socially negotiated goods, since both kinds are equally important for the functioning of human societies. In looking at the Roman world, we should distinguish between them, since, as we shall see, the language of our sources does so itself. We shall also see, however, that the boundary between natural and elective goods is constantly blurred and that both equally are said to be good, necessary, impossible, or facts of life, as appropriate. It is this slippage which makes it possible for Foot in theory, and ordinary people in practice, to treat both kinds of good as ‘natural’, equally necessary for the functioning of society. Foot’s theory also accounts for the constant slippage in our sources between language of fact and value. Statements about what it is good or bad for certain people to do, amount to statements of fact about what holds a society together, and beyond that, what keeps the world and the cosmos together. It is the identification of what is good with what holds society, the world and the cosmos together which provides the strongest reason for individuals not to give in to self-deception, wishful thinking or manipulation when approaching sayings or stories for advice. As they constantly warn us, if we identify with the wrong character or pick the wrong piece of advice, we are liable to suffer disastrously for it, and not only ourselves, but often other people too. It is therefore in everyone’s interest to be as honest and clear-sighted as they can. Each individual may act as his or her own ‘key’ to the material, determining what he or she should take from it, but only if the right key is applied will the right guidance be given. Of course, human nature, even at one moment, may not be simple and circumstances may not be simple, either. Being good may mean being good of one’s kind, but more than one aspect of oneself may be called on in a single situation. When L. Reginus, for instance, as Tribune of the People, let his friend Caepio out of prison (where Caepio had been thrown in military disgrace), he was experiencing a clash between his nature as magistrate and his nature as friend, which was scarcely solved by their leaving Rome altogether and going into exile.69 In such a situation, Valerius gives no hint 69

VM4.7.3.

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that Reginus would have been wrong, or more wrong, in taking one course or the other. In a dilemma, as we have already seen, to follow any part of one’s nature is equally defensible. Even the fact that Caepio went on to have a very mixed career and to disgrace himself again does not cause Valerius to criticize Reginus’ decision. He acted as a friend and both parties survived the consequences; that is enough for the decision to count as good. Here at last we can see the main themes of the chapter coming together. In their naturally, ingrainedly imperfect social world, the best human beings can do is to do well in their particular circumstances and relationships and according to their own nature, ‘nature’ here comprising the whole complex of their situation, capacities and intentions. This will not always serve the justice of heaven, but that justice will eventually come to pass, and if the human being suffers as a result, that is the measure of the imperfection of our world, and to be borne. Though many sayings and stories focus on the inadequacy of our attempts to stave off strife and avoid trouble, viewed from the outside, the system they create has notable strengths. Where everyone is good of his kind, or aims to be, people and groups have the potential to fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. The prevalence of executive and situational ethics makes it possible for different groups and individuals differently situated within groups to share, nominally, the same virtues. The multi-gravitational pattern of ethical community allows people to belong to many overlapping groups while remaining under the umbrella of Roman culture. In the course of a lifetime, an individual will make many decisions, and his or her situation will evolve, perhaps a great deal. A good life is a life in which at every point, the individual’s self-assessment is accurate, his choices appropriate and successful. At every point, goodness may mean something different, and at every point, the individual has the potential to be good anew. There is no such thing as a monolithically good man, a man who is good once and for all, whose internal condition is harmonious and stable and whose practical choices are always coherent and always the same.70 There is no one thing, doing which will make a life good. There is rarely even a sense that a good life has some overall shape or trajectory. A good life is one which has been good repeatedly, at each separate moment of decision, right up to the end, and the best life is one which puts off the end, by a series of good decisions, for as long as possible. It is no wonder that the much quoted gnome of Solon, that you cannot tell whether someone 70

See further pp. 204–6.

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has been happy (in the broad sense) until he dies, resonated with ethical agents in the early Roman Empire.71 During the course of life, the aim was survival, for the individual who hoped to live to make choices another day, and for the community which hoped not to fall apart. To live a good life meant, above all, to continue to live. 71

On happiness as an aim of life, see below, pp. 199–200.

part t wo chap t e r 7

The language of morality

Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die? George Borrow, Lavengro ch. 25.

So far, we have dealt with the content of popular morality: what is approved or disapproved of in sayings and stories. In the next three chapters, we turn to the reasons why certain things are approved or disapproved of. We focus first on the language of moral comment itself, laying out its rich diversity, exploring how far terms and images run in ‘families’ (using images of the natural world, for instance, or from religion) and investigating whether certain ranges of language are consistently associated with particular actions or qualities. We shall look at the verbs in moral statements to see what basis they offer for action. Finally, we shall look briefly at a topic which is of great interest to philosophy and high culture, but which has only a limited presence in popular morality: the internal condition of the ethical agent. Of our sources, proverbs and gnomai are by far the most useful for this exercise. The epimythia of fables offer a limited range of adjectives expressing praise or blame, and rather more verbs telling one in various ways to do or not to do something. Similarly, it is generally in the introductions to exemplary stories, if anywhere, that we find explicitly evaluative language, and its range is not wide. Proverbs and gnomai, in contrast, abound in colourful and explicit terms of praise and blame, and it is with the simplest of these that we begin. The most basic words for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are, in Greek, agathos and kakos, in Latin, bonus and malus. These, with their comparatives and superlatives, are used hundreds of times in our sources to refer to all sorts of people, qualities and actions. We can add to them a number of near-synonyms, all of which have a range of overlapping meanings: in Greek, esthlos (good, morally good, stout, brave, good of one’s kind),1 chrêstos (good, morally 1

E.g. D7.76.

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good, good of one’s kind, brave, useful),2 kalos (beautiful, good),3 ponêros (painful, grievous, morally worthless, bad, cowardly, base),4 aischros (ugly, shameful, base),5 chalepos (difficult, dangerous, harsh, cruel, savage),6 deinos (fearful, terrible, strange, marvellous);7 in Latin, honestus (honourable, wellborn, morally good, handsome),8 improbus (inferior, morally bad, shameless),9 nefarius (wicked, immoral),10 nequam (morally worthless, base).11 The most popular of these, like the basic terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’, are used for a wide variety of people, qualities and actions. So, for instance, kalos is used of the gifts of the Muses, of good fortune, of what is useful or profitable for an individual and of something that is good for society at large. Deinos is used of natural evils (of the kind that farmers hope to escape), of the evils of necessity, of suffering and of bad social actions. To underline the fact that they were regularly used to cover the same range of meanings, we find many of these terms, in different sayings, either positively linked with different near-synonyms, or in contrasting pairs with different near-opposites. Agathos and kakos as a contrasting pair are common, as we should expect,12 as are bonus and malus: ‘You have to call bad (malus) the man who is good (bonus) in his own interest.’13 The positive pairing of kalos and agathos, common elsewhere in Greek literature, appears in our sources too.14 We also find as opposites, agathos and deinos,15 agathos and aischros,16 agathos and phaulos (poor, mean),17 and agathos and apeuktos (sapless).18 Kakos can be contrasted with esthlos19 and with kalos,20 while elsewhere we find it paired with ponêros and deinos.21 Ponêros can also be opposed to chrêstos: ‘Whenever a man speaks good (chrêstos) and does evil (ponêros), and his neighbour is not deceived, the evil (ponêria) is doubled for him.’22 Apart from kakos, we find kalos contrasted in different sayings with aischros and with chalepos.23 Honestus is positively paired with probus and contrasted with improbus in the gnome, ‘You may rightly spare the bad so that you can spare the good.’24 2 3 4 5 8 10 12

13 16 22 23

Z6.22, cf. D3.90 (achrêstos), PSI 2.120, Goodspeed 1905. E.g. Z3.33, Z6.38, D37.35, cf. Z1.89, Z1.100, Z2.73, Z2.76. E.g. D5.87, Goodspeed 1905, P. Oxy. 3006, cf. Z1.5, Z4.53, Z4.69, Z5.28, D4.76, D7.89. 6 Z6.38, P. Iand. 5.77. 7 Z3.9, Z3.37, D7.38, cf. Z2.43, Z4.40, D2.64, D8.45. Z4.72. 9 PS533, PS588. VM4.6 pr., PS244, PS256, PS261, PS263, PS268, PS733. 11 PS33. VM1.5.7, VM5.3 pr. E.g. D6.62, cf. Z1.76, Z3.98, Z5.60. For the sake of clarity for non-Latin and Greek readers, I have kept all terms in the nominative masculine singular, and have reduced comparatives and superlatives to their positive form. 14 Plu. Mor. 182c (8). 15 Z1.92. PS357, cf. PS60, PS74, PS192, PS358, PS386, PS417. 17 D6.92. 18 D6.58. 19 D7.76. 20 Z1.100. 21 Z1.5, Z2.37. Z4.67. Goodspeed 1905. Chrêstos and ponêros always seem to be used of social goods or ills, not natural or divine ones. 24 PS261, cf. PS533, PS588. Z2.76, Z6.38.


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These connections confirm the fact, familiar to readers of classical literature, that goodness tends to be associated, in Greek- and Latin-speaking minds, with a number of other qualities: most often beauty, high birth, manliness or courage, decency (as opposed to shamelessness) and being civilized. To this we may add that goodness and usefulness are also often positively linked, while what is useless (achrêstos) can be described as eutelês (cheap or mean).25 In two other close connections, what is eutelês may also be described as adunatos (impossible),26 while what is adunatos may also be described as mataios (pointless or vain).27 To focus only on the contexts where these terms act as synonyms or near-synonyms, however, would be to do them less than justice. Many of them can also be used, on their own or linked with other synonyms, in their more specific senses. Deilos (vile, cowardly), for instance, may mean ‘bad’ in general, but it is also found in conjunction with anandros (unmanly, cowardly), suggesting that in this case its primary meaning of ‘cowardly’ is to the fore.28 If we look more closely at the contexts in which the most common evaluative terms, other than agathos, kakos, bonus and malus, appear, we begin to see that they are not all simple synonyms, and that there is more order, and more precision, in the way they are used than first impressions might suggest. The word ‘sweet’ (hêdys, glykys, dulcis) meaning ‘good’, and its opposite ‘bitter’ (pikros, barys, amarus, acerbus) appear in both proverbs and gnomai. The affection between parents and children, or within families in general, is regularly described as sweet.29 Women are sweet, and so is romantic love: ‘There is a sweet dementia always in love,’ as Publilius says.30 One’s native land is sweet: ‘Nothing is sweeter than one’s native land,’ proclaims Dio, quoting Homer, at the opening of a speech in his own native city, Prusa.31 It is sweet to be praised, as Pliny notes, quoting Xenophon, in one of his letters, and also to be able to reap a harvest you have not worked for.32 Closely connected with the last is the proverbial sweetness of the great 25 27

28

29 31

26 D3.7. Z5.47. D6.83. We saw how close these terms are above, p. 168. Some examples of the last four terms in this paragraph come from the explanations of the paroemiographers, which I have not used elsewhere; I include them here because they are regularly given as adjectival equivalents – explanations – of eponyms or images which are not self-explanatory: as, for instance, when Zenobius (2.80) glosses ‘buzzing’ as ‘fruitless’ or (3.77) ‘Androcles’ as ‘worthless’. The same terms are also used in gnomai and exempla. Z3.73, cf. Z3.81. This does not, of course, rule out that a general sense of ‘bad’ is hovering behind the more specific one: indeed, readers and listeners rely on such associations in order to give the right evaluation to specific descriptive terms like ‘cowardly’, and even more to terms like ‘sweet’ or ‘pure’. 30 PS314, cf. Ach. Tat. 5.27; Kenyon 1909: 8. P. Iand. 5.77, P. Oxy. 3004. 32 Plin. ep. 7.32.2, D3.95. D. Chr. 44.1 (Hom. Od. 9.34), cf. Lucian Patr. enc. 1.

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bend of the Nile, which by flooding annually makes Egypt so fertile with so little work.33 Hope is sweet, and so is freedom, as Phaedrus concludes from the story of the hungry wolf who prefers his life to that of the well-fed dog.34 On a more ambivalent note, the proverb says, ‘War is sweet – to the inexperienced.’35 Things which are sweet are all things which, in popular wisdom, human beings more or less all like and do not have to be taught to like. They are all, moreover, with the exception of war, things which it is appropriate for us to like – not things which we might instinctively like but have to be taught to avoid. The naturalistic language of sweetness, I suggest, is used in sayings and stories to reinforce the idea that these are ‘natural’ goods, things which are always good for everyone in any situation. By the same token, things which are bitter are mostly things which might be construed as ‘naturally’ painful: necessity, according to Valerius; punishment and debt, according to Publilius. The proverb calls people who get rid of a bitter and inappropriate burden, ‘Goats free of the plough’.36 Closely related to what is sweet is what is beloved or dear (philos, carus). ‘Farewell, beloved light,’ says the old woman in the proverb ironically.37 ‘Discord makes concord dearer,’ says Publilius, probably of lovers’ quarrels (several other gnomai take a similar line).38 In contrast, Valerius describes ingratitude as hateful (invisus).39 Here again, it is goods which might be regarded as ‘natural’ that are said to be beloved, and they are genuine goods, which we are right to value, while the quality described as hateful is something everyone dislikes. A different range of images and vocabulary is used for things which are attractive to human beings, but potentially dangerous: beauty, delightfulness and charm. Valerius tells the sad and, in this context, revealing story of the young man of Etruria who was so beautiful that the women of the region could not take their eyes off him. Fearful of his reputation and their husbands, the youth disfigured his own face to prove his virtue.40 Trust, says the school-book riddle collection, is a beautiful (kalos) thing – but we have already seen how carefully trust must be deployed if it is not to lead to betrayal and catastrophe.41 Gold, says Lucian in the Timon, quoting Pindar, is a beautiful thing – but we have also already seen how ambivalently 33 36

37 41

34 Kenyon 1909: 3, Ph3.7.1: ‘I will briefly set out how sweet liberty is.’ 35 D3.94. Z2.92. VM7.6 pr., PS46, PS11, Z3.69. Another naturalistic term for what is naturally unappealing and hence bad is ‘saltless’ (Z1.63, Quint. 6.3.18, quoting Catullus). ‘Healthy’ also occurs occasionally as a metaphor for ‘good’: e.g. PS644 (shame is the health of the soul), VM4.1 pr. (moderation is the healthiest part of the soul), cf. VM6.2 pr. In Z6.36, a useless man is said to be ‘bloodless’. 38 PS154. 39 VM5.4 pr. 40 VM4.5 ext. 1. Z6.42. Kenyon 1909: l. 15; above, pp. 166–7.


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wealth is viewed in other sayings and stories.42 A proverb dubs good fortune a beautiful thing, but we have seen how random and uncertain good fortune can be, and how often people are warned against trusting it.43 Valerius introduces luxury, which stands at the head of his list of vices in Book Nine, as ‘that charming (blandus) evil’.44 Though it commonly means ‘good’, chrêstos primarily means ‘useful’, and in this sense it is linked with a group of words – chrêsimos, syntelês (useful), axios (worth, worthy), achrêstos, eutelês, alysitelês, asympheros (worthless, useless) – which label qualities and actions by use or value. These are among the most widespread terms of praise and blame – the only ones, apart from good and bad, which appear in all four genres. Some of them (achrêstos, alysitelês, asympheros) are virtually always used of things,45 while others (axios, chrêsimos, eutelês, utilis) are virtually always used of people (though we cannot be sure that this distinction always holds, because one cannot always tell whether people or things are being referred to).46 It is useful for individuals to be productive. Proverbs describe useless people as akarpos, fruitless and sathros, rotten.47 ‘More fruitless than cress’, says the proverb, of people who cannot bring any project to fruition. ‘A buzzing man’ is ‘fruitless’ (because bees who buzz don’t make honey, according to Zenobius). It is also useful to serve one’s country. ‘Whoever is useful to his country is the slave of the people,’ says Publilius.48 These images from the natural world recall the language of sweetness we discussed above, and suggest that usefulness too may be regarded as a ‘natural good’. Many of the qualities and practices described as useful are ones which are socially important, but not always and unequivocally good: wealth, friendship, courage, custom, generosity, honesty. Phaedrus tells a curious fable which is apparently meant to illustrate, not so much the rule that ‘nothing is more useful to a man than to speak honestly’, though that is its moral, but the exception that proves the rule. Two men travel to a land ruled by apes. Seeing them coming, the apes’ ruler orders a throne to be set up for himself and arranges other apes on each side of it, in two lines, as is 42 43

44 46

47 48

Timon 41; above, pp. 171–2. D7.35: ‘The man who would be beautifully fortunate (kalôs eudaimôn) must stay at home.’ This may mean that it is better to farm than sail abroad and trade, but it can also be read ironically as meaning that the safest way to secure good fortune is not to go out and seek it. 45 E.g. Z1.46, Z3.6, D2.55, D2.61, D2.65. VM9.1 pr. E.g. Z1.15, Z1.32, Z1.39, Z1.42, Z1.48, Z1.49, Z1.96, Z2.4, Z2.12, Z2.52, Z2.72, Z2.77, Z3.77, Z3.83, Z5.5, Z5.47, Z6.36, Z6.49, D3.86, D3.90, D3.96, D6.49, D8.3, Plu. Mor. 242f. Z4.57, D2.78, D3.7, D3.90, D7.1 are probably counter-examples. Z1.49, Z2.80 (fruitless), cf. Z2.23 (badness as unripeness), D3.2, D5.97 (rotten). Fruitlessness is also an image for poverty (Z1.60). PS519, cf. Kenyon 1909: l. 6, BS l. 20.

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the arrangement of the imperial court. When the men arrive, he asks each of them who he is. ‘You are the emperor,’ says the first, flattering him. The second, feeling that honesty will always be better rewarded than flattery, says, ‘You are an ape.’ The first man is rewarded and the second killed.49 Aside from its implications for Phaedrus’ view of the real imperial court, this fable illustrates that honesty, if in principle a virtue, may not always have good results, and so may not always be a virtue in context. Society (or the emperor) decides. A number of other metaphors for good and bad confirm the link between value and either social appropriateness or social power. Being useful or worthy is sometimes linked with being modest and well-born,50 while being worthless or useless is linked with being barbarian, slavish, or a weed (pimpernel) in a vegetable garden.51 Plutarch, in the Greek Questions, asks where the proverbial saying comes from, ‘this is kyrios’, which means literally ‘this is powerful’ or ‘masterful’, but figuratively, ‘this is valid’.52 The answer given is that the general Deinon of Tarentum, who was kyrios (a powerful man) in his city, when outvoted in the assembly by a show of hands, held up his one hand and said, ‘This is stronger (kreittôn),’ or (in another version of the story) ‘This is better (beltiôn),’ thereby validating the minority vote.53 The point of the story, as Plutarch presents it, is that virtue is powerful. Both the story and the proverb, however, are equally easily read to mean that power and authority set the standard of good. Valerius equivocates in a similar way when he calls the change from enmity to friendship in human hearts egregius, meaning good; the word is usually applied to people and means literally ‘standing out from the flock’.54 The underlying implication is not only that it is egregius to do what is good, but that what people who are egregius do, is good. Indeed, the genre of the exemplary story in itself tends to equivocate between goodness and high social status. The people who are admirabilis, laudabilis, memorabilis, ‘worthy of being remembered’ or ‘worthy of praise’ (a good thing) tend to be aristocrats, those who are most prominent in politics and war.55 Sometimes, of course, they are remembered for bad behaviour or values rather than good, but good stories so far outnumber bad ones that the equivalence of goodness and high status remains the dominant impression given by any collection of exemplary stories. 49 53 54 55

50 Z2.3. 51 Z2.12, D1.73, Z4.57. 52 Mor. 301c. Ph4.13. Philosophers would see a potential tension between the good-as-honourable and the good-asnecessary which sayings and stories, with their talent for having the best of all worlds, ignore. VM4.2 pr., cf. VM7.4 pr. (military cunning as egregius). E.g. VM1 pr., VM2 pr., VM4.5 ext. 1, VM4.7.4, VM5.1.4, VM6.4 pr., Plu. Mor. 242f, cf. Gell. pr. 2.


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There are further links of imagery between social disharmony and badness, and between foreignness and badness. We have seen that badness can be slavish, barbaric and likened to a weed in a vegetable patch. A day on which things go badly can be a ‘stepmother’, an oath that goes bad, ‘foreign’.56 The Libyans are a byword for new evils which descend on the unsuspecting; a ‘wild’ city is one which breaks its own laws, and the Kerkopian people are eponymic for ‘having bad customs’.57 Some of these may refer to bad things which happen to individuals, but some of them clearly refer to social strife. In these images, ‘good’ is identified with ‘useful’, and ‘useful’ with ‘socially powerful’ or ‘socially integrated’. By a series of almost imperceptible equivocations, being good comes to mean being in harmony with one’s society, or doing well in it; if one is not in harmony with it, or not doing well, one is ‘out of place’, and dubbed wild, foreign, or in some other way abnormal or marginal. In a related image, badness can also be described as untimeliness.58 Honour and shame are well-studied social motivators throughout Greek and Roman culture, and ‘honourable’ or ‘glorious’ (eugenês, honestus and the related decus and pudor) and ‘shameful’, ‘low-born’ or ‘disgraceful’ (deilos, agenês, turpis, indecorus) are widely used as synonyms for good or bad.59 In popular morality, one’s ‘honour’ nearly always (perhaps always, but not every context allows us to be certain) means one’s reputation, and not an internal condition of virtue or vice. Most of the qualities which are said to be honourable or shameful are, like the ones we saw above, social virtues. Military discipline is the glory (decus) of the Roman Empire, according to Valerius, while for Aulus Gellius, who regards culture as a social good, the lack of culture is indecorus, ‘shameful’, if not actually inutilis, ‘harmful’.60 Conjugal love, according to Valerius, is honestus, honourable,61 while Publilius sometimes opposes honestus and turpis as well as dealing with them separately: ‘Dishonour is honourable in a good cause.’ ‘Honour decorates the honourable and marks the dishonourable.’62 The really disgraceful thing in a man, says Phaedrus in the epimythium to the fable of the outraged eunuch, is to have done something (i.e. broken a law) for which he deserved 56 57 59

60

D2.76, Z3.80. 58 Z1.50. Z2.51, D2.47, Z1.5, because ‘Kerkopian’ is already understood as meaning ‘barbarian’. MPER 3.14.12, P. Oxy. 79, PS256, PS268, PS613, PS733, Z3.73, Z3.81, cf. D5.30, which links shame and necessity (the connection explored by Williams 1993 ch. 4. Most necessity, however, is not related to shame.) Cf. Cairns 1993, Kaster 2005 ch. 2 on pudor. Aidos, itself, the standard Greek word for the complex of feelings and ideas around the concept ‘shame’ and nearest equivalent to the Latin pudor, is extremely rare in sayings and stories. 61 VM4.6 pr. 62 PS244, PS263, cf. PS261. VM2.7 pr., Gell. pr. 2.

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to suffer.63 Few qualities or actions owe more to social convention than what is identified as risible, and the gnat on the bull’s horn in the Babrian fable, or the ‘peeping ass’ of the proverb, testify to the fact that there are few greater sources of shame than to be risible.64 Certain qualities, as we have seen, in Valerius’ collection, are called not just good but holy (sanctus) or venerable (venerabilis).65 Valerius additionally uses the term nefas of an evil which is also impious (the senate’s ingratitude which led to the murder of Romulus).66 In proverbs, unspecified actions may be hieros, semnos, hagnos (all meaning holy), katharos (pure) or asemnos (unholy).67 The purity of an oar-stroke is proverbial for something well done.68 ‘Speak, if it is semnos; if not, be silent.’69 Goods like justice which are sponsored by the gods become holy themselves by the transference of epithets and the association of ideas. Other qualities, such as speech, which can be either good or bad, acquire divine sanction, at least linguistically, when they are well used. In a small cluster of images, goodness is linked with position, size and weight, but here, the links are less consistent. Sometimes what is megas (great) is kakos or adynatos;70 but sometimes what is mikros (small) is phaulos.71 To be rectus, ‘upright’, according to Publilius, may be simultaneously good and bad: ‘When vices help you, it’s a mistake to do right.’72 Gravis (heavy) in Publilius can refer to something good (a steadfast mind), bad (a new catastrophe), serious (the anger of a good man), powerful (the rule of custom), or hard (getting back in sadness something you gave in happiness).73 So far, we have seen that popular morality deploys a wide and colourful range of vocabulary for what it approves or disapproves of. There are the good and the bad, and the many words which overlap with them in semantic range. There are the sweet, the loveable, the beautiful, the charming and their opposites. There are the useful, the valuable and the worthy. There is 63 64

65 67

68 69 73

Ph3.11. The eunuch has been taken to court for having a mutilated body, which he contends is a misfortune, not a disgrace; Lucian, Eun. exploits a similar range of attitudes. B84 (though the word geloios comes in the spurious epimythium), cf. Ph1.25, Ph3.6 (one should laugh at those who try to mislead the wary or make empty threats), Z5.39. Cf. Juv. 3.152–3 where an explicitly non-elite character says that one of the worst things about poverty is that it exposes men to ridicule. 66 VM5.3.1. VM6.5 pr. (justice), VM6.6 pr. (fides). Z1.40, Z2.33, D1.11, D8.72 (hieros and katharos), D8.60. There are subtle differences between these words for ‘holy’, but since the actions they describe are not specified, we cannot deduce the significance, if any, of their distribution. D1.11 (hagnos). Kaster 2005: 139–40 identifies purity as one of the key elements of Roman integritas, the quality of wholeness which is at the core of the definition of the good man. 70 D1.98, Z2.57, cf. PS387. 71 Z2.68. 72 PS113. Milne 1922: 10. PS231, PS234, PS230, PS236, PS238, cf. PS229, PS232, PS233, PS235, PS237.


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the complex category of the socially dominant, powerful, prestigious, customary, normal, honourable and included, and their opposites the foreign, slavish, stepmotherly, shameful, risible, the untimely and the out of place. There are the holy, venerable and pure. Finally, there are the big, small, upright, light and heavy. We can classify these terms into three broad categories: images which derive from what we instinctively like, those which derive from the social order and those which derive from the divine order, with the world of abstracts as a small and rather ambiguous fourth. Actions and qualities which borrow images from what we instinctively like – love, hope, harvest – tend to be what we may call ‘natural’ goods. So are those which borrow images from the divine sphere. Those which borrow images from the social sphere are more equivocal: sometimes good and sometimes bad, or only good because necessary, customary or useful. We saw in Chapter Six that qualities such as wealth, friendship, courage, trust, generosity and contentment are the kinds of ethical traits that society itself sponsors, and the imagery which is used of them reinforces this conclusion. Not the least remarkable aspect of the language of popular morality, is that it implicitly recognizes, and expresses in its images, the difference between those actions and qualities which are deemed universally good, and those which depend on local, human confirmation of their goodness. In this discussion, one term has been conspicuous by its absence: eudaimôn in Greek, felix in Latin, ‘happy’ in the broad sense which incorporates goodness, blessedness, good fortune and success. This prime aim of an ethical life for many philosophers is rare in popular sayings and stories, and when it appears, it is virtually always with its narrow meaning of ‘fortunate’. An ‘Adrastan nemesis’, as the proverb says, occurs when someone who has been fortunate becomes unfortunate. Corinthians are proverbially fortunate because Corinth is (or was, in the archaic and early classical world) rich.74 In Phaedrus’ story of an ass owned by the priests of Cybele, who even after its death found work for it to do, turning its skin into a drum, the ass is not bad or even cursed, but simply unlucky. For Publilius too, to be felix means that one has good fortune, which he distinguishes from virtue and even says can go hand-in-hand with wickedness.75 So far is the felix from being a truly good man in the philosophical sense, according to Publilius, that faced with adversity to which he is not accustomed, he cannot cope with it.76 74

Z1.30, Z3.96, cf. Z1.91, D6.9.

75

PS205, PS227, cf. PS169, PS599.

76

PS539.

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Even Valerius does not use the word as often as one might expect. He does, however, use it in both narrow and expanded senses, another indication of his position straddling popular and more elite strains of ethical thought. Often in his exempla felix means specifically lucky or blessed by the gods: so Cato was lucky in his descendants, Rome in having Scipio Macedonicus to give Africanus’ funeral speech, L. Marcius in attracting divine favour.77 Q. Metellus, in contrast, was felix because every aspect of his life was good: his birth, upbringing, career, family and death. Particularly revealing is Valerius’ treatment of Sulla. Sulla called himself felix, but, though he was undoubtedly lucky at times, Valerius clearly does not feel that he deserves the title. He points out that he would call Sulla fortis rather than felix, refers twice to his very mixed qualities and never uses the title in any of his exempla about Sulla.78 Sulla’s life was not good enough overall, it seems, to justify the title. An exemplary story told by Aelian shows the term eudaimôn in use in a clearly philosophical sense. The Athenian general Timotheus, he says, considered himself not truly eudaimôn – because he was not a philosopher.79 A contrast is implied with Timotheus’ considerable happiness, good fortune and success in other respects, since he was an aristocrat and political and military leader. The story captures exactly that sense of eudaimôn which is missing from nearly all our popular ethical material. In general, the aim of popular ethics is to be good, in certain well-defined senses; it is not to be happy. statements and commandments Sayings and stories have four principal ways of commending certain values and practices to their audience. In the first place, they issue orders. ‘Respect your parents. Obey the law.’ ‘Beware of what the day gives; soon it comes to take.’80 Phaedrus (3.8) tells the story of a beautiful boy and his ugly and jealous sister, who tried to make herself feel better by getting him into trouble with their father. Taking them both in his arms, the father told them both to look in the mirror every day, the son to make sure that he was not spoiling his looks with vice, and the daughter to encourage her to overcome her ugliness by virtue. ‘Examine yourself frequently,’ is the moral Phaedrus draws to ensure your ethical progress. 77 78 80

VM3.2.16, VM4.1.12, VM1.6.2. 79 VH 2.10. VM6.9.6, VM9.2.1; discussed by Balsdon 1951, cf. Avery 1967 (on Marius as felix). Oikonomides 1980, PS160. White 2002 ch. 3 rightly defends the importance of the imperative in Greek ethics in general and dismisses the argument that the importance of virtue (as opposed to duty) in Greek thinking means that imperatives are avoided.


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This is the simplest way of getting a message across, relying heavily on a number of authorities which we shall discuss in the next chapter – authorial, social and divine. It usually, though as this Phaedrus fable shows, not always, commends a specific value or form of behaviour, sometimes specifying to whom the commendation is relevant, and sometimes leaving it to the audience to decide. In the second place, sayings and stories make statements, either about what is good or bad or simply about the nature of the world, which imply something about the nature of good or bad behaviour in it. This is a less specific and more subtle method of persuasion, and all four genres use it very frequently. Babrius’ Fable 45, for instance, tells the story of a goatherd who, caught in a snowstorm, drove his goats to shelter in what he thought was an empty cave. There he found, however, a herd of wild goats, also sheltering, which were much larger and finer than his own. Thinking to swap one herd for the other, he fed the wild goats that night and let his own go hungry. In the morning, the wild goats had gone and his own were dead. By hoping for the bigger flock, the fable concludes, he ended up getting nothing even from the one he had originally. The fable invites us to draw certain conclusions: we should use our intelligence, assess our assets realistically and act accordingly. More than that, by saying, effectively, ‘that’s life’ – by presenting itself as an inevitable sequence of cause and effect – it discourages us from questioning whether that really is life. It encourages us to think and act within the parameters established by the story, and threatens us with the risk of failure if we do not. Statements which purport to be about the nature of the world have great ethical power: all the more because they do not present themselves as telling us to do anything at all. The cautionary tale B41 does the same thing, even more baldly. ‘They say that a lizard ripped itself apart in the middle by trying to equal the length of a snake. You will hurt yourself and achieve nothing if you imitate one who is above you.’ Exemplary stories can also be cautionary tales, but more often they rely on the glamour of the subject to make us want to imitate his or her behaviour. Who would not want to be brave, if being brave made them feel a little like Horatius or Alexander, or moderate, if it made them feel like Cato or Socrates? Statements like these offer moral agents choices which are scarcely choices, since the implicit or explicit consequence of taking one option is destruction. Gnomai are also characteristically couched as statements: ‘Women and lionesses are equally savage.’ ‘Of all possessions, wealth, I say,

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is best.’81 What happens if one disagrees and does not want to make money or treat women as savages? By all means try it and see, gnomai seem to say, if you think the poets, your teachers and everyone around you is wrong. But don’t blame us if it turns out badly. Statements about the nature of the world encourage the ethics of conformity and caution. In the third place, sayings and stories claim that certain things are necessary or must be so. ‘Every lark must have its crest,’ quotes Plutarch, and every state has its internal feuds and disagreements.82 ‘For necessaries’, the phrase Pericles used when glossing over dubious uses of Athenian public money, became proverbial.83 Maximus of Tyre tells the fable of the body whose parts rebelled against supporting each other, and all ended up dead. The moral, for bodies and for states, is that one must co-operate.84 Sayings like these, too, seek to take the process of decision making out of the hands of the ethical agent, at least as long as he accepts the authority of the saying or story. Authorities for these examples vary, from divine fiat to the nature of the universe, from social good to individual self-interest. Finally, sayings and stories claim that certain things are pointless or impossible. While not quite as compelling as statements that something is necessary, these are strong words, echoing the theme of necessity and claims like those we have already seen about the nature of the world. We have seen the vast variety of proverbs, in particular, which deride vain or pointless actions.85 They may be pointless or impossible for many reasons: they flout the laws of nature, are the product of foolishness or bring no gain. Claims that certain things are pointless or impossible once again encourage self-interest, self-preservation and caution. One does not want to be made a laughing stock, let alone do oneself real harm. Between these four ways of expressing ethical advice, there is little room for free decision making. If it is not quite the case that ‘everything not forbidden is compulsory’, as T. H. White characterized the ethics of a totalitarian society,86 it is uncomfortably close. The difference is that in popular wisdom compulsion comes not solely from society, but also from the natural order and the divine. Even that difference, however, is blurred in many texts. All four styles of advice cut across all the categories of vocabulary we looked at above, though not every quality and action is 81 82 83 84 85

P. Bour. 1, PS160. Mor. 809b. At Mor. 68e Plutarch cites a line of Euripides as a gnome (though he disagrees with it himself ): ‘When you have luck, who needs friends?’ Z3.91. 15.5. Co-operation is Maximus’ moral; other versions say that all the other parts must obey the head. 86 1958: 120. Above, pp. 45–7.


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represented in every form of verb. Every kind of ethic can be couched in the imperative, from honouring the gods to exercising intelligence; every kind can be couched in the indicative, from loving one’s family to contentment with one’s lot; what is necessary can be anything from accepting fortune to helping a friend in need, and what is impossible can be anything from bringing down the moon to making a friend of a natural enemy. The effect is to make ethics which are the result of social negotiation look as binding on human beings as those over which human beings have no control. And when we look at fables and exempla, the genres which tell us what happens to characters who do or do not do as they should, the seriousness of their advice is clear. Every kind of disaster awaits those who behave badly, from shame to ruin to death. This is not to say our sources doubt that people have free will – that they are able to make choices. Nothing in popular morality suggests that people lack autonomy. What they lack is a range of good options. They can make choices, but in general, only certain choices will lead to success, contentment or continued life. Making socially negotiated, elective ethics look as binding as natural or divinely sponsored ones produces a paradox similar to, and related to, the one we shall see in Chapter Nine on time. There, the world is presented as stable and unchanging, while human lives change within it. Though some of our texts, at any rate, know that ethics do in practice change over time, they never admit that they can remain equally good while doing so: change, as in the first two books of Valerius Maximus, if it happens, is decline from an ideal moral standard.87 In some ways, it seems an odd burden to place on humanly negotiated ethics to claim that they are as inviolable as the laws of nature and the gods; all the more so since, being largely executive ethics, they allow for a great deal of flexibility of interpretation in different circumstances. The obvious advantage is that it emphasizes to ethical agents at any one moment that even ethics whose authority is human and social may not be challenged by the individual. In all these forms of statement and injunction, a significant slippage occurs from the idea, expressed in indicative verbs, that the world is a certain way, to the idea, expressed in imperatives, jussive subjunctives and optatives, that it ought to be a certain way. It is hard to overstate the importance of this move, which, though a matter of high controversy and debate among professional philosophers, is endemic in popular ethical language all over 87

Humanly negotiated ethics can also, of course, vary between societies without necessarily being worse among foreigners.

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the world. It allows perceptions about the world, society and individuals to be presented as facts with necessary consequences for behaviour, and behaviours arising in one part of society to become accepted as routine by all. It is visible in many of the examples I have cited above, and we could multiply examples. Its importance is only equalled by the completeness with which it goes unremarked in use, at least in popular sayings and stories. Probably no other single factor is as powerful in the creation of ethical communities as this ubiquitous and unheralded linguistic slippage. We can put it another way and say that there is a fusion in these texts of what we can call ‘natural’ and ‘elective’ good, the first being the goodness which comes naturally to us, like loving our families, and the second, that which may not come naturally to us but which we ought to practise anyway, like being just or generous. There are far more virtues of the second kind than the first, but the fact that sayings and stories are interested in both allows them to blur the boundary between the two, and treat ‘elective’ virtues as if they were natural, part of the way the world is. the interior world of the moral agent The psychology of ethical agents is a well-known interest of high philosophy, and the interior conditions produced and altered by the emotions of Greek and Roman heroes, as expressed in epic or drama, have been the subject of several important studies in recent years.88 Popular sayings and stories do not have as much as these genres to say about the inner life of ethical agents, but they do say a little which is worth exploring. We have encountered a number of sayings and stories which testify to the possibility of being different on the inside from the way one appears on the outside. This can arise because one deliberately misrepresents oneself, for instance by lying speech, or simply because one’s looks are misleading. It is not always a bad thing: it is even possible, according to Valerius, for a woman’s body to reveal the spirit of a man.89 But usually it is. Aesop, in the Life of Aesop (86–8), for instance, is not at first taken seriously by the Samians because he is ugly. Plutarch twice tells the fable of the dispute between the fox and the leopard about which was most variegated, in which the fox protested that though less variegated on the outside, he was far more so inside.90 Plutarch takes this as illustrating the adaptability of the 88 89 90

E.g. Padel 1992, Nussbaum 1986, 1994, Cooper 1999, Harris 2001, Braund and Gill 1997, Braund and Most 2003, with a useful survey of recent scholarship on the passions (1–10). VM6.1 pr. The woman is Lucretia; Valerius intends it as a compliment. Mor. 155b, 500c–d, P. Oxy. 3685.


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fox. (In another context one might interpret it differently: foxes, in fables, are generally tricky creatures, and another word for internal variegation is deviousness.) Such stories attest a popular prejudice in favour of comprehensibility. This is not, it should be noted, a prejudice in favour of integrity. There is no strong sense that people should be consistent in speech or action in different situations or over time. Ps.-Isocrates, addressing the young Demonicus, is explicit that his behaviour, and therefore educational needs, will change over time.91 Plutarch makes the same point, telling a chreia about the way that Antigonus changed with age.92 Plutarch also observes what Publilius says too, that the end justifies the means (and so, potentially, different behaviour on different occasions).93 Exempla often illustrate very different, even contradictory characteristics of heroes in different situations: so Alexander, for instance, can be brave, generous, jealous or paranoid; Marius can be generous or grasping.94 At any one time the self may be complex, fluid and even incoherent. Sometimes a character is presented as under attack from outside, by some force which is capable of changing it. Love, says Publilius, can overrun us, and love and wisdom cannot cohabit, in which case presumably the emotion drives out the power of reason.95 (Since this is always a temporary condition, reason evidently does not go far.) Valerius tells us that anger can make waves in human breasts and cause confusion there, and rashness can stun the mind with blows, while error wanders, appropriately, through the breasts of men, shaking them with vain imaginings.96 In these cases, the inner self is not described as complex, but elsewhere it is. ‘Know yourself’ implies that intelligence can turn itself on the rest of the self, while the many injunctions to ‘rule yourself’ or ‘rule your anger’ show that one part of the self can and often should exert control over another. The mind must rule the eyes, according to Publilius, and according to ps.-Isocrates, it can teach the rest of the self too.97 Publilius is particularly keen on the idea of conscience as an internal monitor, keeping us well behaved, and Quintilian quotes the proverb ‘conscience is worth a thousand witnesses’.98 When internal controls fail, war may break out between the emotions. ‘In love, grief struggles endlessly with joy,’ says Publilius.99 If it comes to the worst, one part of the self may 91 94 95 98

92 Mor. 182a (2). 93 Mor. 185a (3), PS605. Ad Dem. 44. Though philosophical heroes who are admired for their ethical qualities, such as Socrates, Diogenes or Cato, are presented consistently. 96 VM9.3 pr., VM9.8 pr., VM9.9 pr. 97 PS423, Ad Dem. 51. PS22, PS131. 99 PS306. Quint. 5.11.41, PS115, PS132, PS226 (conscience puts a bridle on the tongue).

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destroy the rest. One of the worst aspects of anger and hate, according to Valerius, is that they cause violent internal torment, ‘because when [either] wants to inflict pain, it suffers it, and is tortured by bitter anxiety lest it should not manage to avenge itself’.100 Publilius says something similar about meanness: the miser’s own nature punishes him.101 Publilius also offers us the intriguing idea that ‘the man who dies by his own weapons is twice destroyed’,102 presumably because he not only dies, but he has first split his interior self by turning on himself in this way. Finally, you can, in popular ethical thinking, take leave of yourself altogether. You can – sometimes you should – forget yourself, says Publilius.103 Not, however, through anger. An angry man is ‘outside his own body’ while he is angry, but when he ‘returns to himself ’, he is angry with himself.104 Whatever the nature of the self, it does not end at one’s skin, and within one’s skin it is not simple. Vocabulary for one’s internal parts and emotions is diverse. There are well-defined thymoi, passions, like anger,105 and virtues, which are sometimes described as inborn.106 There is one’s natura as a whole and also one’s psychê, anima or animus, mind or soul as a whole.107 Valerius calls moderation ‘the most healthful part of the soul’, suggesting that for him, at least, the soul can also be complex.108 In general, though, the relationships between these terms are not elaborated in popular wisdom, and we have too few references to speculate about them very far. Popular thinking, then, has no objection to the idea of the self as complex, sometimes fighting itself, and even occasionally taking leave of itself. The aim of being good, it seems, is not to iron out such complexities and conflicts, any more than ethics in general can hope to iron them out of society. More important is putting them to good – appropriate – use, which may not entail the same behaviour in different circumstances or at different times.109 As we saw in Chapter Six, there is no such thing as a monolithically good man. 100 101 102 105 107 109

VM9.3 pr. PS46, cf. PS273. Note the use of ‘bitter’ in both, suggesting that the torment inflicted is a natural evil. 103 PS179. 104 PS241, PS311. PS79 (assuming he uses his weapons on himself ). 106 PS47, PS500, cf. PS649. E.g. BS: 479, P. Oxy. 3006.22, P. Bour. 1.16. 108 VM4.1 pr. PS369, PS378 (natura), VM4.1 pr. (animus), SB 1.5730, Heinrichs 1967 (psychê). Gill 1996 argues for a similar view of the self in much earlier Greek literature; his summary (15) stands equally well for popular sayings and stories: ‘The mind constitutes a complex of functions which are unified (in so far as they are unified) by their interaction, rather than as constituting the locus of a unitary “I”.’ Gill 2006 discusses the very different, holistic concept of the self in some Hellenistic and Roman philosophy.

chap t e r 8

Moral authorities

Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish. Anne Bradstreet, Meditations Divine and Moral

In the last chapter we began to look at why, in popular sayings and stories, certain actions and qualities are regarded as good or bad. This chapter pursues the same question from a different angle, by looking at the authorities which are cited or implied as reasons why one should think or behave in certain ways. There are many: the gods, nature, myth, history, geography, institutions, good men, famous authors and more abstract powers like consequence (about which we shall have more to say in the next chapter). We therefore need also to ask how authorities are ranked in principle: does that of the gods always outweigh that of humans, for instance, or that of institutions that of individuals, or are there no detectable rules? How does principle relate to practice? When ethical dilemmas arise, does any one group have more say than another in deciding to what authority to appeal? To be persuasive, does a saying or story need to appeal to more than one authority, or is one enough? the god s Popular morality shows a strong desire to anchor human virtue in something outside the human sphere. We have already seen some of the ways in which the gods act as moral authorities. They reward piety and justice and punish impiety and injustice.1 They are described as doing good to good people.2 1

2

E.g. Kenyon 1909, B127, Z4.11, D6.80, cf. D3.20, D7.98, VM1.1.17 etc. When they reward piety, however, the gods are not always acting in the interest of the pious individual – for his greater good. B23, for instance, shows the gods granting an ill-considered prayer which the petitioner comes to regret. P. Oxy. 3006, PSI 2.120, P. Schubart 20, D1.84, D3.15, D6.75, B20.

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They act as exempla of good behaviour.3 We shall see in the next chapter that although justice comes eventually from the gods, it happens only on a long timescale. Within the span of most human lives, other forces and other authorities affect life more. Some of these, however, are themselves divinized, so that the authority for a certain type of virtue is that virtue itself, depicted as a god. ‘Virtue is not fastidious in approach,’ says Valerius in connection with exhibitions of patientia by slaves: She allows lively and galvanized minds to come to her, and provides them with a draught of herself which is not mean or generous from any consideration of persons. She is equally accessible by all and thinks more of your desire than your status, and she leaves it to you to decide how much of her goods you will take, so that you take away with you just as much as your mind can bear. (3.3 ext. 7)4

Valerius also divinizes Modesty, Justice and Good Faith: Modesty . . . taught the most just men to neglect their personal affairs while desiring the best for public affairs. Temples should be built and altars consecrated to her as the mother of all good (honestum) counsel, the guardian of solemn duties, the teacher of innocence. (4.5 pr.) It is time to come to the holy shrine of Justice. (6.5 pr.) That venerable power Faith, when her image is set before our eyes, stretches out her right hand which is the surest token of human good (salus). All peoples have seen how she has always flourished in our state. (6.6 pr.)

In each case, a divine virtue is described as causing the same virtue in a human being. One or two other virtues which are not explicitly divinized are also personified as if they were a kind of metaphysical power: ‘Piety inflamed the elder Africanus with her strength’ (5.4.2). To the sceptical, there is a certain disingenuousness about the question and answer, ‘Why should I be virtuous?’ ‘Because virtue is a god.’ It invites the further reflection: what makes it a god? Answer: the fact that it is a virtue. And what makes it a virtue? The fact that you should practise it. And why should I practise it? . . . But circular arguments, like the tautologies we saw in the last chapter, are the stuff of popular morality. Nothing makes clearer the importance of the divine as a source of moral authority. More surprisingly, perhaps, Valerius several times in Book Nine personifies vices, and talks as if they, like virtues, may cause in human beings 3 4

E.g. Z1.26, Z1.7, cf. Z4.20, Z3.21. 1.1.8. On personified virtues in Roman cult, see further below, pp. 311–13.

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the behaviour they describe. Luxury, Lust, Cruelty, Anger, Hatred, Avarice and Treachery are all treated in this way, and to some of them Valerius’ introductions suggest that they are forces which human beings might find it difficult to repel. Let luxury, that charming evil which is so much more easily censured than avoided, be included in our work, not indeed to be given any honour, but so that by recognizing herself she may be compelled to repent. (9.1 pr.) Cruelty . . . has a truly horrid appearance, a savage face, harsh breath, fearful voice, the whole lot bursting with threats and gory commands. (9.2 pr.) Let Avarice be dragged out, tracker of hidden lucre, voracious guzzler of visible loot, who is never happy with what she has and is made wretched by the desire to get more. (9.4 pr.) Now let Treachery, that occult and insidious evil, be dragged from its hiding place. Its greatest strengths are lying and trickery . . . it does as much harm to the human race as good faith does good.5

Personifying vices is less common than personifying virtues, but we find Envy, Levity, Anger, Greed, Disaster, Shamelessness, Fear, Intemperance, Vice itself and the ambivalent Wealth elsewhere among early imperial sources.6 We may be tempted to dismiss most of these as just figures of speech, not meant to be taken seriously as divine powers (though Shamelessness and Wealth are both explicitly called gods).7 When we accept the genuineness of divinized virtues, however, it would be hasty to dismiss that of vices. The absence of cults to vices cannot be taken as evidence that they are not sometimes thought of as metaphysical powers, any more than the absence of cults to the devil in Christianity proves that Christians do not take the power of evil seriously; it only means that they are not worshipped. The Christian analogy, which historians of Greek and Roman religion are usually, understandably, loath to invoke, may be of some help in this case. There is a wide spectrum of Christian thinking about evil: at one extreme, it is a quasi-divine character of terrifying power, the devil, while at the other, it is not a power in itself, let alone a character, but an absence of good, the condition of human beings who have turned away from God. The problem with personifying evil is that it makes Christianity look dualistic, which it does not regard itself as being. Personification is tempting to the most 5 6

7

9.6 pr., cf. 9.3 pr., 10 pr. E.g. PS302, Plu. Mor. 100f (Envy), PS340 (Levity), PS345, PS643, Plu. Mor. 100f (Anger), PS500 (Greed), PS567 (Disaster), Z4.36 (Shamelessness), Plu. Mor. 100f (Fear, Intemperance and Vice), Bartoletti 1966 (Wealth). Cic. Leg. 2.28.11, Plin. HN 2.14 are among those who criticize the divinization of vices.

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rigorous monotheist, however, because it expresses so vividly Christians’ sense of the cosmic battle between good and evil of which they see their own struggle to be good in everyday life as a part. The result, both in doctrine and in the minds of believers, is often to try to have it both ways and overlook the inconsistency. Greek and Roman religion has no problem accommodating multiple divinities, but it is hardly surprising if they are reluctant to set up cults to vices (though they do sometimes worship highly ambivalent qualities, from the human point of view, like Fate, Fortune and Nemesis). Popular wisdom, though, suggests that sometimes vices are conceived of as opposing forces to personified, even divinized virtues, and therefore that there is room in Greek and Roman religion for seeing the metaphysical sphere as another battleground for the struggle between good and bad which is taking place within society. This picture of cosmic moral struggle is most unlike the conventional picture of relationships between the gods in most Greek and Roman myth, cult and literature, where although there is plenty of conflict, divinities are not ranged against each other in ranks of good versus evil. It is, however, a picture familiar from a number of minority cults in the Roman Empire: not just Christianity, but also Judaism and Zoroastrianism. We may therefore see popular morality as creating an informal mythology which bridges the apparent gap between such cults and ‘mainstream’ Greek and Roman cult and literary mythology. Not every good thing that people do depends from its inception on divine authority. Valerius Maximus’ portrayal of the relationship between Rome and the gods is a good example. Romans are exceptionally pious, and Valerius explicitly connects this with their success.8 Divine favour, however, is not the same as divine authority, and Valerius does not claim that the gods told Romans to expand their power in the first place, despite the fact that the Romans saw expansion as a virtue. Expansion appears to have been the Romans’ own idea, the result of their constant need, as they saw it, to defend themselves from attack. In pursuing the good they identified for themselves, the Romans solicited and received divine aid, so that their self-styled virtue was retrospectively endorsed by the gods. This fits neatly with the point made by Babrius Fable 20, that the gods help those who help themselves. It may also imply that the gods are disposed to help those who are doing good in the sense that they are doing what they are well designed to do, an idea which echoes some of the definitions of goodness we explored in the last chapter.9 8 9

1.1.8–9. Good behaviour is occasionally likened to religious behaviour, probably because the gods’ demand for piety is seen as part of their sponsorship of the good.

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Occasionally the gods are seen simply as pleasing themselves, or even as harming human beings.10 In such cases we can detect traces of those mythical and literary representations of the gods as amoral, which so worried philosophers, and later, Jews and Christians. (This in itself reminds us that high culture was more interested in the relationship between the divine and human ethics than has sometimes been assumed.) They are, however, only traces; most of the time, popular morality takes an optimistic view of the gods’ sponsorship of goodness. nature Nature, in popular sayings and stories, is a powerful, sometimes the fundamental, moral authority. ‘Nature,’ says Publilius, ‘not rank, makes a good man.’ Valerius has a more elaborate theory: ‘It is nature’s law that as you are born, so you must beget, and your parents bound you with the moral obligation to raise grandchildren.’ (2.9.1). This biological imperative introduces morality, in Valerius’ view, into human life at its roots. Morality precedes society and civilization; it is part of being human. Valerius spells out his view further in the introduction to his section on humanity and mercy (5.1). Debating which to deal with first, he says, ‘although you do not know which you approve of the most, it seems that commendation of the one whose name comes from mankind itself (humanitas) should come first’.11 Human beings as a class have given their name to a virtue; there can be no stronger indication that morality is intrinsic to human nature.12 As morality begins with the imperative to pass on to your children what you inherited from your fathers, so it is ‘natural’ for parents to teach their children what is good and bad.13 For Valerius, connecting nature with the gods, parental authority is quasi-divine, and a series of examples shows how parents should regulate their children.14 Valerius describes other virtues as proceeding from nature. ‘It was in his Roman blood to keep faith,’ he says of Regulus (2.9.8). Section 3.1 concerns natural temper – the quality, mostly of courage, which is innate in certain people and surfaces even while they are still children, while it is nature that makes people love their country and gives confidence and determination to great men even when people doubt them.15 10 11

12 13

P. 161. This view of humanitas does not, however, lead Valerius to place it first among all his virtues: that position is taken by courage. Humanitas may precede courage logically, but in his society, courage is more important. This strengthens the idea which we saw in the last chapter that some virtues are natural. 14 5.6 pr., 6.1.3, 7. 15 5.6. ext. 5, 3.8. E.g. B109.

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We have seen how the nature of humanity recurs as a theme in sayings and stories.16 Life is short, hard and full of ups and downs; everyone is at the mercy of fortune. In some respects, it seems, our shared nature transcends communities and the differences between them, and what is good or bad is good or bad for us all. Having said that, an individual’s particular situation within his or her community may also be described as natural. Fables suggest this particularly strongly, since they often represent people of different social positions as different species.17 ‘You were born to be an ass; don’t try to impersonate a lion,’ sums up fables’ judgement on all those who try to imitate someone from whom nature has made them different, and come to a bad end. Nowhere do our sources tell us how to reconcile the virtues specific to our social station with those common to our humanity. We can, however, propose an explanation, along lines we explored in Chapter Six. Popular morality viewed the complexity of society, and different human roles within it, as themselves natural. There is no such thing as an original common human nature with certain virtues, which is later channelled into diverse social roles, some of which may not give much scope for practising those virtues (as slaves, for instance, do not have much chance to show courage, nor women to show political leadership). Rather, human beings are in some respects naturally different; their social roles reflect those differences, and so does their virtuous behaviour. Equally, they are in some respects naturally similar. Some support for this explanation comes from one way in which images of the natural world are used. Like the gods, the natural world often appears as a metaphor for good or bad human action, and this leads to a psychologically important slippage between the two. When Cicero, for instance, says that ‘birds of a feather flock together’, he is invoking a form of natural behaviour to suggest that a certain form of political behaviour is equally natural and therefore acceptable.18 When we apply a proverb like ‘the withered bramble is the most unbending’ to the antisocial antics of a friend, we imply that we no more hope to change him than to change the structure of the plant.19 Such images encourage us to think of social situations as being as ‘natural’ as nature itself. As we noted in the last chapter, this kind of slippage is also a powerful incentive to social conformity. As such, it is particularly appropriate for ordinary people, who have little power to change society and a strong 16 18

17 B28, B41, B73, B98, B115, B129, B137, B139. Pp. 162–3. 19 Z1.16. Quoted by Quint. 5.11.41.

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incentive, therefore, to think (and to be encouraged by their betters to think) that things are all right as they are. We shall see in the next chapter, how the treatment of time in sayings and stories encourages the same state of mind. the social group and its instit ut ions Anthropological studies of ethics and ethical texts generally emphasize the importance of the social group as a guarantor of its own ethics. The same is true in our material, and proverbs are perhaps the best example. Every proverb which, without citing a specific authority (as gnomai usually do), makes an observation about the world or a recommendation about how to behave, depends for its validation on the authority of a group. How do we know that Atticans are trustworthy, Cretans are liars or Lydians are soft? Why do we believe that ‘there’s truth in wine’?20 We just do. Everyone knows that. We’ve always thought so. In other words, the group to which we feel we belong recognizes such sayings as true.21 Identifying ‘the group’, however, from its cultural productions, can be a project of aweful complexity. Within the Roman world, it is difficult to identify even relatively small groups like the immediate audience of a particular author, and it would be a brave historian who claimed to be able to identify the user-group of any one proverb. Add more proverbs, sayings and stories and the difficulties increase exponentially. We can, though, do something. It seems reasonable to assume that between them Greek proverbs, for instance, had users all over the Greekspeaking world, and very likely among Latin-speaking philhellenes too. We have already seen that our evidence does not suggest much in the way of regional variation.22 No doubt no one user knew all the proverbs in circulation at one time, any more than a contemporary English speaker, looking through the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, will find she knows them all. But most people’s repertoires doubtless overlapped. To that extent, the authority of Greek proverbs was located anywhere in the Empire that people used them. To some degree, user-groups of each saying or story must have been self-identifying, consisting of those who wanted to belong and/or saw each other as belonging together in a particular context. An ‘ethical group’, then, consisted of those who recognized a piece of wisdom as authoritative at a 20 21 22

Z1.14. At least in respect of what we are referring to at the moment at which we refer to it. Taylor 1939: 7. Pp. 55–6.

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given moment. Such groups must have been infinitely many. Some will have had more in common than others, and some will have been more stable than others. Most groups, however, will have overlapped extensively with many others, and it is this which allows us to talk in general terms of a widespread, if complex and not precisely definable, ethical community in the early Empire. The fact that we cannot certainly identify the group to which any particular proverb appeals, does not falsify the principle that they appeal to group assumptions.23 Fables and gnomic sayings also appeal to an implied audience of those who agree with their ideas, though both are also attributed to authors, which gives them another source of authority to which we shall return.24 Valerius presents his work as if to a definable, Roman community.25 He also offers more explicit examples than any of our other sources of the authority of the (Roman) group.26 Valerius’ superficially clear demarcation of groups, however, is undermined both explicitly and implicitly in his text. In the first place, though he divides his examples into ‘Roman’ and ‘foreign’, the fact that both groups appear under nearly every subject heading shows at least that the behaviour of foreigners can frequently be classified in Roman moral categories. In fact, Valerius probably goes further and treats foreigners as employing the same moral categories as Romans. One result of this is that certain virtues appear to bind human beings across societies, as well as within them.27 A good example is that of Regulus returning to his death at Carthage.28 Regulus goes back because he has sworn to do so and oaths are sacred – even oaths between warring groups. There are, Valerius indicates, ethics which can be shared, and should be honoured, between what for other purposes are competing groups, making them for the purpose a single, larger group. This, though Valerius never says so expressly, is notably convenient for someone writing when ‘Rome’ has 23

24 25 26 27 28

Gnomic riddles like the ones published by Kenyon 1909 work in a similar way. Anonymous and free of internal references to authority figures, they presumably rely on the existence of readers who will so far agree with their view of the world that they have a fair chance of guessing the answers to their questions. Pp. 222–8. Not least in his organization of topics, which assumes that those who use the work will (or can be persuaded to) think in the same categories as Valerius himself. E.g. 1.1.2–6, 1.1.15, 1.3 passim, 3.2.6b. This does not necessarily make such virtues ‘natural’, just common to more than one group, though virtus at least might have some claim, on linguistic grounds, to universality. 1.1.14. Romans identify their gods with those of other societies where possible, and since oaths are generally taken in a religious context, this connection may be one reason why it is relatively easy to imagine oaths as non-group-specific.

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expanded to include all the states and peoples from which all his ‘foreign’ examples come. Everyone from Scythia to Africa to Gaul is now Roman; it is just as well they can be understood, and understand themselves, in Roman ethical categories.29 Valerius exemplifies how a group can be both defined (‘Roman’) and indefinable (who counts as Roman?), and even when indefinable, powerful (if you count yourself, or I count you, as Roman, then this addresses you). The power of an appeal to the authority of the group, even one transitory or hard to define, is considerable. It is the power of what in other contexts is called society, or public opinion, or simply ‘they’. Nevertheless, this authority, being human, is open to challenge by other human authorities, notably those of institutions, offices and charismatic leaders. The power of institutions is one of the areas where moralizing collections originating at different levels of society diverge. As we saw in Chapter Six, proverbs and fables, and to a lesser degree gnomai, are highly sceptical of the morality of institutions.30 Some gnomai, and most exempla, are more optimistic, viewing institutions and offices of all kinds as good arbiters of morality.31 ‘The state teaches a man,’ as Plutarch says, quoting Simonides.32 Valerius begins his work by addressing the Emperor Tiberius, ‘you who have been placed in charge of land and sea by the collective will of gods and men, who are the surest salvation (salus) of our fatherland, by whose celestial providence the virtues of which I shall speak are most graciously fostered and the vices most severely punished’ (1 pr.). The emperor here assumes some of the functions of both the gods and the institutions of state in sponsoring virtue and punishing vice. Most of the examples which follow, however, date from before the principate, so authority is invested in the offices and officers of the Republic, from priests to generals, from censors to juries in the courts.33 Valerius is also particularly interested in the relationship between institutional and individual authority. Many of his stories deal with cases where the authority of an individual adds to or outshines that of his office, or where individual authority comes into conflict with institutions. As we also saw in Chapter Five, however, Valerius does not allow authoritative individuals in his accounts to be the threat to institutions of state that we might expect. The examples he gives are all of men whose devotion to Rome is known 29

30 33

A special case of group identity and solidarity is friendship, which usually arises within a group. A number of texts identify friendship both as a source of good in itself and as sometimes at odds with the wider society, e.g. VM4.7 pr., 4.7 ext. 1; see below, pp. 232–3. 31 Pp. 119, 158. 32 Sim. fr. 67 (Bergk), Plu. Mor. 784c. Pp. 169–71. See below, p. 232, for the hierarchy of official authority.

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to be above reproach, and who already have (or occasionally, in the case of young military commanders, will have) a long record of devoted service to the state.34 Valerius takes some care, therefore, to reconcile potentially conflicting sources of moral authority, and in particular those of great men and the state. my th, history and geography ‘Trust the good man,’ says the maxim, and in one form or another its sentiment is echoed in every genre.35 Most of the good men featured in popular wisdom lived in another time, and often in another state. Virtually all exemplary stories feature characters from myth or history, while around a quarter of proverbs and a number of gnomai mention mythical or historical figures or geographical locations. In proverbs, nearly a third of these references are to gods and heroes, and the characters most cited are also those most familiar from surviving myth and epic. Popular and high culture, it seems, share largely the same repertoire of references and stories at this time. Graeco-Roman culture as a whole is economical in its use of authorities; a relatively small repertoire is invoked repeatedly in different contexts. Homer, for instance, is cited in literature of this period as a source of information on everything from boat building to types of rhetoric via morality and cult.36 The gods in proverbs are almost entirely Olympians, with a scattering of characters from Homer (Circe, Scylla, Charybdis) and a few references to features of the underworld. The heroes are largely those of the Trojan War and the preceding two or three heroic ‘generations’: Heracles, Theseus and Admetus, Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Ajax and Priam, Helen, Andromache and Penelope are all common. Greek proverbs are bare of references to cults or stories from the Latin-speaking world, but Latin proverbs make occasional references to Evander, Janus or Romulus.37 Some references are to stories, others to qualities for which the characters are famous. A ‘Boeotian riddle’, for instance, is anything unintelligible, after the story of the riddle of the Sphinx, while the lazy ‘sleep like Endymion’.38 If ‘you would wash Peleus’, you are being duped, after the story in which 34

35 37 38

Pp. 140–1. The exception is Scipio Aemilianus, who was honoured for his maiestas when sent there as an envoy while still a young man. This seems to have been due to his exceptionally distinguished ancestry. 36 Morgan 1998: 95, 107. Oikonomides 1980. Gell. 1.10.2 (Evander), Apost. 8.98, Athen. 692d (Janus), Cic. Leg. 1.3.8 (Romulus). Z2.68, Z3.76.

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Medea persuades Peleus’ daughters to kill him by ‘washing’ him, and if you have ‘Achilles’ feet’ you are impressively fast.39 To call anyone or anything ‘Daedalan’ is to call it clever or elaborate.40 Heracles is a byword for strength, Penelope for faithfulness, Kronos for foolish old age.41 Whether eponyms like these remember qualities or stories makes little practical difference, as the stories have been boiled down to one memorable feature, which is itself a quality – the sleepiness of Endymion; the unintelligibility of the Sphinx. Exemplary stories too tend to illustrate a single quality in a character. However complex the story was originally and however many viewpoints and possible conclusions it incorporates, in an exemplary context it makes a simple point. So, for instance, Valerius sketches the story of Alcestis, paragon of wifely affection, to illustrate conjugal love, avoiding discussion of its wider ambiguities. He alludes to Orestes as an example of friendship, ignoring the rest of his complicated story.42 History is treated, in proverbs and exempla, very much like myth or epic (or fable, as we saw in Chapter Four). Characters and events are remembered for one or two salient characteristics. So Plutarch devotes a whole essay to stories about women, taken from both epic and history, to demonstrate their bravery, while Valerius’ historical characters, like his mythical ones, illustrate one quality at a time. ‘Many generals lost Caria’ is the Greek equivalent of ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’. It alludes to the Ionian Revolt of 499 bce, to make the (oversimplifying) point that the Ionian Greek generals failed to co-operate.43 ‘Melian hunger’, according to Zenobius, remembers the terrible famine of Athens’ siege of Melos in 416–415.44 Hannibal’s long and varied career becomes a byword for great generalship.45 Like the mythico-historical Midas, Croesus and Crassus are bywords for wealth – nicely capturing the moral ambiguity of wealth, since they all came to bad ends.46 By treating myth or history as a collection of examples of timeless qualities and general principles, popular wisdom avoids the paradox of using them as a guide to the present. No-one in the early Empire can have thought that the precise circumstances of the Trojan War or Alexander’s conquests 39 41 42 44

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40 E.g. Z3.7, Apul. Flor. 1.9. Z4.92, Mart. 2.14.4. Z5.48, Z5.49, Prop. 3.12.38, 3.13.23, D5.64. 43 D7.72. VM4.6.1, VM4.7 pr. Cf. Ov. Trist. 1.5.21, Stat. Silv. 2.6.54, 5.2.156, Mart. 6.11.1, 10.11.2. Z4.94. Proverbs sometimes remember different features of events from surviving literary sources. In Thucydides’ account of the Melian campaign, for instance, the Melians’ suffering through famine is not mentioned. E.g. VM3.7 ext. 6, Petr. 101. Mart. 6.86.4, Stat. Silv. 2.2.121 (Midas), Mart. 5.39.8, Stat. Silv. 2.2.121, D8.53 (Croesus), Sen. ep. 119.9 (Crassus).

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were likely to arise again. Nor can many people have contemplated with much enthusiasm the resurrection of such larger-than-life characters as populated those stories. But if circumstances are seen in sufficiently broad terms, and characters sufficiently simply, then history may repeat itself. Too many generals are always in danger of spoiling the broth; in extreme danger, women may always be capable of being brave.47 The boldness which brought success to Hannibal, or the prudence which distinguished Fabius Maximus, may, in very different circumstances, bring success to a later general, or a courtier or trader whose wars are fought not on battlefields at all, but in palace corridors or marketplaces.48 The chronological distribution of proverbs and exempla is as striking and suggestive as their mythological distribution (see Fig. 5). Of the sixty or so identifiable historical references in Greek proverbs (about the same number again are unidentifiable), nearly a third refer to the archaic period and two-thirds to the fifth and fourth centuries. Only three or four refer to the Hellenistic period or later.49 Classical Athenian history is particularly well represented, along with other Greek cities and islands – Samos, Lesbos, Lemnos, Skyros, Corcyra – which were much involved with Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries.50 Further afield but still crucial in Athenian history, Thrace, Sicily and Asia Minor are well represented, while the most frequently mentioned religious site is Delphi, which played a substantial role in classical politics. The Roman West does not appear in Greek proverbs at all. Personal names follow the same pattern: they include a wide range of individuals of the classical period, Philip and Alexander, a handful of names from the Hellenistic period, and just one, otherwise unknown, Roman.51 Just as they make moral authorities out of their favourite gods and heroes, later Greeks tend to authorize people and events from what they regard on a variety of grounds as their golden age. This reopens a debate which we raised briefly in the Introduction. Should we expect the moral authorities of ordinary Greek speakers in the early Roman Empire to be so well in line with 47

48

49

50 51

Compare the saying in the British Army, which, though couched as a pair of maxims rather than stories, works in the same way. ‘The first rule of warfare is, don’t march on Moscow. The second is, don’t take your land armies into China.’ If, as Aristotle says (Poet. 1451b 4–7), the difference between history and poetry is that history deals with the particular and poetry with the universal, then history retold for ethical purposes has become a kind of poetry. Z2.59 (a reference to the Arcadians as mercenaries, possibly in the Hellenistic period), Z5.24 (Cleopatra’s companions Naera and Charmonie), Z5.54 (Dion the Hellenistic philosopher), D5.37 (a reference to the Cynics). Numerous proverbs refer to Sparta, Thebes, Argos and Corinth too; the larger and more important the city, of course, the more likely it is to feature in its own right. D5.46 (an ‘impostor’ called Maximus).

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the cultural values of high society and literature? Can we assume that all the persons, places and events mentioned were part of the general knowledge of Greek speakers of the first century bce or even the second century ce? Or are these proverbs not popular material at all, but the proverbs specifically of the educated upper classes, who laced their ‘popular’ wisdom with historical references to show off their education? There is no way to be certain. Some proverbs collected by the paroemiographers occur elsewhere in literature of the period, but that only confirms their use in educated circles. There are, however, as we saw in Chapter One, reasons to doubt a priori that surviving proverbs were confined to a thin stratum of the highly cultured.52 And it is quite possible to use proverbs without knowing what historical persons or events they refer to, as many people do with many modern English proverbs. That they have a certain range of references, therefore, is no indication of how widely proverbs were used. We can go a little further. If our historical and geographical proverbs were distinctive to the cultured upper classes and used by them to demonstrate their cultural literacy, we might expect them not only to recall the archaic and classical eras in general, but to overlap extensively with Greek and Latin literature, and especially with works in the canon. Although there is some such overlap, it is only partial. Not everything, of course, that was read in the first and second centuries has survived, but a significant proportion of it has, since it was in the early Hellenistic period that the most dramatic shrinkage seems to have occurred in what was read.53 The names and events which we can no longer identify may therefore have appeared in the further reaches of elite reading material, but equally they may have referred to folk heroes who never made it into any literary record; we cannot tell. In sum, there is insufficient reason to doubt seriously that proverbs, despite making use of a range of references compatible with surviving high culture, were in wide circulation across society. It is even possible that proverbs attest a socially widespread interest in the archaic and classical past on which high culture depends, rather than the other way round. Either way, this seems to be another respect in which the upper and lower reaches of Graeco-Roman society, as we suggested in the Introduction they might, participate in a common culture. Proverbs’ preference for older over more recent history is shared by some collections of exempla. Plutarch, for instance, cites many more examples 52 53

Pp. 8–9. Until around the fourth century, when there was further significant shrinkage. See Morgan 1998: 53–67, Morgan 2003a.

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from the heroic past, the archaic and especially the classical eras than from more recent history, in his Sayings of Kings and Commanders, Sayings of Spartans, Sayings of Spartan Women and Bravery of Women.54 His Sayings of Romans, however, are more evenly distributed from the third century bce to the first (he ends with Augustus), and in this he follows a trajectory similar to that of Valerius. We might expect, keen as he is on the virtues of Romans of the past, that Valerius would concentrate on the glory days of the middle Republic, but in the event he covers Roman history fairly evenly, allowing for the fact that he will have known more about the more recent than the more distant past.55 There is, it seems, no one disproportionately authoritative period of Roman history for Valerius. Romans have been good in every age, and the only little-represented period is the principate itself.56 Some obvious high points, like the Punic Wars, get a good deal of coverage, as do the military successes of generals such as Marius and Julius Caesar. More unexpected, perhaps, is the number of exempla which deal with the troubled politics of the late Republic, including stories about the Gracchi, Sulla, Caesar, Pompey and Mark Antony. Even in turbulent times, virtue and vice continue to be displayed and one can apparently learn even from extreme situations and the activities of state-threatening individuals. On the foreign side, Valerius follows to some extent Greek views of what was significant in Greek culture.57 In comparison to Greek material, however, it is notable how many of his exempla come from Hellenistic history. Nearly all of these concern peoples whom the Romans fought and who are now part of the Roman Empire, so it is perhaps as understandable that Romans take an interest in them as that Greek speakers gloss over them. Valerius’ foreign subjects are a mixture of famous military heroes like Hannibal and Alexander, and culture heroes, especially poets and philosophers – Homer, Alcaeus, Sophocles, Euripides, Solon, Socrates, Plato, 54

55 56

57

Fig. 5. Valerius gives the impression that while most Roman culture heroes are generals and statesmen, most Greek ones are philosophers, orators and poets. Plutarch’s collections (and the distribution of names in Greek proverbs) show that Greeks could think of plenty of exemplary kings and generals, and Valerius’ bias has more to do with Roman military and political chauvinism than any significant cultural difference. Valerius makes some 96 references to Roman history of the fourth century or earlier, 123 to the third century, 186 to the second, 259 to the first and 17 to the principate. For Valerius, writing under Tiberius, there was very little of the principate in the past. To have told stories about Tiberius himself would have drawn Valerius into writing encomium; perhaps he felt that the suspicion of distortion which always falls on an encomiast would cast doubt on his analysis of older personalities and events. 29 stories refer to mythical heroes, 39 to the archaic period, 138 to the fifth and fourth centuries.

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Aristotle. Valerius’ repertoire of culture heroes owes far more to Greek high culture than does that of Greek gnomai, chreiai and proverbs. Greek proverbs may not depend on high culture for their references, but Valerius gets his view of Greek culture from Greek literature, the Mouseia and the schools of philosophy. He leaves unstated whether he does so in a spirit of admiration or to insinuate that Greece has more great poets and philosophers than generals and politicians. Far more interesting than history to both Greek and Latin proverbs, though not to other genres, is geography. Geographical references abound: to cities, states or areas, or the people who inhabit them. Usually, a proverb associates a place with a particular quality: Skyros is stony, Azanai has a bad climate, Keskos is a city of fools and the coast of Thrace is rough.58 We hear that the Medes and Lydians are soft, Aegyptians evil (and marriages with them unprofitable), Carians worthless, Thracians wise and tricky, Cretans liars but good sailors, Leibetherians unmusical, Parians apt to change their minds and men of Mykonos all the same.59 Some of these qualities, like the fact that Locrians are tricksters, have their origins in historical events (most of them, again, archaic or classical).60 One can imagine over time, however, that the memory of the event need not have persisted; the label would stick as a description of the place or people. Other soubriquets, like ‘wealthy’ for Corinth or ‘arrogant’ for Rhodians, can be given a rough date before or after which they are likely to have been applied, but they may have gone on being true for hundreds of years (and may have stuck long after they ceased to be true). Some, like ‘rough’ for Thrace, could have been coined at any time in Greek history and gone on being relevant indefinitely. Greek proverbs seem to show the rudiments of what we might call a ‘moral topography’. It is clearly Atheno-centric: nearly thirty proverbs refer to people or events which are definitely Athenian, including Solon, Pericles, Chares, Bounas the judge, Epeios (a character in Cratinus), Akeseus and Helicon, the first weavers of the robe of Athena Polias, and a number speak favourably of Athens, referring, for instance, to the trustworthiness of Attic witnesses.61 (A few others are strongly anti-Athenian, and presumably originated elsewhere.62 ) Proverbs which refer to other Greek cities are nearly all either descriptive or negative, while proverbs about places on the edge of the archaic and classical Greek world, such as Africa and Asia, are usually very negative indeed. We cannot be sure, because we cannot locate most 58 59 60

Z1.32, Z2.54, Z4.51, Z5.86. D6.37, Z5.1, D2.55, Z3.37, Z4.29, Z4.37, Z4.62, Z5.30, Z1.79, Z2.21, Z5.17. 61 D2.80, D3.11. 62 E.g. Z2.10, Z2.28, D3.12. Z4.97.

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geographical proverbs for certain, but it seems possible that they characterize their home state as good, while places further away are regarded with increasing suspicion, derision or alarm.63 Latin proverbs range more widely, geographically, than Greek. They inherit some references from the Greeks (translated Greek proverbs include references to Athens, Colophon, Crete and Corcyra). To these Latin speakers add a few references to areas of long-standing Roman and Italian interest (Rome, Aetna, Saguntum64 ), and references to further-flung areas of the Empire (Africa the source of novelties, wealthy Babylon, impoverished Batavia, credulous Gaul, greedy Parthia65 ). Geographically, therefore, Romans’ own interests around the Mediterranean seem to trump those of Greek speakers, but they exhibit a similar geography of moral authority, centring on Rome. It seems plausible to assume that the use of geographical proverbs varied regionally. (Parthians, presumably, did not call themselves greedy.) But in the mobile world of the early Empire, no doubt many people came to hear what their more or less distant neighbours said of them. Just as people up and down the social scale are likely to have known sayings and stories they had no occasion to use, so the range of geographical references widely known will have exceeded what was used in any one locality. poets, philosophers and ot her heroes Closely linked to historical characters as sources of authority, are the authors from whom sayings and stories are taken, and the authors who appear as characters within the texts themselves. When a gnomic saying describes itself as coming from a particular author, or is recognizable as coming from a known author, that author is implicitly invoked as a source of authority. To say that a line comes from Menander or Euripides, is to say that these authors say something about the nature of the world or how we should behave in it that is true, instructive and practically helpful.66 The authority of gnomai therefore works slightly differently from that of exemplary stories, where it is the character who acts as the authority for the quality he embodies or the action he performs. 63 64 65 66

Common sense suggests that sometimes immediate neighbours attracted negative labels, but I have not found a clear example. Liv. 22.39.15 (cf. Var. R. 1.2.2), Cic. Sen. 2.4 (cf. Stob. 98.72; but this is not strictly a local Italian interest, since ‘heavier than Aetna’ as a proverb goes back to Euripides Herc. fur. 637), Liv. 31.17.4. Plin. HN 8.16.42, Stat. Silv. 3.2.137, Mart. 6.82.5, Mart. 5.1.10, Plin. HN 14.148. Most sources of gnomai are poets, who not only have a memorable turn of phrase, but whose association with both divine inspiration and moral authority goes back to the beginnings of Greek poetry.

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The authors cited in gnomic sayings on papyrus write in many genres and are widely scattered in time. In papyri from the first and second centuries, we find, from the archaic period, two identified quotations of Hesiod, and many of Aesop. Euripides is the sole representative of fifth-century tragedy. Fourth-century comedy, however, is well represented, with quotations from Menander, Philemon, Antiphanes, Alexis and Philippides. From the fourth century, too, come the many quotations from ps.-Isocrates. The very beginnings of the Hellenistic period provide two quotations probably from Epicurus and two from Apollodorus. Then there is a gap, before a solitary quotation from Potamon in the first century bce or ce, and one quotation from Phaedrus and five from Babrius from the first century ce.67 This collection gives us one didactic author, three fabulists, one tragedian, six comedians, either two or three philosophers (counting ps.-Isocrates rather generously as a philosopher) and possibly one orator. Nine of the fourteen date, roughly in line with other surviving literature, to the archaic and classical period, two to the end of the fourth or very early third century, and three, perhaps more surprisingly, to the early principate. Broadly speaking, and with the significant exception of Homer, readers of Greek papyri seem to find their gnomic sayings in authors who are also favourites for other reasons: another example of economy in Graeco-Roman culture’s use of authorities. Having said that, only five of them belong to the canon (counting ps.-Isocrates as Isocrates). Moreover, gnomic sayings do not survive in the same relative numbers as texts of these authors overall. For these texts to be in line with literary survivals in general, we should expect to find much Homer, more archaic poetry (plenty of which is quite satisfactorily gnomic), more oratory, more history, fewer fables and less philosophy. The authority of authors who are mined for gnomic sayings, then, is related to that of the best-known authors and the authors of the canon in general, but is not quite the same. Several reasons suggest themselves. The language of new comedy, in particular, is relatively simple. Many comic poets, and some philosophers, sprinkle their works with memorable oneline maxims which are particularly easy to isolate. New comedy and Euripides were the classical dramas most often restaged in later centuries and so were independently popular; the fact that they were already well known may have meant that some of their sentiments transferred spontaneously into popular culture, as well as making them a likely place to look for maxims. One can think of many other Greek authors who make moralizing statements or give commands, but they generally have some feature of language 67

Figures are taken from the LDAB.

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or style against them. Archaic lyric, Aeschylus and Sophocles were regarded as difficult, read by relatively few people and rarely, if ever, performed. Old comedy was also regarded as linguistically difficult, provides relatively few moralizing one-liners, was little read and less performed. History and oratory provide relatively few short, memorable gnomai, though the dedicated reader could certainly find some. The authors who provided gnomai were relatively accessible and often independently popular, in a process of selection which intersected with the evaluation of literature expressed in the canon and the reading habits of literati, but did not depend on them. The choice of Greek gnomic authors in other literature is, with one significant difference, in line with that in papyrus collections. Plutarch, Dio, Maximus and Lucian, for instance, all frequent citers of gnomai, are particularly fond of Euripides and Menander, along with Hesiod, a scattering of other poets and fables.68 They all also, however, quote a great many gnomai from Homer, which is not at all surprising in itself, but adds to the oddity (which I cannot explain) of the paucity of Homer in gnomic papyri. The pattern of citation in Latin is inevitably somewhat different, in that all the commonly excerpted gnomic authors date from the second century bce or later. Latin quotations are largely counterparts of Greek ones. Terence comes second to Publilius among comics, and Virgil is the most cited of other poets.69 Latin authors also cite many Greek gnomai, either in Greek or in translation, above all from Homer and Menander. Within gnomic sayings and exempla, the range of authors (in a broad sense) mentioned as authority figures is equally interesting and not dissimilar to that of authors.70 Aesop appears regularly as a character as well as an author.71 From the classical period, Euripides, Demosthenes and Isocrates all appear as authority figures within gnomai, and Diogenes the Cynic appears many times.72 No-one who lived later than the early third century 68

69

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E.g. D. Chr. 2.9, 17.12, 37.47, Plu. Mor. 24e, 63e, 92a, 473a (Hesiod), D. Chr. 32.6, Plu. Mor. 33f, 495a, 778c (anon. Attic comedy), Plu. Mor. 791d (anon. Attic tragedy). Among authors quoted gnomically are Philostr. Vit. Soph. 486, Plu. Mor. 96f (Theognis), Gell. 12.5.6 (Aristophanes), Quint. 10.1.60 (Archilochus), Lucian Apol. 15 (Herodotus), Plu. Mor. 10a (Simonides), Plu. Mor. 97c (Chaeremon). E.g. Sen. ep. 95.53, Quint. 8.5.5 (Terence), Quint. 37.3 (Virgil), Gell. 2.29.20 (Ennius), Gell. 3.18.9 (Laberius), Gell. 13.8.3 (Afranius), Quint. 6.3.18 (Catullus). Citation of Virgil becomes more common after the second century. The Seven Wise Men appear sometimes as a group, and sometimes individually: P. Oxy. 3685, PSI 9.1093, Lucian VH 2.17, Plu. Sept. Sap. Conv. (as a group); Jouguet and Lefebvre 1904 (Anacharsis), Boyaval 1975 (Thales). See below, pp. 275–7. O. Wilk. 2.1226, PSI 7.848. Milne 1923 (Euripides), P. Mil. Vogl. 6.263, Plin. ep. 2.3 (Demosthenes), O. Wilk. 2.1310 (Isocrates), SB 1.5730, O. Claud. 413, P. Bour. 1 (Diogenes). Nestor also appears within a gnomic saying on papyrus as an authority figure (O. Claud. 188).

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is cited as an authority figure in surviving gnomai. Like most historical stories, they look back to the archaic and classical Greek worlds for inspiration. The appearance in gnomai of authors whose works are also mined for gnomai reinforces their ethical authority. Philosophers, of course, have a reputation as wise and good men at most periods, and we shall discuss them in more detail in Chapter Eleven.73 Most distinctive in this list, perhaps, is Demosthenes. He appears not as a sponsor of wisdom in general but in a story particularly appropriate to him: saying of Aeschines that ‘He died on the point of my speech.’ Gnomai distinguish, it seems, between authority figures which are good for general use and those which are suitable only for certain occasions. All the historical, geographical, heroic and literary authorities we have examined, however, have in common that they are human and intra-cultural (or could have been seen as such). Their authority, therefore, is ultimately that of the social group again, with special reference to those members of the group whose lives or productions were so outstanding as to merit remembering. the authorit y of fables: a problemat ic case That famous poets, orators, statesmen and philosophers have moral authority is hardly surprising in the Greek and Roman worlds. More surprising, on the face of it, and more elusive, is the authority of fables and fabulists. Fables in our period are nearly always attributed to Aesop, ‘Aesop the Phrygian’ or the Phrygians generally.74 Dio Chrysostom introduces a fable in Oration 32 (63) as from ‘a kinsman of Aesop’. Babrius makes a point of telling us (Prol. 16–18) that his fables are Aesop’s, decorated. Phaedrus refers to his fables as Aesop’s in his first three prologues (1, 1–2; 2.1, 8; 3.29, 38), but in the fourth, he says that he has added some fables of his own, in the Aesopic tradition.75 Theon (Progymn. 72) observes that fables can be called Libyan, Sybaritic, Phrygian, Cilician, Carian, Egyptian or Cyprian, attributing them to the east in general rather than to any individual. Canonical poets are also occasionally mentioned as fabulists, as they have been since the classical period: Homer, Hesiod and Archilochus in particular. It is very rare for 73 74 75

Pp. 275–85. E.g. Ael. VH 10.5, Lucian Fab. ver. 2.18, Max. Tyr. 15.5, 32.1. See further van Dijk 1997: 98–107. 4, 11–13. He goes on to say that people have already proclaimed his merit as a fabulist by copying his works (17–19), which suggests that he wants his audience to see his success as a reteller of Aesop as the source of his authority as an independent fabulist.

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an author to proclaim that he is inventing his own fable. One who does, Maximus of Tyre in Oration 36 (1, 2), does so only to dismiss it. ‘Let me tell you a fable in the manner of the wise man of Lydia . . . now let me abandon my fable and convert it into a proper argument.’76 Perhaps Maximus felt that his audience would not like to hear a fable of Aesop treated so perfunctorily. It seems that fables need authorities. By this period, at least, it is not enough simply to tell one ad occasionem; if a fable is to be credible – persuasive – it needs the force of a certain character or author behind it. In the case of Homer or Hesiod, the nature of the authority is clear: these are inspired poets, canonical authors, pillars of Greek and educated Roman culture. The authority of Aesop is more of a puzzle. At first sight, there seems little reason why a Roman citizen, say, of the early Empire, should regard stories attributed to a mythic pre-classical Phrygian slave as having any ethical force for him. It is true that Aesop is an ancient Greek author, and as such shares some of the cultural authority of Homer and Hesiod. On the other hand, he is not part of the canon, and it is clear that in the eyes of some sources, at least, his status is rather precarious. At Plutarch’s Dinner of the Seven Sages, Aesop is present, but not as one of the wise men. He is seated on a low chair (4.150a) and snubbed by the Spartan Chilon when he tells a story. In his Life of Solon, Plutarch again has Aesop snubbed, this time by Solon himself. ‘Solon, our conversation with kings should be as rare or as pleasant as possible,’ Aesop says (28.1). ‘Certainly not!’ says Solon, ‘but as rare or as worthwhile as possible!’ Numerous authors refer to fables as a crude form of moralizing, suitable for children and the uneducated,77 and that being so, one might assume that it did not matter so much that Aesop was not a cultural authority of the first rank. The number of fables to be found in literary texts, however, gives the lie to this claim, and it seems likely in practice that whatever authority Aesop had, he had for all the groups who used him. What that authority was, remains elusive. One possibly first-century text seems to be trying to make Aesop look like more a philosopher, perhaps to improve his status. P. Mich. inv. 25 contains two chreiai: one of the philosopher Aristippus and one of Aesop.78 In the first, Aristippus is asked a question and replies epigrammatically. The text continues, ‘Aesop the fabulist, asked . . . replied . . .’ but unfortunately breaks off. The chreia 76 78

77 E.g. Quint. 5.11, 19–20, Philostr. Im. 1.3, Philostr. VA 14–16, Liv. 2.32, 9. Cf. 19, 2. Gallo 1980 vol. II: 433–45.

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suggests that Aesop, like philosophers in many other chreiai, is surrounded by students or admirers, and it gives us a picture of Aesop’s authority embedded in a community. We may also wonder whether the Vita Aesopi, of which the earliest papyrus fragments just fall into our period, may have been written with the same aim. The Vita gives Aesop a history of wise speech and action, in the tradition of the slave who teaches his master philosophy, which one might similarly see as creating a context and a community for his supposed wisdom. The implication for later readers would be that since Aesop was seen as an ethical authority, even as a philosopher, in his own community, he could be taken as an authority by others. All the same, taking our sources as a group, their support for Aesop as a moral authority is far from unreserved, which brings us back again to the question, where the authority of fables lies. Our sources seem to push it away from themselves, usually towards Aesop or the east in general. Aesop and the east are not authorities as solid as one might like, which brings us back to the immediate context of the fable. The author himself is an obvious candidate for moral authority, but our sources rarely claim such authority, and only, as Phaedrus does, in a heavily qualified way. Perhaps the reader is the ethical arbiter of what he reads. But the reader is, purportedly at least, being educated when he reads fables, which would not be necessary if he were already an authority. Worst of all, from the point of view of authority, fables are not usually set in any particular time or place, and more often than not they are about animals, all of which potentially undermines them as a source of ethics. Nevertheless, despite all these difficulties, our sources are clear that fables are a source of ethics. I suggest the following as a model of what happens. The reader defers to the writer of the text (or perhaps, in school, his teacher). The teacher or writer defers to the source of the fable: Aesop, the Phrygians, Hesiod, or whoever it is. The source defers to whatever gave it authority in its original context – the inspiration of the Muses, or the wisdom of the east, or whatever it is. At the same time, the source defers, by implication, to the reader’s own society: the values of the place and time which set up the source as an authority. His own place and time defer, to some degree, also by implication, to the reader’s individual ethics, since the attitudes of all the contributors to a society at a given point help to create and sustain their society’s ethics. I have used the word ‘defer’ deliberately. The authority of ethical material works in a way not dissimilar to the authority of particular interpretations of words and concepts in Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist theory of

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language.79 For Derrida, the meaning of the words and concepts we use is subject to endless différance or ‘deferral’, whereby we interpret what is on the page with reference to what is outside it. This might include other parts of the text or anything we have encountered outside it. The meanings of words and ideas we have encountered elsewhere are themselves informed by deferral, and so the process goes on. In the case of ethical material, we have not so much infinite deferral as a circle of authority, and, at the same time, a concoction of authorities, which reinforce one another. (One could, in fact, make the same argument for the way we understand language.) In the circle of authority, authority is created by the momentum of the process itself: there is no one point at which it begins, but by the time it has come back to the reader, he probably has a feeling that since so many people past and present have in one way or another approved or relied on this material, it must have something going for it. In practice, the reader may not have a very clear sense of the way each authority defers to the next, chain-fashion, so what he probably perceives is a concoction of authorities, all combining in a delicate alchemy to produce one stronger authority. This is a precarious picture of the status of ethical authority in the early Empire. If even one, let alone more than one, of the links in the chain of deferral were to cease, for some reason, to be regarded as an ethical authority, the whole collection of material might lose status disastrously. In practice, I doubt the situation was as precarious as all that. Or rather, its precariousness is only the same as that with which most societies normally live. Any ethical idea depends for its continued life on being accepted by individuals, by society as a whole, and by at least some of what the society regards as its sources of authority. If any or all of those factors change, ethics change, and in practice in the Greek and Roman world they probably did change, slowly and piecemeal but perceptibly, over long stretches of time. consequences Individuals cited as moral authorities, whether poets or philosophers, or figures from history or myth, normally use their authority for the common good. One of the most powerful and prevalent sources of authority in all ethical material, however, is self-interest, and, more generally, consequentialism. Consequentialism is the method of evaluating good and bad by looking at their results. Utilitarianism is its best-known form, though not 79

Derrida 1967 especially chh. 1, 5, 8, 10, 1982: 3–27.

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all consequentialism seeks, in the classical definition of utilitarianism, the greatest good of the greatest number. Fables, for instance, are highly consequentialist, but the good under consideration is often that of an individual. Babrius’ Fable 51 tells of a widow who kept a single sheep. Trying to get the most fleece possible from it, she sheared it so close to the flesh as to wound it. Smarting with pain, the sheep protests that if she wants to kill him, she should take him to the butcher; if she only wants his fleece, she should stop tormenting him and bring in a professional shearer. In the fable, the sheep tries to ensure his own good by persuading the widow of hers. The fox of Fable 77, taking a different line, persuades the crow to drop his piece of cheese by flattery, and ensures his own good.80 Proverbs too are concerned with consequences, and much of their advice is predicated on self-interest. ‘Don’t sail at night,’ for instance, ‘don’t hunt the wind with a net’ and ‘don’t play the ape’, are all said to stop people doing things that will harm them.81 Sometimes, as an extra inducement, the consequences are included in the maxim, as in the school exercises, ‘Letters are the beginning of wisdom,’ and ‘Seek the most powerful life if you would rule your thymos.’82 Valerius gives some striking examples of consequentialism without indicating anything but approval of it.83 Occasionally, though, he does show some disquiet at the idea that, so to speak, success breeds virtue. In the preface to his chapter on the desire for glory (8.14), he pauses to ask where glory comes from and how should it be gained. Should the really virtuous man ignore glory as unnecessary? ‘Let those whose business is considering such things, and who are able eloquently to express what they have wisely discovered, think about this.’ This is clearly ducking the question he has raised, whether the desire for glory always leads to good results. For Romans living in the first century, however, so soon after the collapse of the Republic, at least partly because of the obsessive competitiveness of its upper classes and their desire for glory, even this half-hearted raising of the question must have prompted some uncomfortable reflections. To a modern reader, it goes much further and throws the whole idea of Roman virtue as military success and imperial expansion into doubt. If the cost was aristocratic conflict, political chaos, dictatorship and the constant threat of internal dissolution, one is forced to ask in what sense the Romans achieved a good life. Valerius, however, declines to pursue his question so far. 80 81

Other fables, e.g. B44, concern the good of one group of characters at the expense of another. 82 Brashear 1986. 83 E.g. 1.2.1, 5, ext. 1, 4.3.6b. Z5.32, Z3.17, Z4.50.

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Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire what lies within

In philosophical accounts of ethics, much stress is laid on the internal quality of the ethical agent – on his or her conscience, state of mind or soul; on whether he or she is wholehearted in pursuing a certain course of behaviour, or divided, with one less virtuous part of the mind or soul kicking against another more virtuous part. As we saw in the last chapter, our sources do not have a great deal to say about the interior life, which suggests that the interior condition of the individual is not likely to be a source of moral authority. What they do say, indicates that the mind, heart or soul of the good man is not coherent or consistent enough to act as guide; indeed, it is not clear that we can talk of good men as such, rather than good words and deeds and good lives, in the sense of successful ones, after death. Our sources do, however, agree on one thing: it should be possible to know what is right and wrong, and if you make a mistake, it is generally your fault. The fact that innumerable proverbs and gnomic sayings tell us to do this or not to do that, implies that we are in a position to make choices and we are responsible for our actions.84 We may not be good men or women because of some state of interior moral coherence and continuity, but we do have some kind of coherence and continuity as complex individuals. Making ethical choices as individuals, moreover, relies on our understanding our own position and analysing correctly what is right and wrong for us in the circumstances.85 That being the case, we must to some extent be our own ethical authority, because nobody but ourselves is likely to be able to decide exactly what our situation and our interests are. metaphor as a moral authorit y We noted above that metaphors of the natural world are sometimes used to give the impression that some socially desirable form of behaviour is as ‘natural’ as the behaviour of birds or plants. Metaphor is worth discussing a little further, as a means of creating moral authority in its own right. When, for instance, we call someone a ‘fox’ for being cunning, or a ‘thorn cicada’ for being uncultured, we are not only using a colourful image to say something about them, we are implicitly attributing human characteristics and intentions to the fox and the cicada.86 If foxes were not thought to be cunning, and the ‘song’ of the (ordinary) cicada to be a kind of culture, there 84 86

85 Pp. 185–90. Valerius says so explicitly, e.g. 9.1.3. E.g. D2.90, Z1.51. Thorn cicadas, unlike other kinds, do not make a noise.

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would be no point in the comparison. In this way, metaphor draws into the sphere of human ethics everything which it names, from gods and heroes to human history, to activities like farming, fishing and hunting, to animals, plants and forces of nature. Everything in human experience, whether or not it is itself a topic of popular morality, can be seen through metaphor as moral, making everything a potential source of moral authority and a reinforcement, if human beings care to see it as such, of their ethical ideas. This kind of reinforcement is more effectively performed by metaphor than perhaps any other figure of speech, because of its devastatingly simple form, ‘C is Y’. Without explaining how, why or how far the comparison operates, metaphor simply states the connection and claims everything the user-group can describe as confirmation of their values.87 conclusion It is in the nature of ethics across societies to have much in common. No group survives long if murder or theft is endemic in it; ideas like justice, truth, trust, fidelity and courage are found everywhere that people live together. At the same time, no feature more sharply distinguishes societies than the moral authorities they invoke. In the modern world, for example, a humanist is distinguished from a Buddhist, a Muslim or a Jew not so much by taking a different attitude to murder, as by rejecting it on different grounds: not because the Buddha, or God speaking to Moses or the Prophet forbade it, but because it diminishes humanity and destroys community. By the same token, one of the things that make Greek and Roman ethics distinctive is the range of authorities to which they appeal. Roman ethics can be felt by Romans to be profoundly Roman, not because they are unique, but because they appeal to Roman gods, heroes and stories. (Indeed, many Romans may have thought that because they appealed to Roman authorities, Roman ethics were unique – just as many Christians believe that Christian ethics are unique because they are authorized by Jesus Christ.) In the last chapter, we divided the vocabulary of morality into three classes: that pertaining to the gods, nature and human society. This chapter has confirmed the significance of the classification. The same three categories emerge as moral authorities, along with a number of others including institutions, myth, history, geography, poets, philosophers and other great 87

Perhaps enrolling the natural world as an authority also made fables, in which animals acted as moral agents, seem less surreal.

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men, and the self-interest of the individual. Most of these can be seen as sub-categories of ‘society’ as moral arbiter, though some geographical proverbs (about the stoniness of Skyros, for instance, or the ruggedness of the Thracian coast) belong to ‘nature’. We have also seen in this chapter that the boundaries between categories can be traversed, creating what one might call a ‘cross-bonding’ of authorities. This is especially clear when social virtues are described using metaphors from the natural world, or when an individual’s self-interest (which may relate to his nature or his social position, or both) is being addressed. There is an obvious advantage in such cross-bonding: it implies that our three categories of authorities are in harmony with one another. Popular morality, it seems, would like users to believe that the gods, the natural world and human society are co-ordinated in their understanding of the good. (There is no sense in our material, for instance, as there is in Jewish and Christian tradition, that the gods might have radically different values from human society and set out to challenge it.) The evidence does not allow us to work out, however, whether social virtues or vices are more often described using metaphors from nature, or the other way round; so we cannot tell, for instance, whether nature is imagined as a ‘higher’ moral authority than society or vice versa. There is no sign that sources of authority are specific to certain groups or situations; all are accessible to all. Nor is there much sign that one group is disproportionately influential in deciding which authorities should be identified as such. This is particularly interesting in the case of cultural figures like poets, philosophers and other famous men, where we might imagine that the upper strata of society would have most influence in determining who counted. As we have seen, however, the range and balance of such authorities invoked in sayings and stories only partly overlaps with what high culture regarded as its chief ornaments. It seems more likely that cultural authorities were the product of negotiation, and perhaps by a wide stratum of society. Only Valerius does much to rank social authorities. He sketches a hierarchy of moral authorities in the Roman state which matches the hierarchy of office. When censors are in office, for instance, their authority outranks that of anyone else (2.9). When censors are not in place, Valerius gives many stories of consuls leading the way with moral authority. An ex-magistrate with maiestas, however, can trump anyone on a given occasion,88 while a serving military officer can trump the authority of magistrates back home.89 88

2.10, 3.2.17.

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Figure 5 Number of exempla from different historical periods

Outside public office, friendship is the virtue most likely to bring one into conflict with other individuals or the state. Friendship trumps most, perhaps all other virtues. C. Blossius, for example, is praised for remaining the loyal friend of Ti. Gracchus, and Pomponius and Laetorius for not abandoning C. Gracchus, even though both Gracchi were regarded as traitors.90 90

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In Chapter Six we saw that being good means predominantly being good of one’s kind, and that one’s kind is a complex amalgam of one’s nature and situation. In both the last two chapters, we saw how limited is the freedom of agents, not to make decisions tout court, but to make decisions appropriate to them. In this chapter, the implicit co-ordination of moral authorities offers some reassurance to the ethical agent engaged in complex calculations of the right thing to do. If they assess themselves and their situation accurately and act appropriately, their decision should be right on every level, divine, natural and social.91 91

The authority of popular wisdom must have overlapped, converged and competed with that of a number of other authorities in everyday Roman life. Oracles, auspices and omens, philosophy, a wide range of poetry and the law are the most obvious; no doubt there were others. To trace all the authorities invoked, for even one quality, would be well outside the scope of this study. It reminds us, though, that sayings and stories were only part of the moral fabric of Roman society, though a powerful and pervasive one.

chap t e r 9

Time and morality

There is a time and a place for everything. English proverb

Our last area of investigation in this section on the ‘why’ of ethics, is time. Popular sayings and stories are saturated with statements and assumptions about time.1 Moral judgements are made on past, future and present. The future or the past often furnishes a reason to behave in one way or another. Ethical debates, decisions and outcomes happen not just in time but because of passing time. Most striking of all, stories and sayings have a good deal to say about kairos or occasio, the idea of the ‘right time’, the ‘right moment’, a moment at which the good or bad consequences of an action can be dramatically magnified. Proverbs, fables, gnomai and exempla present largely complementary ideas about time, though some themes emerge more strongly in some genres than others. (Kairos, for example, explicitly appears mainly in proverbs and gnomai.) We shall return to kairos later in the chapter, along with ideas about human life, decision making and change in time. We begin, however, with what may seem a contrary theme: the implied timelessness of much of our 1

Although Greek and Roman historians have become increasingly interested in recent years both in ethics and in time, few studies so far bring the two together. An exception is Nøjgaard’s study 1964 vol. 1: 211–30, which includes a chapter on time. Nøjgaard observes (211) that it is time that makes a meaningful series out of isolated events. In keeping with his structural analysis of fables, he regards time as expressing the choice with its consequences which lies at the heart of a fable’s meaning (212). He helpfully distinguishes chronological from psychological time, time from duration, and notes how time moves differently from different perspectives. I doubt, however, his claim (216) that the action of a fable is momentary and makes little use of the passage of time (below, pp. 237–8). Anthropologists have become increasingly interested in time and its relationship with ethics. I have found helpful, though not always focused explicitly on the connection between ethics and time, Bourdieu 1963, Thompson 1967, Geertz 1973, Gell 1992, Carbonell Camós 2004, Holzman 2004, James and Mills 2005. The discipline which has historically been most interested in the connection is the study of religions, where Christian tradition, for instance, sees time as a central factor in salvation, and Buddhist tradition sees it as an integral part of the process of gaining enlightenment.

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material, and what it says about the world in which ethical agents imagined themselves to live. still world with moving figures The word ‘world’ here is deliberately ambiguous, meaning both human society and the cosmos as a whole. Our sources talk sometimes of one and sometimes of the other, and often in a way which encompasses both.2 As the antics of Homeric gods and heroes of the distant past illustrate, human beings have an ingrained tendency to imagine the wider world, the cosmos or the metaphysical sphere as working much like the everyday world with which they are familiar, just as, when someone nowadays says, ‘Isn’t that always the way?’ they can be referring to anything from the way that if you make a soufflé your friends will be late for dinner, to the way that it always seems to rain on a bank holiday, without any sense that different rules might govern such disparate phenomena. The language of sayings and stories supports the assumption that the world is stable in various ways. Fables are couched in a past tense: ‘A man from Athens, travelling with a man from Thebes, got into conversation with him, as one would . . .’ ‘On a hillside, a bunch of grapes was hanging from a dark vine . . .’ When they reach the moral at the end, however, they generally change to the present tense or even the future conditional. ‘Let the man who harms me while I am alive not mourn over my corpse.’ ‘If you help the evil you’ll get no good in return . . .’3 An event which is supposed to have happened once in the past has universal relevance, which can only be true if the world and the people in it are much the same in every generation. Gnomai achieve the same effect in a different way. They are usually couched in the present indicative, or in the imperative. ‘Honour the gods. Respect your parents.’ ‘Letters are the beginning of understanding.’4 Anyone, at any time, the implication is, should honour the gods, or can improve their understanding by learning letters. The way Zenobius and Diogenianus present them to us, proverbs often lack a verb at all: what is provided is the essence of the saying, to which users add verbs, as appropriate to their own context. ‘Skyrian goat’, for instance, could become ‘you’re quite the Skyrian goat’, ‘get yourself a Skyrian goat’, ‘she was his Skyrian goat’ or ‘he’ll end up with the Skyrian goat’.5 2 3

In this, popular ethics is close to Stoic cosmology, in which human societies reflect the order of the cosmos (Schofield 1991 chh. 3 and 4). 4 Oikonomides 1980, Brashear 1986. 5 Z1.26, cf. Z2.48. B15, B19, B14, B94.

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It helps when applying a fable from the past to the present that their subjects are stock characters and common situations. The more and less powerful, the more and less intelligent, friends and enemies, ambition, deceit and impiety plausibly exist in every generation. As we have seen, stories from myth and history, though we may know they are more complicated, are treated for ethical purposes in much the same way, drawing general lessons from specific circumstances.6 Proverbs too assume this way of thinking. Nobody precisely lives the life of Habron, sings the songs of Tellen or talks like a Seriphian frog (that is, not at all), but many people do something similar enough to justify comparison.7 In his study of time among the Balinese, Clifford Geertz argues that the Balinese see people less as individuals than as types, and that this makes the passing of time less obvious or important to village communities.8 In a similar way, a ‘traditional English village’ (deliberately vaguely placed in time) might include the butcher, the baker, the wastrel, the nag . . . and since there would always be, in this mythical community, a butcher, baker, wastrel and nag, the fact that individuals came and went would seem less important, and the passage of time would be accordingly less marked. The Balinese case has been disputed, but it has a certain intuitive plausibility, and we can imagine our ethical material creating something of the same impression. If the world always has its foxes, lions and apes, its Croesuses and Cretans, its Catos and Scipios, then in some moods it may seem a timeless world, rather as a world of metaphysical types would be. Fables and proverbs, in particular, take for granted that society is sufficiently stable over time for the past to be (generally) a reliable guide to the future. Similar causes and similar situations produce similar results and effects. Past experience, allied with practical intelligence and an instinct for self-preservation, is the basis on which many of their characters act successfully and well. The cock confronted by a cat disguised as a bag in B17, observes that none of the many other bags he has seen has had teeth, and so avoids being eaten. Experience tells the lark in the cornfield (B88) that when a man does his own reaping, he finally means business. Zenobius’ proverb 1.67 observes that the fox does not come again to a village from which he has once had to flee. The timescale within fables and exemplary stories varies a good deal, and this too suggests a certain stability in the world. If time and circumstances 6 7 8

Pp. 216–18. Z1.4 (Habron was rich and soft-living), Z2.15 (Tellen’s songs were free in expression), D3.44. Geertz 1973: 400, though it has since been argued that this is not the only way the Balinese see people in time (Gell 1992: 70–1).

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were seen as constantly moving on, we should expect the circumstances described at the start of the story to continue to change around the main characters, even if they were not acting themselves, and then their story might not turn out as one would expect from the way it began. As it is, characters in fables and stories pursue their activities and interactions apparently undisturbed by changes of circumstance. So, for instance, the Babrian fable of the cat-bag keeps all the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action. B32, about the weasel who fell in love with a man and became human in order to marry him, jumps in time from the falling in love to the changing of her form to the wedding banquet. B7, about the horse which refused to carry half the ass’s burden and ended up carrying it all, emphasizes the passing of time, though we are not told how much time elapsed between the main events. In none of these cases does the movement of time in the course of the story affect the story, beyond the changes that are effected by the main characters themselves. The stability which sayings and stories claim for the world is an important dimension of their morality. In a sense, time, as we hinted in the previous chapter, is yet another moral authority, one rarely explicit but all-pervasive. People are people and what’s good and bad for them is good and bad, say these texts: it’s always been so and it will always be so, because the world’s like that; it doesn’t change. Don’t bother to fight it. This is another example of that slippage, endemic in the language of popular ethics, between the world as it is and as it should be, which we explored in Chapter Seven. It is beyond the scope of this study to speculate (and it has not been widely explored) whether this attitude is typical of peasant societies, or of the poor in all kinds of societies, but both are imaginable. Not to expect the world to change, even to claim that it cannot change, might be some consolation for those who cannot see how to change it for the better. The stability of the world as ethical texts present it, is offset to some extent by its complexity. The nature of the world may not change around us as time passes, but there are so many characters and potential situations in it, that we must always be alert, and if we overlook one we may pay a heavy price. Babrius’ Fable 5 tells the story of two Tanagrean cocks who had a fight. The one who lost hid himself in shame in a corner of the house. The winner stood on the housetop and crowed and flapped his wings, where he was seen by a passing eagle who carried him off, leaving the defeated cock to have his way with the hens unchallenged. The world of the cocks did not change with the passing of time; cocks have always been in danger from eagles if they draw attention to themselves

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on rooftops. Rather, the winning cock failed to remember that other dangers still threatened him even though he had won his fight. Similarly, in B11, the nature of things does not change after the farmer sets fire to the tail of the fox he has caught in his garden; he simply has not reflected that the fox might run straight into his grain field and raze it to the ground, which is what happens. What does change in these fables is the situation of the main character. Although the world of ethical literature may be a stable one, the lives of its characters are not: they proceed through time, changing as they go.9 Youth is distinguished from the prime of life, which is distinguished from old age.10 Gnomai warn of the danger of reversal of fortune in time; fables and exempla tell stories of those whose fortunes changed, and proverbs allude to them (only exceptionally do we hear of people whose fortune changed twice to restore them to their original position, and then as something unusual and worthy of comment). Human lives in popular ethical thinking are neither cyclical nor circular nor oscillating (all possibilities which have been canvassed by scholars); they move on till they finish.11 Babrius’ Fable 76 illustrates the impossibility of turning back the clock in mortal life. During wartime, a knight kept his warhorse in peak condition with barley and hay, but when peace came, he turned him into an ordinary carthorse. Another war was declared; the knight saddled up his horse again, but the horse fell to his knees saying, ‘You turned me once from a horse into an ass. How are you going to turn me back into a horse?’ The tension between these two phenomena – the stability of the world and the one-way development of human lives – lies at the heart of the relationship between morality and time. One may wonder, though popular wisdom does not give us enough material to develop the idea, whether the movement and mutability of human lives may have been felt to make social strife and moral evil possible. If human lives were as stable as the world around them, perhaps no-one would transgress their allotted role, any more 9

10 11

There is little sign in this material of the idea that time is cyclical, apart from occasional allusions to the farming year. Nor do the themes of progress or decline over long periods of time make much impact, although Valerius does refer to the increasing greatness of Rome (1.1.8, 2.7 pr., 2.8 pr.) and sometimes indicates that he thinks Romans are less moral now than they used to be (2.5.5, 9.1.1). Even these chapters, though, do not talk of decline as a trend, but of the contrast between then and now. Below, p. 240. Most scholars now see ideas of circularity (e.g. Eliade 1954) as coexisting, perhaps as a minor partner, with other patterns (e.g. Minicuci 1995: 73). Leach’s suggestion that the sense of time in classical antiquity is ‘a sequence of oscillations between polar opposites’ (night and day, winter and summer etc.) finds no support in wisdom texts (Leach 1961: 126).

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than the stars err from their courses.12 If some such idea did exist, it was also their movement through time that made it possible for people to do good, and combat the conflicts and evils of existence. Sayings and stories assume that people are normally free to act and determine their own future,13 and characters’ adaptation to changing circumstances is a common theme. Babrius tells the story of the starlings who, having learned to avoid the farmer’s sling, were tricked by him into being shot. As they fled, they met a flock of cranes, and warned them to beware of this new tactic by human beings of saying one thing and meaning another. Human beings learn from experience, change their behaviour and with it their future. Experience must, of course, be allied with practical intelligence, which tells you when and how it is appropriate to change. When the lion felt the hunter’s arrow in Babrius’ Fable 1, and reflected that in his experience a man’s messenger is usually less formidable than the man himself, he rightly decided to run away. The proverbial mouse that tasted pitch would not transgress again.14 Determination, when allied to intelligence, is always a virtue: ‘I shall move every stone,’ say those determined to succeed, and ‘water finds a way’.15 Those who, foolishly, bring change for the worse on themselves are said contemptuously to be ‘moving Camerina’ or, ‘rousing the eight-legged scorpion’.16 Experience grows with age, and age changes one’s ethical behaviour in other ways. ‘When something happens to the inexperienced, it always hurts them more,’ says Publilius.17 Ps.-Isocrates connects time, morality and education in a passage which could stand as an epigraph for any gnomology. ‘Do not wonder if much of what I have said is not appropriate for you at your present age . . . I have chosen through this one essay both to advise you for the present and to lay down advice for the future. You will easily appreciate the need of it then, but you will have trouble finding a welldisposed counsellor.’18 As we have seen, however, there is disagreement about how far age makes one wiser or a more effective operator; some texts suggest that there may be a point beyond which the old cease to be able to use their experience.19 Time may allow human beings to change, but change in individuals is never presented as adding up to social change. Sayings and stories hint at several reasons for this, which add another strand to time’s ethical significance. 12 13 16

Philosophers since Parmenides had recognized the logic of connecting ultimate good with the ultimately stable and unchanging. 14 Z6.41. 15 D7.42, Z6.24. When divine forces do not intervene, that is (see below, p. 242). 17 PS234. 18 Ad Dem. 44 (P. Oxy. 1095). 19 Z1.96, D4.18. Z5.18, D8.8.

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In many cases, changes which come about through good or evil action are restored, or reversed or repaid in the course of time. We have seen how the themes of strict and expanded reciprocity appear in every kind of ethical literature, and how often people who act for ill bring about their own destruction. ‘A timely good to friends in part returns.’ ‘All unjust gain brings harm to the one who gains it.’20 ‘Evil profits bring small leisure and later great grief.’ This principle works positively as often as negatively: ‘You will repay grape [or olive] stones, pig,’ is said of those who give back more than they got.21 The principle of reciprocity redresses a situation unbalanced by a good or evil act. I suspect that this is even true when ‘what comes around’ is better or worse than what ‘went around’: in the case of an evil action, for instance, justice in some mindsets is restored by making the punishment worse than the crime.22 Time brings justice, and rectifies situations and relationships which have been thrown out of balance by the unusual goodness or badness of one party. As much as time enables change, it also enables change to be compensated for and reversed. It is common for those who have done good or ill to bring reward or retribution on themselves. Sometimes, however, the gods are the agents of justice: ‘Zeus looks down after a long time on destruction.’ ‘The wicked man delays his punishment, not evades it,’ says Publilius with relish.23 Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small,24 and if human beings upset the order of the world, the gods will eventually put it right. It is noticeable, though, that virtually all the texts which connect the gods, justice and time say that justice comes eventually – often explicitly after a long time and sometimes after the death of those involved.25 On the human timescale, experience, intelligence, determination, luck and sometimes the successful enrolment of the gods on one’s side are the factors which lead to success or failure; and undeserved success or failure, which also happen, simply have to be accepted.26 All human life is lived in the meantime. Another explanation of the tension between the apparent stability of the world and the one-way trajectory of human lives is nowhere stated, but can 20 22 23

24 25 26

21 P. Harr. 2.170, D3.32. P. Bour. 1, P. Oxy. 3006. The concept of justice on which the doctrine of ‘an eye for an eye’ was an improvement (Exod. 21.24). PS526, cf. PS509, P. Oxy. 3006, PSI 2.120, P. Schubart 20. An usual example of divine justice coming quickly is, ‘Nemesis goes faster than feet,’ Z4.11, Z6.80, cf. D3.20, Z7.98 (on the judgement of Rhadymanthys, in the underworld). B127, cf. S.E. Adv. Math. 1.287; familiar in English from H. W. Longfellow, ‘Retribution’ (1870). [Isoc.] Ad Dem. 38–9, Shelton 1981. In a similar way, Bourdieu 1963: 61–2 shows how the Kabyle distinguish the immediate future (i.e. anything that can be imagined emerging from the present) from the wider future, which is out of human control and in the hands of God.

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be deduced. Ethical material addresses the individual, and it nearly always presents individuals thinking, acting and using their experience. Nowhere does it appear that people might become cumulatively more experienced, wiser or more effective agents by acting in concert or improving over generations. This is in striking contrast to the concept of decline over time, which flourished in Greek literature, in particular, from Hesiod onwards, and appears in Publilius too: ‘Every day worse than the last.’27 The concept of progress over generations has been identified elsewhere in Greek and Roman thought,28 but in popular ethical thinking there is little or no sign of it. Every life begins from scratch and accumulates what experience and wisdom it can, hoping not to get caught out and destroyed in the process.29 Finally, we may seek a resolution of the paradox of the still world with moving figures in the theory of goodness I put forward in Chapter Six. If being good means being good of your kind, and goodness of your kind means surviving to fight another day until the end of your natural life, then goodness has little to do with the trajectory of life itself, and more to do with each position, each role one takes within it. Over a lifetime, one may take many different positions. The positions themselves, though, remain the same. There will always be richer and poorer, stronger and weaker, more and less foolish in an endless series of zero-sum conflicts. Human life, on this view, is less like a journey and more like a dance; it progresses through time, behaving differently at each point, but it always remains part of the same pattern. One factor upsets this picture of a stable world within which human lives trace their trajectory: Tychê or Fortuna. Tychê is an atemporal power. She irrupts into the human sphere without reason, explanation or preparation, arbitrarily changing lives for good or ill (or both, successively). ‘Often an hour gives back what many years have taken away,’ as Publilius says.30 Tychê is unaccountable to gods or human beings; the changes she brings about are not described as reversed by the gods later on because they do not demand justice or reparation; in a sense they are not part of the natural order at all. They are a breakdown of order which human beings can only hope will not happen too often, or not always for the bad. 27 28

29 30

PS119 (cf. Sen. Phaedr. 775), and arguably in VM2.1–6. Dodds 1973: 1–25, Edelstein 1967: xxi (arguing that rectilinear time did exist), Novara 1982: 471 on whether there was progress in virtue in Roman thought. Even Valerius, presenting Romans as becoming more powerful through virtue, does not claim that they become more virtuous in gaining power. One might think that popular ethical texts could have arranged themselves in such a way as to encourage development of thought in those who used them, but there is no sign of this. PS668.

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The number of references to Tychê or Fortuna in ethical texts testifies to her hold on the imagination. Numerous gnomai emphasize the overwhelming power of Tychê when she chooses to intervene.31 Babrius’ Fable 64 puts an unusual spin on the idea by having Tychê appear to a man sleeping too near a well, to warn him not to fall in. She does so, she says, because she objects to being held responsible for the things people bring on themselves. Valerius’ account of the great and long-lasting blessings which Tycheˆ can heap on human beings when she is so minded, explains part of the fascination of Tychê.32 Attracting her attention can be like winning the lottery, bringing good fortune out of all proportion to anything one could engineer for oneself. Unfortunately, far more instances seem to be remembered of bad fortune than good, and as a result the safest attitude to Tychê, as to lotteries, seems to be resignation rather than hope. time past and time f ut ure Ethical texts are very interested in the past and future and the difference between different moments in time. Incorporated in them are a good many expressions for moments, units or periods of time.33 From the water clock in Athenian lawcourts, which measured the permitted length of speeches, comes the saying ‘you waste water to no purpose’.34 If you ‘light a lamp at midday’, you are doing something inappropriate to the moment.35 The night is a period of quiet and leisure when people are able to think: good ideas are therefore called, ‘a plan of the night’.36 A number of proverbs refer to the seasons of the year or to the year, especially the farming year, as a whole. ‘One swallow does not make a spring.’37 ‘Things were always better last year,’ and, ‘a farmer is always 31

32 33 34 36

37

E.g. Pap. Flor. 21.27, PSI 4.280, cf. Bartoletti 1966, Goodspeed 1905. Curiously, the collections of Zenobius and ps.-Diogenianus do not feature Tychê, though they include material on the gods and other anthropomorphic powers like necessity. In two proverbs, Tychê-like activities are attributed to other gods. ‘The dice of Zeus always fall well’ is said of those who flourish (Z2.44) and ‘the god sends [spontaneous or accidental] goods’ is said of those who enjoy good fortune without earning it (D3.15). 7.1 pr. Z1.77, Z2.32, Z4.25, D5.20, D7.82. A number of proverbs also concern repetition, which intensifies the value of the action, whether good or bad: e.g. Z1.12, Z3.29, Z3.33, D3.34, D6.81. 35 D6.27, cf. Z3.72. D2.61. Z3.97. If you chatter on and on, you may be called an ‘Arabian flute player’ (Z2.39). It seems that Greeks did not appreciate the sound Arabian flautists made: Zenobius’ explanation of another proverb records that, ‘it was said of the Arabian flautist that he would play for a drachma and stop for four’ (Z2.58). Z5.12, cf. B131.

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going to be rich next year’,38 express two of the fundamental emotions of human life: fear that things are getting worse, and hope that they are getting better. The span of human life provides many proverbs, including ‘the span of life: very little’.39 ‘Justice gave birth to justice and harm to harm,’ says the proverb.40 The ‘olden days’ of previous generations in general are important to Valerius, while you can proverbially call someone with old-fashioned attitudes ‘older than Codrus’.41 Last but not least comes the timescale of the gods and divine justice which we have already discussed. Some of these proverbs are saying something about time itself; others use time as a metaphor for something else. Since proverbs work by analogy, both kinds are informative: if doing something inappropriate is like wearing your cloak in summer, then there are right and wrong seasons for doing things. It is notable how few humanly created markers of time either type of proverb provides. The Greek and Roman worlds had an enormous number of ways of dividing up time and a wide range of mechanisms with which to mark the divisions. They included olympiads, dates ab urbe condita (from the foundation of Rome), magisterial, regnal and consular years, months, weeks, days, watches, hours, market days, dates of festivals and elections; time could be measured by the sun, the moon, trumpets, sundials and water clocks, and marked by calendars, annals, public documents and tombstones.42 We might expect rather more than one water clock and one Arabian night-watch to appear in ethical sayings and stories. Even Valerius, whose subjects act in the thoroughly timetabled history of Rome, is only occasionally concerned to place his heroes in a coherent temporal sequence. Anyone who wanted to know when Aemilia the vestal virgin or Antius Restio flourished, or how many generations apart the Elder and Younger Cato lived, would not find the answer here, and though it is easy using his stories to link Alexander, Hannibal or Scipio Africanus synchronically with their greatest adversaries, it is much harder to place them in the chronology of Greece or Rome. This treatment of time adds to the impression that much of this material is genuinely ‘popular’ in origin and/or application. Outside towns and cities and lower down the social scale we should expect to find less interest in man-made measurements of time and more in time associated with the natural world, especially the seasons, the span of human life and the generations. 38 40

39 D8.17, cf. D5.16, D8.46, D7.40. D2.54, P. Oxy. 266 and Z2.43. 41 D7.45. 42 Carcopino 1941 ch. 6. Z3.28.

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There are good and bad times which can be measured exactly, or for which exact measurements make good metaphors: appropriate and inappropriate times, times which are too long, too long gone or too long coming. But when it comes to marking the moment at which, or the period within which, an ethical choice and its consequences occur, the fascination of stories and sayings with precise measurement vanishes. We do not find statements like, ‘Do this now and that will happen tomorrow,’ or next season or next year. The timescale on which consequences of ethical choices follow is much vaguer: things happen immediately, quickly or slowly; they happened recently; they will happen some time; they will happen eventually. The most important statements about time in connection with ethics are the vaguest. Some of these contrast the present with the past or the future, and some make the past or the future a justification for doing something. When somebody says that last year was better or that next year will be better, or that somebody long-dead was good, the past and future are contrasted with the present. More, such sayings indicate that something about the present is unsatisfactory. Counterfactual time can be used in the same way. When the naked and shivering young man of Babrius’ Fable 131 sees the prematurely arrived swallow lying dead outside his door, he says, ‘If only I had not seen you! You have destroyed both yourself and me.’ ‘If only . . . not . . .’ is a favourite construction at the ends of fables, when characters review their changed circumstances and reflect that if only one thing had not happened, the situation would not be as (usually, as bad as) it is now. Not dissimilarly, when Valerius records that C. Marius was the first consul to enrol capite censi (the very poor) into the Roman army, or that Atilius Serranus and L. Scribonius ended the ancient practice of the senate and people sitting together at the games, he raises the unspoken question, if they had not, where should we be now? Would ancestral mores have persisted, or Romans be more virtuous?43 This sense of contrast between the present and the past, future or what might have been coexists with the sense of time as continuous and one thing leading to another, which is as essential to ethical literature as it is ingrained in human consciousness. It is necessary that the two run side by side, because if we could not see how we got from then to now or how we will get from now to the future, we might despair of the unsatisfactory present. As it is, juxtaposing past and present or present and future gives the ethical agent a vivid sense that the world might be other than it is, that 43

VM2.3.1, VM2.4.3.

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it has been or might be in the future other than it is, and that there are ways to get to a time (and we perhaps have been in the past in a time) when life was or will be better than it is now. These ideas form a psychologically powerful – perhaps psychologically the most powerful – combination for motivating people to move and change: simultaneously emphasizing that where we are now is not perfect and that we can get to somewhere better. I have emphasized in previous chapters that in many ways the world of these texts is not one of many opportunities: a world in which lizards cannot make themselves as great as snakes, nor jackdaws turn themselves into the handsomest of the birds. If you are rich and feckless, you may become poor, but if you are poor and powerless you are not likely to become rich and influential, unless by the hand of Fortune.44 It is in this context that the juxtaposition of time as a series of contrasts between what is and what we want to be, and time as a continuum between what is and what we want to be, is so powerful. Time is the great ethical motivator for those who have few or no other resources. When no other aspect of life seems likely to improve one’s situation, one can always hope that things will get better over time. And if one is told that they will get better if one behaves in certain ways, the incentive to do so – to behave ethically, whatever that means in a particular context – is enormous. I have argued that being good is largely a matter of being good of one’s kind. How do we reconcile this idea with the idea I have just put forward, that these texts encourage us to imagine alternative situations in which our lives are better than they are now, and perhaps even to hope and work for improvement in the future? Two possibilities present themselves. One is that while we are encouraged to hope for the future, what most of us hope for is a relatively small improvement in our circumstances. The proverbial farmer who always hopes that things will be better next year is not necessarily hoping that next year he will be a senator. He is more likely to be hoping that none of his crops will fail and he will be a slightly richer farmer. In this scenario, hope does not threaten the order of society as a whole, especially as it will never happen that everyone gets what they hope for at the same time. The other possibility is bleaker, but it is one built into many ethical systems in practice, including far more idealistic ones than the one we are examining. That is that people are encouraged to hope, despite the fact that most of them have little or nothing realistically to hope for, because 44

As Tullus Hostilius and Tarquinius did according to Valerius (4.1.1–2). In classical Greece, at least, Valerius seems to believe that intellect can succeed where other qualities cannot, and cites Socrates, Euripides and Demosthenes as foreign examples of the humble becoming illustrious.

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hoping for marginal improvements in their existing lives prevents them from seeking more radical solutions to their problems. It is far from an obvious parallel, but there may be some value in comparing the case of slavery and slave revolts in antiquity. Historians sometimes express surprise that, given the number and concentration of slaves in the Greek and Roman worlds, there were not more slave revolts. Serious revolts were almost entirely confined to a few large agricultural estates, gladiatorial schools and places where sizeable ethnic groups were enslaved together.45 One explanation (of several possible) is that it was not uncommon – and in the Roman world, quite common – for individual slaves to be given their freedom; some slaves were even allowed to work for money with which to buy freedom. In the Roman world, freed slaves became Roman citizens, with all the privileges citizenship brought.46 This possibility, perhaps, made rebellion or running away, both of which were risky and carried horrific penalties, less attractive for slaves, most of the time, than staying put, behaving well and hoping for freedom to come to them. Pacific individualism among slaves will have been encouraged by the fact that imported slaves often did not share a language, while house-bred slaves were brought up to accept their situation (and probably think it better than that of bought slaves). Rebellions occurred mainly in contexts in which a mass of discontents lived close together and shared a language, a very poor quality of life and no hope of freedom. Some of the same factors were probably at work, encouraging particularly the less wealthy in Roman society to behave well. Fear, individualism, a sense that other people were worse off than oneself, and finally hope, are likely to have encouraged many people to behave ethically and look forward to the time when their virtue would pay off, rather than to rebel against their circumstances and run the risk of complete failure. The second function of statements about the past and future is to provide someone with a justification for a certain action or belief. We might be told, for instance, that our ancestors thought or behaved in that way. As we saw in the last chapter, if we respect our ancestors, we want to imitate them. Collections like those of Valerius, and Plutarch’s Sayings, invite the reader to evaluate virtue, including potentially their own actions, by the standards of 45

46

So for instance the Messenians of the Peloponnese, enslaved by Sparta, rebelled periodically between the seventh and fourth centuries until they regained their freedom (e.g. Thuc. 1.101–3); Liv. 32.36, 33.36 records two rebellions by large numbers of Carthaginian prisoners of war in Italy at the end of the third century bce; Liv. 39.29, D.S. 34.2, 36 concern revolts by slaves on large agricultural estates in the second century, Appian BC 1.14 the gladiatorial revolt led by Spartacus (73–71 bce). Wiedemann 1981: 45–60.

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Greeks and Romans (and others) of the past, while new forms of behaviour, like anything else new, generate a certain amount of suspicion.47 Publilius puts a cynical spin on this attitude, observing that ‘we can bear vices we are used to, but we hate new ones’.48 Alternatively, we might be told that thinking or behaving in a certain way will have a good result (for ourselves, usually, or someone we care about) in the future. The language of utility, which, as we saw in Chapter Eight, is very common, is especially strongly connected with the future. Among our sources, fables are particularly utilitarian and forward-looking. Phaedrus’ Fable 2.5, for instance, tells the story of the steward who hoped to improve his standing with the Emperor Tiberius by laying the dust on the emperor’s path with a watering-can. Tiberius, taking him for a slave to give his put-down extra point, said, ‘You have not done much and you haven’t achieved anything; manumission costs much more with me.’ The virtue or otherwise of what the steward did can only be judged by the outcome of the story: the result here, in a sense, determines the value of the action, the future the value of the present. When Cicero coined the gnome O tempora! o mores!49 he both admitted and deplored that time and ethics are linked, and may change together.50 Our sources do not attempt to tease out the implications of this fascinating phrase, with its emotive appeal to a more stable world; that was for later philosophers and Christian theologians.51 It is a good example, however, of what it was about popular ethical ideas that captured the imagination of philosophers from Plato onwards and made them cite, collect and study sayings and stories. A rich and thought-provoking proto-theory is assumed, implied and half-articulated in such texts. the right time Time, as historians and anthropologists have often noted, does not flow smoothly.52 There are more and less memorable times, and the less memorable tend to concertina till they seem shorter than the memorable ones. Times which have exceptional significance for a community, such as its foundation, or its golden age, persist in communal memory without ever 47 50 51 52

48 PS100. 49 Catal. 1.1.2, quoted by e.g. Sen. Suas. 6.3, Mart. 9.70. PS234, PS328. One saying seems to indicate that there are ethics suitable for some times and not others. The proverb, ‘To think archaic things’, (D3.40) is glossed by ps.-Diogenianus as ‘against good custom’. One can see the outlines of early Christian debates about the nature of God’s goodness and how it relates to human ethics, emerging here. Hughes and Trautmann 1995: 5.

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seeming to get further away, and the characters of such times remain as vivid and seem as close to later generations as to earlier ones.53 There are also more and less ethically paradigmatic times: times which produce a plethora of authorities and stories. Certain times become more important than others for many reasons: they are remembered as periods of exceptional power or success, military or cultural or both; they are seen as the moment when good times began, or the last moment before good times ended; they are periods which generated art or literature of their own through which they can be recovered. Remembering them does not mean that members of the early Empire wanted to, let alone expected to be able to, put back the clock; it is rather, as we saw above, that they saw the virtues of those days as timeless and indefinitely available. There are circumstances, however, which are anything but timeless and indefinitely available, and those one must seize or miss for ever. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.’54 This much-quoted English gnome would have met with approval from an early imperial audience. The concept of kairos has attracted a certain amount of interest in recent years, in the context of high literature and especially philosophy.55 Its wide range of meanings includes right measure or proportion, and Hesiod’s phrase, ‘Proportion in everything is best,’ became proverbial (and is close in spirit to the Delphic ‘Nothing in excess’).56 Kairos can also mean profit or advantage, a state of affairs, and of time it can mean a crucial moment, right season or even time itself. In popular sayings and stories, however, it seems usually to mean something like the ‘right time’ or ‘opportunity’. ‘Know the right moment (kairos),’ says one gnome, summing up the message of many texts. ‘Don’t miss the festival.’57 ‘Nothing ripe but once was sour.’58 There is a right time to give and take, and ‘a little gift at the right time (kairos) is big’.59 ‘He does good service who submits to the moment,’ says Publilius.60 On the other hand, to give at the wrong time is pointless: ‘nothing is any use to an old man’.61 There is, as the author of Ecclesiastes put it, a time to be born and a time to die, and ‘an old ox is not mourned’.62 There is also a right time for good fortune, but ‘do not anticipate your tycheˆ before the kairos’.63 Or, as a proverb puts it more pithily: ‘The goat has not yet given birth, and the kid plays on the house.’64 To know the right time one must exercise intelligence: ‘do not look for the prints of a bear who is 53 55 57 60

54 Shakespeare, Julius Caesar 4.3.217–18. Gell 1992: 22. 56 Hes. Op. 694. See especially Tredé 1992, Moutsopoulos 2002. 58 PS441. 59 P. Iand. 5.77, D5.73. BS, cf. PS493: ‘It is hard to redeem the moment.’ 61 D3.89. 62 Z2.97. 63 P. K¨ 64 Z1.42. PS256. oln 6.246.

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already here’.65 On the other hand, one may sometimes hit the right time by accident: ‘often even the stupid man says something timely (katakairion)’.66 Beware, though that it does not lead you astray: ‘The opportunity (occasio) of gain often turns a man.’67 In many sayings time in general, and the right time in particular, becomes something like a god, which has power over us, and over which we have little or no power. As one quotation points out, we cannot control time.68 Unlike the gods or Tychê, though, time is a teacher as well as a power: ‘Kairos is the teacher of many things.’69 ‘What teaches man? Necessity or time . . . Who teaches the right times (kairon)? The end (telos)’.70 If human beings are good pupils, they may not learn to control time, but to ride it, even use it for their own benefit. Knowing the right moment is important to many characters in fables, from the swallow who left the cornfield in time to save her family, to the lion who knew when to retreat from the hunter.71 It serves a number of characters in Valerius’ stories equally well. M. Aemilius Lepidus and Fulvius Flaccus made their joint election to the censorship an opportunity to bury the hatchet (4.2.1). C. Marius seized the moment in an even more remarkable way. ‘He gave citizenship, against the terms of the treaty, to two cohorts of Camertes, who were resisting an assault by the Cimbri with amazing courage, right in the middle of the struggle. He justified what he had done rightly (vere) and remarkably, saying that in the din of battle he could not hear the words of civil law. And indeed,’ says Valerius, ‘that was a time when it was more important to defend the laws than to hear them.’ (5.2.8). To make the most of the right time one needs experience, intelligence and determination. It is no use dithering in the hope that time will stand still or the opportunity will come again. ‘Bounas judges’, says the proverb critically of those who put off making judgements.72 ‘The man who hesitates to avenge himself makes more bad men,’ says Publilius.73 Another proverb puts it more colourfully: ‘You must eat the tortoise or not eat it.’74 (What you must not do, Zenobius explains, is haver and eat a bit of it, for while a large meal of tortoise is purgative, a small one will give you colic.) Those who put something off on the grounds that it is not the right time, are said to be invoking the ‘moon of Akessaios’.75 One must act not only at the right time, but at the right speed. Both swiftness and slowness of action draw a good deal of comment, particularly in proverbs: ‘You’ll get muddy!’ 65 69 73

66 D7.81. 67 PS265. 68 BS l. 4, cf. BS 1.35, P. K¨ Z2.36. oln 6.246, gnome 1, PS24, PS42. 70 Kenyon 1909 col. 3 ll. 20, 22. 71 B88, 1. 72 Z2.67. BS ll. 9–10. 74 Z4.19. 75 D1.57. PS580.

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is said to those who rush into something.76 On the other hand, ‘who gives promptly gives twice’.77 When circumstances combine in one’s favour and one is able to take advantage of them, anything, one feels, can happen. Like tychê and the future, kairos is pure opportunity; it offers the hope of something better than one can achieve in ordinary circumstances and by ordinary hard work. The idea of the right time generates a number of related concepts. One is that time itself can be valuable. ‘Use time thriftily,’ says the proverb.78 This has sometimes been regarded as a distinctively modern concept, related to modern Western capitalism and the Protestant work ethic in which time is explicitly equated with money.79 It is not common in texts of this period – the only other saying I have found is the proverb about chatterboxes wasting the water in the water clock, and hence time – but evidently it is not unknown. More common may be another modern economic concept which Alfred Gell recommended to students of time: opportunity costs.80 The idea that one might do (or not do) something now with an eye to its potential future return, can be found scattered throughout ethical literature. Risk is endemic in both fictional and historical stories, and characters from successful generals to anyone making a new friend or entertaining a stranger, engage in risk analysis. The fable of the prudent fisherman (B6) represents perhaps the prevailing view, that it is not advisable to risk a small immediate profit for the sake of a larger one in the future. This fisherman caught a small fish on his line. The fish begged for its life, arguing that it was too small to be worth much, and that later on, when it was fully grown, it would be worth much more to whoever caught it. The fisherman, unimpressed, kept the fish. A more interesting case is that of the lion and the mouse (B107). A lion caught a mouse and was about to eat it, but the mouse begged for its life, arguing that it was too small to be worth eating and that if it were allowed to live, it might be able to help the lion in the future. The lion laughed at this idea but let the mouse go. Some time later, the lion was captured and was going to be killed, but the mouse found him, chewed through his bonds and set him free. Though the lion does not seem to have 76 77 78 79

80

Z4.31. Proverbs on slowness include Z4.31, D3.9, D6.81. PS274. See Esler 1986 on the various forms of bis dat qui cito dat in Latin literature. Oikonomides 1980, quoted by Seneca (ep. 94.27). E.g. Thompson 1967 (on time and the work ethic in Western capitalism), Heintz 2005 (on time and the work ethic in post-socialist Romania), cf. Thomas 2002: 379–81 (on the link between time, travel and money in southern Madagascar). Gell 1992: 322.

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made an opportunity-cost analysis, as things turned out his small sacrifice turned into a large benefit. Gell associates a strong sense of the right moment for doing something, and by implication the right pace, with agricultural communities in which climate dictates that certain things are done at certain times of year – and where there is often not much margin for error. The Greek and Roman worlds certainly were such agricultural communities, but it is noticeable that the idea of kairos in these ethical texts is associated with human social relations rather than the farming calendar. Either the concept has moved from one sphere to the other (which is quite possible), or there is something about social relations themselves or the social environment which encourages the idea that opportunity will not wait and there is no time to waste. conclusion Time plays a number of roles in popular morality, all of them significant. It acts as a kind of moral authority, telling us that the world, and good and bad, have always been the same and always will, and so they ought to be, and it is no use fighting them. Against this backdrop it shows human lives changing through time, but in such a way that they take one role and then another in a larger pattern which goes on and on. Human life is less a voyage of discovery than a progression from one part to another in a complex dance. Meanwhile, time restores many changes made by good and bad behaviour, balancing success with failure, and bringing justice to the wronged. Actions and qualities are good and bad because they have been good in the past or they will generate good in the future. The perceived difference between the past or the future and the present, together with the possibility of getting from one to the other, makes time a powerful ethical motivator. Even more powerful, though, are the tantalizing forces of favourable Fortune and kairos. These offer the greatest possibility in human life for dramatic, lasting, life-enhancing change – if one is fortunate, and tough and clever. Within the social world of our texts, ethics themselves are time-sensitive to varying degrees. We have seen that hope is not time-sensitive: one can go on indefinitely hoping for things to be better next year. Justice, perhaps surprisingly, is not strongly time-sensitive either: sayings and stories seem to accept that it may come soon or late. Generosity, on the other hand, is highly time-sensitive. A gift at the right moment may make all the difference

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to the recipient; at the wrong time it is useless. In general, the virtues that one practises on oneself, like patience, moderation, self-control, constancy and chastity depend less on time, as they depend less on circumstances, while relational virtues such as courage, clemency and gratitude can be made better or worse by being used at the right or wrong time. Virtues which are the expression of what in Chapter Seven we called ‘natural’, long-term relationships – like pietas towards one’s state or love of one’s parents or children – need a long period of time to be fully expressed, though they do not change over time. Virtues which create long-term relationships (as generosity or gratitude, for instance, need not be) are slightly different again, being the only ones which rely on time to mature them: hence the plethora of sayings advising us to make friends, or learn to trust people, slowly. The virtue with the most complex relationship with time is wisdom, which develops (and may decline) with age and experience, can (indeed, must) be applied all the time, but must take the most careful account of time, as of all circumstances, when assessing situations. A crucial part of wisdom is knowing not only what to do, but when; knowing the right moment to apply all the other virtues. Wisdom must understand, not only people and virtues and situations, but how their existence and continuance in time affects them. coda: beginnings and ends Popular morality has little explicitly to say about its end (telos, finis), in the sense in which philosophers or theologians would understand the term: a point or state which is the ultimate aim and final hope of all ethical activity. It does, however, display some interest in beginnings, in the form of aetiologies. Of even more interest, perhaps, is its extremely strong sense of closure, expressed in the structure of sayings and stories. By way of a coda, it is worth looking briefly at both these phenomena. Aetiologies are commonest among fables, where we have seen that although they are generally regarded as rather different from moralizing fables, they do, in fact, have a moral dimension. They have, moreover, an obvious temporal aspect. They tell of the moment when something happened: how Arabs became liars, or how men became so good at seeing each other’s faults and so bad at seeing their own.81 A number of aetiologies connect virtues with the gods which are not connected with them elsewhere, strengthening our sense of the gods’ 81

B57, B58, B66.

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sponsorship of ethics. Babrius, for example, tells how Zeus collected all good things in a jar, which he gave to men, who could not resist opening it. All the good things flew out except hope, which remains with human beings to this day. According to another story, when the gods were taking spouses, War chose Hybris, which is why wherever men display hybris, war follows.82 Like other sayings and stories, aetiologies show truth, lies, hope and other qualities arising from various kinds of public social interaction. Their treatment of time, though, is paradoxical. They show change happening in the past, but in most cases, the change is enacted by the gods. This does not encourage confidence in change in the future; if it comes, it will be at the whim of the gods, not from human virtue. Two fables may seem to run counter to this disempowering conclusion. In the fable of the ages of man, a man’s hospitality to a horse, an ox and a dog leads them to give him each a portion of their years, while in the story of Truth’s retreat to the desert, it is the lies of men that have made her leave.83 Perhaps, one might think, if man offered hospitality to some other animal, his nature might change again; if men told the truth, Truth might return to them. One wonders, though, whether men can tell the truth when Truth has deserted them,84 and one also wonders whether the exchange between men and animals, which occurs in many myths, is imagined, even symbolically, as possible in later ages. If not, the message of aetiologies is not so much that things change as that this is how we got where we are, and now we are stuck here. Paradoxically, what aetiologies reinforce is not the possibility of change but the sense of the world as unchanging. Endings are a subject of obvious interest in the study of ethics, especially in a system like the one we are exploring, in which the goodness or otherwise of an action is often judged on results. ‘The end is always the judge of what went before,’ as Publilius says.85 In the experience of most human beings, the world is alarmingly lacking in form or closure. We are born into the middle of a whirl of events and other lives; it takes years to work out even in part what is going on; at some random point we are extinguished without ever really understanding where we have been. Being human is a choice between life in a chaotic, inconclusive world, or annihilation. It is no wonder that stories, which reduce the world to some kind of order, are so important to us, and part of the charm of stories is that they end; they tie up and explain; they conclude. 82 84 85

83 B74, B126. B58, B70. This recalls the cases we discussed on pp. 208–9 where a personified, divinized virtue causes the same virtue in human beings. PS190.

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The significance of endings is a subject of vigorous ongoing investigation and debate between literary scholars, philosophers, theologians and even historians. Among the most influential discussions of the past generation have been those of Kermode, for whom endings bring pattern and unity to a work of literature (something we would like to see in real life, but rarely can), and Ricoeur, for whom they are part of the process by which fiction reshapes reality, creating new possibilities.86 Derrida emphasizes the continual failure of texts ultimately to sustain the closure and coherence they aim for, while for Heidegger, it is persistence over time itself, rather than any particular end point, that gives a life story coherence, and a sense of purpose gives coherence and meaning to the self.87 All these insights are helpful when we approach the endings of ethical texts, not least because they make obvious how differently ethical material works from most literature. To say that fables and exemplary stories have a strong sense of an ending is to understate the case. No-one can read a fable or a chreia without being struck by their strong sense of closure; this is one reason why scholars sometimes regard them as a crude form of literature. The aim of fables and other exemplary stories, however, is not to be sophisticated; it is to make a point. And generally the point is at the end, and the rest of the story is simply there to ‘prove’ it.88 Proverbs and gnomai also testify to the importance of endings: ‘What is the learning of the times?’ asks one riddle. ‘The end’.89 ‘Walking leisurely, time reaches everything’ – that is, everything is encompassed, perhaps solved, in time.90 Proverbs and gnomai go even further than fables and stories in pursuit of closure. They are ends without beginnings or middles, conclusions without premises. When we read a proverb such as, ‘Don’t despise a country orator,’ or, ‘The withered bramble is the most unbending,’ it is easy to imagine a ‘back story’ – which, of course, is why there is such free commerce between proverbs and stories – but there is no need; the story is summed up in the proverb. The end does not, in proverbs, gnomai, fables or exemplary stories, exist for the sake of the story; the story exists for the sake of the end. The end does not even relate primarily to the story. What it is trying to tell us is not something about the story but something about the world; not something about its characters in their world but something about its 86 87 88 89

Kermode 1968: 6–10, 54–60, Ricoeur 1979: 127, 1984–8 vol. II: 27–8. Derrida 1967, 1982, Heidegger 1973: 236–7, 279–80. The ‘proof’ consists of appeal to the various authorities which may be embedded in the story or alluded to in the saying. 90 BS, cf. D8.51. Kenyon 1909.

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readers’ characters and how they should behave in their world. If it also happens to give unity or meaning to the story, that is a bonus, reinforcing our sense that the world of the story really does parallel ours. Either way, the end justifies the story, where there is one. The story is a sweetener and a footnote, giving the conclusion’s authoritative source, whether that is some figure of the past or ‘common knowledge’. The danger of this strong sense of closure in ethical texts may seem to be that it makes for a dull world: one where all the interesting decisions have been made, and good and bad determined, and where all we have to do is to read the instructions on the papyrus. In practice, this is not the case. In the first place, many sayings and stories do not tell us what to do, but only what not to do, leaving a wide field open for decision making. Even those which have positive virtues to commend, leave it to us to judge how to apply them. By referring to stories and sayings, though, we give ourselves (and others) the sense at every moment that our decisions are based on a conclusion about the way the world is and ought to be. We may not achieve final closure till we are dead, but meanwhile, every moment has its own closure with reference to some proverb or fable or example, and some of the fearful uncertainty is taken out of life.

part three chap t e r 10

The importance of being miscellaneous

I against my brother I and my brother against our cousin I, my brother and our cousin against the neighbours All of us against the foreigner. Bedouin proverb

In the last section of this study, we place popular morality in a number of wider contexts, comparing it with the landscape of philosophical ethics and ethics in documents of various kinds. In this chapter, the wider context is that of miscellanies in general, and we shift focus from the content of morality to the form in which it was presented, in particular to those who could read. Most people in the Empire doubtless picked up sayings and stories by hearing them used, everywhere from the kitchen to the council chamber via the marketplace and the parade ground. As a way of acquiring knowledge, this must have been, as it still is, a rather hit-or-miss affair, some people learning plenty of stories and tags, and others few. Seneca’s observation, which we have amply confirmed, that many sayings and stories make essentially the same point, must have helped: if one happened never to hear a harsh, unpleasant man criticized as an ‘Areopagite’, one might come across the essentially synonymous, ‘rough as a hedgehog’.1 For those who could read there was another route to knowledge. Stories and sayings were available in quantity, often more or less helpfully arranged by genre, theme, author or initial letter. Classicists have paid little attention to gnomologies as a source of ethical ideas (unlike Byzantinists, Orientalists, mediaevalists and early modern historians, all of whom take miscellanies in general and gnomologies in particular much more seriously as cultural 1

D3.46, Z1.64, Sen. ep. 94.35.

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productions2 ). This is perhaps because we share with much of the twentyfirst-century world the view that miscellanies are light-hearted compilations of trivia, to be dipped into at odd moments, but not to be read from start to finish or with a serious view to self-improvement. To counter this assumption, ethical miscellanies provide regrettably little direct information about the way they were read or used – from end to end, or thematically, or by dipping in at random. Many other types of miscellany, however, survive from the early Empire, all of which aim at least in part to inform and educate, and some of which are much more informative about how they expect to be used, and we shall draw on these for comparison, as well as on later wisdom collections.3 I shall try to show that to apply a modern view of miscellanies to ancient collections of any kind is highly misleading, and that the evidence suggests that ancient miscellanies of all kinds were taken seriously as a source of instruction, including moral instruction, read in extenso, used and quoted. Even the lettered, even the highly cultured took popular morality seriously enough to acquire and promulgate it through the written word as well as orally. the reading of ethical miscell anies It is easier to imagine some ethical miscellanies being read from start to finish than others. A collection of fables can be a pleasure to read. A string of stories about famous generals may be as interesting as one or two. It is harder to imagine being charmed by a hundred proverbs in succession, or a hundred gnomic quotations. I begin with these most difficult cases, and what, if anything, we can deduce about the way our surviving miscellanies were read. Aside from their repetitive form and tone, what most discourages a modern reader from imagining an ancient one absorbing sayings and stories in large concentrations, is that most collections are not thematically arranged. One could read dozens without meeting anything that struck one as relevant to one’s own situation. No collection is arranged, as works of philosophy often are, to lead the reader from more to less intuitively acceptable concepts, or from less to more sophisticated ones. Surely it would be hard to remember individual elements when they were not connected to what came before or after. It seems easier to assume that when such 2

3

Helpful discussions of mediaeval and early modern miscellanies include Sanford 1924, Burton 1983, Taylor 1992, Dagenais 1994, Moss 1996, Nichols and Wenzel 1996, Taylor, Duffell and Burnett 1998, Ferry 2001, Piccione 2004. On the definition of a miscellany, see Appendix 2.


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moralizing sayings were brought together in a collection, it was not to be read as such. What little we know of the circumstances in which proverbs were first collected does not, at least, contradict this view. We do not know whether Aristotle and the Hellenistic philosophers and scholars circulated the collections they made, as collections.4 Perhaps, one might think, such collections were never intended to be read outside libraries and philosophical schools, but simply to form the basis for scholarly research, or even to be exhibition pieces, part of the dazzlingly comprehensive collections of the great Hellenistic libraries.5 Some positive support comes from Zenobius, ps.-Diogenianus and ps.Plutarch themselves. Alphabetically arranged by initial letter, each entry provides the proverb, an explanation of its meaning, sometimes an alternative explanation and sometimes a reference to the use of the proverb or a variant of it in literature.6 In effect, these collections are scholia to Greek proverbs, not too distantly related to scholia to Homer or other famous authors. The unusual – perhaps unique – thing about them is that their subject is not a great work but a compilation of popular wisdom. This testifies to the importance of proverbs in Greek culture, but also suggests at least one way in which the collections may have been used. Just as if you wanted an explanation of a word or a line of Homer, you would scroll to the right place in an edition with scholia; if you wanted the explanation of a proverb, you would look it up under its initial letter in one of these collections. Alphabetical arrangement places limitations on other kinds of use. If you wanted to use Zenobius, for instance, thematically, to look up proverbs about women, you would turn first to the letter gamma for gynê (woman). There you would find no proverbs about women in general, though by lexical good fortune you would find three about old women (graus). Proverbs about women are scattered through the collection under their names, 4 5

6

D.L. 5.26, 7.200. On the collections of Didymus Chalkenterus in Alexandria and Lucillus of Tarrha in Crete see discussions by Crusius and Cohn 1891–3, Rupprecht 1949. It is tempting to connect with this idea the tradition that the first collection of Aesop’s fables was made by Demetrius of Phalerum, who was also associated with the foundation of the Alexandrian library. Demetrius was also credited by Stobaeus (3.1.172–3) with making the first collection of apothegmata (Sayings of the Seven Sages) and with commissioning the Septuagint; unfortunately, all three traditions are bogus (Maltomini 2004). E.g. ‘Plunder of Kinnaros. Callimachus remembered this in his iambics. Timaeus said that Kinnaros was a Selinuntian brothel-keeper. Having grown very rich from this activity, he said in his lifetime that he was going to dedicate his property to Aphrodite, but when he died he laid out what he had to plunder. Skyrian start. A proverb about those who are worthless and never make a profit. Because Skyros is so stony and grim.’ (Z1.31–2).

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the names of their husbands or whatever else is the first word of the proverb.7 Apart from for looking up individual proverbs, it is hard to imagine how these collections could be used unless people read right through them. Did proverb collections, then, exist only to be consulted piecemeal by experts? One more piece of evidence may suggest as much: no proverb collection has yet been found among the provincial libraries or school texts on papyrus.8 On the other hand, scholia are usually commentaries on existing texts, which would suggest that some non-surviving proverb collections may have circulated and been read simply as compilations. The preface to ps.-Diogenianus provides a shred of evidence in support: ‘For men, whatever they found of common utility, wrote it down to be a crowd-leading road on which the majority might find help. They say that the sayings of wise men became known in a similar way, and the pronouncements of Pythagoras . . .’ (pr. 1–6). This seems to indicate that proverbs were written down before they were made subjects of scholarship, just as the maxims of famous men were. If so, perhaps, like maxims, they were, in fact, read in collections. In support of this we can adduce the surprising, to contemporary taste, but unquestionable popularity of proverb collections in the early modern world up to the nineteenth century. A collection like Erasmus’ Adagia was reprinted dozens of times and widely translated into vernacular languages within a few years of being published, and innumerable original compilations preceded and followed it. Of the several hundred mediaeval and modern miscellanies in the Bodleian Library, I sampled about a hundred, including a number of proverb collections, to see how they are arranged and whether they tell us how they expected readers to approach them. They are closely related to their classical forbears, covering a wide range of material and being monothematic or polythematic, thematically arranged, alphabetical or apparently random in order. Also like classical miscellanies, unfortunately, they all too often begin without any introduction at all, or only a brief one in which the compiler introduces himself without explaining how he expects his book to be used. An exception is the proverb collection of Robert Bland, published in 1814. Bland, whose proverbs are taken chiefly from Erasmus, prefaces his work as follows: 7 8

E.g. Akko, Gello, Naera, Polycrates, ‘Sillier’, ‘Lemnian’. This is a weak argument, though; also, finding proverbs on papyrus would not prove the opposite, since there is ample evidence of scholarly activity in large towns.


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Short as this collection may appear [he is apologizing for not including more of Erasmus’ material], there will be found in it, under various heads, observations applying to all the ordinary occurrences and situations in life . . . Should it be urged, that many of the observations are such as would occur to every well educated and sensible man, let those to whom they are superfluous pass them over . . . But should they reject them altogether, the work may still have its utility: the young and inexperienced may find in it that information, which those more advanced in life cannot, or ought not to want; it may lead them to consult the books from which the quotations are taken . . . No attempt has been made, it will be observed, to arrange the proverbs in classes, or even to place them alphabetically. Their number was found to be too inconsiderable for classification; and as an Index is given, the reader will be enabled to find what he looks for as readily as if they had been placed in alphabetical order.9

Since he mentions that some readers may pass over some of the material, it seems likely that Bland imagines them reading the book through. This conclusion is fortified by the fact that he chooses not to arrange his proverbs in any particular order, and is bullish about it. The number he regards as ‘too inconsiderable for classification’ is 657 – almost the same number as Zenobius collects and not many fewer than ps.-Diogenianus. If nineteenthcentury readers had the stomach to read all the way through collections like this in pursuit of wisdom, it is possible that Roman readers had too. The main objection which I raised earlier to the idea that one might read a proverb collection through – that wisdom sayings are miscellaneous and situationally specific, so that reading large numbers of them would be an uneconomical way to seek general ethical guidance – is partially answered by Seneca in his Letter Ninety-Four. Seneca addresses the objections of Aristo the Stoic to sententiae, meaning both proverbs and gnomic quotations. Aristo regards sententiae, which are taught in every school and at every grandmother’s knee, as too specific and not philosophical or systematic enough to produce a good man (2–3, 8–9). Seneca’s response is that although sententiae present themselves to us unsystematically, they can be sorted (in the mind?) into systematic groups (21). They may look infinitely many and diverse, but in fact they are not: their most important themes come up time and again with only minor variations (35). They refresh the memory, concentrate the mind and remind us even of what we know, which is useful, as no-one’s memory or ethical practice is perfect (21, 25). Sententiae, 9

Bland 1814 pr. xiii, xvii. Cf. the anonymously published 1789 collection, Miscellanies Moral and Instructive in Prose and Verse Collected from Various Authors for the Use of Schools and Improvement of Young Persons of Both Sexes, which emphasizes the usefulness of miscellanies for the instruction of the young in its preface, notes that it (like Stobaeus) has changed quotations occasionally, better to fit the point it wants to make, and also presents its material in no particular order.

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moreover, are so vivid and commonsensical that they go straight to our emotions and arouse us to do good (29). Seneca thinks that good men need both philosophical doctrines and sententiae, and says so both here and in the following letter (94.45–6, 95.13–40). If, like Seneca, we take the specificity of wisdom sayings and stories to consist largely in variations on a limited number of general principles, which themselves are widely useful, it becomes easier to imagine Greek and Roman audiences being receptive to larger concentrations of them. And illustrations are easy to find. Any well-represented topic in wisdom literature, such as the importance of justice, or courage, or being able to trust one’s friends, generates numerous sayings and stories which illustrate the theme in diverse contexts. Like Aristo, Seneca accepts that sententiae are both acquired unsystematically in the course of everyday life, and taught systematically, at school and perhaps, through reading, later in life too. In the course of Letter Ninety-Four he quotes twice from a collection of Sayings of the Seven Sages, in addition to quoting many other gnomic sayings as examples of useful sententiae. The fact that he sometimes quotes more than one saying, of one genre or from one collection, in close succession, suggests that he had read and memorized not just individual sayings, but collections of sayings.10 However surprising it is to us, it seems possible that collections of proverbs (or gnomic quotations) were in fact read, and memorized, as collections. Proverb collections are a particularly difficult case. When we turn to maxims of great men, fables, stories, gnomic quotations from the poets and all kinds of other ethical material, a wealth of evidence attests that they were read in collections, and not by any means only by scholars. Papyri, as we have seen, have yielded a rich variety of miscellanies. Many are in school hands, including some belonging to near-beginners. So, for instance, on a broken fragment of pottery we find scratched: Revere your parents like the gods. . . . despising money. [Restrain yourself] if you have a bad temper. . . . to all, if you would succeed in life. . . . old age, if you have the means to support age. Speak, if it is right; if not, keep silence. Do not assume an accusing speech is trustworthy.11

It is likely that texts like this were not only read and copied but memorized. Quintilian recommends (1.1.34–6) that one should give maxims to 10

E.g. 27–8, 43.

11

Milne 1922.


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children to read, write and memorize in the early stages of education, and his recommendations in general chime remarkably well with the papyrus evidence.12 Collections of gnomic sayings on papyrus are sometimes thematically ordered. Fables rarely show any thematic organization, though occasionally two or three consecutive fables share an animal character.13 Among papyri in book hands, P. Harr. 2.174 preserves a fragment of a collection on tychê (fortune), while a fragment published by Bartoletti includes quotations from the poets on wealth, followed by virtue and tychê.14 Thematic organization of any kind would make it easier for people looking for a particular category to skim through the text. It would also help people reading through to remember what they had read. Turning to manuscripts, many compilers of miscellanies say explicitly that they expect to be read, or that parts of their work have already been read. The fables of Babrius and Phaedrus are borderline cases as miscellanies; though they mostly tell versions of existing fables, they both tell them in their own words, and their epimythia are often their own. They qualify because they present a selection from the existing repertoire of fables, presented in no obvious order and making no single overall story or argument. Both Babrius and Phaedrus address their readers. In his third prologue, Phaedrus asks the dedicatee, one Eutychus, outright whether his introduction has persuaded Eutychus to read the work (3 pr. 62–3). Phaedrus also twice addresses the general reader, and hopes that his fables will be found useful.15 Reading does not necessarily imply reading through, but the act of writing an introduction suggests that the author expects readers at least to start reading at the beginning, rather than jumping in at random. Both fabulists’ multiple introductions form sequences, which make most sense if they imagine people reading them in the order in which manuscripts present them. Babrius announces halfway through his work, ‘After this 12

13

14 15

Morgan 1998: 44–6, chh. 3–6 passim. Other miscellanies survive in informal, scholarly hands, making texts which we generally take to be working texts (rather than objets d’art, as some literature in ornamental book hands may have been). Last but not least, miscellanies survive in formal book hands. E.g. PSI 1.16, P. Oxy. 1812, 3522 (possible scholars’ copies), P. Oxy. 2944, 3174, 3541, 4099 (copies in book hands). Babrius (like the Augustana recension of Aesop) is alphabetically organized; some scholars have seen traces of thematic organization in Phaedrus (Herrmann 1973: 67–9, Nøjgaard 1964 vol. II: 15–18, 161–3). Bartoletti 1966, cf. BS: 461–79. Barns 1950–1 publishes a papyrus from the second century bce on tychê. 1 pr. 3–4, 2 pr. 11. At the beginning of Part Two of his fables (9–12) Babrius says that his first book has already gained imitators, while Phaedrus opens Book Four (15–20) by boasting of the envy and glory which are already his.

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door [to fables in verse] had been opened first by me . . . I now sing a second book for you.’ Phaedrus, having begun with the modest statement that he is following Aesop, becomes more and more self-aggrandizing: in Book Two he says that he will preserve Aesop’s style but add something of his own, in Book Three that he has turned Aesop’s country lane into a road, in Book Four that he has added new fables to the corpus and in Book Five that he has gone beyond Aesop altogether.16 Further clues to the way they were expected to be read can be found in miscellanies’ internal organization. True to his aim of enabling readers to find suitable exempla without having to read the whole of existing literature, Valerius presents his work thematically. This should make it relatively easy for the busy reader to skim through, looking for ‘courage’, ‘moderation’ or ‘unexpected wills’, and to find a suitable story. It also, however, makes it easier for the ‘through-reader’ to connect the plethora of stories and remember them. As everyone knows who has played the party game in which one tries to remember a collection of objects which have been displayed for a few minutes and then removed, the trick is to make a sequence of them, and the same is true when reading a collection of stories. Valerius also, as we have seen, links chapters, sometimes in long sequences, by association of ideas. This might again make a useful guide for the reader skimming through to find a particular section, but it also helps the ‘through-reader’ to remember what he has read. Many other miscellanies organize themselves in this way, with some kind of logical progression from one theme or another. Stobaeus’ anthology is an excellent example, beginning with quotations about the gods and moving on to the structure and components of the universe, human nature and behaviour, virtues and vices, society, and ending with death and memorials. Other aspects of Valerius’ work are directed much more obviously at the through-reader than the skimmer. Frequently, Valerius links chapters by commenting on the connections between them, like the chapters on fortune, good and bad, wisdom and cunning (6.9–7.3). Passages which look forward or back and create links between sections are irrelevant to someone mining the work for stories, but they aid memory and create interest for the through-reader. It seems clear that Valerius expects some readers to read in this way. It is not uncommon to place a list of contents at the beginning of a miscellany.17 Such lists must have made it easier for some readers to scan the 16 17

B107 pt. 2.9–10, 16, Ph1 pr. 1–2, 2 pr. 8–12, 3 pr. 38, 4 pr. 11–13, 5.1. Gellius does; so does Stobaeus. It is not certain that the list at the beginning of Valerius Maximus is original (Schanz 1935 vol. II: 589 n. 1).


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text looking for a particular chapter. But they also acted as an advertisement for the work and a prospectus for through-readers, not unlike the epitome which is sometimes preserved at the beginning of a play.18 Even a list of contents, though, was of limited help to the Roman reader looking for a particular topic or quotation. Papyrus rolls came in standard sizes with standard numbers of lines to a column; columns were sometimes numbered and sometimes scribes marked off every hundred lines (for instance in editions of Homer) or the total number of lines in a poem, but to reach the right leaf and column a reader would need to scroll as quickly as possible through earlier sections until he reached the right one.19 The physical structure of a papyrus does not encourage the reader to dip in and out of a text at random, as it is so easy to do with a codex. Rolling and unrolling a papyrus needs care, even with practice, and the charm of opening a text at random or dotting about in it would be severely limited by the physical business of manipulating the roll.20 As a result, the way we typically use a miscellany today – either dipping in and out at random, or using the index to find and turn directly to a particular section – is the way Greeks and Romans are least likely to have used it. Their practical options, before the codex superseded the papyrus roll, were to skim through or to read through.21 In the case of the many texts which provided no list of contents, or worse, were not thematically arranged, it is hard to see how the reader can usefully even have skimmed them. Most collections of fables, gnomic quotations and maxim collections fall into this category, and it is hard to imagine how they could be productively tackled except by being read through. So far, we have seen a little evidence to suggest that some wisdom collections were designed for the use of scholars. At the same time, we have seen nothing to contradict, and a good deal of evidence to support, the idea that wisdom collections of all kinds, arranged in many ways, were accessible to and were read, and read through, by schoolchildren, scholars and readers in general. If we turn to some other miscellanies of the early Empire, we find that they provide even stronger evidence of being designed to be read through, by some if not all users. 18 19 20

21

van Rossum-Steenbeek 1998: 50–2, cf. 83–4. Turner 1987: 16. There is little evidence for the citation of passages by line-number; D.L. 7.187–9 is one example. E.g. Schubart 1962: 97–9, Reynolds and Wilson 1991: 35, Bastianini 1994: 45–8, Puglia 1997: 74–9, Valette-Cagnac 1997: 52–6. Skeat 1990 argues unpersuasively that reading and referring back and forward in a papyrus roll was easier than in a codex. So Gell. 9.4.5, describing some miscellaneous-sounding geographico-ethnographical works he had picked up cheaply at Brundisium.

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Pliny’s Natural History is not nowadays usually thought of as a miscellany. Gellius, however, thought that it was (praef. 8), and as Pliny presents his own work in his preface, it has as much in common with an anthology or miscellany as with a modern encyclopaedia.22 It also has much in common, organizationally, with Valerius’ Memorable Words and Deeds. Pliny’s list of contents helps readers to scroll through the work looking for a particular chapter, but it has serious limitations. At the beginning of Book Thirty, for instance, Pliny attacks Magi for being liars and frauds, and mentions that he has had cause to object to them before. Magi, however, do not appear anywhere in Pliny’s list of contents. If as an ancient reader you had not read the previous twenty-nine books, you would have had no way of knowing or finding what else Pliny had said about Magi (it would be hard enough to find the place again if you had). Cross-references like this are common in the Natural History, and they make little sense for any but the through-reader. There are other signs that Pliny expects some people to read his work through and makes provision for them. Most books are linked with a passage indicating how what comes next follows from what came before. At the beginning of Book Seven, the first six books are summed up before Pliny launches into his account of humanity. Within books, too, sections are linked, and Pliny offers an explanation when he seems to deviate from his course. (‘This will be a good place to talk about the Euphrates,’ (5.20.83) he says when interrupting an account of the towns and regions of Syria.) Factual material is also regularly coloured with passages of lyrical description, historical anecdotes or moralizing: How can one describe that Campanian shore itself, so happy and blessedly lovely, so as to make clear that in that one place there is a work of joyful nature! . . . 22

Pliny does imply (pr. 14) that he is trying to cover every aspect of nature (at any rate, he says that no Greek has so far done so). He goes on to say, though (pr. 17–18), that out of the 2,000 books he has read by 1,000 authors, he has culled around 20,000 ‘noteworthy things’ – not everything there is to know about nature, but the things most worth knowing. The aim of this project, as he says, tongue in cheek, to the Emperor Vespasian, is to give Vespasian not more to read but less. ‘I have appended to this letter a list of the contents of the books . . . By this means you will enable others not to read them either, but to seek whatever each of them desires, and know in what place to find it.’ (pr. 33). Beagon 1992: 11–14 discusses the encyclopaedic nature of the work, in the sense that it covered the ‘basic knowledge for a properly educated free man’ in its area (12), and its Roman precedents; Conte 1994: 72 says the work ‘must surely obey a logic of the discursive form’ and argues that one of the ‘lines of organization’ running through the work ‘articulates it (implicitly) according to “mental connections”. . .’ (100), which also suggests that it would have made sense to read the work through. Small 1997: 16–18 takes pr. 33 at face value as meaning the work was not read through, but see below. She notes that although ‘we find tables of contents so useful’ (17), they did not become standard in ancient books, and points out that Pliny’s index itself would take quite some time to scroll through, before one began looking through the work (without guides like page numbers). She concludes that they are not useful enough to justify the space they take up and the effort of producing them; perhaps, too, dipping into such works was not common enough to be worth making easier.


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The first place [among animals] will by right be allotted to man, for whose sake it seems that great nature brought everything into being, though her great gifts come at a vicious price, so that one cannot rightly judge whether she is a better mother or worse stepmother to man . . .23

None of these literary techniques would make much sense if Pliny expected his readers only to mine his work for information. Sympotic miscellanies form a substantial genre of their own, and a number of scholars have shown how carefully they are framed as works of literature.24 This suggests that authors expected their readers to read them through, and this proposition is supported by the arrangement of topics and the way they are introduced. Athenaeus, for instance, begins the Deipnosophistae by saying, ‘The plan of the discourse reflects the rich bounty of a feast, and the arrangement of the book the courses of the dinner.’ (1.1b). Just as a dinner is carefully ordered to stimulate and satisfy, so, the implication is, is the conversation. Plutarch’s Sympotic Problems claim to be records of learned and philosophical discussions, so they open appropriately with the question whether philosophy is a suitable topic for sympotic conversation at all. After that, Plutarch discusses whether the host should place his guests or not, why different people hold different places in honour, why the so-called ‘consul’s place’ is particularly honourable and what sort of man the symposiast should be, before launching the philosophical discussion proper with a tribute to Plato’s Symposium, a question about love. It is clear that whatever variatio Plutarch later employs to beguile readers, the work is launched with a clear structure and sequence of ideas of the kind that will make sense to the throughreader. Aulus Gellius, in his Attic Nights, chooses not to impose a train of thought on his material (pr. 2–3), deliberately putting down his jottings, as he says, in ‘any old order’. He can afford to do this, in his own view, because everything he has included is useful and interesting, of a sort to encourage lively minds to enquire further. Not for him the indiscriminate piling up of material, ‘reading which, the mind will languish in gloom and boredom before it finds anything which is a pleasure to read or adds to its culture or is worth memorizing’ (pr. 11–12). This sounds as though, contrary to what we might expect, and despite the fact that he has included a list of contents, Gellius expects his readers to read through the work. (He also, like Pliny or Valerius, likes to make links between chapters.) This impression is strengthened when Gellius goes on to say that he hopes readers will forgive him if they encounter material they know (16). If readers had been expected 23

3.5.40, 7.1.1.

24

E.g. Wilkins 2000: 23–37, Vardi 2004, Koenig forthcoming.

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to use the list of contents to pick and choose what they read, they would presumably have been able to avoid what was familiar. Plutarch composed many different kinds of miscellany: primarily, in addition to Sympotic Problems, philosophical and biographical ones, but also what one might call anthropological ones, such as Roman Problems. The last are minimally ordered, but certain trains of thought do connect parts of them.25 The first few topics, for instance, concern why brides must touch fire and water, why torches are lit in the course of marriage rites, why there is only one shrine of Diana in Rome that men may enter and why Diana’s shrine on the Aventine sports cattle rather than stags’ horns (263e–264d). The link between the first two and the second two is that Diana is the goddess of childbirth. There follows a further series of loosely linked questions about various family relations. A work like Plutarch’s Advice to a Bride and Groom is ordered rather differently. Plutarch opens the work by describing it as kephalaia – a summary of the main points of the happy couple’s shared philosophical training, and tells them that they should both read it because it will be useful in their life together (138b–c). There follows a series of points which at first sight look disorderly, but which at least one scholar has seen as following a sequence and even forming a ring composition.26 The sequence does not strike all readers equally clearly, but that the work has structure is widely agreed and should come as no surprise, since it derives from philosophy and philosophy is nothing if not systematic. That being the case, the bride and groom will doubtless do best to read the whole work, and if one is going to read the whole work, the simplest way to do it and to be sure you have covered everything, is to read it from start to finish. It seems likeliest, therefore, that this is what Plutarch expected them to do. Theological miscellanies have in common with philosophical ones that we can expect them, on some level, to be systematic. Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis, his ‘patchwork’ introduction to Christian doctrine, is an excellent example of a theological miscellany which is much less miscellaneous than it first appears. Let these notes of mine, as I have often said, be varied (poikilôs), for the inexperienced who encounter them any old how, and, as the name suggests, let them be thrown together, moving restlessly from one thing to another, and now indicating one thing, now showing another . . . For the writing will find the man who 25

26

Teodorsson 1989: 38–9, 87, 133, while commenting on the loose structure of the work, notes points where the subject matter of a talk follows from its predecessor, or returns to an earlier topic after a digression. See the discussion of Goessler 1999: 97–8. Patterson 1999: 132 does not find the structure quite so clear, but argues that it covers the three main aspects of marriage according to Stoic theory.


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understands it . . . So as you might expect, the fertility of the small seeds of doctrines encompassed in this work is great, ‘like the fodder of the field,’ as the scripture says. (4.2)

Clement goes on to say, with the aid of many literary allusions, that the Stromateis include something of a great variety of subjects. It is enough for him to point the way; after that, people must find out the rest for themselves. In the introduction to a later book, he returns to this theme using a well-known image: The flowers flowering variously (poikilôs) in a meadow, and the orchards of fruit trees in a park, are not organized and separated by species (in the way learned people put together Fields and Helicons and Honeycombs and Robes, gathering the various flowers). The form of the Stromateis is thoroughly variegated, like a meadow, deliberately scattered with those things which happened to come to mind, and without order or bowdlerization. And so my notes will be like sparks, and for the man who is prepared for knowledge, if he happens to encounter them, a real effort to understand will prove advantageous and useful. For it is just that one should labour not only for food, but (much more so) for knowledge. (6.1)

Despite Clement’s protestation that all he has written down here are ‘seeds’, and inartistically scattered ones at that, much of the work is highly ordered. Book One, for instance, begins with the usefulness of written instruction, which is followed by chapters on the shortcomings of philosophers, philosophy as subordinate to theology, the uses of education, the uses of philosophy, what is true in philosophy, what Greek philosophy got from barbarians, the superiority of Jewish Law to Greek philosophy, and so on. As in Pliny’s Natural History, many chapters begin and end with references back or forward to other material, which imply that the reader is reading consecutively. Most importantly, there is nothing here which is not important for a Christian to know, so any reader who wished to progress in his or her faith can be assumed to have read the whole work. The Sentences of Sextus constitute a slightly different kind of theological miscellany: a second-century Christian compilation of proverbs and gnomic sayings from secular poetry and philosophy, widely quoted and cited by later Christian authors.27 In the fourth century the famous spiritual director Rufinus sent a translation of the Sentences to friends who had asked him for 27

Quoted by Origen and Jerome, Regula magistri and Rule of St Benedict. Origen: Contra Celsum 8.30, Comm. St Matthew 15.3, Hom. in Ezech. 1.11, Epiphanius, Panarion 64.7.3 (quoting Origen’s commentary on the first psalm). Jerome: Adv. Iovinianum 1.49, Comm. in Ezech. 6. Regula: chh. 10, 11; Rule: ch. 7. Origen says in the first passage that ‘even the majority of Christians’ find the point he is making in Sextus’ Sentences, and in the second, that Sextus makes a point ‘in his Sentences, a book accepted by many as sound’, which implies that the book was widely read by Christians. It seems to be a Christianized version of a pagan gnomology with added gnomai of Pythagoras (see the discussion by Chadwick 1959: 107–16, 138–43).

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some spiritual reading which was a little shorter and simpler than the writings of the theologians, Origen, Gregory Nazianzen and Basil. In his preface, Rufinus says that the Sentences are so short that they can always be to hand, like a ring. The theologians mentioned would certainly have been read from end to end. Rufinus does not tell his friends to do the same with the Sentences, but he does imply that they should be thoroughly read and studied, so no doubt the whole work was covered eventually. Substantial chunks of it, though not the whole work, consist of sentences which hang together thematically or even follow one from another; for instance, the work begins: A faithful man is an elect man. An elect man is a man of God. A man of God is he who is worthy of God. A worthy man is he who does nothing unworthy of God. Study to be faithful so that you may do nothing unworthy of God.

It would therefore make sense to read large parts of the work, if not the whole collection, consecutively. To return to Plutarch: the introduction to the Sayings of Kings and Commanders contrasts that work with Plutarch’s Lives, which include much of the same material. Biographies, says Plutarch, have to be read at leisure, but a collection of sayings acts as ‘signs of lives and elements’ (172e), and can therefore be read quickly and economically. He does not say that they can be read in any order, but he arranges the work roughly chronologically and by state, so that it is relatively easy to skim over some sections and focus on others. This, among Plutarch’s miscellanies, is the type closest to our ethical miscellanies, and frustratingly, it is the least informative about how it should be read. The most we can say is that it could equally well be skimmed or read through. One last, rather different type of miscellany may be worth mentioning, because it is so clearly meant to be used and useful, and it can only have been used by being read (or at least skimmed) through from the beginning on each occasion. The Oracles of Astrampsychus, originally of around the second century, preserve a series of oracular questions and answers. The questioner would choose the question he wanted to ask from a long, numbered list. He would then be asked to think of a number between 1 and 10. The number of his question added to the number he had thought of would lead to a numbered section in a list of answers. The number the questioner had thought of would lead to the number of an answer within the section. To identify his question, the questioner would have to read, or have read out to him, the options from the beginning. One could easily arrange


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these thematically to make the process quicker, but they are in fact quite unordered: for instance, Will I advance in office? Will I go out of town? Is it to my advantage to enter into an agreement? Will I be successful? Will I purchase what is offered? Will I marry and will it be to my advantage? Can I be harmed in the business affair? Will I move from this place? Is my wife having a baby?28

Apparently the oracle’s customers saw no difficulty in reading or listening to a string of questions compiled in no particular order, to get to the one they wanted. In the epilogue to On Animals, Aelian puts the miscellanist’s project in particularly attractive terms. I know that some will not praise this work, because I have not distinguished between animals in my discourse, nor said everything about each one individually, but I have mixed up the various (poikila) animals variously (poikilôs), and said things about many, and in one place I have left the discourse about one group of animals, and in another I have gone back and said other things about their nature. In the first place, I am my own man and no slave of anyone else’s judgement and decisions, and I say that I do not have to follow wherever anyone else leads. In the second place, seeking to entice readers by the variety (poikilia) of what there was to read, and fleeing the tedium of monotony, I thought that I should weave and knit my work to look like a meadow or a beautiful garland of many colours, with the many animals as the flowers.

Aelian’s apology (apart from his rather weak assertion of intellectual independence) raises an obvious possibility which we have not yet considered. Perhaps to try to discover how miscellanies were read is an intrinsically paradoxical, an absurd project. Not because it is difficult, but because if there is one type of text which can equally well be read in any order, it is the miscellany. If the point of the text is to be varied and disorderly, why should it matter how or how much of it you read? In the twenty-first century, we assume that we will address miscellanies piecemeal – by opening them at random to while away an idle hour, and putting them down without regret. The evidence, however, slender as it is, is rather against this style of reading in the early Roman Empire. We 28

16–24, transl. R. Stewart and K. Morrell in Hansen 1998: 292–3. This method is rather different from that of its nearest relatives, dice oracles (see e.g. Frazer 1898 ad Paus. 7.25.10).

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have found a degree of order in nearly all miscellanies, of a kind which makes them easier either to use systematically, or to read through. In some cases, they have a deep structure, literary or logical, which makes throughreading highly desirable. In others, they make references back and forward and offer the through-reader passages of literary charm to sweeten the recital of information. Miscellanies of many kinds appear in school texts and the reading, copying and memorizing of such material is discussed by educational theorists and attested by many other authors. Paradoxically, even the fact that many miscellanists explicitly aim for variatio, variety of tone and subject matter, argues that they expect to be read from start to finish, at least by some readers. If one did not expect people to read one’s text in a particular order, there would be no point in working to surprise and please them with variety. It is also worth noting that being read piecemeal and out of order, if it did sometimes happen to miscellanies (and no doubt, in practice, it did), was by no means uniquely their fate. In school texts on papyrus, for example, we find many extracts from Homer, Euripides or other popular authors, presented individually or in no particular order. It was evidently normal for schoolchildren to read parts of works and to read them out of order.29 Even copies of famous works in professional book hands on papyrus, suggest that whole works were not necessarily copied or read. Twice as many fragments survive of the first two books of the Iliad as of the next two, and seven times as many as of Book Twenty-Four. More than three times more fragments of the first book of Herodotus survive than of any other (and the next best represented is Book Five). One could replicate these findings many times. It seems clear that reading a work of any genre did not necessarily mean reading it all, or perhaps not all at once. But no-one would say that Homer or Herodotus was therefore not in some sense constructed or meant to be read or heard through, and we cannot make that assumption about miscellanies either. Whatever is distinctive about miscellanies as a genre, it is not that they were not always read consecutively or in toto. conclusion Underlying the modern habit of reading a miscellany piecemeal and in no particular order, lurks the assumption that miscellanies are trivial. At best, they are thought to constitute ‘summaries and selections [from serious literature] from which to acquire the veneer of culture that is all most 29

Morgan 1998 ch. 3.


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people can aspire to’.30 We have seen ample evidence in this chapter that this was not the ancient view. All those we have discussed have had a serious purpose as well as aiming to entertain.31 They often claim to be educational, informative or moral; they make clear that they expect to be read. It seems likely that miscellanies of popular moral material were intended to be read in large chunks and even in toto, and not only read but copied and memorized. The fact that they were bitty and ordered in ways not always conducive to easy learning, however strange to us, does not seem to have worried Roman users (as it seems not to have worried users in the Byzantine, mediaeval or early modern worlds). A partial explanation of this may lie in the argument I developed in Chapter Six, that everyone acts as their own ‘key’ to the moral material they encounter, picking up and using what is relevant to them. Just as oral culture floods people every day with more and less relevant ethical ideas, so do written sources, and individuals sift and sort them according to their needs. The fact that popular sayings and stories were written down and learned in that form as well as orally, can be seen as testament to their perceived importance. Not that readers were not expected to encounter sayings and stories elsewhere, but it was desirable for them to do so in as many ways as possible. It also testifies to the ongoing interplay between the written and oral which informs Graeco-Roman morality, as it informs Graeco-Roman culture in general. The miscellaneous nature of ethical collections means that the way sayings and stories were acquired through reading, mirrors (in more intensive form) the way they were acquired by word of mouth. At the beginning of this study, I hoped to be able to show that there was some positive virtue in this (lack of ) arrangement. It now seems to me more likely that miscellaneity was simply a fact of the oral transmission of ethics, and that it was tolerated in written form perhaps because this material was still seen as primarily oral in character, and perhaps also because readers were more tolerant of the miscellany as a literary form than we are today. What seems clear, as Seneca maintained, is that miscellaneity was no bar to the acquisition of morality, whether orally or through writing. 30 31

Holford-Strevens 2003: 29. On the purpose of even an unlikely candidate like Gellius’ Attic Nights, see Beall 2004, Morgan 2004.

chap t e r 11

Popular morality and high philosophy

As the twig is bent, so grows the tree. English proverb

The subject of this chapter, the relationship between popular sayings and stories and the ideas of philosophical schools, has been deliberately sidestepped in the rest of our study, in the cause of assessing popular morality as far as possible on its own terms. There are two ways to approach the comparison. The more traditional is to compare popular morality with the doctrines of various philosophical ‘schools’ active in the early Empire.1 This kind of systematic analysis has a certain clarity and convenience, and since I have tried to show that popular morality is itself broadly systematic, there is something to be said for establishing how similar it is to any of the systems of ‘high’ philosophy. Appendix 3 makes this comparison, and I argue there that though the two systems share some terms and concepts, many others are not shared, many of the concepts which are shared are evaluated differently, and they are embedded in very different relationships and structures of thought. Above all, the orientations of popular morality and philosophical systems are very different, ‘high’ philosophy being far more idealistic. If we compare popular morality with philosophical doctrine, in sum, the two look widely divergent. In this chapter we take a different approach, one which recent writing by classical philosophers suggests may be more fruitful because it better reflects the way philosophers of the early Empire thought, behaved and saw themselves. This approach shows the relationships between high philosophy and popular morality in a very different light, as extensively engaged with one another and enjoying a degree of mutual influence. It is increasingly understood that philosophers of the early Empire did not see themselves primarily as exponents of systems. They saw themselves 1

‘School’ is not an equally good term for all traditions: Cynics, in particular, should probably not be seen as anything so organized.

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in much more organic, biographical terms: as followers of an inspirational teacher (who might be dead or alive); as guardians of a tradition; as trying to live a certain kind of life. David Sedley has argued that ‘in the GraecoRoman world, especially during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, what gives philosophical movements their cohesion and identity is less a disinterested common quest for the truth than a virtually religious commitment to the authority of a founder figure’.2 Lives, more than doctrines, were what inspired seekers after wisdom. Elsewhere, Sedley links this development with the demise of the great Athenian schools and the philosophical diaspora which followed. ‘It was almost as if, with the virtual collapse of the Athenian schools, the history of philosophy had itself come to an end. The task now was to interpret and understand it, rather than to move it forward.’3 From the later Hellenistic period onwards, Sedley argues, studying philosophy would become less a matter of identifying new problems and evolving new theories, and more a matter of studying and imitating the egregious figures of the past.4 Accounts of the history of philosophy would generally stop around the first century bce, as if nothing that happened later was in the same league. One of the most interesting results of this development, from our point of view, is that it encouraged a great flowering of philosophical biography and biographical doxography. The late archaic, classical and early Hellenistic periods were being reconstructed as a philosophical golden age, and golden ages must be appropriately peopled. Figures like Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Diogenes were not just important thinkers: they were heroes. They were not merely expositors of specific doctrines or founders of discrete schools: they were exemplary lives. They embodied their principles; they lived – and sometimes famously died – as they taught. It became increasingly important to tell their stories, stories which grew, cross-fertilized, proliferated, and generated quotations and catch phrases until they had all of the characteristics of proverb, gnome, fable, exemplum and myth. These philosopher heroes had forefathers in the Seven Sages of the archaic Greek world. The sages, too, had been admirable for their actions as much as their ideas, and they had engaged in many different ways with the world around them, with contemporary politics and society. All of them, 2 3 4

Sedley 1989: 97. This view is not uncontroversial and reverence for founder figures should probably not be stressed at the expense of the other aspects of philosophical life I have just listed. Sedley 2003: 36. Though if we had Aristotle’s exoteric treatises and more surviving from early Stoics, this difference might look less pronounced.

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moreover, could be seen as devoted to the same fundamental principle, that life was to be investigated, carefully and rationally considered, and lived well. In identifying and studying authority figures, most individuals and groups did not feel the need to limit themselves to one at a time. Some figures, above all Socrates and Plato, were revered by everyone.5 Most people were eclectic in their affiliations, taking ideas from many sources and combining them in new ways. As a result, frontiers between schools were manned only periodically, for polemical purposes, and some groups, like Stoics and Cynics, were so much involved as to be only arguably distinct. One effect of seeing philosophy as a path of life rather than a system of doctrines, was to encourage many of its practitioners to combine theoretical philosophy with the giving of practical advice. A large proportion of surviving works, therefore, addresses (as far as we can tell) real people and combines discussion of a topic in the abstract with advice specific to the person’s situation.6 Given this interest in the practical, it is no surprise to find that all the best-known philosophers of the early Empire had a strong interest in ethics, and that many of their works deal with topics equally familiar to popular morality. Nor is it surprising that so many – Philo, Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius to name only the most famous – were also engaged in one capacity or another in politics, as social critics or as high-profile social commentators. If we shift our focus from doctrine to biography, exemplary story and situation-driven ethical analysis and advice, much more of an overlap emerges between high philosophy and popular morality, and not only in subject matter. In particular, to a significant degree, the hero-figures of high philosophy are also, in the early Empire, heroes of popular morality, and the gnomai and chreiai which are characteristically attributed to such figures in popular sources, are equally characteristic of them in high philosophy. Many of the sayings and stories are identical; even more often, they are different in detail but similar in type.

5 6

Frede 1999: 787–9. Cf. Long 2002 ch. 3 on Epictetus’ diverse sources of inspiration, the most important of whom is Socrates; Diogenes is also very important to him (58–61). Griffin (2006: 17–18) helpfully summarizes Seneca’s division of philosophy into theoretical, hormetic and practical, together with the late Hellenistic and earlier Roman background to this approach. On the Roman tradition of diatribe, to which these works belong, see Oltramare 1926, who also (ch. 10) points out the elements of diatribe in Phaedrus and Valerius Maximus.


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Table Number and distribution of stories about or sayings of philosophers in wisdom texts (with distribution of references in Aelian’s VH).

Seven Sages Aesop Pythagoras Pythagoreans Presocratics Democritus Socrates Isocrates Plato Anaxarchus Academy/sceptics Aristotle Theophrastus Peripatetics Diogenes Crates Cynics Zeno Stoics Epicurus Epicureans Thessalians Elder Cato Secundus Others

Proverbs

Fables

On papyrus

VM

In other lit.

2 1 1

1 (ref.) 29

4 1

11

6 4 1

2 2 5 3 12

6

1 5 2 6(C4) 4 1

2

1(C4) 3

1 1 1 1 1 8 2

4

1

1

1

1

1

1 1 1

philosophers and philosophy in popul ar wisdom The table shows the distribution in proverbs, fables, gnomai and exempla of stories about philosophers, in a wide sense of the term, and sayings attributed to them.7 Philosophers, though not the most popular subjects of stories or source of sayings, are fairly well represented in them. With the exception of Socrates, Cleanthes and the at least semi-mythical Aesop, all 7

One could parallel the relative prominence of different characters in many other authors with moralizing interests at this period. Szarmach 1985 shows how Maximus of Tyre makes particular use of Socrates, Plato, Diogenes and Epicurus. Aelian’s Historical Miscellany, which is full of exemplary stories and references, makes most use of Socrates (with 35 references), followed by Plato (31), Aristotle (14), the Seven Sages and Diogenes (13), the Presocratics (12) and Pythagoras (8). If we count only actual stories, Plato and Aristotle do much less well and Socrates somewhat less well, leaving us with a pattern very similar to that of popular wisdom material.

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the famous philosophers of whose lives we know anything, came from aristocratic, or at least wealthy, backgrounds, and most (excepting the Cynics) lived and taught in privileged circumstances. Here, then, as in the case of gnomic sayings from poetry, we seem to have an example of ethical material originating at a high level of society and percolating down the social spectrum.8 Not all philosophers or schools are equally well represented. The only characters to feature in every genre are the Seven Sages (who sometimes appear as a group, sometimes individually). Though by tradition wise men, only one of the Seven (Thales) can even arguably be called a philosopher in the later, more technical sense; the rest are men of practical wisdom who made their reputations in politics. Aesop features in all but one genre; though a wise man, he too can only at a stretch be called a philosopher. After these, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Diogenes are the favourites by far. Presocratic philosophers do relatively well, as do Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans. There are scattered references to other fourth-century figures such as Theophrastus and Isocrates (again, a marginal case as a philosopher). Of later Stoics, Epicureans, the later Academy, later Peripatetics and later Cynics, we find almost no trace. The characters who are popular in popular wisdom, therefore, are not the best-known practitioners of the schools which were influential in the early Empire. They are, however, men who were hero-figures of high philosophy at the time. What is less clear is whether this is an example of ‘trickle down’ from high philosophy to a wider audience. Chronologically and geographically, these findings are well in line with those we saw in Chapter Seven for sources of moral authority in popular wisdom in general. The later archaic and classical Greek worlds provide a disproportionate number of authorities on the Greek side, the Republic on the Latin side (though the almost complete absence of Latin-speaking philosophers in our sources reflects the late development of philosophy in Latin and Romans’ lack of confidence in themselves as philosophers). The philosophers who were remembered as characters and moral authorities are not only those most revered by contemporary philosophers, but also those who were part of a world and a time remembered as important and authoritative as a whole. We may still wonder whether philosophers would have been among the culture heroes remembered from the archaic and classical worlds, if they had not been remembered by later philosophers. It is easy to understand 8

Brancacci 2004 takes Cynic gnomai on papyrus to be teaching Cynic philosophy, which is overwhelmingly unlikely, since most of them are in elementary school texts. Funghi 2004 more helpfully discusses chreiai of Diogenes with sayings of the Seven Sages as part of the same moralizing tradition.


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the widespread appeal of a Themistocles or an Alexander, but should we expect philosophers to appeal to popular taste to the same degree? There are at least hints that we should. As I pointed out above, the philosopher heroes of the classical era are in some ways natural successors to the Seven Sages. Moreover, the philosophers most reported in popular wisdom – Pythagoras, Socrates, Diogenes – are those who are as famous for the way they lived (and died) as for their opinions. Valerius Maximus, who records stories about a much wider range of philosophers than do other genres of wisdom – wider than that of many other authors too – is unusual, and this is no doubt one of the points at which he has more in common with high culture than popular morality elsewhere. But the characters and stories, at least, which are most widely distributed, could have been remembered in popular culture independently from their life in philosophical tradition. It is beyond the scope of this study to trace the transmission of philosophical traditions into later antiquity, but it is worth noting that the incidence of sayings, stories and references reflected in popular wisdom of this period fits a larger pattern in the transmission of pre-Hellenistic philosophy.9 The first volume of Boissanade’s Anecdota presents a number of collections of sayings of the Seven Sages from very late antiquity and the Byzantine world. Along with gnomai of Menander, these were probably the most popular gnomic anthologies of the Byzantine period. Collections of Greek philosophical material surviving in Arabic include (alongside a number of gnomologies of Menander) collections of material ascribed to Pythagoras, Democritus, Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle and Theophrastus, and well over 400 chreiai of Diogenes.10 Dmitri Gutas points out that some of the Arabic material reflects specific philosophical interests in late antique Alexandria,11 but much of it overlaps with popular wisdom. Philosophical hero-figures and their stories and sayings continued to be important well 9 10

11

Maltomini 2004 discusses the transmission of the sayings of the Seven Sages, including examples of sayings in Hellenistic inscriptions. Gutas 1975, 2000c; 194 different chreiai of Diogenes survive in these collections, of which only 38 are known in Greek; 15 feature Alexander the Great, the foil of many of the best Diogenes stories. Stewart 1958 discusses the interesting phenomenon of Democritus’ survival; he is far better represented in both fragments and chreiai than other presocratic philosophers, despite the fact that Plato shows no knowledge of him, the Stoics and Epicureans do not depend on him, and there was at best a very brief school of his followers at Abdera. Sen. Ben. 7.1.3–5 quotes him extensively and Stobaeus collects him. Stewart argues that Cynics knew and appreciated him, and this accounts for his survival (and interest to at least one Stoic); it may also account for the number of chreiai (frr. B35–115) about him. Gutas 2000b, discussing the presence of late Aristotelians like Ammonius, John Philoponus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Porphyry and Themistius. Collections also survive in Arabic of sayings of historians, orators, novelists and essayists.

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beyond the fall of the Roman Empire, and they continued to be transmitted not only by serious philosophers but also in the same contexts as sayings of Menander and other popular poets. The significant exception to popular wisdom’s preference for wise men of the archaic and classical periods is the Cynic Diogenes, who, though he lived (like Zeno and Epicurus) at the end of the fourth century, is strongly associated with the Hellenistic school he founded. Diogenes was a hero-figure for early imperial philosophers, but there are several other possible reasons for his prominence in popular material. Cynics made an exhibition of poverty which went far beyond the temperance or frugality recommended by other schools. Modern philosophers vary in their assumptions about how far Cynics are likely to have appealed to the genuinely, inescapably poor, but it is at least possible that they were felt to be more ‘of the people’ than other philosophers.12 More likely, perhaps, Cynics attracted a great many pithy stories, and seem to have used them as a teaching tool. There was therefore plenty of material about them circulating in a form easy to remember and pass on. Third, because of their reputation for plain speaking and social criticism, many Cynic stories are very funny or memorably obscene – just the kind which readily finds an audience. Then, too, some of the most famous stories about Diogenes involve places, like Athens, or other characters, like Alexander the Great, who were famous in their own right and were the subject of other stories; presumably the overlap helped to reinforce their memorability. We have seen that philosophers were honoured by their successors as much or more for their lives than for their doctrines. In popular sayings and stories, there is even less sign that it was their doctrines that storytellers and audiences appreciated. Turning first to the content of exemplary stories, we find that very rarely could they be told only about that philosopher, or to illustrate his particular philosophy. Most of them illustrate attitudes widely paralleled in other ethical material. Occasionally, the ideas expressed seem so out of step with the views of their hero, as attested elsewhere, that we may suspect that a conventional sentiment has acquired a story about a wise man to give itself extra credibility.13 Papyrus Bouriant, for instance, attributes to Diogenes one story which says that even the poor attract parasites, and two about what dangerous 12

13

This seems to me doubtful; attitudes to wealth in popular sayings and stories suggest that ordinary poor people would more likely have thought that rich men throwing away their wealth to be Cynics were fools. On the misfit between many of the views of the philosophical schools and popular wisdom, see below.


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creatures women are.14 We have seen parallels for both sentiments in every genre of popular wisdom. Another chreia of Diogenes, twice copied in Egypt, reports, ‘Asked where the Muses live, Diogenes said, “In the spirits of educated men.”’15 Eminently well suited as it is to the educational context from which it comes, it is hard to imagine this sentiment being articulated by Diogenes, but the association of the Muses, education and the mind or soul is common enough elsewhere. Valerius reports a saying of Anacharsis about the law which is well in line with attitudes to the law in proverbs, fables and gnomai: it is like a spider web, too frail to catch the powerful, but strong enough to entangle and destroy the weak.16 Interestingly, a papyrus published by Jouguet tells the story of Anacharsis sitting in judgement in a dispute between a father and a son.17 The coexistence of these two stories captures nicely that ambivalence about the law which we discussed in Chapter Six, and neatly fits the reputation of the sages as champions of the poor as well as their own class.18 In a collection like that of Valerius, it is no surprise that stories told about philosophers share a point of view with those told about other characters, since stories are grouped together under themes. So Valerius tells how Anaxagoras greeted the death of a child with a stoicism which is paralleled in the same section by several Roman politicians.19 Socrates is given, along with several notable Romans, as an example of someone who from humble beginnings became a great man.20 A few of Valerius’ stories are at least compatible with the views of the philosophers they describe, if not, on the whole, distinctive of them. Under ‘Wise sayings and doings’ we find Socrates advising his friends to pursue not just the appearance of virtue, but virtue itself, and that it is better to die innocent than guilty. (In the same section, however, Socrates also tells us that the gods know everything, and that marrying and not marrying are as bad as each other, which are views not distinctive to him and not particularly characteristic of him.)21 A few more stories preserve views which can be traced directly to the writings of the philosopher concerned. Plato’s dictum, for instance, that the world will never be a happy place until either wise men rule or rulers become wise, comes straight from the Republic.22 Occasionally a story does the philosophers concerned little credit. Aristotle, for instance, is used by Valerius as a negative example of the ambivalent 14 15 17 21 22

There are also two about black men, which are not paralleled in popular wisdom from this period, though there are unfavourable proverbs and gnomai about Africa. 16 7.2 ext. 14; cf. Plu. Solon 5. O. Claud. 413, SB 1.5730; cf. e.g. Henrichs (1967). 18 Pp. 169–71. 19 5.10 ext. 3. 20 3.4 ext. 1. Jouguet and Lefebvre 1904. 7.2 ext. a–d. D.L. 2.35 tells the second story; it is easily extrapolated from the Crito too. 473d.

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quality of ‘lust for glory’: he allegedly gave some of his books on rhetoric to his pupil Theodectes to publish, and then, jealous of Theodectes’ success with them, claimed them back.23 The fact that this story is wrongly reported only adds to its interest: Aristotle is being used as a hanger for a good story because he is a famous philosopher, regardless of its accuracy or effect on his reputation. Stories about philosophers in popular wisdom, it seems, unless they illustrated attitudes prevalent in popular ethics anyway, were not always the stories which enthusiasts for high philosophy might have told. Popular wisdom had its own slant on the culture of which it partook. One papyrus preserves a fragment, not of a chreia of a philosopher, but of a more substantial Life: the anonymous, (roughly) second-century Life of Secundus the Philosopher.24 This work consists of a biographical sketch and a dialogue, and the pattern of its transmission (it survives in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Arabic and Aethiopic, and was influential in the mediaeval West) puts it in the same wisdom tradition as sayings of the Seven Sages and chreiai of Diogenes.25 Secundus was a Cynic turned Pythagorean, who (for personal rather than philosophical reasons) chose never to speak. The Emperor Hadrian, on a visit to Athens, summoned him to an interview, and the second half of the work consists of a ‘conversation’ in which Hadrian asks Secundus questions about the nature of the universe, human life, women, friendship, wealth, poverty, old age, sleep and death, and Secundus writes down responses. The subject matter is therefore mixed, including some which one might expect in high philosophy and some which is common to philosophical and popular ethics. The responses, however, look much more like popular wisdom than high philosophy. They are presented as a series of short definitions which look very like gnomic sayings, though they are not quotations. To the question, ‘What is wealth?’, for instance, Secundus replies, ‘A burden of gold, servant of pleasures, hopeful fear, mindless profit, envy at one’s table, daily care, a changeable thing, much-loved misfortune, something tricky, insatiable desire, much-desired trouble, a high tripping-point, value reckoned in money, passing good fortune’. The mixture of attitudes, 23 24 25

8.14 ext. 3. In fact, Aristotle wrote an account of Theodectes’ treatise. P. Ross. Georg. 1.17; see discussions by Cribiore 1996: 242 and Gallo 1980: 395–429. It is striking that the work is being copied in Egypt so soon after it was composed. Perry’s 1964 edition, which surveys all the surviving versions, also traces the work’s influence in the mediaeval world (it may be one of the works behind both the Book of Sinbad and Arabian Nights). Perry points out that Hadrian, like Alexander, attracts stories about conversations (or question-andanswer sessions) with philosophers; another involves Epictetus. He also notes that this work is part of the fashion for martyrologies at this period.


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including that gold is desirable, useful, much loved, unreliable and a source of envy and trouble, does not obviously draw on any school of philosophy, but is familiar from popular sayings and stories.26 The question, ‘What is woman?’ produces a series of striking echoes of other wisdom texts: a woman is man’s desire, a wild beast, a lioness in bed, a viper in a dress, the destruction of one’s livelihood, a poisonous asp and a necessary evil. So does, ‘What is a friend?’ ‘A desirable title, an invisible man, a possession hard to find, encouragement in trouble, a refuge in misfortune, support in wretchedness, one who sees life, a man beyond one’s grasp, the most valuable possession, unattainable good luck.’27 Like the Life of Aesop, the Life of Secundus is an intriguing work, mixing biography, philosophy and popular wisdom, and, like the Life of Aesop, its primary audience is hard to identify. The papyrus fragment, which begins towards the end of the biography and breaks off as Secundus meets Hadrian, is a badly written school text from somewhere in Egypt, full of spelling mistakes and errors of sense which suggest that the writer was taking down dictation and did not understand everything he heard. It is at least possible that works like Secundus and Aesop were written for ‘middlebrow’ audiences like this: typically provincial, educated to some degree, socially aspiring perhaps, but not members of the Roman elite. If so, they form a distinct category in the relationship between high philosophy and popular wisdom: the nearest we find to a fusion genre, drawing on elements from both to create something not quite like either. To sum up: philosophers are often presented as hero-figures both among serious philosophers of this period, and in popular sayings and stories. The relationship between the two, however, is not at all clear. There may be an element of ‘trickle down’ from high to more widespread culture.28 A few works, like the Life of Secundus, may express a ‘middlebrow’ fusion of popular stories and ideas with those of more technical philosophy. Some sayings and stories say things about philosophers that one cannot imagine their high-culture devotees liking to hear. Above all, though, it seems likely that high philosophy and the culture in which it lived shared many of their hero-figures and ethical concerns, and that characters like the Seven Sages, Socrates or Diogenes did not have to move from one part of the culture to another, because they were always common to all. 26 27 28

Ch. 16. The next question, ‘What is poverty?’ (17) produces a similar range of answers – it is undesirable, unenviable, hard to lose, often better than wealth and stimulates one to become wise. Chh. 16, 10, 11. It is beyond the scope of this investigation to pursue, but the indirect influence of philosophy is surely detectable in other areas of the wider culture too: not only in rhetoric and literature, but probably in the law, religion and elsewhere.

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From stories about philosophers, we move on to quotations from philosophers or sayings attributed to them. We have seen that several fragments of collections of the Sayings of the Seven Sages survive from the early Empire, along, of course, with many fragments of collections of Aesopic fables. Isolated sayings from individual philosophers also appear on papyrus. Two ostraka, O. Wilk. 2.1226 and 1310, introduce respectively a chreia of Aesop and one of ‘Isocrates the philosopher’, though unfortunately, neither saying itself has survived. The saying, ‘If you are lazy when you are rich, you will become poor,’ which has close relations among the sayings of Menander, is also attributed to Thales in this period.29 Solon’s dictum, ‘I grow old always learning many things,’ is called proverbial by Seneca in the first century and included in his proverb collection by Zenobius in the second.30 Another proverb, ‘See the end of life,’ is glossed by ps.-Diogenianus as referring to Solon’s advice to Croesus about calling no man happy until he is dead.31 Zenobius, too, occasionally identifies the dictum of a philosopher as lying behind a proverb. He explains ‘Friends hold what they have in common’ as a piece of advice from Pythagoras to his followers, encouraging them to share whatever they own.32 The most substantial piece of philosophical quotation in our sources is the gnomic collection edited by Bouquiaux-Simon, which has long been recognized as an Epicurean or Epicurean-influenced anthology, some of whose fragments are paralleled nearly or exactly in other Epicurean sources.33 Other fragments go back as far as Thales or are close, or identical to Menander monostichs or fragments of other poets.34 Nothing in the fragments of this anthology, however, is incompatible with what we have seen in other sayings and stories. They deal with the importance of kairos, of knowing oneself and ruling oneself, of honest speech and minding one’s own business and the ultimate power of time. The only really characteristically Epicurean sentiment in the whole collection is the dictum that since 29 30 31

32 33 34

Boyaval 1975: 3, cf. 24, MPER 3.24 (Menander), gnome no. 628 (Liapes 2002: 204). Sen. ep. 76.3, Z3.4. D8.51. It is conceivable that ps.-Diogenianus excluded the first of these sayings, and Zenobius the second, because they judged in each case that the saying was a gnome rather than a proverb proper. If so, ‘friends hold what they have in common’ and ‘the life of the jar’ may have been classed differently by Zenobius because they only refer to, rather than quote, philosophers. Z4.79, cf. Z4.14 (‘the life of the jar’ refers to Diogenes the Cynic). Fr. 1 = Epicur. fr. 204 Usener = Stob. 3.16.29; fr. 2 is close to Epicur. SV 14; Dorandi 2004 adds to Bouquiaux-Simon’s account of the connections. ll. 7–8 is close to an idea of Thales (D.L. 1.35, cf. Men. Monost. 829 = Stob. 1.8.21; l. 10 = Men. Monost. 630; section 2 ll. 2–3 = ‘Know yourself,’ attributed to the Seven Sages and widely quoted; this section also quotes verses of Philemon (= Stob. 3.21.1) and (heavily reconstructed) Menander (Monost. 22, 210, 27); ll. 19–20 are extracts of an unknown poet.


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one does not rule tomorrow, one should not worry about it.35 Even that might be argued to lie within the range of things that are said about the future in popular sayings and stories. We cannot tell whether this anthology was created for Epicureans, or whether Epicurean material was being pressed into wider service. But the ambivalence is interesting in itself. Perhaps Epicureans saw no difficulty in using a range of popular material to study ethics, which suggests that they acknowledged that some of their ethical ideas were close to popular culture, if they were not derived from it. Perhaps the anthology was made for an amateur. Or perhaps Epicurean ideas occasionally, as material from earlier philosophers did more often, percolated into the wider culture. Like stories about philosophers, reports of their sayings hint at the exchange of ideas, and perhaps more importantly at a common culture on which both high philosophy and popular morality drew, sometimes to very similar effect and sometimes making different uses of shared material. Another of our sources would like us to believe that wise men of all kinds enjoyed similar status, in the eyes of the whole population, in that culturally authoritative environment, classical Athens. In the epilogue to Book Two of his fables, Phaedrus tells us how the Athenians set up a statue to Aesop (in much the same spirit as they historically honoured Aristotle and Zeno of Citium), ‘so that everyone might know that the path of honour is wide open and glory is given not on grounds of birth but of virtue’.36 Phaedrus tells us this to affirm his own authority as a fabulist in spite of his humble beginnings. But it also serves the wider purpose of linking ethical herofigures of all kinds with each other and with the whole spectrum of their societies. Anyone, however exalted, can learn from any wise man, however humble. Anyone, however lowly, can be good and by goodness gain status and glory. This can only be true where everyone shares a wide spectrum of ethical ideas. high philosophy and popul ar moralit y in literary tex ts It has been clear throughout this study how important proverbs, fables, gnomic sayings and exemplary stories are to Greek and Latin authors of all genres, and no group makes more use of them than philosophers. In this section we turn to four specimens of philosophical discourse, to see in detail how they use sayings and stories. In particular, we shall be investigating the 35

l. 3 (= Stob. 3.16.29).

36

2.9.3–4.

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extent to which philosophers do not simply illustrate their arguments by means of popular material, but rely on it to make a case: how far they think (or persuade their audiences to think) by means of stories and sayings, in preference to reason and argument. Seneca, Plutarch, Maximus and Epictetus are all good examples of the kind of philosopher I described at the start of this chapter. They were each committed to a particular philosophical school (Seneca and Epictetus to Stoicism, Plutarch and Maximus to Platonism) but borrowed ideas and acknowledged heroes from others. All were particular admirers of Socrates and (especially Seneca and Epictetus) Socratic method. They regarded Socrates as both an archetypal Wise Man and someone who effectively combined moral and political philosophy, and in that tradition they were interested in both high politics and practical, everyday ethical dilemmas. All wrote on a wide range of topics which look as much at home in the forum and the marketplace as the symposium and the school. Much of their advice, of course, suits their anticipated audiences, which if not necessarily highly philosophically educated, are likely to have belonged to the leisured upper classes. Their subject matter, though, dealing as it does with common problems of social interaction, would be recognizable to a much wider range of people. Plutarch’s remarkable range includes essays on friendship and enmity, virtue and vice, fortune and fate, wealth, envy, tranquillity of mind, marriage, old age, religion and talkativeness. Seneca wrote on providence and standing firm in the face of trouble, of anger, mercy, life and death, grief and consolation, tranquillity of mind, happiness and, in his letters, a plethora of specific moral problems. Maximus gave speeches on virtue and pleasure, friendship and flattery, knowledge and love, on the gods, farming and fighting, and on speech itself. The discourses of Epictetus cover, among other things, reason, providence and the gods, family and friendship, anger, competitiveness and jealousy, illness, endurance and self-beautification. Seneca: To Marcia, on Consolation As we have seen, of all our sources Seneca is the most explicitly concerned with the value of proverbs and gnomai, in particular for teaching ethics, and his essay To Marcia, on Consolation makes a good case study of the way he uses them in a philosophical context.37 Three years previously (1.7), the aristocratic Marcia had lost her son Metilius. Marcia’s protracted grieving 37

Kassel 1958 traces the philosophical tradition of consolation literature. Cf. Chapa 1998 on letters of consolation in papyri, where one of the commonest pieces of advice is ‘bear up bravely’ (e.g. 1.9–10, 3.5, 6.11), and also ‘control yourself’ (8.11–12).


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has begun to worry her friends, so the essay (an imagined dialogue between Marcia and Seneca) aims to persuade her that it is time to move on. Seneca begins (1.1) by telling Marcia that she is herself an exemplar of virtue, who in the past has been conspicuous for her courage and has resisted giving way to immoderate grief. Since she is now failing to follow her own example, however, he offers some alternatives. He introduces them with a self-conscious reflection on the place of exempla in exhortation in general: I know that everyone who wants to advise anyone begins with precepts, and ends with examples. But one must deal differently with different people, so sometimes it is expedient to change this custom. Reason can lead some people, while some need to be faced with famous names, and an authority which dazzles and captivates the mind with amazing sights. I shall place two exempla before your eyes – the greatest of both your sex and age – one of a woman who gave way to grief, and the other . . . who did not let her troubles master her for long, but quickly restored her mind to its proper state. (2.1–2)

At this early point, Seneca regards reason and example as alternative ways of persuading people; example, it seems, will be more than decorative in this philosophical discourse: not just the honey that sweetens the cup, but part of the medicine itself.38 Seneca’s examples are respectively Octavia after the loss of her son Marcellus, and Livia after the loss of her son Drusus. Seneca tells Marcia to choose which she prefers; it is clear from his disapproving description of Octavia and approving account of Livia that she should choose the latter. Then exempla give way to precepts. It is mad to add evil to evil by mourning too long: there must be moderation even in grief (3.4). Next, Seneca says again that he will offer Marcia an exemplum in preference to a precept: Livia allowed her friends to comfort her, and sought advice from a philosopher to help her overcome her sadness (4.1–4). Marcia should do the same – Seneca’s direct advice this time taking the form of a series of imperatives, rather than general statements in the indicative (5.1–3). Marcia combats this suggestion with a precept of her own: it is a natural good to grieve for those we love (7.1). Absolutely, says Seneca, but only in moderation. Look at the way animals or birds grieve: passionately, but for a short time only (7.2). Nature does not ordain that we are completely prostrated by sorrow. It is striking how often, in this and other essays, Seneca intersperses human exempla from the past with exempla or comparisons from the natural world or from everyday human experience. Common sense and common observation, he seems to be saying, will tell 38

At ep. 6.5, Seneca calls precepts the long way, exempla the short way to virtue.

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you the same things as historical examples and arguments. As a rhetorical technique this is effective – nothing persuades the waverer like being told that ‘everyone knows’ something – but it might seem somewhat to downgrade the role of philosophical argument in consolation. If so, in this practical, pastoral kind of essay, at least, Seneca does not seem to mind. If we are not supposed to grieve much, says Marcia, why do we always do it? Because we are never expecting death, says Seneca, despite the fact that we encounter it all the time. He quotes a line of Publilius Syrus, which he calls ‘an outstanding verse and too good for the stage’ (9.5): ‘What can happen to one man can happen to any man!’ The quotation does not repeat a point Seneca has already made; it makes the point itself, ‘proves’ Marcia’s presumed attitude wrong and sets the seal on the argument. Its authority seems to come partly from Seneca’s endorsement of it, but mainly from itself, as a much-quoted gnome. From this point, Seneca’s theme becomes more general and more overtly philosophical. He also begins to use fewer hortatory verb-forms, and increasingly concentrates on general statements about the nature of the world. At the same time his use of examples begins to change. They stop coming first and start to illustrate precepts already given. Gnomai, on the other hand, continue for a time to be used as the quotation from Publilius was used, to move a thought to a conclusion and ‘prove’ a point. It is absurd, says Seneca, to grieve over just one part of life when everything about it is so woeful (11.1). Fortune is fickle and no happiness lasts for long. We are all frail and all die. This is the meaning of the Pythian oracle, Know thyself. ‘What is man? A weak and fragile body, naked, unarmed by nature, dependent on external aid, exposed to all the insults of fortune.’ (11.3). The interjection of the maxim here is unexpected and striking. It carries an authority of its own which, being interpreted to fit Seneca’s argument, adds to the force of his point. There follows a passage of argument in which Seneca tries to convince Marcia that it is inappropriate to grieve for those who have gone. She should be glad for what was good in her son’s life and not fret hopelessly over what might have been. He backs up this exhortation with a series of exempla of men (including Sulla, Caesar and Xenophon) who did not let grief for the dead affect their careers (12.6–15.3.) Essay-Marcia objects that she is a woman, not a man, so Seneca assures her that women are just as capable of virtue as men (16.1) and proves it with another series of exempla of women, including Lucretia, Cloelia and the two Cornelias. A mixture of statement and argument dominates the rest of the essay. Occasionally an exemplum or a gnome is introduced to illustrate a point


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already made, but they are thin on the ground.39 The largest cluster is of examples of people who would have been better off if they had died younger (20.4–6), in which Seneca includes Pompey, Cicero and the Younger Cato. There are, however, a few more passages in which examples from the natural world or everyday life introduce and bear the burden of an argument.40 For instance, to make the point that we know life involves a mixture of good and bad, and have no-one to blame but ourselves if we are surprised when bad things happen, Seneca takes the example of a man planning a visit to Syracuse (17.2–6). Before he goes, his friends inform him of all the pros and cons of the voyage and the place. If after that he decides to travel there, he cannot blame anyone for the difficulties he encounters. Nature is the same, says Seneca (17.6). She tells us what to expect and that is what we get. For most of the remainder of the essay, however, it seems we are to assume that Marcia’s interest is engaged, her conversion is under way, and there is no more need of dazzling her mind with examples. Seneca argues that it is wrong to mourn because we assume that we will never see the dead again, which we cannot know (19.1), or because we were expecting the dead to protect us, which we cannot know they would have done (19.2). We should bear in mind that a timely death is a blessing; it brings release from suffering (21.1) and the uncertain future (23.1). Besides, whatever is perfect, as Marcia felt her son was, can only die (23.3), and this way he will never decline. Best of all, he now knows what the living can only guess at – the mysteries of the universe (26.1). Throughout these chapters, Seneca’s only non-argumentative technique is to imagine Marcia’s father speaking from beyond the grave to impress the last point upon her. Seneca’s use of gnomai and exempla is self-conscious and strategic. They are capable of capturing a reader’s – perhaps especially a distressed reader’s – attention and interest where precepts and arguments are not. They have a moral force which disposes people to find them authoritative and persuasive, so they can be used either to make a point or to clinch an argument. Marcia’s intellectual development progresses from being captivated by stories, to being receptive to imperatives, to understanding the implications for her own ethical behaviour, of Seneca’s general account of the nature of the universe. Once she, and anyone else whom Seneca imagines reading the essay, has had their attention caught by the popular material, it can be 39 40

20.5 offers an illustrative exemplum of Cicero and 21.5 an illustrative gnome from the Aeneid. Inwood 2005: 285–99 discusses the role of Nature in leading us to goodness: Nature has ‘embedded in our natures’ a ‘proneness to exaggerate the praiseworthy’ (296) which enables us to learn about what is good from the world around us, even though unadulterated good never appears there.

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abandoned in favour of straight philosophy. Seneca does not, however, go back over ground that he has already covered with gnomai and exempla, to make the same points by argument. Conviction by sayings and stories, it seems, is acceptable in itself, if ideally only as a first step on one’s intellectual journey. It seems likely that this strategy is a regular feature of Seneca’s letters and moral essays. It has long been noted that his Letters to Lucilius are organized to provide ‘a dynamic teaching and learning experience’.41 This can be seen, to take just one example, in the way that the first few letters end with a kind of ‘thought for the day’, a gnomic tag from a philosopher or other author, which is abandoned as the pedagogical relationship develops and Lucilius becomes more philosophically sophisticated. In a recent essay, Miriam Griffin has shown the same process at work in On Benefits. The recipients of On Benefits seem to be regarded as starting from a higher philosophical level than grief-stricken Marcia, because Seneca begins not with stories but with precepts couched in various hortatory verb-forms. Exhortation, Griffin argues, represents a pedagogical strategy for the relatively unsophisticated, who, as they progress in the course of reading the work, come to be able to deal with statements and arguments about the nature of the world, and finally to apply what they have learned to specific hard cases.42 Plutarch: On Tranquillity of Mind Plutarch incorporates more popular sayings and stories, in every kind of essay, than any other author of the early Empire.43 It is difficult, though, to identify any quite so deliberate pedagogical strategy in his essays as in Seneca’s; sayings and stories are scattered throughout his philosophical works, and Plutarch uses them in a variety of ways which seem to have more to do with the immediate context than their position in the essay as a whole. On Tranquillity of Mind is a good example. Plutarch claims that it is a collection of notes which he had made for his own use and sent to his friend Paccius at Paccius’ request, and it is larded with literary allusions and quotations. Plutarch’s first gnomic quotation is one of which he is particularly fond, and he uses it in one of his trademark ways: to contradict it. No other author 41 43

42 Griffin 2006. Discussed by Griffin 2006. On Plutarch’s use of proverbs, fables, gnomai and exempla in the Moralia see especially Fernández Delgado 1991.


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so often cites gnomai to modify or even disagree with them.44 The effect is of a shock tactic: the reader, trustfully disposed to agree with the quotation just because it is gnomic, is startled out of his complacency and made to think afresh about the subject. The author in this case is Democritus, who said that the man who wishes to be tranquil in mind should not engage in public or private business (465c). It is as if he had quoted Euripides, says Plutarch: ‘Stay, wretch, and do not tremble in your bed.’45 Plutarch thinks that this gnome is only true in certain circumstances (he does not think it is always untrue, and cites it elsewhere with approval); sometimes, it is the worst advice possible, making people soft and lazy and no use to their country. Anyway, inactivity is no guarantee of peace of mind (465d); if it were, women would be more tranquil than men, whereas everyone knows that the women’s quarters of any house are a hotbed of jealousy, strife, ambition and superstition. Plutarch follows up this argument with an exemplum of Laertes, which ‘proves’ that those who seek honour, should act. The exemplum more than just illustrates: it clinches the argument. The next gnomic quotation is again involved in a contradiction, but this time the quotation, according to Plutarch, is right. Some people think that a certain type of life – farming, unmarried or kingly, say – is the recipe for peace of mind. Not so, says Plutarch, as Menander can show you: ‘I used to think, Phanias, that the rich who do not need to borrow money, would not moan at night nor toss and turn, but would sleep sweetly and quietly.’46 But they do not, Plutarch implies. Menander makes Plutarch’s point for him, and is his authority for it. Peace of mind, Plutarch continues (466d), is brought about by reason when it is firmly established in us. To illustrate this proposition he gives a series of exempla: of Alexander, Agamemnon and Phaethon (not at peace), Creates, Diogenes and Socrates (at peace). We should therefore cultivate tranquillity (467c), like the man in the wellerism who threw a stone at his dog, and, missing but hitting his stepmother, said cheerfully, ‘Not so bad!’47 A little later, another series of exempla functions as a way towards tranquillity (467e–68a). If we think of all the famous men who have suffered from whatever evil afflicts us, it will help us to rise above our angst. Like Seneca, Plutarch sometimes introduces a comparison from the natural world which acts very like an exemplum. Illustrating his proposition that it is tranquillity, not good fortune, that makes people content with life, he says (467c) ‘just as thyme, the driest and bitterest of plants provides 44 46

45 Or. 258; Plutarch also cites this at Mor. 788f, 901a and 1126a. See p. 19. 47 The wellerism functions here like an exemplum. Fr. 281 Kock, 466b.

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honey for the bees, so wise men often take something apt and useful from the most difficult situations’. There follows an argumentative section in which Plutarch considers how to deal with enemies who annoy us. The important thing, he concludes, is to maintain our own tranquillity and work on our own vices, and he offers a gnome to prove it: ‘Why, most malignant man, do you snap at others’ faults and overlook your own?’ (469b). On the other hand, we must not become obsessive about our own faults, or we shall be like a cupping-glass which draws the evil humours out of a body (this time the everyday medical analogy takes the place of an exemplum or comparison from nature). Another cluster of exempla backs up the point. There are several ways of developing tranquillity. One is to consider one’s own good fortunes; failing that, one can think of all the people who are worse off than oneself or who envy one (470b–71a). Plutarch gives the example of Socrates (470f ), who, when he heard one of his friends complaining about how expensive Athens was for luxuries like Chian wine, purple dye and honey, took him to the grain market, and the olive and cloth markets, showing him how many everyday items were very cheap. This exemplum makes a slightly different point from the preceding one, so is more than illustrative: it moves the argument on a little. It is foolish, says Plutarch, to make oneself discontented by envying others. Everyone has their own troubles, even kings and heroes, as a series of gnomai testify (471b–c). They are followed by more exempla: Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, made himself unhappy because he was not also a poet and philosopher; Alexander was infuriated when a competitor in a footrace slowed up to let him win, implying that he could not do so fairly (471e). The important thing is to obey the Pythian saying: Know yourself, and then use that self in the way that suits it best. (This neatly illustrates how flexible that most authoritative and most popular of gnomai was; Plutarch’s interpretation of it here is quite different from Seneca’s in To Marcia. Like Seneca, though, Plutarch uses the authority of the phrase both to sum up the argument so far and to turn it in a slightly different direction.) A number of gnomai and exempla follow to illustrate the point (472d–f ). In the course of these illustrations, Plutarch notes that two well-known gnomai cannot be cited here without modification. Hesiod said that, ‘Potter is angry with potter and carpenter with carpenter,’48 but, Plutarch says, people are not only angry with their peers but also with people who are different from them: the rich envy the educated, the famous the rich, and so on. And 48

Op. 25, 473a.


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to fortify his claim that we carry the sources of tranquillity or disturbance within us, he quotes Homer’s description of the jars of good and evil that stand on Zeus’s threshold, only to say that the jars actually reside in the human soul.49 Plutarch’s regular method when making an argument is to state his point and back it up with a quotation or an example. It may look as if sayings and stories are therefore no more than decoration, but that is not the case. More often than not, the sayings and stories constitute the whole ‘proof’ for Plutarch’s claim. In such passages, Plutarch relies on the authority of popular wisdom to persuade the reader that the point he makes is right. That being so, there is a certain paradox in the periodic challenges he raises to his own gnomic quotations. One might have expected him to be more careful to preserve the authority of such texts. Perhaps he hopes that by giving the impression that he knows both how to deploy wisdom material and how to judge it, Plutarch hopes to raise his own authority above even that of the texts he cites. The next point in On Tranquillity is that all human life contains a mixture of good and bad, sad and happy experiences, and the art of life lies in knowing how to use and blend them appropriately. As Euripides puts it, ‘Good and bad cannot be kept apart, but mix to some degree, to good (kalos) effect.’50 No one spirit (as Menander claims) presides over each person, but two contradictory fates (as Empedocles says). A mixture of philosophical and historical exempla of men who did or did not graciously accept their fates follows (474e–75a). Since all our experiences are mixed, says Plutarch, we will do well to remember Menander’s line, ‘You have suffered nothing bad (deinon) if you do not regard it as such.’51 As Euripides says, ‘Woe – but why woe? We suffer what mortals suffer.’52 The last two quotations are offered without much commentary, and seem to be posited as attitudes for the reader to aspire to, rather than as the introduction or clincher to an argument. So too is another line of Euripides which occurs a little later: ‘The god himself will release me, whenever I desire.’53 Shortly after, another line of Menander is used in a slightly different way again, as food for thought. It is a line, Plutarch says, which may cause a shiver of apprehension: ‘There is not a man living who can say, “I shall not suffer this.”’54 True, says Plutarch, but on the one hand we can prepare ourselves for the bad things in life, and on the other, there is much which is in our power to do, which may help us to achieve 49 52

Il. 24.527, 473b–c. Fr. 300 Nauck, 475c.

50

Fr. 21 Nauck, 474a. Bacch. 498, 476b.

53

51 Fr. 179 Kock, 475b. 54 Fr. 355.4, 467d.

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tranquillity. We must remember other lines of the poets, which remind us that we have a conscience and that often no-one is to blame for our misfortunes but ourselves.55 In this passage, Plutarch seems to be using quotations like stepping stones from one thought to another: it is impossible to be sure whether the course of the argument suggests the quotations or the other way round. Interwoven with them, a series of exempla returns us to the point that tranquillity can only be achieved within, and should not be at the mercy of fortune or circumstances (474d–75a). From blaming oneself, Plutarch moves into his peroration: nothing gives life so much tranquillity as a soul free from evil, whose actions leave behind them a sweet scent and endless delight. Plutarch says that he loves the story of Diogenes (477c) who, seeing his Spartan host preparing with great ceremony for a certain festival, said, ‘Does not the good man think every day a festival?’ This takes him from the goodness of men to the goodness of the universe and the divine mind which animates it, on which exalted note the essay ends. Plutarch not only uses more sayings and stories than any other author of this period; he uses them in more ways. They illustrate propositions and are offered as ‘proofs’. They are stated like precepts, for people simply to accept, or to think about. Frequently, Plutarch uses one genre to make a point and another to back it up. Sometimes sayings and stories seem to turn Plutarch’s thought in a new direction, whether accidentally or by design, so they act in place of an argument, as a stepping stone from one idea to another. Most unusually, Plutarch not infrequently cites sayings and stories in order to modify what he thinks the reader will take as their meaning, to contradict them or to contrast them with one another. In this essay popular ethical material tends to occur in clusters. There is no obvious overall development in their use, however; they are scattered throughout the work, as they are through many other essays in the Moralia (and, though much more thinly, in the Lives too). Plutarch relishes sayings and stories and finds them apposite and useful almost everywhere in his philosophical writings. Maximus of Tyre: Oration 32 Maximus of Tyre’s Oration 32, on whether the true end of life is virtue or pleasure, is a much shorter and simpler work than the previous two, partly because it is only one in a series of five orations (which cumulatively 55

Eurip. Or. 396, 476e; ?Callim. fr. 372 Schneider, 477a.


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aim to prove that virtue is preferable to pleasure). Michael Trapp notes that in the early stages of the sequence Maximus uses a large number of heroic and historical exempla and images from everyday life, while the later stages are led by argument.56 Maximus’ rhetorical and pedagogical strategy therefore has something in common with Seneca’s, though Maximus tends to use exempla and images less to make points than to set up problems for discussion. Despite its being the penultimate in the sequence, there are still signs of this strategy in Oration 32, which consists of a defence of pleasure as if in the mouth of Epicurus. It opens with an Aesopic fable about a lion, a deer which hid in a thicket, and a shepherd who refused to tell the lion which way the deer had gone while gesturing towards the thicket with one hand.57 Epicurus, says Maximus (2), could use this fable to jeer at the man who condemns pleasure with his voice while inclining towards it in his sympathies (the parallel is not very close, but that does not seem to worry Maximus, or perhaps he is deliberately giving the case he wants listeners to reject a weak start). Pleasure cannot be worthless, because everyone desires and experiences it naturally (2–3). Exaggerated exempla of people in whom pleasure has turned bad, like decadent Ionians or greedy Sicilians, miss the point. In fact, the whole natural world values pleasure (4). At each stage of the argument so far, the fable, exemplum or natural comparison has been used to make a point, but is followed by a passage of argument which makes the same point again. So, for instance, having said that it is foolish to criticize pleasure because of the excesses of a few people (3), Maximus says that just as nobody criticizes reason because people sometimes misuse it, so one should not criticize pleasure because some people overdo it. This proceeding is typical of Maximus; though he uses a significant number of sayings and stories, he never allows them to carry an argument, but always states the argument in philosophical terms as well. Maximus’ final point in Epicurus’ favour is that one cannot rely on people to be virtuous unless they find it enjoyable (5–10). This time the passage of argument comes first: no-one will choose good over evil unless the good brings pleasure, because being good is hard work, and no-one works hard unless he thinks it will profit him. Pleasure is the profit we make on virtue. In alleged support of this, Maximus adduces a large number of exempla. Achilles and Hector, he says, enjoyed the heroic virtues of friendship and fighting (6). Heracles enjoyed his labours (7). Socrates enjoyed falling in 56

Trapp 1997: 236–7.

57

Close to B50.

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love with beautiful young men (8). Even Diogenes enjoyed living in his barrel (9). As for the Spartans of the fifth century, it was a pleasure for them to die for their country, while the Athenians took pleasure in both wars and festivals. Epictetus: Against Vicious and Aggressive People Maximus’ use of popular wisdom is the simplest we have seen so far: straightforwardly illustrative and decorative, sweetening the start of this oration and others and providing colourful material for perorations. Epictetus’ discourse 4.5, Against Vicious and Aggressive People, takes us back closer to some of the strategies of Plutarch and Seneca. Epictetus begins with the general statement: ‘The good (kalos kai agathos) man neither fights with anyone nor, as far as possible, does he let others fight.’ An exemplum is promptly adduced: Socrates, who always tried to avoid conflict himself and prevent it among others. Since Socrates is an authority figure for Epictetus, this amounts to a ‘proof’, but an argued proof is also forthcoming from Socrates himself: nobody should try to rule anyone but himself because no-one is in charge of anyone else’s ruling principle. Socrates therefore acts neatly as source, illustration and proof of the point. The aim of education, Epictetus then says (7), is to learn what belongs to one and can rightly be ruled, and what does not. When one is in this state, one cannot act wrongly, any more than a horse or a dog can act against its nature. The illustration from nature acts as a bridge to the next point, which is that acting in accordance with one’s nature will make one happy: who has seen a horse unhappy because it cannot sing like a bird, or a dog because it cannot fly? (12–14). The man who acts against his own nature should be a cause of grief for others, a point which Epictetus makes with the help of a series of modified excerpts from a gnomic passage of Euripides (15). This is only common sense, he continues: we are naturally attracted to the mild and gentle and repelled by the violent and quarrelsome (15–19). The trouble with being mild and gentle, objects Epictetus’ imagined interlocutor, is that one is apt to be despised by ignorant and unjust men (22). No matter, says Epictetus; what matters is your internal moral condition, and there is no reason not to be open about it (23–4). In the same way (employing an everyday comparison), those who live in a strong city need not worry about besiegers. Turning to a siege of the heroic age, Epictetus pursues the comparison: what destroyed Eteocles and Polyneices was their internal condition of anger and hostility, which led to war and their


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shared destruction. Returning to Socrates, Epictetus explains that Socrates understood the paramount importance of one’s internal condition when he tolerated the violent behaviour of his wife (33–4). We, similarly, should hold on to our mildness and gentleness, because only this makes for harmony in households, states and the wider world (35). After this uplifting thought, Epictetus finishes on an unexpectedly pessimistic note. We often fail to carry our goodness out of the schoolroom into the wider world: we are, in the words of the proverb, ‘Lions at home but foxes at Ephesus’. The proverb is left to clinch the dialogue on its own authority. We do not want to be foxes, so we find ourselves chastised and exhorted to do better. In Epictetus’ discourses, sayings and stories usually act as illustrations of general propositions. Sometimes they are the point’s only support; sometimes there is a reasoned argument as well. Occasionally a wisdom text moves us on from one point to another. But on the whole, it is notable, given the gnomic, informal feel of so much of his discourses, how little Epictetus relies on popular wisdom to make his arguments. conclusion High philosophy of the imperial period has both interests and techniques of communication in common with popular morality. The gnomic saying, the exemplary story, the genealogy, all of them endemic in popular culture, are equally important as forms of philosophical discourse. Every philosopher has his favourite ways of using popular material, which range from simple decoration, through using it to capture a reader’s attention and carry them through the first few steps of an argument, to using it in place of an argument, to make or clinch a point. The relationship between popular morality and high philosophy, seen in these terms, is close and complex, and more than a little mysterious. Comparisons have tended in the past to be made to show the influence of one philosophical school or another on a particular author or body of material, but it should be clear by now how unsatisfactory that procedure is.58 We should not be surprised to find some overlap of ideas in ethics which belong to the same cultural world; it would be odder if we did not. But coincidence of subject matter does not necessarily imply dependence. Nor does material common to two spheres of thinking necessarily mean the same in both. The fact, for instance, that the late Roman school text 58

E.g. Nøjgaard 1964 vol. 1: 519–25 (on fables), Adrados 1999a vol. 1: 604–5 (Cynic influence on fables), 635ff. (Stoic influence). See Appendix 3.

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Papyrus Bouriant 1 includes stories about Diogenes the Cynic, does not mean that those stories are read the same way in an elementary school as they would be by a devotee of Cynicism. Above all, if there is dependence, we cannot take for granted that popular morality depends on high philosophy, and not the other way round. If anything, there is more evidence that high philosophy drew its questions, if not its answers, from popular morality. The godfather of Greek moral philosophy, Socrates, is regularly shown by Plato as beginning from current Athenian views of a topic like goodness or justice, and proceeding to show its difficulties and its potential. Aristotle says explicitly that the philosopher of ethics begins with what ordinary people say, assumes that it is (roughly) right and tries to tease out its implications and solve any puzzles which arise.59 However far from popular thinking the theories of the Hellenistic schools travel, they all begin from ordinary notions of what is good, bad or morally problematic. We may never know why biography and exemplum became quite so important in late Hellenistic philosophy, but it is at least possible that popular culture influenced the change. Conversely, we cannot be sure whether the presence of figures like Socrates and Diogenes in popular wisdom is influenced by high philosophy, or whether they are parallel expressions of a common culture which shares materials and means of expression. The latter is a real possibility, since sayings and stories of the famous are endemic in popular culture, and when philosophers are their subject, their content is almost never distinctive of the philosopher in question, and occasionally sounds positively unlike him. Nor can we be sure whether popular morality and high philosophy’s shared enthusiasm for culture heroes of late archaic and classical Greece is a coincidence, an example of influence in one direction or the other, or (economically and perhaps most plausibly) part of a wider cultural phenomenon which defined that period as a golden age and its characters as authority figures of many different kinds. We should therefore resist the assumption which classicists (out of an understandable caution born from the skewed nature of our evidence) tend to make, that ethical, like other cultural ideas, generally filtered down from higher levels of society to lower. As I noted in the Introduction, all societies, at all levels, need ethics to help to hold them together, and it is reasonable to assume that like those other essentials – language and social order – popular ethics developed spontaneously and coherently. The majority did not need professional philosophers to create an ethical code that made 59

NE 1145b2–7.


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sense, any more than they needed professional grammarians to create a language that made sense. And professional philosophers no more created new ethical systems in order to study ethics, than grammarians invented new languages in order to study philology. High philosophy begins, at least, by depending on popular ideas, and when ideas appear in popular ethical texts which could come from either tradition, it is rarely safe to assume that they originated in high philosophy. Most importantly of all, the worlds of popular ethics and high philosophy were not segregated, any more than the worlds of proverbs or fables and high literature were. The best we can do to characterize the relationship is probably to say that in high philosophy and popular ethics we find two streams of culture, ultimately rising from many of the same sources, which sometimes mingle, each influencing the other, and sometimes run separately, along roughly parallel terrain. Even when they do not mingle, they are closer in some ways than we might expect, a vivid reminder that our scholarly distinction between popular and high culture is probably often too sharp, and that the landscape of ethics in the Roman Empire is ultimately one landscape.

chap t e r 12

Morality inter alia

Walk on in good heart.1

From philosophy, we turn finally to evidence for popular morality in two very different genres, documents on papyrus and on stone. This chapter has a certain miscellaneous quality of its own, but I hope to a purpose. It aims to sketch, through examples and case studies, how the material we have been examining compares with the moral language of a number of other widely shared discourses from the early Empire. One of the attractions of documents is that some, at least, of them come from a lower social level than the great majority of our literary survivals. Most (virtually all papyri) are provincial, and originate outside large urban centres. Many deal with the mundane activities of relatively ordinary people: craftsmen, farmers, traders, soldiers, local magistrates. Whole social groups, notably women, freedmen and members of ethnic minorities, who in literature are overlooked or marginalized, come into their own in papyri and inscriptions, and are revealed as active, often influential members of their communities. Unfortunately for our purposes, the social distribution of documents which are long and complex enough to deploy ethical language and ideas, does not match that of documents in general. Funerary inscriptions, for instance, which list the virtues of the deceased are nearly always among the longer and more elaborate productions, often composed in verse or illustrated with a relief, which tells us that the family concerned was relatively wealthy. Honorifics are voted to leading members of their communities – large-scale benefactors, magistrates, members of the senatorial and equestrian classes. Families which can afford long-drawn-out legal cases involving repeated petitions to and audiences with provincial governors, are not poor or lacking in influence. We cannot assume, therefore, that when we read documents which make significant use of ethical language, we are reaching 1

Dice oracle from Cremna in Pisidia: Horsley and Mitchell 2000: 30.201 (see below, pp. 319–21).

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any further down the social scale than we are when reading literature. The chances are that we are dealing with roughly the same stratum of society. Even where documents do use ethical language, its range is usually much smaller and its density much lower than that in proverbs, fables, gnomai or exempla. To make best use of what material there is would need a synoptic study of first- and second-century inscriptions or papyri as a whole, which (especially in the case of inscriptions) would be a large undertaking, beyond the scope of this study.2 As an example of what such a project might yield, however, we shall sample one particularly well-endowed city of Asia Minor, Ephesus, to see the range and distribution of ethical language that its inscriptions employ. Some genres are richer in moral language than others. We shall visit two corpora of inscriptions which use more ethical vocabulary than most, both of which have been analysed thematically by other scholars: the Greek and Latin epitaphs collected by Richmond Lattimore and the honorific inscriptions from early imperial Italy studied by Elizabeth Forbis. We shall also look briefly at the cult of virtues in the early Empire, and reflect on the connections between which virtues are worshipped and which are commonest in sayings and stories. Finally, we shall look more closely at a handful of texts on papyrus or on stone, to see, as we saw in the philosophical essays of the last chapter, how individual documents select and deploy ethical language to make their point. the l anguage of moralit y at ephesus The inscriptions from Ephesus published in the series Inschriften griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien make a promising corpus of evidence from our point of view. There are plenty of them – more than survive from almost any other city – most in Greek but some in Latin, and they are generically and socially diverse. Between them, they employ a wide range of ethical language.3 The largest group of terms has to do with fate (moira), fortune and being fortunate (tychê, fortuna, eudaimonia, eutychês, felicitas, felix): these terms 2

3

Inscribed virtues have been discussed as part of the social and political struggle in cities of the Empire: so e.g. Jones 1978: 105–14, Knibbe 1980, Macro 1980: 682–4, Robert 1965: 222, Sheppard 1984–6, Rogers 1991, de Blois 1994, Kleijwegt 1994, Woolf 1994, Pleket 1998, Ma 2000, Pobjoy 2000. Cooley 1998 analyses in detail the moral language of the senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre. These figures cover the whole chronological range of inscriptions from Ephesus, as well as all kinds; there are some changes over time (philokaisar obviously dates only from the Empire), but most terms appear regularly over a long period of time.

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occur over 250 times in inscriptions.4 The majority of references, however, is to agathê tychê, good fortune, in political or honorific inscriptions. Where sayings and stories focus on the harshness and unpredictability of fortune, inscriptions either claim that their human subjects have enjoyed good fortune, or invoke good fortune on the subject. An official text on public display is evidently not the place to express fears or doubts, but to demonstrate confidence equally in the gods and human beings. The gods or what pertains to them (often, as in popular morality, justice), feature frequently as ‘holy’ (hosios, semnos, sanctus); holy or pious people may also be called eusebês or philotheos; in this, inscriptions are well in line with popular morality. Over 200 inscriptions employ the vocabulary of honour (time, philotimia, honos), fame and reputation (doxa, philodoxia, euonymos, lampros, clarus). Praising people for their love of their own honour as well as their devotion to city or state, as we shall see, marks a difference between Ephesian and Italian honorific material. At Ephesus, words like ‘honour-loving’ appear only in Greek inscriptions, not in Latin. Differences of culture are here displayed linguistically in texts which may originally have stood in close proximity, marking an east–west faultline in ‘Roman imperial culture’. If anything, this fault is more marked in inscriptions than in sayings and stories, suggesting that it is particularly a feature of high culture and society. One Greek inscription, however, in honour of the Roman (and likely Latinspeaker) C. Vibius Salutaris praises his ‘love of honour and virtue’.5 As many inscriptions again praise greatness (megas, megalophrosynê) and nobility (eugeneia, nobilitas), and the closely related boldness and enthusiasm (thrasos, epithymos, prothymos, authadia, audax, avidus) of honorands. These are all virtues widely associated with elites, including in sayings and stories, though as we shall see, in Italian honorifics the greatness and glory of the great and glorious is generally suppressed in favour of marking their devotion to the state. No such modesty afflicts these inscriptions, and one result is that their range of language is closer to that of popular morality than that of their Italian counterparts. This supports the impression we have received from Valerius and from Plutarch’s Sayings that intense devotion to the state was felt to be culturally distinctive to Romans, especially 4

5

A more detailed analysis would find much robust and competitive social (self-)positioning expressed in inscriptions: so, for instance, the aspirational felix (‘happy, fortunate’) is especially favoured by freedmen. 27.125–6, 104 ce. This lack of emphasis on Romans’ love of their own honour in Italian inscriptions is striking given their obsession with their honor, in other contexts, as Barton 2001 analyses in depth. Outside Italy, honour appears regularly as a virtue of civic benefactors in Western inscriptions (Lee 2006).

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the Roman elite; in the Graeco-Roman world only the Spartans matched them. It is no surprise to find almost 200 references to generosity and helpfulness (boetheia, philanthropia, eunoia, aphthonia, euergetês, adiutor, adiutrix, beneficarius, beneficarium, liberalitas) in Ephesian honorifics. If they were gluttons for glory, the Ephesian elite were also generous. Forbis draws attention to the importance of the idea of fulfilling an officium, a duty or office, in Italy, and the word appears at Ephesus too, in several Latin inscriptions. There is no real equivalent in Greek texts, though philoponia and philoponos, ‘loving work’, do each appear once.6 Subjects of Ephesian inscriptions are praised for their wisdom, prudence and especially their foresight (sophia, sôphrosynê, pronoia, euboulos, providentia), as another eighty-odd inscriptions bear witness. Some of these inscriptions are funerary, some honorific, but in either case to praise people for their wisdom seems to be more common in Greek than Latin inscriptions.7 We saw that wisdom is more often praised in Greek than Latin popular morality too, and is perhaps more highly valued in Greek than Roman culture in general. Close to wisdom in the frequency of its appearances comes justice (dikê, iustitia and their cognates), in which inscriptions are well in line with popular morality. There is then a steep drop in the incidence of terms. Several find themselves used between fifteen and twenty times in the corpus, among them pistis or fides (trust, good faith8 ), eleutheria or libertas (freedom), patriotism and love of the emperor. All of these are much rarer in Greek than Latin inscriptions. There is a further scattering of references to aleˆtheia (truth), andreia or virtus (courage), elpis or spes (hope), benignitas and indulgentia (kindness), modestia (modesty) and clementia (mercy). All these ideas (the last five of them Latin terms) are used in much the same way in Latin inscriptions and in aristocratic Roman literature too; almost all of them are also paralleled in popular sayings and stories: indeed, with the exception of freedom and love of the emperor, they are more common there than most of the ideas in previous paragraphs. In some respects, then, Ephesian inscriptions testify to what popular and elite culture have in common. In others they display their differences, while in a few cases they show how eastern, Greek-speaking 6 7

8

1.6, 1.11,a15. Apart from dedications to the emperor, who is frequently praised for his providentia, Forbis 1996: 93. Wisdom in Greek is such an elastic concept that it can be used, for instance, of an athlete’s love of hard work (1.12–11,a15). But some of these are on Christian tombstones and refer to religious faith, e.g. 7(2).395.

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and Latin-speaking western (or at least Roman) culture differ from one another. The language of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in these inscriptions is very similar to that of popular sayings and stories. Agathos, kakos and bonus are staples, as is kalos and occasionally more colourful words for ‘bad’ such as dyscherês. Family members, especially spouses, are commonly called philos or carus (dear) or hêdys or glykys (sweet). Philos, not surprisingly, has a wide range of applications outside the family too: one can, for instance, love one’s native land, fighting, hard work, the emperor or Romans in general. Many good things are called ‘worthy’ or ‘worth’ something (axios), and others are designated ‘useful’ (chrêsimos, utilis). If inscriptions do not display quite the range of terms in sayings and stories, those they do use are deployed in very similar ways: family and country are ‘sweet’ and ‘dear’, financial generosity and patronage are ‘worthy’ and ‘useful’. Like the inscriptions analysed by Lattimore and Forbis, a very large proportion of those Ephesian inscriptions which use ethical language at all, is either funerary or honorific. We should therefore expect their language to mirror mainly the values of family affection on the one hand, and on the other, those of the upper class in its euergetistic relationship with its fellow citizens, and it does. The disappointing consequence is that Ephesian inscriptions – though large in number, varied in kind and well-endowed with ethical vocabulary – map in practice a very limited (and relentlessly positive) ethical landscape, from a very limited range of perspectives, in comparison with sayings and stories.9 virtues in public life and deat h Richmond Lattimore’s synoptic study of themes in Greek and Latin epitaphs draws material from almost the whole of the classical world and is especially concerned with attitudes towards death. It also includes sections on the virtues of the dead and on the role of Tychê and Moira.10 In epitaphs, as in sayings and stories, Tychê is violent, capricious and ineluctable. Lattimore quotes a number of examples from the first and second centuries: ‘But it is impossible to avoid the inescapable gifts of Tychê.’ ‘Hateful Tychê who does you every injustice.’ ‘Alas, why, grievous Tychê, did you rob 9 10

There are some interesting differences between the language of Greek and Latin honorifics, in particular, which would repay more detailed analysis, but that is beyond the scope of this study. Lattimore 1942: 149–51. Other gods appearing in epitaphs are most commonly gods of the underworld, though one also finds phrases such as ‘devoted to the Muses and Apollo’, especially on the tombs of young men who have yet to go to war or hold public office (e.g. Bernand 1969: 74.3, 82.2).

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wretched me, the glorious ornament of my native land, of life?’11 Moira acts in much the same way: ‘A young man, I did not stir up strife against the young, nor against men, but Fate presented me to the king of the underworld.’12 All these views are familiar from popular sayings and stories, but are rather different from the respectful attitude to Tychê which one might expect to find, for instance, in a religious cult or a political or honorific inscription.13 Among the most common qualities of women in epitaphs, as Lattimore notes, is beauty (in sayings and stories, beauty is more often attributed to qualities and actions than women or men). Dearness, sweetness, fertility and good housekeeping are especially regularly attributed to wives.14 The first two are used in sayings and stories of both female and male relatives, while the second two rarely appear; in this respect, it seems, epitaphs are more strongly gendered than popular morality. In one respect, however, epitaphs for relatives are not strongly gendered. Lattimore cites many examples of epitaphs which celebrate the love between husband and wife, and the fact that they never quarrelled.15 Among the very wide range of other virtues by which people are commemorated, some of the commonest are piety, wisdom, justice, honesty, ‘virtue’ in general, faithfulness, nobility, modesty and (of women) chastity.16 With these we are back in familiar territory; they are all among the qualities most often commended in popular wisdom. No-one has yet studied the range and relative frequency of the virtues enumerated in first- and second-century epitaphs as a whole. The indications which emerge from Lattimore’s study, however, suggest that virtues celebrated on epitaphs are, on the whole, also those found in popular sayings and stories. Not all corpora of inscriptions compare quite so well. Elizabeth Forbis’ study of the vocabulary of virtue and praise in Italian honorary inscriptions and patronage lists of the early Empire, shows a very different 11 12 13

14

15

Kaibel 1879: 215a (Roman Paros), Kaibel 1878: 664.5 (Marseilles, second century), Kaibel 1878: 208.7–8 (Thasos, second century). SEG 6.414.1–2 (Lycaonia, second–third century). Ferguson 1970: 77–87, discusses a similar, largely negative range of descriptions of Tychê in the early Empire, drawing on a wide range of funerary inscriptions and also what he calls ‘popular literature’, principally novels. Lattimore 1942: 276–7; sweetness e.g. Kaibel 1878: 79.7–8 (Rome), fertility, good housekeeping e.g. Kaibel 1878: 243b (Pergamum, second century). Roman women are much more likely to be praised for their wool-working than Greek women. Curchin 1982, 1983, studying epitaphs from Spain and Britain respectively, notes that both men and women are commonly called ‘dearest’, ‘most holy’, ‘most pious’, ‘rare’ or ‘incomparable’. D’Ambra 1993a discusses the visual representation of virtues on tombstones which may take the place of verbal descriptions. 16 290–9. Lattimore 1942: 277–9.

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pattern.17 Forbis argues that one aim of honorific inscriptions is to portray the honorand as an exemplum of virtue, which makes this a very suitable corpus for comparison with sayings and stories, but the characters which are described bear only a partial resemblance to their cousins in exemplary stories.18 Forbis divides her study into virtues pertaining to financial generosity, motivations for patronage, administrative and political virtues, and virtues of personal and moral character. A key term for understanding the language of honorific inscriptions is meritum, a word denoting the kind of favour which a patron does for a client and which deserves to be honoured. The great majority of merita celebrated in these inscriptions are financial, relating to people who have given benefactions to towns or cities, and words for generosity (munificentia, liberalitas, largitio, benignitas, bonitas) multiply.19 People who do favours are described as ‘best’ (optimus), or less often ‘most worthy’ (dignissimus) or ‘most outstanding’ (praestantissimus).20 We have seen that sayings and stories approve of the rich helping the poor, but in honorific inscriptions the idea becomes central and definitive of goodness in a way that it is not in our material. Benefactors are credited with a number of virtuous motives for their gifts. Love (amor) (of one’s native land, for instance) is one, familiar from sayings and stories. Another is benevolence (benevolentia). Hope (spes), keenness to help (voluntas, studium), the desire to honour or doing of honour (honorificentia, reverentia), the sense of service (obsequium) and pietas all occur.21 Forbis notes that with the exception of reverentia, all these qualities can be felt by the recipients of gifts as well as the givers, and she points out that this helps to give the impression that the good qualities on display are in fact shared by all citizens, regardless of their financial means. This brings honorifics a little closer to sayings and stories in tone: the idea that people of diverse wealth and status may share socially binding virtues has, as we have seen, an important place in popular morality. Those who fulfil an office well may be praised for their fides, innocentia (uprightness, integrity), abstinentia and integritas, their justice and moderation, honestas (honour), holiness, outstanding nature (excellentissimus) and clemency, industry (industria and its close relatives sollicitudo, diligentia, cura and labor), virtus, dignitas, gratia (favour, goodwill) and consilium 17

18

Forbis (1996: 2–3 and n. 9) notes that the vocabulary of praise in Roman inscriptions is much wider than that in Greek, which centres on aretê, justice, love of honour and wisdom. Forbis’ chronological limits are slightly wider than mine, beginning at the end of the Republic and continuing to the late third century. 19 29–43. 20 21–8. 21 45–59. Forbis 1996: 9.

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(good counsel).22 All these terms can be found in popular sayings and stories. A few – justice, good faith, moderation – are as widespread and important there as they are here. A couple – abstinentia, industria and its relations – are important in Valerius but less so or not at all elsewhere, suggesting that they are particularly valued by the Roman upper class. Widely familiar from popular morality, however, are the personal qualities praised in these inscriptions. They include modesty and propriety (modestia, verecundia), chastity and uprightness (pudicitia, castitas, probitas).23 Convergences of vocabulary, however, sometimes mask differences of meaning. We have already seen that the same term does not always mean the same when applied to different people or in different genres of popular morality. Frugality for a Roman aristocrat does not mean the same as frugality for a peasant; friendship from a rich man towards a poor one does not involve the same behaviour as friendship from a poor man towards a rich man. Similar divergences occur between popular morality, even at the high end of the social scale, and honorific inscriptions. Abstinentia for Valerius Maximus, for instance, means much the same as continentia, continence, and both refer to both sexual continence and the refusal to acquire wealth.24 In honorific inscriptions, abstinentia is applied to people who have wealth but are generous with it, and do not use it for political advancement.25 So (Mar)cus Modestus Paulinus is honoured in the late second century as ‘most abstinent’ for his disinterested care of the ‘most glorious city of Marsi Marruvium’, care which has involved holding a number of offices and looking after the corn supply and the roads.26 Verecundia to Valerius means ignoring one’s own advantage in the interests of the state.27 In honorific inscriptions it refers to people who are dedicated to the state to the extent of exercising a certain self-discipline, but hardly to the point of self-denial. When Veratius Severianus of Cumae allowed the public to erect two statues to him, he displayed verecundia by paying for one of them himself.28 Not all qualities, of course, have different meanings in different genres. Hard work, patriotism, justice, good faith and chastity in women all have, as far as one can see, the same meaning or range of meanings in inscriptions as in 22

23

24 28

61–82. Integritas is not used of aristocratic men in Forbis’ corpus. It seems possible that this absence is an accident: compare Kaster’s analysis, in which integritas is fundamental to aristocratic women and men. Fides and innocentia are characteristic of people who are financially generous but not seeking political advancement; obsequium of financial donors and reverentia of magistrates. Forbis 1996: 83–90. Pudicitia and castitas are almost always used of women, in line with the central importance of chastity in sayings and stories. ‘Being one of a kind’ (singularis, incomparabilis, rarissimus) also features in inscriptions, but not significantly in sayings, though it might be implied in certain exemplary stories. 25 Forbis 1996: 64–5. 26 CIL 9.3667. 27 VM4.5 pr. VM4.3 passim. Forbis 1996: 83–4, CIL 10.3704, cf. CIL 5.5127, cf. CIL 5.532.

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sayings and stories. Nevertheless, the divergencies we can detect mark the fact that honorifics operate in a particular mental set: one which is subtly but noticeably different from that of popular morality as a whole. In one respect the difference is striking. The virtues which honorands exhibit are nearly always described as contributing to the good of the community, the town or city, rather than to that of the individual, his family, friends or social allies.29 When Gaius Cornelius was honoured by the people of second-century Ariminum, for instance, as outstandingly moderate (sic), hardworking, faithful and industrious, he had been procuring corn for the town.30 Publius Mucius is honoured by the people of Albingaunum around the turn of the third century for being ‘always solicitous for the safety of the town’, while in Dertona around the same time, Gaius Metelius was being honoured ‘for his outstanding integrity and good faith towards the citizens both individually and together’. In Cales, again at much the same time, Lucius Vitrasius Silvestris was honoured for ‘his keenness to help our common fatherland’ and ‘his generosity to all our citizens’.31 Underlining this rhetoric of devotion to the community, Forbis notes that the Greek virtue philotimia, which features on many public inscriptions in the east, and also in numerous sayings and stories, has no equivalent in Latin honorifics in her study.32 Most popular morality tends in the opposite direction, valuing the individual, his family, friends and immediate social group above the good of the state (or its institutions) in general. We have seen that patriotism is a rather rare virtue in sayings and stories, while the kind of institutions which Forbis’ honorands staff and support are subject to widespread scepticism. The only ethical collection whose ideas come close to the orientation of Forbis’ inscriptions is that of Valerius. This is appropriate enough, since Valerius’ readership is likely to have included those members of Roman, Italian and provincial elites to whom honorific inscriptions were regularly erected.33 It is one of the areas where Valerius’ ideas align better with high society than with popular morality as a whole. 29 30 31 33

This is not, of course, to say that honorands’ activities were not in practice aimed at least partly at their own good and that of their allies. Forbis 1996: 213–14, CIL 11.377. 32 Forbis 1996: 45. Forbis 1996: 217, CIL 5.7784, CIL 5.7375; p. 136, CIL 10.4643. Forbis’ inscriptions belong to quite a wide range of social groups, from freedmen to senators and including both men and women, but the groups have in common that their members are rich enough to act as substantial benefactors to towns and cities, which puts them economically, if not by birth, in the highest ranks of society. Forbis also notes (94–5) only a limited overlap between honorifics and the virtues ascribed to emperors, especially on coins. The latter include virtus, clementia, iustitia, pietas, munificentia, liberalitas, fides, honos, spes, pudicitia and aequitas. All these do appear in inscriptions, but relatively rarely, while other imperial virtues such as providentia and fortitudo do not feature in honorifics of this period at all. On imperial virtues see further Charlesworth 1937, WallaceHadrill 1981 (who argues that Augustus saw the imperial virtues as politically expedient rather than

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Forbis argues that the vocabulary of honorific inscriptions overlaps very little with that, for instance, of moral exempla.34 If we extend the comparison to popular morality in general, the overlap is rather greater. The orientation of the two corpora, however, is in the main quite different and in places their values seem to be flatly opposed – honorifics from the public sphere emphasizing munificence, for example, rather than traditional values of Roman private life like poverty and frugality. Of our ethical collections, only Valerius has much in common with the outlook of honorifics, and even he diverges from them in many respects. Comparing Forbis’ honorifics with those of Ephesus confirms that in Greek culture the accent in honorific inscriptions is on the glory of the individual, together with his or her devotion to the community, while in Latin-speaking culture devotion to the community is associated rather with the sense of duty and devotion to the city or the state in the abstract. Both languages share, however, the concepts of benevolence, generosity, goodwill and helpfulness, which make the values of elites giving to their cities sound so like those of popular morality. Since benevolence, generosity, goodwill and helpfulness are qualities which can be exercised in many ways at many social levels, this is a good example of executive virtues binding a community together. While marking their exceptional resources and praising each others’ patronal behaviour, the Greek- and Latin-speaking elites could also claim to be part of the same ethical community as those they patronized. Robert Kaster’s analysis of a group of emotions, and their related virtues, which were central to Roman high society of the late Republic and early Empire, offers the possibility of another interesting comparison between popular morality in general and the values of a particular social group. In this case, the group’s values prove to be significantly more idiosyncratic than in the last. Kaster focuses on five emotions: verecundia (roughly, respect or shame), pudor (decency, shame or embarrassment), paenitentia (regret), invidia (envy or indignation) and fastidium (disgust or distaste), and shows how they interact to regulate social behaviour. By expressing respect for Cicero, for instance, Caesar acknowledges that Cicero has status in his world. By expressing disdain for his fellow senators, Cato places their status under threat. If one magnate embarrasses another with some kind of inappropriate action, he puts both their reputations in jeopardy. From this kind of regulation to ethics is a short step: if powerful Romans of the first

34

philosophical ideals; this, surely rightly, positions them closer to popular morality than philosophical ethics), Noreña 2000, Fishwick 2002–4, Gradel 2002. On the Greek background to the cardinal virtues see North 1966; on some imperial virtues visually expressed, d’Ambra 1993b. Forbis 1996: 92–3.

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century bce or ce wanted to be able to live together, they must have found it bad to envy one another and useful to behave creditably; they would have felt they ought not do anything they might regret. In this way, Kaster shows, we can see emotions and their related ethics as helping to restrain ultra-competitive and self-interested Roman aristocrats of the period from the more destructive expressions of their amour propre. (We may wonder how well they worked; the turbulent history of the period suggests that perhaps they did not.) What is most striking in the context of this study, however, is how very socially specific these ideas are. Verecundia, paenitentia and fastidium are concepts of little interest or none at all in popular morality. Only invidia, which thrives at every social level, is really common, but the invidia of stories and sayings is a cruder and simpler quality than that of high literature and society. Kaster identifies two principal branches of meaning in aristocratic invidia: pain at another’s success because it is undeserved, and pain at another’s success because he is one’s competitor.35 In fables, many characters suffer from envy and try to do something about it. Usually, like the ass who wanted to be treated like his master’s dog, or the jackdaw who wanted to feast like the eagle, they find themselves made fools of or worse, and the emphasis of the story is on their foolishness rather than the pain they suffer from their envy.36 Gnomai about invidia leave it open to what kind of pain they are referring: so, for instance, Publilius Syrus observes that ‘You have to be either brave or fortunate to bear envy,’ and, ‘Envy smoulders in silence and hostility.’37 In Kaster’s examples of verecundia, paenitentia, fastidium and invidia, then, we can see, as we rarely can so clearly, the values of a micro-society in operation: specialized, introverted and continually and obsessively refined. Roman aristocrats did, of course, acknowledge many virtues which have a wider social relevance. Towards the end of his study, Kaster explains that the man (less often, woman) who behaves virtuously along the lines he has been investigating may be described as integer: upright, honest or undamaged. Integritas does not consist only of the virtues engendered by the five emotions which Kaster discusses; it also includes fides, pietas, iustitia, constantia, industria, veritas, clementia, frugalitas, temperantia, sanctitas, probitas, auctoritas, dignitas and honos.38 (This makes the definition of integritas much wider than integritas in honorifics, which describes people who have performed their duties with disinterested scrupulousness.) He identifies a 35 38

36 E.g. B129, B137. 37 PS285, PS287. Kaster 2005: 84. Kaster 2005: 139–40. Kaster gives a wider range of related terms, e.g. modestia, moderatio and continentia alongside temperantia and frugalitas, and aequitas alongside iustitia. He does not investigate, though, the range of meaning in aristocratic use of these terms.

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number of further virtues which were important to Roman aristocrats but do not form part of integritas, including fortitudo, prudentia, magnanimitas, liberalitas and benevolentia.39 Some of these qualities are common to all kinds of popular sayings and stories and share much, if not always the whole range, of their meanings, while one or two (dignitas, honos), it is no surprise to find, are of particular interest to Valerius Maximus and other exempla of the famous and aristocratic. Some, at least, of the people who practised Kaster’s emotions and the virtues related to them, came from the same social groups as some of those who were honoured in Forbis’ inscriptions. It is clear from the comparison how much context affects what virtues are most discussed and admired, and a fortiori how much context affects our sense of how much upper-class values and popular morality had in common. the worship of virtues The personifying and divinizing of virtues, which is detectable from the earliest Greek literature onwards, seems to have developed steadily in classical Greece and expanded considerably in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Though much has been written on divinized virtues in recent years, the focus has usually been on their cults, and their connections with popular morality have not been examined in detail.40 Those that were worshipped include, in the Latin-speaking West, Fortuna, Concordia, Salus (Health), Victoria, Spes (Hope), Honos, Ops (Wealth), Libertas, Mens (Mind), Virtus, Iuventus (Youth), Pollentia (Power), Pietas, Felicitas, Bonus Eventus (Good Fortune), Aequitas (Justice), Aeternitas, Annona (Wealth, Good Harvest), Clementia, Disciplina, Indulgentia (Mildness), Iustitia, Pax, Providentia, Pudicitia, Securitas Tutela (Protection), Copia, Abundantia and Fecunditas (Bounty, Fruitfulness), and in the Greek East, Eunomia, Eukleia (Glory),

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142. An exception is Clark 2003, who analyses divine qualities in Rome from their origins to their use in the middle and late Republic on stage, on coinage, in political debate and in the self-presentation of politicians and generals. Clark (e.g. 14–17) raises the question how ‘popular’ such representations can be taken to be; she (20–62, 76–8) helpfully discusses the relationship between Greek and Roman qualities and whether some qualities are more truly godlike than others (concluding, surely rightly, that to try to distinguish degrees of anthropomorphism strains and distorts the evidence). Helpful studies of the significance of individual qualities include d’Agostino 1961, Picard 1962, Boyancé 1972: 91–152, Piccaluga 1981, Freyburger 1986 (Pistis/Fides); Kajanto 1981, Champeaux 1982–7, Matheson 1994 (Tychê/Fortuna); Champeaux 1989 (Pietas); Hölkeskamp 2000 (Fides, Pax, Honor, Pudor); McDonnell 1990 (Virtus); Richardson 1978 (Honos and Virtus); Clark 1993 (Spes). Perret 1970 notes the connection between Horace’s account of Spes, Fides and Fortuna in Carm. 1.35, cult and popular morality.

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Nikê, Themis, Eirênê, Hygieia (Health), Tychê, Sôphrosynê, Aretê, Eleutheria and Homonoia (Agreement).41 Such cults were not uncontroversial, at least among philosophers.42 Cicero, in On the Nature of the Gods, puts both sides of the argument. The Stoic Balbus argues that men have always thought that whatever in life was useful, must come to them through the goodness (bonitas) of the divine. Anything which came from a god was accordingly called by the name of that god – so Ceres gave her name to corn, Liber his name to wine and so on.43 In the same way, divine virtues, Faith, Mind, Virtue, Honour and the rest, give their names to human ones. This human intuition, Balbus argues, is sound because some things, notably Wealth, Safety, Concord, Liberty and Victory, are so powerful that they cannot be governed except by a god, so they must be divine. In reply, the Academic Cotta argues that if one is going to take any power or quality as divine, there is no logical place to draw the line, and one will end up worshipping ‘monstrosities’ like Love, Treachery, Fear, Work, Envy, Fate, Old Age, Death, Darkness, Misery, Complaint, Gratitude, Fraud and many others, not to mention every minor hero and patron of human progress.44 Philosophers were not the only ones to see the force of this argument. Pliny the Elder, among others, is scathing of the tendency of divine abstractions, including of negative qualities, to multiply.45 Comparing the range of abstractions known to have been worshipped, however, with the vices and virtues of popular morality, suggests that philosophers’ fears that divinities might multiply uncontrollably, were misplaced. The striking thing about the comparison is that almost without exception, virtues which were worshipped – even those attributed to themselves by emperors and promulgated 41

42 43 44

45

For two lists in this period see Juv. 1.115–16, Plin. HN 2.14. On divinized virtues of this period see Axtell 1907, Lind 1973–4. Axtel notes (79–80) that both Seneca and Pliny the Elder are sceptical about the deification of abstracts, but Valerius is enthusiastic about them. Lind notes that abstractions appear in cult, myth, poetry and art, to which should be added popular sayings and stories. See also Mattingly 1937, Bieber 1945 on Honos et Virtus, Drexler 1961 on Honos, Fears 1981. Dietrich 1988 gives some useful Greek background on divine personification. Wallace-Hadrill’s view (1981: 311–16) that Romans rarely worshipped ‘virtues proper’, but rather things that were desired, makes an anachronistic distinction but the right observation. Stafford 2000, though concentrating on Greece, gives a helpful overview of later debates about personification. Cic. De nat. deor. 2.62–4. 3.39–51. Some of these, as we have seen, were indeed worshipped. If we worship Dionysus for introducing us to the vine, says Cotta, we should also worship Apollo’s son Aristaeus for discovering the olive. This line of attack was enthusiastically taken up by early Christians: Tertullian (Apol. 11) tells Romans sardonically that they ought to worship Lucullus (cos. 74 bce) for introducing the cherry to Italy. HN 2.14. Valerius’ anthropomorphic language of negative qualities, pp. 208–9, may be the kind of thing to which Pliny objects.

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as part of the imperial cult – were ones which were also prominent in popular morality.46 There is piety, which one exercises towards both gods and other people, and Good Fortune, which descends from above on to the lucky few. There are virtues of social cohesion and survival in the face of external threat – peace, security and victory. There are virtues of internal social negotiation – justice, freedom, agreement, clemency and mildness. There is wealth, vital to both states and individuals, and glory, vital especially to the elite. There are qualities which regulate individuals and prevent them clashing, like chastity and prudence, and qualities which individuals practise to improve the quality of their lives whether they are interacting with others or not, like health. Last but not least, there is that virtue which sustains even the poorest and most vulnerable sector of society: hope. Having grown up unsystematically and piecemeal over centuries, by the early Empire the personified virtues reflect approximately the landscape of goods which members of the Empire everywhere, of every social level, might be expected to share. Like popular morality itself, they form an excellent example of the ‘grammar’ of ethics which develops spontaneously in any functional society. Far from being random, irrational or uncontrolled, the growth of divinized powers, virtues and sometimes vices, seems more likely to have been strongly, if subconsciously, socially regulated, and regulated by not merely the subconscious of the privileged group who were in a position to proclaim new cults, build temples or endow festivals, but by a much wider group of those who accepted contemporary moral norms. In this context, the argument Cicero gives to Balbus is more perceptive than perhaps he realizes. ‘Many other divinities . . . have been constituted and named for their great beneficence, and with good reason, both by the wisest men of Greece and by our forefathers. For whatever was especially useful to the human race was thought to have come through divine goodness towards men.’47 What society values, it is anxious to endow with divine authority. Popular sayings and stories make the connection frequently; their assertions are encouraged and backed up by cults which display divine authority in vivid form, by divinizing the quality sponsored itself. m oral vocabul ary in papyri and individual inscriptions In the early stages of this study, I had high hopes of several bodies of documents on papyrus, which I expected to yield significant levels of moral 46

Exceptions are Pollentia, Aeternitas and Tutela.

47

Cic. De nat. deor. 2.60.

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language: among them the Acts of the Christian Martyrs and Acts of the Alexandrians with their accounts of individuals standing trial on issues of principle. These documents do feature a certain amount of ethical vocabulary, but not very much and not enough to make a thematic analysis of them as a body very interesting. The other body of material of which I had expectations were the records of ordinary trials which survive from various parts of imperial Egypt and which, among other things, form a rare and valuable record of provincial rhetoric in action. To those familiar with the elaboration of ethical language and ideas in Demosthenes or Cicero, these documents are an exciting prospect. In the event, they too offer less material than I hoped, and hardly enough to generate an interesting thematic analysis. One exceptionally long and interesting document, however, is worth analysing individually. It is our best documentary example of ethical language in a provincial legal context from this period. Oxyrhynchus papyrus 237 of 186 ce contains (written on the back of Book Five of the Iliad) a petition from one Dionysia to the Prefect of Egypt in Alexandria. It seems that when she married, Dionysia had been given a certain property by her father Chaeremon, a former gymnasiarch of Oxyrhynchus.48 Some time later, Chaeremon mortgaged the property, with the consent of Dionysia, her husband and her mother. He became unable to repay the loan thus raised, and Dionysia helped him in some way. She then seems to have agreed to give him the income on the property in the future, but not until his debts to her and the first lender were paid. Chaeremon complained to the Prefect that Dionysia had defrauded him, either by claiming the property in the first place or by keeping the income on it. Dionysia defended herself. The Prefect told the Strategus of the Oxyrhynchite nome to look into the case and give a ruling, which he did, ruling for Dionysia. Chaeremon refused to accept this and began a new suit claiming that Dionysia’s husband had physically attacked him and that he, Chaeremon, was therefore entitled to take Dionysia away from her husband, and her property with her. Dionysia and her husband protested, and it is from this stage of the case that this document dates. The extract below comes from Dionysia’s new defence: Chaeremon once more renewed his attacks upon me without cessation, but recognizing the impossibility of accusing me any longer concerning my rights to possession [of the property] after such elaborate inquiries and so much correspondence had taken place, turned his schemes (epiboulê) in another direction; and though 48

This text therefore illustrates that documents long and complex enough to yield ethical language and ideas in interesting concentrations nearly always belong to the higher strata of society.

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your highness had like your predecessors recently proclaimed that applications concerning private suits were not to be sent to you, he not only wrote but came in person and mutilated the case, as if he were able to deceive (planesai) even the lord Prefect . . . [H]e . . . wrote you a letter to the following effect: ‘From Chaeremon, son of Phanias, ex-gymnasiarch of Oxyrhynchus. My daughter Dionysia, my lord Prefect, having committed many impious (asebos) and illegal (paranomos) acts against me at the instigation of her husband Horion, son of Apion, I sent to his excellency Longaeus Rufus a letter in which I claimed (axiô) to recover in accordance with the laws the sums which I had made over to her, expecting that this would induce her to stop her insults (hybreis). The Prefect wrote to the Strategus of the nome in the 25th year, Pachon 27, enclosing copies of the documents which I had submitted, with instructions to examine my petition and to act accordingly. Since therefore, my lord, she continues her outrageous behaviour and insulting conduct (aponoiai enybrizôn) towards me, I claim (axiô) to exercise the right given me by the law, part of which I quote below for your information, of taking her away against her will from her husband’s house without exposing myself to violence (bia) either on the part of any agent of Horion or of Horion himself, who is continually threatening to use it. I have appended for your information a selection from a large number of cases bearing upon this question. 26th year, Pachion.’ Such was his letter. He could not indeed cite a single insult (hybris), or any other act of injustice (adikêma) against himself with which he charged me, but malice (phthonos) was the root of his abuse (loidoria) and assertion that he had been shamefully treated (deina paschôn) by me, saying that forsooth I turned a deaf ear to him, and a desire to deprive me of the right which I retain over the property. Stranger accusation still, he professes that he is exposed to violence (bia) on the part of my husband, who, even after my marriage contract with him which stated that I brought him this right unimpaired (to dikaion katharon), gave his consent to me and afterwards to my mother . . . when we wished to agree to Chaeremon’s mortgaging the property in question for a total sum of 8 talents. Since that time (he has continued) attempting to deprive me of my husband, being unable to deprive me of my property, in order that I may be unable to get provision even from my lawful husband, while from my father I have had neither the dowry which he promised nor any other present, nay more, I have never received at the proper times (kata kairon) the allowance provided.49

Moral and legal language are interwoven throughout this document, with moral, if anything, predominating. Chaeremon seems to be trying to convince the Prefect that what he describes mostly as moral outrages (apart from the violence he alleges from Dionysia’s husband) are the basis for a legal ruling.50 When Chaeremon describes himself as making a legal claim he says axiô, which means literally, ‘I thought it right,’ or, ‘worthy’. According to Dionysia, Chaeremon plots to deceive the Prefect; though the terms 49 50

Translated by the editor. Impiety was a legal offence and hybris may have also been (as it was, for instance, in Athens), but not in the sense in which Chaeremon is using them; he means simply that she crossed him.

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boulê and planesai are not distinctive of popular sayings and stories, the activities they represent certainly are, and are generally disapproved of. Asebeia, hybris, phthonos, loidoria, bia and aponoia do all appear in sayings and stories as vices. We have seen, too, deina meaning ‘bad’ and katharos meaning ‘good’ in earlier chapters. Along with trying to make moral offences stand for legal offences, both parties yoke the two together rhetorically as if they were equivalents. Chaeremon calls Dionysia’s behaviour ‘impious and illegal’, while she denies that he has a single concrete instance of any ‘insult or . . . injustice’. Both parties choose their moral vocabulary with some care. When he describes Dionysia’s behaviour to him as ‘impious’, Chaeremon is speaking of the parent–child relationship as sponsored by the gods; he is also characterizing it as steeply hierarchical on the model of relations between gods and human beings. She, in contrast, refuses to acknowledge the hierarchy and uses language more commonly associated with strife between equals or near-equals: ‘malice’, ‘abuse’. If anything, one is more likely to bear malice towards a superior than an inferior, so she may even be positioning herself socially, as she certainly is morally, above him. Finally, we may note that Dionysia claims she has never had her allowance from her father kata kairon. This is a common phrase, but in a context so loaded with moral language it is hard not to hear moral overtones in it. Chaeremon has missed the moment to develop a good relationship with his daughter, failed to seize his opportunities, and the result is that she is no longer interested in maintaining a good relationship with him. He may claim that Dionysia is mad, suffering from aponoia, but he is the one who has not been thinking straight. Turning from papyrus to stone, and ethical language in individual inscriptions, many include just one or two ethical terms, or sometimes a short list; the practice of listing virtues on tombstones goes back to archaic Greece.51 A sarcophagus from Roman London, for instance, commemorates, ‘dearest (carissima) Atia’ – ‘dear’, like ‘sweet’, being a standard description of family members.52 Another London tombstone calls Tullia Numida pientissime femine, a most pious woman (probably meaning that she was devoted to her husband).53 Such terms can be paralleled many thousands of times across the Empire. A more elaborate example from Roman Alexandria describes one Antoninus as ‘colleague in power, fellow worker, good advisor, companion, blameless, entirely beautiful, philanthropist, good name, my sweetest master . . . lover of your father, your 51 52

Lattimore 1942: 198–9, 275–80, 335–9, Sourvinou-Inwood 1995: 372–6. 53 Collingwood, Wright and Tomlin 1995: 22. Collingwood, Wright and Tomlin 1995: 20.

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mother, your brother . . .’.54 Several of these qualities seem to relate to public office, and it is also common on tombstones for the offices the deceased has held to be listed. Occasionally, much longer and more complex eulogies of the dead survive in the form of funeral orations inscribed on stone. One of the best known, the Praise of Murdia, comes from Augustan or early first-century Rome.55 In some ways, says the speaker, ‘the praise of all good women is simple and the same, because their natural virtues (bona) and the duties appropriate (propria) to them do not demand much variation in language . . .’. Murdia’s ‘natural’ virtues include modesty, uprightness (probitas), chastity, obedience, wool-working, hard work and good faith, in which ‘she was equal to and like other upright women’.56 We can reduce these to three broad categories, loyalty, chastity and hard work, which can plausibly be regarded as the three ‘core’ virtues of women in popular morality too. Finally, she is said to have virtue again, to work hard and – significantly – to have wisdom in times of danger.57 Murdia’s life and death, however, are not a simple expression of female virtues. She was married twice; one son, the speaker of the oration, survived from her first marriage and several children from her second. In her will, Murdia left her daughter a legacy, her eldest son his father’s money, her second husband what was his by right, and all her sons an equal share of the rest.58 Much of the surviving portion of the speech is the speaker’s justification of what we may suspect the husband and other children regarded as an inequitable disposition, in which the eldest son inherited rather more than anyone else. The speaker emphasizes Murdia’s loyalty and propriety towards both her husbands. ‘She determined to maintain the marriages given her by her parents to worthy men with obedience and uprightness, so that, married, she might become more pleasing (gratior) by her merits, be held dearer (carior) by her good faith, be left more lustrous (ornatior) by her good judgement, and that after death, she might be praised by general consensus of the citizenry . . .’59 ‘Dear’ and ‘pleasing’ are familiar qualities, especially in family members. ‘Lustrous’ is more unusual, and better suited to public affairs like will-making. The speaker also emphasizes Murdia’s love for 54 55 56 58 59

Samm. 343. CIL 6.10230 = ILS 8394.L (Wistrand 1976, Kierdorf 1980: 139–40). Marble. The beginning and end of the speech are broken off. 57 29–30. 20–9. 6–13. Line 6 refers to ius, legal right, when it says that Murdia wills her husband what is his by right; cf. above, pp. 315–16. 14–18.

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her children, which he describes, along with her gratitude towards her husbands, as doing all concerned honour, and as ‘fairness’ (aequalitas), ‘justice’ and ‘sincerity’ (veritas).60 Love for one’s children is another wellattested popular virtue, though more often attributed to men in our sources. Veritas is a virtue of all sorts of people, but honour, fairness and justice are if anything more associated with men, and men in power. The inscription gives us a glimpse into an ethically complex situation which has arisen from Murdia’s conventional life. She has relationships, responsibilities and resources with which to express and affect them, and her decisions cannot be equally welcome to all. Ethical ideas which in sayings and stories form relatively clear patterns of meaning and application, are therefore invoked to give structure and appropriate meaning to the problem. By describing Murdia’s actions as a mixture of virtues characteristic of women, virtues characteristic of family members of both sexes and virtues which are more often ascribed to men in the public sphere, the speaker attempts to express both her femininity and her authority, her devotion to her family and her ability to discharge her legal responsibilities wisely. Few funerary inscriptions hint at such difficult and interesting situations. Popular morality, however, appears in them in diverse forms. Agileia, wife of (Quintus) Oppius Secundus, was buried in Rome in the late second century.61 Her epitaph begins, conventionally, by listing her virtues. She was ‘beyond her years most chaste and virtuous and sober-living (castissimae et pudicissimae et frugalissimae); she loved her husband and his house blamelessly (innocenter)’. Nature, continues the inscription, gave her twenty-seven years before giving her over to the ‘perpetual leisure’ of death. Then Agileia addresses her husband in a distich which also survives (in slightly different form) among the Distichs of Cato: ‘Do not fear Lethe, Oppius: for it is foolish constantly to fear death and so throw away the joys of life.’62 For death, she goes on, is natural to men and not a punishment. Whoever is born must die. The stone concludes conventionally with Agileia entreating her husband not to mourn for her; she is waiting for him ‘on an eternal bed’, and finally she says, ‘Farewell, gods of the overworld, and all men and women, farewell.’ The last line is another metrical line, though if it is borrowed, we do not know from where. Agileia’s virtues typify those of Greek and Roman matrons, in sayings and stories no less than on tombstones. Her view of death from the other side is more characteristic of funerary inscriptions, which often speak of the dead moving on, going to the underworld, or waiting for their loved ones, than 60

1–5, 18–19.

61

CIL 6.11252.

62

2.3. There is a hint of Epicureanism about this sentiment.

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of popular morality, which focuses rather on the finality of death.63 The pragmatic note of the distich, however, is equally appropriate to the dead and the living, and bridges the two neatly. It is pointless to fear death – not because we know what happens afterwards, nor because we are philosophers or have any special or profound understanding of it, but simply because it stops us making the most of life. The gnome does not appear in quite this form anywhere else in first- and second-century sources, but its viewpoint is familiar. Carved on a tombstone, it gives popular morality a new and powerful source of authority: the dead. Even the dead share the ethics of the living, it says; all the more reason to take their advice. The final example in this section is of a very different type again. Dice oracles are a form of divination especially popular in Asia Minor, from where a number of well-preserved examples survive on stone.64 A long inscription from Cremna in Pisidia, published by Horsley and Mitchell, is typical in format.65 Fifty-six possible responses of the oracle are recorded (in hexameter verse), together with the number and order of throws of the dice which produce that response and the name of the divinity after whom the throw is named. The first virtually complete entry, for instance, reads: ‘11113. 7. Of Athena Areia. Four Chians and one three says: fleeing hostility and evil you will come eventually to the prizes. You will come and the grey-eyed goddess Athena will give you [something]. The activity which you undertake will be according to your desire.’ The divinities for whom the throws are named are an early indication that dice oracles share many of their concerns with popular morality. Alongside the Olympian gods we find the Fates, Fortune in several different forms (‘Caring’, ‘Pilot’, ‘Saving’), Victory, Good Time and Harm.66 Throughout, things that are going to happen to the questioner are characterized as good (agathos, kalos), bad (kakos, deinos, lypêros), profit, or useful or profitable (kerdos, chrêsimos, onêsimos, symphoros).67 Questioners are frequently warned to watch out for enemies or hostility,68 but equally often urged not to have fear, to be brave, or that they will win their struggle.69 Besides daring, safety is often mentioned as a good thing.70 63 66 67

68 69

70

64 Noll´ 65 Horsley and Mitchell 2000 no. 5. Garland 2001: 38–76. e 1987, 1996/7. 16, 211 (Fates), 31, 51, 96, 206 (Tychê), 36, 41, 176 (Victory), 158 (Good Time), 256 (Harm). Though the things which are to prove useful or profitable, or otherwise, are too vaguely described (‘You think bad things: there is no profit in it . . .’) for us to determine whether they are what in Chapter Seven I called socially constructed goods. 13, 39, 138, 148, 212. 70 warns against strife and lawsuits; 243 to do well in a lawsuit. 25, 165, 200, 263 (don’t be afraid), 88, 93, 134, 138 (be brave), 38–9, 139, 179 (you will win). 187 may suggest that fear will prevent you from coming to harm, or that even if you fear, you will not come to harm. 50, 64, 104, 155, 164, 199, 205, 239.

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Intelligence, good planning and being prepared are regularly recommended.71 If you obey the god, the god will guide you, give you what you seek, bring you good cheer and bring your plans to fruition.72 Questioners are frequently told not to hurry, but to wait for the kairos, the right time; there is a right time for everything. Be calm or relaxed (hêsuchos) (only once is the questioner urged to make haste).73 On the other hand, sometimes the questioner is advised that something is impossible.74 In this connection, in one response the oracle waxes metaphorical and offers two proverbs or nearproverbs as part of its response: ‘Throwing seed into the ocean and writing letters on it are both empty toil and fruitless activity,’ following them with a third: ‘Being mortal, do not compel the god, who will harm you [in retaliation].’75 Metaphors from the natural world are scattered throughout the oracle, and bear a strong family resemblance to those of Greek proverbs: ‘Do not put your hand in the wolf’s mouth.’ ‘Don’t labour in vain, like the bitch that gave birth to the blind pup.’ ‘As wolves are masters of lambs and strong lions of horned bulls, you will be master of all these things.’ ‘You are looking for a fish in the sea.’ ‘Do not move every stone, lest you find a scorpion.’76 Among the minor themes of the responses are good health and hope.77 Many of the hallmarks of popular morality are here: the valuing of piety, intelligence, courage and caution; the fear of enemies and conflict; the concern with the right time, with what is fruitful or profitable and what is impossible. The gods have featured throughout this study as ethical authorities, and in dice oracles they act both as a source of advice about what it is good or bad, right or wrong to do, and in many cases as guides, protectors and guarantors that all will turn out well.78 Ethical language does not so much make or reinforce a point in inscriptions like this; it is the point. The medium is the message: all life is an ethical activity. Whether one comes to the oracle to find out whether to make a journey or a business transaction, whether one will marry or a friend will recover from an illness, or simply whether one is going to prosper 71 72 73 74 75 77 78

54, 124, 151, 155, 161, 173 (plan); 63 (be prepared). 157 (obey); 35, 64, 94, 110, 178, 247 (the god will guide or give you what you seek); 9, 140, 228 (good cheer – not the eudaimonia of philosophers but euphrosynê); 85, 100, 179 (fruition). 53, 74, 103, 108, 113–14, 118, 123, 125, 159, 249 (don’t hurry); 55, 103, 108, 113, 115, 123, 147, 189, 234, 241–2 (kairos); 156 (wait for your chance); 113, 157, 161, 214, 223, 234 (be calm); 207 (make haste). 250. 213 warns the questioner that something is difficult and tricky, 191 that he should be on his guard. 76 212, 108–9, 245–6, 74, 194–5. 216–18. 44, 49, 104, 186 (health); 157 (hope). 255 warns against arrogance. Not only gods but daimones, anonymous minor divinities rare in sayings and stories, play this role in oracles (26, 39, 76, 81, 154, 165, 200).

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or what is going to happen, the reply will be couched in ethical terms.79 Dice oracles vividly illustrate the argument I made in Chapter Six, that a good life for any individual is the one which enables him to survive, and if possible thrive, in his particular circumstances. ‘You are good for every undertaking,’ says the oracle encouragingly. ‘Take counsel calmly and the god will be your guide.’ ‘You will finish having done what you want and found what you desire.’80 conclusion I hope that the examples in this chapter and the last have begun to show how the language of morality presents itself in different contexts and different micro-societies across the Empire. Popular moral language and ideas permeate all kinds of texts, though their range, density and interaction in papyrus documents and inscriptions is not as great as what survives in popular sayings and stories. Different occasions call for somewhat, though not entirely, different language. We have noted a few differences in the range of terms used in comparable bodies of inscriptions in Greek and Latin, marking likely differences between eastern and western culture. If we compared bodies of inscriptions from different Greek cities, we might well find, as Forbis finds studying Italian cities, certain preferences in vocabulary, varying from city to city, too. This fits the picture we built up in Chapter Six of a world of very many communities, some larger and some smaller, all overlapping, most with many other communities, all helping to sustain the precarious but remarkably durable moral fabric of the Empire. Every community and intersection of communities will have had its ethical vocabulary, much of which will in practice have been common to everyone, and much to most people, but some of which may have been shared by relatively few. By comparison, papyri and inscriptions throw into relief the variety, complexity and subtlety of moral language in proverbs, gnomai, fables and exempla. They help us to appreciate more fully the moral landscape we have been investigating in this book: the remarkable range of navigational tools 79

80

20, 23, 49, 58, 105, 129 concern travel; 44, 49, 104, 166, 186, 208, 227 (?), 255 sickness or pain; 120, 125, 153, 183, 214, 231, 251, 259 business or trade. We do not know whether those who used the oracle (sometimes, always or never) came with a specific question, and since they threw dice to get their answer, presumably its connection with the question, if there was one, was not always obvious. But the frequency of references to these topics (amid more common and more general references to ‘your plans’, ‘your hopes’, ‘your task’, ‘what you desire’ etc.) suggests either that they were common concerns of visitors or that they were sufficiently common activities to apply to most people. 63, 110, 130 (editor’s translation, emended).

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it offers to ethical agents, and the amount of food for thought. In return, popular morality helps us to interpret more subtly the ethical language of inscriptions and papyri: when they are appealing to common values, when parading values distinctive to an individual, class or situation; when they are expressing sentiments shared across the Empire, and when local ones; when they are being prosaic and uncontroversial, when daring or poetical. If papyri and inscriptions are less rich in moral language than we might have hoped, cults of divinely personified virtues and vices come much closer to the range of ideas in popular sayings and stories than we might have expected. If we added to the powers and virtues which were officially worshipped, the virtues and vices which from time to time authors suggested – as a joke or in annoyance – might be added to them, we should have an even wider range and one still closer to that of sayings and stories.81 As it is, virtue cults highlight some of the most important, most strongly represented themes of popular morality, from fate to good fortune, justice to wealth, wisdom to generosity. The fit is not perfect, in part because some virtue cults are particularly associated with imperial, rather than popular virtues and in part because neither body of material claims to be exhaustive or systematic, but it is close enough to be striking. It suggests that despite the concern or scepticism of intellectuals, the forces which encouraged the deification of certain qualities were nearly related to those which validated moral ideas in the wider society. In the last chapter, I noted that evidence for the ‘trickling down’ of ideas from high philosophy to popular ethics was less strong than evidence for ‘trickling up’. In the case of papyri and inscriptions, it is much harder to be sure whether one or the other or both are involved, partly because direct testimony is elusive and partly because the use of ethical language in documents is less highly developed, so less different from popular usage, than that of philosophical theory. We have seen that some intellectuals attribute the deification of some virtues to human beings in general, which suggests ‘trickle up’. We may note that some deified qualities do not make it into sayings and stories of the period, which suggests an absence of ‘trickle down’. But most of the terms we have met in this chapter are common to documents and to popular morality, and we have also noted that there are sound reasons for this, especially in the case of inscriptions, where those who caused them to be written and displayed may have wanted to emphasize their community with those who viewed them. That being the 81

E.g. Plaut. Bacch. 114–24 (includes Love, Pleasure and Charm), Cic. De nat. deor. 2.23 (includes Desire and Pleasure).

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case, it is probably safer to take documents as evidence of some of the overlapping worlds which between them generated popular morality. In some ways they are marginal worlds, belonging to the relatively rich and socially prominent, but they have a good deal in common nevertheless with others further down the social scale, just as the values of Valerius Maximus, despite showing clear signs of their aristocratic context, have a surprising amount in common with fables, gnomai and proverbs.

Conclusion

He lives long who lives well. English proverb

The aim of this study has been to recover an aspect of the mentality of people within Roman society of whose thought world we otherwise know little, and to see how it relates to the mentality of those of whom we know rather more. We have investigated what moral agents from a wide spectrum of social backgrounds thought made their lives good or bad, morally successful or unsuccessful. Such a study touches on many arenas of Roman life and Roman historiography, from politics, social and economic activities, to religion, the home and aspects of high culture like philosophy and literature. At the same time it looks at the Roman world from its own angle, so I have tried to establish something of how ethical agents saw their environment – what their horizons were, how they rated what they did or had, and how they made decisions about how to live. We have seen how against a relatively optimistic picture of the morality of the metaphysical world and nature, popular wisdom viewed human life as physically, socially and morally fragile and prone to fail. We have explored what our sources regard as the main causes of strife between human beings and its main antidotes, some of which are communal, some individualistic, and we saw how the tensions, limitations and intrinsic weaknesses of these antidotes worried them. In the process, we have focused on four distinct but interwoven genres of popular wisdom, whose likely origins give each of them slightly different agenda, and we have suggested how agents might have used these differences to situate themselves appropriately in the diverse ethical contexts and relationships in which they operated. On this basis we have built up a picture of how popular morality worked as a system: its shape, coherence and vocabulary; how, despite its weaknesses, it was seen as helping a society to hold together and individuals to live well. We have seen how the ethical community worked like a jigsaw, or 324

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perhaps a dance, in which the participants frequently changed places but the pattern remained much the same. We have examined how notions of the moral were variously, but systematically, rooted in the divine sphere, in nature or society, and we have seen how within those broad categories, sayings and stories invoked a wide range of authorities, from geography to history, from institutions to individuals including magistrates, generals, poets and philosophers, from conscience to utility, from gods and myths to the power of language itself. We have seen too how morality often presents agents as trapped in a world of little change and fewer opportunities, while it tantalizes them with hope and the dramatic interventions of forces like kairos and tycheˆ. Finally, we have seen how in the early Empire different groups of people made use of popular morality in the many forms of public discourse in which they engaged, and how those discourses partly or largely overlap. In his Collection of Adages, which went through ten vastly popular editions between 1500 and 1536 and eventually comprised 4,151 proverbs and proverbial phrases gleaned from classical literature and the Church Fathers, Erasmus cited Greek and Roman authors in support of his view that proverbs were moral, useful, persuasive and educational.1 In the classical world, he said (pr. 5), popular sayings were valued as they deserved: they were collected by the greatest philosophers, cited by the best authors, quoted by the most distinguished jurists, inscribed on temple doors as worthy of the gods and carved on columns and marble tablets as worthy of being eternally remembered. With reason, as he believed: sometimes, in the world of letters, the smallest things have the greatest intellectual value. Erasmus was not the first nor the last collector of proverbs and publisher of popular wisdom in the Renaissance (Valerius Maximus’ was the first Latin prose work to be printed in Europe), and he was writing in a tradition which stretched back, probably without a break, to antiquity, and stretches forward to the present day. Nowadays, proverbs and their close kin gnomai, fables and exemplary stories do not receive the same attention from high culture as they did until relatively recently. If we do not choose, however, to apply their colourful moralism and pragmatic adaptability to our own lives, they may still contribute to our understanding of Greek and Roman lives. Popular morality was one of the foundations on which the classical world was built, and on which Greek and Roman societies endured so long. 1

Each saying was supplied with an explanation, references and commentary and they were presented in no order; two indices listed them alphabetically and by topic.

ap p e n dix 1

The political and literary connections of Babrius

Our dating of Babrius depends on P. Oxy. 1249, a papyrus fragment containing Fables 18, 110, 118 and 25, which Grenfell and Hunt dated to ‘hardly . . . later than the end of the second century, and [it] may easily go back to the first’. Babrius’ fables are addressed to a ‘son of King Alexander’ (pr. 2.1–2). The only King Alexander we know of in the first or second century ce, is a man who was established on the throne of Rough Cilicia (or part of it) by Vespasian, probably in 72.1 Babrius could have been teacher to the son, who may or may not be the Branchus who is addressed in the prologue to the first book (l.2). Of Alexander, we know only the name and two data about his career.2 He was, however, a small fish in a large pond, in which there were few other fish to whom he was not related by blood, marriage or patronage. He was the son of Tigranes V, whom Nero established as client king of Armenia and against whom Corbulo campaigns in Tacitus’ Annals 14–15. His greatuncle, Tigranes IV, had also been king of Armenia, until he was prosecuted and executed at Rome in 36 (Ann. 6.40). Tigranes IV was a grandson of Herod the Great, and so part of a sprawling, interconnected, feuding group of families who between them controlled most of the client kingdoms of the Near East for more than two centuries. This family connection encompassed, among others, the Hasmonean kings of Judaea, the kings of Pontus, Armenia, Parthia and Cappadocia,3 the kings of Emesa and Commagene who were a remnant of the Seleucid Empire,4 and the Prefect of Egypt Ti. Julius Alexander.5 1

2 5

If Babrius was writing for an Asian king’s son, it may explain why not all his fables derive from Aesop; some are close to Assyrian fables, and one appears to be a direct translation of a fable from the Book of Achiqar, which was published in 1927 from cuneiform tablets (Perry 1965: lx); perhaps Babrius was paying a compliment to Asian literary tradition. Babrius also, unusually, includes Syria in the sources of fable in the same passage. 3 Tac. Ann. 14.26. 4 Tac. Ann. 2.42. Josephus places him in Rough Cilicia (AJ 18.140). He also fought in the Armenian campaign with Corbulo, and helped Titus at Jerusalem (Sullivan 1977: 932–3).

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Not only were these dynasties connected among themselves, they were very well connected at Rome. Herod the Great was close to Augustus. Ti. Julius Alexander and Agrippa I of Judaea had close relations with Antonia the Younger and her circle, which included the Emperor Claudius.6 Agrippa was one of many members of his family to be brought up in Rome: he was educated with Drusus and was a friend of both Caligula and Claudius.7 Agrippa may well have known Vespasian through Antonia; Vespasian was probably a member of Antonia’s patronage group as far back as Claudius’ reign.8 Agrippa later helped Vespasian in the Jewish War, and his sister Berenice was Titus’ mistress for twelve years.9 Tigranes’ family had owed their (intermittent) rule in Armenia to Roman patronage since 20 bce.10 Tacitus (Ann. 14.6) says of Tigranes V that, ‘his long residence at Rome as a hostage had made him as docile as a slave’. Tigranes may also have met Vespasian at Rome; if not, Vespasian’s Eastern campaigns established the connection. In addition, several close associates of Vespasian, such as Trajan’s father M. Ulpius Traianus and L. Junius Caesennius Paetus (PIR 2 C 174), had also served as military tribunes in Armenia, with Corbulo (Tac. Ann. 15.28.2). Another client king with close connections to Rome was Antiochus IV, king of Commagene and Cilicia from 38 to 72. He was brought up at Rome, and perhaps educated with Agrippa I of Judaea. Dio (59.24.1) calls the two of them ‘teachers of tyranny’ to Caligula. It was Caligula who initially gave Antiochus his family’s kingdom, then took it away; it was restored by Claudius on his accession, and Antiochus maintained good relations with the principate, in particular with Antonia’s circle, until Vespasian’s accession. Antiochus was another who fought with Corbulo on behalf of Tigranes (Tac. Ann. 14.26.2), declared early for Vespasian in 69 (Tac. Hist. 2.81.1) and sent troops to Titus’ siege of Jerusalem (Tac. Hist. 5.1.2). He also married his daughter to Tigranes’ son Alexander (Jos. AJ 17.140). This is ultimately how part-Armenian, part-Judaean Alexander came to hold Rough Cilicia. In 72 Antiochus was accused of plotting against Rome with the king of Parthia. He fled with his family, was arrested in the Cilician mountains by Caesennius Paetus and was taken first to Greece, and then to honourable but permanent retirement at Rome.11 His daughter Iotape, however, and son-in-law Alexander (not his sons, who had rashly fought a battle with Caesennius) were given part of his kingdom, which left them in the prestigious but exposed position of being one of only three surviving 6 8 10

7 Jos. AJ 19.360, 18.167, 20.137. Jos. AJ 18.143, 19.276. 9 Nichols 1978: 128, Jones 1984: 59. Suet. Vesp. 4.1, Tac. Hist. 3.66.3, Jos. AJ 18.179. 11 Jos. BJ 7.228–39. D. Chr. 54.9, 55.10.

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client kingships in the area under the Flavians. They did reasonably well out of it. Our last shred of information about Alexander comes from an inscription from Ancyra, which records that he exchanged the kingdom for a suffect consulship under Trajan, perhaps in 103.12 Inscriptions also give us the name of one, and possibly two sons: C. Iulius Agrippa, who was a quaestor in Asia,13 and, less certainly, the better-known C. Iulius Alexander Berenicianus, who is mentioned in Dio (68.30.2) as a legate of Trajan in Parthia in 116, achieved a suffect consulship and became proconsul of Asia 132–3 under Hadrian.14 The King Alexander mentioned by Babrius, therefore, if the same man, is far from being an anonymity. He was well-connected both in Asia and in Rome and his son or sons were also successful in imperial politics, though neither of them appears to have been called Branchus. We have few firm dates for his branch of the family, but with Babrius in mind, it is worth trying to establish a rough chronology. Alexander’s great-grandfather, Herod the Great’s son Alexander, was born some time between 36 and 29 bce and executed by his father in 7 bce as a political threat. He had two sons, Alexander and Tigranes, who must have been born not earlier than 15 and probably closer to 10 bce. (The elder Alexander was another member of the family brought up at Rome, probably first in the house of Asinius Pollio and later at court.) That would put Tigranes IV plausibly in mid-life when he was executed by Tiberius in 36. Alexander’s son, Tigranes V, was therefore presumably born not earlier than around 5 ce and probably nearer 15 ce (allowing twenty-five years between generations). He would then have been about forty-five when Nero dispatched him to Armenia. The ‘long time’ he had been a hostage at Rome may mean most of his life. If so, he very likely knew Agrippa, to whom he was distantly related, and his son Agrippa II, who was born in 38 and educated at Claudius’ court, and also Antiochus of Commagene, in Rome. It is also likely that he was married in Rome and that his son Alexander was brought up there. Again reckoning conventionally, Alexander might have been born in the 40s. We know that Antiochus was married in Rome and had a son there who was old enough to be affianced, still in Rome, in 44; Antiochus’ daughter, Alexander’s future wife, could therefore plausibly have been round about Alexander’s age, and the chances are that they were both brought up in Rome and betrothed or married there. We do not know 12 13 14

Syme 1953: 154, Sullivan 1977: 936, Bowersock 1994: 144. IGLS 4.1314 [2] (Apamea), cf. CIL XVI 8 [2] (68), Halfmann 1979: 46. Riemann 1877: 292, Halfmann 1979: 47. The family’s connection with Trajan went back to his father, M. Ulpius Traianus.


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whether they went or stayed when Tigranes went east in 60, but there is no mention of them in narratives about either Tigranes or Antiochus in the east in the 60s. To return, finally, to Babrius. Babrius writes in Greek, but his name is Italian, attested in inscriptions from Umbria, suggesting that he may be a hellenized Italian, or a Greek who had taken the name of an Italian patron, living in Cilicia. It seems clear that he knew Latin: it was first noted by Lachmann and Crusius that his choliambics show features which seem to belong to Latin metrical tradition, but not to Greek.15 In particular, Babrius always chooses a Greek word accented on the penultimate syllable in the last foot. This is without parallel elsewhere in Greek iambic poetry, but is inevitable in the Latin scazon; only a poet who knew the Latin convention is likely to have done such a thing. Babrius’ other peculiarity is resolving iambs into trisyllabic feet, which he does freely, and which is rare in Greek verse but common in Latin, especially after Petronius, and above all in Martial. The relationship between Babrius’ verse and Martial’s suggests a date and place of work for Babrius. Martial came to Rome from Spain around 64 (10.103–4). In 80 he celebrated the opening games for the Colosseum with a book of epigrams, which suggests he was well known by then. He was a friend of Seneca the Younger, Pliny the Younger and Quintilian and their circle, and, like Quintilian, he was a client of Titus and Domitian. Martial was therefore part of a literary group which circulated round a political group which was also that of Alexander. It is an attractively economical hypothesis that Babrius acquired his Martial-like style by being in Rome at the same time and being part of the same literary circle as Martial, and that it was in Rome that he met Alexander. If Babrius was addressing Alexander’s children in verse, say, in their teens, at a time when they would have been able to read and appreciate his style, he might have been writing in the late 70s or 80s.16 He may never have been to Rough Cilicia at all, or perhaps he went only in the 70s as client, ‘court poet’ and/or teacher to Alexander and his children. If Babrius was part of a well-known literary group with strong links with Near Eastern royal houses, it becomes much less surprising that he was, as he says himself, imitated, and that his poems were copied in Egypt so soon after they were written. His patrons, like himself, were accomplished and successful. The 70s and 80s were a period of considerable change and 15 16

Perry 1965: liv–lv. Quintilian (1.9.2) recommends fables as children’s reading; as we have seen, this is often taken as a reference to Babrius, unsurprising if they knew one another in Rome.

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tension in the Near East. In addition to events in Commagene and Cilicia, there were changes in Armenia, Cappadocia (transformed into a consular province), Nabatea and elsewhere in Syria throughout the Flavian period and well into the second century. The fact that Alexander and his son or sons managed to remain in sufficiently good standing with the ruling power to be consuls under Trajan suggests a high degree of political sophistication. There remains the question of Branchus, the dedicatee of Babrius’ first book (pr. l.2). He has been taken to be the son of Alexander, or, allowing for some lapse of time between the two books, as another, earlier pupil. I have been unable to find any evidence for Branchus as a historical name. In myth, however, it is the name of the founder of the oracular shrine of Apollo at Didyma, then of the prophet or priest of Apollo at Didyma, or an epithet of Zeus when worshipped there. It also appears, among other places, in Callimachus – in a fragment of Iambus 4, and in fr. 229, from a largely lost lyric poem entitled Branchus, which Babrius quotes in Fable 142.17 The cult of Apollo at Didyma had been refounded by Alexander the Great and was very important to the Seleucids, to whom Alexander’s sons were related through their mother. It was still notable at this period: there were cults of Caligula, Claudius and Nero there (all emperors with whom Alexander’s family had close relations) and Trajan held the title of prophet at Didyma.18 In this context, Branche would make a neatly complimentary epithet to apply to one of Alexander’s sons, reminding readers delicately that this imperially favoured cult was one with which they had important (if now rather distant) family connections. 17 18

B142.3: O Zeu genarcha . . . cf. Callim. fr. 229 Zeu . . . genarcha . . . . Fontenrose 1988: 50–1, Bowersock 1994: 134.

ap p e n dix 2

The definition of a miscellany

A miscellany may historically be a collection of smaller works, excerpts of works, snippets of information, stories or maxims, arranged thematically, alphabetically, chronologically, randomly or in any other way. The contents may be limited – by author, genre or subject – as much or little as the compiler chooses, though before the twentieth century, a degree of thematic unity was the norm. Anthologies, encyclopaedias, companions and even dictionaries and commentaries are therefore more or less closely related to miscellanies, if not identical to them. (There is no clear dividing line between the miscellany and the anthology, but it is convenient, and intuitively appropriate to classicists, to reserve ‘anthology’ for collections of epigrams.) There is no soi-disant ancient genre of miscellany, the nearest being satura (originally a medley of prose and/or verse compiled to be read or performed on stage, and later the genre of satire), which only covers a fraction of works which one can call miscellaneous.1 Those who compiled what we should call miscellanies gave them a variety of names. Aulus Gellius called his miscellany Attic Nights, describing it as commentaria, ‘notes’.2 Gellius reports (praef. 6–9) no fewer than thirty titles which other compilers had given to works of a similar type, of which the least picturesque include From My Reading, Problems, Handbook, Memorabilia, Things, Incidentals, Things Educational, Topics, Questions and Things Thrown Together. Among the many metaphorical titles he mentions is Stromateis, ‘tapestries’, which is the title of a lost work by Plutarch and a surviving one by Clement of Alexandria.3 Others, as diverse as they are inventive, include, Muses, Woods, Athena’s Robe, The Horn of Plenty, Honeycomb, Fields, Bouquet, Fruit Basket, 1

2

Ennius is credited with the earliest use of the word satura, given to a miscellaneous collection of poems; he may have borrowed the idea from Posidippus’ Soros (Petersmann 1986: 7–21, Coffey 1989: 11–18). On the prevalence of book titles drawn from the natural world, see Coleman 1988: xxii–xxiv. The earliest use of the word ‘miscellany’ was by Politian in his Miscellanea of 1489. 3 Plutarch’s Stromateis is cited by Eusebius, PE 1.7. Praef. 3, 11.

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Natural History and Universal History. A little earlier, Valerius had called his compilation of exemplary stories simply, Memorable Words and Deeds, while a little later, Aelian called his historical miscellany, Poikilê Historia (the nearest English comes to doing the adjective justice is the use Gerard Manley Hopkins makes of the word ‘pied’). The ancient miscellany, like its modern counterpart, is properly any collection of shorter pieces or excerpts, arranged to educate or entertain. To judge by the number and diversity surviving, the number not surviving of which we know, and the number of quotations from them and references to them in other literature, miscellanies played a central role in Hellenistic and Roman culture.4 Examples survive of almost every imaginable kind: historical, natural historical, medical, philosophical, theological, sympotic, poetic, rhetorical, biographical, proverbial and mixed. They survive in manuscript, on papyrus and on stone, and constitute an important stage in the genealogy of literature, picking and preserving the plums of earlier works and providing material for later ones. They may have been the primary or only form in which many people encountered Greek and Latin literature, and they were certainly the form in which many in the Byzantine, mediaeval and early modern worlds would become acquainted with the classics of Greece and Rome. As such they deserve more serious study by classicists than they have yet received. 4

D. Stern 2004b: 7 makes a similar point about the anthology in Jewish literature, which he says has been generally neglected as a genre, despite being perhaps the most important genre in early Jewish literature.

ap p e n dix 3

Popular morality and philosophical doctrine

One obvious overlap between philosophical doctrine and popular wisdom is in vocabulary.1 We have seen that popular sayings and stories employ a very wide range of terms for good and bad qualities and behaviours. Philosophers do not use quite so many terms, but many of those they do use are the same. The cardinal virtues, courage, justice, practical wisdom and temperance are strongly represented in both groups (and in all the philosophical schools). Confidence, benevolence, piety, self-control, usefulness, honour, truthfulness, friendship are all familiar concepts to users of popular wisdom. Health, beauty and strength, wealth, reputation and high birth all make their appearance in high philosophy as well as being praised in popular sayings and stories. Vices like anger, envy, violence, greed, lust, trickery and superstition are condemned equally by intellectuals and masses. A certain amount of the vocabulary in philosophical lists of virtues and vices does not feature in exactly the same form in popular wisdom, but seems to be labelling recognizably the same concepts. The verb dikaiopragein, for instance, ‘to do justice’, does not appear in popular literature, but it is obviously related to dikaios. Aphrainein, to be foolish, means the same as mê phronein or môrein.2 Authekastos, ‘truthful’, means the same as alêthês or alêthinos.3 Popular wisdom may not have a term, to hêgemonikon, for the part of the mind that rules one rationally, but it is familiar with the concept. Against these points of contact, the differences between philosophical doctrine and popular ethics stand out in high relief. Not one of the main structural concepts of any of the philosophical schools has much importance in popular morality. We have seen how little the latter has to say about eudaimonia, the ultimate aim of most philosophical systems. Hêdonê, the 1 2

For ‘high’ philosophical doctrines I rely principally in what follows on Long and Sedley 1987; also Arnold 1911, Bodson 1967, Colish 1990 and Reydams-Schils 2005. 3 Stob. 2.58.5–15. Stob. 2.96.18–97.4.

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state of virtuous pleasure appreciated by Epicureans, is never identified in popular ethics as something one should work for. The Platonist idea that contemplating god or the good, or being godlike, is the highest aim of human life finds no echo in popular ethics. We have seen how little interest popular morality has in virtue for its own sake, rather than as a means of survival. The Stoic virtues of apatheia, absence of the suffering caused by desires and passions, and ataraxia, not being churned up by what happens to one,4 have no parallel in popular sayings and stories, which do not mind people having desires and passions at all, provided they do not lead them into bad behaviour. Nor has the Cynic idea that poverty, even squalor, might be desirable and wealth something to be given up entirely for the sake of an ethical life.5 Popular morality does not worry about possible conflict between the concepts of fate and free will: it simply assumes that both exist. It does not debate whether or not the gods intervene in human life, but assumes that they do, and that we are not the less responsible for our actions. Popular morality has plenty to say about suitable and unsuitable occasions for speech, but parrhêsia, that freedom of speech so beloved of the Cynics, which tells the truth regardless of causing trouble or offence, has no parallel.6 Nor does Cynics’ and Epicureans’ lack of interest, in different ways, in normal social life have any parallel in popular material, which assumes that ethics take place par excellence in the field of everyday society and human conflict.7 A few concepts appear in both bodies of material but are evaluated differently. High philosophy, for instance, is generally against adultery, while popular morality is against it only in women.8 In a few cases, such as attitudes to women, a spectrum of views in popular morality is well matched among philosophers, from the notorious misogyny of Aristotle to the relative philogyny of the Epicureans. It is possible too that some concepts and terms which appear in both genres do not mean quite the same thing in each. For an Aristotelian, for instance, friendship comes in three kinds – that of pleasure, use and virtue – and only the last is really good.9 In popular sayings and stories, all kinds of 4 5

E.g. D.L. 7.115, Stob. 2.88.8–90.6, 2.90.19–91.9, 2.93.1–3. Musonius Rufus fr. 18a and b. Seneca disliked the tendency of some Stoics to behave with what he thought was a Cynic degree of frugality (ep. 5). There was a good deal of cross-fertilization between the two schools; to confuse the picture, it is not always clear how faithfully some sources (notably Dio Chrysostom) convey Cynic views when they claim to be doing so. 6 E.g. Hor. Sat. 2.2.65, on which see Krueger 1996, Lucian Dem. 12, Epict. 3.32.50. 7 E.g. Epict. 3.22.26, Lucian Vit. Auct. 9, D.L. 6.29, 72 (Cynics), Epicur. RS 7, 40, Lucr. 2.7–19, 5.1120– 35, Diog. Oen. fr. 24 1–3, fr. 44 (Epicureans), though the fifth axiom of Epicurus preserved on the walls of Oenoanda says that one cannot live pleasantly without prudence, justice and honour. 8 Epict. 2.18.15, Stob. 2.93.1–13, Apul. De deo Socratis 2.4, 13–14. 9 EE 1235b13ff., NE 1155a5ff.


335

friendship count as good. The concept of ‘reason’ enjoys a rich vocabulary in both Greek and Latin, in both popular and philosophical ethics, but we may doubt whether high philosophy’s refined understanding of the mind, its divisions, conflicts and regulation, has much counterpart in popular thinking. One can imagine a few of the specified virtues and vices in high philosophical texts mystifying users of popular ethics. Do we really need to be worried about cannibalism, ritual murder or fingernail-chewing?10 Just as significant, the sets, subsets and hierarchies within which high philosophy’s plethora of good and bad qualities and actions are organized, are as foreign to popular morality as are many of their terms. Popular material does not distinguish between primary and secondary virtues, virtues and goods, goods and potencies, virtues, vices and indifferents, or vices and passions.11 It does not classify some virtues, vices or passions as subsets of others.12 In general, as we have seen, ‘good’ and ‘virtue’ in popular morality cover everything from the necessary to the divinely ordained, the socially ordered, the aristocratic, the desirable, the successful, the praiseworthy and the pleasurable. On the other hand, there is nothing in the philosophical systems we have looked at which quite matches the tendency, which we saw in Chapter Eight, of popular ethics to categorize goods as natural, divinely sponsored or socially constructed.13 In pointing out these differences between philosophy and popular ethics, I have not made much of the differences between philosophical schools. One could argue that some schools’ views are closer to popular ideas, at least in some areas, than others’. Aristotle shares with popular ethics a strong sense of the importance of fortune in life, and a certain social pragmatism. Epicurus shares the view that friendship is always a good thing (though Epicurean friendship was doubtless a more refined phenomenon than most everyday associations).14 In an unpublished article, Peter Brunt took his interest in the relationship between Stoic ethics and early imperial social conventions a stage further, drawing particularly on Seneca, Musonius, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Clement of Alexandria. He argued that for many of these writers, the 10 11

12 13

14

NE 1145a27–33, 1148b15–49a20. E.g. Cic. Fin. 3.17.20–2, Stob. 2.60.9–24 (primary and secondary virtues), Stob. 2.58.5–15 (virtues and goods), Stob. 2.134.7–137.2 (goods and potencies), D.L. 7.101–3, Stob. 2.96.18–97.5 (good, bad and indifferent), Stob. 2.88.8–90.6 (passions). E.g. Stob. 2.59.4–60.2, 60.9–24, 90.19–91.9. Stoic indifferents and Aristotelian lesser goods, though, are in some ways similar to popular morality’s socially constructed goods. Popular ethics, especially gnomai, also make simple links between concepts, as we have seen: ‘friends are like treasuries’, ‘time brings evil doings to light’ and so on (pp. 119–20). SV 23.

336

Appendix 3

definition of virtue often coincided with the demands of ordinary social life. The way a man presents himself to the world, for instance, walking, speaking and gesturing in a way neither rustic nor effeminate, sluggish or excitable, indicates his moral as well as social standing in both Roman upper-class and Stoic circles.15 A number of Stoics in this period recommend friends not to go about looking like philosophers, dirty and unkempt, but to keep to ordinary decent standards of cleanliness and dress.16 Luxury was widely condemned by Stoics, but equally by Romans (and some Greeks) in general. On the other hand, socially prominent Stoics of the early Empire did not assert (as Chrysippus had) that bread and water are enough to sustain life.17 Clement follows Musonius in recommending good plain food and wine in moderation, along with nice table manners.18 Stoics were not expected to furnish their surroundings luxuriously, but neither were they expected to do without the houses, furnishings and slaves appropriate to their social station.19 Nor were Stoics against the ordinary recreations of sport and games, provided they did not leave one too tired to think.20 Adultery, taboo for Stoics, was equally taboo in society at large, for good practical reasons.21 Brunt points out that recommending people to honour the customs of their own society may seem contrary to the idea that virtue consists in conforming to universal laws of nature. He suggests that although no surviving source says so explicitly, Stoics would perhaps have argued that custom may happen to conform to nature in some cases, and that that had happened here.22 Brunt’s conclusion is that Stoic ideas not only coincided conveniently with many of the traditional views of the Roman elite, but were adapting to them as they became more popular. Some Stoics, if Brunt is right, accommodated themselves so far towards ordinary elite values that the two became hard to tell apart. (The particular elite values he discusses, however, are themselves a long way from popular ones. The emphasis on self-presentation through dress, walk and gesture; the rejection of luxury which allows one to keep a decent upper-class dinner table, wine cellar, town house and establishment of slaves; the enthusiasm for sports and games – all these have few or no echoes in popular sayings 15 16 17 19 20 21 22

Sen. ep. 15.7, 52.12, 66.3, 84.5, 8, M. Aur. 1.9.3, 3.5, 7.31, 37, 60, cf. Cic. Off. 1.102, 128, 130. E.g. Sen. ep. 5.1–6, Sen. De ira 2.21.11, Epict. Ench. 39, 4.12.16. Cf. Clem. Paed. 2.111, 129 (against luxury in women’s dress), Epict. Ench. 1.4.20, 3.1, 4.11, Clem. Paed. 3.46–7 (on cleanliness). 18 Clem. Paed. 2.1–34, cf. Mus. frr. 18a and b. SVF 3.706. Mus. fr. 19, 21, Clem. Paed. 2.38.3, 3.52. Sen. ep. 15, 80.2–3, D.L. 7.123, Sen. De ira 2.20.3, Epict. Ench. 4.4.24–8, cf. Cic. Off. 1.103. Epict. Ench. 2.18.15, cf. above, n. 8. Brunt suggests that later Stoics may have moderated earlier teachings to make them conform more easily with ordinary upper-class mores, though the paucity of direct evidence for the early Stoics makes it hard to be sure.


337

and stories.23 ) It is certainly true that there are similarities between the concerns and even the views of high philosophy and popular ethics. We should expect there to be: they come from the same Graeco-Roman world. But allowing for basic similarities due to common origins, the differences between philosophical doctrine and popular ethics are very great. Above all, the basic orientations of philosophical doctrine and popular ethics are widely different. The first is deeply interested in ideals, in theoretical accounts of ethical lives which at best could only ever be accessible to a tiny minority of highly privileged and educated people, and at worst (as critics complained of Stoicism) could never be attained by anyone. The second is concerned with getting by in a conflict-ridden everyday world in which most people are far from privileged.24 Many of the major concerns of popular sayings and stories – the gods, fortune, trust, wealth, strife – are minor concerns among philosophers. Important concerns among philosophers, such as temperance, constancy, power, passionlessness, pleasure, happiness or the regulation of the soul, are of little interest to popular ethics. Even where the two spheres share subjects of interest – friendship, wisdom, courage, justice – they often have different understandings of them or views about them. Despite some similarities, overlaps and even some shared material, the relationship between high philosophy, expressed as systematic doctrines, and popular morality is tenuous at best. philosophical inf luences on moralizing aut hors Among our sources for popular ethics, two in particular have been thought to show the influence of high philosophy: Phaedrus and Publilius Syrus. We noted in Chapter Three that Phaedrus has been suspected of both Stoic and Cynic affiliations.25 Although his subject matter and attitudes are on the whole well in line with those of other fables, he is arguably a little more idealistic, and in particular he praises people as bonus or castigates them as improbus without qualification, in a way which makes them sound like moral terms which philosophers might use. 23 24

25

Popular wisdom does assume that people who can afford it keep slaves and dine their friends, and it approves of physical health, if it does not have much to say explicitly about exercise. Even e.g. Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics are strongly idealistic, though they systematize ideas that he has drawn from observation. Stoics were criticized for operating two levels of ethical thinking, one theoretical and the other practical, which, though it no doubt contributed to their wider appeal, was seen by other philosophers as a cop-out. He is also unusual among fabulists in setting his stories in recognizable political contexts, both past and contemporary, e.g. Ph1.2 (Athens at the rise of Peisistratus), Ph2.5 (the court of Tiberius), Ph3 pr. 3.9 (the circle of Socrates), Ph3.10 (the reign of Augustus).

338

Appendix 3

On investigation, however, there is little to link Phaedrus explicitly with high, especially Hellenistic philosophy. Improbi, for example, have specific characteristics in their fables: they are not to be trusted;26 they destroy weak characters who look to them for protection;27 they are capable of lies, deceit and sacrilege.28 These are all qualities which could equally well be called generally mala, bad. They have many parallels in other popular material and there is nothing to link them distinctively to any philosophical school. Phaedrus’ fondness for making absolute statements like, ‘One should not trust bad people,’ or, ‘One should not do this,’ does not prove that he has a more ‘moral’ view of good and bad than other storytellers, nor that he thinks in more absolutist or black and white terms about good and bad people. It may be simply a preferred turn of phrase, which means much the same as, ‘It is bad (dyskolon) to transplant an old tree,’ or, ‘It is sweet and beautiful to die for your country.’29 Apart from Aesop, Phaedrus boasts of taking inspiration from the Muses and trying to outdo the wisdom of Anacharsis.30 (He also associates himself with Linus and Orpheus.31 ) He tells a fable about Aesop looking for a real man by walking through the Athenian agora at midday, missing an opportunity to tell it about its usual hero, Diogenes.32 He also tells two stories about Simonides.33 His cultural references, therefore, are well in line with those of wisdom texts in general; they keep to the archaic and classical worlds, and the philosophers they mention are iconic wise men. Phaedrus’ epimythia occasionally, and his stories themselves even more occasionally, imply a kind of moral judgement which would not be out of place in the works of a philosopher. There are echoes of philosophical dicta: ‘Examine yourself often’; ‘A learned man carries his wealth within him.’34 ‘One should not hurt anyone,’ begins Fable 1.26 uncompromisingly, an unusual sentiment for a fable but not unsuitable for a philosopher, if not distinctively Stoic. In Fable 2.5 Phaedrus proclaims his desire to reform the sort of people who fuss about trying to get close to the emperor and ingratiate themselves; the desire to reform people, as we have seen, is not a strong component of popular morality, but it does feature in stories about philosophers. As evidence of a philosophical affiliation, all this is rather fragile and general. Most of it, too, is no closer to specific philosophical doctrines than to other popular ethical texts. We should not be astonished to discover that Phaedrus the emperor’s freedman had picked up some philosophical ideas 26 30 34

27 Ph1.16, Ph1.31. 28 Ph5.2, Ph4.11. 29 P. Bour. 1, Hor. Carm. 3.2.13. Ph4.20. 31 Ph3 pr. 56. 32 Ph3.19, cf. D.L. 6.41. 33 Ph4.23, Ph4.26. Ph3 pr. 15–23, 52. Ph3.8.1, Ph4.23.1 (but this is said of Simonides, not a philosopher).


339

along with political and cultural ones in the course of his career, but there is little in his fables to show it decisively. Scholars have looked for, and found, philosophical references in Publilius Syrus too, and since he worked in Rome in the first century bce it is quite possible in principle that he encountered and was influenced by philosophers, Roman or Greek.35 Publilius offers us no direct references to philosophers in the surviving sententiae, but a number are at least compatible with philosophical doctrines. Perhaps the most striking is: ‘The definition of a good man is that he cannot do harm.’36 ‘No man of honour refuses to love virtue,’ ‘the wise man rules his spirit, the fool is its slave’ and ‘the stumbling-block to all virtue is fear’ are also dicta that would suit many philosophers.37 One can imagine a Cynic, urging the value of free speech, advising a follower ‘if you bear the vices of your friend, you make them yours’, or ‘you sin twice when you accommodate a sinner’.38 ‘You have to be wise to know you are a fool’ might seem to remember the ignorance which Socrates regularly attributed to himself.39 ‘How fortunate is the life which has passed without feuds’ suits both philosophers and popular ethics, though popular wisdom might have more doubts about the chances of it happening.40 These quotations illustrate the overlap between high philosophy and widely distributed sayings, and they may be the result of philosophical influence on Publilius – though only the first cannot be closely paralleled in other popular texts. At the same time, Publilius abounds in sayings which could not be further from the ideals of high philosophy. ‘It is harder for a wise man to be the object of contempt than for a fool to be beaten.’ ‘It is foolish to be frugal when you do not know for whom you are saving it.’ ‘Money is the one thing that makes the world go round.’41 (Nothing 35

36 37 38

E.g. Haltenhoff 2003, who argues that Publilius adapts the morals of the Roman elite for the lower classes. He finds traces of Stoicism in PS427: ‘You never know what to look forward to or avoid; that is the day’s joke,’ and of Epicureanism in PS152: ‘Pain decreases where it has nothing to feed on.’ (He also suspects there of being Peripatetic influences, but gives no example.) These are certainly both compatible with Stoic and Epicurean ideas, but both could equally well express common sense; this is a good example of coincidence of ideas being over-interpreted as direct influence. Haltenhoff also points out the high incidence of words such as bonus, honestus, probus, dignus and innocens in these sententiae, connecting them to the elite. We are hampered here by the relative paucity of Latin proverbs and sententiae; we can certainly say that honestus is particularly common, among our other sources, in Valerius (above, pp. 197–8); near-equivalents occur in a Greek gnome on papyrus too (P. Oxy. 79, about Alexander). So this term, at least, probably is associated particularly with elites and trickles socially downwards. The others have more widespread parallels, so are harder to pinpoint socially. PS721. PS723 (though ‘honourable’ might seem an odder word in a philosophical context); PS40, cf. PS77, PS137, PS728. 39 PS451. 40 PS599. 41 PS118, PS582, PS506. PS10, PS65, cf. PS348.

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divides high philosophy from popular wisdom more sharply than their attitudes to money. Popular sayings and stories may assert that the rich are more vulnerable than the poor in times of trouble, or that if one is poor one can be content with poverty, but never do they suggest that money is not desirable and being rich and powerful generally preferable to being poor. As for the idea of giving away one’s money for the sake of philosophy, as Democritus is supposed to have done, Valerius says of it, ‘The mind boggles . . . and passes on.’42 ) The most, then, we can safely say is that Publilius may take occasional ideas from high philosophy, and that if so, he incorporates them into a repertoire of attitudes, most of which no serious philosopher of any stripe would view with approval. The evidence for a close relationship between high philosophy, viewed as a series of systematic doctrines, and popular wisdom is therefore not strong. They address many of the same ideas, sometimes using the same vocabulary. But the central concepts of high philosophy are either absent in popular wisdom, or differently understood, while the relationships between virtues, vices, passions and the mind or soul which suffers and practises them, are quite differently expressed in the two spheres. 42

VM8.7 ext. 4.

List of papyri

Abbreviations follow the Checklist of Editions of Greek, Latin, Demotic and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets, BASP suppl. 5th edn (2001) Papyrus

Date (century) ce

Fables P. Ryl. 3.493 MPER NS 3.30 P. Köln 2.64 P. Haun. 3.46 P. Lugd. Bat. 25.5 P. Oxy. 10.1249 O. Claud. 2.413 Sijpesteijn (1968) 10 P. Yale 1.46 P. Oxy. 42.3007 P. Mich. 7.457 Gallo (1980) 433–45 P. Oxy. 11.1404 P. Mich. 18.765 Hesseling (1893) Parássoglou (1974) 31–7 Sijpesteijn (1968) 8–10 P. Bour. 1 P. Amh. 2.26

1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2–3 2–3 2–3 3 3 3 3 3 3–4 3–4

Gnomai MPER 3.24, 25 P. Oxy. 1.79 P. Oxy. 42.3004 Oikonomides (1980) 179–83 P. Oxy. 41.2994 Husselman (1945) 118–20 Gallazzi (1982) 97–101 P. Amh. 2.25

1 1 1 1–2 1–2 1–2 1–2 1–2

Provenance

Author/subject Aesop

Oxyrhynchus Mons Claudianus Oxyrhynchus Tebtynis? Oxyrhynchus Karanis Palmyra?

Soknopaiou Nesos Oxyrhynchus Oxyrhynchus

Babrius Aesop Babrius? Aesop Aesop Aesop Aesop Babrius Aesop Babrius Babrius Babrius Menander Seven Sages

Oxyrhynchus Karanis

341

[Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] (cont.)

342

Papyrus

List of papyri Date (century) ce

Provenance

P. Mich. 7.430 Waddell (1932) 16, 18 Hesseling (1893) 293 O. Claud. 185 O. Claud. 186 O. Claud. 187 O. Claud. 188 Kenyon (1909) Messeri Savorelli and Pintaudi (1997) 174–7 P. Oxy. 52.3685 PSI 9.1093 PSI 11.1198 P. Köln 6.253 P. Köln 7.308 Stephens (1985) 5–6 Shelton (1981) 355–62 P. Rein. 2.79 Milne (1922) 156–7 P. Schubart 29 Henrichs (1967) 45–54 Collart (1945) MPER 3.32 Görschen (1973) 115–31 Milne (1908) 126–7 Milne (1923) 40–3 Bartoletti (1966) 1–14

1–2 1–3 1–3 2 2 2 2 2 2

Karania Oxyrhynchus

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

Oxyrhynchus Oxyrhynchus Oxyrhynchus

P. Harr. 2.170 P. Oxy. 50.3541 P. Lond. Lit. Bouquiaux-Simon (1989) 461–79 Cribiore (1995) 263–70 P. Oxy. 42.3005 Gallo (1980) 433–45 P. Iand. 5.77

2 2 2 2–3 2–3 2–3 2–3 2–3

Lenaerts (1975) 195–6 Müller-Poethke (1980) 5–17 P. Erl. 8 Bingen (1966) 340

2–3 2–3 2–3 2–3

Mons Claudianus Mons Claudianus Mons Claudianus Mons Claudianus Oxyrhynchus?

Oxyrhynchus Oxyrhynchus? Soknopaiou Nesos Oxyrhynchus Elephantine Thebes Thebes

Author/subject

Menander Menander Menander Menander Plutarch Plutarch Seven Sages [Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] Menander Menander Antisthenes? Chaeremon Euripides Euripides Philemon? Philemon? Euripides Menander Theophrastus/ Anaximenes Demosthenes

Oxyrhynchus Philadelphia Tebtynis Oxyrhynchus Fayum Elephantine

Menander et al. Menander Menander Aristippus Menander Diphilus [Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] Hermarchus

List of papyri Papyrus

Date (century) ce

Kalbfleisch (1953) 107 Pintaudi-Sijpesteijn (1989) 89–91 P. Ross. Georg. 1.12 P. Oxy. 6.966 P. Mich. 8.1100 Pap. Flor. 19.181–8 P. Oxy. 42.3006 P. Oxy. 33.2661 P. Oxy. 44.3174 P. Ross. Georg. 1.13 Gallazzi (1985) 221–4 Mitthof (2000) 107–10 P. Goodspeed 1 P. Erl. 10 Schubert (1997) 97–105 P. Lund. 1.3 Maehler (1967) Hesseling (1893) 293–314 Reitzenstein (1900) 607–8 Nachtergael (1991) 221–5 PSI 2.143 Maehler (1967)

2–3 2–3 2–3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3

O. Wilk. 2.1310 P. Bon. 1–7 Stephens (1985) 6–8 Keil (1884) 596–643 P. Lond. Lit. 207 P. Lond. Lit. 255 P. Bour. 1 Boyaval (1977) 215–33 Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (1918) 742–3

3–4 3–4 3–4 3–4 3–4 3–4 3–4 3–4 3–4

Kenyon (1909) P. Schubart 20 Goodspeed (1905) 181–2 P. Köln 6.246 Plasberg (1903) 217–24 Pap. Flor. 22.27 O. Mich. 1.658 P. Oxy. 8.1095

3–4 3–4 3–4 3–4 3–4 3–4 3–4 4

Provenance

343 Author/subject

Fayum? Narmouthis Oxyrhynchus Karanis Oxyrhynchus Oxyrhynchus

Menander Menander

Narmouthis

[Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] Euripides Hesiod [Isocrates] Menander

Karanis Upper Egypt Oxyrhynchus Palmyra? Hermoupolis Oxyrhynchus Fayum Oxyrhynchus Oxyrhynchus Oxyrhynchus? Fayum Memphis? Philadelphia

Euripides Antiphanes [Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] Menander Menander Ps.Epicharmus Euripides Theognis Homer Hesiod Pythagoras

Panopolis Upper Egypt Oxyrhynchus

[Isocrates] (cont.)

344

List of papyri

Papyrus

Date (century) ce

Müller (1996) 1–3 P. Lugd. Bat. 25.5 P. Ross. Georg. 1.16 MPER 4.136–9 Papathomopoulos (1962) 113–16 P. Harr. 2.174 Goodspeed (1905) 181–3 PSI 2.120 Nachtergael (1991) Pap. Flor. 22.28, 30 Lenaerts (1989a) 210–15 SB 3.6215–18 PSI 4.280 P. Freib. 4.45 Brashear (1986) 3–16 O. Bodl. 1.144 Jouguet-Lefebvre (1904) 208–9

4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4–5 4–5 4–5 4–5 4–5 4–6 4–6

Exempla Gallo (1980) 325–40 MPER 3.32 O. Claud. 2.413 Jouguet-Lefebvre (1904) 201–5 P. Mil. Vogl. 6.263 P. Ross. Georg. 1.17 P. Bour. 1 Boyaval (1974) 241–7 Boyaval (1975) 225–35 PSI 7.848 SB 1.5730 O. Wilk. 2.1226

1 2 2 2 2 3 3–4 3–4 4 4 4–5 Late Roman

Provenance

Author/subject

Hermoupolis

[Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] [Isocrates] Euripides

Fayum Hermoupolis? Oxyrhynchus Hermoupolis Upper Egypt

Menander [Isocrates]

Oxyrhynchus Menander Philemon?

Mons Claudianus Thebes Tebtynis

Saqqara Fayum

Diogenes Diogenes Anacharsis Demosthenes Secundus Diogenes Thales et al. Thales Aesop Diogenes Aesop

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Index

The names of authors are included where their use or views of popular wisdom are discussed in some detail in the text. abstinence 146, 306, 307 (see also ‘self-control’) Achilles Tatius 31 adultery 334, 336 Aelian 271 aetiologies 253 agriculture 18, 53, 104 Anacharsis 281 anger 101, 104, 150, 174, 209, 333 apatheia (absence of suffering) 334 Aristophanes of Byzantium 28 Aristotle 4, 5, 26, 27, 58, 259, 334, 335 arrogance 37, 64, 96, 150, 316 ataraxia (freedom from passion) 334 Athenaeus 267 Aulus Gellius 266, 267 autonomy (see ‘freedom’) avarice 47, 73, 92, 150, 209 bad (range of vocabulary for) 191–3, 304, 316, 319 beauty 118, 155, 193, 194, 305, 333 beloved (see ‘dear’) benevolence 306, 333 bitter 193–4 boasting 48, 64 boldness 115, 118, 302 bon mot fables 80–2 carping 37, 38 caution 102, 319, 320 censorship 139 change 33, 54 charm 194 chastity 145, 153, 155, 253, 305, 307, 317, 318 Christianity 2, 17, 86, 88, 113, 209, 210, 248, 269, 303 Chrysippus 27 Cicero 128, 312 civilization 193, 196

Clearchus 5, 27 clemency (see ‘mercy’) Clement of Alexandria 268 community (as moral arbiter: see ‘society’) concord 67, 101 conflict 35–7, 54, 63–7, 101, 157, 163, 164, 197, 316, 320 consequentialism 228–9, 248 constancy 253 contentment 66, 97, 157 continence 146, 153, 157 (see also ‘self-control’) conviction 140 core ethics 183 courage 10, 16, 40, 41, 95, 137, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 174, 193, 253, 303, 319, 320, 333 cowardice 16, 37, 38, 138, 193, 209 cross-bonding of authorities 232 cruelty 150, 209 cultural capital 170 cunning 147 Cynics 27, 79, 122, 166, 276, 278, 280, 299, 334, 339 dear 194, 304, 305, 316, 317 death 18, 114, 116, 163, 288, 317–8, 319 debt 92 deceit, trickery 38, 69, 74, 333 decency, shame (pudor) 193, 309 Delphic maxims 18, 26, 84, 104, 116, 205, 249, 284, 288, 293 Demetrius, On Style 26 Demetrius of Phalerum 259 Demon 28 dice oracles 8, 270, 319 Dicta Catonis 87 Didymus Chalkenteros 28 Dio Chrysostom 85, 125, 225 discipline 138, 154

377

378

Index

disgust, distaste (fastidium) 309 dream books 8 drunkenness 118 dullness 38 education 52, 53, 103, 116, 156 elective good 204 end justifies the means 155 endurance 137, 157, 208 enmity 68–70, 100, 146, 155, 319 enthusiasm 302 envy 209, 309, 310, 316, 333 Epictetus 282, 297 Epicureans 284–5, 318, 334, 335 Erasmus 9 error 150 ethics wide, ethics narrow 12 eudaimonia (see ‘happiness’) evil 36, 79, 157, 208, 338 executive virtues 180, 184, 203 experience 71, 80, 237, 240, 242, 250 failure (though overambition) 65, 73 fairness 318 faith (see ‘good faith’) family 18, 50, 54, 78, 102, 106, 108, 119, 159 fate 77, 113, 301, 304, 319 favour 306 fertility 305 fides (see ‘good faith’) flattery (see ‘sycophancy’) foolishness 43–7, 48, 70–3, 316, 333 foreigners 52, 157, 214 fortuna (see ‘fortune’) fortunate (see ‘happiness’) fortune (tychê, fortuna) 11, 33, 77, 111–2, 115, 119, 120, 134–5, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 165, 242–3, 288, 301, 304, 319, 335 freedom 203, 232, 240, 303 free speech 339 friendship 18, 39–40, 55, 68–70, 82, 98–100, 119, 141, 153, 155, 159, 167, 181, 333, 334 frugality 146, 154, 155, 159, 174, 318 fruitlessness 46, 195 the future 243 generosity 41, 55, 93–4, 142, 154, 155, 157, 167, 181, 252, 303, 306 gentleness 67, 118 geography (as moral authority) 221 glory (see ‘reputation’) gluttony 18, 48, 73, 157 gods 18, 31–5, 54, 75–7, 82, 111, 113, 118, 131, 150, 158, 161, 207, 241, 320 golden age 218

good (range of vocabulary for) 191–3, 304, 316, 319 good counsel 307 good faith, trust (pistis, fides) . 11, 37, 55, 68, 82, 99, 136, 155, 157, 167, 208, 303, 306, 317 good housekeeping 305 gratitude 41, 95, 97, 142, 253 great 198 greatness 139, 154, 156, 157, 302 greed 47, 73, 115, 209, 333 (see also ‘avarice’, ‘gluttony’) happiness 48, 49, 199–200, 333 hatred 150, 209 health 51, 118, 333 heavy 198 helpfulness 40, 41, 306 Hermogenes 26, 58, 84, 124 hierarchy (social) 42, 65, 82, 316 history (as moral authority) 217–21 holiness 198, 302 honesty 40, 74, 82, 154, 305 honour 154, 306, 333 (see also ‘reputation’) hope 47, 52, 112, 117, 303, 306 humanity (humanitas) 31, 34, 54, 75–7, 111, 114, 142, 162, 211, 212 hybris (see ‘arrogance’) hypocrisy 74 ignorance 52 ill temper 38 importunateness 37 impossibility 46, 168, 193, 202 inappropriateness 37, 38 inequality 54, 164 inscriptions 8, 304–6 integrity 306, 310 intelligence (see ‘wisdom’) is – ought slippage 120, 203 jealousy 157 Judaism 2, 88, 210 justice 40, 66, 67, 75, 109, 136, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 169, 208, 241, 252, 303, 305, 306, 316, 318, 333 kairos (see ‘right time’) kindness 303 kydos (see ‘reputation’) law 102, 109, 110, 151, 169, 172 laziness 92 leisure 153, 155, 318 levity 209 lies (see ‘truth’)

Index love 50, 78, 106, 157, 318 Lucillus of Tarrha 28, 58 lust 149, 209, 333 luxury 47, 48, 149, 157, 209, 336 manly virtue (andreia, virtus: see ‘courage’) Maximus of Tyre 57, 226, 295 mercy 97, 142, 144, 154, 155, 167, 174, 253, 303, 306 metaphor 33, 165, 212, 230, 244 metaphysical, the 31, 75–7, 111, 119, 131, 158 mildness 157 mind 104, 108, 206, 230 moderation 145, 253, 306 modesty 147, 154, 156, 157, 208, 303, 305, 307 moral luck 165 multi-gravitational model of ethics 183, 189 murder 18, 181 myth (as moral authority) 216–7 natural goodness 185 natural goods 194, 195, 199, 204, 214 natural temper (indoles) 137, 211 nature (as moral authority) 162, 211–2, 232, 289 necessity 32, 54, 135 nemesis 32, 33 nobility 96, 193, 196, 302, 305, 333 old age 34, 35, 78, 115, 118, 163 old women 51 opportunity costs 251 oppression 37 Oracles of Astrampsacus 270 overambition (see ‘arrogance’) parable 20 passion 206, 335 past, the 148–9, 243 (see also ‘history’) patience 253 patriotism 18, 100, 144, 153, 154, 303, 306, 308 peacemaking 153 Peripatetics 339 peripheral ethics 183 phase rules 179 philosophers (as moral authorities) 222–5 piety (‘loyalty’, ‘devotion’, towards people, communities, state) 107, 143–5, 153, 156, 157, 159, 253, 305, 306, 308, 316, 317, 333 piety (towards gods) 131–3, 143–5, 154, 157, 159, 320 Plato 11, 26 pleasure 333 Pliny the Elder 128, 266–7, 312 Pliny the Younger 19, 125 Plutarch 18, 19, 21, 28, 85, 267, 268, 270, 290

379

poets (as moral authorities) 222–5 pointlessness 46, 168, 193, 202, 319 poverty (see ‘frugality’, ‘wealth’) power 35, 37, 63–7, 95, 96, 119, 196 powerlessness 37, 63–7, 95, 97, 118 pride 155, 157 prisoner’s dilemma 166 progress 242 protection 167 ps.-Phocylides 10, 88 Quintilian 26, 52, 58, 85, 124, 261–2 rashness 150 reason (see ‘wisdom’) reciprocity (strict and expanded) 42, 78, 100, 162, 167, 241 regret 309 religion 32, 54, 76, 131, 132, 161 reputation 91, 95, 96, 157, 197, 302, 333 respect for elders 153 respect, shame (verecundia) 307, 309 responsibility 115, 154, 158, 164, 230 revenge 151 riddles 5, 214 right time, opportunity (kairos) 11, 33, 235, 248–52, 316, 319, 320 rottenness 195 ruthlessness 154 savagery 157 scorn 37 Secundus, Life of 282 self, nature of 205–6 self-confidence 140, 154, 181, 333 self-control 104, 145, 150, 154, 155, 157, 159, 209, 253, 333 self-reliance 42 Seneca the Younger 26, 27, 86, 125, 259, 286–90 service (see ‘helpfulness’) Seven Sages 5, 18, 26, 59, 84, 90, 91, 104, 122, 224, 259, 275, 278, 279, 282, 284 severity 141 Sextus, Sentences of 269 shame 197 shamelessness 193, 209 situational ethics 180 slander 49 slavery 54, 92, 109, 137, 158, 159, 196 small 198 social capital 170 society (as moral arbiter) 141, 213–6 Solon 7, 35, 42, 189, 284 soul 206, 230 Sparta 2, 17

380 speech 48–9, 105–6, 148, 173 state 131, 140, 158, 169, 215 Stobaeus 28, 61, 107, 259 Stoics 22, 79, 276, 334, 336 stubbornness 38 Suidas (the Suda) 61 superstition 333 sweet 193–4, 304, 305 sycophancy 37 temperance (see ‘self-control’) Thales 34 Theon 57, 85, 124, 225 Theophrastus 28 trade tranquillity of mind 290 treachery 150, 209 trust (see ‘good faith’) truth, truthfulness 48, 74, 80, 105–6, 303, 318, 333 tychê (see ‘fortune’) ugliness 18 unmanliness 48 upright 198, 307

Index usefulness 193, 195, 196, 304, 319, 333 utilitarianism (see ‘consequentialism’) vanity 52, 157 verbs (mood) 181, 200–4, 236, 287, 288, 289, 290, 294 verbs (tense) 236 violence 150, 316, 333 virtues (divinized) 135, 136, 208, 210, 311, 322 wealth and poverty 18, 47, 52, 90–4, 119, 146, 155, 167, 171, 209, 307, 333 wellerism 24 wills 152 wisdom (intelligence, good sense, prudence) 43–8, 55, 66, 70–3, 82, 102–5, 112, 120, 130, 147, 154, 157, 168, 181, 188, 242, 250, 253, 303, 305, 320, 333 women 50, 78, 106, 107, 159, 172, 288 (see also ‘family’, ‘love’, ‘old women’) work 95, 116, 153, 157, 303, 306, 308, 317 worth (see ‘usefulness’) worthy (axios, dignus) 304, 306, 315 youth 34, 35

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