the classical tradition

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The Classical TraditionGreek Scholars in Venice: Studies in the Dissemination of Greek Learning from Byzantium toWestern Europe by Deno John Geanakoplos; From Sophocles to Picasso: The Present-DayVitality of the Classical Tradition by Whitney J. OatesReview by: Frederic WillArion, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring, 1963), pp. 93-102Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20162825 .

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THE CLASSICAL TRADITION1

Frederic Will

I THIS ROOK CONSIDERS THE CONTRIBUTION OF CERTAIN EMIGRE

Greek scholars, in the later 15th century, to the editing, printing, and dissemination of classical texts in Italy. All of these men came from Crete originally, but their careers varied greatly. Demetrius

Ducas found his way to Spain, where he spent the most creative

part of his life working with Cardinal Ximenes in the editing of the huge Polyglot Bible. Marcus Apostohs spent most of his life in Crete, hunting and copying manuscripts. Marcus Musurus

was an editor of numerous texts for Aldus Manutius in Venice,

but became even more famous as a lecturer at the University of

Pa via. Zacharias Calliergis was most effective as a wonderfully skilled printer, in Venice. And so on. The penultimate chapter of the book is devoted to the relation of Erasmus both to some of these men, and to the milieu in which they Uved. Here many of the earUer strands of the work are picked up and held together. Initial and final chapters survey the contribution of Renaissance

Greeks and Greek colonies to the Italy of the day. The work has certain transparent faults, two of which must

be mentioned immediately, then put aside so that its merits can be discussed.

First: the style is heavy and dull, and accedes systematically to the rituals of scholarly language. If the author were not a feeUng person, and were not deeply involved in his theme, the stylistic agony here would be almost mortal. How could so many stock

phrases be used so many times? 'Opportunistic as perforce they had to be . . .' (p. 280); 'various far-flung

areas of Europe' (pp.

293?4); 'circumstances ... intervened to prevent immediate

implementation...' (p. 65); 'this second matrimonial venture

provoked the ire . . .' (p. 83). In isolation these banal and con

stantly repeated phrases hardly attract attention; cumulatively,

though, they threaten the life of the whole work like a deadly narcotic. Has the author?who is American?never Ustened to a

word of spoken EngUsh? We would hardly suppose it, to read his own translations from Renaissance poetry. There seems to be

no vestige of literary energy here. Language has lost all relation to Ufe.

And, second, that Ufe is badly needed. The axis of Geanakop los' book is biography. It is essential that the individuaUties of his

men should emerge, that their distinctive characters should ex

press the complexity of the native Greek contribution, a com

1 Greek Scholars in Venice: Studies in the Dissemination of Greek

Learning from Byzantium to Western Europe. By Deno John Geana

koplos. Harvard University Press, 1962. 348 pp. $7.50.



94 THE CLASSICAL TRADITION

plexity on which the author insists. Yet those characters are never

given individual life: they melt quickly into one another, until of each we remember only vague outlines, and a few facts?the

character's one or two most important editions of Greek texts,

and the Italian cities in which he passed most time. But we retain

nothing of his living personaUty, except, perhaps, the ringing sound of those few descriptive adjectives?'self-interested/ 'noble/

'indefatigable'?which the author has doggedly attached, like Ho meric epithets, to his cast of actors. We wanted living language, but we are given tags describing Ufe. Geanakoplos can not make

people out of words, because he has not, to begin with, experi enced his words as

Uving. Yet there are many merits here. Enthusiasm and commitment

compensate for great faults. The author has some of the spirit which Erasmus expresses in praising Aldus Manutius:

By God, it is a Herculean task and one worthy of a princely mind to restore to the world something divine which has almost completely foundered, to search for what is hidden, to bring to light that which has been concealed, to imbue

with Ufe what has been mutilated, to reconstruct passages that have been mutilated, and to emend others distorted in countless ways through the fault especially of irresponsible printers, to whom the small profit of even one gold coin is of greater value than all of literature, (p. 271).

Geanakoplos' scholarly passion gives itself wide and significant scope; an important area?the late 15th and early 16th centuries

?of the Renaissance. We touch frequently the author's evident

desire?to know what happened, to hold the past?engaging

accu

rately and conscientiously with the appropriate records of 15th and 16th century Venice, Florence, or Rome. There may be errors

of detail here, not to mention errors of interpretation. Much of

the material is obscure, many points debated and debatable. But

Geanakoplos is open-handed, ostensibly unbiased, and creates a

favorable sense of his self-abnegation before the importance of his

subject. Five relatively unknown Greeks have been excavated in this scholarly dig.

While digging, Geanakoplos also uncovers certain general points of great interest. His language works against him, and makes everything seem less important than it is. It even makes him seem, which is probably half-true, not to realize the impor tance of the points he brings out. They are almost by-products of his Erasmian 'passion.' Yet they emerge. Three are salient.

First, there is much evidence of the unity of vision with tech nical skill in these scholars during the Renaissance. The word 'vision' must be defined here. Michael ApostoUs, Marcus Musurus,

Arsenios ApostoUs, Zacharias Calliergis, and Demetrius Ducas?

the chief actors in this drama?were all Greeks, born in Crete between 1422 (Michael ApostoUs) and 1480 (Demetrius



Frederic Will 95

Ducas). They were all, therefore, directly affected by the fall of

Constantinople, and by the gradual, and widely felt, growth in

power of the Ottomans. They were all brought up in an anxious

world?which should be intelligible to us?where the power of a

great religion (Christianity) was being threatened, and the docu ments of a great culture (the ancient Greek) were being scattered and

imperilled. For various reasons these men, and many like

them in formerly Byzantine countries, emigrated to Italy. There

they found jobs with printing establishments, in private libraries, in schools, and often in a combination of these posts. These new

positions gave them opportunities, and often security, which were no

longer possible even in Crete, not to mention more eastern

parts of the former Byzantine Empire. Into that new world they took, along with their private ambitions and other traits, a

strong sense of the importance of the threatened ancient Hellenic cul

ture, which was their own heritage, though they were no longer its

equals; though they were, as Marcus Musurus wrote,

the remnants, because, in the cycle of civilization, which has a

beginning, a middle, and an end, we are in the closing

stage of our culture . . . (p. 109)

Their 'vision' was the half-seen memory of the first stage of their

civilization, and that memory motivated much of their activity. This 'vision' was

put to work, in every case, to contribute to

the technical, practical preservation of the literary remains of the Greek past. We know, today, how much of ancient literature has

perished, and how much of it barely survived the Middle Ages; we are aware of the material fragility of the classical tradition.

But the Greek emigre scholars of the 15th century were far more,

and far more immediately, aware of this fact. A man like Michael

ApostoUs, who did much of his scribe-work in Crete, knew that often when his employer Bessarion requested

a new manuscript,

the job entailed would be front-Une salvation. Musurus and

Ducas, who worked with the press of Aldus Manutius in Venice, realized that their efforts were vital in the first place simply as

mere dissemination and preservation. They willingly turned their 'vision' and talents to the work of editing, compositing, and

proof

reading. It was not necessary that they do this wilUngly, for actu

ally such activity was

expected even from authors?as we see, for

instance, in the way Erasmus and Aldus collaborated on the

'meanest' details of the printing of the Adages. But these scholars did do such work wilUngly, with at worst no sense that the edi torial side was baser than the creative, and at best a feeling that the two phases of work were organically interrelated. It would never have occurred to them that later, in much modern classical

scholarship, concern with details might be erected into an end.

The fusion of vision with technical indoctrination, in this case, was born under unique historical conditions, and the meanings both of 'vision' and 'technique' here depend closely on the under




standing of that epoch. Yet there is some kind of exemplary beauty in the situation which had developed. Scholarly activity was deeply involved with cultural commitment and a sense of threatened values, and both were held close to real Ufe by the

practical exigency of book-production. A second point which emerges is harder to characterize, though

certain 20th century notions of tradition, such as that developed by T. S. EUot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," have in a

way prepared us. I mean the awareness of the plasticity and 'man-made character' of the classical tradition.

To us the classics of Greek and Roman literature seem, at first

glance, to be a firm block of literary works, the 'soUd' productions of soUd men, whom we can name and date with the confidence of

well-trained schoolboys

at a spelling bee. And, of course, we are

partly right. But not so much as we think, or rather much more

partially than we think. Our maiden contacts with textual criti

cism, if we get that far, are

usually instructive. We see to what

degree the specific words of the texts we read are open to doubt; we look at the bottom of the page in our Oxford texts. Then we

encounter, perhaps, the Homeric question. Then the questions of the date of Hesiod, of the travels of Archilochus, the movements of the Sophists. We may even come, if we follow recent scholar

ship, to realize the uncertainty of the ancient Greek calendar

system and, therefore the uncertainty of our ability to date an

cient events at all by our own system. This knowledge should be

sobering, although it can lead to excesses of its own.

The breach of confidence begun here is soon widened by a further discovery, of the plasticity and historicity of the classical tradition. The past itself may be "unknowable"; but the problem involved in trying to know it is compounded when we realize by

what a variable tradition even that knowledge about that past has been handed on to us. Men have made the classical tradition, and

so it has varied from century to century; so, really, has 'antiquity'

itself, at least in any effectual sense of the word. We need to reaUze this.

It is a kind of realization which points toward the truth, and which is disquieting only if we insist that the ancient past should be intelUgible in, say, the way that the timeless truths of physics are intelUgible. The classical tradition has been made by men

choosing, interpreting, and shaping the elements of that tradition.

Geanakoplos is never explicitly concerned with this point, yet his work illustrates it wonderfully. For he has looked closely at a

burning moment during which the 'modern' classical tradition was

very much in the process of being made by men. He has shown us scholars?Uke Michael ApostoUs in Crete?in the throes of copy ing texts which would shortly find their ways into editiones prin cipes which?like many of those of Manutius?would remain

standard for a century or more. (The Aldine Pindar, for that mat



Frederic Will 97

ter, "would stand for three centuries as the vulgate

version of

both the text and scholia." p. 214). Or we see a man Uke Arsenios

ApostoUs collecting, in his Thesaurus Cornucopiae et horti Adon

idis, "thirty-four extremely important Greek and Byzantine gram matical treatises . . ." (p. 172), and, what is of more formative

importance, "fragments from ancient Greek poets which cannot

elsewhere be located, the manuscript sources for which are now

lost." This latter service, the preserving of what would otherwise

be lost, is symbolic of the entire gesture of creating a tradition; it is a small, but immensely symptomatic, act. A far larger act, one

which for the outset had widespread cultural effects, and which was

directly influential in the creation of a classical tradition, was

Erasmus' publication of his Adages, the first Aldine edition of which appeared in 1508. The list of authors used for that Bart letfs Quotations of the sixteenth century

comprises some of the most celebrated and influential works of Greek antiquity in the fields of rhetoric, philosophy, eth ics, geography, and epic and lyric poetry. And the large

majority of these?with the notable exception of the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch?were virtually unknown to the West before their subsequent publication by the Aldine Press, (p. 265).

A third broad awareness, which emerges from Greek Scholars in Venice, is of the unity of European Renaissance culture, inso

far as it turned on the axis of the classical tradition.

This point does not centrally concern Geanakoplos, but there is no misreading the evidence he assembles. His title is the first clue. Though Italy and Greece have never been poUtical friends, and

though even in the Renaissance cities like Venice and Rome

were rather grudgingly hospitable to their sizable Greek col onies, still the flowering of Italian Humanism was to some extent the product of collaboration between Greek and Italian scholars, scribes, and printers. This was a moment of harmony between the

two nations.

It is not only

a question of the unity between Greece, the

Greek East, and Italy, as it concerned the classical tradition. De

metrius Ducas spent his most creative years at the new University

of Alcal? in Spain where he worked with Cardinal Ximenes in

preparing the Greek portion of the enormous Polyglot Bible, the New Testament part of which first appeared in 1544. Erasmus, a

representative of northern Humanism, appeared only briefly in

Italy?between 1506-9?where he both contributed to and took much from the cosmopoUtan scholars whom he found in Venice and Padua. Then he took his deepened classical learning back to

Holland. The center of his learning in Venice was the sophisti cated group which Aldus had gathered about himself, around 1500. That Neakademia, with its membership of 36 to 39 per

manent members, was an exclusive club of scholars who, only in



98 THE classical tradition

Greek, discussed questions of textual criticism and dissemination.

More than twelve of these men were Greek. Others, Uke Girolamo

Aleandro, were 'foreign' professors; Aleandro was the "founder of

the teaching of Greek in Paris" (p. 129). Another?an honorary visiting member?was the EngUsh 'physician-humanist' Thomas

Linacre. And so on. Without intending to stress the international

point, Geanakoplos makes this axis of European cultural unity

perfectly clear. He seems hardly

to be aware of the immensity of

such a statement as that

the Greek chair at the nearby university of Venetian-con

trolled Padua, during its occupancy by the Cretan scholar Marcus Musurus, became the most famous in all Europe, with students from Italy, France, Germany, the Lowlands,

Spain, and Hungary flocking to hear his lectures, (p. 283). Yet these words ring loudly even for our day. We are striving for

European unity again. The Common Market and NATO are at least gestures toward unity; there is an increasing interchange of scholars and students among European countries; there is even a

sense of the essential unity of a European 'Christian position/ as distinct from a

miUtantly anti-Christian position. In this context

it is hard to imagine a more profitable subject of thought than the

underlying classical unity of western Europe.

II

Many of the issues raised in this book appear, in different form, in a second recent volume.2 This book consists of seven essays, six of them based on talks given at Indiana University in 1958.

There are six contributors, all ostensibly concerned with the gen eral question of the 'vitaUty of the classical tradition.' Before them all stands an introduction by Whitney J. Oates, which

makes us fear for the collection: will it be vapid and merely edi

fying? Then comes the introductory essay by Eric Havelock, on the 'tragic' as the most significant facet of the Greek spirit for our

age. Our worries grow. When will the collection get to work?

Why all this generaUty? Three of the remaining pieces go to work, but in the wrong

way for this collection; they do not illustrate the vitaUty of the classical tradition. One, by the painter Stephen Greene, concerns 'The Tragic Sense in Modern Art/ but passes so briskly over the

whole question of the tragic, in human experience, that the

classically tragic is lost from sight. Another, by Roger Sessions, on 'The Classical Tradition in Music/ works over the relevant

material?of which there is not much?very capably in terms of

textbook influence. We learn that our musical scale and the

2 From Sophocles to Picasso: The Present-Day Vitality of the Classi

cal Tradition, edited by Whitney J. Oates. Indiana University Press, 1962. Pp. 208. $4.50.



Frederic Will 99

themes of many modern works of music have been 'in

herited from' or Influenced by' the Greeks. But the notion of 'in fluence' is here understood in such a conventional and external

form that we are in the end left with a rather heavy positivistic account. Not even so much, in gesture to the main themes, is

provided by H. D. F. Kitto, in his 'The Vitality of Sophocles.' There we find, as we

might expect, much good

sense and percep tion devoted to analyzing Antigone, and to discussing the re

markable power of 'condensation' in Greek tragedy. But we find

nothing about the classical tradition. The vitality of the classics is, after all, quite a different matter from the vitality of the classi cal tradition. Such a realization, on the part of editor and con

tributors, would have strengthened this collection. We have come, here, for more than reassurances that the ancient Greeks

were great.

Herbert M?ller, in the concluding essay, on 'Freedom and the

Classical Tradition/ takes us farther. He points out the complex sources of our notion that each individual deserves, and must

justify, his own freedom. Christianity has something?but rela

tively Uttle?to do with that conviction. The Christian Church has always defended freedom theologically, while it has seldom done so politically. The 'Church/ M?ller argues and complains, has too often aUgned itself with political reactionism. The fifth

century Athenians gave a far more practical and lasting impulse to the notion of freedom. They knew how to embody their demo cratic theory, even though they were unable to preserve it very long in its practical form. They began the adventure of taking

man seriously

as a political animal. Their 'faith' was

surprisingly, but potently, continued by the rise of bourgeois culture in the

early Rennissance. The growth of a mercantile middle-class, with

its laissez-faire economy, made the individual?at first the 'great man/ then man in general?newly saUent. The importance of the

individual both assumed, and seemed to justify, his freedom.

Finally the eighteenth century. The great rationalists and free thinkers of that period preserved the notion of man's freedom, and bound that notion closely to the sense of human dignity, of

pride in humanity. To men as different as d'Alembert, Diderot, Shaftesbury,

or Lessing

we owe at least one single conviction:

that man is no slave of the divine, but that each individual is

free, at least to some important extent, to create his own

destiny. The Deists thereby join the Athenians, and the early bourgeois middle-class, as

shapers of a complex tradition. The 'classical' is

part, but only part. Briefly, M?ller has shown what a limited, yet decisive and originating, ingredient the classical can be.

Otto Brendel, in a pair of essays which are the high-point of this collection, has enforced Muller's point, from the example of

visual art. But he has also gone much farther, because he has

entered into greater detail, and provided a sense of what it might




mean, to the artist in the classical tradition, to be working with

that tradition.

His first essay, on 'The Classical Style in Modern Art/ begins by distinguishing the Renaissance from the Neo-Classical uses of ancient visual material. In the Renaissance no canon of accept able models or methods of treating them had been estabUshed.

There was considerable freedom. This was not the self-conscious

freedom which will appear later?say in Picasso?when an ironic,

perverse, or jocose independence from classical forms is dis

played, while at the same time the classical forms are being em

ployed. Renaissance artists enjoyed

a far easier relation to their

classical models, which to a great extent they followed exuber

antly out of love and joy, but which no obscure conscience bound them to imitate. Neo-classical art, and especially that fostered by the national academies which begin to make their appearance in the seventeenth century,

was neither free nor exuberant in its

relation to classical form. Still long after Winckelmann's revolu

tion, past even David or Canova, the Neo-classical sculptors and

painters were subordinating their powers of self-expression; they were holding themselves to the chilly 'forms' which the classical had come to mean for them. It is no wonder that since the mid nineteenth century the classical, in visual art, has acquired a new

meaning. Brendel interests himself greatly in the vitality and virtuosity

with which Picasso has redefined the classical. There is in the

early Picasso both the exuberant delight in classical expression, and the masterly formal exactitudes of which the neo-classicists

were so fond. But it is not long before Picasso begins to adopt a more

complex attitude toward the artistic tradition. The growth

of this attitude has its roots in the 'feelings' which were at the time

producing cubism, and which were themselves products of a

desire to experience the world freshly, in freedom from the clich?s of visual awareness. Yet at the same time Picasso pre served the tradition of classical forms as an indispensable vocabu

lary of visual effects. This passionate but immensely distorting preservation is best

illustrated by Picasso's Guernica 1937, which Brendel makes the

subject of his second essay. We see brought together, on that holocausted canvas, twisted or

fragmentary classical images: a

detached, oratorical arm, lying in rubble; a proud, conquering bull?a bull from the sea; a fractured Hippolytean horse; a se

renely hysterical female head?an ancient head of Justice, or a

tragic mask?surveying the scene with all the calmness possible or

appropriate to it. Even the entire canvas, long and rectangular,

and spiritually concentrated on the center, looks 'classical.' Yet it contains only the twisted and the destroyed. As a whole it is an

image of the world of classical forms which Picasso, in the late

thirties, considered appropriate to mature expression. It is an



Frederic Will 101

cient form, passed through the millstones of agony, and repre sented in a new, broken wholeness.

The essays by M?ller and Brendel deal with the classical tra dition. Muller's piece is more 'external'; it surveys, from outside,

the complex strands which are woven together to form a single fabric?our beUef in the importance of human freedom. The 'classical' is rightly

seen as one, and as only one, of those strands.

Brendel's essays are written, by some

strange projective power of the author, from the inside of the tradition. In part they are

historical, Uke Muller's piece. Brendel summons up some chang

ing versions of the meaning of the classical in art. But at his best, and especially in the discussion of Guernica, Brendel makes us

participate in the detailed, plastic, gradually maturing negotia tion between a

great artist and classical forms. He makes us see

to what extent those forms had become internal to Picasso, had come to interest him as elements of his spiritual vocabulary. At this point every lieu commun about the nobility of the classical tradition falls away, and we are left with an essential and vital

spiritual tradition.

Turning from M?ller and Brendel back to the other essays in this book, one is tempted first to ask why the others wrote as they did. Why didn't they, too, write about the classical tradition, about the way in which the inheritance of classical culture was 'handed over' to its successors? Even if they had stayed on the

outside of the tradition, like M?ller, they would have been at

tending to the theme of the book. It is not simply, though, that

they would have been doing their duty. For this book brings at one

point a radical awareness with it. And that awareness, in its

turn, makes us feel another weakness in the lesser contributions.

We are made to reaUze that the classical tradition, as distinct

from the classical in itself, has unique significance. Of course this distinction is difficult to make. The classical in itself is an elusive notion. Every aspect of classical culture is intelligible to us only through our translation of it: through our versions of its

words; through our conditioned experience of its visual forms;

through our contemporarily shaped conceptual experience of its

philosophies. Given these limitations, though, it is still possible for self-critical and historically trained 'moderns' to form an ob

jective judgment of the character of aspects of antiquity. Such

judgments will vary with the generations. But at least one factor, in all of them, will be constant. They will converge, in a vast

leap of spirit, directly upon a culture which flourished two and a half millennia ago. They will write about the astonishing power of 'condensation' in Sophocles, about the deep sense of the 'tragic' among the Greeks, or perhaps about the way men voted in fifth

century Athens. Their undertaking is important. But one lack will be felt in all their studies, as it is felt in the pieces by Have

lock, Kitto, or Stephen Greene in this collection.




None of these scholars will be touching the Greeks at the point where they emerge onto the scene of our present. While it may be true that the Greek achievement is to some extent still intelli

gible in itself and as it was, it is even truer that those Greeks?the Greeks of that achievement?remain far from us. But those Greeks

also had another life, that which they began to lead from the mo ment when they became memory, part of tradition, efforts of

soul which were to be reincarnated by Uving men, from manu

scripts, from fragments of ancient sculpture, or from active and

actual patterns of political behavior. In short, from the Greek tradition. In the perspective of this tradition the Greeks were

what they became, and what they are still becoming. To some extent these are the Greeks of whom Kitto writes, in his essay on

Sophocles, and with whom most classical scholars are con

cerned. In a larger sense, though, Kitto is not concerned with

these Greeks. These are men transmuted into creative principles

of intellectual and aesthetic experience, and as such crowd

against our present, and our presence, with a troubUng immedi

acy. They are

uncomfortably real.



the classical tradition

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