The classics in the Middle Ages may have been recorded on a different medium from what had been used before or is used today, but were they exactly contiguous with the classics now, or did such a category even exist then? If the term ‘‘classics’’ relates powerfully to the Middle Ages, it is because in no era have the classics (or at least a shifting subset of them) and education been bundled together more tightly (Riche 1976, 1989; Orme 1973). The paradox is that in the Middle Ages the classics were not defined as such. In fact, it may be anachronistic to impose a schema of‘‘classical’’ and ‘‘nonclassical’’ upon the medieval period. Schoolmasters and exegetes, the medieval equivalents of modern-day literary historians, did not differentiate texts as classical and postclassical, but rather as pagan or Christian; prose, metrical, or rhythmic; and so forth.
For people in the Middle Ages, authors who are now labeled ‘‘postclassical’’ or at best ‘‘late antique’’ sometimes stood on a comparable if not equal footing with Horace, Statius, or Vergil in the frequency with which they were written out in scriptoria and in the intensity with which they were perused in the curriculum (Munk Olsen 1991). Medieval scholars found a rough parity among the different authors whose texts had already been enshrined in the curriculum for more than half a millennium. Alongside the great authors of ancient pagan Rome came writers of late antiquity, including poets and Christians, such as Prudentius (348-ca. 405), Martia-nus Capella (fifth century), Boethius (ca. 480-524), Priscian (ca. 500), and the poets of the so-called Bible epics, Juvencus (fourth century), Sedulius (fifth century), and Arator (sixth century); all of them were auctores (authors) whose words were replete with auctoritas (authority) (Glauche 1970).
The acceptance of pagan authors from antiquity alongside Christian authors from late antiquity by no means occurred automatically or easily. Not unexpectedly, many early Christians felt ambivalent about the amount of attention they lavished upon the classics.
Both Jerome (ca. 350-420) and Augustine (354-430) give voice famously to regrets about time squandered on pagan authors (Hagendahl 1958, 1967; MacCormack 1998b). Jerome tells (Epistle 22) of having dreamed that God, after calling him a Ciceronian rather than a Christian, had the saint whipped, while Augustine in the Confessions (1.13) rues having wasted his hours and energies on Dido in Vergil’s Aeneid. But elsewhere the two deploy images drawn from the Bible that helped to justify retaining the pagan classics as the basis of education. Jerome, on the basis of Deuteronomy 21:11-12, envisaged pagan learning as a female slave whose services could benefit Christianity, but only after she had pared her nails and trimmed her locks (Epistle 21.13). Augustine justified the acquisition of pagan learning by citing the episode in Exodus 3:22 and 12:35-6, in which the Israelites plundered the gold of the Egyptians (On Christian Doctrine 2.40.60-1).
As Jerome’s image makes apparent, for Christians to appropriate texts by pagan authors required accommodations, and these adjustments could take multifarious forms. One was to make the pagan author a Christian, even if an unwitting one. This was the effect of the nearly ubiquitous interpretation that expounded Vergil’s fourth (and so-called ‘‘Messianic’’) Eclogue as foretelling the birth of Christ (Benko 1980). Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) maintains (Purgatorio 22.73) that reading this very poem (together with the Aeneid) by Vergil caused Statius (ca. 45-96) to be saved (Martinez 1995). But obviously it would not have been feasible to make all pagans retroactively Christian.
Another strategy entailed replacing pagan classics by reassembling their elements in forms that better suited Christian beliefs and aesthetics. Medieval churches sometimes incorporated architectural components, such as columns, from pagan temples, as reliquaries did small craft objects from antiquity, such as engraved gems, cameos, and coins. The most extreme literary parallel to such reutilization in architecture and art was the cento, a type of poetry that was constructed entirely or mainly of lines and phrases quoted from earlier poems. The main quarry for such reuse was the oeuvre of Vergil, which was centoized (to give two extreme examples) by Proba (flourished ca. 385-7), a female poet who in her Vergilian Cento on the Praises of Christ gave a condensed account of the life of Christ and its biblical background (Clark and Hatch 1981; Green 1995), as well as by Ausonius (ca. 310 - ca. 394), who in his narrated quite explicitly the activities of a wedding night (O’Daly 2004).
A third approach to the classics was to find veiled behind their literal surface a background of allegorical meaning. The metaphor of the veil is deliberate, since especially in the twelfth century these allegorizing interpretations sometimes touched upon long-established hermeneutic constructs like integumentum (covering) and involucrum (wrapping) (Dronke 1974). The Aeneid underwent such allegorization repeatedly (Jones 1986), notably at the hands of Fulgentius (mid - or late-sixth century) and Bernardus Silvestris or pseudo-Bernardus Silvestris (twelfth century), both of them predecessors of Cristoforo Landino (1424-92). Nor was Ovid’s Metamorphoses exempted from this process, which was taken to its heights in the anonymous Ovide moralise (Ovid moralized, after 1309), not only the first complete translation but also an exposition of the poem according to multiple interpretative levels, and in the Ovidius moralizatus (Ovid moralized), Book 15 of the Reductorium morale (Bringing back to the moral) of Pierre Bersuire (died 1362), also known as Petrus Berchorius (Hexter 1989). Greco-Roman myth attracted indefatigable scrutiny from mythographers, many of whom coaxed from the stories meanings that made them more consonant with Christianity - or, to be more precise, with a Neoplatonism that was itself in greater harmony with Christianity (Chance 2000).
The educational system that developed in the Middle Ages out of its ancient Roman forebear emphasized imitation of models (Ziolkowski 2001). Many medieval authors (particularly but not solely those who wrote in Latin) followed, sometimes consciously, at other times unconsciously, the vocabulary and style of ancient authors. In the ninth century, Einhard modeled his Life of Charlemagne (dated variously between 817 and 833) after Suetonius (Innes 1997). In the tenth, Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim (ca. 935-75) set out to supplant the comedies of Terence, with all their moral shortcomings, by creating imitations that dealt with Christian saints. In the twelfth, Aelred of Rievaulx (ca. 1110-67) wrote a dialogue On Spiritual Friendship that was a Christian (and even more a Cistercian) response to Cicero’s On Friendship (Hyatte 1994).
Besides the shift from paganism to Christianity, a further factor of the utmost relevance in understanding the classical tradition in the Middle Ages is that of language (Ziolkowski 1991). Even in antiquity a command of literary Latin was a skill that had to be won through effort, with formal study being a sine qua non. The need for schooling only grew, since in western Europe the literate forms of Latin and the spoken ones related to it drew apart from each other decisively in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, from the sixth through the eighth centuries. Although Latin ceased to be a mother tongue, it lived on in the Middle Ages as both the written language of record par excellence and the spoken language of religion, learning, and high culture. Its unifying force was so potent that the entire region of Latin Christendom was designated not Europe but rather omnis Latinitas (all Latinity; Hexter 1987). This overarching Latinity was acquired through a basic education that emphasized Latin texts, many of them ancient. These classics, whether ancient or not, were without exception read in Latin. They looked nothing like their equivalents today. For one thing, poems were packaged differently, with special introductions (known as accessus ad auctores [introductions to the authors]), metrical commentaries, commentaries of other sorts, and so forth (Minnis and Scott 1991). For another, lines that are now regarded as authentic were sometimes missing or arranged differently, or lines that are rejected were included (Clogan 1968).
It warrants special mention that medieval manuscripts teem with texts that were falsely attributed to classical authors (Lehmann 1927). Thus Vergil’s Aeneid opened with verses that do not grace the pages of standard editions today. The 13 poems of the so-called Appendix Vergiliana were believed unreservedly to have been composed by Vergil, and occasional other poems, such as a Conflictus veris et hiemis (Debate of spring and winter) and a death lament for Emperor Henry III, were now and again taken to be works of Vergil as well. And the number of pseudepigrapha wrongly credited to Vergil pales beside the number eventually foisted upon Ovid. In the author-centered world of the Latin Middle Ages, there was good reason to present texts as the creations of established auctores.
As for the other half of the classics as they are now conceived, whatever Greek prose and poetry survived, it did so almost exclusively in Latin translations, such as the ‘‘Latin Homer’’ (as was known a poor Latinization of the Iliad) and (until the twelfth century) the bits of Aristotle that Boethius had put into Latin before his execution. Intrepid souls managed to acquire knowledge of Greek, but such individualists stand apart as having been unusual (Berschin 1988). Even when Greek texts began to be translated into Latin in greater volume in the twelfth century, often the base text for the work was an Arabic version that had already existed. Thus the earliest form of Aristotle’s Poetics to be Latinized contains Latin versions of Arabic poetry that had been substituted earlier in its transmission for the passages of ancient Greek verse in the original. The names of a few major Greek authors were common knowledge among the educated, so that Hesiod, Pindar, and Apollonius were not forgotten, but their works were available in neither the original Greek nor Latin translation. When Dante enumerates the illustrious poets (Inferno 4.83 and 88-90) who for a while stride alongside Vergil and him in limbo, he names Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. Even in the case of a poet as great and as well read as Dante, such lists do not always signify that the poet had a direct acquaintance with the authors in question. A lesser writer than the poet of the Divine Comedy might weh include in a catalogue authors whose works were familiar to him only through excerpts.
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