From Gibbon to Auden: Essays on the Classical Tradition (review)

This remarkably wide-ranging, penetrating, witty, and polished collection has a rather interesting pedigree. In 2007, the distinguished Torinese house of Einaudi brought out Saggi sulla tradizione classica dal settecento al novecento, a good Italian translation of a selection of Glen Bowersock”s reviews and occasional lectures and papers done between 1976 and 2003. The bulk of these are reproduced, in their original English but sometimes updated form, in the collection under review here. One perhaps regrettable omission from Saggi is a review (The New Republic, November 12, 2001) of Erich Segal’s The Death of Comedy: so we have lost “Il Viagra non può alleviare il dolore del mondo, la commedia sí.” But we have gained a substantial discussion of Burckhardt on late antiquity, the perfect complement—or antidote—to Auden’s 1966 lucubrations on the “Fall of Rome,” to which Bowersock helped give their first published life in 1995; and a slighter but characteristically percipient and sharp review of Travels With Herodotus by the peerless and now sadly late Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski, whom Bowersock dubs “a modern Aesop” (for his take on political reportage rather than on his titular subject).

The whole of From Gibbon to Auden is at least equal to the sum of its parts, which are disposed into a Gaul-like three: the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, respectively. Part 1 kicks off very strongly indeed with four Gibbonian pieces. Bowersock is an enormous admirer of Gibbon and his “masterpiece” (31), but yet one who, like Mommsen, “the greatest Roman historian of modern times” (19), finds himself “obliged to limit in a certain way my admiration for his work” (18). This self-limitation is most conspicuous in a 1976/7 essay, “Gibbon on civil war and rebellion in the Decline of the Roman Empire,” where Bowersock plausibly enough pins much of the blame for the work’s shortcomings in this regard on “Gibbon’s great evil genius, Tacitus” (28). Nevertheless, in 1988 Bowersock set himself to explain what it was about Gibbon’s historical imagination that helped make the Decline and Fall so special and put his finger on its very literariness, declaring that Gibbon “shaped his truth as if it were fiction” (12). This is a judgment that Gibbon himself could not possibly have endorsed, but the value of a minutely text-critical approach is salutarily illustrated by an admiring review of a 2002 monograph by Oxford’s Warton Professor of English Literature, David Womersley, who in 1994 had brought out the best modern edition of the Decline and Fall. For Bowersock, though, the eighteenth century was the age not only of Gibbon but also of Suetonius, whose influence on Johnson and Duclos he acutely and amply demonstrates. A lively account of the somewhat accident-strewn rediscovery by “excavation” of Herculaneum (1711) and Pompeii (1748) rounds off part 1.

The four items in part 2, the Nineteenth Century, are something of a grab-bag. Apart from the positively revisionist 2004 essay on Jacob Burckhardt’s Griechische Kulturgeschichte with special reference to Late Antiquity, there are entertaining pieces on sign-language (a review of an English translation of Andrea de Jorio’s 1832 La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano), on Berlioz’s countercultural reversion to Virgil as major inspiration for his Troyens, and on Edward Lear’s neglected 1858 drawings of Petra (two of the drawings, and a derived oil painting, are helpfully reproduced).

Part 3, the Twentieth Century, is altogether more substantial. The star of the first half of it is Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933), to whom a trinity of powerful essays is devoted. The author of Julian the Apostate and the connoisseur of the “old poet of the city” (as Lawrence Durrell called him) has a field day with Cavafy’s dozen truly scholarly, historical-cum-sensual poems, published, unpublished, and incomplete, that somehow address the phenomenon that was Julian—one that had already...