Ōtomo no Kuronushi, immortal of poetry
In Japan in 905, a highly influential poetry anthology established six immortals of poetry. Ōtomo no Kuronushi, a ninth-century Japanese poet, was among those six immortal poets.[1]
Kuronushi lasted as an immortal of poetry less than two centuries. A highly influential Japanese literary work from the early eleventh century did not include Kuronushi in a list of thirty-six immortals of poetry. Moreover, a poem by Kuronushi wasn’t included in an anthology of one hundred classical Japanese poems, each from a different classical Japanese poet, written about 1235.[2]
While Kuronushi lived into the 890s, his poetic reputation was under threat even by 905. A compiler of the poetry anthology that came to define the six immortals of poetry criticized Kuronushi for being vulgar and provincial. By the thirteenth century his poetry was described as “like a mountaineer with a load of wood on his back stopping to rest under cherry blossoms.”[3] Criticism of Kuronushi was remembered as his immortal status died.
Among the six immortal poets, Kuronushi was not the only one to be forgotten. Three others mentioned with him in 905 also faded in literary status. But those other immortals did not disappear from the lists of immortals as quickly as Kuronushi did. Ōtomo no Kuronushi has a distinguished position among the six immortals of poetry.[4]
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Read more:
- long-run development of the poetry industry
- the misery of being a poet
- bitterness about communications industry change
Notes:
[1] The six immortals of poetry (rokkasen) were listed in the Kokin Wakashu. Ōtomo no Kuronushi had large landholdings in Otsu in the Omni province of Japan. He was from the influential provincial Ōtomo family that had connections with the Japanese imperial court going back at least to the seventh century.
[2] The thirty-six immortal poets come from Fujiwara no Kinto’s “Anthology of Poems by the Thirty-Six Poets” (Sanjūrokkasen). The hundred poets are from Fujiwara no Teika’s Ogura Hayakunin Isshu.
[3] Ki no Tsurayuki, from his introduction to the Kokin Wakashu. Fujiwara (1967) p. 17.
[4] Among the six immortal poets recognized in Japan in 905, two have had a large, enduring effect on Japanese literary imagination. These two are Ono no Komachi and Ariwara no Narihira. Komachi wrote complex erotic poems. She is remembered as a beautiful woman who had many love affairs before she became old and ugly. Narihira was a grandson of the Japanese emperor and also had many love affairs. He is thought to have been a primary contributor to the Tales of Ise and to have served as a model for the leading man in The Tale of the Genji. Komachi and Narihira were celebrated as archetypes of the beautiful woman and man in the imperial court of Heian-period Japan (794-1185). According to a scholarly authority, “Ono no Komachi is even better known today, mainly because of the legends that grew up around her.” Keene (1999) p. 224.
The other four immortals are largely forgotten. Kisen Hōshi and Fun’ya no Yasuhide were “minor poets who are remembered mainly because Tsurayuki mentioned them {in his introduction to Kokin Wakashu in 905}.” Id. pp. 224-5. A third immortal, Sōjō Henjō, was a grandson of the emperor and seems to be remembered mainly for rumors that he had a love affair with Komachi. Nonetheless, all three of these poets made the early eleventh-century list of thirty-six immortals of poetry. Only Ōtomo no Kuronushi has the distinction of being on the 905 list of six immortals of poetry, but not on the subsequent list of thirty-six immortals of poetry.
[image] Ōtomo no Kuronushi. One of a set of six hanging scrolls of the six immortals of poetry by Katsushika Hokusai (1750-1849). Japan, Edo period, ca. 1806-8. In Freer Gallery, F1907.369.
Reference:
Keene, Donald. 1993. Seeds in the heart: Japanese literature from earliest times to the late sixteenth century. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Fujiwara, Sadaie. 1967. Fujiwara Teika’s Superior poems of our time; a thirteenth-century poetic treatise and sequence. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
compiling interests in the Syriac Book of Medicines
The Syriac Book of Medicines, a Syriac text thought to have been written in the twelfth century, compiled a wide range of material. Its geographic scope of knowledge spans the region of southeastern Eurasia and northern Africa from India to Italy to Libya. It includes excerpts from Galen’s corpus, prescriptions “used by the Indians” and prescriptions including Indian names of drugs, a lengthy section on astrology, and medical recipes similar to those found on ancient Egyptian papyri written in Greek. The Syriac Book of Medicines, like Asaph’s Book of Medicines, is a loosely organized compendium encompassing a broad geographic, cultural, and conceptual sphere of knowledge.[1]
The account of the Splendid Root in the Syriac Book of Medicines underscores the book’s broad scope of agglomeration. The account of the Splendid Root, which is presented as a type of medicine, first provides an etymology. The roots of the Splendid Root are “expeller of devils” and “fetid smelling.” The root is then given mythical-medical importance: “this root was the firstborn of all the roots that came up from the earth, and King Solomon frequently used it.” In the Hebrew Bible, being firstborn is associated with inheriting blessing; King Solomon is a paragon of wisdom. The flower of the root has a blossom like a red rose. When that blossom withers, what’s left is two little balls “like the testicles of a man, and inside them are black and red seeds.”[2] This botanical description seems purely symbolic.
Harvesting the root involves liturgically styled ritual. Consider the procedure:
When you wish to pull up this root, clean yourself from impurity, and forgo bread that has been made by women. And wash your head and array yourself in white apparel, and keep fasting until you see the stars. And come to this root on the sixth day of the month Iyyar and say to it, “Peace be to you, O Splendid Root.”
Ritual purity with respect to food and women is important in Jewish law, as is fasting. Iyyar is the name of a month in the Hebrew religious calendar. Following the above address to the root is a prayer for the root:
Unto Thee, O Lord, Lord God, the Mighty One, I cry, Who art the Eternal, and the Everliving One, and the Begetter of life in all parts {of the earth}, Who hearest and understandest; Creator of all the worlds, the Exalted One among all things which exist, of the Sun and Moon, and of the stars, and of the earth, and of the sea, and of the dry land, the Creator of all creations, the Beautiful Name, and Giver of understanding, O give Thou unto us this good for the healing of all the children of men. [3]
Apart from the context of the Splendid Root, that prayer could be conventional in Jewish, Christian, or Islamic worship. Subsequent to the prayer are highly unconventional actions:
every evening when you go to it you shall say to it, “Be thou well, O Splendid Root, with beneficial health!” And when you have finished this prayer, say “Peace be unto thee, O root, for thou reignest over all roots.” Do this for three days. And on the fourth day come in the morning before sunrise, and dig up the ground on all four sides of the root, to the depth of a cubit on each side. Then bring a black dog, and tie one end of a rope around his neck, and tie the other end of the rope to the root, and then smite the dog until he pulls this root up out of the ground. And when you have pulled it up, bring a thin plate of gold or silver, and tie it up in a piece of new, clean linen, and bury it in the place where the root was, and cover it over. And take the root, and go to {your} house or the church, and place it in the hollow of the head of the door, or on the seat of God, and take fine incense from the church, and cense it before Him. [4]
From conventional, liturgical praise of god the account thus shifts to ritual action with a black dog and idolizing the Splendid Root. The ritual cost of a plate of gold or silver and new linen makes the ritual infeasible for ordinary folk use. The alternative ritual locations of the lintel of door to a house or a most holy place in a church desacralizes the latter. Incensing the root mocks Christian liturgical sanctification of the altar for the Christian sacrifice. The remedy user is then instructed to recite another highly conventional prayer:
O God, Thou Sustainer of All, Who willest all things, Who preservest all things, Thou Name, beautiful and ornamented in all things, Thou Creator of the Sun and Moon, give Thou unto me, O my Lord, in Thy mercy, the actual and peaceful possession of this root, in all its operation, together with the power thereof, so that it may be for the healing and cure, and relief of the souls of all the children of men. Let it come unto me with all its working powers. Yea and Amen.
After these disparate steps, the Splendid Root is said to have powers far beyond healing, curing, and relief of medical ailments. The Splendid Root can deliver victory in legal cases. It can protect a person from devils or thieves, that is, spiritual or human assailants. If a person nonetheless suffers from theft, the Splendid Root can make known to the victim through a dream the identity of the thief and the location of the stolen property. The Splendid Root apparently enhances the value of magicians’ services:
if you go into a house where there are magicians, they shall speak from inside the earth, from that place wherein they are set.
The Splendid Root can also work as a contraceptive, an antidote to poison, a cure for snake bites, an object that drives away storms from ships, a cure for menstrual flow, a means for identifying friends and enemies, and a means for becoming invisible. With respect to the invisibility effect, the account declares: “That has been well tried, and is certain.” In its presentation of Galenic medicine, the Syriac Book of Medicines repeatedly emphasizes the value of gaining and verifying knowledge through experience.[5] That empirical value covers a wide range of practices within the Syriac Book of Medicines.
The account of the Splendid Root was cut off in copying. The account has the heading “Concerning the Splendid Root, and the answer of Dioscurus about the wonderful things that it does among men.” Two men named Dioscurus were Coptic Christian leaders in Alexandria in the fifth and sixth centuries. The Syriac Book of Medicines contains a first-person description of a snake-bite in Alexandria.[6] It also describes human dissection, a medical practice historically associated with a medical school of Alexandria. A fifth or sixth century Coptic Christian leader may well have been incorporated into the account as a legitimating authority. However, a remedy that is closely associated with the Splendid Root is described as “in use among Persian physicians.”[7] Moreover, the leading second-century Greek pharmacologist Dioscorides is mentioned several times in the Syriac Book of Medicines. Perhaps Dioscurus is a corrupted reference to Dioscorides. In any case, after copying the description of placing the root’s seed “in the nose of the man who is in the sight of the moon,” a copyist ended the account of the Splendid Root. The account, as transmitted, contains nothing from Dioscurus. Dioscurus may have been one element too far for the last copyist, an ardent Christian living near Mosul in 1894.[8]
The Syriac Book of Medicines doesn’t contain leading medical practice to which has been appended traditional local practices and folk remedies. Galenic medicine was the leading medical practice in twelfth-century Mesopotamia. In the Syriac Book of Medicines, Galenic medicine has been adapted to other interests and combined with medical remedies from a variety of other sources.[9] Among such adaptations is human dissection. Galen did not dissect humans. Yet in the midst of describing Galenic medicine, the Syriac Book of Medicines explicitly refers numerous times to dissecting the human body.[10] Human dissection was practiced in Alexandria early in the third century BGC, but apparently ended later in that century. Human dissection does not reappear in surviving records of the Mediterranean world until the fourteenth century.[11] Human dissection occurred in Persia during the Achaemenian period (about 558 to 330 BGC). It also doesn’t appear, at least explicitly, in later Persian and Islamic records.[12] Whether references to human dissection in the Syriac Book of Medicines came from Achaemenian Persia, Hellenistic Alexandria, or covert dissections in the Islamic world, those references anticipated the re-emergence of human dissection in fourteenth-century Italy. Within the twelfth-century Syriac Book of Medicines, references to ethically fraught human dissection apparently didn’t impugn the value of the closely associated Galenic medical reasoning.
The economics of content bundling helps to rationalize the Syriac Book of Medicines. In the vigorously competitive literary economy of first-century Rome, authors bundled styles, diction, and themes in creating works. Disparate interests in a wide variety of content, lack of value depreciation by content association, and low marginal cost of content acquisition support content bundling. Disparate interests in medical theory and practice was a recognized issue in Galenic medicine. In medicine understood more generally, disparate interests included astronomy/astrology, the favor of god or gods, and spells conferring powers. In the ancient Islamic world, the absence of legal copyright and the presence of institutional support for copying made cost of content acquisition low. Lack of value depreciation by content association can be interpreted as a diverse, tolerant culture, or a culture with weak forces of systemic reasoning. The value of bundling depends on competition for attention to content identifiers representing commodity content, rather than to bespoke content. The Syriac Book of Medicines’ scope is reasonable in the circumstances and culture that also produced the account of the Splendid Root.
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Read more:
- content bundling in ancient Rome
- content form in the historical success of Aristotle’s Problemata
- logic of substitutes in ancient materia medica
Notes:
[1] E.A. Wallis Budge handled the manuscript about 1890 near Mosul. He judged it to be from the twelfth century. He described it as a quarto, “bound in the thick brown leather covers of the period.” Budge (1913) v. 1, intro., p. xl. The manuscript survived only from its third chapter. I use Syriac Book of Medicines as a conventional name for the manuscript. Budge gave the manuscript the lead title, Syrian Anatomy Pathology and Therapeutics. The book’s description of the zodiac sketches its geographic scope of understanding. Id. v. 2, p. 604. For an Indian medicine, medicine “used by Indians,” and Indian ingredients, id. pp. 150, 152, 153, 180, 201, 265. On Budge’s conceptual framework, see Becker (2005). Id., pp. 183-8, asserts that the correct translation of the third part of the Syriac Book of Medicines is the Book of Topical Medicines. As described subsequently above, the third section includes much more than topical medicines.
[2] Budge (1913) v. 2, pp. 708-710, provides the translation of the account of the Splendid Root. All quotations above, unless otherwise noted, are from that source. I have modernized the English in Budge’s translation and made a few other stylistic changes for ease of reading. For liturgical passages I’ve retained Budge’s King James English. At least a conceptual contrast between the two types of passages would have been apparent to twelfth-century Syriac readers. In the title, Budge leaves untranslated the Syriac word Kahina (splendid) in the quasi-generic name of the root. I use the translated name Splendid Root because the common meaning of the name was probably apparent to Syriac readers and is highly relevant to the account of it.
[3] The phrase “children of men” occurs in the Bible, e.g. Daniel 2:38, Psalms 90:3, 107:31. In the Book of Enoch, the phrase contrasts children of human parents and the children of a god and a woman (nephilim).
[4] The seat of God apparently refers to the gold covering of the ark of the covenant within the Holy of Holies. See Exodus 25:18-21, 37:6, and Hebrews 9:5.
[5] The Greek Magical Papyri include spells for invisibility, e.g. PGM I.247-62. On experience, see Syriac Book of Medicines, trans. Budge (1913) v. 2, pp. 25, 46, 142, 145, 200 (“we have gained experience of these matters,” “experience testifies,” “experience in testing these statements,” “the result of experience covering a long period of time,” “know from his own experience”).
[6] Id. p. 25.
[7] Id. p. 705. This remedy, which is recorded four remedies sequentially before the Splendid Root in the Syriac Book of Medicines, involves instrumentally killing a pelican. In the Physiologus, a highly influential didactic text from Alexandria some time between the second and fourth centuries, the pelican is presented as a figure of Christ. The Physiologus’s account of the pelican seems to have no trace in this remedy.
[8] See the colophon to Budge’s copy, id. pp. 726-7.
[9] Bhayro (2013) provides detailed analysis of the reception of Galen in the Syriac Book of Medicines.
[10] Budge (1912) notes some references to human dissection, Intro. v. 1, pp. clxii-iii. Many others exist, e.g. id. v. 2, p. 127, “Moreover, since we have learned from the dissectors of the body that all these members are moved by muscles which receive nerves from the brain….”; id. p. 130, “Because you have learned from dissections that the nerves are sent forth from the spinal narrow into the whole face….”
[11] Staden (1992).
[12] Shoja & Tubbs (2007). Important currents in Islam opposed human dissection. Savage-Smith (1995).
References:
Becker, Adam H. 2005. “Doctoring the Past in the Present: E. A. Wallis Budge, the Discourse on Magic, and the Colonization of Iraq.” History of Religions. 44 (3): 175-215.
Bhayro, Siam. 2013. “The Reception of Galen’s Art of Medicine in the Syriac Book of Medicines,” in Barbara Zipser (ed.), Medical Books in the Byzantine World (Bologna: Eikasmós), pp. 123-144.
Budge, E. A. Wallis. 1913. Syrian anatomy, pathology and therapeutics; or, “The Book of Medicines.” London: Oxford University Press. (vol. 1: introduction and Syriac text; vol. 2: English translation of text)
Savage-Smith, Emilie. 1995. “Attitudes toward dissection in medieval Islam.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 50 (1): 67-110.
Shoja, Mohammadali M., and R. Shane Tubbs. 2007. “The history of anatomy in Persia.” Journal of Anatomy. 210 (4): 359-378.
Staden, Heinrich von. 1992. “The discovery of the body: human dissection and its cultural contexts in ancient Greece.” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine. 65 (3): 223-241.
al-Jahiz the litterateur versus Yūhannā ibn Māsawayhi the physician
In ninth-century Baghdad, the eminent litterateur al-Jahiz wrote learned, scholarly works on theology and learned, outrageously humorous essays on illicit practices. Al-Jahiz reportedly suffered from sensitivity to cold food in his feet, and to hot food in his head. He also reportedly suffered from paralysis and numbness on his left side, and inflammation and painful tenderness on his right side.[1] Whatever was troubling al-Jahiz, it had sharply contrasting symptoms.
Al-Jahiz and the eminent physician Yūhannā ibn Māsawayhi squared off in a knowledge test. They reportedly met in ninth-century Baghdad at a lavish dinner that the caliph’s vizier hosted. They tested each other thus:
Among the dishes there was fish, followed by meat cooked in sour milk. Yūhannā {ibn Māsawayhi} avoided mixing them. Said Abū `Uthmān {al-Jahiz}, “O Shaikh {respected teacher}, either the fish is of the same nature as the milk, or it is opposed to it; if they are opposed to each other, they are canceled mutually; if they are of the same nature, we may assume that we are eating one of them and continue until we are sated.” Said Yūhannā: “By Allāh, I am no philosopher, but eat, O Abū `Uthmān, and see what happens tomorrow.” Abū `Uthmān ate as an argument on his behalf, but during the night he was half paralyzed. Said Yūhannā: “By Allāh, this is the consequence of an invalid syllogism. Abū `Uthmān was led astray by his belief that fish and milk are of the same nature.” [2]
Al-Jahiz the litterateur argued based on linguistic logic. Yūhannā ibn Māsawayhi the physician emphasized learning from practice and observation. Al-Jahiz’s body suffered from his failing to recognize in words proper differences in nature. Māsawayhi’s empirical method demonstrated its superior merit. Of course, mixing fish and meat doesn’t actually cause any physical harm. Moreover, the above story is almost surely fabricated.[3]
Neither al-Jahiz nor Yūhannā ibn Māsawayhi was strictly a litterateur or an empirical physician-scientist. Al-Jahiz made careful observations of the natural world and described Darwinian evolution. Yūhannā ibn Māsawayhi was famous for caustic wit and forceful quips.
Battles between litterateurs and scientists continue. But the outcome is certain. Nature and truth will not be defeated.
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Read more:
- ibn Butlān vs. ibn Ridwān: which is warmer, the chick or the chicken?
- astrologers vs. physicians
- Indian and Greek physicians compete to revive the dead
Notes:
[1] Fihrist, trans. Dodge (1970) p. 399. In the Fihrist, al-Nadim included al-Jahiz not among literary men but among theologians of Mu’tazilah.
[2] HP p. 347 (Ch. 8, entry for Yūhannā ibn Māsawayhi). The transmitter of this story was ibn Butlān. Ibn Butlān was skilled both as a rhetorician and a physician, but he could not establish sufficient social strength to overcome ibn Ridwān in a knowledge battle in eleventh-century Egypt. Al-Jahiz wrote a book called Refutation of Medicine (Naqd al-Tibb). Fihrist, trans. Dodge (1970) p. 407. That work hasn’t survived. Montgomery (2005)’s bibliography of al-Jahiz’s surviving works. Al-Rāzī wrote “a refutation of al-Jahiz’s refutation of medicine.” HP p. 546 (entry for al-Rāzī). Al-Jahiz lived 776-869; al-Rāzī, 865-925. Al-Jahiz’s hostility toward medicine evidently was sufficiently influential to prompt a leading physician to write a book in response many years later.
[3] Among various indicators of fiction, ibn Abi Usaybi’ah attributed the story to ibn Butlān, who died c. 1068. That’s roughly two centuries after the events of the story would have occurred.
References:
Dodge, Bayard Dodge. 1970. The Fihrist of al-Nadīm: a tenth century survey of Muslim culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
HP: Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah, Ahmad ibn al-Qasim. English translation of History of Physicians (4 v.) Translated by Lothar Kopf. 1971. Located in: Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; MS C 294. Online transcription.
Montgomery, James E. 2005. “Al-Jahiz.” Pp. 231-242 in Cooperson, Michael, and Shawkat M. Toorawa. 2005. Arabic literary culture, 500-925. Dictionary of Literary Biography, v. 311. Detroit: Thomson Gale.
Tagged: al-Jahiz
coronis colophon in Codex Coislinianus
A coronis verse dialogue in the colophon of Codex Coislinianus is much less artful than the coronis epigram in the colophon of an obscure, third-century papyrus. Codex Coislinianus, also known as HP or 015 (Gregory-Aland numbering), is a Greek uncial manuscript that’s an important textual witness to the Pauline epistles. It has been dated paleographically to the 6th century. The colophon of Codex Coislinianus includes Greek verses, given here in English prose translation:
Address:
I am the coronis, teacher of the divine doctrine. If you lend me to anyone, you should get a receipt, because borrowers are evil.Answer:
I keep you as a treasure of spiritual blessings, one which is longed for by all men, combined from many parts and adorned with writing in various colors. In truth, I will not rashly give you to anyone, nor again will I grudge your benefit to others, but when I lend you to my friends, I will take a worthy book as security. [1]
Like the coronis epigram, this coronis verse dialogue starts with direct address from the coronis and then immediate shifts the speaking figure to the book itself. The address is practical and crudely condemnatory. The answer, which apparently is in the person of the book owner, is also unimaginative.
The coronis verse dialogue has survived in more than six ancient manuscripts. In addition to Codex Coislinianus, it survives in Codex Regis (Minuscule 88). That’s a Greek minuscule New Testament manuscript dated paleographically to the twelfth century. The coronis dialogue also exists as a preface to Codex 773, a Greek Gospel manuscript from the eleventh century. The coronis dialogue has also survived in ancient Armenian and Georgian translations. [2]
The coronis verse dialogue seems to have survived because it was added to an important, early Christian text. The coronis wasn’t used in eastern Christian literature. It was not commonly used in western Christian literature. In Greek literature generally, the use of the coronis declined after the fourth century.[3] The coronis verse dialogue surely could not have survived by its literary merit. It may have survived only because it was fortuitously added to an important copy of the Pauline epistles from earlier than the fifth century.
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Read more:
- an artful, literary coronis epigram
- history of para-textual markers
- manuscripts in second-century Rome
Notes:
[1] Trans. Blomkvist (2012) p. 16. The headings “address” and “answer” are part of the text. The last line of the answer in Codex Coislinianus is missing. I’ve adapted the translation based on id. p. 16, n. 55, Birdsall (1984) pp. 220-6, and Scherbenske (2013) p. 116. The last line exists in Codex Regex (Minuscule 88), Codex 773, and the Armenian and Georgian translations. While Scherbenske (2013), p. 116, has “book in exchange” rather than “receipt,” Birdsall (1984), p. 221, supports the later as the correct parsing of the letters into words. More generally, the translation of Blomkvist (2012), p. 16, is more semantically coherent than that of Scherbenske (2013), p. 116. The analysis above applies to either translation.
[2] Blomkvist (2012) p. 16, inc. n. 55; von Dobschütz (1925); Birdsall (1984) pp. 220-6. Von Dobschütz (1925), p. 284, declares that no other Greek “Euthalian” manuscripts (besides the three mentioned above) contains the coronis verse dialogue.
[3] Birdsall (1984) p. 221.
References:
Birdsall, J. Neville. 1984. “The Euthalian Material and Its Georgian Versions.” Oriens Christianus 68: 170–95, reprinted in Birdsall, J. Neville. 2006. Collected papers in Greek and Georgian textual criticism. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. Pages number cited to reprint.
Blomkvist, Vemund. 2012. Euthalian traditions: text, translation and commentary. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Scherbenske, Eric W. 2013. Canonizing Paul: ancient editorial practice and the Corpus Paulinum. New York: Oxford University Press (revised version of online dissertation).
von Dobschütz, Ernst. 1925. “The Notices Prefixed to Codex 773 of the Gospels.” Harvard Theological Review. 18 (03): 280-284.
Tagged: text
Hellenistic epigrams sing sexual allure of old women
In the Hellenistic period of western Eurasia, epigrams became a highly elaborated literary form. No longer confined to funerary inscriptions on stone and the oral conviviality of symposia, carefully written epigrams formed authored collections that circulated on papyrus.[1] Readers of these epigrams were surely learned and cultured. They were probably relatively wealthy. Hellenistic epigrams that sing the sexual allure of old women suggest that a significant share of women were among the learned, cultured, and relatively wealthy readers of Hellenistic epigrams.
Charito has completed sixty years, but still the mass of her dark hair is as it was, and still upheld by no encircling band those marble cones of her bosom stand firm. Still her skin without a wrinkle distils ambrosia, distils fascination and ten thousand graces. Ye lovers who shrink not from fierce desire, come hither, unmindful of her decades. [2]
An epigram praising the old courtesan Archeanassa from Colophon has even more literary merit than connoisseurs of Hellenistic epigrams have generally recognized. Asclepiades of Samos, a leading Hellenstic epigrammatic poet who wrote early in the third century BGC, almost surely authored this epigram:
I hold Archeanassa, the courtesan from Colophon;
sweet Eros sits {or sat} even on her wrinkles.
Ah, lovers who plucked the fresh flower of her youth
when it was first budding -- what a pyre you came through! [3]
Whether the speaking voice of the epigram is Archeanassa’s funerary stele or a lover of the aged Archeanassa isn’t clear. That ambiguity echoes the love/death experience that the epigram ascribes to the lovers of the young Archeanassa. The mixed metaphor for the young Archeanassa, a “fresh flower” with sexual allure burning like a pyre, appealingly resolves with age into the sweet, pure sexual allure of the aged Archeanassa.
Two Greek scholars writing about the third century GC attributed the Archeanassa epigram autobiographically to Plato. Recent scholarship has convincingly argued on grounds of language and style that Plato did not author the Archeanassa epigram.[4] The attribution to Plato seems to have come from a common form of popular literature: “an ancient scandal sheet that claimed to reveal the sexual indiscretions of famous persons.”[5] The scandal sheet’s attribution of the Archeanassa epigram to Plato is insightful as well as sensational. A plausible Greek etymology of Archeanassa of Colophon is “the first (womanly) snare at the summit.” Thus Archeanassa of Colophon was a linguistically appropriate mistress for Plato, the eminent philosopher of first causes. Archeanassa of Colophon almost surely wasn’t a real person.[6] That’s an important insight for understanding the Archeanassa epigram.
* * * * *
Related posts:
- aging in Roman love elegy and Bedouin love poetry
- a visually poetic Hellenistic coronis epigram
- Ovid rewrites Roman love elegy
Notes:
[1] Gutzwiller (1998) provides a thorough scholarly review of the historical development of epigram.
[2] AP 5.13, by Philodemus of Gadara, early 1st century BGC. Other ancient epigrams praising the sexual allure of old women are AP 5.48, 5.62, and 5.282. Aristophanes, Women in Parliament (Ecclesiazusae) 980 ff., provides a sharply contrasting ancient Greek depiction of the sexual allure of old women. Roman love elegy represents women’s aging harshly and bluntly. The Bedouin poem of Buthaynah and Jamil in love and aging, in contrast, seems to have some echoes of AP 5.48.
[3] AP 7.217, trans. Sens (2011) p. 278.
[4] Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book III – Plato, sec. 31, attributes the epigram to Plato, via Aristippus. Athenaeus of Naucratis also quotes the Archeanassa epigram and attributes it to Plato. See Deipnosophistae, Bk. XIII, c. 56, trans. Yonge (1854), v. III, p. 940. AP attributes the epigram to Asclepiades. Ludwig (1963) argues convincingly that the ascription to Plato is false.
[5] Gutzwiller (1998) p. 254, n. 55, Ludwig (1963) p. 62. Diogenes, Lives, Plato (3.29) describes this work as by Aristippus and entitled “On Ancient Luxury.” This Aristippus is not plausibly Aristippus of Cyrene and is not plausibly known. Gutzwiller (1998), p. 254, n. 55, suggests that Aristippus was probably a forger’s assumed name.
[6] Sens (2011) pp. 281-2 notes that Archeanassa is a “rare name” that is attested only in a Sappho fragment and an inscription from Rhodes. Id. observes:
Nothing is known about Archeanassa apart from the — probably spurious — claim by Athenaeus and Diogenes Laertius that she was Plato’s girlfriend, and given that the Sapphic resonance of the name makes it appropriate for a woman of amatory prowess, there is little reason to suppose that she was a real person.
Ludwig (1963) notes that names associated with Plato – Agathon, Phaidros, and Xanthippe — were used in epigrams falsely attributed to Plato, and that those names probably helped to support that attribution. The etymology of Archeanassa of Colophon probably functioned similarly.
References:
AP: Paton, W.R. 1920. The Greek Anthology with an English Translation. London: William Heinemann (vol. I, bks. 1-6; vol. II, bks. 7-8; vol. III, bk. 9; vol IV, bks. 10-12; vol. V, bks. 13-16). (epigrams indicated AP {bk}.{epigram # within bk})
Gutzwiller, Kathryn J. 1998. Poetic garlands: Hellenistic epigrams in context. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press.
Ludwig, Walther, 1963. “Plato’s Love Epigrams.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies. 4:2 (Spring) pp.59-82.
Sens, Alexander. 2011. Asclepiades of Samos: epigrams and fragments. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ideal of user engagement
Are users engaged enough in your service to ignore a cataclysm happening just outside the window?
Apollonius of Tyre through Arabian Nights
A doctor walking along the sea shore sees a coffin floating in the waves. The doctor orders his servants to retrieve the coffin and take it to his house. There, the doctor opens the coffin and finds “a very beautiful girl adorned with royal ornaments and lying in a state of apparent death.” Inside the coffin is also twenty thousand gold coins. An accompanying note awards half of those coins to the finder and asks that the other half be spent on a funeral for the girl. The doctor, swearing to spend more than half the money on a funeral, orders his servants to construct immediately a pyre.
But while the pyre was being carefully and expertly constructed and assembled, a medical student of youthful appearance but mature judgment arrived. When he saw the corpse of the beautiful girl being placed on the pyre, he looked at his teacher and said, “What is the cause of this recent death?” The teacher said: “Your arrival is timely; the situation requires your presence. Take a jar of unguent and pour it over the body of the girl to satisfy the last rites.”[1]
Consider the medical student’s question and the teacher’s answer. They are substantially disjoint. The teacher did not answer the medical student’s direct question. Moreover, the teacher declared that the medical student’s presence is necessary, but then asked the medical student to perform a task unrelated to being a medical student. The teacher could have poured the unguent over the girl’s body, or the teacher could have ordered a servant to do so. Between the medical student’s question and the teacher’s answer is a substantial seam that the narrative thread traverses.
The above fragment is part of a text known as The Story of Apollonius King of Tyre. The Apollonius text was highly popular in Europe during the Middle Ages.[2] It has been, however, generically troublesome for modern critics. The Apollonius text seems formally between New Comedy of post-Alexandrian, Macedonian-ruled Greece and Greek novels thought to have been most prevalent in the Roman Empire about the second and third centuries.[3] Scholars have surmised that The Story of Apollonius King of Tyre is a summary of an earlier, more coherent narrative.[4] Substantial seams like the one above are thus understood as artifacts of the summary text.
Seams in The Story of Apollonius King of Tyre are better understood as a fundamental characteristic of the text. Agon amidst the chaotic actions of humans and Gods; story journey, most paradigmatically from slavery in Egypt to freedom in covenant with God in the promised land; and wonder at the marvels of God’s creation are three artistic keys that gain great imaginative force in Greek, Judeo-Christian, and Islamic art, respectively. The third key is associated with intricately patterned art. The text known in Europe as the Arabian Nights exemplifies the third key. Its unifying narrative is relatively uninteresting. Its art is in wonderful patterns of events recounted and juxtaposed within the text.[5] While the Apollonius text and the Arabian Nights probably had their main origins in much different times, places, and genres, they both developed through literary processes and literary cultures that had much in common.[6] The third key helps to open greater artistic appreciation of a text misperceived as only a story, The Story of Apollonius King of Tyre.
The full piece about the medical student in the Apollonius text is as marvelous as tales in the Arabian Nights. The medical student — “of youthful appearance but mature judgment” — treats the beautiful girl’s dead body with unusual wisdom. He pulls aside the clothing on her upper body and massages her chest and all her limbs. He puts his lips to her lips. Translators render an obscure phrase as the medical student oddly saying to himself, “Apply heat at four points.” Early Arabic poetry associates a similar phrase with vaginal intercourse. The medical student takes the beautiful dead girl into his bedroom and places her on his bed.[7] The medical student then applies a heated woolen compress to the girl’s upper body. The beautiful girl’s body responds warmly to the medical student’s treatment.[8] Surely not only men with impure hearts can appreciate this erotic treatment.
Although effective, this erotic treatment is illicit. Doctors are not supposed to have sex with their patients. Having sex with a corpse is widely frowned upon, even where not outlawed. But the medical student’s erotic treatment brings the beautiful girl’s corpse back to life. Opening her eyes, recovering her breath, in a soft, indistinct voice the girl speaks:
Please, doctor, do not touch me in any way other than it is proper to touch the wife of a king and the daughter of a king.
Contemporary critics in high academic chairs will recognize that a rape has occurred, denounce the medical student’s actions, and insist that he be ran out of the story and locked up. Men who don’t get it will wonder why the girl isn’t grateful. The teacher, an instructional businessman lacking a modern education, praises the medical student’s expertise. Disposing of the medical student like an extraordinarily well-paid common prostitute, the teacher pays him ten thousand gold coins. The medical student then disappears from the story.[9]
The ending part of the sexual-healing account sounds additional notes on the Apollonius text’s themes of fidelity and licentiousness. After the medical student is paid for his services and disappears, the teacher-doctor takes over treatment of the beautiful girl. The doctor prescribes for her a nourishing diet and a regime of warm compresses. A regime of warm compresses echoes the medical student’s erotic treatment. In contrast, the medical student apparently didn’t tell the doctor of the beautiful girl’s royal stature. After a few days, the doctor learns of the girl’s royal descent. He then decides to adopt her as a daughter. That choice seems only to highlight carnal interests mixed with familial relations, a motif that plays repeatedly in the text. However, echoing virtuous regulation of sexuality across the text, the ideal of virginity prevails:
When she {the beautiful girl} tearfully pleaded that she not be touched by any man, he {the teacher-doctor} granted her wish and placed her within the cloistered confines of the priestesses of the goddess Diana, where all the virgins were able to preserve their chastity.
The girl already had a daughter with Apollonius. Being touched by the medical-student man apparently shouldn’t be counted since she was then dead. In the temple of Diana, the girl gains recognition as the most beautiful and most chaste virgin. She becomes a figure like the Christian sense of the Virgin Mary, but in the temple of Diana.[10]
The Apollonius text is marvelous like the Arabian Nights. Like the Arabian Nights, it is difficult to source and date within a wide range. Both the Arabian Nights and the Apollonius text seem to aggregate a wide range of sources, from ancient high literature of celebrated authors to trans-historical folktales. The Arabian Nights contains both colloquial Arabic and highly literary language and rhetoric.[11] The Apollonius text is likewise linguistically heterogeneous. A noted translator of the Apollonius text observed:
I have found The Story of Apollonius King of Tyre difficult to translate, the major problem being the abrupt stylistic changes, the wild fluctuations from simple, almost primitive narrative to stylized and elaborate forms of expression. It has been hard to resist the temptation to correct deficiencies such as repetition, parataxis, and the failure to subordinate one idea or event to another, or even to differentiate between distinct periods of time. [12]
Repetitive designation and leading-word repetition are frequently used techniques in the Arabian Nights. These artistic techniques also occur frequently in the Apollonius text. Thematic and formal patterning, which necessarily require apparent junctions and seams, are important artistic techniques in both the Arabian Nights and the Apollonius text.[13]
Limiting appreciation of the Apollonius text to a story — The Story — is a historical literary problem. The Judeo-Christian heritage of Europe has elevated the importance of story in literary interpretation. But the third key — wonder at patterned creation — unlocks art of the Apollonius text.[14] That text differs from surviving Greek novels not just in the asymmetry of its intersexual relationships, but also in its marvelously varied patterning of intersexual relationships.[15] Its relational texture includes romantic love (in the sense of the Greek novels), covenant love (the Judeo-Christian ideal), bare carnal desire (the motive to use a prostitute), and licentious desire most shocking (father-daughter incest). The affair of the medical student with the beautiful girl’s corpse is an outrageous, highly entertaining focal point in that relational texture.
* * * * *
Related posts:
- a comic story of chastity and sexual desire
- revising a Greek tale in the Islamic world
- wisdom from the Hellenistic world, through the Islamic world, into medieval Europe
Notes:
[1] Apollonius, ch. 26, trans. Sandy (1989) p. 753. Previous quote is from id. All subsequent quoted Apollonius text is from that translation, unless otherwise noted.
[2] The Apollonius text has survived in at least 114 Latin manuscripts written before the eighteenth century and in many vernacular manuscripts written all across medieval Europe. Numerous references and allusions to it further indicate its popularity. Archibald (1991) p. 3 & Ch. 3-4.
[3] Konstan (2011).
[4] E.g., Kortekaas (2004). For brief conjectural history, see id. Ch. 9.
[5] Hamori (1983), pp. 38-42, provides an insightful discussion of patterned tales.
[6] The prevailing scholarly opinion is that the earliest surviving recension of the Apollonius text is from the late fifth or early sixth centuries. That recension is thought to have developed from a Greek or Latin original from the second or third century. The earliest surviving Apollonius text is from the ninth century. A stable text has survived from ninth century, although many minor variations were also produced. A stable text probably also existed from the sixth century, although the evidence is less compelling. See Archibald (1991) Ch. 3. In pondering the relation of Islamic culture to the theme of courtly love in European troubadour lyrics, Grunebaum (1952), p. 238 observed:
The interaction between East and West in the Middle Ages will never be correctly diagnosed or correctly assessed and appraised unless their fundamental cultural unity is realized and taken into consideration. It is that essential kinship of East and West that will account both for Europe’s receptiveness to Arabic thought and to the (more or less) independent growth in the Occident of ideas and attitudes that on first sight appear too closely akin to their oriental counterparts not to be attributed to mere borrowing.
Those observations may also apply a millennium earlier. A text created through a process of aggregation and redaction, within the common cultural sphere that gave rise to Islam, might well exemplify the same imaginative key as Islamic art more generally. The Appollonius text is a “carefully patterned and symmetrical story,” and it is “probably the result of an accumulation of oral and literary motifs and garbled historical memories.” Archibald (1991) pp. 12, 44. Konstan (2012) fruitfully compares the structure of the Apollonius text to that of the folktale “Hansel and Gretel.”
[7] How the girl got into the medical student’s bedroom is a crux in the Latin text. Sandy (1989) translates: “With some assistance he took the girl to his bedroom, placed her on his bed, … .” Archibald (1991), in contrast, has: “Taking equipment with him, he brought the girl into his own room and placed her on the bed.” See Kortekaas (2007) for a philological analysis of the crux. Id. favors the former sense in translation. But the overall tone of the section seems to me to favor strongly the latter, improved with explicit use of the terms “his bedroom” and “his bed.”
[8] Sexual stimulation as cure for frozen humors is also a feature in a story of the eminent physician Jibra’īl ibn Bakhtīshū curing a woman who had her arms frozen, outstretched above her head.
[9] While ten thousand gold coins would be a huge fee for a common prostitute, in context that’s not a large reward. Ten thousand gold coins is the amount of found money directed to the funeral. The teacher-doctor pocketed a corresponding amount as the finder’s reward. Moreover, the teacher-doctor declared that he would spend more than the directed amount on the funeral. Yet when the medical student brought the girl back to life, the teacher-doctor didn’t reward the student with any more money than the directed amount for the funeral. In the ancient world, reviving the dead was a celebrated feat of the consummate physician.
[10] An Old English Apollonius text has survived in an eleventh-century manuscript amidst Christian legal and homiletic works of Archbishop Wulfstan. A large middle section of text, including the medical-student section, is missing. Perhaps that section was too outrageous for a churchman to include.
[11] G, the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript that is the oldest Arabian Nights manuscript extant, is highly colloquial and includes textual indications of oral story-telling. It also includes extravagant literary ornamentation.
the wording of G comprises a “third language,” neither purely colloquial nor exclusively literary, in which both fushā {classical literary Arabic} and colloquial are employed in the presentation of each tale.
See Pinault (1992) p. 15.
[12] Sandy (1989) p. 739.
[13] For example, in the medical-student section of the Apollonius text, the word “touched” is repeated in three important positions. Word foreshadowing occurs when Apollonius’ tearful wife pleads to go to sea with Apollonius: “Let’s sail together, … let’s live or die together.” The reference to die foreshadows her fate at sea. Similarly, Apollonius orders that his wife’s coffin have its joints sealed with pitch and covered with sheets of lead before the coffin is thrown into the sea. Those details make sense only in terms of subsequently finding the coffin and reviving the apparently dead wife. On general techniques of story-telling in the Arabian Nights, see Pinault (1992) pp. 16-30.
[14] The Apollonius text is typically now entitled Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri (The Story of Apollonius King of Tyre). Manuscript incipits also included other descriptions with respect to Apollonius: gesta (deeds), vita (life), narratio vitae (narrative of the life), and liber (book). Archibald (1991) p. 92.
[15] On the contrast between symmetry and asymmetry in Greek novels and the Apollonius text, see Konstan (1994).
References:
Archibald, Elizabeth. 1991. Apollonius of Tyre: medieval and Renaissance themes and variations: including the text of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri with an English translation. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
Grunebaum, G. E. von. 1952. “Avicenna’s Risâla fîʾl-ʿišq and Courtly Love.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies. 11 (4): 233-238.
Hamori, Andras. 1983. “A Comic Romance from the Thousand and One Nights: The Tale of Two Viziers.” Arabica, 30 (1), 38-56 DOI: 10.1163/157005883X00021
Konstan, David. 1994. Sexual symmetry: love in the ancient novel and related genres. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Konstan, David. 2011. “Apollonius King of Tyre: Between Novel and New Comedy.” Paper presented at 5th Trends in Classics International Conference on Latin Genre, 27-29 May 2011 at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki.
Konstan, David. 2012. “The ‘Hansel and Gretel’ Effect in Apollonius King of Tyre. In Marcos Carmignani, Luca Graverini, Guillermo De Santis and Benjamin Todd Lee, eds., Collected Studies on the Roman Novel (special issue of Ordia Prima), forthcoming.
Kortekaas, G. A. A. 2004. The story of Apollonius, King of Tyre a study of its Greek origin and an edition of the two oldest Latin recensions. Leiden: Brill.
Kortekaas, G. A. A. 2007. Commentary on the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri. Leiden: Brill.
Pinault, David. 1992. Story-telling techniques in the Arabian nights. Leiden: Brill.
Sandy, Gerald N., trans. 1989. Anonymous. The Story of Apollonius King of Tyre. Pp. 736-72 in Reardon, Bryan P. , ed. Collected ancient Greek novels. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tagged: love
building a fire on a whale-turtle island
More than a millennium ago, a story of building a fire on a whale-turtle island was known across the span of Iran, Russia, England, Egypt, and Ethiopia. A version of that story exists in the Physiologus, a second-to-fourth-century didactic Greek Christian text from Alexandria (Egypt). A Latin translation made between the fourth and sixth centuries tells the story thus:
Physiologus spoke of a certain whale in the sea called the aspidoceleon {asp-turtle} that is exceedingly large like an island, heavier than sand, and is a figure of the devil. Ignorant sailors tie their ships to the beast as to an island and plant their anchors and stakes in it. They light their cooking fires on the whale but, when he feels the heat, he urinates and plunges into the depths, sinking all the ships. You also, O man, if you fix and bind yourself to the hope of the devil, he will plunge you along with himself into hell-fire.[1]
A whale “urinating” and plunging into the depths seems to correspond to a whale blowing through its blowhole and then diving. More generally, the Physiologus seems to have added to earlier observations of nature broader interpretations, more abstract symbolic understandings, and moral teachings.[2] The Physiologus was translated into Ethiopic, Armenian, Syriac, Arabic, and Old Church Slavonic from the fifth to tenth centuries. A version of the story of building a fire on a whale-turtle island appears in the didactic Old English poem “The Whale,” preserved in the tenth-century Exeter Book.[3] Its source is almost surely a version of the Physiologus. By the tenth century, the Physiologus was one of the most widely known books in western Eurasia.[4]
In the tenth century, along the Persian Gulf in present-day Iran, a sea captain recounted a different version of the story of building a fire on a whale-turtle island. The sea captain claimed that he heard the story from another who said that he heard it from an old sailor. In this Persian-Arabic version, some Persian sailors sailing from India encountered a strong storm that damaged their ship. They managed to land on a small island containing no wood or water. By the time they repaired their ship, the date had turned to the Persian New Year’s Day. That meant celebrating the feast of Nowruz:
to celebrate it, {the sailors} took on to the island all the bits of wood they could find in the ship, palm leaves, and material, and set fire to them. All of a sudden the island began to tremble. As they were not far from the water, they threw themselves in and climbed aboard {their ship}. Immediately the island sank into the sea, with such turbulence that they were almost drowned and had great difficulty in reaching safety. They were filled with great terror. For the island was nothing but a turtle asleep on the sea. It had fled when it was awoken by the burning fire. [5]
The source for this story is probably the Physiologus. However, the Physiologus’ didactic allegory of staking a new residence on top of the devil was transmitted to the Persian sea caption as just a sailor’s tale of wonder. Scholarly literature in the ancient Islamic world often added moral teaching to earlier Greek stories. The sea captain’s story shows moral teaching being discarded in the much different discursive circumstances of folk entertainment.[6]
The reception of the Physiologus’ story of building a fire on a whale-turtle island points to more general communications economics. The Physiologus’ success in ancient communications markets benefited from both its moral orthodoxy and its entertainment value. Its moral orthodoxy ensured that elites would employ scribes to copy it. Its stories of natural wonders, which could easily be shorn from its moral instruction, supported popular demand for it. The Physiologus thus had a market position somewhat similar to college education in the U.S. today.
* * * * *
Related posts:
- a younger brother’s love for his older brother’s wife
- Indian medicine triumphs over Greek medicine
- Aristotle’s wisdom in an ancient Persian court
Notes:
[1] Physiologus, XXXI. On the Whale, that is, the Aspidoceleon, trans. Curley (1979) pp. 45-6. A less detailed version of the story occurs in a letter, on marvels of India, purportedly from Alexander to Aristotle (part of the Greek Alexander romance). An account of the story that refers to the heat of cooking provoking the animal is included in the Babylonian Talmud. See Hansen (2002) pp. 180-1. Al-Jāhiz (d. 869) in his Book of Animals criticizes sailors’ tales. He refers to this story as the most fabulous and preposterous of them all (vol. VII, pp. 33-4). Grunebaum (1953) p. 300.
[2] Aristotle’s History of Animals and Pliny’s Natural History are examples of earlier works providing much less abstractly interpreted descriptions of nature. The former describes whales having blowholes, through which water was expelled (Bk 4, Ch. 10; Bk. 8, Ch. 2). The latter describes massive sea creatures in the Indian Ocean (Bk. 9, Chs. 3-4). With respect to more abstractly interpreted work, the Zoroastrian Avesta Yasna includes an account of the hero Keresaspa, “a youth of great ascendant, curly-haired, bludgeon-bearing,” cooking food on top of a beast. The beast, scorched by the heat, flees, overturning the cooking pot and also putting to flight the hero-cook. See Yasna, Ch. 9, sec. 11. The Physiologus’ story of building a fire on a whale-turtle island differs significantly in setting and action from the Yasna’s story. Contrary to the claim of Curley (1979) p. 83, I don’t think it likely that the Physiologus’ story has its germ in India from the Yasna’s story. Note the peculiarity of Keresaspa being described as “curly-haired.” Curly hair is much more characteristic of Africans and Greeks than Indians. Perhaps describing Keresaspa as “a youth of great ascendant, curly-haired, bludgeon-bearing” indicates that the Avesta Yasna drew material from stories associated with Alexander the Great.
[3] Trans. Cook (1921).
[4] See Curley (1979), Introduction. The Physiologus was commonly incorporated into medieval bestiaries. Well-known stories of the phoenix rising from ashes and the pelican feeding her young with her own blood are found in the Physiologus.
[5] Buzurg Ibn Šahriyār, trans. Freeman-Grenville (1981) p. 22. This sea-captain’s account included additional naturalistic description of whales, such as: “When the male couples with the female, it often takes place on the surface of the water.” Whales in medieval thought came to be associated with lust. See Wentersdorf (1983-84) pp. 364-5.
[6] The story of building a fire on a whale-turtle island appears in the first voyage of Sindbad the Sailor. In that voyage, it plays a pivotal role in a reversal of fortune, but it is not otherwise moralized. Sindbad’s voyages seem to be mainly adventure-entertainment, with a general moral framework of reversal of fortune. Sindbad’s voyages are set in Harun al-Rashid’s reign of the Abbasid caliphate (786-809). The earliest surviving manuscript of Sindbad’s voyages is a Turkish manuscript from the seventeenth century. The name Sindbad the Sailor points to the Indus River in present-day Pakistan. While the date and origins of the narrative of Sindbad’s voyages are highly uncertain, Sindbad’s story of the whale-turtle island plausibly comes from the Physiologus. Like Buzurg Ibn Šahriyār‘s version, Sindbad’s version shows the story shedding moral interpretation in serving for folk entertainment.
References:
Cook, Albert S., James Hall Pitman, and Cynewulf. 1921. The Old English Physiologus. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Curley, Michael J. 1979. Physiologus. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Freeman-Grenville, Greville Stewart Parker, trans. 1981. Buzurg Ibn Šahriyār. The book of the wonders of India: mainland, sea and islands. London: East-West Publications.
Grunebaum, Gustave E. von. 1953. Medieval Islam: a study in cultural orientation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hansen, William F. 2002. Ariadne’s thread: a guide to international tales found in classical literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Wentersdorf, Karl P. 1983-84. “Animal Symbolism in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’: The Imagery of Sex Nausea.” Comparative Drama, vol. 17, no. 4 (Winter), pp. 348-382.
Tagged: antiquity
early Islamic stories shift heroes from deeds to ideals
Ancient Greek stories make heroes known by their deeds. Structurally similar early Islamic stories shift narrative weight from deeds to ideals. Stories about an honored physician saving a person dying from lovesickness illustrate this shift.
By no later than the first century in the Greco-Roman world, a story was circulating about a physician who saved a royal dying from lovesickness. The royal fell silently in love with a forbidden other and was subsequently wasting away. Only an eminent physician was able to identify the disease as lovesickness. Granting the royal the forbidden beloved cured the lovesickness.
The most prominent version of this story involves Prince Antiochus, son of King Seleucus. King Seleucus ruled the third-century BGC Seleucid Empire. In one telling of the story, Antiochus fell deeply in love with his stepmother, Seleucus’s wife. Antiochus silently suffered nearly to death from that forbidden love. His father, his friends, and the whole court were in despair. A physician or astrologer, variously named as Erasistratus, Leptines, and Cleombrotus, correctly diagnosed Antiochus’ lovesickness. Informed of the nature of the disease, Seleucus gave his wife to his son, and his son’s sickness was cured.[1]
A structurally similar Islamic story was circulating in the Islamic world by no later than the tenth century. The Islamic story takes place in the seventh century, the early years of Islam. The story participants apparently were high-status figures in the relatively egalitarian tribal structure of early Islam. Their circumstances paralleled those of the father and son in the Greek story:
there were two brothers of the Banū Kinna, a subtribe of Thaqīf, who loved each other dearly — indeed, greater affection than shown by those two had never been seen. When the elder once went on a journey, he left his wife in the care of the younger, and the latter, looking at her one day, inadvertently, fell in love with her and became ill as a consequence.[2]
Several physicians could not diagnose the cause of this illness. The eminent physician al-Hārith ibn Kalada, however, devised a diagnostic experiment.[3] Although Muslims were forbidden to drink wine, ibn Kalada ordered that the ill younger brother be given wine to drink. The ill younger brother became intoxicated and recited a love poem. This effect prompted the people to declare to ibn Kalada, “You are the best physician among the Arabs.” Ibn Kalada ordered that the brother be given more wine. The brother then recited a poem obscurely revealing his love for his older brother’s wife.[4] The older brother hence divorced his wife and told the younger brother to marry her. The story ends not with the Greek unification of lovers, but with death:
the younger brother replied: “By God, I shall never wed her.” And he died true to his word. [5]
In contrast to the Greek story, the heart of this early Islamic story is not the physician’s shrewd diagnosis, nor the curative act of making a forbidden love available. The heart of this story is the ideal — “his word.”[6]
* * * * *
Related posts:
Notes:
[1] Pinault (1992), Ch. 2, review sources for the Greek story. These sources include Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings, 5.7.3; Plutarch, Life of Demetrius 38; Appian, Roman History 11.10; Lucian, The Syrian Goddess 17-18, and How to Write History 35; Julian, Misopogon 347; and Suda, s.v. Erasistratus.
[2] HP, pp. 214-5, transmits this early Islamic story and provides the above quotations. The physician who subsequently figures in the story, ibn Kalada, is also from the tribe of Thaqīf.
[3] Some versions of the Greek story of lovesickness describe the physician conducting an experiment to determine the cause of the sicknesses. The experiment consists of having young women of the court (and in some versions, also young men) appearing to the patient to test his response.
[4] The poetic translation seems to lose the key to the revelation. The key apparently depends on details of Islamic family law and familial terms.
[5] The ending is consistent with a sobriety-sensitive interpretation of the hadith:
He who loves and remains chaste, conceals his love, and dies, dies a martyr.
Here’s some scholarly analysis and interpretation of this hadith.
[6] A tenth-century Arabic text by as-Sijistani tells of Hippocrates diagnosing a prince’s lovesickness for his father’s concubine. Compared to the Greek versions, this early Islamic story also highlights ideals, in this case the ethical wisdom of Hippocrates. See Pinault (1992) Ch. 6 (analysis) and App. B (English translation of source text).
References:
HP: Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah, Ahmad ibn al-Qasim. English translation of History of Physicians (4 v.) Translated by Lothar Kopf. 1971. Located in: Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; MS C 294. Online transcription.
Pinault, Jody Rubin. 1992. Hippocratic lives and legends. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Tagged: Ibn Abi Usaibia
logic of substitutes in ancient materia medica
Medical practice created a demand for knowledge of substitutes among materia medica. A sphere of knowledge competition in ancient medicine stretched from southern Spain to India and from northern Greece to northern Africa. Across this vast geographic expanse, a medicinal herb found in one location might not be readily available in another location. More generally, the cost of medicines promoted demand for substitutes. Some medicines, such as theriac, consisted of many exotic ingredients and were very expensive. At the same time, physicians sought to provide medicine for the poor. Cheap substitutes for expensive medicines helped physicians to serve the poor.
Some ancient lists of substitutes among materia medica have a simple propositional form. They consists of lists of pairs of medical substances. A focal medical substance is paired with its substitute.[1] The earliest surviving list of substitutes among materia medica has such a form. It exists as a chapter in the influential, seventh-century Medical Compendium in Seven Books, by Paulus Aegineta. In Baghdad early in the eighth century, the Jewish physician Māsarjawaih produced in Arabic a formally similar list of substitutes. Māsarjawaih, thought to have been the first to translate a scientific book into Arabic, apparently was an important scholar. His list of substitutes thus probably garnered considerable attention in the ancient world.
What is the logical structure of the substitute propositions individually and as a list? A substitute might be equivalent to the focal medicine. That’s often the case today for a brand-name drug and a generic drug. But a substitute might also be a useful but inferior replacement for the focal medicine. Expressed in logical formalism, if the substitute for A is B, does that mean A = B, or does it mean A > B? What about if the substitute for A is B, and the substitute for B is C, then is C also a substitute for A?
Paulus Aegineta’s substitute list shows no awareness of these logical issues of substitution. Paulus Aegineta attributes to Galen the substitute list that he reproduces. He introduces the list with the following text:
In Alexandria, he {Galen} says, wishing to obtain the campion (lychnis) for a certain woman who was in danger, and not having got it, if I had not found and used the seed of acanthium, the woman would have been soon lost. Hence, having been requested by my companions, I made out a list of the medicines which may be substituted for one another, in order, beginning with this same article: [2]
After the list, Paulus Aegineta appends this commentary:
Commentary. This is taken from a work ascribed to Galen, the authenticity of which, however, is very doubtful. Cornarius has attempted many corrections of the text, and we have found ourselves compelled to make other alterations.
The introductory text, with the exception of the apparently inserted “he says,” seems to have come from Paulus Aegineta’s source. Its claim “if I had not found and used the seed of acanthium, the woman would have been soon lost” has the ring of authentic Galenic self-promotion. More importantly, both Cornarius and Paulus Aegineta have critically reviewed the list. Nonetheless, the first substitute pair listed is “Instead of {for} the seed of acanthium, campion (lychnis).”[3] That substitute-pair statement suggests that seed of acanthium would be used if both seed of acanthium and campion are available (no need for a substitute). Galen, in contrast, apparently would choose campion in such circumstances. If seed of acanthium and campion are medically equivalent substitutes, then the choice of one or the other has no medical significance.
If the substitutes in Paulus Aegineta’s list are medical equivalents, then its materials would be more usefully placed in equivalence classes, rather than pairs. Paulus Aegineta’s list contains 41 repeated materials. These repeated materials imply equivalence classes with more than two members. For example, Paulus Aegineta’s list includes these pairs (preceding number is the pair sequence number and A => B indicates that the substitute for focal medicine A is B):
45: diphryges => Phrygian stone 105: magnet => Phrygian stone 106: Phrygian stone => agerat 128: roasted misy => diphryges
If the substitute relation is an equivalence, then these pairs imply the equivalence class {diphryges, Phrygian stone, magnet, agerat, roasted misy}. Presenting the substitutes as pairs obscures some of the facts, e.g. that a substitute for roasted misy is Phrygian stone.
Moreover, in Paulus Aegineta’s list, no materials repeat as the focal medicine in different pairs. Materials are either a focal medicine and a substitute, or a substitute for two different focal medicines. That lack of symmetry in the pairs is contrary to the symmetry of equivalence.[4]
Internal evidence in Māsarjawaih’s list suggests that its substitute pairs are not equivalences. Māsarjawaih’s list contains 15 repeated materials. All these repeated materials occur once as the focal medicine and once as the substitute medicine (except for oil of radish, which occurs twice as a substitute). In Māsarjawaih’s list, as in Paulus Aegineta’s list, no material is repeated as the focal medicine. Moreover, in Māsarjawaih’s list, the repeated elements are arranged in adjacent pairs, with the repeated element as the substitute in the first pair, and as the focal medicine in the second pair.[5] That textual arrangement fosters an inference of transitivity and thus a substitute preference order. For example, consider these pairs from Māsarjawaih’s list:
7: crystalline sugar => dry black plum 8: dry black plum => tamarind [6]
The arrangement of those pairs supports the inference that tamarind is a substitute for crystalline sugar, but an inferior substitute relative to dry black plum.
References to groups of medicines in Māsarjawaih’s list also suggests that the pairs are not equivalences. Māsarjawaih’s list contains six instances of “all of these {with or without further specification}” and two instances of “both of these”. All eight of these grouping occur in the focal position. That’s consistent with the focal position being superior to the substitute position. A physicians looking for a substitute chooses not among focal medicines, but among substitutes. Specifying multiple inferior medicines would not instruct a physician’s choice among those inferior medicines.
Māsarjawaih’s list contains some inconsistencies. Consider these pairs:
98: leech => place cupping glass on the spot affected by a snake, scorpion, a kind of worm, and dalmukha 99: inspissated juice of artichoke => nux vomica 100: both of these => borax and mustard
The grouping “both of these” most plausibly refers to “inspissated juice of artichoke” and “nux vomica.” However, with the transitivity that the list suggests overall, pair 100 could be more simply specified as “nux vomica => borax and mustard.” The transitive inference would generate the same substitute relation as the grouping “both of these.” A more surprising specification is this:
49: caper => caper with pure honey or caper with oxymel or mountain mint
The substitute apparently encompass the focal medicine. That makes no sense.
Specifying medical substitutes as a list of pairs of materials has weighty medical weaknesses. Medicine is typically used to treat a specific sickness. That specific sickness is likely to be relevant to the best substitute medicine. Specifying substitutes without respect to quantities also seems irrational: the potencies of materia medica surely vary. Other ancient specifications of substitutes provide details on the medical application and relative quantities.[7]
The systemic shortcomings of ancient medical substitute lists suggest a more general systemic problem. Ibn Abi Usaibia’s History of Physicians indicates that ancient physicians commonly studied logic and could have applied it to lists of medical substitutes. Nonetheless, even a highly sophisticated, extraordinarily comprehensive pharmacological treatise from the twelfth century seems not to have considered the logical relation between substitute claims.[8] Systemic reasoning has less direct personal return than pursuing particular interests. That’s as true in intellectual reasoning as it is in government budgeting.
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Data: substitutes among materia medica according to Paulus Aegineta and Māsarjawaih (Excel version)
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Notes:
[1] Usually the medical substances are what’s called simple medicines — a single plant, animal, or inorganic material.
[2] Bk 7, Sec. 25, trans. Adams (1844) p. 604. What the Galenic text means by “in order” isn’t clear. The pairs in this list are much less ordered than in Māsarjawaih’s list. In addition to the ordering of pairs with repeated materials (described above), Māsarjawaih’s list also groups pairs by non-medicinal characteristics, e.g. robs, electuaries, oils, clysters, galls, etc.
[3] Levey’s example translation of Paulus’ list is “For A, B.” Levey (1971b) p. 10. That A is the focal medicine is consistent with the position of repeated materials across the lists of both Paulus and Māsarjawaih.
[4] Pythagoras’ list of substitutes, which was valued enough for Hunayn ibn Ishaq to translate in ninth-century Baghdad, explicitly identifies substitute equivalences with a separate pair and often the descriptive tag phrase “in turn.” See Levey (1971b) pp. 24-5 (mugwort and camomile), pp. 28-9 (common germander and Hart’s Tongue fern; white mustard and gum ammoniac; black nightshade and knotweed) pp. 30-1 (gum of the olive and black cumin).
[5] Such pair adjacencies occur in Paulus’ list (see, e.g. above pairs 105 and 106 with Phrygian stone), but adjacent pairs with repeated materials are much less frequent than pairs with repeated materials that are widely separated in the pair list sequence.
[6] For Māsarjawaih’s list translated from Arabic into English, see Levey (1971b) pp. 35-45. The list describes the pairs with sentences of the form, “The substitute for A is B.”
[7] See the substitute lists of Pythagoras and al-Rāzī in Levey (1971b).
[8] Ibn Baklarish was a leader in compiling information on medicines. According to Ibn Abi Usaybiah:
Ibn Baklārish was a Jew, one of the greatest medical savants in Andalusia, who possessed vast experience and knowledge in the field of simple medicines. He served the dynasty of Banū Hūd as physician. Among his books is a “Synopsis of Simple Medicaments” with an index; this was composed in Almeria for al-Musta`īh bi-Allāh Abū Ja`far Ahmad ibn al-Mu`amin bi-Allāh ibn Hūd.
HP p. 644. Levey (1971a) reproduces a few pages from ibn Baklarish’s monumental twelfth-century book on simple medicines. That book shows mace gum as a substitute for sarcocol, and sarcocol as a substitute for marine sponge. These relations imply that mace gum is also a substitute for marine sponge. But ibn Baklarish didn’t list mace gum as a substitute for marine sponge.
References:
Adams, Francis. 1844. The seven books of Paulus Aegineta, tr. from the Greek, with a commentary embracing a complete view of the knowledge possessed by the Greeks, Romans, and Arabians on all subjects connected with medicine and surgery. London: Sydenham Society.
HP: Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah, Ahmad ibn al-Qasim. English translation of History of Physicians (4 v.) Translated by Lothar Kopf. 1971. Located in: Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; MS C 294. Online transcription.
Levey, Martin. 1971a. “The pharmacological table of ibn Biklãrish”. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 26 (4): 413-21.
Levey, Martin. 1971b. Substitute drugs in early Arabic medicine. With special reference to the texts of Māsarjawaih, al-Rāzī, and Pythagoras. Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft.
[image] Thanks to the Historical Collections & Services, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia, for making the above image available on the web.
Tagged: Galen
