The sharpest antagonisms run not between classicism and its alternatives in the learned tradition, but rather between classicism in Latin and other forms in the spoken languages. The classical tradition, passed down through reading and writing and constituted by texts responding to earlier texts, stands at least implicitly in contrast to the oral tradition, transmitted from mouth to ear and back again in unending loops. Yet although the classical tradition goes together with book learning and the oral tradition with folklore, the traditions were not partitioned altogether from each other during the Middle Ages (Ziolkowski forthcoming a). Formerly the two were envisaged hierarchically, with the learned above and the popular below. According to this model, elements of the higher form sometimes seeped down to the lower, to become gesunkenes Kulturgut (sunken cultural materials); less often, there was talk of movement in the opposite direction, gehobenes Kulturgut (elevated cultural materials). Now the tendency is to acknowledge the interpenetration of folklore and learned lore, official and popular culture, and orality and literacy, and not to privilege the one over the other (Bakhtin 1968; Burke 1978; Ong 1982).
Legends proliferated around major personages and authors of classical antiquity, permeating not only Latin manuscripts but also vernacular literature and decorative arts associated with secular audiences and settings. Thus the truly popular cluster of heroes known as the Nine Worthies comprised three classical pagans, three biblical Jews, and three Christians; the first threesome was made up of Hector, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar (Gerritsen and van Melle 1998). Hector was one of many characters from Trojan legend who belonged to the broadest culture of the Middle Ages. So exalted was the prestige of the story that many royal and noble families traced their lineage back to the post-bellum Trojan diaspora: Britain was purportedly founded by one Brutus, the name of the Norse god Thor was alleged to have originally been Tror (from Troy), and so forth (MacDougall 1982: 7-27; Waswo 1995). Just as Rome had the Trojan-born Aeneas, so northern European nations devised Trojan originators for their own dynasties.
For all the glamor of the Trojan legend, the so-called romance of Alexander the Great (356-323 bc) seems to have seized the imagination of even more people during the Middle Ages (Cary 1956). Its accounts of his global conquests as well as his adventures among the marvelous races of the East, in space, and in the depths of the ocean stimulated treatment by artists not only in manuscript illuminations but also in mosaics, stone sculptures, woodcarvings, ivories, and tapestries.
The historical Alexander had Aristotle as his teacher. Their relationship inspired a legend that speaks volumes about the interplay between folklore and learned lore in the Middle Ages. According to the legend, Alexander became romantically involved with a beautiful young woman named Phyllis (Smith 1995). When Aristotle endeavored to have Alexander break off the liaison so that his charge could devote more time to his studies, Phyllis arranged for the philosopher to see her as she sang and performed her coiffure. Smitten, Aristotle became infatuated to the point where he agreed to allow her to ride him piggy-back.
Another exemplum that cautioned against the wiles of women, in particular against the readiness of women to exploit their sexual power by abasing learned men, had Vergil as its protagonist (Putnam and Ziolkowski forthcoming). Unlike that of Aristotle and Phyllis, it lacks even the most tenuous tie to any biographical facts. Rather, it pays tribute to Vergil in his guise as necromancer, a role that was awarded to him only in the Middle Ages, as an understandable (if not logical) extension of the universal knowledge that had been attributed to him already in antiquity. In the tale of Vergil in the basket, the great Roman poet pursued the emperor’s daughter in the hope of an assignation. After he refused repeatedly to take no for an answer, the young woman agreed to meet. The agreement was that he would enter one night into a large basket and that she would draw it up so that he could share a rendezvous with her in the tower where she had her chamber. All went according to plan until he had been pulled halfway up the tower, at which juncture the emperor’s daughter left the poet stranded. Once day broke, a crowd gathered and ridiculed him. The humiliation has its counterpoint in the tale of Vergil’s revenge. After being made a laughingstock, Vergil summoned his magical powers and extinguished all the fires in Rome. Eventually he let it be realized that the only way for the fires to be rekindled was by lighting torches and tapers at one of the most intimate orifices on the body of the woman who had spurned him. Like the legend of Aristotle and Phyllis, the two about Vergil received artistic treatment in various media.
The exempla about Aristotle and Vergil in the representational arts were not conditioned by any ancient treatments of them, but in many other ways Roman art and architecture exercised influences upon the Middle Ages that should not be overshadowed by Roman texts. The early medieval style that is termed Romanesque has an ambiguous name that was coined to describe an architecture (in vogue from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries, roughly) that stands in the same relation to ancient Roman institutional architecture as the Romance languages do to Latin. Alongside this indirect but pervasive afterlife of ancient architecture, many regions of Latin Christendom contained direct evidence of the Roman empire in the ruins of ancient monuments that served as quarries and also as reminders of a grandeur of building scale and technique that went unsurpassed until the Gothic cathedrals. Responses to this aspect of the classical tradition may be detected in texts as unlike each other as the Old English poem from the Exeter Book, The Ruin (thought to have been inspired by the remains of Roman Bath), and the two Rome elegies of Hildebert of Lavardin (1056-1133), one of which marvels at the greatness of what Rome must once have been, the other of which professes that Rome’s function as the seat of Christianity elevated the city more than any manmade edifices ever did (Witke 1990; Czapla 1998). Loosely related would be travel guides to Rome that scrutinized its antiquities, such as the twelfth - or thirteenth-century Marvels of Rome, conventionally attributed to ‘‘Master Gregorius’’ (or to a canon named Benedict) (Osborne 1987; Kinney 1990).
World History
