Disputes over what to call the parts of this region from the perspective of the reception of the ancient tradition reveal problems with the definition: the result is always an asymmetrical arrangement. Slavia Romana stresses ties to Rome (ancient and Christian) and requires two corresponding concepts: Slavia Byzantina (political) and Slavia Orthodoxa (religious). Slavia Latina would correspond to Slavia Graeca. This pair neutralizes the political and religious differences. Greek, however, did not play the same role in spreading the classical tradition among eastern Slavs as Latin did among the western Slavs.
The borderline between the two Slavic areas depends on the criterion applied. The line is easiest to draw in reference to Catholicism and Latin as the language of culture and education. It will run differently when drawn according to architectural orders or the influence of Roman law. It is most interesting - and most difficult - to draw it according to the declarations of identity revealed in the sources (Axer 1994a). This movable border cuts across the Commonwealth. Along it, hybrid subcultures developed, adapting both systems for the reception of ancient culture.
Early testimony to this phenomenon in Belarus (then the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) is provided by Nicolas Hussovianus’ Carmen de bisonte (1523), which he offered to the pope. The author declared that the bison he described was not a bison according to the western model (as described by Caesar and Pliny), because his background as a writer included Greco-Ruthenian books and local hunting experiences. Hussovianus agreed to an extension of the Latin world on the condition that the local heritage be respected, for he believed it enriched Europe. Strikingly, there is no sense of betraying the Ruthenian-Byzantine world, but rather of faith in the possibility of drawing from both traditions and hope for their synthesis (Schama 1995; Axer 2004c).
This trend can be followed in the territory of today’s Ukraine, where a Latinized community of Ukrainian clergy (its influence stretching to Moscow in the seventeenth century), a separate Greek-Catholic Church (founded in 1596), and a Ukrainian lay, Latinized gentry developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Sievcenko 1996; Yakovenko 1995). Under these conditions, a Latin Ukraine subculture was able to develop, combining the concept of Roxolania with the Kievan tradition open toward Moldova and Constantinople and seeking independence within its own Orthodox education system, adapting Jesuit educational techniques to its own needs (e. g., Petro Mohyla’s Kiev Academy) (Sievcenko 1984).
The situation changed in the middle of the seventeenth century, when civil wars (Khmelnitsky’s uprising) led to the Ukraine’s being divided between Russia and Poland. The isolation of the Latinized Ukrainian elites, with their kinship to the Polish environment of freedom and their deep communion with Ruthenian historical memory and the Orthodox faith, was revealed. Symbolic here is the fate of the Kievan governor Adam Kysil, who testified to his double identity in Latin but ultimately became the embodiment of betrayal for both sides (Sysyn 1986). Along the Baltic, from the Bay of Gdarisk to Lake Ladoga, local cultures overrun and reorganized by German conquerors (the Teutonic Order) in the late Middle Ages, and adopting Lutheranism as the dominant religion during the Renaissance, developed an interesting subculture of German Protestant humanism superimposed on the local culture. In Ducal Prussia, a university was established in Konigsberg; in the area where Polish, Swedish, and Russian influences crossed (today’s Latvia and Estonia) the Jesuit colleges were created (i. a. in Dorpat, Dyneburg, Riga). This area would become a bridge between Germany and Russia, important for the reception of the classical tradition in the Russian empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In German-speaking Royal Prussia, which belonged to Poland, an active center of Catholic reform existed in Ermland (Dantiscus, Hosius, Cromerus, Treterus), where the reception of Christian antiquity remained in constant dialogue and dispute with the Protestant communities of Gdarisk and Toruh. Silesian humanism should be recognized as a separate subculture.
Transylvania developed its own neo-Latin subculture, continuing until the end ofthe nineteenth century. Apart from the Hungarians, this involved the Saxons, who maintained regular contacts with Germany and Italy. Local historians from the period became part of the new Latin Wallachian (Romanian) identity in the nineteenth century.
5.2 Latin and the noble-nations
The ‘‘nobleman-nations’’ of central-eastern Europe are a particularly important phenomenon in the history of Hungary and the Polish Commonwealth: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Poland assimilated Lithuanian, Ruthenian, Prussian, and Livonian nobles; in Hungary after the Battle of Mohacs, there was a strengthening of the sense that the sole carrier of Hungarian identity in the divided country was the Hungarian gentry (una eademque nobilitas Hungarica [one and only Hungarian gentry]).
Studies on the reception of the ancient tradition have failed to appreciate the fact that the nobility used Latin to its advantage and turned it into their own supra-ethnic language of the political nation, treating it as a characteristic of their own civic and collective identity. In Hungary, Latin was the official language until 1844. In this case, not changing to Hungarian as the national language could be seen not as cultural backwardness, but as a dramatic effort to hang onto a language that would be comprehensible to Europe.
In Croatia this identification served to declare unity with the Magyars under the Josephine rule (1790), and after 1847, when Hungarian policy threatened to Magyarize the language and culture, to defend Croatian identity (Rapacka 2004).
In the Commonwealth, Latin became a component ofpolitical language through a different mechanism. Used in public life much longer than in western Europe, it also entered into a special relationship with the vernacular languages of this multinational
State, particularly with the language of the dominant Polish people. This bilingualism effectively delimited the state’s political uniqueness, serving its purpose well in epistolography and oratory, whose role went far beyond the usual western European practice (Axer 1998).
In the nineteenth century Latinitas (Latinity) became a component of the mythologized national identity of the Poles, Hungarians, and Croats, as did the liberties and privileges of the nobles.
5.3 The Roman republic as a model
The history of republican forms in Europe, with the Roman Republic as the initial model and the French republic as its modern culmination, also includes the twelfth-and thirteenth-century waves of medieval republicanism. The republicanism of noble-nations in sixteenth - and seventeenth-century central-eastern Europe should be considered along the same lines (Szucs 1985).
The Polish nobility went the farthest in building a republican model. The Hungarian nobility entered into a compromise, adopting the nonancient concept of ‘‘the kingdom’s mystical body.’’ With time, the Prussian nobility abandoned republican liberties for a western-type model of the state. The Lithuanian nobility decided to join the Polish model, as did the Ukrainian elite (regardless of whether this was a process of voluntary confederation or the Poles’ internal colonization of eastern Europe). In the Polish republic, a set of concepts from republican Rome (mainly from Cicero) helped in the self-interpretation of the concepts of respublica (republic), civis (citizen), and libertas (freedom), along with the whole system of values declared by the nation-state.
This domestication of the traditions of the Roman Republic became especially important in the final period of the Polish republic, its partition by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The ‘‘republican camp,’’ seeing salvation in restoring the old political forms and at the same time seeking aid from France, used the same political language to describe the utopian model of the past as the precursors of the French Revolution (Rousseau, Mably) had used to describe the utopia of the future. The republicanism of the noble-nation losing its sovereignty also harmonized with the language of the Founding Fathers in the US (Walicki 1989; Axer 1994b).
The diverse noble cultures of central-eastern Europe form interesting subcultures of the reception of ancient models of freedom and the republican language of public debate, and can be superimposed on the previously mentioned hybrid forms of reception resulting from ethnic and religious diversity.
5.4 Societas Jesu versus civic education
The Jesuit Order, brought to central-eastern Europe in the sixteenth century (to Bohemia in 1555, to Hungary in 1561, and to the Polish Commonwealth in 1564), had a huge impact both on spreading the supranational, post-Trent version of the reception of antiquity and on its domestication in this region. A fundamental role was played by the Jesuits, who assumed a major (Hungary) or decisive (Polish Republic) role in organizing general education, based on a curriculum binding for all colleges in Europe (Ratio atque institutio studiorum Societatis lesu [Method and system of the studies of the Society of Jesus], 1599). The college network covered the whole region, reaching eastwards as far as Smolensk. Catholics and Protestants, as well as Orthodox and Uniates in the late Renaissance, found a good general, modern education at these schools.
The Jesuit college unified the models and signs of culture, invoking the classical tradition that had become a component of the noble-nations’ identity. The Jesuits also turned to the burgher, and even peasant, communities. Hence a common language of signs developed, with a still-under-appreciated influence on the mentality of local and regional communities that extends up to the present. The Jesuits’ teaching of classical languages (particularly Latin), along with Greek and Roman history, created a new language of communication in political life that led to a redefining of the limits of Latinitas as the community of the Catholic religion and a unified version of the ancient tradition. Only German neohumanism in the nineteenth century constituted a similar attempt at reshaping the teaching of the classical tradition on a European scale. However, whereas neohumanism laid the foundations for educating the cives rei publicae (citizens of the republic), Jesuit schools provided civic education to citizens of the states as they were then: citizens of the noble-nation republic in the Commonwealth, but loyal subjects of the Habsburg monarchy in Protestant Bohemia.
College curricula were adapted to the needs of the region: following the model constructed in the west and using western innovations in terms of teaching and communication strategies (especially in preaching and theater), the Jesuits were sensitive to local conditions and capable of modifying their strategy. Their educational programs referred not only to the larger regional identity but also to the identities of individual national and ethnic subcultures. To meet these goals, they would deviate from the general Ratio studiorum and, in addition to Latin, use national languages: Polish, German, even Latvian.
An unusually clear picture of these efforts emerges from studies of the scripts and programs of theaters affiliated with the colleges. Within the Commonwealth, the most thoroughly studied in this respect, there were 56 colleges in the seventeenth century that staged approximately four thousand performances. Jesuit theater participated not only in religious polemics but also in strictly political public debates and in shaping the collective memory. Due to the ‘‘Jesuit dark legend,’’ however, the impact the Jesuits’ activity had on building a sense of community, civic attitudes, and local patriotism is often underestimated.
The process of domestication of the ancient tradition, so effectively assisted by the Jesuit Order, changed its character as the academic quality and intellectual ambitions of the college faculties weakened. From the mid-seventeenth century, Jesuit colleges began displaying growing conformism, moving toward accepting cliental obligations and expanding their success within existing systems.
The Order’s dissolution (1773) was a smaller blow to the educational system of this region than it was in western Europe. Particularly in the Commonwealth, the landing was a soft one. The Jesuits had tried to modernize the educational canon from the 1740s, and outstanding individuals (Bohomolec, Naruszewicz), who played an important role in the Enlightenment reform of the cultural paradigm, had appeared among them. The Commission for National Education took over the Order’s libraries and adapted their curricula, maintaining the link between the Latin language, literature and Roman history, and literature in the national languages. Some Jesuit colleges (e. g., in Vilnius, Lviv, Olomouc, Wroclaw, and Zagreb) were also transformed into universities in different periods.
5.5 Auctores - regional readings
The reading of the Latin classics in central-eastern Europe is poorly researched. Western studies on Ciceronianism, Vergilianism, Horatianism, and Ovidianism touch this region only incidentally. Local scholars, anxious to confirm their own traditions as ‘‘being European,’’ focus on proving that western European models of the reception of auctores found worthy followers in their respective cultures.
It is therefore worth noting the development of a special ‘‘regional’’ way of reading the major Latin authors, along with the lack of this sort of originality in reading the Greeks, at least in the Catholic territories. This confirms the domestication of ancient culture in its Latin variation and its strong ties to the noble-nation’s ideology. One can also see the unifying role of Jesuit education in creating models of reception and a shared resource of reading matter and quotations.
The reception of Cicero is the best studied. The rhythm of reception was different in the Commonwealth than in the west. Already in the Renaissance, the orations were the main object of study, as practical instructions that facilitated functioning in public life and the parliamentary system. This approach did not appear in the west until the French Revolution.
The texts of Cicero, Tacitus, and Livy mainly concern the Republic in crisis and reminiscences about the Republic, so references to this tradition were invoked by the nobility, particularly during political crises. These references survived the downfall of the state, becoming part of the national myth, and were subsequently used as well by artists and scholars working to regain independence.
In the Renaissance and Baroque culture of the Commonwealth, the choice of works from the Vergilian corpus is almost as striking. A lack of interest in the Aeneid (imperial ideas drew no response) was accompanied by wide reading of the Bucolics and especially the Georgies, because the Polish nobleman was primarily a farmer.
Ovid, too, was read in a unique way in this region, as the only Roman poet who - because he had been exiled ‘‘to Scythia’’ - could become the forefather of local poetry.
World History
