Stobaeus

Under contract to Oxford UP is the first English translation of Stobaeus’ Anthology (Books 3–4) – I am the general editor, and have commissioned a number of scholarly experts to translate the various authors represented therein.

 

The grandest “guide to life” ever produced

Fifteen centuries ago, a Macedonian named John had two related problems: one concerned his son, Septimus, and the other concerned information management. He wanted his son, set to start out on life, to do well; and he believed that the writings from the wisest Greek authors of the previous millennium could help. But by this point in late antiquity, these authors had written simply too much for a busy young man to appreciate, much less absorb or acquire for later reference. So John, from the market town of Stobi – hence his common name, Stobaeus – having been inspired by the perennial genre of the anthology (“bouquet”), got radical: he would pluck from the whole library of Greek edifying classics a single, binding-busting, guide to life.

 

Stobaeus excerpted, collected, and organized thousands of passages from three hundred authors: Homer and Hesiod and late archaic poets; the tragic and comic dramatists of Athens; the philosophers, historians, and orators of the classical period; sages and celebrities whose wise sayings had been transcribed and passed down; letter- and essay-writing representatives of later philosophical schools such as the Stoics, Cynics, Platonists, Epicureans, and Pythagoreans; and      a host of ethnographers, moralizers, rhetoricians, and collectors from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. This anthology (Books 3–4 of his eventual four-book publication) begins as a protreptic to virtue (aretê), divided into forty-two chapters. Stobaeus’ authors praise and analyze virtue itself and then go on to offer in-depth explorations of specific virtues, such as wisdom, discipline, courage, justice, truthfulness, sincerity, self-mastery, forbearance, self-knowledge, conscience, memory, trust, hard work, modesty, tact, good-naturedness, and civic solidarity. They also sketch out the complementary vices, including the controversial ones related to anger, self-love, and austerity. Each chapter contains several dozen excerpts, each catching Stobaeus’ eye as a most poignant turn of phrase, compressed bit of insight, or captivating and convincing discussion. Sometimes these are from familiar authors, such as Euripides, Menander, or Epictetus, but rarely will the passage itself be familiar; even when quoting from well-known authors, Stobaeus champions their lesser-known ideas and texts. Often, however, the authors will not be familiar at all – Hierax, Eusebius the Platonist, Phintys – and Stobaeus brings forth a statement that is altogether fresh. Whether the passage is a single line or fifty, Stobaeus’ primary criterion appears to be potency: does it have the zip and impact that only the greatest of a language’s stylists can in moments of brilliance achieve?

 

The second half of Stobaeus’ anthology continues in this vein, now organizing chapters around a person’s major life decisions and core relationships. How should one think about marriage, having children, caring for one’s siblings and aging parents, acquiring or disdaining wealth, growing one’s own food, serving in the military, being the recipient of undeserved good or ill fortune, growing old, confronting mortality, and flourishing in general? These are questions people still have, and Stobaeus assembles a wildly pluralistic set of observations, object-lessons, and proposals that, despite their antiquity, speak powerfully today, if sometimes pungently. What Socrates thinks about family pride is juxtaposed with Plutarch, with a certain Phalaris in his letter to Axiochus, with Aristotle, with a certain Bion in exchange with King Antigonus, and with the poets Euripides, Menander, and Astydamas. Extended statements about old age come from a certain Anaximenes, the Stoic Musonius, and the Platonist Juncus. Wielding his editor’s scissors and glue, Stobaeus makes the anthology a reflection of his personal reading and taste. Yet he does not dogmatize; his ideology and proclivities, whatever they may be, never compromise his aesthetic sensitivity and his intellectual catholicity.

 

John of Stobi transformed the enormous extent of ancient Greek literature, much of it now otherwise lost or obscured, into the greatest “How to Live” guide imaginable. To the extent that ancient wisdom has promise for the modern day – and contemporary publishing trends show that it does – his anthology is the superlative assembly of that wisdom. The taste for edifying Stoic literature, along with burgeoning interest in Epicureanism, Cynicism, and Aristotelianism, will be satisfied, and new tastes for still-niche schools can be fostered.

 

A translation of the anthology

In creating an anthology for his son – and presumably for other men eager for or expected to acquire the same philosophical-literary education – Stobaeus has achieved, for us, three remarkable cultural feats. (i) He preserved passages from hundreds of literary and philosophical texts that did not otherwise survive the next millennium. (ii) He highlighted signal passages from an astonishing variety of surviving historical, oratorical, and otherwise learned texts. (iii) He organized and juxtaposed these passages to tell a story – from his late antique perspective, as champion of the classical tradition against its eclipse by Christianity – of the ethical, social, and political education of a complete person.

 

From the ancient world this anthology is unique – in its vast length, its breadth of interest, its plurality of sources, and its overarching organization. In magnitude, its cousins are Diodorus Siculus’ Library of History; Athenaeus’ Learned Banqueters; Pollux’s lexicography; and the Byzantine encyclopedia Suda. But none has as its goal to wrangle into manageable form the greater part of Greek literary wisdom, and none so lets its passages do the talking: Stobaeus seems to have limited his written contributions to a now-lost introduction and the chapter titles. In short, the Anthology is a fascinating, epoch-spanning, and generically expansive font of ancient Greek wisdom as understood by one of its last contemporary observers, at the transition between the ancient and medieval eras, when one can still produce an anthology of wisdom pure of Christian dogmatics.

 

Stobaeus’s Anthology is of great interest both to students of classical antiquity and to those interested in the revival of classical learning during the European Renaissance. It represents one major conduit by which ancient Greek wisdom was conveyed to the modern era, and it exercised a major influence on the way the classical tradition was conceived, from the early modern era through the nineteenth century. The Anthology was one of the first ancient works to receive a modern edition, by Victor Trincavelli in 1536 (Venice). Less than a decade later, Konrad Gesner re-edited the Greek text and included his Latin translation (1543, Zurich); this went through a number of editions, and other editors improved on the Greek in turn. The Anthology proved the best source available to early and late modern scholars for innumerable topics: the Hellenistic schools of philosophy; religious traditions such as Hermeticism; the dramatic writings of the fifth- through third-centuries bce. Edward FitzGerald, the famed translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859) and, later, works of Greek drama, wrote to a friend in the early 1840s, with some understatement: “I have been reading Stobaeus’ Anthology as I saunter in the fields: a pretty collection of Greek aphorisms in verse and prose. The bits of Menander and the comic poets are very acceptable.”

 

In time, the anthology’s passages from its A-list authors were excerpted and published, often with translations, on their own: for instance, Sophocles, Musonius, and Hierocles. But for many other authors this never occurred. In fact, the entirety of Stobaeus’ work was virtually never again translated and made readily available (the exception is an 18-volume modern Greek translation sold from an Athenian bookstore). Several factors may explain this. As the FitzGerald letter suggests, for centuries, those who wanted access could read the Greek (or Latin) – and the early nineteenth-century Meineke edition, surely the one he read, is still to be found on the used-book market, indicating a wide circulation in its heyday. The immensity of the Anthology, and especially its range of poetic and prose authors, makes a solo translation effectively out of reach for any scholar. Its lesser-known authors had not generally risen to a sufficient level of interest. And its format, a large-scale structured anthology, seemed of little concern to those other than specialists in late-antique Greek wisdom literature.

 

All this has changed. Neither Greek nor Latin are widely read, and even classical scholars often find reading in English quicker and more convenient. Even were those languages commonly read, there are no editions of Stobaeus, in Greek or Latin, in print or even widely available to read; the most recent critical edition, by Otto Hense, is long out of print. But a modern translation is now within reach. Collaborative translation, aided by email, Dropbox, and Zoom meetings, has become straightforward. Digital lay-out makes feasible a single-volume edition. Interest in the minor authors of the Hellenistic and Platonic-Pythagorean schools has expanded, as has the tracing of concepts through the centuries, the working methods of ancient editors and collectors, gnomologia and other assemblages of “wisdom,” and the fragmentary material of the major authors. Stobaeus as the sole ancient excerpter of philosophical fragments attributed to women has sparked much interest.

 

This translation of Stobaeus’ anthology has two aims. It makes public what might be the most arresting and beautiful results of the classical Greek literary tradition, a garland of its wisdom – bracing, attractive, idiosyncratic, dubious, and enthralling – that revitalizes the contemporary view of the past. And it addresses a major scholarly need, one that may revolutionize the understanding of the breadth of Greek moral literature.