A classics professor explores what biographies— even apocryphal ones—can teach us about the ancients
A classics professor explores what biographies— even apocryphal ones—can teach us about the ancients
Pop music fans of a certain vintage know the urban legend: Phil Collins witnessed a friend drown while a potential rescuer stood by and did nothing. Then he wrote the song "In the Air Tonight," sat the miscreant in the front row of a concert, and shone a spotlight on him while singing the damning lyrics about a man drowning while someone "would not lend a hand."
It wasn't true, of course—but it made for good gossip and provided a juicy embellishment to Collins's biography. And in the end, it said more about the audience than the artist.
Flash back a couple of millennia, and you could have fodder for the Ancient Lives Project. Classics professor Verity Platt is one of three lead researchers on the three-year effort, funded with some $1.5 million from the European Research Council. The project aims to explore biographical "facts" ascribed to Greek and Roman poets, philosophers, and artists—not because they're believed to be true, but because they inform study of how their work has been viewed and interpreted throughout the centuries. The project will include three conferences, funding for grad students and postdocs, and the creation of a website compiling reference materials for scholars. "The idea is that there's a huge amount of material about ancient poets from a biographical point of view, and over the last few decades people have tended to dismiss it all as fiction," says the British-born Platt, who did her undergrad, graduate, and postdoctoral work at Oxford. "The main scholarly enterprise has been to debunk it all. But this project is saying, 'Hang on, there's all this wonderful material that may not be true, but is still interesting if you think of it from the point of view of reception. What kind of evidence does it give for how people were reading ancient poets?' The stories people told about their lives are evidence of the way they were reading their works."
Take Virgil, author of The Aeneid. In the Middle Ages, Platt says, he was popularly described as having been a magician. "He was seen as the archetypal pagan poet, so he was the doorway to a world beyond Christianity that becomes associated with the occult," she says. "His tomb was located around Naples, and he was almost the city's pagan saint. So Virgil as a magician has this whole life which is independent of his poetry, but gives us insight into the way people were reading his work and the kinds of lives they had." Similarly, Socrates is commonly depicted as ugly and snub-nosed—and while that may be accurate based on contemporaneous descriptions, Platt says, there's a deeper symbolic meaning to that portrayal. "Socrates famously didn't trust any material representation or manifestation of things in the world—it was all about abstract thought," she says. "So it makes sense that a philosopher who stands for those ideas is ugly; his outward form belies his inner self."
Platt also cites the Greek poet Sappho, whose reception and description has varied through the ages. "There's the idea of her as this romantic heroine who threw herself off a cliff because she was rejected in love, so she is this representation of female desire," says Platt. "Then there's the whole lesbian side of Sappho, which is very important for people studying women's writing and queer theory." Platt, who is the project's expert on visual interpretations of ancient poets, points out the bust of Sappho in her Goldwin Smith office. "Sappho is someone whom we have no idea at all what she looked like," she notes. "If you look at her portrait, the person she looks most like iconographically is Athena, who was called 'the manly maid' and was the goddess of warfare as well as of weaving and other feminine skills. So Sappho has these more masculine qualities and is equivalent to the male poets in stature, but she has all these feminine qualities too."
Then there's Homer, whom Platt holds up as an example of how understanding of the ancients has evolved right up to the modern day. Because he was likely not a real person—The Iliad and The Odyssey having sprung from centuries of oral performances before being written down—his "biography" has always been a matter of interpretation. "Homer may not have existed at all, but there's a rich biographical tradition about him," Platt says. "Everybody wants to claim him as their own and tell different stories about him. So you have the ancient tradition that he was blind, which is related to him being a kind of prophet. Then you have someone like Malcolm X, who said that Homer was a black slave who was blinded so he couldn't run back to Africa and was forced to tell the stories of his white owners—so he recreates Homer in the image of black liberation. So it's really interesting as a way of thinking about how these poets have been reclaimed by successive generations for their own ends."