When The Classical Tradition was published two years ago, I picked up a hefty copy despite my fears that the book would sit on a shelf untouched — as indeed it has done until today.

I would get to it eventually, I told myself whenever my glance fell on its broad white spine. The editorial staff at The New York Review of Books must have felt the same way, because a review of The Classical Tradition appears in the current issue. Better late than never! Even as the book, a collection of essays by more than a hundred writers, bears the names of its three editors —Anthony Grafton, Glenn Most, and Salvatore Settis — on the cover, so the review is signed by two critics, Stephen Greenblatt and Joseph Leo Koerner (although only Greenblatt is named at the Review‘s web site); collaborations are easily held up by unforeseen developments. I for one am deeply grateful for the time lapse. The good reviews that accompanied publication in a more timely manner may have motivated me to buy the book, but they didn’t get me to read it. What made this good review potent enough to induce some heavy lifting (and heavy holding: do not try to read The Classical Tradition on your lap!) was the yeasty mulch of two years’ guilt. There was also the reek of smug bürgerlich contentment: why, I’ve had that book for ages! Let’s see if it’s what they say it is!

When I was done with the Times, I fetched the book and opened it to one of the sections of color plates. There were a few photos of antique sculptures, but most of the images were of objects created in post-medieval times. This didn’t really register. What registered was the presence of an essay on “Opera,” to which my hand idly turned the pages. There was, of course, no opera in the classical world, but modern opera was born of the attempt, first undertaken at the very end of the Sixteenth Century, to recreate Greek drama, which was thought to be sung, and not until Mozart’s maturity, two hundred years later, do we find a grand opera on a non-classical theme. (I’m thinking of Don Giovanni.) The older I get, the more essentially classical — true to the original baroque objectives — Verdi’s operas seem. Opera is fairly inconceivable without its foundations in the tragedies (and the comedies) of ancient Greece and Rome.

Robert Ketterer’s essay on opera focuses, reasonably enough, on the texts of operas, not the music. (There are few things in Western culture more detached from its classical antecedents than our music.) What kind of stories have been told, and with what degree of simplicity or complication? It was interesting to encounter this material, all of it very familiar to me, arranged in the perspective of “the classical tradition,” and I was able for the first time to grasp the relentlessness with which arguments for operatic “reforms” have always been grounded in appeals to (somewhat imaginary) classical standards. Metastasio (1698-1782), the great librettist whose texts were recycled and updated long after his retirement, was a reformer, and Gluck’s Orfeo is not so much a reform opera as it is a repeated reform — an umpteenth recurrence to original positions. Wagner and Berlioz were consumed by the drive to relight the classical flame, and, in Elektra, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (writing for Richard Strauss) recreated a play by Sophocles in psychoanalytic terms that Freud might have found congenial.

Ketterer suggests that one of the earliest operatic tropes, the lament of Ariadne, survives in “the grieving heroines of Verdi and Puccini,” but, as I say, Verdi at least seems more powerfully connected to the classical tradition than that. Take Don Carlo. With its sprawling, five-act action and its preoccupation with superstition and tyranny, Don Carlo doesn’t look very classical; Metastasio does not fly to mind. But turn it around, and it will be seen to complete the classical project: in this opera, the gods of mythology and their Olympian/pastoral haunts have been transformed into powerful people and historical setttings. Nothing about the incarnation in mortal flesh reduces the epic scope of the drama; on the contrary, it reveals our own sparks of divinity. The opera breathes as grand an air as any; it is, arguable, the grandest of grand operas.

I also read Anthony Grafton’s even longer essay on “Tacitus and Tacitism.” If nothing else (and there is a great deal else), the piece demonstrates the elasticity of ancient sources; just as Augustine inspired both sides of the debate about church reform, so Tacitus could be enlisted to support either the endurance of tyranny or its overthrow.  

The classical tradition has, from the moment that it was taken up by Dante and Petrarch, jostled somewhat uncomfortably alongside the official tradition of Western Christendom. Indeed, it seems more than coincidental that the climax of the Renaissance occurred so shortly before the rupture of the Reformation. 

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Ordinarily, I should have written a great deal more about my dip into The Classical Tradition this morning than in fact I did — if I hadn’t been distracted by anxiety about this afternoon’s Remicade infusion, which in the event went swimmingly. The reason for my anxiety was boring and perhaps overscrupulous, but there was a nuggest of general importance in it, for, with a proclivity to skin cancer and an inconveniencing autoimmune disease, I shuffle between occasionally incompatible therapies. Any ordinary person of my makeup, a century or more ago, would be dead already — it’s that simple. (Did I say “simple”? I’d be dead of colon cancer, which doesn’t even figure in my everyday maladies anymore.) It is not lost on me that I am living in the freshest frontier of baby-boom expense.

I hope never to find out just what the doctors and nurses mean when they warn, frowning, that if you have an infusion of Remicade while you’ve got an infection or (inference?) are taking antibiotics, not only will the Remicade not work, but you can never take it again. Sometimes I feel a bit like a child who’s being spooked into good behavior. Sometimes I feel that, when push comes to shove, as it arguably did today, the schoolroom rule will be relaxed. But I’m way too old (and old) to discount the admonition.

Ray Soleil asked me, is this something new or have people always had it? Meaning my bundle of autoimmune problems. The answer is “yes” to both, and the proof is that Rameses II, if he didn’t quite have ankylosing spondylitis, had something rather like it, just as I do, and that he had it, probably, for the same reason: upbringing in an unusually clean environment. I spent a huge chunk of my childhood in undeveloped “woods” across the street, and did plenty of burrowing and digging and dirtying. But it’s the dirt from other people that builds strong bodies twelve autoimmune ways, and that, in my Bronxville bubble, was completely missing. Once upon a time, your father had to be a pharoah to provide such a germ-free environment. All I needed was an executive with a Dow-Jones Utility.

***

And while we’re on the subject of Who’s Smarter Now?, how many Greeks and Romans, educated Greeks and Romans, d’you think knew anything about Rameses II’s health problems?

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2013 at 12:57 pm.