A century or so ago, the English word “gobbet” was given a new lease of life.
This obscure term for a small lump of something unsavoury (mud, raw meat,
snot) was reborn. It now referred to a short extract of text, one that was
often set as an examination exercise for students to identify and analyse.
Who wrote these lines? What is their context? What is their historical
significance?
The OED finds its first use in the new sense in March 1912, in a poem in Punch
satirizing those who promised quick routes to classical learning: “He’ll
gorge you with gobbets of Homer” (meaning, you won’t have to read the whole
thing). But the examination exercise went back well into the nineteenth
century, and the word must have had currency in university jargon long
before the Punch satirist picked it up. You certainly find it several years
earlier in donnish letters and diaries. R. W. Livingstone, for example, the
best-selling author of The Glory That Was Greece, was full of complaints in
a letter to an Oxford colleague written around 1910 that, while the students
could do their gobbets in the examinations well enough, they did not seem to
have much clue about classical literature and culture as a whole: “The
shocking thing is that real understanding of the classics counts for so very
little side by side with the gobbets”.
Like most nineteenth-century innovations in pedagogy and testing, the gobbet
originated in Classics, and took a particularly strong hold in the study of
Greek and Roman history. But it soon spread to the study of history more
generally and to theology, where the Bible proved a prime candidate for
“gobbeting”. It has a remote descendant in the I. A. Richards school of
practical criticism in English, which (whatever Richards’s original and
loftier aims for the exercise) now boils down to throwing an unidentified
piece of poetry at students, and expecting them to identify it and say
something sensible about it.
In Ancient History, as in most other historical disciplines, the gobbet still
holds an honoured place, as the best test of the novice’s acumen and skill.
The student is confronted with a few sentences of text, the more apparently
unremarkable the better: perhaps part of Cicero’s list of names of those
senators who assisted his recall from exile in 57 BC, or Tacitus’s casual
reference to the death of some second-rank Roman noble, or the career of a
senator as recorded on his tombstone. The answer has to show that you know
what the passage is about, where it comes from and why it might be more
important historical evidence than it seems. But to get top marks you have
to be able to explain why we might not wish to take the text concerned at
face value. Could Cicero have been economical with the truth in constructing
his list of helpers? Is there more to the Roman noble than meets the eye?
Can you detect a mysterious, and significant, gap in that senator’s CV? Is
there some other piece of evidence you can drag out (from memory) which
gives a subtly different picture?
The gobbet is, in other words, an exercise not only in showing that you know
the sources well, but also in showing that you know better than them. It is
an adversarial kind of exercise, which pits the historian against the
ancient evidence, and challenges him or her to prove their superiority. As
such, it encapsulates the two competing tendencies that lie at the very
heart of the study of Greek and Roman history: the first is a tremendous
reverence for the evidence, especially the literary evidence, that gives us
access to what happened in the ancient world; the second is a simultaneous
distrust of the reliability of that evidence and a sense that the expert
historian must find a way to transcend the bias and loaded agenda of the
ancient writers themselves. This is a conflict which goes back to the
nineteenth-century origins of ancient history as a modern discipline, and
continues even now.
When the University of Cambridge started teaching ancient history seriously in
the 1850s, it was explicitly history in, through and of ancient literature.
In the early examination papers, questions on historical topics in our sense
of the word (“Give your estimate of the probable results to Greece and to
the world if Alexander had lived to consolidate his Asiatic conquests”,
1867) rubbed shoulders with what we would call literary subjects (“What
shapes did satire assume in Greek literature, and in Roman writers other
than satirists? Define the term in its strictly Roman sense”, 1873). The
teachers of the new discipline reflect this emphasis. Though Oxford had had
a “Camden Chair of Ancient History” since the seventeenth century, Cambridge
did not elect a Professor of Ancient History until 1899. Unsurprisingly
perhaps, they chose a man, J. S. Reid, best known for his editions of the
speeches and philosophical works of Cicero. A decade later, Reid tried to
move sideways by applying for the Chair of Latin, an ambition thwarted by
the election of A. E. Housman.
This literary emphasis remains. The main periods of university ancient history
courses continue to be the fifth century bc in Greece and the first
centuries bc and ad in Rome – in large part because we still assume that the
study of ancient history is to be grounded in the study of Herodotus,
Thucydides, Tacitus and (though not counting as a historian exactly) Cicero.
Hence too, despite the over-ambitious counterfactual 1867 examination
question, the relative marginalization of Alexander the Great in educational
syllabuses. We worry, just like our nineteenth-century predecessors did,
about why and how to teach a man and a period for which there is no
commensurately “Great” contemporary, or nearly contemporary, historian.
But this trend has always been balanced by the determination to do better than
ancient historians themselves, looking at new aspects of the past, with new
methods. Moses Finley was being more traditional than he acknowledged, or
perhaps realized, when he lectured undergraduates in the 1960s and 70s on
the malign influence of “the sources”. Their concerns were not ours, and too
much immersion in the written evidence would prevent us focusing on the
things which ancient writers ignored but which we knew really mattered.
There was nothing much worse that you could say about Tacitus than that he
failed to explore the Roman economy, or the poor, or slavery. A more
moderate version of this position has informed the first page of most
undergraduate ancient history essays for generations (not to mention many
published books on the subject). These almost always start with a gloomy
assessment of how inadequate the ancient evidence is to the question at
hand, and of just how difficult it is for us to escape the bias and blinkers
of the ancient writers we are forced to rely on: as if that “bias” was not
itself “history” in one sense of the term – and as if it wasn’t close to a
miracle that we had so much material, biased or not, surviving from a
culture more than two millennia distant from us. The message is that we have
to do battle with our evidence. And that is the message which comes over in
the gobbet exercise too.
Andrew Lintott’s new book, Cicero As Evidence: A historian’s companion, treats
the multi-volume writings of Cicero, from the private letters to the
philosophical treatises, as if they were one big gobbet. The bulk of the
book goes through these works in chronological order, asking how a historian
of the late Roman Republic can best use, understand and critique them. In so
doing, it shows both the good and the bad side of the discipline of ancient
history, as it has traditionally been practised. It is a book full of
traditional academic virtues and their matching vices.
Lintott knows the works of Cicero as well as anyone could. He makes it clear
in the preface that Cicero As Evidence is, in part, the outcome of an Oxford
University historical special subject on “Cicero” (only one of the Oxonian
tinges to the book – he repeatedly calibrates the lengths of Cicero’s works
by reference to pages of the “Oxford text”). The advice he offers on reading
Cicero to the notional undergraduate audience that still haunts the book has
its negative and positive aspects; it is scrupulously and sometimes
painfully judicious.
He wants, on the one hand, to warn the novice against a naive, gullible
approach to this material. You must not imagine, as he explains very
clearly, that what have come down to us as “Cicero’s speeches” were in most
cases anything like what were actually delivered in courtroom, Senate House
or Forum. This is not just a question of Cicero improving what he had said
on the day, when it came to circulating the “published” version. Some were
outright confections, never delivered at all. This is well known to be the
case with, for example, the later speeches in the series “Against Verres”;
for Verres had seen the writing on the wall and scarpered when the trial was
only part way through. But the idea that his famous fourth speech against
Catiline is almost as much a retrospective invention is not so widely
acknowledged. More than this, however, Lintott hammers home the obvious, but
often neglected, point that the speeches as we read them make no sense in
terms of the courtroom procedure of Roman law. If they reflect anything of
what was said at the trial, it is only because Cicero has stitched together
elements of various separate phases of the proceedings (including witness
interrogation) to make something that would be handed to posterity as a
single, coherent “speech”.
Lintott also, time and again, shows how much you can extract from a more
suspicious reading of the details of what Cicero wrote. Lintott would score
highly on that question about the list of names of those who helped to
restore Cicero from exile. He points, for example, to the ambiguity in
Cicero’s treatment of Pompey that lies just under the surface. And he notes
how, among his enemies, Cicero soft-pedals on the invective against some,
whose acquiescence he would need if he was to reintegrate himself
successfully into Roman political life, while hounding safer targets. The
vehemence of his attacks on the unfortunate Piso and Gabinius does not
indicate, as an innocent reader might suppose, that they were particularly
responsible for his exile; but rather that they were not around to reply.
There are more positive sides to Lintott’s approach too. He is impressively at
home with the whole body of Cicero’s writing and has a sharp eye for some
interesting and evocative passages. He is particularly good at unravelling
the niceties of senatorial debate, as they are hinted at by Cicero in his
letters. And he has an elegant few pages on the strange work known as the
Commentariolum Petitionis (Handbook on Electioneering) written by Cicero’s
brother Quintus to advise him on how to get elected to the consulship. Many
have suspected this to be a first-century ad forgery, one of those imaginary
historical exercises that Roman rhetoricians so loved. Lintott is not, for
once, on the suspicious side, and uses the Commentariolum to capture the
atmosphere of a Roman election, the handshaking, the canvassing and the
streetwise PR campaign. Cicero, as we know, was to prove extremely
successful at this. Not so the effete aristocrat Scipio Nasica in his own
attempt at a charm offensive in an earlier election campaign. Surprised to
find that the peasant’s hand he was shaking was so horny, he asked the poor
man if he used his hands to walk on. Scipio lost that election.
Cicero As Evidence offers important lessons for anyone working on the history
and culture of the ancient world. Lintott’s insistence on mastering the
political and legal context within which these texts were written, obvious
as it may seem, is far from redundant. After all, there are, even now,
classicists writing highly sophisticated literary analyses of Greek
literature of the second century ad, without apparently stopping to reflect
that it was composed under the hegemony of the Roman Empire.
Nonetheless there is a dispiriting side to the book. Although he would claim
to be celebrating the sheer richness and diversity of these extraordinary
texts, written by one of the most influential figures in Roman culture and
politics ever, Lintott in fact tends to approach his subject with all the
wary suspicion of the gobbet-writer, constantly on the look out for bias,
misrepresentation and omission and not wanting to be misled by the wily old
orator. There is, in other words, for all Lintott’s commitment to Cicero and
his work, an underlying antagonism detectable here between the historian and
the ancient writer. One cannot help but feel that if Cicero himself were to
take Lintott’s Cicero exam, he might find himself in the 2.2s.
But there is also a “wood and trees” problem with the idea of history as
gobbet. The finely honed analysis of individual passages is all well and
good. But ancient writers did not write in three-line chunks, nor (despite
the modern vogue for “sourcebooks”) did they write to be “sources”; nor, of
course, did they write to be “Evidence”. By keeping his nose so close to the
micro-problems, Lintott can miss out the bigger picture of the world in
which Cicero operated, of what he thought he was doing and why that has been
of such interest ever after.
So, for example, a carefully crafted section of Lintott’s book dissects
Cicero’s philosophical writing and its relationship to his political life
more generally. But there is nothing on just how extraordinary it was for a
Roman politician to be analysing the world in Greek philosophical terms in
the first place, or on the revolution in Roman thought (of which Cicero was
part driver, part beneficiary) that made this possible. Another few pages
offer a sensible analysis of the politics behind one of Cicero’s, now little
read, religious speeches. This is Cicero’s own response to an enigmatic
priestly interpretation of a strange rumbling sound that had been heard
outside Rome and was assumed to be a message from the gods. But Lintott
offers little to help us understand what difference this made, or how
important the gods were in a world that might otherwise seem to be governed
by hard-headed realpolitik and philosophical scepticism.
Underneath, the problem is much as R. W. Livingstone saw it a hundred years
ago. We might not be so thrilled as Livingstone was by the “one man” in the
exam “who had a rather nice and true passage about Virgil and brown-faced
Italian village children” (his fellow examiner “ruthlessly underlined” it).
But he was right to argue that the skills of micro-analysis shown by the
first-class gobbet-writer may not be those that illuminate classical culture
more widely.
Andrew Lintott
CICERO AS EVIDENCE
A historian’s companion
480pp. Oxford University Press. £70.
978 0 19 921644 4
Mary Beard is the author of The Roman Triumph, published last year. She
is Classics editor of the TLS.
