Pseudo-Jerome’s Cosmographic Games (Cosmographia Aethici)

PSEUDO-JEROME’S COSMOGRAPHIC GAMES (COSMOGRAPHIA AETHICI) Antti Lampinen (St Andrews & Helsinki)

Introductory remarks The Cosmographia Aethici is a fascinating piece of literary forgery1 from the earlier half of the eight century (probably not long after 727). Essentially, the Cosmography is a prosimetrum text of indefinable genre2 by an unknown author, with some ties to Southern English monastic centres and Irish the learned tradition but possibly writing in Northern Italy or Merovingian Francia3 – a writer pretending to be Saint Jerome producing an expurgated breviarium of a text originally written by a pagan philosopher Aethicus several centuries prior to Jerome’s time, indeed before Christ (72). This ‘Aethicus’ is said to be a ‘Scythian’ from (H)Istria (2), but whether this means the city of Histria in Scythia Minor, by the Black Sea, or the Istrian peninsula of the Adriatic, seems to fluctuate within the text.4 The language of Cosmographia is utterly unique, combining the innovative and often Greek-informed coinages of its vocabulary to a sometimes hopelessly muddled or ambiguous syntax. But the author manages the ‘found text’ paradigm of his forgery well,5 and creates three distinct voices: his piously sermonising ‘Jerome’ often intersperses his opinions into the text and uses many of the favourite expressions of the presbyter; ‘Aethicus’s own voice when quoted verbatim is alternatingly bombastic and voluminous or cryptic and somber; and between these two there are the more neutral sections representing the supposedly abbreviated narrative of the original. Although the author is often called Pseudo-Jerome, I think it is better to speak about ‘the Cosmographer’, so we can distinguish between the voices of Jerome and Aethicus in the text, both of whom are creations of the Cosmographer.

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Forgery in the sense that the writer of the piece was not Jerome, and that there was no original ’Aethicus’ text behind the Cosmographia. However, it is another question entirely whether the Cosmographer/Pseudo-Jerome wanted his readers to believe that the real historical Jerome was actually the producer of the final text, or if he left purposefully open the (correct) interpretation that the text was by someone who only pretended to be Jerome. In other words: was ‘Pseudo-Jerome’ (as opposed to ‘Jerome’) the intended author in the first place: did the Cosmographer construct his text so as to allow his readers to find out the truth, or read the text in a state of ambiguity about its ‘Jerome’ and with the pleasant suspicion that they were reading a clever fake? 2 Called ‘unclassifiable’ by Berg 2013, 5-6. 3 Herren considers this areal delineation the likeliest, based on the centres that produced the earliest copies: St. Gall, Regensburg, Salzburg, Murbach, Reichenau and Bobbio. In his edition he gestures towards possibly preferring Bobbio as an attractive candidate. The Greek of the Cosmographer may have been learnt from Theodore of Tarsus: Herren 2009, 27-29. 4 Herren 2011a, p. 56 ad loc. 5 The inspiration may partly derive from the texts attributed to ‘Dictys of Crete’ and ‘Dares Phrygius’.

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The text I’m using today is that established by Michael Herren (2011a), based on but frequently correcting the 1993 edition of Otto Prinz for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Herren has, through his updated edition, his translation (first ever of this very difficult text) and his quite farreaching commentary advanced our understanding of the Cosmographia. Since recent scholarship has, moreover, dispatched some of the persistent but unfounded speculations about the text – such as that there is an actual pagan cosmography behind it, or that the author is the mid-eight century Irish bishop of Salzburg, Virgil – we are finally adequately equipped to say something about the contents of the text, as well as to advance cautious ideas about the intentions of the author. Severe difficulties still remain, though. Both the intended audience of the Cosmography and the ways in which it was read are intricate and perhaps ultimately unanswerable questions.6 A few tantalising connections do emerge – for instance the appearance of ‘Aethicus’ Taracontae insulae, the homeland of the Turchi, in the Hereford mappamundi.

Today I would like to examine, however briefly, the ways in which the Cosmographer manipulates his inherited religious polemics and imagery. My original idea was to include also some of the Cosmographer’s ethnicised material, but this would prolong the paper too much. And in any case I will in the future be looking into the latter aspect. Basically, only a handful of scholars has studied the Cosmographia in the past forty years, and there is still much to be said about the ‘ethnographicising

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Herren 2009, 27 suggests that the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian, where the Cosmographer had quite possibly studied, would have also been a good match for an intended audience: international, sophisticated, alert to debates on authority and Biblical exegesis, and having an Irish contingent appreciative of literary techniques similar to Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, and daring word-formations such as those in the Hisperica famina. Of the later readers, it seems that for instance Ratramn of Corbie, famous for his Epistula de cynocephalis, did use the Cosmography.

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gestures’ therein, as well. But today will be about religion. Essentially, the themes of religion and ethnography circumscribe the basic ambiguity of the Cosmography, its fine balancing act between a partly tongue-in-cheek narrative of marvels and a pessimistic, even quasi-apocalyptic reflection on the limits of human knowledge. I think what will emerge will demonstrate the many instances of irony and subversion in the treatment of Aethicus’ supposed material – but also reveal the limits of seeing this text as entirely devoid of seriousness. Though I’m speaking of Cosmography and the Cosmographer, even these terms are misnomers in a text that is cosmography only in its first sections (1-23), as your handout shows. From 22 and 23 onwards begins the section which Danuta Shanzer has called a pastiche of a Reiseroman, and Ian Wood has read as an adaptation of ethnographical treatises: both are correct to a certain extent. 23104 constitute ‘Aethicus’s first journey beginning from Taprobane in the east and taking in the West and the North, incorporating distinct episodes such as that of Alexander enclosing the Unclean Races in 40-43, and a treatise of ship types in 44-57, adding fantasy-creations to material from Isidore’s Etym. 19.1. By concentrating on the Northern lands, and almost entirely avoiding Gaul, Italy, and Spain, the Cosmographer has obeyed one of the most basic tenets of forgers: do not elaborate on matters about which your audience is too well informed. Sections 105-111 narrate more briefly the second journey, which does not seem to interest ‘Jerome’ as much: indeed, the central theme of the ethnographicising passages in the Cosmographia are the peoples of the north. In discussing these, ‘Aethicus’ is able to move free of previously established Latin texts that would have been read in his time: consequently, they are full of fantastic innovativeness, though often still within the bounds of the time-honoured common stereotypes about the North and northerners.7 Section 112 constitutes a treatise on the winds, and 113 includes the unique alphabet said earlier in the work to have been invented by Aethicus. 1. Constructing author(ity/-ie)s in the Cosmographia In the Cosmographia ‘Aethicus’ is given a whole range of works he is supposed to have penned: the Aenigmata, the Sophogramii [sic], Rus artium on the skills of the inhabitants of the Orkneys, and a collection of Pythagorean sayings. The ability of ‘Jerome’ to refer the reader to these further works should they want more information about certain details strengthens the overall conceit, although since Jerome’s primarily motivation for reading ‘Aethicus’s Cosmographia is stated to be its narration of things which ‘Moses and the Old Testament omitted’ (Cosm. 1: your handout I), it must be assumed that the ‘Jerome’ editing Cosmographia is not portrayed as having perused these in person, but picking

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Herren 2009, 22 notes, however, that familiarity with the Greek tradition about the Hyperboreans is demonstrated by elements interspersed in the northern ethnographies of ’Aethicus’.

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out cross-references in ‘Aethicus’s purported original work. The same delineation according to the Holy Scripture is repeated in Cosm. 30 (handout V): the impression is that the limits of knowledge are dictated not by ‘Aethicus’, but by ‘Jerome’s understanding of what is needed to supplement the information from what he calls hagiografia. The real Jerome was also the Cosmographer’s source for several details and expressions, including some renderings of Hebrew names, informed by De nominibus Hebraicis. The Bible and Isidore’s Etymologies are two sources which the author must have been able to consult throughout the composition of the work, as material from these is distributed evenly throughout the Cosmography. Individual references exist to a wide range of texts, including Avitus of Vienne’s De spiritalis historiae gestis, Servius’ Vergil-commentaries, Vergil, Macrobius’ commentary to Somnium Scipionis, the Liber monstrorum and Pseudo-Augustine’s De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae. The most recent sources used by Pseudo-Jerome are the Latin translation of Pseudo-Methodius and the Liber historiae Francorum, which finished in or just before 727.8 Other interesting sources he seems to have made use of include the Γ-redaction of the Pseudo-Callisthenian Alexander Romance, though mostly he accessed the Alexander material through Julius Valerius’ Res gestae Alexandri Magni, and the Topographia Christiana of Cosmas Indicopleustes, which may have been present in entire or partial translation in the English libraries.9 Some Hiberno-Latin literary features are shared with the midseventh-century grammarian Virgilius Maro Grammaticus and the Hisperica famina, but this should not be regarded as supporting the writer’s Irishness. The figure of ‘Aethicus Ister’ himself, as suggested by Michael Herren, may well have been ‘found’ in Virgil the Grammarian, who wrote about a character called Estrius or Istrius, described as a historian and a moralist.10 The Cosmographer also shares his propensity of inventing sometimes very fancifully named ancient figures of authority, word games, and etymologies with Virgil the Grammarian.11 Before delving into the passages in your handout, it may be useful to say a few things about a crucial point for Cosmographia’s treatment of religiosity – namely, the construction of authority within the text. Whether we foreground its identity as a forgery or a work of secondary creation (nova de veteribus), the text both required and allowed for a great range of authority-construction. The Cosmographer is engaged in building up two figures: that of ‘Aethicus’, and that of Jerome as he edits

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Herren 2010, 15. B. Bischoff & M. Lapidge (eds.) 1994, Biblical Commentaries of the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian, 320-21; 208-11: Cosmas seems to have been cited once in the Biblical Commentaries, and there is some other evidence, as well, for the transmission of Topographia Christiana in the Anglo-Saxon England. 10 Cf. Herren 2011a, liii. It would be very much like the Cosmographer to pick the Greek word as the basis of forming his ‘Aethicus’. 11 For these in Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, see Naismith 2008, 60. 9

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Aethicus (handout passages I, VIII, X). Section 66a (the first part of your passage X) is particularly fascinating, as Pseudo-Jerome conjures up an image of himself using the critical apparatus to edit ‘Aethicus’ exactly in order to guarantee the trustworthiness of the material he presents to his reader. He refers to many of Jerome’s own works in his guise as the bishop, and seems to know them quite well, including his letters. Generally, ‘Jerome’ says that already ‘Aethicus’ has left out much material about areas and peoples which otherwise had been mentioned in Josephus’ ‘Histories’ and the Holy Scriptures (Cosm. 30, your handout passage V). Herren observes (xxiv; cf. 2009, 26) that this also builds up ‘Aethicus’ authority: he is a Vergil-like enlightened pagan author (43), who recognised the peerless source of wisdom, and did not seek to compete with it, but instead augmented it about things less treated. ‘Jerome’ constantly praises ‘Aethicus’ for his unique information, but also makes clear he is criticising and censoring other things (e.g. Cosm. 58, your handout n. IX); a device which allows for an inclusion of novel and wonderful elements while referring to Jerome, a high Christian authority already supposed to have made the selection and done the fact-checking (with Bible firmly in mind). 2. Nova de veteribus – Position of Religion in the Cosmographia Aethici PAGANISM, MYTHOLOGY AND THE GODS ‘Jerome’ of the Cosmographia repeatedly utters warnings about how reading pagan literature, especially poems, might endanger the spiritual well-being and development of Christians. This is close to the warnings of Isidore in Sententiae, but also participates in a general and by-now rather conventional admonitory tradition.12 But ‘Jerome’ of Cosmography also extends his editorial gaze into the past. Handout passage XI (Cosm. 72b) represents Jerome’s comment on ‘Aethicus’s earlier versepanegyric to Greece, named ‘Paternal Loins, Maternal Breasts’. The church father reminds the reader that there was a reason why ‘Aethicus’ did not give an ethnography of Greece, as there would have been many vices and sins in evidence among the Greeks of ‘Aethicus’’s day, since they had not yet been cured by the medicine of ‘the Samaritan’ (Christ), and had suffered much from the influence of dialecticians. Handout passage XIII (Cosm. 80a) preserves a bizarre episode of euhemerized ancient mythology, which moreover has suffered badly in the course of the manuscript transmission. Basically, Hercules, an arrogant thief and thug, murders Apollo, who is not a saint himself either, by way of a stratagem by some sort of fountain: both are implied to be mortal rulers. In the future this episode could, perhaps, be compared with other Late Antique and Merovingian examples of euhemeristic treatment, such as the Picus myth in the Latin Excerpta Latina Barbari.13 As things stand, however, I would like to take issue for instance with Herren’s uncomplicated glossing of the ethnonym Choatrae

12 13

Isid. Sent. 3.13.1. Cf. Cosm. 43. Cf. Garstad 2011.

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as ‘Scythians’. It is true that Choatrae appears as an infrequent group name among the Scythian whole in writers like Lucan and Pliny the Elder, but I fail to see why the Cosmographer would have meant by this the whole entirety of Scythians. Cosm. 98, passage XV in the handout) portrays ‘Aethicus’ becoming inspired by the memory of the Sibyl and Pythagoras on Samos, and composing a hymn in their honour on the basis of the sententiae of their verses and expanding on them. ‘Jerome’ does not seem to find much fault in this, but on the contrary seems to cast the relationship of Aethicus, the editor of Pythagoras’ obscure statements, and himself, the editor of Aethicus’ similarly rhetorical and elaborate language, into a parallel. WISDOM AND PHILOSOPHY Pagan philosophers are consummately invented by Pseudo-Jerome. He comes up with several creative names for philosophers of antiquity and other earlier writers, such as Dimomorchas, Fabius of Athens (79, defeated by Aethicus’ fine irony in handout n. XII); Cluontes (based on Cleanthes) and Argippus (the silvery counterpart of Chrysippus) [both of these in c. 17, handout n. II], and seems to also be referring to Harpocrates (24, in your handout n. III) and Apion (66b in your handout n. X; cf. 71: Herren suggests Hebion to come from the sect of Ebionites, but I think the Cosmographer’s occasional gestures towards Josephus make Apion a more likely candidate). The Leucium earlier in the same passage (66b), by the way, can either derive from Lucian, who wrote Lucius in the first person, or Leukios Kharinos, the author of novelistic romances about the apostles (Aug. C. Felicem. 2.6, Phot. Bibl. 114). Aurelius [also handout n. III], another one of the interlocutors of ‘Aethicus’ in Spain, may be based on Marcus Aurelius. The Indian Brahmin-king Hiarcas, whom Philostratus’ Vita Apollonii mentions, shows up in Cosm. 14, 16 and 17, but not on the basis of any direct reading of Philostratus on the part of the Cosmographer, but stemming from a letter by the real Jerome (Ep. 53.1.4).14 Interestingly, while ‘Aethicus’ is described to have criticised Hiarcas’ theories (Cosm. 14), the theories referred to seem mostly like the flat-earth cosmography of Cosmas Indicopleustes’ Topographia Christiana.15 Latin translation of this work, or at least translated excerpts of it, were present in the late seventh-century England, as Bremmer 2010, 46-47 notes. Like many Late Antique and Medieval alchemical texts, historical figures also get repossessed. In 66b, the latter section of your handout X, mentions Pythagoras, ‘the Mantuan’, and Leucius as well as the doubled Tullius and Cicero, Plato and ‘Hebion’ as examples of philosophers who confounded and confused their readers, and hence should be avoided by the faithful. The criticism of ‘Jerome’,

14

Jerome also mentions the mensa Solis, but this is a Herodotean ‘contamination’ (Shanzer 70) located in Ethiopia. 15 Herren 2009, 29 suggests that Topographia Christiana, with its flat-earth cosmology and plentiful personal details of the author’s travels, could well have been the primary target of the Cosmographer’s satire.

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amusingly, seems to be directed precisely against such elements which the Cosmographia made use of: obscurity, multivocality, and indeed modifications of the letters of the alphabet, which seems like an ill-fitting censure when ‘Aethicus’ alphabet’ is appended to the end of the best-preserved manuscripts. Handout number VIII (Cosm. 43) is where Jerome interrupts his paraphrase of ‘Aethicus’ to address the reader in his own voice, and explain why he has left out sections of the philosopher’s text where he thinks the unexpurgated version would endanger the reader. These sections are repeatedly placed after extended periods of ‘Aethican’ material, and particularly in this case ‘Jerome’ explicitly compares Aethicus to Vergil. Next, your handout IX Cosm. 58a to 58c, which Herren comments is a ‘remarkably good rant and a fairly accurate rendering of Jerome’s own style’, represents a section in which the bishop seems again to become very anxious about what he is doing, and launches into another moralising series

of

warnings

about

reading

pagan

philosophers unedited, as this might well lead to introduction of error. He also refers to Epicurean atomism, accessed through Jerome’s Epistle 119.5.4. HERESY AND SCHISM From this (still in handout IX, 58c), ‘Jerome’ switches into describing a recent outbreak of heresy, including a list of mostly invented names of heresiarchs – possibly only Macedonius is real: he may be the bishop of Aquileia involved in the last stages of the Three Chapters controversy. The nova petigo of the heresy seems to refer to the final resolution of the long-drawn out schism at the Council of Aquileia, convoked by pope Sergius just before year 700. Thus, the section to the recent outbreak appears to break out from the writer’s pose as St. Jerome, since the reference seems to be to the Three Chapters Controversy or the Aquileian Schism of the 550s, over a century after Jerome’s death. The area of Istria is clearly introduced from the point of view of Jerome himself, and called vicina

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finitima huius regionis, without huius tying into anything preceding, and in here is definitely the Adriatic region, though this is not always the case in the Cosmographia. What is fascinating to me here is that heretics could essentially be invented according to the same principles as the Cosmographer invents population names or ancient philosophers, or the way that Virgil the Grammarian has been observed to invent ancient dialecticians and grammarians. The formal and structural similarities between ethnography and heresiology, by the way, have been usefully delineated in a recent contribution by Todd Berzon, given in your handout’s bibliography. APOCALYPSE The tone of religious references in the Cosmographia becomes much more sombre when ‘Aethicus’ enters the prophetic mode, casting dire warnings about turmoil in the Balkans and the attacks of nomads against the Mediterranean islands. The same can to a certain extent be said about most references to the ‘Enclosed Nations’ of the North. These had just entered the Latin tradition in an influential way through the translation of Pseudo-Methodius’ Apocalypse, and the Cosmographer clearly wanted to elaborate that material in a way that shows remarkable readiness to modify texts which otherwise were considered revealed or venerable. But the Cosmographia innovates also about these groups, lifting two among their number, the Cynocephalians and the Turks, to a particular prominence. In your handout passage IV, Cosm. 28, the Cynocephalians of the isle of Munitia are described in a way that re-uses many traditional septentriographic elements, some of which seem to be suspiciously close to what Solinus’ Collectanea wrote about the Irish: this needs to be investigated more. Their religion is a typical ‘hard-primitivistic’ image, presented as demon- and omen-worship. The more gruesome details are partly borrowed from Pseudo-Methodius’ Apocalypse (8.10) – which is the first to switch their location from India to the North – as well as Isidore’s Etymologies (11.3.15): the Isidoran reference to the obvious physical characteristic of the dog-headed people seems to have been adapted into a sardonic-sounding statement about Aethicus’ ‘famous investigative method’ being able to discern that their heads indeed do resemble canine heads. The passage also showcases the Cosmographer’s propensity for elaborate ethnonymic jokes, especially when he takes up Jerome’s actual formulation in De nominibus Hebraicis (p. 135.8) about Chananei negotiatores, but the ‘Canaanite tradesmen’ become in here Germanic tradesmen, who call the dog-headed people ‘Canines’.16

16

See Wood, 200.

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The other northern group lifted into spotlight from the Pseudo-Methodian list of ‘Enclosed Nations’ in the Cosmographia are the Turks, Turchi, in your handout passage VI (Cosm. 32). Here, too, the Cosmographer has interwoven several different sources, but without explicit verbal allusions: Chronicon Fredegarii 2.6, the Γ-redaction of Pseudo-Callisthenes, and Pseudo-Methodius’ Apocalypse (10.5) are all important, but he adds his own verbal games to the mix. The name of the Turks is explained from truculentia, and their island and city, Taraconta, seems to refer to the Greek word tarakhé, ‘upheaval’, which is fitting since they are supposed to take part in the apocalyptic incursion of the Enclosed Nations upon the world. Their religion seems to add misunderstanding to a vaguely Semitic worship of Moloch. Impressed by the census and taxation of Caesar Augustus, they thought he was a ‘new god of days’ (cf. Isidore Etym. 8.11.31 on Cronus as tempus), and for once in their history paid tribute to someone. This gets somehow converted into an idol-worship, and the idol’s name seems to be derived from Moloch – although Herren (2011, ad loc) has also cleverly suggested that read backwards (i.e. in the Hebrew way), MORCHOLOM becomes MOLOCH ROM – the king of Rome. Alexander the Great gets intimately tied into the vision of last days in the Cosmographer’s presentation, and also quite extensively Christianised. He seems indeed to be a figure much like Aethicus’, a pagan living before the arrival of Christ who nonetheless respects the Jewish religion (cf. Jos. Ant. 11.306-46) and is in come connection with the only God. In your handout passage VII (Cosm. 41a-b) Alexander acts upon a debilitatingly frightful vision of what the Impure Nations might do to the world, after which he sacrifices to the Christian god on mount ‘Chelion’, probably Helicon, and receives via divine grace a stratagem, by which he traps the Impure Nations behind a mountain wall up in the north. Then finally, in handout passage XIV are excerpts from a long-winded and intriguingly prophetic section around Cosm. 84a-b, where a description of Macedonia and Thessaly zooms via a panegyric of Mount Olympus into a praise of Alexander, which then morphs into a Christianised apocalyptic vision, where Alexander ascends in glory to Mount of Olives, and returns to do battle against the peoples of the east, who are threatening Cyprus and the Mediterranean coast with their plundering.17 It seems to me that Alexander in these passages gets decisively conflated into the apocalyptic personage of ‘the Last Roman Emperor.’ 3. Ethnographicising register and religion: some horizons for further study So my question, on the basis of all of the above, is: “what happens to religious authority” in a forged text such as Cosmographia Aethici? I have barely any full-formed answers yet to this question, and neither to the somewhat interlinked and just as fascinating question of the ethnographicising details

17

Behind this seems to be the Byzantine-Arab treaty of 688, sharing the administration of Cyprus.

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in this text. But I would like to offer just a few additional thoughts on what questions I personally see in the horizon in the study of such texts. i)

Patrolling religious authority in a forged text by several means; when is the emphasis on authority taken so far as to appear as parody?

ii)

The question of belief; audience expectations regarding a work like Cosmographia – what texts are treated as ‘fiction’? Is the concept meaningful in 8th century context? And is it meaningful for the religious references in the text?

iii)

Euhemerism in the treatment of earlier pagan myth and ritual

iv)

Role of antiquarianising and ethnographicising elements from antiquity in the intellectual tradition of the Dark Ages; quasi-Biblical register, invention of ‘scripturallooking’ names

It seems likely that the Cosmographer was planning to write a work that would never reveal the true identity of its author – a true pseudepigraphical work, that is. To be sure, the Cosmographer is a fairly unique case, his aims opaque to say the least, and his work was not necessarily read or copied for the reasons he wrote it (for instance, it does seem to have been placed among Alexander matter in some libraries; also Ian Wood is probably correct in noting how the popularity of the work in Bavaria might derive from its status as a frontier region18), but it certainly alerts us to the possibilities that even works written in an ostensibly ‘serious’ genres (ecclesiastical registers or the commentary form come to mind most easily) should not be divested of their ironic and ludic elements, whether in the Latin or Greek tradition. The Cosmographer’s text, which also in its language and attitude resembles Virgilius Maro Grammaticus’ creative yet po-faced authority-building as a grammarian, seems partly to be attempting to do the same thing in a different, though barely definable, genre. Danuta Shanzer has mounted a very well-argued study of the Reiseroman aspects of the Cosmographia, but even so, I am somewhat unconvinced of the usefulness of ancient genre definitions for our understanding of this text, in the first place.19 On the other hand, just like in Virgil the Grammarian’s texts, satire and spoof is not the whole explanation.20 ‘Travel romance’ can certainly have had religious tones, such as in the Tale of Macarius of Rome (before 11th century), and while the Alexander-passages in Cosmography tend to introduce sections of pseudo-prophecy and apocalyptic tones, this does not happen all the time.

18

Wood 2000, 206-7. Shanzer 2006. 20 Cf. Naismith 2008, 62. 19

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The first, broadly speaking ‘cosmographical’ section seems like primarily a learned spoof on cosmographical narratives, and this tone does prevail over extensive sections of the travel romance narrative, as well. But the mood seems to be quite different in the sections influenced by the Alexander tradition about the ‘Enclosed Nations’ (largely through Julius Valerius’ Res gestae Alexandri Magni) and by the Pseudo-Methodian Apocalypse. For its audience, the testimony of ‘Aethicus’ could hardly have contributed any more to the Christian doctrine than the Bible did, and hence the sections on hell, the Devil, and the primacy of the Christian tradition must be regarded as buttressing the authority of the Cosmographer’s created original source, a pagan philosopher knowing the one God – a suitably pious variation of the old ‘Anacharsis’ type.21 ‘Jerome’, of course, was the creator of the Latin Vulgate, so his assessment as for the commensurability of ‘Aethicus’ and the Scripture would have seemed to carry quite a lot of weight. The Cosmographia seems to demonstrate that even if it is a jeu d’esprit, Merovingian-era re-use and manipulation of earlier literary materials was not just credulous recycling and reverential pastiche, but genuinely creative, subversive, and original field of adaptation and reordering. Of course, we can think about the text as having started as a parody among the most brilliant pupils of Theodore of Tarsus in Canterbury, but morphing into something subtly different and perhaps more ambiguous in its later stages. Variety evident in the world consisting of different peoples could be arranged and presented in ways that highlighted both its fascination and dangers, and the combined authorities of ‘Jerome’ and ‘Aethicus’ took the reader to try and de-code it. The implied reward is a harmonised view of classical and Christian understanding of the world, validated by the highest authorities – if you just can work out what to trust, and what to think. So it is not quite easy as in Isidore’s harmonised vision!22 In this, we might compare Pseudo-Jerome’s conception of a philosophus to that of Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, who similarly saw sapientia to pertain to both divine and mundane matters, and behind both of their conception of philosophia was the positive attitude of Isidore of Seville.23 Both writers seem to offer to their audience a chance to become closer to a Christian version of an ancient philosophus, and part of their purposeful ambiguity, false tracks, and cryptic utterances may have been informed by a Merovingian impression or interpretation of what ‘ancient wisdom’ looked and sounded like.24 In the case of Cosmography, there may be an actual clue towards this purpose in section 98, where ‘Aethicus’ gets inspired on the isle of Samos, and writes a longish oracular praise-

21

Cf. Shanzer 2006, 84; Herren 2009, 24. We might even see in the Cosmography a problematisation of Isidore’s clear pursuit for a synthesis between Christian and pagan learning; while still using both Sententiae and Etymologiae extensively, the Cosmographer could be seen to want to call into question the neatness of the influential Isidoran world-view. 23 Naismith 2008, 65 on Virgil the Grammarian. Shanzer 2006, 84 on ‘Jerome’. 24 Cf. Naismith 2008, 76: ‘the world Virgilius conjures up […] does succeed in capturing the flavour recondite grammatical discourse may have had for students in the seventh century.’ 22

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poem to the Sibyl and Pythagoras, ‘appropriating to himself the feeling of their verses and expanding upon it’ (Cosm. 98; handout number XV). Another calculated clue for the reader about how to read the work may be detected in section 79, your handout n. XII), where Aethicus defeats the Athenian philosophers exactly due to his scrupulosissimis ironiis. For Pseudo-Jerome’s more satirical parts, targets may also be sought in the over-literal Biblical interpretation, reverence for authority, and credulity – perhaps in particular in the Topographia Christiana of Cosmas Indicopleustes.25 In conjuring up the general tone and feeling of such texts, or other geographical, antiquarian or ethnographicising narratives such as that of Solinus’ Collectanea, the Cosmographia does a wonderful job, with its mixture of exotic-sounding population names, digressions on natural phenomena, a running scriptural commentary on the received classical traditions, and euhemeristic treatment of classical myths and legendary figures. The Cosmographer or ‘Pseudo-Jerome’ is culturally speaking a conservative and a typically Grecocentric anti-relativist. In the field of religion, the same pattern applies to ‘Aethicus’s negative views regarding the wisdom and book-learning of the Irish, as well as the quip about the ‘Brutish Isles’. He even may be echoing or emulating the depreciating comments directed at the home-baked British and Irish learning in the School of Theodore at Canterbury. In other words, his adopted Greco-centricity might be second-hand, whether sincere or not. In terms of religion, the Cosmographer’s view is similarly directed on the ‘great Rome’ and Christian world-view: but where the ethnicising gestures and religious sentiments tie together are the apocalyptic passages. The confused and overlapping religious scene, with plenty of gentiles, righteous pagans, idolaters, euhemerised ancient heroes and Christian church fathers all contribute a feeling of antiquity to the text.26 The Arabs and Slavs are not religious enemies, however, even though the rhetoric around them is prophetic. The true religious other seems to be the Enclosed Nations of the North, who represent all that is repulsive, impious, and depraved. Yet their presence in the text is that of a classical edge-of-the-world curiosity. In a way, Pseudo-Jerome’s reader becomes a bit like Alexander, himself: seeing many things and wondrous peoples, trying stratagems against them, but in the end relying on superior sources of wisdom (Aristotle for one, Jerome for the other) to confirm their impressions on these matters. Even despite the sections where Alexander is invoked to ‘return to Mount Zion’ and the barbarian depredations are bemoaned, texts like Cosmographia Aethici can only with difficulty be seen as primarily a product of an age of anxiety or epistemic insecurity. On the contrary, the Cosmographer

25

Cf. Shanzer 2006, 82-3; Herren 2009, 29. Cf. Naismith 2008, 78-79 on the religious position constructed within the texts of Virgilius Maro Grammaticus for his persona as ‘Vergil’. 26

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acts with a clear sense of purpose and a certain subversiveness in a literary world where not even such eminent writers as Jerome or Augustine, nor apocalyptic texts, nor those of god-fearing pagans, were beyond pastiche, irony, and certainly some elaborate re-ordering. There may even be a certain amount of impatience that the Cosmographer directs at the old trite ways of recycling the same exemplars and figures: he certainly sets out to forge his own path, and the supporting authorities. The impression is that of someone saying: “Look how much we have! Why don’t we do something exciting and new with these things?” Bibliography Bazelmans, J. 2009, ‘The early-medieval use of ethnic names from classical antiquity. The case of the Frisians’, Ethnic Constructs in Antiquity: The Role of Power and Tradition, T. Derks & N. Roymans (eds.), Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 321-37. Berg, J. 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