5. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405)
Section III
Renaissance Revisions: Recovery and Renewal
8.
1. Francis Petrarch, Letters to Cicero and Homer (1345, 1360) and Sonnets (1327–1368)
2. Leonardo Bruni, In Praise of the City of Florence (1404)
3. Poggio Bracciolini, Letter to Guarino Veronese (1416)
4. Lauro Quirini, Letter to Pope Nicholas V on the Fall of Constantinople (1453)
5. Cassandra Fedele, Oration in Praise of Literary Studies (1487)
1. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)
2. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1518)
3. Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince (1516)
4. Thomas More, Utopia (1516)
1. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso (Roland Goes Mad, 1516/1521/1532)
2. François Rabelais, Gargantua (1534/1535)
3. Michel de Montaigne, Essays (1580, 1587–1588)
4. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605/1615)
1. Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella (c. 1582)
2. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (1587/1588)
3. William Shakespeare, Soliloquies (1594–1601) and Sonnets (1609)
4. John Donne, Songs and Sonnets and Holy Sonnets (1633)
Early Modern: New Horizons
1. Amerigo Vespucci, New World (1502/1503)
2. Hernán Cortés, Second Letter of Relation (1520)
3. Garcilaso de la Vega “the Inca,” Royal Commentaries of the Incas (1609, 1616–1617)
4. Saint Francis Xavier, Letter to His Jesuit Colleagues (1552)
5. Luís de Camões, The Lusiads (1572)
6. Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (1666)
7. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688)
13. Other Voices
1. Marguerite de Navarre, Heptameron (1558)
2. Anonymous, The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)
3. Saint Teresa of Ávila, The Book of Her Life (1565)
4. María de Zayas y Sotomayor, Tales of Disillusion (1647)
5. Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women (1600)
6. Sarra Copia Sulam, Manifesto on the Immortality of the Soul (1621)
7. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Poems (c. 1669–1694)
14. Man
1. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, The Mayor of Zalamea (1640)
2. Molière, The Misanthrope (1666)
3. John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671)
CHRONOLOGY
Antiquity: Foundations of Western Literature
BCE
c. 800–700 Homer, Iliad
c. 700 Hesiod,Works and Days
c. 650 Sappho, Poems
c. 586–539 Isaiah
c. 600–200 Psalms
c. 538–330 Genesis
c. 538–330 Exodus
c. 458 Aeschylus, Agamemnon
431 Euripedes, Medea
c. 428–425 Sophocles, Oedipus
423 Aristophanes, Clouds
c. 380–360 Plato, Phaedo 330–164 Job
59 Lucretius, Nature of Things Before 54 Catullus, Poems
44 Cicero, Fourth Philippic
c. 29–19 Virgil, Aeneid
CE
c. 8 Ovid, Metamorphoses
c. 80–90 Matthew
c. 80–90 Acts
c. 90–110 John
c. 95 Revelation
c. 98 Tacitus, Agricola
167 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
397
The Middle Ages: Formation of the Western Literary Tradition
Augustine, Confessions
c. 526 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
c. 817–36
Einhard, Life of Charlemagne
c. 970 Hrotswitha, Sapientia
c. 975–1025 Beowulf
c. 1040–1115 Song of Roland
c. 1130
c. 1140–1207
Abelard, Story of My Misfortunes
Song of My Cid 1141–51
c. 1155–89
1184–86
Hildegard, Know the Ways
Marie de France, Lanval
Andreas Capellanus, Art of Courtly Love 1298 Marco Polo, The Description of the World
c. 1308–1320 Dante, Inferno
1349–51
Boccaccio, Decameron
c. 1380–1400 Chaucer, Canterbury Tales 1405 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies
c. 1420–27
c. 1430–36
Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe
Renaissance Revisions: Recovery and Renewal
1327–68
1404
Petrarch, Letters and Sonnets
Bruni, In Praise of the City of Florence 1416
1453
Bracciolini, Letter to Guarino Veronese
Quirini, Letter to Pope Nicholas V 1487
Fedele, Oration in Praise of Literary Studies 1513
Machiavelli, The Prince 1516
Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince 1516
More, Utopia
1516/1521/1532
Ariosto, Orlando furioso 1518
Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier 1534/1535
c. 1582
Rabelais, Gargantua
Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 1587/1588
Marlowe, Faustus 1580, 1587–88
Montaigne, Essays 1594–1601, 1609
1605/1615
Shakespeare, Soliloquies and Sonnets
Cervantes, Don Quixote 1633
Donne, Songs and Sonnets and Holy Sonnets
Early Modern: New Horizons
1502/1503 Vespucci, New World
1520 Cortés, Second Letter of Relation 1552 Xavier, Letter to His Jesuit Colleagues
1554 The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes
1558 Marguerite de Navarre, Heptameron
1565 Saint Teresa, The Book of Her Life 1572 Camões, The Lusiads
1600 Fonte, The Worth of Women
1609, 1616–17
Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas 1621 Sulam, Manifesto on the Immortality of the Soul
1640 Calderón, The Mayor of Zalamea
1647 Zayas y Sotomayor, Tales of Disillusion
1666 Molière, The Misanthrope c. 1669–94 Juana Inés de la Cruz, Poems
1671 Milton, Samson Agonistes
1688 Behn, Oroonoko
PREFACE TO VOLUME ONE
This volume introduces students to major writers of the Western tradition from Antiquity to 1700. It cannot include all authors of high significance, but in the sum, it presents a sampling of essential literary texts, highlights significant themes, and traces prominent trends over a more than two thousand year span. It includes exemplars of a range of genres including epic, lyric, and dramatic verse; prose narrative including story, romance, and novel; and nonfiction prose including autobiography, biography, letter, speech, dialogue, and essay. Languages represented include the ancient languages Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and the modern languages (in different stages of development) English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
The decision to include selections from the works of the seventy authors represented here, and to do so within a volume of normal size, has meant that few of the component works are given in their entirety. The Greek plays and Shakespearean dramas that are commonly assigned for classroom use are readily available in multiple inexpensive editions, so that every instructor may choose his or her favorite play or translation. The broad array of texts provided here, however, displays the full panorama of the Western literary heritage through the seventeenth century.
SECTION I
Antiquity: Foundations of Western Literature
Introduction to Section I
The Western literary tradition sits on a three-legged stool. The three legs are the Mediterranean civilizations that gave birth to European culture when antiquity ended and a new age began: ancient Israel, ancient Greece, and ancient Rome. Not one of these three, at its origin, was impressive. All three were surrounded by nations, empires, and city-states that were wealthier, more populous, and more powerful. But as they developed, they gathered strength. After they no longer existed as independent entities, their cultural legacy continued to shape the vision of the Western world, and still does today.
The Israelites were a small and beleaguered people among the occupants of the eastern Mediterranean region where civilization began—where, that is, approximately from the third to the first millennium BCE,1 agriculture, commerce, cities and states, writing, and law originated. By around 1200 BCE, they lived in the hills, clustered in villages, and tended their flocks. They did not occupy the more fertile plains along the coasts of the Mediterranean or bordering the great rivers of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and adjacent regions) and Egypt. They were neither clever merchants like the Phoenicians; nor builders of temples and pyramids like the Babylonians and Egyptians; nor masters of a fierce military machine like the Assyrians; nor skilled at statecraft like the Persians. They shared in the religious culture of their Canaanite neighbors, who believed in many gods and goddesses whom they worshiped with ritual sacrifices of produce or livestock. But the Israelites were unique in believing that their god, whom the West later esteemed as the one God, had called them to a special mission: to worship him by obeying his commandments.
The commandments that the God of the Israelites laid down were not about petty crimes or paying taxes: they demanded deeds of mercy and righteousness, an entire commitment of mind and spirit. This was new. Some ancient deities of other peoples, notably the Egyptians, issued judgment,
1. This volume employs the abbreviations BCE and CE (Before the Common Era and Common Era) to denote the principal divisions of past time that scholars now generally prefer to the older BC and AD (Before Christ and Anno Domini, “the year of the Lord”).
I. Antiquity: Foundations of Western Literature reward, and punishment, but no other ancient religion framed the relationship between the divine and the human overall in terms of moral affiliation. The Israelites did not always follow God’s commandments, of course, and their sacred texts record their frequent failures—failures that were greeted recurrently by God’s anger, forbearance, and forgiveness. Those sacred texts were compiled in the last centuries BCE in what is called the Hebrew Bible; Hebrew is the language the Israelites spoke, and “bible” derives from the Greek word for “book.” From the eighth through the first century BCE, the Israelites were defeated in turn by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, and the Romans; the latter two naming the region “Judea,” and its citizens “Jews,” as they are known in the modern age. Having lost their state and their independence, the Jews scattered throughout the Mediterranean region and into western and northern Europe. They never abandoned their ancient faith, inscribed in the Hebrew Bible.
Like the ancient Israelites when the first millennium dawned, the inhabitants of the mainland and nearby islands of modern Greece were a poor and meager population. Farmers, herders, and fishermen, they lived in scattered settlements divided from each other by rugged mountains or stretches of sea. Their settlements, or poleis (from which term our word “politics” is derived), formed around a sacred site, usually a hill, called the acropolis There, they believed, a patron deity dwelled, to whom they offered sacrifices, and for whom, by the seventh century BCE, they began to build wooden temples— the ancestor of one of the enduring architectural forms of Western culture. The Greeks were unified by their temple building; by their exquisitely crafted pottery; and above all by their language, which we know as Greek. The terms “Greek” and “Greece” derive from the Latin of the Romans who later triumphed over these people and renamed them. The inhabitants, however, called themselves the “Hellenes” and lived in “Hellas,” the place where their language was spoken. The civilization they created we call, accordingly, “Hellenic,” and in its later manifestations, after Greece was absorbed into the empire forged by the Macedonian prince Alexander the Great, “Hellenistic.”
The brilliant civilization of these Hellenes rose on the ashes of an earlier civilization, the Mycenaean. The Mycenaean kingdoms resembled the states of the ancient Near East with which they were engaged commercially and militarily, where the fearsome incursions of their skilled warriors left scars and destruction. Their own civilization suffered annihilation not long after 1200 BCE. From the ruins of their burnt cities and palace complexes, the Hellenes emerged after a lapse of four centuries, their first great poet Homer celebrating in two-verse epics2 the heroic deeds of long-dead Mycenaean
2. epic: a long poem, often derived from oral tradition or earlier texts, celebrating in lofty language the deeds of a legendary hero or the origins of a nation.
ancestors that had been preserved in folk memory and transmitted orally. Like those ancestors, the characters of Homer’s epics were warriors, intent on violence. They displayed on the battlefield not only their skill at arms, but also, vividly, their acuity, tenacity, and strength of will. Homer’s two epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, describing respectively the Greek conquest of the non-Greek city of Troy and the long, arduous journey home of one of the victorious heroes, became the bible of the Greeks, and the source of much of Western literature.
Soon after Homer composed his epics, other poets, now literate—the Hellenes having adapted the Phoenician alphabet for that purpose—wrote in both epic and lyric3 genres. The epic poet Hesiod told the origin of the gods of their people in his Theogony, while his Works and Days narrates the annual cycle of tasks incumbent on the striving peasant. Over the next centuries, lyric poets—natives of the many cities now sprouting throughout Hellas—described exquisitely their personal experiences of love, joy, and fellowship. Among them is the first known female poet, Sappho, whose verse depicting her erotic desires influenced much ancient poetry, although moderns did not recover her work until the twentieth century, reconstructing it from quoted fragments, recovered potsherds, and papyrus scraps buried in desert sands.
In the fifth century, Greek literature reached new heights in the original genres of drama,4 both tragic and comic, and the prose genres of history, rhetoric, and philosophy. Greek tragedies returned, as had Homer, to the imagined ancestors of the Hellenes and their struggles with an implacable destiny. In the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, mortals of great vision and purpose strive against the relentless power of the gods, the athanatoi, who, unlike the humans with whom they toyed, were not bound by death. The comedies of Aristophanes, meanwhile, like Hesiod’s Works and Days, consider the events of the present moment, laying bare the absurdity of human interactions.
Greek drama, like its precursors, was written in verse, as were the first philosophical speculations about the nature of the cosmos by the thinkers the Greeks called sophoi (sages), and we call “pre-Socratics.” They bear the latter name because they precede Plato’s depiction in prose dialogues of his mentor Socrates, who is often considered the Western world’s first philosopher, or “lover of wisdom.” Socrates does not seek to know about the cosmic realm, but rather the human one: what motivates humans to act; how they know;
3. lyric: lyric verse (originally, in the Greek context, poems sung to the accompaniment of the lyre, an ancient musical instrument) generally takes the form of a short, non-narrative poem, expressive of the poet’s emotions.
4. drama: a composition (at first in verse, later also in prose) narrating a story through the action and dialogue of characters, generally intended for theatrical performance.
why they love; how best they can live; and will they indeed die. Socrates himself wrote nothing, but his pupil Plato conveyed his ideas, much elaborated, in elegant literary dialogues. Plato’s prose works followed a century of prose composition, coincident with the era of fifth-century dramatic verse, whose authors included the two inventors of historical writing, Herodotus and Thucydides, as well as the Sophists, professional teachers of rhetoric, whose willingness to manipulate language for advantage provoked the criticism of both the comedian Aristophanes and the philosopher Socrates.
The thoughts and visions of the Greek poets and philosophers were not lost—as had been the palaces of the Mycenaeans—when the Greek cities fell to the Macedonian conqueror Alexander in the fourth century BCE, or to Roman generals in the second. The Hellenistic civilization hatched from Alexander’s conquest cherished, edited, copied, and circulated the works of the Greek masters throughout the Mediterranean region, and bestowed that legacy upon the Romans.
The Romans, who would later conquer both Jews and Greeks, were at the outset a scanty band of farmers inhabiting a village in the orbit of the Etruscans, the lords of northern Italy. Their city on the river Tiber may indeed have originated, as is told in legend, in the eighth century, when Homer had not yet composed his epics, and the Hebrew Bible had not yet been codified in writing. Little more is known until the fifth century, when Rome, having freed itself from Etruscan sovereignty and the reign of kings, became a republic ruled by a Senate, the ancestor of our own, composed of elders from the ruling class of “patricians.” In time, the aristocratic Senate was balanced by the creation of an Assembly representing the whole of the adult male citizenry. With a few more modifications, by the second century BCE, the village of Rome had matured into the Roman Republic, the capital of an empire. For by this time, Rome dominated nearly the whole of the Italian peninsula, and had launched a series of wars that won them mastery of the entire Mediterranean region. Of all the great empires of the ancient Mediterranean world, Rome was the greatest.
Rome’s political dominance, for a time, lacked corresponding cultural achievements. In its early stages, Rome borrowed from the neighboring cultures it admired and then conquered. From the Etruscans, it borrowed architecture, religious rites, funerary practices (including gladiatorial combat), and an evaluation of women higher than that of Near Eastern societies or the Greeks. From the Greek colonies clustered in southern Italy, the Romans took their gods, their mythology, and their theater. The earliest literary products of ancient Rome that are still extant—the plays of Plautus— are Latin imitations, nearly translations, of Greek comedies.
Into the last century BCE, Greek models shaped Roman literary works: Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, which in Latin verse explains Greek
Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience; the lyric poems of Catullus; the poetry of Ovid, especially his Metamorphoses narrating the most appealing Greek myths; Virgil’s epic Aeneid, patterned on the Homeric epics. Prose works as well had Greek antecedents: Cicero’s speeches, saturated with principles of Roman law and particulars of Roman political life, were derived from Greek prototypes he had studied under expert rhetoricians trained in the tradition of the orator Demosthenes. Like Cicero, the elite youth of Rome sought an advanced education by journeying to Greece, whose language they had probably learned in childhood—if we are to believe the pedagogue Quintilian—even before they learned Latin.
While Cicero was still delivering speeches in the Roman forum, and before Virgil wrote his epic of Rome’s founding, the Republic gave way, after a bloody unraveling, to an Empire. A monarch now ruled, surrounded by an ever-growing bureaucracy, consulting as he pleased with a hapless Senate that endured, nonetheless, until the Empire’s eventual collapse. In the first two centuries CE, when Rome was politically and militarily at its zenith, its boundaries at their maximum extent, it continued to produce writers of the highest quality. Their works, while they still hearkened back to Greek precedents, also gave expression to what was now a Roman tradition of thought. Seneca, a moralist, essayist, and playwright, and Tacitus, a historian and critic, exemplify this era of Roman civilization. So too does Marcus Aurelius, at once emperor and scholar, whose Meditations, grounded in Greek philosophical Stoicism,5 were written, appropriately, in Greek.
The last three centuries of the Roman era, in contrast, feature few Latin authors of comparable stature, the Empire’s literary fortunes waning along with its political stature. For Rome was losing traction as its borders were breached and its sovereignty frayed. Migrations of foreign tribal peoples, mainly Germanic, changed the demographic makeup of the Roman population and impaired its administrative and military machinery. In response to these challenges, Roman leaders divided the empire into two zones, headed by two emperors: a western zone anchored in Rome, and an eastern zone anchored in Constantinople—a new city founded by the emperor Constantine in the fourth century on the site of the older Greek one, Byzantium.
During the turbulent decades of the late fifth and early sixth century CE, the western empire faltered or, as historians have described it, “fell.” Its governing structures crumbled, and Germanic kings took the place of senators and emperors. The eastern empire, soon abandoning Latin for Greek and now referred to as “Byzantine,” endured into the fifteenth century,
5. Stoicism: a school of late Greek (Hellenistic) philosophy that posits the cosmic order of the universe, governed by laws of nature, knowable by reason, to accord with which the sage must lead a life of virtuous self-restraint.
I. Antiquity: Foundations of Western Literature
when it, too, fell—to a new enemy, the Ottoman Turks. The administrative division of the Roman Empire into West and East prefigured a cultural divergence between the two zones as they developed from the fifth century. The cultural organism that emerged in the West in the aftermath of imperial Rome constitutes what we call Western civilization, whose literary product is Western literature.
Meanwhile, during the same five centuries that saw the triumph and fall of the Roman Empire, the Hellenistic culture that Rome had adopted as its own was yielding to a competitor: Christianity. An offshoot of ancient Judaism, Christianity had become the principal cultural force in the Mediterranean region. Sheltering within the Roman shell, initially ignored, then persecuted, then legalized, and at last established as the official state religion, it refined its message and strengthened its institutions. When Rome fell in the West, the system of churches Christians had built survived, led by governors called bishops who wielded authority that secular leaders had vacated; and defined by a theology, or belief system, elaborated by the learned thinkers known as the “Fathers” of the church.
Christianity centers on the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew learned in the Hebrew Scriptures, who preached compellingly the imminent coming of the kingdom of God. Jewish leaders viewed him as a threat, and the Roman governor of Jerusalem, the principal city of Judea, ordered his execution. According to his followers, the crucified Jesus rose from the dead, having atoned by his death for the sins of those who believed in him. Thus purified, or “saved,” they would, like Jesus, attain life after death, the very immortality the Greeks had deemed impossible for humankind. The story of Jesus the “Christ,” meaning “savior” in Greek and signifying “Messiah” in Hebrew, is told in the New Testament. For Christians, this brief collection of narrative accounts, or “Gospels,” history, letters, and prophecy, constitutes the counterpart and fulfillment of the Hebrew Bible, which they call the Old Testament.
Chapter 1
The Hebrew Bible: Commandments and Promises
Introduction
Composed in its final form over some five hundred years (eighth to third centuries BCE), and based on texts and legends reaching back perhaps as many more, the Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament, is an amalgam of histories, narratives, laws and ritual prescriptions, devotional poetry, wisdom literature, proverbs, and prophecy; it is distributed in thirty-nine (Jewish and Protestant Bibles), or forty-six (Catholic), or fiftyone (Eastern Orthodox churches) books.1 Of immeasurable richness and variety, it has a coherent theme: that the one God, creator of the universe and all living things, chose the Jews—the ancient Hebrews or Israelites—for a special relationship, or covenant, with him, laying upon them a special responsibility to obey his commandments. Those commandments, ranging from high moral injunctions to detailed rules for ritual practice and purity, are to be remembered and taught to each new generation so that the commitment to the worship of the one God winds through the ages in a great solemn chain linking past and future.
Selections are included here from Genesis and Exodus, the first two books of the Bible (which are at the same time the first two of the Torah, or the “Law,” consisting of the Bible’s first five books); the Psalms; Job; and Isaiah. From Genesis is taken the account of Abraham’s response to God’s command to sacrifice his son Isaac—a response that demonstrates the magnitude of Abraham’s faith. From Exodus is taken the first narration of God’s delivery to Moses, the Israelite leader, of the Ten Commandments, the principal moral laws binding the Israelites in their covenant with God. From the one hundred and fifty Psalms, excerpts from two are selected that express wonderment at God’s majesty and reliance on his omniscience and omnipotence. From the Book of Job—an extended tale of one righteous man’s sufferings and questioning of God’s justice—is taken a passage in which God asserts the immensity of his power. From the second section of Isaiah are taken two chapters in which God comforts his people exiled in Babylon, and offers spiritual sustenance to those who are in eternal covenant
1. In addition to a scattering of others, mostly later, not included in the official, or “canonical,” collection, and referred to as deuterocanonical, pseudepigraphic, or apocryphal.
