The sweetest wine: Julian the Apostate and the luxury of Greek
On reading a language we don't need
One of the most moving things about reading ancient literature is when you come across a passage you know and love quoted by someone almost unimaginably distant in time and place from yourself: a momentary glimpse of the vast extent of the republic of letters, and the webs of affinity and strangeness across it. I had that experience this week in a particularly unexpected way, which made me reflect on the different relationships we can have with different languages, and at different times in our lives. When people advocate for the teaching and learning of languages, they tend — quite reasonably — to emphasise the practical benefits; but today I want to write about the “luxury language”, the profound pleasure and solace of reading great literature in a language we don’t “need”.
Last week I started reading some of the letters of the Emperor Julian (usually known as Julian the Apostate), from the mid-4th century — not a text I had even heard about, I don’t think, let alone read before. In a letter to Evagrius the rhetor written in Constantinople in 362 AD, Julian describes particularly beautifully a property near the sea in Bithynia which he is giving to Evagrius as a gift: a gift, he says, ὄικοθεν ὄικαδε, oikothen oikade, ‘from one home [or household, or almost family] to another’, quoting Pindar.1 Quoting, in fact, the very piece of Pindar I discussed here a few weeks ago, the opening of Olympian 7.2 In Pindar, too, it describes a meaningful gift: the gold cup, filled with wine, which in the opening simile of the poem a man gives to his son-in-law. Within the simile, the cup signifies the transfer of the bride herself, and the bond of marriage between the families. But the poem is not about a marriage — it’s about the victory of Diagoras of Rhodes in the boxing competition at Olympia in 464 BC — and the cup filled with wine is an image for the gift of the poem itself.
Here is the second half of Julian’s letter:
ἔστι δ̓ ἐνταῦθα καὶ γεωργίας ἐμῆς μικρὸν ὑπόμνημα, φυταλία βραχεῖα, φέρουσα οἶνον εὐώδη τε καὶ ἡδύν, οὐκ ἀναμένοντά τι παρὰ τοῦ χρόνου προσλαβεῖν τὸν Διόνυσον ὄψε καὶ τὰς Χάριτας.3 ὁ βότρυς δὲ ἐπὶ τῆς ἀμπέλου καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς ληνοῦ θλιβόμενος ἀπόζει τῶν ῥόδων, τὸ γλεῦκος δὲ ἐν τοῖς πίθοις ἤδη νέκταρός ἐστιν ἀπορρὼξ Ὁμήρῳ πιστεύοντι. τί δῆτα οὐ πολλὴ γέγονεν οὐδ̓ ἐπὶ πλέθρα πάνυ πολλὰ τοιoύτων ἀμπέλων; Τυχὸν μὲν οὐδὲ ἐγὼ γεωργὸς γέγονα πρόθυμος, ἀλλὰ ἐπεὶ ἐμοὶ νηφάλιος ὁ τοῦ Διονύσου κρατὴρ καὶ ἐπὶ πολὺ τῶν Νυμφῶν δέεται, ὅσον εἰς ἐμαυτὸν καὶ τοὺς φίλους (ὀλίγον δέ ἐστι τὸ χρῆμα τῶν ἀνδρῶν) παρεσκευασάμην. νῦν δή σοι δῶρον, ὦ φίλη κεφαλή, δίδωμι μικρὸν μὲν ὅπερ ἐστί, χαρίεν δὲ φίλῳ παρὰ φίλου, οἴκοθεν οἴκαδε, κατὰ τὸν σοφὸν ποιητὴν Πίνδαρον.
Moreover there is there [on the property] a little monument to my husbandry, a small vineyard producing a wine that is fragrant and sweet, which does not wait for time to bring it Dionysus and the Graces. The grapes both on the vine, and when they are being crushed in the press, smell of roses, and the fresh wine in the jars is like an "efflux of nectar" [Odyssey 9.359] if one may trust Homer. Why then are there not many such vines, growing over many acres? Perhaps I was not a very industrious gardener. But since my mixing bowl tends to contain little wine, and calls for a large proportion of the nymphs [i.e. water], I only provided enough for myself and my friends—and they are few indeed. Well then, I now give this to you as a present, dear one, and though it be small, as indeed it is, yet it is precious as coming from a friend to a friend, "from home, to home," in the words of the wise poet Pindar.
The allusion is only fleeting, but it is highly appropriate. The description of the property Julian is giving to Evagrius focuses, as is clear from the passage above, on the particularly lovely wine produced by its grapes: the small estate itself is like the gold cup, filled with ‘the dew of the vine’.
I found myself very moved by this letter, even before I got to Pindar at the end, though to start with I wasn’t sure why. It is actually very unusual for me to read something new in Greek. I was trained in an old-fashioned way with Latin and Greek on an equal footing: a system in which any “classicist” was expected to be able to teach either, and as a graduate student and in my first few years of teaching after that, I did teach both. After my first permanent appointment (at King’s College London in 2010), however, I effectively stopped teaching Greek as part of my routine job. Though I believe it is still commonly expected in many US department, it is now quite unusual for classicists with a permanent job in a UK university to be expected to teach widely in both Latin and Greek. As a result, most UK classicists are really professional Latinists or Hellenists, not both.
Teaching a language regularly is of course one of the best ways of keeping it up, and it can be difficult to do so without this incentive. This is not the place to lament the state of UK academia, but the strong focus in recent decades on highly specialist research and publication has magnified this effect: few people publish specialist research on literature in both Latin and Greek, and overall there’s very little career incentive to keep up both languages, and quite a lot of disincentives.4
On the other hand, if you do keep it up, the relationship to a language you don’t “need” in a professional sense — I mean one which you rarely or never teach, and don’t write on as a scholar — is refreshingly different. This has very much been my experience of Greek over the last 15 years: as time has passed, it has become more and more a source of pure pleasure. I’m not trying to be clever or up-to-date when I’m reading Greek, or to make lots of connections with scholarship or other literature; I’m not thinking about which themes to emphasise in an imminent class, or coming up with exam questions; I’m not worried about whether I have anything interesting to say about it at all. When I read Greek, I do so almost entirely for the pleasure of it, and I almost always re-read texts I know fairly well, or, at most, a text I don’t know well by an author I do: when I was pregnant, for instance, I read Euripides’ Alcestis and the Gospel of Luke. For years, in fact, I’ve read almost nothing in Greek apart from Homer, Pindar, the tragedians and the New Testament.
Our third son, born at the end of April in 2022, had a slightly more difficult start than his older brothers, due to an unusual reaction between his blood and my own. He was small and quite unwell to start with and spent a week in special care. Once we came home, I was in that phase of early babyhood in which you can’t really “do” anything other than feed the baby: feeding a newborn baby, especially one who has some catching up to do, is essentially a full-time job. Reading while feeding has never struck me as quite as easy as some pro-breast-feeding propaganda likes to make out (they become aware — and touchingly jealous — of the book surprisingly early, and you need both hands quite a lot), but all the same it is about the only thing other than perhaps watching TV that you can sort of “do”. And to my surprise the first thing I wanted to read after coming home with the baby was Homer. I own multiple editions of the Iliad but none were in Paris, so I staggered round the corner with my tiny, skinny baby in his unwieldy pram to the Les Belles Lettres bookshop (I had to park him just inside by the door — not a shop laid out with prams in mind). This strange post-natal impulse revealed how much Greek for me is a solace and a joy: somehow, subconsciously, as delicious and profound a pleasure as feeding a new baby, brought ὄικαδε, safely home.
So actually it was an unusual experience last week to be reading something new. I’ve never read any of Julian before, and if you’d asked me a fortnight ago, I couldn’t have told you anything about him other than his notorious epithet. As so often with the best reading experiences, I happened on his letters by chance. I had spent a week or so indexing a (very good) book on Plato, which had left me with a strong desire to read some Plato in Greek. (Needless to say, if you are still interested in the topic of a book after you’ve finished indexing it, it is the real deal.)
When we moved to France, we thought we were only coming for a year, and the books I expected to need professionally that year didn’t include any Greek apart from Pindar, so almost all my fairly substantial library of texts are still in storage in London. I really wanted to read some Plato, but I was reluctant to spend a significant sum on an expensive edition when I already own most if not all of his works. In search of a reasonably cheap copy, preferably of the Gorgias, I headed off last Friday afternoon to Gibert Joseph, the bookshop on the Boulevard St Michel which I’ve mentioned before. There are other better-stocked bookshops for the classics in Paris, but Gibert is aimed at students, and always has a large selection of second-hand, lightly thumbed editions at marked-down prices.
I was vaguely envisaging a slightly battered Budé, but Gibert’s Budé selection did not have either of the dialogues I most wanted to read, and they were all quite pricey. Instead I happened upon this Classiques en poche series of paperback parallel text editions, very affordably priced: between €11 and €15 new, but the Gibert ones were all second-hand (though largely pristine) and about €9. The Greek font is slightly muddy but perfectly serviceable, and the books also have brief introductions and a few footnotes, though no proper commentary. In other words, the perfect format for relaxed reading, and genuinely pocket- (or handbag-) sized. Having rapidly selected three volumes of Plato and one of Sophocles (Ajax) I was browsing to see what else they had and came upon Julian’s Letters, with translations (into French, obviously) by Joseph Bidez, and introduction and notes by Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat: proof yet again of the essential superiority of the French publishing industry. (Penguin Classics used to print in parallel texts for shorter Latin works, but they haven’t done so for many decades now I don’t think, and I’m not sure they ever did it for Greek.)
I was early to collect one of the children from school, so I sat down at a café and started with Julian. I was especially moved by this particular letter, I think, not only because it is beautifully written, or because the literary references — to Homer and Pindar — are to texts I also love, but because its description of a lovely gift, freely given, binding together the distant — a delight in itself, and in what it stands for — both described and enacted, as I read it, the experience for me of reading Greek.
The phrase is also in Olympian 6.99, though I’m fairly sure that Julian was recalling Olympian 7 here, since the context there is so appropriate to the letter.
Evidently there are some variant readings as the online text and my printed text read differently. For convenience, I copied this text from the online edition, but edited it to accord with the text in my printed edition.
The perverse result of this is that most of the best classical linguists in the UK do not have permanent university positions: they are either teaching in schools or doing insecure hourly-paid or part-time language teaching in universities.
I’ve always been fond of Julian’s observation (in his satire on Christian ‘beard-haters’) that he ‘sang for the Muses, and myself’. (If it isn’t fun, don’t do it, as Robert Creeley put it.) There’s an entertaining and under-sung novel about him, eponymously called “Julian”, by Gore Vidal.
Hey Victoria, your piece was a joy to read. Thank you so much.
I think what gave me so much reading joy was how you wrote about language, about reading it, about shopping for it, about your experience as a new mother. The whole thing. I loved it.
I’m no classicist. I wish I were. I do have schoolboy Latin and a little Greek. But, being Jewish, I do read Hebrew. I think there is something magical about different scripts, eg Greek and Hebrew, that by their very shape to our Western eyes bring difference and a sort of romance. They also speak of a different sense of time, and require our eyes to look differently. I think that is a very beautiful thing.
I always feel that Jewish time has a different quality, and when we read Hebrew in synagogue or use Hebrew in the home for blessings on Friday night etc we are part of a different time continuum. In a way, of course I do need Hebrew to know my way around the Torah (the Old Testament…even the name has a kind of gravitas) and the Siddur (prayer book) and to understand it all, but I don’t need it at all in my modern day 21st century busy life. But I still love it for all that it offers as a counterbalance to all that, and for its reminders of identity and ancestry.
I think though, as you say in Julian, reading Greek or Latin is of a different order again to a jew reading Hebrew (although as a classicist I guess you absolutely do have a very real and pressing need to read it in order to teach it), I read it because I’m Jewish you don’t read them because you’re Greek or Roman; the sheer joy of reading for the sake of reading alone is intensified by the text being in both a different language and a different script.
Once again, I’m so pleased I found your piece. I’m looking forward to reading your Stack.