Rhetorical Practice in the Chreia Elaboration of Mara bar Serapion
Catherine M.
Chin
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2006
Vol. 9, No. 2
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https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv9n2chin
Catherine M. Chin
Rhetorical Practice in the Chreia Elaboration of Mara bar Serapion
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol9/HV9N2Chin.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute,
vol 9
issue 2
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
Mara bar Serapion
Rhetorics
Chreia Elaboration
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This essay argues that the text known as
the Letter of Mara bar Serapion is an example of a Greek
rhetorical exercise, the chreia elaboration. The letter fits
the paradigm of the chreia elaboration as it is found in Greek
rhetorical handbooks, such as those of Theon and Libanius.
Since it is a rhetorical exercise, the letter should not be
read as straightforward evidence for the experience of Roman
conquest in Syria, nor should it be read as evidence for
Christian apologetic practice in early Syriac literature.
Rather, the letter provides scholars with the opportunity to
examine the interaction between Greek rhetorical literature and
the rise of Syriac prose literature in late
antiquity.
[1] The
Letter of Mara bar Serapion to his Son, known through
a sixth- or seventh-century manuscript (BM Add. 14658) edited
in the nineteenth century by William Cureton, is a
little-studied document in scholarship on Syriac
literature.
William Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum
(London: Francis and John Rivington, 1855), 70–76 (English);
43–48 (Syriac); on the date, see pref. i. I am grateful to
Michael Penn and Tina Shepardson for their critical comments
and suggestions on an earlier version of this essay. I would
also like to thank the anonymous readers for Hugoye
for their suggestions, and Orval Wintermute, who first pointed
me in the direction of Mara bar Serapion.
The difficulties involved in dating the work and
determining the religious and philosophical persuasion of its
author, in addition to the general lack of philosophical
creativity in the text itself, have relegated the letter to a
secondary position in the study of early Syriac literature and
Syriac Christianity.
There have been very few studies of the letter in
the past century. The major bibliography is: Kathleen McVey, “A
Fresh Look at the Letter of Mara Bar Serapion to his Son,”
V. Symposium Syriacum 1988, ed. R. Lavenant,
Orientalia Christiana Analecta 236 (1990): 257–72;
Friedrich Schulthess, “Der Brief des Mara bar Sarapion,”
Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen
Gesellschaft 51 (1897): 365–91; and the comments of H. J.
W. Drijvers in “Hatra, Palmyra und Edessa: Die Städte der
syrisch-mesopotamischen Wüste in politischer,
kulturgeschichtlicher und religionsgeschichtlicher
Beleuchtung,” ANRW II.8 (1977), at 886–87. I very much
regret that the most recent article to appear on the letter,
Ilaria Ramelli’s “La lettera di Mara bar Serapion,”
Stylos 13 (2004): 77–104, was unavailable to me at the
time of writing and could not be incorporated into this
article.
There have been strong arguments that the
writer was not a Christian, but a Stoic sympathetic to
Christianity;
Notably those by F. Schulthess, “Brief,” 381–91.
still, the examination of the letter by Kathleen
McVey, presented in 1988, has to a certain extent re-opened the
question of the author’s allegiances. The philosophical themes
in the letter are not uniquely Stoic, as McVey points
out;
K. McVey, “Fresh Look,” 261–62.
at the same time, the references to Christianity
are marginal enough to the general rhetorical arc of the letter
to cast doubt on McVey’s thesis that the author was a Christian
propagandist.
K. McVey, “Fresh Look,” 270–72; against this view,
see F. Millar, The Roman Near East 31 BC–AD
337 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993),
460–62.
Studies of the letter have in the main
concentrated on its philosophical, religious, and historical
content, and the relationship between its content and its
putative author, rather than on its rhetorical form. A closer
examination of the form of the letter may help place it more
firmly in its ancient intellectual context, which, I argue, is
that of a standard Greek rhetorical exercise, the chreia
elaboration. When the text is situated in this rhetorical
context, the murkiness of the historiographical questions
surrounding the text’s date and “religious” character becomes
in some ways easier to understand: if the author of the
document is not an original Mara bar Serapion, but a later
writer composing a prosopopoetic exercise in his name, the
vagueness of historical detail in the letter and its relatively
commonplace philosophical ideas become the stuff of classroom
“general knowledge” rather than documents of individual
experience or belief. This shift does not gain the historian
any more evidence for a historical Mara bar Serapion, of
course, but it does position the letter as further
documentation for a tradition of interchange between Greek and
Syriac rhetorical and educational traditions.
I. The Chreia and its Uses
[2] The
letter as it stands is in two parts: the letter itself, and a
short anecdote about its supposed writer, Mara bar Serapion.
The division between the two is stark: the letter, written
primarily in the first person and addressed in the second, ends
with the words: “And if anyone grieves or worries, I do not
counsel him, for there in the life of the whole world he will
find us before him.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
48.22–23. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from ancient
texts in this essay are my own.
The anecdote immediately follows, written
in the third person, as an account of a conversation between
Mara bar Serapion and a companion:
One of his friends asked Mara bar Serapion when he was bound
at his side, “By your life, Mara, tell me what laughing-stock
appeared to you, that you laughed?” Mara said to him, “I
laughed at time, since, although it has not borrowed evil
from me, it repays me.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
48.24–26.
[3] This
anecdote is in the clearly recognizable form of a rhetorical
chreia, a brief narrative, usually concerning a famous
historical figure, that ends in a pithy remark or witty
gesture. The second-century teacher Theon, in his
Progymnasmata, lists several types of chreiai, among
which are “chreiai that offer an explanation in answer to a
question…. For example, ‘When he was asked whether the Persian
king seemed happy to him, Socrates said: “I can’t answer, since
I can’t know what he thinks of education.”’”
Theon, Progymnasmata, 3.52–54, text in
James R. Butts, The Progymnasmata of Theon (Ph.D.
dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1987).
The story of Mara
bar Serapion and his laughter seems to fit into this general
type; it is difficult to imagine that ancient readers of the
anecdote would not have recognized it immediately as an example
of the genre. Indeed, as many writers on ancient Greek and
Roman education have made clear, the chreia played a
significant role even in elementary education in antiquity,
being used to teach basic literacy, as well as to inculcate
common social and cultural norms.
The most useful works on the chreia now available
are the two volumes of edited and translated texts on the
chreia, with introductions and analyses by Ronald F. Hock and
Edward N. O’Neil, The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric, vol.
1, The Progymnasmata (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986),
and vol. 2, The Classroom Exercises (Atlanta: Scholars
Press, 2002). A third volume is currently being prepared on the
chreia in Byzantine commentaries and scholia. Other writers on
education who comment helpfully on the uses of the chreia are
Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and
Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
esp. at 186–89; and Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the
Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 223–24; H.
Marrou comments only occasionally on the chreia in his survey
of primary and literary education in Greek antiquity: A
History of Education in Antiquity (tr. G. Lamb; New York:
Sheed and Ward, 1956; reprinted Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1982).
As Ronald Hock and Edward
O’Neil point out, many such chreiai take the form of a saying
by a philosophical figure in answer to a question, and closing
with a constrastive (usually, in Greek, men…de)
response, such as, “When Diogenes was asked why people give to
beggars, but not to philosophers, he said, ‘Because people
expect to become lame or blind, but they never expect to
philosophize.’”
R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil,
Chreia, vol. 2, 16.
This is almost precisely the form of the Mara
bar Serapion chreia, with Mara bar Serapion being asked a
question and responding with a contrast (“although [time] has
not borrowed evil from me, it repays me”). The chreia at the
end of the letter thus initially suggests a possible context,
as an anecdote typically found in literary schooling.
[4] The
presence of a typical chreia at the end of the document takes
on greater importance if the letter itself is also placed in a
context of rhetorical exercises. As is well known, it was
common for students of grammar and rhetoric in antiquity to
compose themes both about historical figures, and centered on
specific historical anecdotes in which these figures played a
part.
H. Marrou, History of Education,
174; R. Cribiore, Gymnastics, 228–30.
Perhaps the richest set of examples are those
collected in the Suasoriae of the Elder Seneca, in
which the embellishment of certain historical situations is
standard to many of the exercises, such as the exercises on how
to advise Alexander the Great on his battle strategy.
Suasoriae 1.1–16, text in Michael
Winterbottom, The Elder Seneca: Declamations, vol. 2
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).
It was
at the same time common for students to compose speeches under
the names of various historical figures as an exercise in
characterization (prosopopoieia or ethopoieia).
Stanley Stowers, Letter-Writing in
Greco-Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1986), 32–33.
Book 8 of
Theon’s Progymnasmata is dedicated to prosopopoieia,
and includes in its description of this rhetorical practice the
creation of speeches attributed to “specific people: for
example, what words would Cyrus speak as he moved on the
Massagetae, or what would Datis say, after the battle of
Marathon, on meeting with the king?”
Progymnasmata 8.6–8.
This sort of
composition was a familiar exercise for declamation, and
Cribiore suggests, given the high rate of survival of examples,
that such prosopopoetic writing was likely a favorite school
practice.
R. Cribiore, Gymnastics, 228.
While I would not argue that the Letter of
Mara bar Serapion was composed by a child, or anyone
beginning to learn basic rhetorical techniques, I think it is
not too much to suggest that it was composed as a prosopopoetic
exercise by a writer deeply engaged with the Greek rhetorical
tradition, and probably in a pedagogical context. Similarly,
the authors of Seneca’s Suasoriae were not
“beginners,” but people to whom demonstration of rhetorical
skill was professionally important, and whose work, for that
reason, was pedagogically useful.
[5]
Following George Kennedy, scholars of ancient education have
sometimes placed epistolary composition outside the main
concentration of formal rhetorical education, suggesting that
letter-writing was primarily taught as training for business or
civil service.
George Kennedy, Greek Rhetoric Under
Christian Emperors (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1983), 70–73.
Others, however, cite the use of model letters
in elementary education to argue that letter-writing did form
part of the standard curriculum for literacy.
See Abraham J. Malherbe, Ancient
Epistolary Theorists (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 7;
and S. Stowers, Letter-Writing, 32–33.
Clearly some
teachers, like Theon,
Progymnasmata 8.10.
did expect students to write letters as
part of their training in ethopoeia or prosopopoeia. Libanius,
too, expects his students to have mastered the art of
letter-writing.
Ep. 777.6; examples are discussed
in R. Cribiore (who follows G. Kennedy in placing
letter-writing primarily in professional schools),
Gymnastics 216–17.
It would not, then, be especially remarkable
to find prosopopoetic letters produced in a school or
pedagogical context, even if letter-writing were also covered
in other professional training. Combining prosopopoetic writing
with paraenetic or hortatory letter-writing would result in
something like the example of paraenesis in the epistolary
manual of Pseudo-Libanius: “My friend, always become an
imitator of virtuous men. For it is better to hear good when
imitating good men than to be blamed by everyone when following
bad men.”
Epistolary Styles 52, text in A. J.
Malherbe, Ancient Epistolary Theorists, 74.
Pseudo-Demetrius, in his treatise on
Epistolary Types, comes closer to the fictionalizing
hortatory letter in his example:
I have presented to you in summary those things for which I
am well-respected amongst my subjects. I know then that you,
too, can in this way keep the good opinion of your obedient
subjects; even though you cannot make many friends, you can
be moderate and generous to all. Being such, you will have a
good reputation among many, and you will keep your reign
tranquil.
Epistolary Types 11, text in A. J.
Malherbe, Ancient Epistolary Theorists, 36.
This passage is, of course, purely fictive as a moment of
royal advice, but the existence of such fictional historicizing
exercises should not surprise a reader who is approaching a
text with a rhetorical or pedagogical setting in mind.
[6] Most
significantly for the purposes of this paper, it was also
common practice for students to read and memorize chreiai, and
to use them in composition. At the grammatical level, chreiai
were used in exercises on the different declensions, and
students were asked to decline chreiai rather repetitively, as
in the ars grammatica of Diomedes:
The chreia exercise varies by case as follows: in the
nominative singular: Marcus Porcius Cato said that the roots
of literature are bitter, but the fruits pleasing. In the
genitive: the saying of Marcus Porcius Cato is remembered,
that the roots of literature are bitter but the fruits
pleasing. In the dative: it pleased Marcus Porcius Cato to
say that the roots of literature are bitter, but the fruits
pleasing.
R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil,
Chreia, vol. 2, 69.
A number of preserved Greek school exercises indicate that
such declension exercises using chreiai were practiced in
schools, and not merely in manuals.
R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil,
Chreia, vol. 2, chapter 2 contains a full discussion
of these examples.
At a more advanced level,
rhetoricians adopted the chreia for use in precisely the kind
of historicizing composition discussed above. Students would
have learned, then, to “expand” chreiai into historical
narratives. Theon gives the following brief example:
For example, a concise chreia: Epameinondas, as he was dying
childless, said to his friends: “I have left two
daughters—the victory at Leuctra and the one at Mantineia.”
Let us expand like this: Epameinondas, the Theban general,
was of course a good man in time of peace, and when war
against the Lacedaemonians came to his country, he displayed
many outstanding deeds of great courage. As a Boeotarch at
Leuctra, he triumphed over the enemy, and while campaigning
and fighting for his country, he died at Mantineia. While he
was dying of his wounds and his friends were lamenting, among
other things, that he was dying childless, he smiled and
said: “Stop weeping, friends, for I have left you two
immortal daughters: two victories of our country over the
Lacedaemonians, the one at Leuctra, who is the older, and the
younger, who is just now being born at Mantineia.”
Progymnasmata 3.226–40, tr. J. R.
Butts.
Notably, this expansion contains several elements in common
with the Letter of Mara bar Serapion: it relates
itself to actual historical events; it contains several
completely unverifiable—and quite possibly entirely
false—historical details; and it has added overt pathos to the
concision and understatement of the original chreia. Other
educational writers give far more extended examples of chreia
elaboration.
See those collected in R. F. Hock and E. N.
O’Neil, Chreia, vol. 2, chapter 3.
Although execution seems to vary, Hock and
O’Neil identify the standard elements in chreia elaboration as
follows: encomium of the speaker, paraphrase of the chreia,
philosophical rationale behind the chreia, argument from the
opposite state of affairs, analogy, example, “testimony of the
ancients,” and a short epilogue.
R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil,
Chreia, vol. 2, 83–90. In some texts, various elements
are left out or modified, as is typical of differences between
educational writers.
The resulting composition
could easily reach the length of the Letter of Mara bar
Serapion; comparable examples are found in the work of
Libanius, whose teaching in Antioch places him easily within
the boundaries of a Greek-Syriac literary milieu.
[7] McVey
has raised the possibility that the Letter of Mara bar
Serapion is a rhetorical exercise, although she considers
it unlikely.
K. McVey, “Fresh Look,” 272.
While the letter does not fit exactly the
scheme proposed in the rhetorical manuals, I would argue
nonetheless that it contains enough of the elements and
organization suggested in these pedagogical texts to be taken
seriously as a chreia elaboration. The major differences can, I
think, be explained by the fact that the writer of the letter
has framed his elaboration as a hortatory or paraenetic letter,
an exercise in prosopopoieia, rather than more
straightforwardly as a third-person account of the chreia and
its speaker.
As Jeffery T. Reed notes, “the flexibility
of the epistolary genre allowed for its conflation with other
genres”: “The Epistle,” in A Handbook of Classical Rhetoric
in the Hellenistic Period, S. E. Porter, ed. (Leiden:
Brill, 1997), 189. Reed also notes (190) that it is more common
in the Hellenistic period for pseudonymous letters to follow
rhetorical norms than for authentic letters to do so.
To begin, the letter opens with a brief
encomium, typical of chreia elaborations. In this case, the
encomium is not of Mara bar Serapion, but is addressed to his
son, who is praised for his intelligence (“you are very
diligent in learning”).
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
43.2.
Such substitution of one family
member for another also occurs in Pseudo-Nicolaus,
Progymnasmata 3, in which Theano, the supposed wife of
Pythagoras, is replaced with Pythagoras in the encomiastic
section of the elaboration of her chreia.
R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil,
Chreia, vol. 2, 218.
Further elements
of chreia elaboration are also found in the letter: arguments
from the opposite case are grouped together at Cureton 45.6–16,
which reads in part, “In which possessions will men trust? Or
about which things will they say, ‘They are abiding?’ About an
abundance of property, which is stolen? About fortifications,
which are plundered? About cities, which are destroyed?” It
then offers further examples of the opposite state of affairs
by citing exempla of unfortunate figures of the past:
“Therefore a man may rejoice in his kingdom like Darius, … or
in his bravery like Achilles, or in his wife like Agamemnon, or
in his son like Priam….” Following this section, the letter
includes “testimony of the ancients” and examples in the form
of further cases from history: “For how did the Athenians
profit by the killing of Socrates? They received hunger and
death in retribution for it. Or the people of Samos by the
burning of Pythagoras? For in one hour their whole land was
covered in sand.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
46.12–14.
Further examples are framed, next, as
general cases that Mara bar Serapion himself has seen: “But I,
my son, have examined those things… […] Evildoers rejoice and
the upright are afflicted. The one who has, denies it, and the
one who does not have fights to acquire. The poor seek, and the
rich conceal, and everyone laughs at his companion.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
46.20–47.3.
These
examples are followed by a concluding exhortation: “For it is
not enough to read this matter that thus comes into my mind to
write to you, but it should go on into action.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
47.16–17.
Finally, the
letter closes with a brief historicizing epilogue placing Mara
bar Serapion in a prison setting: “And also here in prison we
give thanks to God because we have received the love of
many.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
48.7–8.
The presence of all these elements in roughly
the correct order according to the norms of chreia elaboration
strongly suggests that the writer of the letter is familiar
with the rhetorical conventions described above.
[8] There
are two key elements that I have not yet discussed, and that
have been transformed by the prosopopoetic and hortatory
framing of the letter. These are the paraphrase of the chreia
and the elaboration of the philosophical rationale behind it.
Nearly all of the examples of chreia elaboration include, after
the encomium, a paraphrase of the chreia involved. Here, for
example, is Libanius’ paraphrase of the following chreia:
When asked by someone where he kept his treasures, Alexander
pointed to his friends. […] Paraphrastic. So, having
approached him, a certain man said, “O King, I would gladly
see your treasures.” And it seems to me that he was moved to
do this when he saw that an entire nation had just been
conquered, and was thinking that the result of this was a
great deal of money. What, then, about Alexander? He did not
reply immoderately, as if someone had asked him something
inappropriate. And he did not order his servants to take the
man and lead him around and show him lots of gold, or so many
silver talents, or plenty of spoils, but directing the man to
look at his friends, he said, “Do not seek any other wealth
of Alexander. These are my treasures.”
Libanius, Progymnasmata 3, in R. F.
Hock and E. N. O’Neil, Chreia, vol. 2, 140–42.
The paraphrase here expands the chreia in several ways:
first, it sets the chreia within a vaguely historicizing
setting by suggesting that Alexander is fresh from a military
victory.
R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil, Chreia
vol. 2, 143 n. 281, suggest that the imagined setting may be
after Alexander’s victory over Darius.
There is no evidence in the chreia that this
is the setting for the event; it is entirely Libanius’
invention. Libanius also adds the suggestion that there are,
indeed, piles of gold, silver, and spoils there to be looked
at, although Alexander ignores them. Finally, where the chreia
does not have Alexander speak at all, Libanius invents a short
conversation between Alexander and his inquirer. This kind of
expansion appears to be typical of the paraphrases in chreia
elaborations.
See R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil,
Chreia, vol. 2, examples collected in chapter 3.
[9] The
combination of suggested historical detail and invented speech
also occurs in the Letter of Mara bar Serapion, a
little after the encomium, as one would expect in a chreia
elaboration.
For I have heard about our companions, that when they left
from Samosata it pained them; and like those who complain of
the time, thus they also spoke: “Therefore we are journeying
from the house of our people, and we will not return to our
city and see our people and receive our gods with
honor.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
44.6–9.
There follows a description of the people of Samosata
grieving and in exile. Clearly, while the passage is not a
direct paraphrase of the chreia, it serves some of the same
purposes as the paraphrase: it provides a historical setting
for the speaker, and invents dialogue to enliven the scene.
Notably, this passage, and the lines following it, have been
the lines on which historians have relied most heavily in
attempting to date the letter; if it is right to think of the
historicizing here as a deliberate rhetorical ploy, the power
of this device is still in evidence.
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
pref. xiii–xv, dates it to the late second century; F.
Schulthess, “Brief,” 379, tentatively to the end of the third
century; F. Millar, Roman Near East, 460, suggests the
late first century.
The fact that
this passage is not a direct paraphrase of the chreia may,
moreover, be explained by the fact that the letter is an
exercise in prosopopoeia; Hock and O’Neil list no chreiai that
are spoken in the first person, and the move in the letter
outside the third person would create difficulty for a writer
in summarizing what were purportedly his own actions and
sayings. Assuming, then, that the prosopopoeia forbids the
writer from paraphrasing directly, in the same way that it
forces the encomium to be directed at the addressee rather than
the speaker himself, the writer still uses the conventions of
paraphrase to suggest a historical context for the speaker and
to establish the setting of speaking to one’s companions more
generally.
[10]
After this “paraphrase,” there is a short philosophical
rationale offered, which reads in part:
But consider this: that to wise men every land is equal, and
to good men, in every city there are many fathers and
mothers. […] What, then, do we have to say about the error
that is founded in the world? In the world its course is
heavy, and in its motions we are shaken like a reed in the
wind.
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
44.23–45.2.
Since the chreia is not directly paraphrased, however, the
philosophical rationale for it is also not direct. Rather, the
philosophical maxims used throughout the rest of the letter in
its paraenetic aspects take up the function of the saying in
the chreia, and also provide its philosophical rationale. I
turn to these themes next.
II. Philosophical Themes and Rationales: The
Contents of the Letter
[11] The
main theme of the chreia is Mara bar Serapion’s philosophical
indifference, expressed in his laughter. Secondary elements
are: the presence of friends, the prison setting, the troubles
of time, and the idea of ownership, as expressed in the
metaphor of borrowing and lending. Each of these themes is
found in the letter in order in various formulations, so that
collectively these too suggest the dependence of the
letter-writer on the previous existence of the chreia.
Philosophical Themes
[12]
First, and most obvious in the letter and in the chreia, is the
theme of philosophical indifference. The Mara bar Serapion of
the chreia has separated himself from his troubles enough to
take an ironic position with regard to them. Likewise, the Mara
of the letter exhorts his son to the study of philosophy as the
only way to separate himself from a variety of troubles. A
series of philosophical clichés serve to bolster this
exhortation: “Those who busy themselves with philosophy are
looking to escape from the distresses of the world.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
43.19–20.
“To
wise men every land is equal.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
44.23.
“For a man is never loosed
from his wisdom as one is from his possessions.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
45.25–26.
The theme of
ironic observation and detachment is also persistent: “I
wondered at many who cast out their children, and I wondered at
others who bring up those who are not their own. There are men
who acquire property in the world; and I also wondered at the
others who inherit what is not their own.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
45.2–4. K. McVey, “Fresh Look,” 271, suggests that the first
part of this remark is a condemnation of the exposure of
children, an argument that I discuss below.
These are
precisely the sort of nondescript philosophical sentiments
about the unpredictability of fate and the need to deal
philosophically with loss that school children would have
learned and copied as maxims in any Hellenistic or Roman school
setting, for example, in the sayings of Menander, or the
appearance of such lines as,“To the wise man, every land is
home,” or even, “Whoever thinks to fare well through
phronesis: it is useless, for everything in life comes
about not through intellect, but through chance.”
Quoted in T. Morgan, Literate
Education, 133. NB that Morgan also describes maxims on
the appropriateness of properly seeking wealth (125–27); it is
important to remember that these maxims are not strictly meant
as a coherent philosophical program, but as an induction into
commonly held cultural values.
Clearly one of the main concerns of educational literature is
the teaching of such commonplaces, and the reasons behind them.
In this respect, the Letter of Mara bar Serapion
breaks no new ground.
[13]
Indeed, as a concrete development of the idea of indifference,
the writer of the letter focuses at length on the idea of the
wise man’s attitude toward possessions. In the chreia, this
theme is expressed in the metaphor of borrowing and lending; in
the letter, its expression is much more literal. Again, the
sentiments found in the letter are for the most part
unexceptional: “And let not ownership subdue you, which many
hunger after, and let it not entice your eye to desire riches,
something which does not endure.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
43.22–33.
Or, again, “all of these
possessions which are seen by you in the world, like one who
exists for a little time, like a dream they are
loosed.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
43.24–44.1.
“For I have seen that when there are many
goods, so also distresses are met. And just as luxuries are
brought, so also are griefs gathered. And [where] properties
are great, there the years of bitterness are many.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
45.27–46.2.
The
philosophical depth of these exhortations is minimal, yet they
reflect a basic exposure to the philosophical parlance of
antiquity. They recur in the elaborations of chreiai,
especially in the sections devoted to the “philosophical
rationale” of the chreia. For example, one chreia elaboration
preserved in the work of Doxapatres explains this chreia as
follows:
The saying of Aphthonius the rhetor is remembered, who said,
“It is grievous to lose what has already been experienced.”
[…] The rationale: Since everyone prefers what is known to
what is unknown, and since everything whose usefulness is
known is considered better, he judged that the loss of these
things would be very painful….
R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil, Chreia
vol. 2, 244.
In the case of its passages on the transience of
possessions, the letter does reveal a moral stance similar to
Stoicism, but this devaluing of material wealth was also a
commonplace in Neo-Platonic thought and Pythagoreanism,
K. McVey, “Fresh Look,” 261.
not to
mention ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature, and, as we have
seen, basic literate education in the Hellenistic and Roman
world.
[14] More
specifically, the chreia suggests that Mara bar Serapion’s
detachment is so great that he can laugh at his situation even
when “bound.” Theon preserves a similar chreia about Socrates:
“The philosopher Socrates, when a certain Apollodorus, an
acquaintance, said to him, ‘The Athenians have unjustly
sentenced you to death,’ responded, laughing, ‘But did you want
them to do it justly?’”
R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil,
Chreia, vol. 1, 90.
In the letter, Mara bar
Serapion’s observations and his ironic surprise find their
counterpart in the laughter with which the world greets the
wise man: “The poor seek and the rich conceal, and everyone
laughs at his companion…. They rejoice in evil affairs and they
spurn the one who speaks the truth. A man marvels, therefore,
when the world wears him out in scorn….”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
47.2–6.
The presence of
this scornful laughter alongside Mara’s notes on human
inconsistency recalls the two different kinds of laughter in
the chreia: first, the “laughing-stock” that Mara’s friend sees
nowhere in evidence, and second, the philosophical—and by
ordinary standards unexpected—laughter of Mara bar Serapion
himself. In the letter, the two types of laughter are developed
into the full-blown themes of philosophical indifference and
irony (the laughter of Mara bar Serapion), and the world’s
rejection of the sage (expected laughter at a laughing-stock).
Neither theme can claim either originality or development in
the letter, but both give evidence of a basic grounding in
ancient philosophical tropes in use in rhetorical training. On
the assumption that the letter is secondary to the chreia, the
unremarkableness of all of these sentiments is fairly easy to
understand. If the author of the letter was more concerned with
drawing out the themes implicit in the chreia than in advancing
their philosophical development, s/he has done an admirable
job. Moreover, in hortatory or paraenetic letters, it was not
always considered good form to submit original philosophical
insights. The epistolary manual of Pseudo-Libanius contains the
following advice on writing paraenetic letters: “[P]araenesis
is hortatory speech that does not admit of a counter-statement,
for example, if someone should say that we must honor the
divine. For nobody contradicts this exhortation were he not mad
to begin with.”
Epistolary styles 5, tr. A. J.
Malherbe, Ancient Epistolary Theorists, 69.
Thus the very commonness of the
letter-writer’s expressions lends them a certain rhetorical
force.
[15]
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the letter s the
writer’s use of the figure of time (zabnâ). Here the
ambivalence in the letter-writer’s interpretation of the chreia
becomes obvious. “Time” in the chreia is personified to ironic
effect, and seems to mean approximately the same thing as
“circumstance”: “I laughed at time, since, although it has not
borrowed evil from me, it repays me.” In the letter, “time” is
an ambiguous figure. Friedrich Schulthess supposed that “time”
in the letter was an expression of the Stoic concept of
“fate,”
F. Schulthess, “Brief,” 383.
but as McVey points out, this is a strained
and otherwise unattested translation.
K. McVey, “Fresh Look,” 262.
I would argue
that the philosophical generalities in the letter also weigh
against a strict technical interpretation of the term. Cureton
seems to see “time” as personified at some points in the letter
(“the Time forbade us to complete those things;”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
75.30.
“that dominion
which the Time has assigned to us”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
76.7–8.
), but not at others (“such
men as are called to discipline seek to disentangle themselves
from the struggle of the time;”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
70.23–24.
“they are the ups and downs
of the times”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
71.5.
). The ambiguity is understandable, however, if
the author of the letter is seeking to conform both to the
personification in the chreia and to a more prosaic use of the
word. The personification of “time” in the anecdote is
striking, and could be put to good rhetorical effect, but would
be difficult to sustain over an extended composition. The
repeated use of the word “time” in the letter reflects the
centrality of “time” in the chreia, but its ambiguity in the
letter seems to be a result of the problems inherent in
expanding a concise witticism into a serious treatise. Theon’s
chreia of Epameinondas, quoted earlier, comes to mind: here the
Theban general’s victories are personified as his daughters,
but in the expanded chreia the victories are described in both
everyday terms and in personified terms. The result is perhaps
more labored than the original, with the change from “I have
left two daughters—the victory at Leuctra and the one at
Mantineia” to “Stop weeping friends, for I have left you two
immortal daughters: two victories of our country over the
Lacedaemonians, the one at Leuctra, who is the older, and the
younger, who is just now being born at Mantineia.” Given the
manner in which the writer of the Letter of Mara bar
Serapion follows other conventions of chreia elaboration,
it is perhaps best to see the figure of time as ambiguous by
virtue of the difficulty of chreia expansion rather than
because of a complex philosophical agenda.
Historical Themes
[16] The
presence of both friends and troubles is another obvious theme
in the letter and chreia, and it is through examination of the
“hardship” of Roman military action described in the letter
that scholars have generally attempted to place the letter in a
specific historical context.
See n. 37, above.
Yet these examinations have been
singularly inconclusive. The references in the letter to a
Roman conquest of Samosata suggest, at first glance, three
different possible contexts for the letter: the Roman takeover
of Commagene in the late first century, the war between Rome
and Parthia in the mid-second century, and the conflict between
the emperor Valerian and the Persian Shapur I in the mid-third
century. Unfortunately, the flight to Seleucia and the
imprisonment of residents of Samosata described in the letter
do not find corroboration in accounts of any of these three
conflicts.
See K. McVey, “Fresh Look,” 258–60.
Fergus Millar has suggested that a late first
century date may be most probable for the letter, but
acknowledges that the assumption of any such strict historicity
in the letter is problematic.
F. Millar, Roman Near East, 460–62.
Given the difficulty in
matching the circumstances described in the letter to any known
Roman conquest of Samosata, however, it is worth considering
more seriously the possibility that the letter-writer is not
describing actual events at first hand, or at all. The muddled
description of Mara bar Serapion’s troubles could more easily
have arisen from the clues given in the chreia, namely, that
Mara is imprisoned with certain companions, and that the times
are bad. The detail of Roman conquest would then be a
rhetorical flourish based on the knowledge that the Romans had,
at some point in the past, conquered Samosata. The
parallels with Theon’s “expanded” chreia are here apt: the
student of rhetoric is to give the anecdote a lively historical
setting, adding whatever details seem most plausible or vivid.
Details of Mara bar Serapion’s capture by the Romans lend the
letter both vividness and a certain pathos which the chreia
itself lacks. Likewise Libanius’ elaboration of the Alexander
chreia: the chreia is given a setting “historical enough” to
tempt scholarly identification (Hock and O’Neil suggest
Alexander’s victory at Gaugamela),
R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil,
Chreia, vol. 2, 143 n. 281.
but there is no need for
this account to be read as accurate. Indeed given the fact that
the same chreia could be attributed to various
speakers,
R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil,
Chreia, vol. 1, 309, 315–16, 325–26.
some caution in reading them as the basis for
historical accounts must be maintained.
[17]
There is one important historicizing element found in the
letter that is absent in the chreia: the presence of children,
both the children mentioned in the description of the exiles,
and Mara bar Serapion’s son specifically.
F. Schulthess suggests a situation in which
Mara bar Serapion and his son were separated during the leaving
of Samosata: “Brief,” 377–78.
Yet the children
in the letter are easily explained by the genre of the text.
The letter is an exhortation to the philosophic life, and such
exhortations were traditionally given the form of advice from
an older man to a younger.
Cf. S. Stowers, Letter-Writing, 39.
The most famous example of the
genre is probably Seneca’s set of letters to Lucilius, advising
the young (and possibly fictitious)
S. Stowers, Letter-Writing, 40.
man on the proper method of
undertaking the philosophic life. However, such letters were
also commonly in the form of advice given from father to son;
the trope of father-to-son exhortation is a common one in both
Roman didactic and Near Eastern wisdom literature.
For a detailed discussion of the Roman
tradition, see Fannie J. LeMoine, “Parental Gifts: Father-Son
Dedications and Dialogues in Roman Didactic Literature,”
Illinois Classical Studies XVI (1991): 337–66.
In
literature on the chreia, too, the theme of proper upbringing
of the young is prominent: one of the most often-quoted chreiai
is that of Diogenes: “When he saw a boy misbehaving, Diogenes
struck the boy’s pedagogue.”
R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil, Chreia
vol. 1, 316, cite it as the most frequently occurring chreia in
their set of texts.
Both Libanius and Pseudo-Nicolaus
elaborate this chreia with appeals to parents’ concern that
their children be taught proper behavior by their pedagogues,
acknowledging the trope of the parent as arbiter of correct
education.
R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil,
Chreia, vol. 2, 158–60, 212–14.
The letter-writer is thus able to frame Mara
bar Serapion’s letter in a highly traditional manner and then
use this framework to include another common philosophical
complaint: that children, good and bad alike, are most often a
grief to their parents.
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
44.3–6.
Thus the act of expanding the
chreia into a historical document and philosophically hortatory
letter using the figures of sons and children allows the
letter-writer to conform even more closely to traditional
Greco-Roman rhetorical norms.
[18] The
Letter of Mara bar Serapion seems to fit in with the
general pattern of chreia elaboration, with paraenesis added
and certain elements of the chreia elaboration form modified to
suit the genre of the prosopopoetic letter. A schematic
division of the letter into its different rhetorical components
would then look something like this:
Rhetorical Components
Cureton
encomium
43.1–5
paraenesis
43.5–44.6
paraphrase/historicization
44.6–20
philosophical rationale
44.20–45.5
argument from the opposite
45.6–17
further paraenesis
45.18–46.9
testimony of the ancients/exempla
46.10–47.16
further paraenesis
47.16–48.7
epilogue
48.7–23
followed by the original chreia
48.24–26
In comparison with Hock and O’Neil’s list of elements common
to the chreia elaboration (encomium, paraphrase, philosophical
rationale, argument from the opposite, analogy, example,
testimony of the ancients, epilogue), the similarities are very
clear.
Conclusion: Syria, Greek Education, and
Christianity
[19] The
idea that the Letter of Mara bar Serapion is deeply
indebted to Greek rhetorical traditions, and may not reveal
much as an eyewitness account of a Roman victory, has of course
arisen in other work on the letter, although the work’s
specific status as a chreia elaboration has not, until now,
been explored.
F. Millar, Roman Near East, 460–61,
acknowledges that the letter is problematic but attempts to
date it to the first century nonetheless, on the assumption
that it is a product of the Roman victory at Commagene.
McVey has argued that the letter conforms in
many respects to stock philosophical writing in antiquity, and
that extrapolating a concrete historical setting or context
from the letter is difficult, not to say impossible. Specifying
that the letter is a chreia elaboration would, I think, both
reinforce and explain this difficulty: while it acknowledges
that “Mara bar Serapion” may well have been a recognizable
historical figure to the readers of the chreia, it gives modern
readers no more actual historical information about him than
Libanius’ elaboration of the Alexander chreia gives us about
Alexander. McVey argues further that the writer of the letter
can nonetheless be identified as a Christian writer of the
fourth century, on the strength of two passages: one that
apparently connects the dispersion of the Jews to the death of
their “wise king,” and another that describes people as
“casting out” their children, a passage that McVey takes to be
a reference to (and condemnation of) the exposure of
infants.
K. McVey, “Fresh Look,” 267–71.
Her conclusion is that the writer is a
Christian apologist posing as a pagan intellectual in order to
support Christian supersessionist and moral claims. Here, too,
however, the identification of the letter as a chreia
elaboration should complicate the drawing of such
straightforward conclusions from these two passages.
[20] To
take the second passage first, as the simpler case: the lines
in question read as follows: “For I wondered at many who cast
out their children, and I was amazed at others who bring up
those who are not their own. There are men who acquire property
in the world; and I also was amazed at the others who inherit
what is not their own.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
45.2–4.
If we read the letter as a
rhetorical exercise, it is easy to connect this passage to such
texts as the Controversiae of the Elder Seneca, in
which children are frequently lost, kidnapped, disinherited, or
otherwise misplaced through often spectacular turns of
fortune.
E.g., Seneca, Controversiae 7.1.1,
“The man who was released by his son, the pirate chief”; 7.3.1,
“The thrice-disinherited son caught pounding up poison”; 7.4.1,
“The blind mother who would not let her son go,” text and tr.
in M. Winterbottom, Elder Seneca.
In a slightly more subdued Greek rhetorical
context, the passage is reminiscent of another chreia
attributed to Diogenes: “The Cynic philosopher Diogenes, when
he saw an illegitimate child throwing stones, said, ‘Stop,
child! You might hit your father without knowing it.”
R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil,
Chreia, vol. 1, 317.
The
point is more about human ignorance and turns of fortune than
simply about the ethics of stone-throwing. I would suggest that
the passage in the Letter of Mara bar Serapion takes
up this trope, not to condemn child exposure per se, but as a
comment on the unpredictability of human affairs and the
resultant need for detachment. As the letter elsewhere
suggests, “glory, that vanity that fills the life of men, do
not reckon it among those things that make us happy: quickly it
does us harm, especially in the birth of beloved sons.”
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
44.2–4.
It is
hard to read this as an unmixed endorsement of child-rearing.
The question of child exposure, then, taken in a rhetorical
context, does not allow for a simple identification of the
letter with any specifically Christian moral claims.
[21] It
is harder to interpret the passage about the dispersion of the
Jews and about their “wise king.” This is partly because there
is a crucial verb missing in the passage, and partly because,
as we have seen, the genre of chreia elaboration tends to
historicize in extremely vague ways. Again, it is worth quoting
the passage in full; it occurs in the section of the letter
that, following the conventions of chreia elaboration, combines
exempla and “testimony of the ancients” to support its
argument:
For what did the Athenians profit by the killing of Socrates?
They received hunger and death in retribution for it. Or the
people of Samos by the burning of Pythagoras? For in one hour
their whole land was covered in sand. Or the Jews, of their
wise king? For from that very time their kingdom was taken
away. For God justly made retribution for the wisdom of these
three, for the Athenians died hungry and the people of Samos
were irreparably covered by the sea, and the Jews were
destroyed and persecuted out of their kingdom, and are
dispersed throughout every land. Socrates is not dead,
because of Plato, nor Pythagoras, because of the statue of
Hera, nor the wise king, because of the new laws that he
established.
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
46.12–20.
There is, unfortunately, no clarifying verb in the question,
“Or the Jews, of their wise king?” It is reasonable to suppose
that, given the context, the reader should supply a phrase
like, “by the death [sc. of their wise king],” and in fact this
is what Cureton does in his translation,
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
73.35–36. F. Schulthess, “Brief,” 371, likewise supplies “by
the killing [sc. of their wise king]” here. It may be going too
far to supply “by the rejection/crucifixion?,” as K. McVey does
(“Fresh Look,” 264), especially since “crucifixion” would
presumably remove all doubt that the “wise king” should be
identified with Jesus, who is after all never named in the
text.
but it is
significant that Jesus is not actually named in the text, nor
is the crucifixion specified. I do not mean to suggest that the
writer here cannot have a Christian apologetic argument in
mind, and I think it is more than reasonable to suppose that
the “wise king” here is meant to be a reference to
Jesus.
NB however that F. Millar, Roman Near
East, 461, considers Solomon an equally likely
possibility.
This has been the general consensus of
scholars working on the letter since Cureton.
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
pref. xiii; F. Schulthess, “Brief,” 379; Drijvers, “Hatra,”
does not mention the passage specifically, but places the
letter in a Christian milieu; K. McVey, “Fresh Look,” 263ff.
[22] The
vagueness of the reference is, however, important. Cureton
suggests that it is due to the early date of the letter, and
that the writer was prudently avoiding a mention of Jesus in
order to remain safe during a period in which Christians were
persecuted.
W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum,
pref. xiii–xiv.
If the letter is a chreia elaboration,
however, there is no need to suppose that the lack of
specificity is so coherently motivated. As McVey notes, the
reference to Pythagoras in the same passage is also
problematic, in that the writer conflates Pythagoras the
philosopher with Pythagoras the sculptor, also of Samos, who,
according to Diogenes Laertius, lived at about the same
time.
K. McVey, “Fresh Look,” 270; Diog. Laer.
V. Pyth. 25, text and tr. in R. D. Hicks, Diogenes
Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Harvard:
Cambridge University Press, 1925).
The appeal in both cases, then, is not
necessarily to a Pythagoras or to a “wise king” the specific
details of whose identity are vital to the argument. Rather,
the appeal is to a more general “antiquity” populated by
generic wise figures who are persecuted. To return, briefly, to
Libanius’ elaboration of the chreia on Alexander and his
friends, Libanius offers the examples of Orestes and Pylades
and of Achilles and Patroclus as support for his argument that
friends, are, indeed, treasures.
R. F. Hock and E. N. O’Neil,
Chreia, vol. 2, 152.
These examples tell us no
more than that these legendary figures were recognizable as
“friends” in Greek cultural discourse. They do not entail that
Libanius endorsed a return to Homeric military or religious
ideals. Indeed, despite his devotion to traditional Greek gods,
it seems clear that Libanius did not, for example, follow
Julian the Apostate in any extreme religious nostalgia.
Cf. Polymnia Athanassiadi, Julian and
Hellenism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 126–27,
206–7.
It is
plausible then that by the time the Letter of Mara bar
Serapion was written, some form of the anti-Jewish
argument that the death of Jesus, or of a “wise king,” was the
reason for the dispersal of the Jews was current in Syriac
thought. This would support McVey’s contention that the letter
may date from around the fourth century or later, when the
argument is prominent in Syriac Christian sources. It does not,
however, entail that the writer of the letter had a particular
theological interest in promoting this argument. On the
contrary, Bowersock’s work on the long period of coexistence
between “paganism” and Christianity in Syria seems well
supported by a letter that places Socrates, Pythagoras, and
Jesus (or a wise Jewish king) in precisely the same group,
namely, persecuted wise men.
Glen W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late
Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990),
chapter 3. See also H. J. W. Drijvers, “The Persistence of
Pagan Cults in Christian Syria,” in East of Byzantium:
Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period, ed. Nina G.
Garsoïan et al. (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982), 35-43.
Drijvers has a less optimistic view about this coexistence, but
acknowledges that it did occur.
If, as Bowersock has argued,
Hellenism, Christianity and local cult could thrive in
coexistence in Syria, it would be prudent to avoid the
conclusion that any familiarity with Christian arguments
implies a Christian affiliation. The composition of an
originally Greek type of rhetorical exercise in Syriac should,
instead, make clear the vast range of possibilities for
cultural and narrative interchange in such a text. Rather than
privileging one narrative over the others, it may be better to
use this text to question the likelihood that cultural and
religious affiliations were routinely seen as exclusive in the
late ancient Near East.
[23] The
removal of the Letter of Mara bar Serapion to his Son
from a concrete historical context poses certain problems for
the historian of Syrian-Roman relations in the first centuries
CE. The letter’s placement in a far more traditional rhetorical
context, however, opens up new possibilities for the study of
early Syriac literature and the history of education in the
provinces of the Roman Empire. Although the date of the letter,
on this reading, remains elusive, the use of Greek and Roman
rhetorical forms in Syriac prose composition suggests a high
degree of cultural exchange between Syriac speakers and their
imperial neighbors. Notably, the codex in which the Letter
of Mara bar Serapion is found also contains several
translations of Greek philosophical and educational works,
among them sententiae of Menander, Isocrates’
paraenetic speech to Demonicus, maxims attributed to Theano and
to Pythagoras, works of Aristotle, and Porphyry’s
Isagoge, as well as Greek-influenced works such as the
Book of the Laws of the Countries.
See William Wright, Catalogue of the
Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum, vol. 3 (London,
1872, repr. Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 1990), 1154–60.
If Cureton is
correct in dating the codex to the sixth or seventh century, it
would also have been produced during a prolific period in the
translation of Greek works into Syriac.
See Sebastian Brock, “From Antagonism to
Assimilation: Syriac Attitudes to Greek Learning,” in East
of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period,
ed. Nina G. Garsoïan, et al. (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks,
1982), 17–34; for the position of these translations in a
larger narrative of transmission of Greek literature into
Syriac and Arabic, see S. Brock, “Greek into Syriac and Syriac
into Greek,” Journal of the Syriac Academy III.
Baghdad (1977): 1–17; reprinted in S. Brock, Syriac
Perspectives on Late Antiquity (London: Variorum, 1984);
and D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The
Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early
ʿAbbasid Society (London: Routledge,
1998), 20–23.
The Letter of
Mara bar Serapion, following Brock’s general narrative of
progressive Syriac assimilation to Greek culture over the
fourth to the eighth century,
S. Brock, “From Antagonism,” 19–25.
may be later than the
fourth century. Along with the Greek translations in the codex
are a large number of works by the late fifth-/early
sixth-century Syriac philosopher Sergius of Resh‘aina,
commentator on Aristotle and translator of Galen.
W. Wright, Catalogue, 1154–58; cf.
S. Brock, “From Antagonism,” 21.
A
similar move toward Syriac cultural adoption of Greek figures
is evident in the number of Greek cultural icons used in the
letter: Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, Achilles, Priam, and
Agamemnon, to name only a few.
On the other hand, the number of Greek
loan-words in the letter is small; the names of Greek literary
and cultural figures are easily the most prominent. Brock
argues for an increasing use of Greek loan-words as
assimilation occurs, especially in translations (S. Brock,
“From Antagonism,” 18; see also his “Aspects of Translation
Technique in Antiquity,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine
Studies 20 [1979]: 69–87) and “Some Aspects of Greek Words
in Syriac,” in Synkretismus im syrisch-persischen
Kulturgebiet, ed. A. Dietrich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht; reprinted in Syriac Perspectives in Late
Antiquity). It may be, however, that the use of loan-words
in a rhetorical exercise would have been considered “bad form,”
as it often was in Latin and Greek practice. As Brock has
elsewhere suggested, in some bilingual contexts Syriac would
have been considered a language of greater literary prestige
than Greek, which might also have inclined the author to avoid
loan-words: S. Brock, “Greek and Syriac in Late Antique Syria,”
in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, ed. Alan
K. Bowman and Greg Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 149–60.
This prominence of Greek
rhetoric and literary culture in the letter is even more
clearly recognizable once the letter is properly understood to
be a chreia elaboration.
[24] The
Letter of Mara bar Serapion is thus a document of both
limited and important historical use. While it tells us little
about the political relationship between the Roman Empire and
late ancient Syria, it nonetheless usefully illustrates the
intersection of Greek literary forms and Syriac literary
practice. The writer who posed as Mara bar Serapion for the
purposes of this letter should alert students of Syriac
literature and Christianity, not so much to the need for a
philosophical outlook on life, as to the need to approach
ancient Syria as an active participant in the culture of the
broader Mediterranean world._______
Notes
_______
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