The following essay forms the introduction to a famous anthology of the seventeenth century, the Epigrammatum delectus, a Port-Royal textbook published at Paris in 1659.[1] The essay was twice translated into French in the same century, but the use of the text in France did not survive, apparently, the downfall of the Port-Royal movement. It was, however, later adopted by Eton College, where it was used in the sixth form.[2] The text went through thirteen English editions between 1683 and 1762. The author of the essay, and a collaborator with Claude Lancelot in making the selections for the anthology, was Pierre Nicole, who began teaching in the Little Schools around 1646. It has been said that the essay was written at that time.[3]

The scope of the anthology is indicated on the title page, which I translate: A selection of epigrams carefully chosen from the whole range of ancient and modern poets, and so on. With an essay on true and apparent beauty, in which from settled principles is rendered the grounds for choosing and rejecting epigrams. There are added the best sententiae of the ancient poets, chosen sparingly and with severe judgement. With shorter sententiae, or proverbs, Latin, Greek, Spanish, and Italian, drawn both from the chief authors of those languages and from everyday speech.

The essay is preceded by a preface in which the origin, purpose and method of the anthology is explained. The two ends of instruction, we are told,[4] are learning and character, and of these the latter is the more important. But there are many books, and especially books of epigrams, that are quite filthy and obscene. Young people are led by curiosity to read these, and losing all chastity of mind enter upon a progressive corruption of life. It would be best if they could be kept wholly from such books; but there is a good deal in them of genuine profit and literary merit, which makes it difficult to keep them wholly out of the hands of youth. Therefore the editor undertook to expurgate the epigrammatists, especially Catullus and Martial. He was horrified when he read over their works, but he found some good among the bad, as in vipers not everything is poisonous but some things even useful to health. His primary purpose, then, was to protect the good young man from being harmed and to leave him no excuse for wishing to have or peruse such books since the good in them had already been extracted for him.

The difficulty then arose of making the selection serve the purposes both of morality and of judgement. The editor could either gather together all the epigrams that were not obscene, or he could choose only the best. He took in fact both ways: he preserved everything of Catullus and Martial except the cheapest odds and ends and filthiest obscenities, and he applied strict standards of judgement to the rest so that, unless an epigram had literary merit or contained something worth knowing, he felt there was no reason to burden the book with it.

Nevertheless, some middling epigrams found entrance into the anthology—he confesses the fact so the reader will not look for excellence without flaw. The reasons were, first, that the complete perfection he was looking for is seldom or never attained. Hence, if he had admitted only those epigrams in which there was nothing to censure, the task would not have been one of selecting some but rather of rejecting almost all. Again, in epigrams dealing with memorable events or in praise of famous men, sometimes he looked to the profit of the work rather than to its polish, as in Ausonius' quatrains on the Caesars. Finally, he will not deny that chance has played its part against his will. As a judge after a series of severe sentences will give a lighter one to a man no less guilty than the others, so after rejecting a great number of epigrams by some writer a sense of pity arose and a distaste with severity of judgement; then if anything that seemed pointed turned up, though no better than what was rejected, he could not bear to see it discarded. This has occasionally happened, but hardly ever without a warning note to the reader.

He admits that some, perhaps quite excellent, epigrams have escaped him, either because he never read them or because he was at the moment of reading less attentive. But the paucity or lack of selections from a given writer should not be taken as an indication of ignorance or indiligence in that case. Rather, he confidently professes to have exerted the greatest patience and industry—patience, since so many were so bad. His hope was by his trouble to free others from so much trouble. With this in mind he read countless authors of different ages and countries, a total of around 50,000 epigrams, from most of which nothing at all was worth excerpting. There is no point in memorializing the names of the bad, except to note in passing that he found hardly anything so inept as the Delitiae, as they call them, of the German poets[5]—in this connection he gives special mention to the book of Lancinus Curtius[6], which contains 2,000 epigrams.

He found some fairly tolerable epigrams in other books, which nevertheless he excluded, for what is lacking in distinction is better not known at all than learned at the expense of better things, not to speak of its being a burden to the mind which gradually will lose the ability to judge excellence, and so, becoming accustomed to mediocrity, will be unable to attempt anything higher. There is no more useful motto for a man in quest of solid learning than Grotius' line: "Not to know some things is a large part of wisdom."[7]

The editor added to the epigrams a collection of sententiae since the two forms are quite cognate, the sententia being a kind of shorter epigram, for the principal part of an epigram, the conclusion, usually consists in a sententia. It is true that such collections have come in bad repute, and not wholly unjustly, but the thing itself is worth doing. For what is our aim in reading books except to nourish and fashion judgement? and what better serves this end than sententiae, which furnish as it were the premises and axioms by which one is able to form a just and true judgement on most of the duties and affairs of human life? Hence he extracted these gems from the huge pile of trifles in which they lay mixed. Perhaps they please less in isolation than when one runs across them as he reads, and for this reason such anthologizing should be contemned. But it would be precious to refuse a great accession of profit because of a small dimunition of pleasure.

The editor thought that in many cases the selections should not be published without notes, for epigrams have often some obscurity in them and their whole charm is lost unless the light that would illuminate it is at hand. The notes to the selections from Martial are pretty largely taken from Farnaby. Elsewhere the editor has supplied notes sparingly, at those points where the reader might be stuck. He has also changed the titles of a good many pieces, especially where the original involved the name of some fictitious or base person. The purpose of a title is to recall the whole piece to memory or to facilitate finding it in an index. Why, then, title an epigram To Gargilianus or Cecilianus, which gives no idea of what the epigram is about? The editor, therefore, has substituted titles which express as well as possible the force of the poem, a difficult task especially when the meaning is compact, as only one who has tried it knows.

But that out of the brevity of this book the reader may get that ability in judgement, which above all should be cultivated, the editor thought it worth while to prefix to the anthology an exposition of the norms of judgement used in selecting the epigrams. He drew these norms not merely from his own wit or from the authorities of Antiquity, but from the conversation of learned men experienced in civilized life. Hence the reader will find here their judgements, not the editor's, and will, if he is unbiased, perceive how just and accurate they are.

The preface is then followed by the essay. The principles of the essay, as Nicole asserted above in the preface, are not peculiarly his own but those of the group with which he was associated. They are the principles, for example, of the Port-Royal logic: particularly 1), "one of the most important rules of true rhetoric," "that there is nothing beautiful except that which is true; which would take away from discourse a multitude of vain ornaments and false thoughts;" and 2) the doctrine that "the figurative style commonly expresses, with the things, the emotions which we experience in conceiving or speaking of them," and hence in the light of the adjustment of feeling to the situation "we may judge the use which ought to be made of it, and what are the subjects to which it is adapted."[8]

The purpose of the book is to serve morality and to promote judgement.[9] To this end the editor provides a check list of the better epigrams, and affixes an asterisk to designate the best.[10] Seventeen pieces are given the highest rating: thirteen of Martial's (1.8, 1.21, 1.33, 2.5, 3.44, 3.46, 4.56, 4.69, 5.10, 5.13, 8.69, 10.53, and 12.13); the re-written epigram ascribed to Seneca and discussed in the notes to the essay (note 32); Claudian on Archimedes' sphere;[11] Boethius, De cons. phil. 1.m.4; and one modern poem, Buchanan's dedication of the Paraphrase of the psalms to Mary, Queen of Scots.[12]

J. V. Cunningham
The University of Chicago

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NOTES

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