Traditionally the twin aims of poetry, as expressed in Horace’s Art of Poetry are to instruct and to please. He says the poet aims at either of these goals, but that the best poets aim for both, mixing the “sweet” with the “useful”. The didactic side of some of our early classics is quite pronounced. Some poems are presented as actual instruction manuals, only partly tongue in cheek. Virgil writes a poem “useful to farmers”. Ovid writes an Art of Love useful to everybody. As late as the Romantic period, Percy Bysshe Shelley extravagantly claimed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”! How much of today’s “creative literature” has an explicit or even implicit pedagogic aim?
Medieval preachers, poets, and historians frequently used exempla—anecdotes drawn from history or phenomena observed in the natural order—to illustrate the points they were interested in making. One of the meanings of Modern English example preserves the sense of the singular form of the Latin word, exemplum. There were many compilations of wise sayings and exemplary stories attributed to the great men of ancient history. It appears that the first book printed and published in England was a translation of something called The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, a medieval Arabic anthology of ancient and ecumenical wisdom
This week I have found myself interested in a particular exemplum that I have by chance run into a couple of times. It might be called the example of “Alexander the Great and the Pirate.” Its most influential appearance in a major work of medieval literature is that found in The City of God of Augustine, who found it already established as an ethical exemplum in Cicero. My own first encounters were in two late medieval works of poetry, one in English (John Gower’s Confessio Amantis), the other in French (François Villon’s Testament). In general, Alexander had a particularly good medieval press. He was one of the “Nine Worthies” of historic myth, three of whom (including Hector and Julius Caesar) were ancient pagans. He had a whole large literature of his own, including a Romance of Alexander and several other fictive “biographical” works.
But in this anecdote he doesn’t come off so well. The Emperor has brought before him a captured petty marauder and pirate, intending to berate him—doubtless before having him executed. “What do you think you are doing,” he asked the man, “terrorizing the seas in this manner?” But the malefactor was staunch and fearless in his reply. “Just what you think you are doing in terrorizing the whole world. But because I do it with a little boat, I am called a brigand. Because you command a great fleet, you are called an emperor.”*
It is a medieval illustration of this exemplum that I have put at the top of this essay. It is from a fifteenth-century manuscript of Gower’s Confessio Amantis. It depicts a magnificently dressed and baby-faced emperor and a scruffy pirate with his loot beside him and his pirate ship in the waterway behind. If you have never heard of John Gower, you are certainly not alone. He was a friend of Chaucer and a man of similar learning, an energetic scholar and writer. He produced extensive works in three languages: French, Latin, and of course English. He was thus an important literary figure: what he was not was a great poet. Comparing the work of the two men, one immediately perceives the difference between artistic genius and artistic so-so. But for exemplary purposes—and I am writing about exempla, after all—he is a more obvious and uncomplicated representative of the conventional morality of his age. The title of his poem means “The Lover’s Confession,” and its content is, indeed, in the form of auricular confession made by an allegorical penitent to an allegorical priest. It has many of the features of a medieval manual of penance and delineates in detail the nature of each of the seven deadly sins and deals at length with their several ramifications. (Chaucer’s corresponding work is the “Parson’s Tale,” which is not a tale at all, but an undisguised confession manual.) What medieval writers considered important and what their modern readers think is important are not always the same thing. The “Parson’s Tale” is very long and tedious; yet Chaucer obviously thought it was very important for his scheme, implying that it is the key to the whole of the Canterbury Tales. I doubt that anyone but literary scholars have read it in the last three hundred years, and few if any of them with pleasure. For his part, Gower blends his religious framework with the elements of a love allegory—producing an odd literary goulash. But his poem is very important for its opulence of classical materials, especially those from Ovid. Modern readers are likely to think that like the curate’s egg, Gower’s poem is “good in parts”.
In Augustine, the exemplary purpose of the little story of the pirate (elsewhere named as Diomedes) is clear and serious. The opening argument of the City of God, especially developed in its first four books, is that the Roman Empire had lost the divine approbation for its want of justice. In some ways the argument is not dissimilar to contemporary left-wing critiques of western imperialism in the modern period. Of course it is not advanced in material or “dialectical” terms, but in those of the categories of traditional antique ethics and philosophy. Its categories are those of the great Greek philosophical traditions put into a Latin vocabulary by Cicero and others. If you suppress justice, writes Augustine, what are kingdoms except great criminal enterprises? And what is a criminal gang except a small kingdom? This is part of an entirely serious treatise on political philosophy.
But sometimes a little story meant to serve as a teaching device takes off on its own. That is what happens in Gower. The Emperor is so impressed by Diomedes’s gutsy response that he immediately inducts the pirate into his household, makes him a knight and bestows upon him an estate of land. All thoughts of Augustinian social justice vanish from the narrative. In his new life the pardoned pirate becomes a famous warrior in his own right. People can read of his exploits in the chronicles. Soon enough Gower himself seems to realize that what is a pretty good moral exemplum is not the plot of a decent narrative poem and struggles to get back to the point, at least to the degree that he can recall what it is.
Perhaps the most popular exemplary book in late medieval England was one called the Gesta Romanorum (The Deeds of the Romans). It might also be described as one of the most fantastic books ever written. The stories, anecdotes, or “deeds” are followed by moralizing interpretations. The book’s content has no really coherent organizing structure, and the moral “applications” are often as incoherent as the stories to which they in theory relate. But it is absolutely full of amazing little “historical” narratives, many of them involving the weird, the violent, and the miraculous. Since it was a book of free-standing anecdotes, more or less anybody could have added one to the collection, and apparently did. But it appears that everybody in the literary world read it. Its moral applications are sometimes hard to figure out. I recall one little tale, for which the “application” tells us that the “king” means God. That would hardly be surprising were there a king in the story, but there isn’t. No matter. A literary device so versatile as to have served the purposes of Augustine’s probing theology of history and the moralizing authors of pre-modern comic books must capture our attention. Absolutely everybody seems to have read and borrowed from the “Deeds of the Romans”, including major English writers of the Renaissance period. Gower certainly did. A moral application without its tale is perhaps more tolerable than a tale with no conceivable moral application, which seems to be our most prominent current mode in fiction.
*City of God, IV, iv.
