1. “Every Thursday evening he wrote a long letter to his mother in red ink and sealed it with three wafers; then he skimmed his history notebooks or read an old volume of the philosopher Anacharsis that happened to be in the study hall.”1 From the very first page of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Charles, the future husband of the protagonist, is presented as mediocre and ridiculous. (His heroic dimensions will emerge only at the end of the novel.) Every slight detail that concerns him, including the mention of “the old volume” of the philosopher Anacharsis read at boarding school at Rouen, has something awkward and stuffy about it. Flaubert imagines the story of Madame Bovary commencing about the year 1835. At that date the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, first published in 1788, was still a best seller. In the span of a century it enjoyed about eighty editions, if we count the anthologies and the adaptations for young people. It was translated into English, Spanish, German, Italian, Danish, Dutch, modern Greek, and even Armenian. By way of this extremely long book, generations of readers, young and old, learned about the history and antiquities of Greece. “The old volume” of Anacharsis, read by Charles Bovary in the long evenings at school, was frayed from use. But for Flaubert it was also a relic from the past: testimony to a taste and a world gone forever.2
Enormous success was followed by oblivion. Today we can permit ourselves to contemplate the Voyage with equanimity. “It is a book which can be freed from the dust covering it,” wrote V.-L. Saulnier.3 The contrary may be true. What interests us today in the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis is its improbability.
2. Jean-Jacques Barthélemy was born in 1716 at Aubagne in Provence in a family of well-to-do merchants.4 He studied in the seminary but probably never seriously considered an ecclesiastical career; he always remained the abbé. A number of learned contributions brought him to the notice of antiquarians. In 1753 he became the secretary of the Cabinet des Médailles. The following year he relinquished his position and left for Rome in the entourage of Étienne-François de Stainville, subsequently duke of Choiseul, who had been appointed the French ambassador.
In Rome, where he spent three years, Barthélemy found a stimulating intellectual atmosphere. He met Johann Joachim Winckelmann and corresponded with him; became involved in the discussions provoked by the archeological discoveries at Herculaneum; and began a piece of research, which he would publish a few years later, on the Nilotic mosaic of Palestrina.5 In this period he began to reflect on a new project, one far removed from his usual erudite form of research.6 In his autobiographical reminiscences published a half century later, he described it in this way:
I was in Italy and in the cities I visited I was more interested in their ancient splendor than in their contemporary state. I spontaneously went back to the century in which they disputed among themselves the glory of cultivating the sciences and the arts, and I thought that to report an extended journey in that country at the time of Leo X, would put before our eyes one of the most useful and interesting spectacles for the history of the human spirit. A summary description should suffice to give the idea of it. A Frenchman crosses the Alps: in Pavia he meets Gerolamo Cardano.. . . In Parma he sees Correggio frescoing the cupola of the cathedral; in Mantua, Count Baldassar Castiglione.. . . In Ferrara he sees Ariosto.. . . In Florence, Machiavelli and the historians Guicciardini and Paolo Giovio.. . . in Rome, Michelangelo who is building St. Peter’s dome, and Raphael decorating the Vatican galleries.. . . In Naples he finds Talesio [sic], whom Bacon defines as the first to restore philosophy, working to reconstruct the system of Parmenides; he finds Giordano Bruno, whom nature seems to have chosen as its interpreter.. . .7
Page after page Barthélemy spoke of this project, left unfinished. The concept undoubtedly had been inspired by the Essai sur les mœurs (1760)—more specifically, from the chapter in which Voltaire contrasts the ephemeral hostilities among the Italian cities with the intellectual advances achieved in the sixteenth century.8 Barthélemy took this one step further and hypothesized that artistic and intellectual progress had been produced by the “tendency to emulation by the various states” into which Italy was divided—a thesis that would be taken up by J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi and Jacob Burckhardt.9 With Jules Michelet and Burckhardt, Barthélemy viewed in “this stupendous revolution [cette étonnante revolution] a first, decisive step toward the modern world: “Because, after all, the century of Leo X was the harbinger of those which followed, and many of the geniuses who distinguished themselves in various countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries owe much of their glory to what Italy had produced in earlier centuries.”10
The project was to take the form of a travel journal written by a Frenchman, a transparent alter ego of the writer. This narrative invention, vaguely inspired by Fénelon’s Aventures de Télémaque, tied the presentation to a relatively circumscribed period of time.11 The imaginary French traveler, as we seem to gather from Barthélemy’s rather confused sketch, participated in the decoration of the Vatican Stanze worked on by Raphael between 1511 and 1514, and on the construction of the dome of St. Peter, which Michelangelo began in 1550; he saw Correggio, who was frescoing the ceiling of the Parma cathedral in 1526, and met Giordano Bruno in Naples about a half century later. All these events were compatible with the life of a person who was relatively long-lived. But Barthélemy did not hesitate to take liberties with the narrative constraints he had imposed on himself. Among Ariosto’s contemporaries, he included Petrarch, who had lived a century and a half earlier, and Tasso, born eleven years later. The former was there because his works were read and commented upon in the sixteenth century, and the latter because he had been inspired by Ariosto: “In this same way,” Barthélemy commented, “we call the Nile both the source and the mouth.”12 This panorama of Italian sixteenthcentury artistic and intellectual life would evoke, in a condensed form, a much longer historical process. Through the description of his failed project Barthélemy may have influenced the synchronic presentation of the Italian Renaissance proposed by Burckhardt in his famous Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.
Barthélemy abandoned his project because he began to realize that his knowledge of the Italian Cinquecento was inadequate. So he transposed a similar narrative device to a historical period with which his erudite researches had made him more familiar: the Greece of the fourth century b.c. I have imagined, we read in the preface to the first edition of the Voyage, that a Scythian named Anacharsis journeys to Greece and observes the usages and customs of the people, participating in their celebrations and meeting many famous persons: “I have written a travel account, rather than a history; because in a travel account everything can be used, even the most minor circumstances which are not proper for a historian to mention [qu’on y permet des détails interdits à l’historien].13
3. A historical novel stuffed with erudition, an undigested miscellany inspired by François Fénelon’s Aventures de Telémaque: these are the images that today are vaguely associated with the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis. But the passage just quoted sheds light on a more complicated experiment. For Barthélemy the tenuous romantic mechanism set in motion by the imaginary Scythian traveler was a means, not an end.14 But what were the “minor circumstances which are not proper for a historian to mention,” recovered by the artifice of the narrative? A glance at the Voyage provides a preliminary answer. In the third edition (1791), the first volume recapitulates the political and military history of Greece. The six following volumes take a totally different form. The exposition swarms with footnotes (twenty thousand, Barthélemy proudly proclaimed).15 Take a chapter at random, the twenty-fifth: “Of the Homes and the Meals of Athenians” (Des maisons et des repas des Atheniens). The reader finds himself before a minute description of a symposium in which the notes reference passages from Greek and, less often, Latin authors. Rarely, some modern writer may also be cited, such as Isaac Casaubon (for his commentary on Athenaeus) and Jacob Spon.16 The chapters of the Voyage on religious ceremonies, on holidays, on the various places visited by Anacharsis are similarly constructed.17
These were the subjects traditionally treated by antiquarians.18 In his memoirs Barthélemy asserted that he had made use especially of the great collection of Greek antiquities edited by Johann Frederik Gronovius: twelve folio volumes which contain, among other writings, treatises by Ubbo Emmius, Nicholas Cragius, and Johannes Meursius.19 Barthélemy was especially influenced by Meursius, whose work was organized thematically. To overcome the lacunae left by his predecessors Barthélemy meticulously scrutinized every sort of text, including recently published inscriptions. Scores of minute tesserae, based on a myriad of citations, were joined to form an enormous mosaic: the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis.
4. It would take some thirty years to complete the work. In a letter to his friend Madame du Deffand written on 18 February 1771, Barthélemy alluded bitterly to his decision, taken long before, in 1755, to follow the duke de Choiseul to Rome, and to leave his position at the Cabinet des Médailles. From that time, he recounted, his obligations to the duke and to the duchess de Choiseul (to whom he was, respectively, protégé and gentleman-in-waiting, perhaps even lover) had prevented him from pursuing his true vocation, that of the scholar.20 A few months later, in December 1771, Louis XV, bowing to pressure from Madame du Barry, exiled the powerful duke de Choiseul to his estate at Chanteloup, near Amboise. Not long afterward, Barthélemy, too, lost his position (and a large part of his stipend) as secretary general of the Swiss Guards.21 After some hesitation he decided to follow the duke and duchess into their rural exile: and for four years he resided with them in the isolated and tranquil surroundings of Chanteloup.
For the duke and duchess and their small court, Barthélemy, some time before, had written a mock-heroic poem entitled La Chanteloupée, ou la guerre des puces contre Mme L.[ouise] D.[duchesse] d.[e] Ch.[oiseul].22 It would be published, with some embarrassment, only after his death. In year six of the Republic a writing like this, testimony of the frivolity of the Ancien Régime, did not seem to merit being included among Barthélemy’s works. But the description of the home of Dinias, a wealthy Athenian, included in the aforementioned chapter 25 of the Voyage, evokes a not too dissimilar situation. Anacharsis asks the wife of Dinias, Lysistrata, permission to visit her residence:
Her dressing table was first to catch my attention. I noticed silver basins and pitchers, mirrors made of various materials, hair pins, curling irons (a), ribbons of many sizes to bind them, nets to catch them (b), yellow powders to dye them blonde (c), many sorts of bracelets and ear rings, boxes of rouge and of white make-up, and of black vapors to tinge the eyelashes; and whatever was needed to keep teeth polished (d). I was examining these objects carefully, and Dinias could not understand how they could be a novelty for a Scythian.23
The footnotes, set off by letters of the alphabet inside parentheses, cited Lucian, Homer, Hesychius, and even a gloss to Theocritus: all passages used to construct a description of an Athenian boudoir of the fourth century b.c. which reads like a passage of rococo antiquarianism. Neither ancient nor eighteenth-century historians would have admitted the possibility of discussing details of this kind: frivolous, irrelevant, and thus prohibited (interdits). But for Barthélemy the antiquarian it was obvious, instead, to dwell on aspects of what we would call today the material life, so prominent in the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis. The quizzical gaze of the ignorant traveler, the barbarian Anacharsis, propels us toward the informed view of the antiquarian Barthélemy. The ingenuous division on which the fiction hinges clears the way for the critical disjunction.
5. The Voyage is neither a systematic antiquarian treatise nor a historical narrative. Barthélemy followed a third way, combining fiction and erudition. This choice must have been dictated in part by the surroundings in which he passed much of his life: an aristocratic ambience open to intellectual curiosities of every type, dominated by the prepossessing figure of Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand, an intimate friend of both the duchess de Choiseul and the abbé Barthélemy, with whom they corresponded almost daily.24 In 1771, when Barthélemy unexpectedly unburdened himself in a letter to her concerning his relations with the duke and duchess de Choiseul (together with the request to destroy it which went unheeded), Madame du Deffand was seventy-four years old. Full of vitality, highly intelligent, she had been blind for more than two decades. She judged people and books with utter independence. She considered “detestable” Les Scythes, the drama by Voltaire (with whom she probably had an affair in her youth, and with whom she continued to correspond).25 When she was seventy-eight she was reading Jacques Necker’s Sur la législation et le commerce des grains.26 At eighty-one she wrote to Barthélemy, who had advised her to read William Robertson’s History of America: “I am delivering a recantation on Robertson’s America. Of all the things I care nothing about, it is the most pleasurable, the one that is best written, almost interesting.”27
In Madame du Deffand’s letters we frequently encounter similar thoughts. To the duchess de Choiseul she wrote: “I no longer know what to read. I cannot stand books on philosophy and ethics, histories appear to me to be long and boring romances about events which are not always true and, which, even if they were, often would not be more interesting. All that remains then is conversation, and I am content with this, because I do not have a choice; once in a while it is of good quality, but rarely.”28
Madame du Deffand had just read, or better, perused the twelve volumes of the Cléopatre by Gauthier de Costes (La Calprenede), published in the midseventeenth century. But in this interminable and, as she herself admitted, boring novel, she had found a few “absolutely beautiful” passages: the conversation between Agrippa and Artaman, the “moving” description of a battle between gladiators.29 The duchess de Choiseul and the abbé Barthélemy, respectively forty and nineteen years younger than Madame du Deffand, had tastes that differed completely from hers where romances and books of history were concerned. The duchess de Choiseul, who found La Calprenède unbearable, wrote to Madame du Deffand, contrasting to the despotic authority of Catherine of Russia, so highly praised by Voltaire, the humble but genuine glory (“the kind that sets the heart and the imagination ablaze”) earned by the Marquis Carlo Ginori, the man who had laid the foundations for Livorno’s prosperity: “They speak to us of Catherine, and the Marquis Ginori is unknown!”30 Madame du Deffand, who was not interested in the history of Roman and Carthaginian navigation and was bored reading Robertson, was chided by Barthélemy: what she lacked, he said, was that solid knowledge of antiquity gained by reading Greek and Latin writers.
The exploits of those people [Romans and Carthaginians] are peaceful but exciting: and excitement attracts attention and interest. We are talking, it is true, of a tranquil interest: so much the better, because according to M. de Bucq happiness is nothing other than a calm interest. To witness the Romans and Carthaginians, the Spanish and the Portuguese crossing the seas to discover new lands seems to me preferable to seeing the factions of Guelfs and Ghibellines or of the Red Rose [House of Lancaster] and the White Rose [House of York] who put everything to the torch to conquer people who would have gladly done without them.31
The contrast between the passions and the interests, in both a psychological and economic sense, which emerged at the end of the seventeenth century had become, in the course of the eighteenth, a fundamental theme in political philosophy.32 Barthélemy’s words show that the same contrast had materialized, even if not so openly, in the historiographical domain. The polemical allusion to the War of the Roses probably concerned the Histoire de la rivalité de la France et de l’Angleterre, by Gabriel Henri Gaillard (1771), a book which Madame du Deffand had greatly liked.33 Gaillard spoke of wars and internecine conflicts to argue that the European states wanted peace: “Europe is civilized, Europe believes itself to be enlightened, and yet it makes war! We have rushed to applaud the Europe of the Enlightenment, but Europe is still barbaric!”34 Barthélemy agreed, but Gaillard’s Histoire left him unmoved. Historians were beginning to learn to speak about peaceful activities, about the commerce which had achieved for Europe supremacy over the rest of the world: but it was a genre making slow progress.35 To describe the peaceful occupations of the men and women who lived in Greece in the fourth century B.C., Barthélemy took his inspiration not from historians but from antiquarians, true as well as false.
6. In 1789 the Monthly Review discussed the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis. The assessment, which was basically favorable, closed with a poisonous insinuation: could Barthélemy have taken his cue from the Athenian Letters?36 It was an exceedingly cryptic allusion. Under this title there had appeared in Cambridge in 1741 an edition of apocryphal correspondence, virtually a private printing consisting of only twelve copies and lacking the author’s name.37 In this collection a Persian spy by the name of Cleander and his correspondents exchanged detailed information about Greece in the age of Pericles, Egypt, and Persia. Cleander described his meetings with Herodotus, with Socrates, with Aspasia; he discussed the theater and philosophy and religion; he juxtaposed the political liberty and commercial vitality of Athens to the despotism of the Persians—a transparent allusion to the contrast between contemporary England and France.38
The Athenian Letters were presented as the English translation, commissioned by the British consul in Tunis, of a Spanish version, prepared by a “learned Jew,” of the original written in “an ancient Persian tongue” and discovered in the library at Fez. The authenticity of the letters was emphasized in the footnotes: in one of them the veracity of a recently published Greek inscription (the Marmor Sandvicense) was proved, paradoxically, by fictitious statements of Cleander, the Persian spy.39 A letter to Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle describing future scientific progress in the form of a prophetic vision was denounced as a forgery and thus relegated to an appendix—a final flourish which ironically reiterated the general authenticity of the Athenian Letters.40 Each piece of correspondence was accompanied by a capital initial, the only clue offered deliberately by the authors of this erudite game, whose identity was revealed only when the Athenian Letters were reprinted in an edition of about one hundred copies in 1781.41 The new preface was tinged with melancholy: almost all the authors in the interim had died. “When a certain period of time has elapsed,” wrote one of the survivors, “the truth can be revealed; the illusion vanishes, the masquerade is over.”42 Some of the participants had occupied public positions: Charles Yorke, who with his brother Philip had authored the greater part of the collection, had been lord chancellor; William Heberden, who in one of the letters portrayed a meeting with Hippocrates, had become a famous physician.43 All had been students at Cambridge; almost all had been members of Corpus Christi College. The group, about a dozen persons, included antiquarians such as Daniel Wray and Thomas Birch, who had thought up the initiative; a philologist, Samuel Salter; a writer on religious questions, Henry Coventry. A notable presence was that of Catherine Talbot, who would become the author of essays which were reprinted often: she was perhaps the first European woman to produce a historical work, even if in this case it was fictional history.44
In a letter to the Monthly Review Barthélemy, while acknowledging the similarity in structure between the Athenian Letters and the Voyage, unequivocally rejected the accusation of plagiarism.45 To demonstrate his own originality, he affirmed that at one point, during his Roman sojourn, he had considered writing a book based on the experiences of a French traveler in the Italy of Leo X; later, he had decided instead to take advantage of his own antiquarian experiences, transforming the French traveler into the Scythian Anacharsis. There may have been some truth to these allegations (later repeated in his memoirs); not so credible, instead, was his assertion that he had learned of the existence of the English collection only after he had published the Voyage. Horace Walpole, who had a long association with Barthélemy, was well acquainted with many of the authors of the Athenian Letters.46 And one of the imaginary characters in the Voyage, Arsame, minister to the king of Persia—in whom contemporary readers, starting with Walpole, recognized a transparent homage to the duke de Choiseul—resembled too closely, even in the name, the satrap Orsames, one of the interlocutors in the Athenian Letters.47
7. In the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis every detail is scrupulously, punctiliously documented; in the Athenian Letters the invented documents serve to support the genuine ones. In both cases the amalgam of authenticity and fiction attempts to substitute the limitations of the existing historiography. But how to recount the daily life, “the minute circumstances, which a historian is not permitted to report”? Here the dependence of Barthélemy’s Voyage on the Athenian Letters is obvious: Cleander, the Persian spy, is the obvious model for Anacharsis the Scythian. Twenty-five years before Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs, the Athenian Letters expressed the need for a type of historiography which did not yet exist: “These letters by our agents, which portray from life the activities of Greeks and Persians, provide us with a better idea of their customs than what can be offered by severe antiquarians, with their elaborate and formal treatises.”48
But even Cleander was not an original invention. Today the Athenian Letters immediately call to mind the Lettres Persanes. But the model for the Athenian Letters, mentioned explicitly in the introduction to the 1781 reprinting, was not Montesquieu, but rather the work which had inspired his Lettres: L’esploratore turco, by Gian Paolo Marana (1681), whose translations and adaptations in French and English had been disseminated throughout Europe (L’espion turc; L’espion du grand seigneur dans les cours des princes chrétiens; The Turkish Spy).49
The narrative artifice is identical, the results totally different. Montesquieu’s corrosive viewpoint, here and there anticipated by the libertine Marana (for example, in the description of the Eucharist), observes without understanding them the surrounding social customs, thereby unveiling their absurdity and arbitrariness.50 In the Athenian Letters and in the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis the foreigner (the spy, the traveler) seeks information on the simplest customs without harboring any hostile intention. In one case the purpose is to make the present time, which we take for granted, less familiar.51 In the other, the purpose is that of familiarizing us with a past the everyday form of which eludes us: an apparently banal operation, which in fact presupposed a deep fissure within the historiographical tradition born in Greece.
8. Herodotus (8:26) recounts that Xerxes, king of Persia, after the battle of Thermopylae, asked a group of Arcadian deserters what was occupying the Greeks. Learning that they were celebrating the Olympic games, he inquired what the prize might be. An olive wreath, they replied.
Xerxes’ questions, which no Greek would have dreamed of asking, irreparably revealed his barbarism and his disassociation from a world in which valor, not wealth, constituted the highest honor. The crown of laurel bestowed on the winner of the games ended up by symbolizing the relationship of reciprocal exclusion between Greeks and barbarians. In a dialogue by Lucian of Samosata, a Scythian who had come to Greece broke into wild laughter when he learned that young people were vying against one another for a crown of wild olive or pine branches. The name of the Scythian was Anacharsis.52
His alter ego, the protagonist of Barthélemy’s voyage, was equally ignorant of the rules governing the games in Greek society. The questions posed by this barbarian brought to light everything that historians, both ancient and modern, had taken for granted and thus had not bothered to mention.
9. During the long gestation of the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis, a work of a wholly different kind appeared, one destined to much more lasting fame: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Its author, Edward Gibbon, had imbibed that antiquarian culture which had produced Barthélemy, that of the Académie des Inscriptions.53 But other elements had played a role in the education of Gibbon, principally the ideas of the philosophes, which were totally foreign to the abbé Barthélemy.54 Gibbon has been called the founder of modern historiography for having understood how to combine antiquarianism and histoire philosophique.55 The road taken, infinitely more modestly, by the abbé Barthélemy assumed the merging of antiquarianism and romanticized history: in the long run, a losing strategy.
The nineteenth century viewed Barthélemy’s Greece as a vast panorama.56 The success of the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis was like a bonfire enduring one hundred years, now forever extinguished. And yet it may be only fair to view this by-now-illegible book as a pioneering effort of historical ethnography, and to view in the Scythian Anacharsis, besides a descendant of the Anglo-Persian spy Cleander, an involuntary forerunner of anthropologists and inquisitors closer to our times.57