James Gillray, "Britannia Between Scylla and Charybdis" 1793 (public domain)

by Patrick Hunt

How often do we use idioms as part of common speech, figures of comparison that easily sum up an experience or trial by extension? That many of these seem idioms are devoid of actual context doesn’t deter us from peppering our language with them. Some are particular or unique to one language and culture, others like Classical mythological figures are found in quite a few Western languages or have corollaries because the myths themselves are foundational to many historical cultures. Most of us have heard or used some of the following: “Between a rock and a hard place,” “Herculean Labors”, “Achilles’ Heel”, “Pandora’s Box”, “Siren Song”, “Bearing the weight of the world on one’s shoulders” or perhaps less often “Pregnant with Thought”, “Cupid’s Dart”, “Sisyphean Task”, “Stygian darkness” and “Music to Soothe a Savage Breast (or Beast)”.  Whether or not we deliberately try to evoke the myth allusion involved, all of the above reference great Classical myths, as this brief article develops.

For example, the popular idiom “Between a rock and hard place” describes a difficult situation – often used in parallel with “on the horns of a dilemma” – when the undesirable choice between two options appears equally difficult.  A French parallel is often être entre le marteau et l’enclume or with pris “caught” instead of être, “being…between the hammer and the anvil.” In Italian, the flipside “between the anvil and the hammer” is tra l’incudine e il martello.  Another French variant is “between the devil and the deep blue sea” (entre le diable et la mer d’un bleu profond or something similar).  But these are only a few examples of one basic idea where different languages have to sum up a common experience in a colorful phrase that may be best expressed or already accessible in a convenient myth metaphor.

Between a  Rock and a Hard Place

The specifics of “Between a rock and a hard place” actually describe the monsters or destruction faced by Odysseus and his shipmates when facing Scylla and Charybdis in crossing through the narrow Strait of Messina between Italy and Sicily.  Scylla was the female monster in the Italian cliffs who had a girl’s upper body and dogs and snakes below, feared for plucking men out of passing ships and devouring them. Charybdis was the giant whirlpool on the opposite Sicilian coast that would catch and sink whole ships. In Odyssey XII.234-59, following the instructions of Circe, Odysseus chose to lose six men to Scylla as a lesser risk rather than losing the whole ship and crew to Charybdis. In Latin, the aphorism Incidit in scyllam cupiens vitare charybdim, “He runs on Scylla wishing to avoid Charybdis” is often credited to Virgil but his Aeneid 3.320 ff about this event does not include this line, nor do Ovid’s works.  I’ve sailed this passage in a boat coming with a stiff wind from the west around Sicily’s Cape Peloro – the Italian town of Scilla is even named directly across from the cape – turning south and southwest toward Messina and seen firsthand the danger of the “Scyllan” rocks where the wind could drive a boat as well as many swirls of water turbulence where two seas, Tyrrhenian and Ionian, mix in this narrow strait, making oceanographic wind and current vectors the real monsters. [1]

The Labors of Hercules

Anyone facing an array of insurmountable obstacles can identify with this one, although we wouldn’t want the kind of divine obstruction that Hercules faced. Luckily for him, at least one deity was on his side. The myth sources are variable but the great hero Hercules (Herakles in Greek) was hated by Juno (Hera in Greek) partly because he was not her son but instead the offspring of her philandering husband Zeus (Roman Jove). In a rage of madness brought by Hera (Juno), Herakles either killed his wife and/or children. His punishment was a set of twelve (although sometimes limited to ten) daunting ordeals or labors mandated by Hera. Hera’s intent is indeed either to destroy the hero or bring even more hubris upon him. Any of these ordeals would likely be impossible tasks, especially without the help of Athena, patron goddess of heroes. Yet, the hero Hercules not only accomplished the tasks but in doing so rids the world of more than a few monsters and tyrants or accomplishes labors that would have destroyed anyone else.

In usual order, the Labors or Ordeals of Hercules were generally accepted as killing the Nemean Lion, killing the Lernean Hydra, capturing and obtaining the golden horns of the Keryneian Hind, destroying the Erymanthian Boar, ridding Greece of the Stymphalian Birds, cleaning the Augean Stables in a day, capturing the Cretan Bull, stealing the Mares of Diomedes (and killing the tyrant himself), getting the girdle of the Amazon Queen Hippolyta, stealing the cattle of monstrous Geryon, bringing Hera the Apples of the Hesperides and capturing Kerberos the guardian dog of Hell. In Hesiod’s Theogony c. 310 ff, one of the oldest Greek sources, Kerberos was said to be fifty-headed and have a voice like ringing bronze but most depictions show him three-headed. The first tasks took place mostly in the Peloponnesus of southern Greece, the next few broadened out to outer Greece, Thessaly and beyond, while the last ones extended to the limits of the world. Although many of these ordeals required immense strength and courage, the last two actually required more brains than brawn, and Athena’s help was especially vital in these final labors. The Classical tradition finally distilled all of these Herculean labors together in one source, the Bibliotheca Historica of Diodorus Siculus in mid-first century BCE.

Herakles Fighting the Monster Geryon, Black Figure c. 540 BCE, Louvre Museum (Photo: public domain)

Achilles’ Heel

A weak spot different than any other, this proves to be one’s undoing. If someone searches for this kind of vulnerability, it’s misplaced in the most unlikely location: the tendon of the heel.  In myth Achilles was the son of Thetis, semidivine sea nymph, and Peleus, king of the region of Mt. Pelion. Hearing an oracle speak of his future war death in Troy, his mother Thetis took baby Achilles down to the dark Styx River, which separated the upper and underworld realms, to dip him in the water and make him immortal. Holding him only by the heel so she could immerse him in the dark flowing water, his body became invulnerable except for this one spot. Achilles then later rather ignobly dies near the end of the Trojan War by a random arrow – in many texts – shot by Paris that transfixed his heel and he died. The absurdity of this mortal wound in Achilles’ heel is best explained not by the unusual fatality of such a wound – unless the arrow was poisoned as some sources claim – but rather best understood in this way: his heel became the one spot where all his mortality was collected from the rest of his body. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses XII.580-611, however, it was not a random arrow shot by Paris but the god Apollo who helps Paris by both identifying Achilles and guiding his arrow to Achilles’ one weak spot.

Pandora’s Box

This is what we all dread when we say to someone in warning, “Don’t open that, it’s a Pandora’s Box,” meaning it will produce dire results that are mostly irreversible.  Hesiod (Theogony 560-612, Works and Days 63-105) 8^th-7^th c BCE was a primary source of the tale of Pandora, meaning “All-Gifted”, who was the composite beautiful gift of all the gods as earth’s first woman, “sheer guile” created to ensnare humanity. Prometheus had foresight as his name suggests, having stolen fire from the gods to make human lives better and Pandora was a punishment to humans for Prometheus’ theft, but his brother Epimetheus could only do what most of us do: understand things after the fact. Pandora was warned by Prometheus and others not to open the vessel – in Hesiod it was a pithos clay jar but apparently Erasmus translated the Greek pithos into Latin pyxis - but she did in her husband Epimetheus’ absence, thereby unleashing all evil, disease, pain, death and sorrow on the world. Only hope remained at the bottom to make life tolerable. A modern equivalent to not being able to stop the concatenated outward ripples of a deed is “the law of unintended consequences”.

John Waterhouse, Pandora, 1896, private collection (Photo in public domain)

Siren Song

We are ever susceptible to the metaphorical Siren Song, seductive and mind-numbing because it acts to suspend our rational judgment. In the Homeric Odyssey XII, Circe had warned Odysseus not to listen to the Sirens because their haunting music would drive him mad. Or if he did, at least have his sailors tie him to the mast – to keep him from throwing himself overboard – and plug his rowers ears’ with beeswax so they would be impervious to the sweet high song. Odysseus insisted on hearing them as they sang (XII.178-94) and the hero related:

“  ‘For never yet has any man rowed past this isle in his black ship until he has heard the sweet voice from our lips. Nay, he has joy of it, and goes his way a wiser man. For we know all the toils that in wide Troy the Argives and Trojans endured through the will of the gods, and we know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth.’

So they sang, sending forth their beautiful voice, and my heart was fain to listen, and I bade my comrades loose me, nodding to them with my brows; but they fell to their oars and rowed on.” (A.T. Murray tr.)

Odysseus escapes only because he cannot control his own destiny, dependent on his men and the binding ropes. In our own day, by pretending to understand enough of the past, present and future but more likely knowing ad hominem human psychology, politicians seem particularly adept at singing the modern Siren Song and we seem to always fall for it by believing their promises. The original Greek sirens were voluptuous women lying on beaches like mermaids to entrap sailors. Homer does not describe them like later Greeks as winged bird women, an image borrowed from Ancient Egypt’s ba mobilary afterlife spirit. [2]

Bearing the weight of the world on one’s shoulders

This is a reference to mythical Atlas, the Titan who carried the world on his shoulders.  While this metaphorical task often refers to overwhelming human responsibility in modern parlance with enormous emotional cost, Atlas was after all a primordial giant himself who could actually do it, however grudgingly. In Aeneid 4:246-51, Virgil personified the towering North African mountains named after Atlas.

“Now in his [Mercury’s] flight he saw the steep flanks / and the summit of strong Atlas,/ who holds the heavens on his head, Atlas, / whose pine-covered crown is always wreathed / in dark clouds and lashed by the wind and rain:/ fallen snow clothes his shoulders: while rivers fall/ from his ancient chin, and his rough beard bristles with ice.” (A.S. Kline, tr.)

One of the most impressive ancient sculptures of Atlas is the Farnese Atlas in the Archaeological Museum of Naples, a Roman copy of a Greek original commanding attention in its size – over 2 m (6’8”) – and detail, now named after its Renaissance Farnese collectors. Although it is actually a night star map depicted on Atlas’ globe and said by some to represent the lost star catalog of the Greek astronomer Hipparchus (c. 130 BCE) [3], it is an apropos myth subject as bearded Atlas is bent under the heavy weight of the sphere.

Pregnant with Thought

Anyone giving birth to great intellectual achievement with high creativity can be said to be in this state of “pregnant with thought”. A parallel idea is a “brainchild”. Although sources suggest different myth variants, one ancient Greek myth refers to Zeus about to give birth to Athena, goddess of wisdom and war. After he had impregnated Metis, goddess of thought, he feared an oracle that said her children would be more powerful than their father. In order to outwit any possible usurper of his Olympian throne, Zeus swallowed the pregnant Metis and nine months later gave birth to an adult goddess Athena from his forehead, fully armed.

A great Classical sculpture – a Roman copy of a Greek original – depicts Zeus with a huge swelling of his brow before giving birth to Athena from his forehead. This majestic bearded Zeus sculpture may have been a small copy of the ivory and gold colossal statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World ostensibly originally modeled by Phidias after the handsome 5^th c. BCE tragedian and general Sophocles because he was considered to possess sufficient arête.  In every creative venture where Athena inspired mental prowess the ancient myth is symbolically replicated, even a human mind can likewise be filled with thought and bring the “brainchild” to birth.

Cupid’s Dart

Trying to explain how we humans fall so swiftly in love or at least are felled by lust for someone else, many have opined for millennia that such external forces both suddenly strike and render us powerless. Modern research validates that not only could pheromones be involved under the radar, but that additional physiological responses are triggered by all sorts of internal chemistry, including endocrinal and hormonal stimulation in dopamine, adrenaline, endorphins, vasopressin, oxytocin and norepinephrin. [4]

The best ancient Greek answer to the mystery of falling in love was that the arrow of Eros the god of love struck, or Cupid’s arrow in the Roman version. “Cupid’s dart” may well be valid in the presence of pheromones and other physico-chemical signals. What is often lost in the story is that Eros/Cupid had two arrow capabilities: while the golden-tipped arrow brought love and attraction, the lead-tipped arrow brought the opposite hate and repulsion. Apuleius related some of this dichotomy in his famous tale of Cupid and Psyche in his Golden Ass. The anonymous Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite also sang that love knew no boundaries, that the goddess and her son struck all living creatures at times with overwhelming irrational desire.

Sisyphean Task

A Sisyphean task is an endless one. In Greek mythology Sisyphus was a legendary king of Corinth whose hubris – pride in his cleverness, endless trickery against gods and humans, seduction of his niece Tyro and breaking the honored law of philoxenia (hospitality to strangers) by killing guests - brought about his punishment in Tartarus of the lowest underworld. His eternal task was having to roll a rock to the top of a mountain only to have it roll back down the other side. Thus he had to start over again and again, forever continuing a task that was never completed. This is the stuff of nightmares because such a hellish task was one of  the direst punishment a mortal could face. Fortunately, his myth descendants were not so cursed, since his grandson Bellerophon was the hero who killed the Chimaera monster while riding the winged horse Pegasus with Athena’s help.

Stygian Darkness

In Greek mythology, the River Styx was a boundary between the upper world of the living and the underworld of the dead. It was so inky black that anything under its surface disappeared from sight.  As mentioned above, its water conferred invulnerability, sought by Thetis for her son Achilles whose flesh was protected except for his heel where she held him above the black water. The gods swore unbreakable oaths by the Styx and were eternally bound by them.  One meaning of the word Styx was “detestation” partly because for the dead crossing the Styx was a sign of hopelessness. In his Inferno, Dante somewhat alters the ancient Classical character of the Styx, attributing some of the qualities of the River Acheron to it, including adding the boatman Charon to the Styx instead of the Acheron and its position diving upper world and underworld, as he places the Styx deeper.

Music to soothe a savage breast (or beast)

Music has enormous power to both emotionally move or physically arrest, and it is not only humans so affected. How music acts at the deeper level of the brain is still very much a mystery, but there is considerable consensus about music’s power, as F. D. Martin stated in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 25.3: “…There is little doubt about the peculiar power of music to evoke an intensity of experience that few other arts rival.”  [5]

The core of the original above idiom alludes to the Greek myth of Orpheus, the Thracian musician loved by Apollo, god of music, with many myths attesting the music of Orpheus being capable of calming animals. Roman mosaics also find this a common motif, with Orpheus sitting playing his lyre (kithara) surrounded by a peacefully incongruous crowd of animals normally hunting or fleeing from each other. One of my favorite mosaics is at the Archaeological Museum in Palermo , Sicily. Ovid’s Metamorphoses 11.1-4 notes:

“While with his songs, Orpheus, the bard of Thrace,/ allured the trees, the savage animals,/ and even the insensate rocks, to follow him…”  (B. More, tr.)

As it is directly written, this idiom is a line from an English Poet, William Congreve, 1697 (here is the excerpt):

The Mourning Bride

“Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast/,
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
/I’ve read, that things inanimate have mov’d,
/And, as with living Souls, have been inform’d,/By Magick Numbers and persuasive Sound.
/What then am I? Am I more senseless grown
/Than Trees, or Flint? O force of constant Woe!
/’Tis not in Harmony to calm my Griefs.”


Congreve either consciously or unconsciously referenced the Orpheus myth, as seen in the multiple parallels to the Ovid quote with animals, trees and even rocks mentioned in both the original Metamorphoses and the 17^th c. derived poem.

Beasts (detail) from Orpheus Mosaic, 4th c. CE, Hatay Museum, Antakya, Turkey (Photo: public domain)

Conclusion

Seen in the above idioms that color our speech, when a longstanding myth metaphor already satisfies the demand for a strong expression, regardless whether or not the myth reference is universally known, the idiom chosen may reflect a millennia-old habit of describing just such a human experience.

Notes

[1] Patrick Hunt. “Classical Monsters as Oceanographic Phenomena,” California Classical Association (N. S.) Spring Meeting on Seafaring and Maritime Trade in the Mediterranean, Asilomar – Pacific Grove, California, April 27, 1985.

[2]  John D. Cooney. “Siren and Ba, Birds of a Feather”. The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 55.8 (1968) 262-271.

[3]  Georg Thiele Antike Himmelsbilder. Berlin: Weidmann, 1898; Bradley E. Schaefer, “The epoch of the constellations on the Farnese Hercules and their origins in Hipparchus’s lost catalogue”, American Astronomical Society Meeting, San Diego, 2005; but note criticism of Schaefer by Dennis Duke, “Analysis of the Farnese Globe”, Journal for the History of Astronomy 37 (2006) 87-100.

[4] “Cupid’s Arrow May Cause More Than Just Sparks To Fly This Valentine’s Day” Science Daily Feb. 14, 2009

[5]  F. D. Martin. “The Power of Music and Whitehead’s Theory of Perception. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 25.3 (Spring, 1967) 313-322.

Jan de Tavernier, Chroniques et Conquetes de Charlemagne, Brussels, BR 9066, c. 1460, [courtesy of State University of New York, Oneonta, Art History)

Emerging into the soaring, flamboyant gothic courtyard of the 15th century Hotel Chambellan in the heart of medieval Dijon feels truly like teleporting to another time and place.  The effect is only heightened by the fact that to get there you need to duck through a narrow, dark passageway that departs from a non-descript, inconspicuous doorway opening onto the facing rue des Forges.  The almost overwhelming sense of transition is not just an aesthetic one, although the setting, with its gothic spires, impossibly intricate lacy, filigree banisters and leering gargoyles, certainly plays a role.  One realizes immediately that something more subtle and powerful is at play here, something that touches an emotional chord.  In the Chambellan, everything feels right: the light, the air, the hand-cut stones that each bears a small mason’s mark, proof of its artisanal provenance.  The magic works because the context feels complete.  It is to a large extent this missing contextual framework that often leads us to find many historical works of art naive, lackluster or, in the case of performances of medieval music, simply boring.

Sylvia and Eric, Asteria Music Group, at Chambellan, Dijon (photo courtesy of Asteria)

When we first met, we were coming from very different musical backgrounds: Sylvia from the world of musical theater on Broadway, and Eric from the world of electronic music, where he spent time as an intern in the studio of composer Philip Glass.  But we both had a deep love of renaissance music and had studied it at college.  One day, Eric pulled out a stack of Burgundian chansons from the 15th century that he had gathered while at the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Switzerland.  It was this repertoire that sparked our collaboration, one that has continued for the last ten years.  As we explored these passionate love songs, we began to ask ourselves questions about the people who wrote them.  Who were they?   Where did they live?  What were their lives like?  What, in other words, inspired these remarkable, sometimes inscrutable lyrics?   We were convinced that courtly life and behavior in the 14th and 15th centuries must have been anything but boring!

In fact, compared to today, the late Middle Ages appears to have been a time of exaggerated expression of the human condition.  Lords, courtiers, pages — everyone rejoiced, wept and despaired with great frequency and passion.  The chivalric tradition, first codified nearly four hundred years prior by the troubadours just after the turn of the first millennium, still held sway at the dawn of the renaissance.  Life, for the nobility at least, involved an elaborate ritualization of virtually every aspect of public life.  It is this context of emotionally charged expression that led to a blossoming of Burgundian poetry, and its musical vessel, the polyphonic chanson, its verses overflowing with praise to the Lady and promises of devotion to love’s decrees.  But what did it all mean?  And how were we ever going to get to the bottom of these questions from the reading room at the New York Public Library?

Medieval Musicians, adapted by artist Ruth Tietjen Councell from a 13th c. Castilian manuscript

In 2006, we took the plunge and rented a small house for six months in the countryside outside of Carcassonne, in the Languedoc region in the south of France.  The area near Carcassonne is decidedly not that “south of France”.  There are no beaches, glamorous film festivals or endless fields of lavender here, rather a mostly parched landscape of craggy hills, rude valleys, and a predilection for fierce, days-long wind storms pushing chilly, dry air down from the north.  But this is where the troubadours lived so long ago and in order to get to the bottom of the origins of “courtly love”, we were going to have get to know this place.

Standing upon the ramparts of storied castles such as Lastours and Puivert from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we discovered that even today we were seeing a barren landscape such as the troubadours would have seen.  The emptiness and isolation speak directly to the yearning one feels in the poetry they wrote – the longing for things far away and unreachable.  As we explored those rugged landscapes, we began to understand themes in their lyrics that had seemed either mysterious or simply banal when viewed from the context of today.

It was a continuous surprise to us to discover that many of the elements of Western fairy-tales, so often associated with medieval life – such as the princess in a distant tower, or the youngest of three princes who must leave to find his fortune in a far off land–far from being debunked, in fact could often be directly traced to actual medieval customs or rituals.   We discovered that it was indeed the youngest princes who really did leave their homes to seek their fortunes, although not necessarily for fairy-tale reasons: being the last in the succession ladder, their only hope for wealth and power was to marry into a different family clan.  Thus were born some of the actual roots of the numerous “knight errant” stories that pepper Arthurian and other fantasy lore.  Since most of the geographically closer landowning noble families were already effectively inbred through waves of power consolidation over the centuries, that “youngest prince” had often to go quite far afield to find new and suitable territory, sometimes even to other countries.

For us, this prince narrative highlighted a phenomenon that we encountered over and over again as we explored the roots of courtly love; stories and legends that seem at first to be merely concocted entirely from someone’s imagination, in reality often have historical precedents or were inspired in some way by real events.  Realizing this helped us to resist the urge to discard certain poetic themes as banal or unremarkable because even themes that seem straight forward take on new shades of meaning when properly contextualized.

It was months later, after we had left the south for the decidedly more fertile territory of Burgundy that a different courtly motif began to reveal a part of its mysterious origins.  Medieval verse is riddled with mentions of slander.  The authors of the epic Roman de la Rose, one of the towering monuments of medieval literature, saw fit to create a major antagonist in the form of an allegorical figure named “wicked tongue” (malbouche) who continually thwarts the romantic intentions of the story’s hero.  Characters such as “wicked tongue”, or one of his many equally gossipy variants, abound in the literature and songs of the time – why is this?  Part of the answer is pragmatic: medieval culture was a profoundly hierarchal one.  Wealth was almost entirely held and exploited by the noble elite, and only small amounts trickled down through the ranks of functionaries to the general population.  Implied in such a social structure, however, is a responsibility of the lord for the general wellbeing of the people in their service, and this responsibility extends much further than such relationships today.  In addition to food, nobles were generally required to clothe their attendants.  Since the appearance of their servants was a reflection on themselves, large sums were dispensed regularly for clothing and again on special occasions for special outfits.  During the reign of the Valois dukes in the 15th century, travel and related expenses were similarly paid entirely out of ducal coffers.  All this dependence created a scenario in which you quite literally owed the duke your life and the threat of losing all this privilege must have seemed daunting indeed.  Taken together with the medieval obsession with honor and protecting one’s good name, the very real threat of malicious slander throwing someone’s reputation in doubt must have been taken extremely seriously.

Chateau de Germolles, Mellecey (photo courtesy of chateau)

But there is another, more personal, piece of the puzzle that we observed during our stay that shed even more light on the mysterious prevalence of slander as a theme in the late medieval poetry.  In 2007, we were invited to be in residence for two weeks in the only remaining palace belonging to the dukes of Burgundy in Burgundy.  The Chateau de Germolles, today a private residence, was built by Philip the Bold at the end of the 14th century for his wife, Marguerite of Flanders.  Philip, the first Valois duke of Burgundy and a brother of the king of France, spared no expense in renovating this residence for his duchess, and some of the best artisans of the age, including the sculptor Claus Sluter, and the painter Jean de Beaumetz, were engaged to decorate it.  As with Dijon’s Hotel Chambellan courtyard, one feels at Germolles a palpable connection with history, particularly when standing in the duchess’ garderobe, a superbly preserved medieval chambre that is covered entirely from floor to ceiling in its original 14th century painted murals.

Documents chronicling the movements of the nobility in the late Middle Ages reveals that many courts were itinerant, moving from castle to castle to consolidate political and social power.  The more land you owned, however, the more territory you had to cover regularly to insure fealty and loyalty from your subjects.  Thus, the Duke of Burgundy would move with his entire retinue between his various castles, including about three hundred people comprising courtiers and other personnel, as well as dozens of wagons to carry his furniture and other possessions.

At first glance, life at court in a Burgundian palace appears to have been a gracious affair, with large rooms, each sporting large fireplaces.  Even the duchess’ private ‘high chapel’ had its own fireplace.  Rooms on the third floor are even more opulent, with loft-style rooms spanning the width of the castle.  Large, medieval poster beds (a replica of which exists today in one of the upstairs rooms at Germolles) evoke luxurious spaciousness.  That is, until one learns that these rooms were often shared by up to twenty people at a time, and beds commonly slept an astonishing eight to ten people each; those three hundred people had to live somewhere!  Even the large “private” rooms of the princes served multiple functions by necessity; the duke routinely ate, relaxed, slept and held court in the same room, with furniture moved or repurposed as needed.  With this contextual backdrop, life at court probably contained much less polite banter and a great deal more gossip that one initially imagines.  In fact, the image it most conjures up for us today is one of a sort of perpetual high-school: certainly a fertile petri dish for slanderous gossip!

That year we also “discovered” an important 15th century manuscript in the municipal library of Dijon, which is fittingly located in an old Jesuit monastery – fittingly because monasteries were among the first places where books were manufactured (initially by hand, of course) and collected.  We didn’t actually discover this manuscript in the literal sense; historians have known of its existence for years.  It has never, however, been edited or transcribed.  In other words, it hasn’t been translated into modern musical notation.  This means that the manuscript and its contents were essentially unknown to musicians, even to many who specialize in early music.  Over the course of the past four years, we’ve been returning to Dijon in the summer months to work with this manuscript, with the goal not only of performing and recording this wonderful, forgotten repertoire, but also to make our personal performance editions available to other musicians and enthusiasts.  Along the way, we have made numerous friends in and around Dijon, and have become particularly fond of the Burgundian tradition of repaying offerings of music with offerings of wine, particularly when the place where this exchange is taking place happens to be called Volnay, Gevrey Chambertin or St Romain.

When medieval music and poetry is presented in a vacuum, that is without a sense of where it came from and for whom and by whom it was written, it is a bit like drinking one of the aforementioned vintages while holding your nose and with your eyes closed: you only get a small part of the experience.  There is something tantalizing, but ultimately out of reach.  To remain with wine for a moment, learning about the ‘terroir’ and amusing details like the Burgundians’ habit of aerating the wine in their mouth by slurping the first few sips makes the whole experience of drinking wine from Burgundy more pleasurable and, ultimately, more meaningful.  In our experience the same thing happens with music.  Just as you don’t have to be in Burgundy to appreciate a great wine, you don’t have to have visited a ducal palace to appreciate the beautiful music of that era (although it certainly doesn’t hurt), but to the extent that you (or the performers) are able to integrate some of the contextual underpinnings, the moment has the potential to transcend the aesthetic domain and become an emotional one.

Eric Redlinger and Sylvia Rhyne of Asteria (photo courtesy of Magnatune)

Brunner Vineyard, Hueb-Sax, Switzerland (photo P. Hunt 2011)

By Patrick Hunt

Converse with almost any native Swiss person about Swiss wine, and you should engage justifiable national or regional pride, since wine cultivation has been continuing since the Roman era, nearly 2000 years, especially in the Rhine Valley.

One of the loveliest Swiss wine districts is in the upper Rhine canton of St. Gallen, in the Werdenberg region of eastern Switzerland near the convergence of Austria and Liechtenstein. Last weekend (September 25, 2011) was the Winzerfest, the local Wine Festival in the village of upper Sax-Hueb, culminating with its grape harvest as well, and as the grape leaves have been turning festive yellow and red colors, plenty of local wine flowed. These vineyards may be among the most picturesque in Switzerland, as my photos can only suggest, with panoramas that stretch across the valley to Liechtenstein’s mountains, only a short, easy ride away across the Rhine River as I found by bicycle. Feldkirch in Vorarlberg, Austria is tucked away just over the hill to the east.

Allegra (author's daughter) cycling in Sax (photo P. Hunt 2011)

In late August while exploring old Roman roads in the region, I hiked along the Trübliweg southward between Frümsen and Sax, a road winding through the hills, through the Sennwald forest above the Rhine valley floor. The path curves along fragrant alpage grazing pastures all under the towering crags of the Kreuzberg range. Cowbells sound out intermittently along with more regular local village church bells. The Sax-Hueb hillside vineyards undulate with the topography because the Swiss tend to use their land so carefully and efficiently, making every square meter count, and few vistas are as satisfying to my eyes as vineyards along hills. While the vineyards are not the dominant landscape feature here, they are nonetheless carefully managed and treasured as a precious resource.

Herr Brunner in his winery (photo courtesy of his website, http://www.saxerwy.ch/aktuell.html)

Just above the village of Sax, the road out of its hamlet of Hueb has one of the meticulous vineyards of Herr Brunner. Brunner has won silver medals in the International Weinprämierungen for his whites, especially his Pinot Blanc, and also for his red Blauburgunder, one of the German names for Pinot Noir. [1] Brunner wisely purchased south-facing hill property in 1981, planted vines two years later in 1983 and continued to expand until he now has 6,000 vines on 1.6 hectares (nearly 4 acres) and produces 10,000 bottles of wine. Nearby above the town of Sax are other vineyards and wineries as well, including the Rohner wine production.

Because the region can have good summer heat through early September, Brunner’s red wines in addition to his prize-winning Blauburgunder also include Cabernet Cubin, Diolinoir (a hybrid created in Switzerland in 1970 by crossing Rouge de Diolly and Pinot Noir) and Gamaret (a 1970 Swiss hybrid of Gamay and Reichensteiner). Brunner’s whites include Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, his prize-winning Pinot Blanc and Riesling Sylvaner. Both Brunner’s and Rohner’s Sax wines should be valued far beyond the 14-21 euro prices. Brunner’s Diolinoir 2009 is one of the silkiest Swiss red wines I’ve ever tasted, bursting with flavor and character, not at all a lightweight wine but instead superb with a truffle risotto and cheese or just by itself. The bottle I tasted over several days is form his Hemberg vineyard.

Swiss enologists and botanists have hybridized quite a few hardy varietals for the Rhine region along with other Swiss climatic conditions overshadowed by the Alps, often with considerable rain and frost. André Jaquinet of the Station Fédérale de Recherches en Production Végétale at Changins is responsible for several of these new hybrids. The enology unit at Changins-Wädenswil is part of Agroscope, the Swiss Federal Research Office for Agriculture, and Jaquinet is folowing the footsteps of the famous enologist Dr. Hermann Müller-Thurgau (1850 – 1927), the first director of the Swiss unit at Wädenswil.  Müller-Thurgau was a pioneer in wine cultivation after whom the worldwide varietal is named since he introduced it in 1882 by crossing Riesling and Madeleine Royal (not Sylvaner). Now over 41,000 hectares (over 100,000 acres) of Müller-Thurgau are cultivated worldwide in mostly cool climates as well as here in the upper Rhine valley.[2]

Herr Brunner's 2009 Diolinoir (Photo P. Hunt, 2011)

On a very warm August evening overlooking the Rhine Valley and Liechtenstein,  we all indulged some of this Sax wine in Ueli and Lisel’s hillside garden in Sax-Hueb under the Kreuzberg, enjoying it with what may be the best quarktort in the world – certainly that evening – a regional dessert made by Lisel. The deliciously sweet quarktort was the perfect combination for balancing a local Sax white wine, Seyval Blanc 2008 (a hybrid often also named Seyve-Villard from some of its French origins, although also called Seibel). Summer warmth made this cooled local wine the most refreshing drink possible.

View across upper Rhine Valley to Austria from Brunner Sax Vineyard (photo P. Hunt 2011)

A bottle of 2008 Sax wine consumed with quarktort (photo P. Hunt 2011)

I also found to my delight that both Goethe and James Joyce appreciated this valley in their travels for varying reasons. Joyce came through this upper Rhine Valley multiple times and has a famous plaque in the nearby train station of Feldkirch, thankful his Ulysses was spared in 1915 [3]; likewise Goethe has a commemorative plaque in nearby Vaduz, Liechtenstein, from a layover visit in 1788. I do not know if Goethe or Joyce tasted local wines around here, but as they were both fond of good wine, I feel certain they would have enjoyed a foray here at least as much as I have. For anyone wanting to saturate the senses and the soul with beauty, I heartily recommend a summer Upper Rhine Valley cycling or hiking trip in the Werdenberg region along the Trübliweg (for winetasting, please call Herr Brunner first, see link: http://www.saxerwy.ch/kontakt.html). This wine visit would be my favorite culminating point, a bit of paradise. The Swiss surely know how to live well in this remarkably beautiful land. As Goethe said in his Wanderers Nachtlied, ‘Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,’  ”Over all the mountaintops is peace.”

Goethe Plaque in Vaduz, noting 1788 stay - lower right (photo P. Hunt 2011)

James Joyce (public domain image)

Notes:

[1] Jancis Robinson, ed. The Oxford Companion to Wine, Oxford, 1994, 117

[2] Tom Stevenson. The New Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia, 3rd. ed. Dorling Kindersley, 2001, 396. Also see Gesellschaft für Geschichte des Weines, 2011, “Hermann Muller-Thurgau”.

[3] a quote from 1932 when visiting his Feldkirch friend Eugene Jolas, while moving from Trieste to Zurich in 1915 during WWI, the Vorarlberg train was inspected by police and officials but Joyce avoided possible arrest and/or likely censorship of his manuscript.

Sax Wine with Lisel's Quarktort (photo P. Hunt 2011)

Sankt Magdalener Village above Bolzano (P. Hunt photo 2011)

By Patrick Hunt

Why are the crisp Alto Adige wines not more well-known? In June I spent a week around Bolzano (Bozen in German), tasting and drinking great local wine. In the Alto Adige under the Alps, Bolzano is that wonderful combination of the best of both Italy and Austria. Annexed to Italy in 1919 from Austria, German culture and language hybridize with Italian language and amore per la vita under these lovely mountain valleys with vines growing up the slopes to great heights.  Above Bolzano, the ‘Rosengarten’ Dolomites bask in alpenglow to the east.

Bolzano Town Square (P. Hunt photo 2011)

Surprisingly to some, wine history here goes back to Roman times and before, at least to 500 BC. Several museums have Roman artifacts including the Museo Archaeologico dell’Alto Adige (Südtiroler Archäologiemuseum) – also home of Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,300 year old ice mummy – and the Südtirol Museum of Wine in Kaltern. Wine ladles and pruning hooks are some of the artifacts in the collections and locals insist the Rhaetian tribal viticulture was using wooden barrels about 15 BC when the Romans built roads that connect here, like the Via Claudia Augusta over the Pons Drusi (Bridge of Drusus) over the Adige River. Since Romans like Pliny, Virgil and Martial all praised Rhaetian wine, there’s a possibility they could have even intended wine of Alto Adige. Medieval viticulture was underway with both Italian passion and Austrian precision. Later during Habsburg rule, imperial authority greatly supported quality winemaking in the Alto Adige, which enjoys about 300 days of sunshine per year and cultivates over 20 different grape varieties.  Some of the highest summer heat in Italy is in the Bolzano valley – I repeatedly saw 35 ° C in late June – which is perfect for ripening grapes.  Locals joke that there are 40 vines per every Bolzano resident and that if “Venice floats on water, Bolzano floats on wine.”

Lagrein Kretzer Wine (P. Hunt photo 2011)

I can well believe these statements once I saw vines growing everywhere imaginable along the river valleys and climbing the ridges from above Trento through Merano and the Adige Valley. According to the wine Alto Adige wine industry and wine lovers who’ve spent any time here, its quality wines are distinguished in a tiny wine region that stretches less than 50 miles south to north:

“Around five thousand winegrowers tend just 5,300 hectares (13,100 acres) of grape-growing areas in different climatic zones with variable types of soils and at elevations ranging from 200 to 1,000 m. (600 to 3,300 ft.) above sea level – a wide variety that brings forth a considerable dense concentration of top wines. This is confirmed by a quick look at the leading Italian wine guide: for years now, Gambero Rosso has awarded Alto Adige the largest number of top scores (“Three Glasses”) in proportion to its total vineyard area.” [1]

This is in contrast to Tuscany and Piemonte wines, grown in much larger total areas  of wine region but with less overall distinction, since more wines (98%) have Italian DOC (Dominazione di Origine Controllata) protection appellation here [2] than anywhere else in Italy with diverse microclimates and a complex geology ranging from the eroded limestone soils of the Italian Prealps around Trento to the Venosta sands and Merano shales, mica schists and phyllites to the porphyry soils of the Dolomites around Bolzano. Yet less than 5% of these wines are even exported to the U.S., much (49%) being consumed regionally. Many of the wines are grown on pergolas and high Guyot trellises, whose X-cross beams can be seen all over the valleys almost from east of Lago Garda northward.

Sankt Magdalener Classico, Ansiet Waldgries (P. Hunt photo 2011)

Although Alto Adige white wines are far more famous – Pinot Grigio (also known here as Grauer Burgunder or Ruländer), Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc, Sauvignon Blanc, indigenous Gewürztraminer along with Müller Thurgau, Sylvaner, Riesling, Veltliner, Moscato Giallo (Goldmuskateller) and Kerner – making up 55% total volume in the Alto Adige, its red wines (45% total volume) include the indigenous Schiava and Lagrein as well as Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Moscato Rosa, among others. Schiava is also known as Vernatsch in German as well as Trollinger (from Tirol) elsewhere in Germany. A light cherry red wine, Schiava is blended with the fuller bodied Lagrein for breadth and depth. More Schiava (22-30%) grapes are grown here than any other grape varietal, with Pinot Grigio a distant second (11%). Many consumers prefer the light Schiava – “berry and almond aromas” – blended rather than by itself.  Schiava is also known in Germany as the Black Hamburg grape. Some of the Alto Adige wines can also be designated by the Germanic QbA rather than Italian DOC designations. [3]

Vineyards of Bolzano (P. Hunt photo 2011)

One of my new Bolzano favorites here is a cuvée blending several varietals: the Sankt Magdalener (Santa Maddalena) of the village of the same name just east of Bolzano in the hills. Sankt Magdalener unites Schiava and Lagrein in a cuvée percentage depending on the vintner but often around 80% Schaive and 20% Lagrein. [4] I tasted multiple wines, including those of Josephus Mayr, a family making wine since 1568, as well as other red wine blends such as the velvety Lagrein Kretzer Weingut – Erbhof of Josephus Mayr (2009), the memorable Ansitz Waldgries St. Magdalener Classico (2010) and the Hans Rottensteiner St. Magdalener (2010). In his iconic Sotheby’s Guide to Classic Wines, Molyneux-Berry also highlighted a quality Sankt Magdalener (Oberingram Sanlt Magdalener) from Alois Lageder, [5] which was my introduction to this wine. These blended Sankt Magdalener red wines are worth drinking alone for vivid flavor or paired with the Bolzano cuisine with its distinct Austrian touches of juniper flavored speck (ham) on schüttelbrot, wurst with schwartze trüffel and spinach knödel dumplings. Of course, you can just as easily have tagliatelle con porcini because it is still also Northern Italy.

If possible Roman esteem is not enough, Alto Adige wine has been rightly praised by medieval Tyrolean poets like Oswald von Wolkenstein (1377-1445) and even highlighted in a fresco on a wall in Brixen (Bressanone) cathedral. In Bolzano and other towns, decorated with old Gothic script on buildings and wrought iron signs hanging from old shops, you would hardly know you were in northern Italy. Other than a few even older Italian Romanesque campaniles here and there, most of the church towers have Baroque German bronze onion-dome bell towers. After enjoying the sunshine of Bolzano in the vineyards under distant snowy peaks, I totally agree with the poet Heinrich Heine about the Südtirol here:

“In southern Tyrol, the weather cleared up, the sun from Italy allowed its nearness to be felt, the mountains grew warmer and shinier, I began to see entwined around them wine grapes, and I could begin to lean out of the coach more often.” [6]

Bolzano Rathaus (Town Hall) (P. Hunt photo 2011)

Notes:

Ingres, Paolo and Francesca (48 cm x 39 cm), 1819, Angers, Musée des Beaux-Arts

 By Patrick Hunt

Jean A. D. Ingres (1780-1867) painted Dante’s story of Paolo and Francesca as an ekphrasis in similar settings multiple times, beginning in 1819 and through at least to 1856. (1) This article summarizes Ingres’ Paolo and Francesca (48 cm x 39 cm), 1819, Angers, Musée des Beaux-Arts. According to the Louvre, Ingres was fond of a “troubadour style” and returned to this theme of “troubled or thwarted passion” on multiple occasions. (2)  As literary antecedent, Eleanor of Aquitaine had introduced the new troubadour style in her “Courtly Love” with its trouvères to France, (3)  openly promoting lyrical love poems by Chrétien de Troyes as well as by the likes of Wolfram von Eschenbach. Such narratives, where men kneel low before their ladies, often cite thinly-disguised seductive or adulterous love as seen in this famous scene of Ingres and in the narrative of the even more famous Dante canto.

Our primary historic source for the tragic story is Dante himself. (4) Francesca da Rimini’s father Guido da Polenta, Duke of Ravenna, had secured peace with his Malatesta enemy neighbor, Malatesta da Verucchio, the lord of Rimini, and cemented it by negotiating marriage of his daughter Francesca with the son Giovanni Malatesta (Gianciotto), a likely cripple. The Malatesta heir Gianciotto substituted his handsome younger brother Paolo as a deceptive proxy for the wedding and there the incendiary relationship smouldered and soon combusted.  According to legend, Gianciotto slew his brother Paolo and Francesca having found them together, the moment Ingres narrates with the kiss.

In Inferno Canto 5:82-7, Dante meets the damned lovers in the second circle of those who sinned against the flesh, shades “carried on the assailing wind”, alluding to Virgil, his poetic guide in more ways than one:

Even as doves when summoned by desire

borne forward by their will, move through the air

with wings uplifted, still, to their sweet nest,

those spirits left the ranks where Dido suffers

approaching us through the malignant air,

so powerful had been my loving cry.  (5)

Dante well knew that his dove simile would remind readers familiar with Aeneid 6:190 ff that Virgil long before had prior used doves to represent his mother Venus as the goddess of love in order to find the entrance to the Underworld at the Avernus, (6) also infamous for its malignant, sulfurous air from volcanic activity in the caldera of the Campi Phlegraei (“Burning Fields”).(7) Roman familiarity with the Campi Phlegraei was certainly a given judging by votives and shrines there. (8)  If this literary association of Dante and Virgil is accidental, it is still a commonplace that doves were emblematic of steadfast human love – doves purportedly mate for life – and thus a fitting love symbol for both Virgil and Dante as his visible successor. Dante, however, inverts an underworld quest blessed by Venus (Aeneid Book 6) to an ephemeral tryst cursed by society and God into an eternal underworld embrace (Inferno Canto 5). This stolen kiss is not so steadfast as interminable.

Somehow echoing the Archaic Greek Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite where the often capricious goddess of love has power over all living creatures and where passion can explode gentle dreams into genocidal disaster, Dante makes these words Francesca’s:

Love, that releases no beloved from loving,

took hold of me so strongly through his beauty

that, as you see, it has not left me yet.

Love led the two of us unto one death.

Caïna waits for him who took our life.

These words were borne across from them to us. (9)

Dante has parodied I Corinthians 13 where agape trumps eros in the end. But not here.  In her desire for vengeance over violence, “because of the fair body 
taken from me – how that was done still wounds me”, Francesca implies Gianciotto Malatesta is the one for whom Caïna waits. In Circle 9 of the Inferno, Caïna is almost at the very bottom of Hell where the worst of the treacherous are punished, named after biblical Cain who murdered his brother Abel because God preferred Abel’s sacrifice. (10)

In this painting of Ingres, Paolo and Francesca have just finished reading love poetry about Launcelot’s kiss to Guinevere when the two succumb not to perfume, body proximity and privacy – all that would have been too easy – but to a subtler literary beguilement, a “Gallehaut” as Francesca curses in Dante’s tale:

One day, to pass the time away, we read

of Lancelot – how love had overcome him.

We were alone, and we suspected nothing.

And time and time again that reading led

our eyes to meet, and made our faces pale,

and yet one point alone defeated us.

When we had read how the desired smile

was kissed by one who was so true a lover,

this one, who never shall be parted from me,

while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth.

A Gallehault indeed, that book and he

who wrote it, too; that day we read no more. (11)

Gallehaut was Lord of the Distant Isles in Arthurian lore and in the 13^th c. French Lancelot epic. He acted as a panderer for Dante because he was the legendary go-between for the adulterous Lancelot and Guinevere. Francesca may be dissembling, however, in blaming her fate on an inanimate book rather than on her own will. History sometimes suggests that both Paolo and Francesca had children independent of each other before they met and were therefore less innocent of the flesh. Dante’s version, however, fits better with Courtly Loving and Francesca’s pitiable rationalization as well as providing the stimulus for Ingres’ painting, even if we don’t quite fully believe Francesca that books are that dangerous, completely blinkering our power of reason and suspending all capacity of judgment when experience is vicarious as here.

Dante cites the physiology of desire in some of lust’s overwhelming symptoms: locked eyes, pale faces (because their blood is likely rushing downward to their gonads), trembling, and finally kissing. Pale faces may also be proleptic for their impending death. Yet the implausible agency is not their willing flesh but a book. Ingres has Francesca dropping the fatefully heavy book, swooning and unable to control her body gone limp as Paolo – the aggressor in Francesca’s mind – swoops in for a supple kiss, also gently touching her neck and hand with his roaming hands.

Pulled aside by the furtive Gianciotto who enters quietly behind the curtain in the right rear drawing his murderous sword, this red curtain protecting their privacy also contains the decipherable heraldry of both Rimini and Ravenna houses, with the more recognizable Malatesta scudo on the left above Francesca and her own simpler, single bar dexter on the right.

Malatesta Heraldry 13-17th centuries

Dante’s character swoons as well in this vicarious contagion of love, maybe because he reminds his Inferno too is a literary construct.  Could Dante also be referencing the lust-driven sinners of Jude 1:12b-13:

They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead. They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.

One of Francesca’s narrative starting points was that “One day, to pass the time away…” Now time has indeed passed away into eternity. The old debate about how much Paolo and Francesca suffer swirling about in the Inferno – they are together after all, as many have pointed out, somehow suggesting Amor omnia vincit even in Hell and that love damned is yet a faint Imago Dei -  misses most of the point of contrapasso: Paolo and Francesca are stuck together forever, never able to part even if they wanted to. They have lost all of their volition, of self-generated movement, of individuality, and are at the whim of the maelstrom just as they were unable to resist the fractional physical whim of a single kiss. Is this choice or consequence? Dante’s character may pity them but Dante the poet does not mitigate their hell. This inextricable, now forced union between Paolo and Francesca could even be the existential starting point of Sartre’s No Exit. But all that is to come in the endless future, not this single moment Ingres selects as their downfall. Gowing noted Ingres’ work has always been so controversial, (12)  and this painting is no different. If this is a Romantic operatic tragedy orchestrated by Ingres – it has indeed fueled music by many composers, producing no less than eighteen different operas between 1823 and 1914 – there is something of caricature lurking as well in the painting, where the typical Ingres curves of rounded faces contrast against the long angular lines of a passive Francesca and a striving Paolo, neither any more realistic than the fantasy they were pretending to model and blame on a book, as if love were a mere literary impulse.

_Notes:

Herculaneum, Roman Wall Painting fungi detail, National Museum, Naples (public domain image)

Truffles can drive people to do funny things. Moliere’s 1664 Tartuffe, a farce about fraud, may not actually explain an iota of trufflemania. The word ‘truffle’ is an esteemed word, uttered almost religiously except to those who are suspicious of its devotees and only see the earthy truffle as an over-rated delicacy for histrionic food hypocrites. What glandular nexus of the olfactory lobe is missing from their brains I will never know. Those who only know the chocolate “truffle” have little idea this is a modern candy surrogate for the real thing.

As hypogeous fungi growing underground in the dark in a widespread global phytogeography, forming symbioses with the roots of host trees and plants via ectomycorrhizae, truffles have enriched our knowledge as well as palates with their rich historic fare throughout ethnobotanical history. It was the peerless French gastronome Brillat-Savarin who said, “whoever says ‘Truffle’ utters a great word”,  [1]  and his 1825 tome is a good place to start, although trufflemania goes back millennia.

Coveted White Truffles (public domain image)

A few years ago in Northern Italy, my Sardinian friend Roberto drove 200 kilometers at breakneck speed in his racy Alfa Romeo from Gran San Bernardo in the Alps high above Val d’Aosta. With my teenage daughter Beatrice, we were on our way to one of the best truffle restaurants in Piemonte for a legendary tagliatelle con salsa cremosa al tartufo bianco. Tires screeching on every steep turn, we made it to the restaurant southeast of Torino in little more than an hour, the needle often well past 185 kmh on the autostrada with me clinging with one hand to my leather seat and the other in the brace position. When I mentioned being possibly pulled over – in part hoping to slow him down – Roberto laughed at the thought of anyone challenging him. This was because he was a high officer of one of the national polizia. Looking back, I admit I was salivating over the dinner but was concerned about my fifteen year-old daughter in the back seat of the sporty car as the blurry landscape zipped by. Racing down the mountains she would frequently squeal in what I rationalized as adolescent spleen over our speed. Dinner was certainly worth the angst for me, I don’t know if Beatrice agreed. A few years later, she now loves truffles too, so I hope she discovered then and there that trufflemania may even be genetic and indulgently forgave her father. My birthday presents from her lately have been sel aux truffes and beurre de truffe, just compensation as I add vintage.

Truffles from various species have excited human appetites for millennia in Europe and elsewhere. According to Greek and Latin writers, including Theophrastus, Pliny, Juvenal, Apicius and other Romans, some mushrooms and other fungi have long been lusted after for various reasons, not the least for food, aphrodisiacal properties real or imagined, or even medicine. Any truffle lover who has been in the Piedmont of Italy during the seasonal peak of tartufo bianco can well appreciate how one’s olfactory brain seems to magically swell into a gigantic funnel of a nose to breathe the fragrance of truffle. If parfumiers ever produce a truffle perfume from Tuber magnatum, I shall be one of the first to religiously fork out whatever is necessary to walk around in a cloud of truffle vapor, even if a slight drool glistens on my chin. White truffles are literally worth their weight in gold in an Italian October in the Langhe region of Piemonte, especially in Grizane or Alba. The price of one truffle-shaved baked potato alone at the Four Seasons Hotel restaurant in New York has often easily exceeded $200. [2]  The most recent (2010) international white truffle auction held worldwide in simultaneous venues including London and Rome resulted in one regular big buyer pouring out $330,000 for 1.3 kg (2.87 pounds) of Alba truffle. [3]

Black summer truffle (Tartufo Neri estivi) Rome shop window, photo A. Pingstone

Venerable truffle traditions like this one, while interrupted for the medieval centuries, hark back at least to Sumer in Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia. In Greek and Roman times alone, truffles and other fungi were certainly appreciated as gourmet food.

Theophrastus (c. 371-287 BC), the great Greek Encyclopedist and protégé of Aristotle, refers to the truffle in Greece in general as [h]udnon, describing various habitats. Another less generic word he uses is geraneion, likely connected to the Greek word for sow (grôna) as a truffle-hunting animal even in ancient Greece. [4]

Pliny correctly connects truffles to a good rain:

“When there have been showers in autumn, and frequent thunder-storms, truffles are produced, thunder contributing more particularly to their development.” [5]

Any association with thunder is apropos in warm Mediterranean climes since this phenomenon is usually auspicious of a good drenching, necessary to soak the soil and the truffle spores therein. Pliny also claims the best truffles in Greece come from Elis, also fitting since this well-watered locus is also the site of Olympia, sacred sanctuary of Zeus, thrower of thunderbolts.

Juvenal continues the Jovian link in a satire :

“If the spring will bring peals of thunder, we will have the desired truffles. Keep your grain, Libya…and send us truffles,” [6]

also suggesting it would be better for the grain harvest to fail than the truffle harvest to perish. Accepting it as fact, Plutarch likewise also asks why thunderstorms are conducive to truffles. [7]  These several links to Jupiter, chief of Olympian Gods are only right since the divine truffle is to many the king of food, definitely preferred over choice North African wheat, generally among the best in the Roman world. Who even needs fresh bread when fragrant truffles can be consumed with due reverence?

Apicius too in De Re Coquinaria (“The Careful, Experienced Cook”) Book VII, who lists six truffle recipes in his priciest recipes (Polyteles XVI.316-21), insists on keeping truffles (tubera) dry and cool and away from water despite their putative origins.  Here is one of his careful preparation methods:

“Brush the truffles [tubera], parboil, sprinkle with salt, put several of them on a skewer, half fry them; then place them in a sauce pan with oil, broth, reduced wine, wine, pepper, and honey. When done retire the truffles bind the liquor with roux, decorate the truffles nicely and serve.” [8]

Classical tradition often shows how much the Romans loved mushrooms (Basidiomycetes) as well as truffles (Ascomycetes). The Latin word boletus can be – but is not necessarily limited to – the modern cèpe in French or porcini in Italian. It’s amusing that American supermarkets offer both cèpe and porcini in the same dried packaged mushroom section to guarantee snagging buyers of either edible fungus. Roman writers including Pliny, Plautus, Tacitus, Juvenal and Martial all discuss the boletus, usually taxonomically referring to Boletus edulis while the Latin tuber terrae (also tufera) for “truffle” appear in Pliny’s prose, Juvenal’s and Martial’s poems and epigrams (e.g Epigram 13.50) and the expected cookbooks of Apicius; all of these writers laud the tasty virtues of truffles and boletes. Mosaics and Pompeian wall paintings also depict favorite edible Roman mushrooms.

White Truffles from Croatia (public domain image)

The great literary and historical tradition of mushrooms may include homicide. If ancient historians are right, the Roman emperor Claudius seems to have been poisoned in AD 54 by his wife Agrippina. [9]  She is often said to have salted his favorite dish of likely boletes with strychnine or something else equally fatal, but the historical record is as murky as her past. Pliny, Suetonius, Tacitus, Dio Cassius and other Roman writers – seemingly a quorum – all claim she dispatched him by dishing up something irresistible like his preferred mushrooms, whereas Seneca is cryptic [10]; other modern medical commentators disagree on the mushroom poisoning, although mycophobes are thus expectedly disappointed. [11]  Agrippina’s murder motive to expedite Claudius’ death so her son Nero could ascend to his emperorship is less debatable. Tacitus is unwavering in his account of Agrippina’s plot:

“All the circumstances were subsequently so well known, that writers of the time have declared that the poison was infused into some mushrooms, a favorite delicacy, and its effect not at the instant perceived, from the emperor’s lethargic, or intoxicated condition.” [12]

Suetonius agrees with Tacitus:

“…at a family dinner Agrippina served the drug to him with her own hand in mushrooms, a dish of which he was extravagantly fond.” [13]

If boletus is merely generic Latin for edible mushroom, it is often claimed the favorite delicacy of Claudius could have been either the Italian Cantharellus cibarius (chanterelles) or Boletus edulis (bolete), exact forebear of porcini in a delicious sauce. Not all the fungi at Claudius’ imperial table were poisoned so the disaster was masked and did not affect the imperial poison detector Halotus. We can easily imagine the warm aroma of steaming porcini in an infused cream. If true, maybe Agrippina even prophetically quipped this beloved mushroom dish was the food of the gods, since Claudius was about to become one (Divus Caesar). The Roman wall painting image from Herculaneum at the head of this article may even depict Cantharellus cibarius according to Jashemski, authoritative on Roman botany. [14]

Chocolate Truffles - what too many think of hearing "truffle" (public domain image)

Yet the phytogeography and ethnobotany of truffles and their cousins are not limited to Europe. Not only have the more familiar dark French truffles (Tuber melanosporum) long been called the “Black Diamond” of the Périgord, but truffles also have a fame going back nearly 4,100 years to Sumer in Ancient Mesopotamia [15] and including at Mari, roughly 1900 BC. [16]  Some scholars like mycologists Shavit and Volk have even suggested the Negev desert truffles (Terfezia pfeilii, a.k.a. Kalaharituber pfeilii) normally appearing after spring rain were the miracle of “manna” rising from the ground to feed early Israel in their wilderness wanderings in Exodus 16:14, flavorfully and perhaps with a flavor similar to coriander. [17]  Manna in Hebrew essentially meant “What is it?” and it might have been easily mistaken in legend as it is now in fact for a small brown desert rock at first sight. The connections Shavit and Volk raise are intriguing because both manna and desert truffle are “small and round” and found “on or in the ground.” Only right that philology meets mycophily for those of us inclined to both. Nor should it be a surprise to anyone knowledgeable in the Middle East that some of Islam’s holiest literature also refer to the desert truffle as manna and its juice a good medicine for eye maladies as narrated in certain Ahadith of Mohammed.[18]  Shavit even relates an account from Ludovico di Varthema, the intrepid Renaissance Italian traveler in the Near East, who reported witnessing caravans of 25 or more loaded camels, sacks filled with desert truffles plodding to Damascus. [19]  Why does this make one think of the Magi with their precious gifts? Why not truffle alongside gold, frankincense and myrrh?

Moving back to the remembered almost present à la Proust, I count myself fortunate to be invited in summer or autumn to go truffle-hunting (Tuber aestivum) with Burgundian friends who are also wine producers of excellent premier cru Vosne-Romanée. In this case dog noses are in demand! In the same village I know another family, including a boutique champagne producer from Epernay who also has the most marvelous and enviable sense of smell for mushrooms, however remote or miniscule they may be. From favorite Saturday morning markets in Chamonix, Annecy and Beaune and en route to Paris, I had purchased more than a few charcuterie items along the way. But I knew I couldn’t smuggle them back home past the long-nosed customs dachshunds and beagles. These included viandes filed with tasty morsels making them look like treasured Renaissance breccia marbles: saucissse de Beaufort (French alpine cousin of Gruyere cheese), saucisse de cepe (mushroom), saucisse de sanglier (wild boar) and others. I stopped as usual in Vosne-Romanée to visit these vigneron friends. We were sharing food and their Grand Cru wines from the domaine cellars – especially salubrious Grands-Échezeaux 1996 and 2002 – and I had contributed my share of saucisses happily paired with their domaine wines. This champagne producteur was the son of my friend, Marie-Therèse Noellat, the grande dame of Domaine Georges Noellat, down from Epernay for the weekend to visit family. Solely by holding each paper-wrapped saucisse to his prominent nose, he could immediately tell from the fragrance what type was inside.  His face especially lit up with the saucisse de cepe, which he pronounced with a sigh as having been just the right season when the meat was matured. If my nose had been as refined over the familial centuries– and maybe as grandly sized – as a champagne producteur, perhaps I would be in the wine business instead of being a peripatetic academic.

Not all fungi have been eaten merely for taste and gustatory effect by our possibly gourmand-or-not ancestors who roamed Europe tasting just about every kind of plant or root when thick forests stretched from Brittany to Warsaw. In the alpine Neolithic, we now surmise “Ötzi” the Iceman from 5,300 years ago carried bracket fungus for a different reason in his frozen kit when discovered in a melting glacier in 1991 by climbers in the Ötztal Alps high above the Tyrol between Italy and Austria. “Ötzi” most likely carried broken bracket fungus (Basidiomycetes) threaded on a thong – in this case Piptoporus betulinus or birch polypore – that he could chew and swallow as a vermifuge for his intestinal parasites (preserved whipworm Trichuris trichuria),[20]  a known common malady and diagnosed “pharmaceutic” remedy traceable in this case to the dawn of civilization, also possessing anti-inflammatory and antibacterial use. [21] The parasites either found the fungus toxic or it worked as a quick emetic as chewing it probably didn’t go down so well in the Neolithic stomach either. How that particular medicinal remedy came about combating nasty worms with nastier bracket fungus can only be from millennia of scouring woodlands in human experimentation and observation.

Naturally, old cultures tend to also have a long memory of such fungal remedies. Even now if you visit any Chinese herbalist with hundreds of apothecary-like antiquarian glass jars filled with unrecognizable dried mysteries, age-old remedies include another famous bracket fungus, lingzhi in Chinese (named Ganoderma lucidum in taxonomy). Lingzhi has long been considered an efficacious polypore since at least the Han Dynasty, perceived as beneficial to human longevity and health in various ways, possibly including lowering blood pressure, reducing cholesterol and also as anticarcinogenic, although the taxonomy of lingzhi is apparently complex. [22]  Good health and good taste may or may not be combatants, since many edible fungi are known to have a fair share of good nutrients and amino acids without the arteriosclerotic effects of red meat. On the other hand, still nothing fungal beats a truffle for sheer gastronomic ecstasy.

How long we truffle hunters have searched for truffles and other edible or medicinal fungi is anyone’s guess. Maybe the early modern humans of 25,000 years ago (previously called Cro Magnon from that eponymous rock shelter) deep in the Périgord dug their truffles out of the leafy forest floors in between painting other comestibles like smoked venison in flight across the cave walls at Lascaux and Les Eyzies. It seems brain capacity hasn’t changed that much in the interim if we can be instantly transported from deep abstractions on quantum mechanics to crazed behavior by one profound smell in a flash of seconds. Perhaps mycophilia and mycophobia and the like are relegated to olfactory instincts based on attenuated gene pools. Now after sufficient instinct memory through thousands of years, perhaps either you have the truffle-loving gene or you don’t. That just makes more for those of us who, like the ancients, remain blessed with the divine affliction of trufflemania.

*********************************

Notes and Sources:

[1]    Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy. Penguin Classics, 1994, 90 & 93: “the truffle is not a positive aphrodisiac; but it can, in certain situations, make women tenderer and men more agreeable.”  Another useful text is Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat. A History of Food, Wiley-Blackwell, 1994, 434-5 ff; for Classicists,  A. H. R. Buller. “The Fungus Lore of the Greeks and Romans.” Transactions of the British Mycological Society 5 (1914-1916) 47-8.

[2]    Dan Dorfman. “Trufflemania Extends to the $200 Baked Potato”. New York: The Sun, October 4, 2006. In Dorfman’s article, restauranteurs state: “some customers go crazy” and “…they just can’t seem to wait…” Good descriptions for this ailment called trufflemania.

[3]    Richard Vines. “[Sir] Stanley Ho Pays Top Price at $417,000 Truffle sale for Charity.” Bloomberg News, Nov. 27, 2010.

[4]    Theophrastus, Historia Plantarum I.6.9  [h]udnon ([h]udna in the plural). Also see Werner Winter. “Two Greek Words for the Truffle,” American Journal of Philology 72.1 (1951) 63-68; R. Sharples and D. Minter, “Theophrastus on Fungi: Inaccurate Citations in Athenaeus” Journal of Hellenic Studies 103 (1983) 154-6 with all the complications of misreadings of Athenaeus on Theophrastus: “” Both of these modern commentaries point the philological Greek connection between the truffle (geraneion) and sow (grôna).

[5]    Pliny, Natural History XIX.13.1. Elsewhere in NH XXV.9.67.115 Pliny mentions tuber terrae or “earth tuber” for truffle.

[6]     Juvenal. Satire V.115 ff.

[7]     Plutarch, Moralia VIII “Table Talk” 4 Quaestione 2;  P. A. Clement, H. A. Hoffleit, trs./eds. Plutarch: Moralia VIII.1-6, Harvard Loeb Classical Library, 1969, 316ff; R. Gordon Wasson, Stella Kramrisch, Carl A.P. Ruck and Jonathan Ott. Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion. Yale University Press, 1992, 84.

[8]    Apicius, De Re Coquinaria VII, Epimeles II.27; Polyteles “Sumptuous Dishes, Chapter XVI.315.

[9]    Patrick Hunt. “Nero” in Notorious Lives: Great Lives in History. Salem Press, 2007.

[10]    Seneca Apocolocyntosis 4 suggests Claudius “expired, moreover, while listening to comic actors”, not quickly at the dinner table.

[11]     V. J. Marmion and T. E. J. Wiedemann. “The Death of Claudius.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 95.5 (2002) 260-1. XVI.

[12]    Tacitus. Annals XII.66-67. Tacitus relates that Agrippina used a convicted woman poisoner named Locusta for the deadly concoction and that the mushroom in the dish was an “exceptionally fine” one.

[13]    Suetonius. Life of Claudius 44.2

[14]   Wilhelmina M. F. Jashemski, Frederick Meyer and Massimo Ricciardi. The Natural History of Pompeii. Cambridge University Press, 2002, §99, 128, fig. 111.

[15]    Jean Bottéro. “The Cuisine of Ancient Mesopotamia.” The Biblical Archeologist 48.1 (1985) 36–47.

[16]    Elinoar Shavit. “Truffles  Roasting in the Evening Fires” Fungi 1.3 (2008) 18-23. Shavit quotes Addu, governor of Saggaratum to Zimri-Lim, king of Mari, c. 1770 BC.

[17]    Elinoar Shavit and Thomas J. Volk. “Terfezia and Tirmania. Desert Truffles (terfez, kama, p/faqa): Delicacies in the Sand or Manna from Heaven?” BotitBotany. University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. (January 2007). A word in biblical Hebrew sometimes used for truffle is paqa, which Volk and Shavit also connect to the Elisha passage in II Kings 4:39-42.  Volk is a mycologist in the Biology Department of University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/jan2007.html.

[18]  “Sa’id bin Zaid…reported: I heard Allah’s Apostle (Sallallaho Alaihi Wassallum) as saying: Truffles are a kind of ‘Manna’ and their juice is a medicine for the eyes,” cited in Sarfaraz Khan Marwat, Mir Ajab Khan, Muhammad Aslam Khan, Mushtaq Ahmad, Muhammad Zafar, Fazal-ur-Rehman and Shazia Sultana. “Vegetables Mentioned in the Holy Qura’n and Ahadith and Their Ethnomedicinal Studies in Dera Ismail Khan, N.W.F.P., Pakistan.” Pakistan Journal of Nutrition 8.5 (2009) 531.

[19]  Shavit (2008), 20, cites George Badger, ed. The Travels of Ludovico di Varthema. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1863. This is reprinted as The Travels of Ludovico di Varthema. Elibron Classics, Adamant, 2001, 15 where in Chpater 3 footnote 2,  Badger also gives the Arabic word kama for desert truffle.

[20]  Luigi Capasso. “5300 years ago, the Ice Man used natural laxatives and antibiotics.” Lancet 352 [9143] (1998) 1864; Luigi Capasso. “Laxatives and the Ice Man”. Lancet 353 [9156] (1999) 926.

[21]  B. Schlegel, U. Luhmann, A. Härtl, U. Gräfe. “Piptamine, a new antibiotic produced by Piptoporus betulinus Lu 9-1.” Journal of Antibiotics (Tokyo) 53 [9] (2000): 973–4; H. V. Wangun, A. Berg, W. Hertel, A. E. Nkengfack, C. Hertweck.  “Anti-inflammatory and anti-hyaluronate lyase activities of lanostanoids from Piptoporus betulinus.”, Journal of Antibiotics (Tokyo) (Germany) 57 [11] (2004): 755–8.

[22]   R. S. Hseu, H. H. Wang, H. F. Wang and J. M. Moncalvo. “Differentiation and grouping of isolates of the Ganoderma lucidum complex by random amplified polymorphic DNA-PCR compared with grouping on the basis of internal transcribed spacer sequences.” Applied and Environmental Microbiology 62.4 (1996) 1354–1363.

The ancient Library of Alexandria, real as it once was, is essentially the stuff of myth. What we usually understand as libraries, even the most ambitious of libraries, don’t much resemble the myth or the reality of the original at the shore of the Mediterranean. Though it was known in ancient times as the Mouseion (μουσεiον in Greek), a place holy to the Muses, from which comes our word, museum – more than anything else, it resembled the modern research university, built around, but not solely about, its store of recorded knowledge; in some ways, the Library stands as one of the founding models (and myths) of the universities of today.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina (public domain image)

So it would take a fair degree of vision and confidence to set out to reinvent this ur-institution. A new Library of Alexandria, calling itself the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, began to take shape a decade ago. Situated on the Mediterranean shore, a few hundred yards east of its antecedent, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina embodies both ancient heritages and a forward- and outward- looking statement of contemporary Egypt. Though one is usually well advised to take institutional mission or vision statements with a grain of salt, the vision statement of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is both telling and, I believe, entirely genuine: “The Library of Alexandria seeks to recapture the spirit of the ancient Library of Alexandria and aspires to be: The world’s window on Egypt; Egypt’s window on the world; an instrument for rising to the challenges of the digital age; and, above all, a center for dialogue between peoples and civilizations.”

With the patronage and engagement of First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, and under the leadership of the charismatic Dr. Ismail Serageldin, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has rapidly grown into a vast and complex suite of programs and facilities, including library-normal collections and services, four museums, exhibit spaces, information-technology R&D labs, the only external mirror site of the Internet Archive, cultural heritage programs and institutes, auditoria, a planetarium, publishing and grand open spaces. Like any self-respecting university, it hosts numerous conferences. In fact, it resembles nothing so much as a newly-built public university (though I can’t think of one of comparable grandeur).

Except that it has no student enrollment and no faculty as such. Conveniently, the University of Alexandria – which lacks a library system – is adjacent, and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina campus is daily awash in university students, school groups, tourists, and researchers. The stunning, multi-level main reading room of the library, under a fantastic domed, sunlit ceiling, seats some 2,000; the Bibliotheca Alexandrina plausibly claims it to be the largest reading room in the world. During a weeklong visit in 2006, I did not see that chamber quite filled to capacity, but it was certainly heavily used.  There are also several specialized libraries serving, children, teens, and the blind/visually impaired, and others dedicated to cartography, arts & multimedia, and special collections.

Despite its high profile, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is not the national library of Egypt; the Dar Al-Kutub, established in Cairo in 1870, officially has that distinction, with extensive holdings primarily of Egyptian publications and manuscripts. So the Bibliotheca Alexandrina cannot build collections as a copyright depository or registry; by contrast, the original Library used its Ptolemaic patronage and confiscatory authority to amass the ancient world’s largest collection of manuscripts, roughly half a million scrolls, give or take a few hundred thousand (a shortage of hard facts is associated with an excess of conjecture on this point). With an initial collection of some 500,000 volumes (in 2002) and shelving for some 8 million volumes, the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina has the enviable luxury of growth capacity, something few other major libraries can boast.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina's Alphabetic wall (public domain image)

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s print collection has relied to a remarkable degree on donated books, in many languages and on many subjects. Patronage ranges from private local citizens to foreign governments to European royalty (Sweden’s Queen Silvia and Norway’s Queen Sonja opened the Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s Nobel Section, containing Nobel Literature winners from 1901 to the present). In 2010, for example, it received half a million volumes donated by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, an institution with which it has strong ties. Its collection scope, however, emphasizes digital as well as printed volumes and manuscripts. In addition to providing broad spectrum of born-digital information, it has a large book digitization lab to broaden online access to Arabic-language texts; for reasons associated with letter forms and diacritics, optical character recognition of Arabic printed texts is more challenging than that of Latin-alphabet languages, and Bibliotheca Alexandrina staff are leaders in this craft.

The architecture of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is spectacular, situated along the Corniche, facing the Mediterranean Sea. Designed by the Snøhetta Hamza Consortium of Egypt and Norway, it received the 2004 Aga Khan Award for Architecture, a competition supported by UNESCO. As the award citation explains, “The library was designed as a tilting disc rising from the ground, with four levels below ground and seven above. The scale of the building is thus minimized at close quarters, so it does not overwhelm the visitor.… The circular form of the library also has strong symbolic significance and an iconic presence. Its exterior wall is clad with four thousand granite blocks carved with letters from the [120] alphabets of the world.” Alexandria is a fascinating amalgam of old and new; Pharaonic, Hellenic, Roman, Arabic, colonial, 50s-modern, and contemporary, and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina offers a decidedly 21^st century addition to the mix.

Reconstruction of original Alexandrian Library (public domain image)

Hosni Mubarak, now 82, has been president of Egypt for almost thirty years, a classic autocratic ruler. This has made it possible, among other things, for Egypt to have had a moderating regional role and a relatively stable domestic economy, which make it convenient for the West to overlook internal tensions. We have little idea of his succession; “Après moi, le déluge” might apply. Or not. One wishes to believe that the brilliance of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina as a center of learning, knowledge, and education will assure its transcending of politics. But it is closely associated with the Mubaraks, and to the extent that its modernism, internationalism, and essentially secular vision may elicit antagonism from now-repressed anti-modern or anti-Western elements, one hesitates to assume it will always enjoy its current immunity from the hurly-burly of politics. The first Library of Alexandria famously perished (a process that took centuries and a series of catastrophic events, not a single holocaust as usually imagined), and it is not impossible that its successor might meet the same tragic fate. For now, the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina instantiates the ancient and modern ideals of the previous Mouseion and serves as a practicum of hope for global dialogue.