Here's that passage again from my previous blog post. Robert (Greek Myths; I, Claudius, etc) recalls his first encounter with the war hero, T. E. Lawrence:
The first time I met him... was in February or March 1920, It was a guest-night at All Souls, where he had been awarded a seven-years’ Fellowship... I was only an accidental guest and knew nobody there. Lawrence was talking to the Regius Professor of Divinity about the influence of the Syrian Greek philosophers on early Christianity and especially of the importance of the University of Gadara close to the Lake of Galilee. He mentioned that St. James had quoted one of the Gadarene philosophers (I think Mnasalcus) in his Epistle. He went on to speak of Meleager and the other Syrian-Greek contributors to the Greek Anthology, and of their poems in Syrian of which he intended to publish an English translation and which were as good as (or better than) their poems in Greek. This interested me, and I said something about a morning-star image which Meleager had used in rather an un-Greek way. Lawrence then said: ‘You must be Graves the poet? I read a book of yours in Egypt in 1917 and thought it pretty good.’ This was embarrassing, but kind. He began asking me what the younger poets were doing now: he was out of touch, I told him what I knew.
The framing of the encounter is plausible enough. Graves had published a couple of poetry-books during the war; Lawrence had been awarded a fellowship at All Souls, and was working up his notes from the desert campaign towards publication as Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But everything within the frame is somebody-or-other's fib or wishful thinking:
- Strictly speaking there was no University of Gadara, because universities weren't a thing yet. This is Graves's fib; we also find it in Claudius the God, where it's specifically the Epicurean University of Gadara (and an indirect influence on the teachings of Christ, according to Claudius' sources on the ground).
- There never was a Mnasalcus of Gadara or anywhere else. Graves made him up. He's in Claudius the God as well. This whole package is Graves's invention.
- There are no surviving poems in Syrian by Meleager, Philodemus (who was also from Gadara), or any other Anthology poet. My guess is that this time Graves is faithfully reporting what was said, and that this fib was Lawrence's own. He did quite badly in Greek and Latin at school and never got much better; there he was at All Souls surrounded by brilliant scholars who knew the classics whatever their field (or they could never have been admitted as undergraduates), and I can see him being tempted to one-up them. Oh, you've only read Meleager in the Greek? What a shame!
