The Cultural History of Solitude in Antiquity: An Introduction

Abstract

This article presents a novel approach to the study of the cultural history of solitude in antiquity. It presents solitude in comparative perspective, notably in conversation with anthropology, paleolithic studies, zoology, as well as with a broad range of ancient philological sources that range from ancient Egypt to to India to classical Greece and Rome down to Jewish Alexandria and late-antique Christianity. As it shows, the history of solitude is not a simple fall from communitarian grace to individual alienation, nor is it a simple rise from a conformist mass to triumphant autonomy: neither lapsarian nor whiggish teleology, or vision’s of history’s necessary arc, are adequate to the complex role that the uses, the cultivation, the culture of solitude has played throughout human history. And I say ‘throughout’, for, far from being the invention of Augustine’s meditations on original sin, or the medieval confessional, or Montaigne’s tower, or the mass-print paperback, or British romanticism, or the French revolution or bourgeois counter-revolution, or neo-liberal late-stage capitalist alienation, solitude is as old as hominids, and perhaps as old as our primate ancestors: a recent ethological study suggested that a certain eye-covering gesture by captive Colchester mandrillsin—usually highly sociable monkeys that live in troops—signaled a desire to be left alone. Sad solitude, bad solitude, useful solitude; loneliness on a desert island, loneliness in a crowd, or a moment to one’s own in deep forest or a room or a city or a tomb: all of these are as old as culture, from Latin cultura, meaning a way of living, dwelling, adorning, growing, caring for others (plants, animals, gods) and taking ‘care of the self’. To study the cultural history of solitude is to study practices but also ways of speaking and thinking, ways of approaching what it means, in the words of the American poet Wallace Stevens, to ‘live in a place / that is not our own and, much more, not ourselves’. He adds: ‘And hard it is in spite of blazoned days’