Accordingly, this essay read backwards retraces the path of my search from Lyly's Euphues. The Anatomy of Wit (1579). through the provenance of The Commonwealth of the Bees to the source of a certain minor variation I had come across from time to time over the years. Read forwards it is a short essay the result of that search.
§5 The earliest surviving source of systematic information on bees available to the West came from Aristotle's writings On Animals. Being written in Greek, this work was not widely known among medieval writers. The Latin writer Pliny the Elder had read his On Animals carefully and added to it considerably in Book XI of his own Natural Histories — some of it we now know to be correct, some not. It is the Natural Histories from out of which medieval university students and scientists learned the fundamentals of science. It was the standard textbook for over 1000 years after it was written in the first century C.E.
Almost no one in the West, during the middle ages, no matter how or to what extent they were educated, practiced anything we would today call “science”.1 Reading ancient authorities and citing them as sources was what science came down to for all but a very few exceptions such as Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus. And even they cited the ancients as authorities for everything they did not observe themselves. The experimenta they mentioned were not actually experiments in the scientific sense but rather facts gathered from direct experience (experientia, personal observation) rather than the writings of authorities.
§4 Some 100 years before Pliny, Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) had written an account of rural life called The Georgics. Some 10 years later, he wrote the enormously popular poem The Aeneid. Lesser versions of that popularity rubbed off on all his works thereafter including The Georgics and the account of apiculture it contained in Book IV. While Virgil's work was not adopted as a science text its popularity among literary types made it a second go-to source text for the exemplum come to be known as The Commonwealth of the Bees.
Virgil's bee kingdom is briefly mentioned as exemplum as early as the 1st century C.E. De Clementia of Seneca the Younger. Some 300 years later, in the 4th century, St. Basil, bishop of Caesarea, was looking for a way to keep his flock awake during a series of long Lenten sermons on the Creation of the World. Such a theme was called an Heptameron (an account of the six days). Basil filled each day with pagan accounts of nature salted with bible verses. The pagan accounts were often factually wrong and the bible verses misquoted as well. The Heptameron, however, was a smash hit.
Basil had drawn his account of the bees almost entirely from Virgil. St. Ambrose, pleased to think he might succeed so well with his own flock, expanded Basil to produce his own Heptameron. In his version he added details from Pliny to those from Virgil. Being less than a perfect translator, as well, he mistranslated Basil on at least one point that would become gospel for over a thousand years.
§3 Just as his authorities, Virgil and Pliny, and all the rest of 1st century C.E. Rome, Ambrose paid special attention to the “king” of the bee-hive. (They did not know that it was a queen.) He is a merciful monarch.
He does not make use of his sting to inflict punishment. There are well-defined laws in nature, not set down in writing, but impressed in the mold of custom, by virtue of which those who possess the greatest power tend to be more lenient in the exercise of it. Those bees who do not obey the laws of their king are so overcome by remorse that they even kill themselves by their own stings!2
Here we also find the apparently first mention of the purported fact that bees who disobeyed their king executed themselves with their own stinger. Basil was the inspiration but his Greek said something quite different that Ambrose mistranslated.
But how many medieval writers had the opportunity and desire to read St. Ambrose? How could this misinformation get passed along? The answer, it would seem, is that there only needed to be one: Bartholomaeus Anglicus (Bartholomew the Englishman), a 14th century Franciscan of minor orders and an academic. Bartholomew was particularly conscientious and had access to the finest academic libraries from which to cull every myth of medieval science and even a bit of fact. These he gathered in his Liber de proprietatibus rerum — one of the most copied manuscripts (in Latin and French) of the pre-printing world. The first printed edition was issued by a press in Strassburg, in 1491. A 1505 edition weighed in at over 500 pages. In it he tells the reader that he received the detail of self-execution from St. Ambrose.
§2 Another effect of the advent of movable type, of course, was that copies of books had to be made in quantity in order to make a living. The Latin of such books as the Liber de proprietatibus rerum could not sell in sufficient quantity to meet the need. A group of professional translators grew up to meet the demand.
It is for this reason that we can quote Bartholomew in Tudor English.
For though theyr King have a sting, yet he useth it not in wreake. And kindly, the more huge Bées are, the more lighter they be, for the greater Bées are lyghter than the lesse Bées. And also Bees that are unobedient to the king, they déeme themselues by theyr owne dome [doom], for to dye by the wound of theyr owne sting.3
This edition — called Batman uppon Bartholome — was published in 1582, “Imprinted by Thomas East, dwelling by Paules wharfe.” But the title page states it is “Newly Corrected” indicating that there was an earlier edition.
§1 The first edition of John Lyly's Euphues and his England was printed in 1580. In it we find the self-executing bee.
And that which is most mervailous, and almoste incredible: if ther be any that hath disobeyed his commaundements, eyther of purpose, or unwittingly, hee kylleth him-ſelfe with his owne sting, as executioner oſ his own subbornesse. The King him-selfe hath his sting, which hee useth rather for honour then punishment:...4
I'd often wondered what it could be about, where it could have come from. Presented with the task of reviving the history of The Commonwealth of the Bees there seemed to be no better time to look further into the question. The humble scholar just gets in the habit of maximizing every opportunity. There is after all impossibly much to know.
1While astrology is entirely a myth, the precise measurements necessary in order to know the positions of the planets for various functions steadily evolved over the middle ages to arrive at the science of astronomy before the other sciences had begun in earnest. Something of the same can be said for alchemy evolving into proto-chemistry.
2 St. Ambrose. Hexameron, Paradise and Cain and Abel (1961). John J. Savage, tr. §68.
3 Batman, Stephen. Batman uppon Bartholome, His Booke De Proprietatibus Rerum (1582). 179.
4 Lyly, John. Euphues and his England (1580). Arber ed. (1869), 262-4. https://vgs-pbr-reviews.blogspot.com/2024/04/tudor-englands-most-popular-novel-and.html
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