The end of the fifth chapter of Herman Melville’s final novel, The Confidence-Man, contains the following entertaining paragraph within a larger entertaining section. On a steamboat journey, the title character has found a college sophomore reading Tacitus. Upon this discovery, he–not Melville himself, it should be noted–launches into a diatribe against the Greek and Roman classics:

“Nay, I foresee all that. But you carry Tacitus, that shallow Tacitus. What do I carry? See”—producing a pocket-volume—“Akenside—his ‘Pleasures of Imagination.’ One of these days you will know it. Whatever our lot, we should read serene and cheery books, fitted to inspire love and trust. But Tacitus! I have long been of opinion that these classics are the bane of colleges; for—not to hint of the immorality of Ovid, Horace, Anacreon, and the rest, and the dangerous theology of Eschylus and others—where will one find views so injurious to human nature as in Thucydides, Juvenal, Lucian, but more particularly Tacitus? When I consider that, ever since the revival of learning, these classics have been the favorites of successive generations of students and studious men, I tremble to think of that mass of unsuspected heresy on every vital topic which for centuries must have simmered unsurmised in the heart of Christendom. But Tacitus—he is the most extraordinary example of a heretic; not one iota of confidence in his kind. What a mockery that such an one should be reputed wise, and Thucydides be esteemed the statesman’s manual! But Tacitus—I hate Tacitus; not, though, I trust, with the hate that sins, but a righteous hate. Without confidence himself, Tacitus destroys it in all his readers. Destroys confidence, paternal confidence, of which God knows that there is in this world none to spare. For, comparatively inexperienced as you are, my dear young friend, did you never observe how little, very little, confidence, there is? I mean between man and man—more particularly between stranger and stranger. In a sad world it is the saddest fact. Confidence! I have sometimes almost thought that confidence is fled; that confidence is the New Astrea—emigrated—vanished—gone.” Then softly sliding nearer, with the softest air, quivering down and looking up, “could you now, my dear young sir, under such circumstances, by way of experiment, simply have confidence in me?”

Many of the “Greats” (Aeschylus, Thucydides, Ovid, Horace), and a couple of the “Pretty Goods” (Anacreon, Juvenal, Lucian), come in for harsh criticism.

Humorously, however, there is a classical joke buried in the passage that is worth examining in some detail. After bemoaning man’s skepticism of his fellow man, the speaker says, “Confidence! I have sometimes almost thought that confidence is fled; that confidence is the New Astrea—emigrated—vanished—gone.”

“Astrea”? Who’s that? Well, as it happens, this is an arch reference to the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses–the same Ovid the speaker taxed for “immorality” earlier in the paragraph. The Metamorphoses opens with an account of the origin of the world, followed by its decline. By the time we reach the end, things are so bad that Astrea (or Astraea), a personification of justice, flees the earth. Ovid writes:

victa iacet pietas, et virgo caede madentis
ultima caelestum terras Astraea reliquit. (Metamorphoses 1.149-50)     

Piety lies conquered, the virgin Astraea, the last of the

heavenly ones, abandons the slaughter-soaked earth.^[1]

Her flight is preceded by conflict between husband and wife, stepmothers and stepchildren, and sons and fathers. In Melville, the flightof the “New Astrea,” confidence, is preceded by conflict between “man and man,” “stranger and stranger.” Though the parties are as different as can be–particular, concrete family relations in Ovid; general relations between men as such in Melville–this is yet another link between the two.

And just as Melville humorously ups the ante on Ovid by generalizing the nature of conflict, so he does again by replacing Ovid’s one verb reliquit with a tricolon (“emigrated—vanished—gone”) that is reminiscent of the opening of Cicero’s Second Catilinarian Oration, where he says of Catiline, “He has departed, he has gone out, he has escaped, he has burst forth” (abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit). Both the meaning of the verbs and the asyndetic structure recall old Tully.

Cicero aside, this bit of Ovid from Metamorphoses 1 has been quite popular. It occurs, for example, at the beginning of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus 4.3, where it forms an important part of that play’s Ovidian allusive program. But the sophisticated use Melville makes of it in The Confidence-Man indicates to me that he had first-hand familiarity with his sources, something that is particularly impressive when we recall that Melville was an autodidact.

At this point, it is well to remember that the short version of “confidence man” is “con man.” For in order for the speaker to make the elaborate intertextual joke that he does here, he would have needed the very classical education he derides. And to get it, so does his audience.

That seems quite appropriate, given that the conversation between the classically-inclined college sophomore and the (supposedly) classically-skeptical confidence man occurs on April Fool’s Day in a novel that was itself published on April Fool’s Day.