The Swerve Page 9
In this general vanishing, all the works of the brilliant founders of atomism, Leucippus and Democritus, and most of the works of their intellectual heir Epicurus, disappeared. Epicurus had been extraordinarily prolific.3 He and his principal philosophical opponent, the Stoic Chrysippus, wrote between them, it was said, more than a thousand books. Even if this figure is exaggerated or if it counts as books what we would regard as essays and letters, the written record was clearly massive. That record no longer exists. Apart from three letters quoted by an ancient historian of philosophy, Diogenes Laertius, along with a list of forty maxims, almost nothing by Epicurus has survived. Modern scholarship, since the nineteenth century, has only been able to add some fragments. Some of these were culled from the blackened papyrus rolls found at Herculaneum; others were painstakingly recovered from the broken pieces of an ancient wall. On that wall,4 discovered in the town of Oenoanda, in the rugged mountains in southwest Turkey, an old man, in the early years of the second century CE, had had his distinctly Epicurean philosophy of life—“a fine anthem to celebrate the fullness of pleasure”—chiseled in stone. But where did all the books go?
The actual material disappearance of the books was largely the effect of climate and pests. Though papyrus and parchment were impressively long-lived (far more so than either our cheap paper or computerized data), books inevitably deteriorated over the centuries, even if they managed to escape the ravages of fire and flood. The ink was a mixture of soot (from burnt lamp wicks), water, and tree gum: that made it cheap and agreeably easy to read, but also water-soluble. (A scribe who made a mistake could erase it with a sponge.) A spilled glass of wine or a heavy downpour, and the text disappeared. And that was only the most common threat. Rolling and unrolling the scrolls or poring over the codices, touching them, dropping them, coughing on them, allowing them to be scorched by fire from the candles, or simply reading them over and over eventually destroyed them.
Carefully sequestering books from excessive use was of little help, for they then became the objects not of intellectual hunger but of a more literal appetite. Tiny animals, Aristotle noted, may be detected in such things as clothes, woolen blankets, and cream cheese. “Others are found,”5 he observed, “in books, some of them similar to those found in clothes, others like tailless scorpions, very small indeed.” Almost two thousand years later in Micrographia (1655), the scientist Robert Hooke reported with fascination what he saw when he examined one of these creatures under that remarkable new invention, the microscope:
a small white silver-shining6 Worm or Moth, which I found much conversant among books and papers, and is supposed to be that which corrodes and eats holes through the leaves and covers. Its head appears big and blunt, and its body tapers from it towards the tail, smaller and smaller, being shaped almost like a carrot…. It has two long horns before, which are straight, and tapering towards the top, curiously ringed or knobbed…. The hinder part is terminated with three tails, in every particular resembling the two longer horns that grow out of the head. The legs are scaled and haired. This animal probably feeds upon the paper and covers of books, and perforates in them several small round holes.
The bookworm—“one of the teeth of time,” as Hooke put it—is no longer familiar to ordinary readers, but the ancients knew it very well. In exile, the Roman poet Ovid likened the “constant gnawing7 of sorrow” at his heart to the gnawing of the bookworm—“as the book when laid away is nibbled by the worm’s teeth.” His contemporary Horace feared that his book will eventually become “food for vandal moths.”8 And for the Greek poet Evenus, the bookworm was the symbolic enemy of human culture: “Page-eater,9 the Muses’ bitterest foe, lurking destroyer, ever feeding on thy thefts from learning, why, black bookworm, dost thou lie concealed among the sacred utterances, producing the image of envy?” Some protective measures, such as sprinkling cedar oil on the pages, were discovered to be effective in warding off damage, but it was widely recognized that the best way to preserve books from being eaten into oblivion was simply to use them and, when they finally wore out, to make more copies.
Though the book trade in the ancient world was entirely about copying, little information has survived about how the enterprise was organized. There were scribes in Athens, as in other cities of the Greek and Hellenistic world, but it is not clear whether they received training in special schools or were apprenticed to master scribes or simply set up on their own. Some were evidently paid for the beauty of their calligraphy; others were paid by the total number of lines written (there are line numbers recorded at the end of some surviving manuscripts). In neither case is the payment likely to have gone directly to the scribe: many, perhaps most, Greek scribes10 must have been slaves working for a publisher who owned or rented them. (An inventory of the property of a wealthy Roman citizen with an estate in Egypt lists, among his fifty-nine slaves, five notaries, two amanuenses, one scribe, and a book repairer, along with a cook and a barber.) But we do not know whether these scribes generally sat in large groups, writing from dictation, or worked individually from a master copy. And if the author of the work was alive, we do not know if he was involved in checking or correcting the finished copy.
Somewhat more is known about the Roman book trade, where a distinction evolved between copyists (librari) and scribes (scribae). The librari generally were slaves or paid laborers who worked for booksellers. The booksellers set up advertisements on pillars and sold their wares in shops located in the Roman Forum. The scribae were free citizens; they worked as archivists, government bureaucrats, and personal secretaries. (Julius Caesar had seven scribes who followed him around taking dictation.) Wealthy Romans employed (or owned as slaves) personal librarians and clerks who copied books borrowed from the libraries of their friends. “I have received the book,”11 Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus, who had lent him a copy of a geographical work in verse by Alexander of Ephesus. “He’s incompetent as a poet and he knows nothing; however, he’s of some use. I’m having it copied and I’ll return it.”
Authors made nothing from the sale of their books; their profits derived from the wealthy patron to whom the work was dedicated. (The arrangement—which helps to account for the fulsome flattery of dedicatory epistles—seems odd to us, but it had an impressive stability, remaining in place until the invention of copyright in the eighteenth century.) Publishers had to contend,12 as we have seen, with the widespread copying of books among friends, but the business of producing and marketing books must have been a profitable one: there were bookshops not only in Rome but also in Brindisi, Carthage, Lyons, Reims, and other cities in the empire.
Large numbers of men and women—for there are records of female as well as male copyists—spent13 their lives bent over paper, with an inkwell, ruler, and hard split-reed pen, satisfying the demand for books. The invention of movable type14 in the fifteenth century changed the scale of production exponentially, but the book in the ancient world was not a rare commodity: a well-trained slave reading a manuscript aloud to a roomful of well-trained scribes15 could produce masses of text. Over the course of centuries, tens of thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of copies, were made and sold.
There was a time in the ancient world—a very long time—in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one’s head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst.
Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.
The scribes must have been among the first to notice: they had less and less to do. Most of the copying stopped. The slow rains, dripping through the holes in the decaying roofs, washed away the letters in books that the flames had spared, and the worms, those “teeth of time,” set
to work on what was left. But worms were only the lowliest agents of the Great Vanishing. Other forces were at work to hasten the disappearance of the books, and the crumbling of the shelves themselves into dust and ashes. Poggio and his fellow book hunters were lucky to find anything at all.
The fate of the books in all their vast numbers is epitomized in the fate of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library located not in Italy but in Alexandria,16 the capital of Egypt and the commercial hub of the eastern Mediterranean. The city had many tourist attractions, including an impressive theater and red-light district, but visitors always took note of something quite exceptional: in the center of the city, at a lavish site known as the Museum, most of the intellectual inheritance of Greek, Latin, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Jewish cultures had been assembled at enormous cost and carefully archived for research. Starting as early as 300 BCE, the Ptolomaic kings who ruled Alexandria had the inspired idea of luring leading scholars, scientists, and poets to their city by offering them life appointments at the Museum, with handsome salaries, tax exemptions, free food and lodging, and the almost limitless resources of the library.
The recipients of this largesse established remarkably high intellectual standards. Euclid developed his geometry in Alexandria; Archimedes discovered pi and laid the foundation for calculus; Eratosthenes posited that the earth was round and calculated its circumference to within 1 percent; Galen revolutionized medicine. Alexandrian astronomers postulated a heliocentric universe; geometers deduced that the length of a year was 365¼ days and proposed adding a “leap day” every fourth year; geographers speculated that it would be possible to reach India by sailing west from Spain; engineers developed hydraulics and pneumatics; anatomists first understood clearly that the brain and the nervous system were a unit, studied the function of the heart and the digestive system, and conducted experiments in nutrition. The level of achievement was staggering.
The Alexandrian library was not associated with a particular doctrine or philosophical school; its scope was the entire range of intellectual inquiry. It represented a global cosmopolitanism, a determination to assemble17 the accumulated knowledge of the whole world and to perfect and add to this knowledge. Fantastic efforts were made not only to amass vast numbers of books but also to acquire or establish definitive editions. Alexandrian scholars were famously obsessed with the pursuit of textual accuracy. How was it possible to strip away the corruptions that inevitably seeped into books copied and recopied, for the most part by slaves, for centuries? Generations of dedicated scholars developed elaborate techniques of comparative analysis and painstaking commentary in pursuit of the master texts. They pursued as well access to the knowledge that lay beyond the boundaries of the Greek-speaking world. It is for this reason that an Alexandrian ruler, Ptolomey Philadelphus, is said to have undertaken the expensive and ambitious project of commissioning some seventy scholars to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek. The result—known as the Septuagint (after the Latin for “seventy”)—was for many early Christians their principal access to what they came to call the Old Testament.
At its height the Museum contained at least a half-million papyrus rolls systematically organized, labeled, and shelved according to a clever new system that its first director, a Homer scholar named Zenodotus, seems to have invented: the system was alphabetical order. The institution extended beyond the Museum’s enormous holdings to a second collection, housed in one of the architectural marvels of the age, the Serapeon, the Temple of Jupiter Serapis. Adorned with elegant, colonnaded courtyards, lecture halls, “almost breathing statues,” and many other precious works of art, the Serapeon, in the words of Ammianus Marcellinus, the fourth-century historian rediscovered by Poggio, was second in magnificence18 only to the Capitol in Rome.
The forces that destroyed this institution help us understand how it came about that the Lucretius manuscript recovered in 1417 was almost all that remained of a school of thought that was once eagerly debated in thousands of books. The first blow came19 as a consequence of war. A part of the library’s collection—possibly only scrolls kept in warehouses near the harbor—was accidentally burned in 48 BCE when Julius Caesar struggled to maintain control of the city. But there were greater threats than military action alone, threats bound up with an institution that was part of a temple complex, replete with statues of gods and goddesses, altars, and other paraphernalia of pagan worship. The Museum was, as its name implies, a shrine dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses who embodied human creative achievement. The Serapeon, where the secondary collection was located, housed a colossal statue of the god Serapis—a masterpiece fashioned in ivory and gold by the famous Greek sculptor Bryaxis—combining the cult of the Roman deity Jupiter with the cult of the Egyptian deities Osiris and Apis.
The Jews and Christians who lived in large numbers in Alexandria were intensely uneasy with this polytheism. They did not doubt that other gods existed, but those gods were without exception demons, fiendishly bent on luring gullible humanity away from the sole and universal truth. All other revelations and prayers recorded in those mountains of papyrus rolls were lies. Salvation lay in the Scriptures, which Christians opted to read in a new format: not the old-fashioned scroll (used by Jews and pagans alike) but the compact, convenient, easily portable codex.
Centuries of religious pluralism under paganism—three faiths living side by side in a spirit of mingled rivalry and absorptive tolerance—were coming to an end. In the early fourth century the emperor Constantine began the process whereby Rome’s official religion became Christianity. It was only a matter of time20 before a zealous successor—Theodosius the Great, beginning in 391 CE—issued edicts forbidding public sacrifices and closing major cultic sites. The state had embarked on the destruction of paganism.
In Alexandria, the spiritual leader of the Christian community, the patriarch Theophilus, heeded the edicts with a vengeance. At once contentious and ruthless, Theophilus unleashed mobs of Christian zealots who roamed through the streets insulting pagans. The pagans responded with predictable shock and anxiety, and tensions between the two communities rose. All that was needed was an appropriately charged incident for matters to be brought to a head, and the incident was not long in coming. Workmen renovating a Christian basilica found an underground sanctuary that still contained pagan cult objects (such a sanctuary—a shrine to Mithras—may be seen today in Rome, deep below the Basilica of S. Clemente). Seeing a chance to expose the secret symbols of pagan “mysteries” to public mockery, Theophilus ordered that the cult objects be paraded through the streets.
Pious pagans erupted in anger: “as though,”21 a contemporary Christian observer wryly noted, “they had drunk a chalice of serpents.” The enraged pagans violently attacked Christians and then withdrew behind the locked doors of the Serapeon. Armed with axes and hammers, a comparably frenzied Christian crowd burst into the shrine, overwhelmed its defenders, and smashed the celebrated marble, ivory, and gold statue of the god. Pieces were taken to different parts of the city to be destroyed; the headless, limbless trunk was dragged to the theater and publicly burned. Theophilus ordered monks to move into the precincts of the pagan temple, whose beautiful buildings would be converted into churches. Where the statue of Serapis had stood, the triumphant Christians would erect reliquaries holding the precious remains of Elijah and John the Baptist.
After the downfall of the Serapeon, a pagan poet, Palladas, expressed his mood of devastation:
Is it not true22 that we are dead, and living only in appearance,
We Hellenes, fallen on disaster,
Likening life to a dream, since we remain alive while
Our way of life is dead and gone?
The significance of the destruction, as Palladas understood, extended beyond the loss of the single cult image. Whether on this occasion mayhem reached the library is unknown. But libraries, museums, and schools are fragile institutions; they cannot long survive violent assaults. A way of life was dying.
Hypatia was the daughter of a mathematician, one of the Museum’s famous scholars-in-residence. Legendarily beautiful as a young woman, she had become famous for her attainments in astronomy, music, mathematics, and philosophy. Students came from great distances to study the works of Plato and Aristotle under her tutelage. Such was her authority that other philosophers wrote to her and anxiously solicited her approval. “If you decree23 that I ought to publish my book,” wrote one such correspondent to Hypatia, “I will dedicate it to orators and philosophers together.” If, on the other hand, “it does not seem to you worthy,” the letter continues, “a close and profound darkness will overshadow it, and mankind will never hear it mentioned.”