by Stuart Kelly
A sepulchre of possible authors, a catafalque of contradictory texts: the Bible is a library, but one in ruins.
Sappho
{sixth century B.C.E.}
THE GREEK LYRICAL poet Sappho of Lesbos furnishes us with the most extreme example of what happens when any author is read. An interpretation does not filter out versions of history to distill some inalienable truth; it duplicates the past into the present. Like science-fiction attempts to clone an extinct species, the ancient DNA is fused into a contemporary cell and fostered in some suitable matrix. The reader re-creates the writer into his or her own world.
With an author like Sappho, most of whose nine books of poems have been lost, the very lack of a tangible text encourages her imaginative resurrection. Like a figure in a hall of mirrors, she is distorted, refracted, skewed, and twisted by the reader’s particular curvature. The bare bones of her biography are fleshed out with numerous myths, wishes, and archetypes, as well as some outright oddities. According to the Suda, she invented the plectrum.
Some fragments of a play called The Girl from Leukas, by the comic playwright Menander, display one of the earliest and most persistent of the legends about Sappho: that she committed suicide by flinging herself from a cliff because of her unrequited love for a ferryman called Phaon.
Sappho had written poems in the persona of the deity of love, Aphrodite, lamenting being spurned by the beautiful Phaon. In a curious instance of back-reading, based on the presumption that a female poet first could not impersonate, and second was irredeemably solipsistic, the imagined words of the goddess of love became the autobiographical outpourings of Sappho herself. Another tradition asserted that her husband was called Cercylas of Andros, and this union persists in some encyclopedias, even though, since the name means “Mr. Cock from Mansville,” it is most likely an invention of the comedians.
The Latin poet Ovid frequently recommended reading Sappho’s poetry to those who would become adept at courtship (and told those seeking alleviation from romance to strenuously avoid her). She was the pinnacle of female accomplishment in poetry and, as such, is the only nonlegendary heroine in his Heroides (although this may be a typically knowing wink). Ovid’s Sappho, supposedly writing to Phaon, “burns like Etna,” and her songs will be known throughout the whole world. When Seneca satirized ludicrous speculations in his Epistles to Lucilius, he wryly typified such endeavors as being like trying to find the birthplace of Homer, or resolve whether or not Sappho was a prostitute. Nonetheless, the joke was taken seriously by subsequent scholars.
In the Renaissance, the blame for the disappearance of Sappho’s poems was put on the church. Tatian, in the second century C.E., had referred to her as an erotomaniac, and it seemed apposite that a work which kindled the flames of love should itself be committed to the fire. At some point before the fall of Constantinople, the actual poems were eradicated.
But Sappho herself continued to be a byword for the female poet. In the eighteenth century she was a bluestocking, presiding over a coterie of acolytes. In the nineteenth, Christina Rossetti imagined her “living unloved, to die unknown / unwept, untended and alone,” a neurotic, suffocated martyr. The Modernists, such as Ezra Pound and H.D., made a virtue of necessity, and imitated the terse shards of what remained; and the postmodernists, not to be outdone, preferred the beauties of the blanks, gaps [ . . . ], and absences. Sappho was the laureate of the torn, the fissured, and the cavity.
Despite this parade of projections, in The Book of Lost Books, Sappho could be considered one of the lucky ones.
These scansion marks are practically the whole legacy of Telesilla of Argos. They represent the verse form, called the Telesillean, which she invented; a few scraps of her own verse survive, and a larger number of examples by male authors. She supposedly encouraged resistance to Spartan expansionism. Tatian informs us she was “silly” and “wrote nothing of worth.”
Myrtis of Boeotia, according to the Suda, was the tutor of the acclaimed poet Pindar, and another of her pupils, Corinna of Tangra, beat him in competitions, and rebuked him for adopting the Attic dialect. Neither has survived.
Praxilla of Sicyon, who wrote drinking songs; the “female Homer” Amyte of Tegea; Nossis of Locri; Moero of Byzantium; and Erinna have all been eradicated, with the exception of a few quotations and fifty-four lines of Erinna’s poem The Distaff.
Perilla, whom Ovid thought second only to Sappho, has joined the mute muses of antiquity, along with most of the work of Sulpicia and the Miscellaneous History of Pamphila. Whether it was Plutarch or his wife, Timoxena, who wrote the book On Cosmetics does not matter, since it no longer exists.
Instead of an array of possible roles, from political activist to theoretician of practical beauty, we are left with Sappho, most famous, as the Edinburgh Review noted, for “her love, her leap, her looks and her lyrics.” It is not an image without its pernicious, darker side; an insinuation that self-destruction is the natural corollary of female creativity. With Sappho: Letitia Landon, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Charlotte Mew, Virginia Woolf, Marina Tsvetaeva, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Sarah Kane.
K’ung Fu-tzu
{551–479 B.C.E.}
“FROM THE BIRTH of mankind until now, there has been none to equal him.” So said Mencius, an early interpreter and one of the foremost followers of K’ung Fu-tzu, known in the West as Confucius. The historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien in the first century B.C.E. claimed that ten generations had venerated Confucius, a commoner, while the memory of countless princes had vanished. The academic William Theodore de Barry in 1960 could likewise assert that “if we were to characterise in one word the Chinese way of life for the last two thousand years, the word would be ‘Confucian.’”
He is an endearingly unlikely revolutionary. Although countless fables have accreted to his name, we can safely say that he was born into a low-ranking family in the state of Lu, did not hold high office, traveled for a while and attracted disciples. After his peregrinations, he eventually returned home, and edited the “Six Works”: The Book of Poetry, The Book of Rituals, The Book of Music, The Book of History, The Book of Changes, and The Spring and Autumn Annals. He did not claim a divine provenance for his pronouncements, nor did he justify his propositions from an investigation into first principles. His work is not a manifesto, nor a prophecy, nor a tractatus. The closest possible analogy is a curriculum. Knowledge of the so-called Confucian Classics was central to the examination system, in which one’s results determined one’s place in the bureaucracy of China for two thousand years.
At the center of Confucius’ vision is a concept that defines his difference from other epochal figures: jen or “humaneness.” Translating concepts from Chinese is a perilous business, and various authors have suggested perfect virtue, magnanimity, altruism, and goodness. Confucius, when asked about jen by his pupil Fan Ch’ih, defined it as “to love others.” It connotes a virtue embedded in being human, which expands to encompass how one should behave toward others.
A closely aligned and similarly slippery concept is li. Originally, li meant “correct ceremony,” but again, the term enlarged to include the secular as well as the religious: somewhere between politeness and propriety, ritual and decorum, is li. Moreover, it was a fundamental aspect of good government. It was not merely a diplomatic stance, but a reflection of the smooth order between ruler and subject.
On another occasion, Confucius advanced a refinement on the interrelation between these attributes. “What has a man to do with the li if he lacks jen?” At the simplest level this is a clear indictment of hypocrisy. No amount of solemn observation of social niceties, civil responsibilities, and religious etiquette can compensate for a hardened heart. But Confucius continues, linking jen to another concept. “If a man is without jen, what has he to do with music?”
Music and li were paired in Confucius’ teaching. As well as possessing wisdom, courage, and self-control, the paradigmatic man would be refined by li and music. The man “whose mind was alr
eady awakened by understanding The Book of Poetry would be established by li and perfected by music.” What this perfection would consist of, we cannot know, as The Book of Music is lost.
Throughout the Lun yü or Analects, there are, however, numerous instances that testify to the importance of music in the scheme of Confucius’ thinking. On his travels, when Confucius heard the music of Shun, he did not eat meat for three months, saying, “I never dreamed that the joys of music could reach such heights.” After he returned to his home state of Lu, he set about reforming its music. An apocryphal story from the Shih chi of Ssu-ma Ch’ien claims that, as a young man, Confucius studied a piece of music with the Master Hsiang. He worked so assiduously that he could see the composer in his mind’s eye, and startled the Master by declaring (correctly) that the piece was written by King Wen, the so-called Cultured King.
Moreover, twice in the Analects, Confucius draws attention to the deleterious effects that improper music could have. The tunes from the state of Cheng were wanton, and comparable to specious orators. They had corrupted classical music, like the debased mixed color of purple that was replacing the pure color of vermilion, or like the self-interested and ambitiously clever men who treacherously deposed noble families.
Music, good government, humaneness, and ritual were all part of a seamless vision of an ordered universe. As Ssu-ma Ch’ien said, all of the six books help to govern: “The Book of Rites helps regulate men, The Book of Music brings about harmony, The Book of History records incidents, The Book of Poetry expresses emotions, The Book of Changes reveals supernatural influences and The Spring and Autumn Annals show what is right.” Confucius’ reforms of music sought to restore the pentatonic balances, stripping away innovation and mere decoration. Corrupted music could infect the whole universe with discord. Confucius clearly believed there was a political benefit to be gleaned from cultural savoir faire: he berated the official who knew the three hundred odes in The Book of Poetry by heart, but could not use them strategically when sent to foreign states.
Given its importance, it seems surprising that The Book of Music was lost. What is more surprising is that any of Confucius at all survived.
By 221 B.C.E., King Cheng, the overlord of a semibarbarous state known as Ch’in, finally conquered the remaining states of Chao, Yen, Ch’i, Ch’u, and Han (Lu, alongside many others, having been incorporated during the “Warring States” period). Under the name of August First Emperor Shih Huang-ti, he set about turning the disparate states into an empire.
He was assisted in this by his chancellor, Li Ssu, the theoretical architect behind the military might of the emperor. Li Ssu belonged to a school of thought known as legalism, which was fundamentally opposed to much of Confucian thought.
For example, Confucius’ ideal ruler led by being a moral exemplar to the people: his virtue would affect the populace in much the same way as grass could not help but be bent by the wind. Legalism had a very different approach to the business of governance. The emperor’s key function was punishment and reward; he made examples of the people.
While Shih Huang-ti became increasingly reliant on alchemists, searched for an elixir of eternal life, and commissioned his elaborate mausoleum, Li Ssu resolved to do something about “the men of letters who do not model themselves on the present, but study the past in order to criticize the present.” In tandem with Shih Huang-ti’s megalomaniac ambition to ensure that history would begin with his reign, the consequences were inevitable.
The result was the Burning of the Books, when the Chinese bureaucracy turned destructively against itself. Except for a single copy of each work, to be stored in the emperor’s personal library, Li Ssu initiated a purge. It was a crime to harbor books, and town squares were soon choked with the smoke of massive pyres. People heard discussing books were publicly executed, along with their immediate family. Officials who did not implement the new rules were punished in the same manner as the offenders. Two hundred and sixty Confucian scholars were buried, alive, in a mass grave, in order to prevent them from reconstructing the classics from memory.
The First Emperor died in 210 B.C.E. Li Ssu and the chief eunuch, Chao Kao, conspired to destroy the emperor’s decree that his eldest son should succeed to the throne, replacing the order with one in favor of the more pliable Hu-hai. Chao Kao then eliminated Li Ssu, forced Hu-hai to commit suicide (after slowly driving him mad with elaborate deceptions), and declared a grandson of Shih Huang-ti to be emperor. New internecine conflicts broke out, which ended with a former police officer establishing the Han dynasty.
The Han, however, were keen to curb the worst excesses of legalism and encouraged a resurgence in the Confucian system. Scholars re-edited, and occasionally even rewrote, the five remaining Classics. The Book of Music was lost entirely during the burning. Eventually, in 175 B.C.E., a decree was issued that the surviving texts, which for nearly half a century had persisted in the hearts and minds of men, should be engraved on stone.
Aeschylus
{c. 525–456 B.C.E.}
PTOLEMY III (247–222 B.C.E.) had a lot to live up to. His grandfather Ptolemy I had accompanied Alexander the Great on his campaigns and, on the conqueror’s death, acquired the government of Egypt. There he had constructed a new wonder of the world: the Alexandrian Library. The repository grew out of Aristotle’s personal library. In addition, Ptolemy I, called the Preserver, brought such scholars as Euclid the geometer and the grammarian Zenodotus to create the most distinguished academy of literary, historical, philosophical, mathematical, and astronomical knowledge in the known world. The Preserver’s son Ptolemy II secured and expanded the library. According to tradition, to satisfy his desire that the library should be the most complete as well as the most prestigious, he employed seventy Jewish scholars to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. Such endeavors require peace, and Ptolemy II brokered a treaty with the Romans and forged a dynastic alliance with the erstwhile enemy of the Egyptians, Antiochus II of Syria, by giving his daughter Berenice in marriage.
So, in time, Ptolemy III inherited a legacy of military security and intellectual esteem, along with the urge to outdo his ancestors and further extend the glory of Egypt. As luck would have it, Antiochus II callously divorced and poisoned Berenice as soon as Ptolemy II died, and Ptolemy III waged a war of vengeance, subduing Asia from Mesopotamia to Babylon and recapturing statues of deities stolen throughout the wars between Egypt and Persia. He conquered deep into the south, as far as Ethiopia, and developed a powerful maritime fleet. The garlands of victory were all very well, no doubt, but his predecessors were praised as men of letters as well as heroic conquerors. Ptolemy III turned his attentions to the library.
Cataloguing the library’s 200,000 scrolls began in earnest, and an anomaly of unthinkable proportions was discovered. Pharaoh had no Aeschylus. That the “Cage of the Muses,” as some referred to the library, lacked a complete text of the most revered Athenian dramatist seemed an unforgivable oversight. Obtaining it would provide the perfect demonstration that Ptolemy III had accomplished what Ptolemy II and Ptolemy I had failed to do. Alexandria would have its Aeschylus.
The Athenians had the only copy of The Complete Works of Aeschylus in existence. After, one assumes, protracted negotiations, it was agreed that these revered scrolls might be transported to Alexandria for scholars to make an accurate copy, and then returned to Athens. To ensure that this agreement was honored, Ptolemy III would deposit fifteen silver talents with the Athenians, repayable when the text was brought back intact. This was a phenomenal amount of money: the entire annual Jewish tribute payment amounted to only twenty silver talents, and that had driven them close to rebellion. Following the agreement, the manuscript arrived in Alexandria.
Did the idea arise in Ptolemy’s own mind? Did a librarian impress upon his pharaoh exactly what they had? This was the sole complete copy of Aeschylus in existence. It was a unicum, a nonpareil, a one and only. It was the Golden Fleece, it was Helen of Troy’s wedding ring, it
was the ball of string that Theseus unraveled in the Labyrinth. It was worth losing fifteen silver talents. How could the Athenians protest against the Vanquisher of Syria?
The scripts stayed in Alexandria, with a strict injunction that no copy should ever be made. And then Ptolemy III died. Later, Ptolemy XIII died. Finally, the empire died. Their religion died. But the original manuscript remained: it, and its singularity, preserved. Since its transcription was forbidden, scholars flocked from around the known world and from every intellectual background to read it: Plotinus the Neo-Platonist, Clement of Alexandria, Diodorus of Sicily, Nepotian of Africa, even Aelian, who notoriously hated travel. Some came to marvel at the poetic majesty; others came to ponder whether, in a line from Prometheus Bound, “Nothing will make me reveal the name of the God to come who is greater than Zeus,” Aeschylus had had an out-of-time inkling of Christianity. None of them quibbled with the centuries-old piece of self-important petulance that kept the manuscript there.
On December 22, 640 C.E., a reader with a very different agenda was in control of Alexandria. His aesthetics were strict: “Those which disagree with the Word of God are blasphemous, those which agree, superfluous.” Amrou ibn el-Ass, on direct orders from the caliph, decreed that the library be burned. The scrolls opened a final time, unfurled before the unscholarly eyes of flame, and The Complete Works of Aeschylus became lost forever.
One of the more astonishing examples of acquired behavior in the animal kingdom occurs in the eagles of southeast Europe. As documented by the ornithologist Grubač, these birds not only have adapted to their habitat, but also make active use of their environment. One of the primary sources of nutrition in harsh, rocky climates, along with hedge-hogs, Boback marmosets, and large-toothed susliks, is the tortoise. The eagles have been observed, gliding at low altitude, to drop suddenly into a plunging attack, and curl their talons around the rim of the tortoise’s shell. They then soar to upwards of one hundred meters, and drop their catch onto round, exposed stones in order to split the shell. With the protective armor of its quarry shattered, the eagle can then eviscerate its prey with relative ease.