The Swerve
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17 Among them: Athens, Cyprus, Como, Milan, Smyrna, Patrae, Tibur—from which books could even be borrowed. But see the inscription found in the Agora of Athens, on the wall of the Library of Pantainos (200 ce): “No book shall be removed, since we have sworn thus. Opening hours are from six in the morning until noon” (quoted in Sider, The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, p. 43).
18 Clarence E. Boyd, Public Libraries and Literary Culture in Ancient Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1915), pp. 23–24.
19 Cf. Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
20 Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 237.
21 Knut Kleve, “Lucretius in Herculaneum,” in Croniche Ercolanesi 19 (1989), p. 5.
22 In Pisonem (“Against Piso”), in Cicero, Orations, trans. N. H. Watts, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 252 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), p. 167 (“in suorum Gaecorum foetore atque vino”).
23 The Epigrams of Philodemos, ed. and trans. David Sider (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 152.
24 Though there had been a serious recent earthquake, the last major eruption had taken place in 1200 BCE, so the source of queasiness, if there was one, was not the volcano.
25 Cicero, De natura deorum (“On the Nature of the Gods”), trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, 268 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 1.6, pp. 17–19.
26 Ibid., p. 383.
27 Cicero, De officiis (“On Duties”), trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library, 30. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), 1.37, p. 137.
28 As I will discuss below, the word translated here as “superstitition” is in Latin religio, that is, “religion.”
29 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library, 184–85 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 2:531–33.
30 Epicurus’ epilogismos was a term frequently used to suggest “reasoning based on empirical data,” but according to Michael Schofield, it conveys “our everyday procedures of assessment and appraisal”—Schofield, in Rationality in Greek Thought, ed. Michael Frede and Gisele Striker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Schofield suggests that these procedures are linked to a famous passage by Epicurus on time: “We must not adopt special expressions for it, supposing that this will be an improvement; we must use just the existing ones,” p. 222. The thinking that Epicurus urged upon his followers was “a perfectly ordinary kind of activity available to all, not a special intellectual accomplishment restricted to, for example, mathematicians or dialecticians,” p. 235.
31 Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes (“Tusculan Disputations”), trans. J. E. King. Loeb Classical Library, 141 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 1.6.10.
32 Ibid., 1.21.48–89.
33 The charge was made by “Timocrates, the brother of Metrodorus, who was his [Epicurus’] disciple and then left the school,” in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library, 185 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 2:535.
34 Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard Gummere, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), 1:146.
35 Letter to Menoeceus, in Laertius, Lives, 2:657.
36 Philodemus, On Choices and Avoidances, trans. Giovanni Indelli and Voula Tsouna-McKirahan, La Scuola di Epicuro, 15 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1995), pp. 104–6.
37 Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. Alvin B. Kernan, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), II.ii.41–42; 72–87. Jonson is participating in a tradition of representing Epicurus as the patron saint of the inn and the brothel, a tradition that includes Chaucer’s well-fed Franklin, who is described in the Canterbury Tales as “Epicurus owene sone.”
38 Maxim #7, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library, 185 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925; rev. ed. 1931), 1:665.
39 Vatican sayings 31, in A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1:150.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE TEETH OF TIME
1 Cf. Moritz W. Schmidt, De Didymo Chalcentero (Oels: A. Ludwig, 1851) and Didymi Chalcenteri fragmenta (Leipzig: Teubner, 1854).
2 Cf. David Diringer, The Book Before Printing (New York: Dover Books, 1982), pp. 241ff.
3 Diogenes Laertius: “Epicurus was a most prolific author and eclipsed all before him in the number of his writings: for they amount to about three hundred rolls, and contain not a single citation from other authors; it is Epicurus himself who speaks throughout”—Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2:555. Diogenes Laertius lists the titles of thirty-seven books by Epicurus, all of which have been lost.
4 Cf. Andrew M. T. Moore, “Diogenes’s Inscription at Oenoanda,” in Dane R. Gordon and David B. Suits, eds., Epicurus: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance (Rochester, NY: Rochester Institute of Technology Cary Graphic Arts Press, 2003), pp. 209–14. See The Epicurean Inscription [of Diogenes of Oinoanda], ed. and trans. Martin Ferguson Smith (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992).
5 Aristotle, Historia animalium, trans. A. L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library, 438 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965–91), 5:32.
6 Quoted in William Blades, The Enemies of Books (London: Elliot Stock, 1896), pp. 66–67.
7 Ovid, Ex ponto, trans. A. L. Wheeler, rev. G. P. Goold, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 1.1.73.
8 Horace, Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library, 194 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), Epistle 1.20.12.
9 In Greek Anthology, trans. W. R. Paton, Loeb Classical Library, 84 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 9:251. (Evenus of Ascalon, fl. between 50 BCE and 50 CE).
10 Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 4.
11 Quoted in Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 77.
12 Leila Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books: The Book Arts from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Chicago: American Library Association, 1991), p. 171. See also pp. 149–53.
13 On women copyists, see Haines-Eitzen.
14 It is estimated that the number of books that had been produced cumulatively in the history of the world before 1450 was equaled by the number produced between 1450 and 1500; that this number was produced again between 1500 and 1510; and that twice this number was produced in the next decade.
15 On scribes, see L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 2nd edn. (London: Oxford University Press, 1974); Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books; Rosamond McKitterick, Books, Scribes and Learning in the Frankish Kingdoms, 6th–9th Centuries (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1994); M. B. Parkes, Scribes, Scripts, and Readers (London: Hambledon Press, 1991). On the symbolic significance of the scribe, cf. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 246ff. Avicenna’s figure of “perfect potentiality,” for example, is the scribe in the moment in which he does not write.
16 Huge granaries south of Alexandria received endless bargeloads of grain, harvested from the rich flood plains along the river. These had been scrutinized by lynx-eyed officials, appointed to ensure that the grain was “unadulterated, with no admixture of earth or barley, untrodden and sifted”—Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 42. The sacks in their thousands were then transported by canal to the harbor, where the grain fleet awaited them. From there the heavily laden ships fanned out to c
ities whose burgeoning populations had long outstripped the capacity of the surrounding countryside to support them. Alexandria was one of the key control points in the ancient world for bread and hence stability and hence power. Grain was not the sole commodity that Alexandria controlled; the city’s merchants were famous for the trade in wine, linens, tapestries, glass, and—most interesting for our purposes—papyrus. The huge marshes near the city were particularly suitable for the cultivation of the reeds from which the best paper was made. All through the ancient world, from the time of the Caesars to the rule of the Frankish kings, “Alexandrian papyrus” was the preferred medium on which bureaucrats, philosophers, poets, priests, merchants, emperors, and scholars gave orders, recorded debts, and wrote down their thoughts.
17 Ptolomey III (246–221 BCE) is said to have sent messages to all the rulers of the known world, asking for books to copy. Officials were under order to confiscate from passing ships all the books that they had on board. Copies of these books were made and returned, but the originals went into the great library (where in the catalogue they were marked “from the ships”). Royal agents fanned out through the Mediterranean to buy or borrow more and more books. Lenders grew increasingly wary—borrowed books had a way of not coming back—and demanded large deposits. When, after intense cajoling, Athens agreed to lend Alexandria its precious authoritative texts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—texts that were zealously guarded in the city’s records office—the city insisted on the enormous bond of 15 talents of gold. Ptolomey posted the bond, received the books, sent copies back to Athens, and, forfeiting the bond, deposited the originals in the Museum.
18 Ammianus Marcellinus, History, Loeb Classical Library, 315 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), 2:303. Cf. Rufinus: “The whole edifice is built of arches with enormous windows above each arch. The hidden inner chambers are separate from one another and provide for the enactment of various ritual acts and secret observances. Sitting courts and small chapels with images of the gods occupy the edge of the highest level. Lofty houses rise up there in which the priests … are accustomed to live. Behind these buildings, a freestanding portico raised on columns and facing inward runs around the periphery. In the middle stands the temple, built on a large and magnificent scale with an exterior of marble and precious columns. Inside there was a statue of Serapis so vast that the right hand touched one wall and the left the other”—Cited in Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, p. 148.
19 Alexandria was, as we have seen, a strategically important city, and it could not escape the conflicts that constantly tore at the fabric of Roman society. In 48 BCE, Julius Caesar pursued his rival Pompey to Alexandria. At the Egyptian king’s command, Pompey was promptly murdered—his head was presented to Caesar who professed to be grief-stricken. But though he probably had no more than 4,000 troops, Caesar decided to remain and secure control of the city. At one point in the course of the nine-month struggle that followed, the gravely outnumbered Romans found themselves threatened by a royal fleet that had sailed into the harbor. Using resin-smeared pine torches with an undercoating of sulfur, Caesar’s forces managed to set the ships on fire. The conflagration was intense, for the hulls were sealed with highly flammable pitch and the decks were caulked with wax. (Details of the firing of ancient fleets are from Lucan, Pharsalia, trans. Robert Graves [Baltimore: Penguin, 1957], p. 84, III:656–700). The fire leaped from the ships to the shore and then spread through the wharves to the library, or at least to storehouses that held some of the collections. The books themselves were not the object of attack; they were merely convenient combustible material. But burned books do not take into consideration the arsonist’s intentions. Caesar left the conquered city in the hands of the deposed king’s glamorous and resourceful sister, Cleopatra. Some portion of the library’s losses may have been quickly restored—a few years later the besotted Mark Antony is said to have given Cleopatra some 200,000 books that he had looted from Pergamum. (Columns from Pergamum’s library are still visible among the impressive ruins of that once great city on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.) Books randomly stolen from one library and dumped into another do not, however, make up for the destruction of a collection that has been painstakingly and intelligently assembled. No doubt the library staff worked feverishly to repair the losses, and the institution, with its scholars and its enormous resources, remained a celebrated one. But the point must have been painfully clear: Mars is an enemy of books.
20 It was not until 407 that bishops in the empire were granted the legal authority to close or demolish temples—Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, p. 160.
21 Rufinus, cited in ibid., pp. 161–62.
22 Greek Anthology, p. 172.
23 The Letters of Synesius of Cyrene, trans. Augustine Fitzgerald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), p. 253. Something in Hepatia’s whole way of being evidently excited profound respect, not only from scholars but also from the great mass of her fellow citizens. A young man from Damascus who traveled to Alexandria to study philosophy some two generations later still heard stories of the admiration that Hypatia aroused: “The entire city naturally loved her and held her in exceptional esteem, while the powers-that-be paid their respects first to her”—Damascius, The Philosophical History, trans. Polhymnia Athanassiadi (Athens: Apamea Cultural Association, 1999), p. 131. Cf. the poet Palladas’ praise of Hypatia:
Searching the zodiac, gazing on Virgo,
Knowing your province is really the heavens,
Finding your brilliance everywhere I look,
I render you homage, revered Hypatia,
Teaching’s bright star, unblemished, undimmed …
Poems, trans. Tony Harrison (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1975), no. 67.
24 Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History (London: Samuel Bagster & Sons, 1844), p. 482.
25 See The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu [c. CE 690], trans. R. H. Charles (London: Text and Translation Society, 1916): “she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through (her) Satanic wiles. And the governor of the city honoured her exceedingly; for she had beguiled him through her magic” (84:87–88), p. 100.
26 More than two hundred years later, when the Arabs conquered Alexandria, they evidently found books on the shelves, but these were for the most part works of Christian theology, not pagan philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. When Caliph Omar was asked what to do with this remnant, he is said to have sent a chilling reply: “If the content of the books is in accordance with the book of Allah, we may do without them, for in that case, the book of Allah more than suffices. If, on the other hand, they contain matter not in accordance with the book of Allah there can be no need to preserve them. Proceed, then, and destroy them.” Quoted in Roy MacLeod, ed., The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), p. 10. If the story is to be believed, the papyrus rolls, parchments, and codices were distributed to the public baths and burned in the stoves that heated the water. This fuel supply, legend has it, lasted for some six months. See also Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World, trans. Martin Ryle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), and Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World. On Hypatia, see Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
27 Ammianus Marcellinus, History, trans. Rolfe, I: 47 (xiv.6.18).
28 Jerome, Select Letters of St. Jerome, Loeb Classical Library, 2362 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), Letter XXII (to Eustochium), p. 125.
29 “When I was a young man, though I was protected by the rampart of the lonely desert, I could not endure against the promptings of sin and the ardent heat of my nature. I tried to crush them by frequent fasting, but my mind was always in a turmoil of imagination. To subdue it I put myself in the hands of one of the brethren who had been a Hebrew before his conversion, and asked him to teach me his language. Thus, after ha
ving studied the pointed style of Quintilian, the fluency of Cicero, the weightiness of Fronto, and the gentleness of Pliny, I now began to learn the alphabet again and practice harsh and guttural words [stridentia anhelantiaque verba]”—Jerome, Select Letters, p. 419. In the same letter, Jerome advises a monk, “Twist lines too for catching fish, and copy out manuscripts, so that your hand may earn you food and your soul be satisfied with reading,” p. 419. The copying of manuscripts in monastic communities, as we have already seen, turned out to be crucial to the survival of Lucretius and other pagan texts.