by David Grant
Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica later recalled the objections of Apollonius ‘The Grammarian’ (amongst others) to the plagiarism of Theopompus and Ephorus, and he also brought to our attention the books with telling titles: Latinus’ six books On the Books of Menander that were Not by Him and Philostratus’ treatise On the Plagiarisms (or Thefts) of Sophocles.76 Some misattribution was of course innocent and later writers repeatedly misidentified authors of the same name; as many as twenty writers named Dionysius or Ptolemy are known to us, a situation which prompted Demetrius of Magnesia, a tutor to Cicero, to publish Of Poets and Writers of the Same Names, which sought to differentiate them.
The real identities of the Pseudo-Callisthenes attached to the Romance and of the Curtius Rufus who biographed Alexander, remain just as obscure; both may prove to be classic cases of mistaken identity. But these are not unique; the Byzantine encyclopaedia we know today as the Suda, possibly deriving from the Greek souda meaning ‘fortress’ or ‘stronghold’, was thought by Eustathius (ca. 1110-1198) the Archbishop of Thessalonica, to be named after its compiler, Suidas. This is a worrying state of affairs as Eustathius presented himself as a scholar on things Homeric.77 In truth, we don’t know its etymology; although Strabo mentioned a Suidas as author of a separate work on Thessaly, the 10th century lexicon, with its 30,000 entries, remains essentially orphaned.
Even the venerable tales of Homer and the Epic Cyle were surrounded by confusion and they were not beyond early exploitation. From the fall of Troy to the Persian Wars, Greek history was ‘covered with an obscurity broken only by dim and scattered gleams of truth’.78 It was an environment bound to give birth to legends, lies and folklore; after all, ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’. As for the view of Plato on the matter: ‘Hesiod and Homer and the other poets… composed false stories which they told people and are still telling them.’79 Although his pupil, Aristotle, concluded: ‘It is not the poet’s function to describe what has actually happened, but the kinds of thing that might happen’,80 the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heracleitus of Ephesus (ca. 535-475 BCE), declared: ‘Homer deserved to be expelled from the contests and flogged.’ Herodotus argued that Homer exaggerated because he was a ‘poet’ when his own father had been an epic poet too; even Thucydides couldn’t resist taking a stab at the author from pre-history.81
Despite these criticisms, or perhaps because of their underlying allegations, newly manipulated accounts of the war for Troy had surfaced by two supposed participants. The anonymous composers, the ‘charlatans [who] cloak their non-existence with names well-tailored to their roles in the accounts of dramatic historians’, were apparently exercising their rhetorical skills through the eyewitness accounts of Dares of Phrygia, a Trojan ally, and Dictys of Knossos on Crete who arrived with the invading Greeks.82 The diary of Dictys, written in Punic, was ferried from Crete back to the philhellene emperor Nero who enthusiastically commissioned a translation into Greek.83
Paralleling Dictys’ tale, and supposedly unearthed when an earthquake revealed his tomb, was the De excidio Troiae historia (The History of the Destruction of Troy) of Dares which contained an absurd precision of detail: the war for Troy lasted ten years, six months and twelve days, with 676,000 defenders and 886,000 Hellenic invaders taking part. Yet it fooled the influential Augustan-era historian Cornelius Nepos, an influential friend of the ‘new poet’ Catullus (ca. 84-54 BCE), and it even duped the sapient Cicero. Nepos wrote to his lettered friend Sallust explaining that he ‘delighted’ at finding a ‘history written in Dares’ own hand’; ‘Thus my readers… can judge for themselves whether Dares the Phrygian or Homer wrote the more truthfully; Dares, who lived and fought at the time the Greeks stormed Troy, or Homer, who was born long after the War was over.’84
These newly appeared accounts were, however, more accessible than the originals of Homer, whose Odyssey had been translated into Latin as early as ca. 250 BCE by Livius Andronicus. Once translated into Latin by Nepos, these easy-to-read diaries with elaborate prefatory letters giving the precise circumstances of their discovery, were immortalised into the romances of the Middle Ages, for example in the form of Benoit de Sainte-Maure’s Le Roman de Troie, inspiring Giovanni Boccaccio to his Filostrato, which was, in turn, adapted by Geoffrey Chaucer to his Troilus and Criseyde.85 Elements of Dares and Dictys even entered a French edition of the Iliad by Jean Samxon in 1530.86 Their continued popularity reflected their monopoly on information concerning the Trojan War, that is until Petrarch was able to acquire a ‘very wooden’ Latin translation of a genuine Homer manuscript from Constantinople in the 1360s. Remarkably the West had been blind to original Homer for almost 1,000 years. Luckily, as Polybius knew, ‘justice has an eye’.87
Rome also fell for the Batrachomyomachia, The Battle of Frogs and Mice, a parody of the Iliad with probable Hellenistic origins but regarded as a genuine Homer work. Plutarch was less convinced and pinned the epic poem on Pigres of Halicarnassus who was of Carian royalty and thus an ally of the Great King Xerxes, and surely this better explained its blatant Trojan irreverence.88 Recalling that Alexander once described a clash fought at Megalopolis between Antipater and a Sparta-led Greek coalition as a ‘battle of mice’, we may ponder whether the origins of the Batrachomyomachia were earlier still.89
Further evidence of manipulation of the Homeric epics comes from Strabo in his Geography. He proposed that a verse supporting Athens’ claim to the island of Salamis had been inserted into the Iliad by Solon or by the tyrant, Peisistratus.90 According to Herodotus, and somewhat suspiciously, Onomacritus, the friend and counsellor of Peisistratus, had been banished from Athens after it had been proven that he added his own material when editing the Oracles of Musaeus, the 6th century mystic seer, predicting the islands off Lemnos would disappear into the sea.91
Tampering with text was not the exclusive territory of historians and antiquarians. Legislation passed by Lycurgus the Athenian logographer and one of the so-named Ten Attic Orators, suggests creative interpolation had been damagingly interwoven into Greek drama. The new law demanded that actors should not deviate from the ‘official’ scripts as part of a move to preserve the integrity of the original plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. So liberated from the originals had the thespians’ lines become that actors were threatened with losing their performing licenses if embellishment was detected.
But a precedent had already been set; some two centuries earlier Solon had berated Thespis (6th century), the first actor to perform on stage as a character from a tragedy, for telling blatant lies; Thespis predictably replied that there was nothing wrong with lying in a play.92 Many of the new deviations were no doubt justified under the banner of parrhesia, freedom of speech, and they were later picked up by scholiasts in the Library at Alexandria proving Lycurgus’ attempts were not altogether successful. But theatre was particularly susceptible to manipulation and misattribution; in Rome the prolific Varro judged 109 of 130 plays credited to Plautus to be falsely assigned, whilst the remaining twenty-one were termed ‘Varronian’ or ‘Plautines’ in recognition of the forensic success.93
Other early and more basic investigative models had existed to challenge the veracity of texts; Porphyry (literally ‘the Purple’), for example, the Neo-Platonist philosopher of Tyre who, in the 3rd century CE, questioned a wide swath of literary and religious validity: from Homer’s blindness in his Homeric Questions, to Christian texts and other pseudepigrapha. But to attribute deeper schematic thoughts on methodology to the ancient compilers of books would be to commit a ‘hagiographical anachronism’, to use Grafton’s term.94
‘HABENT SUA FATA LIBELLI’ – FROM PAPYRUS TO THE MODERN CODEX95
We use the term ‘book’ liberally and certainly it is true that habent sua fata libelli – ‘books have their own destiny’. Firstly, we should differentiate the handwritten codices manu scripti, which gave us our term ‘manuscript’, from codices impressi, the printed books that arrived in 1439 with Gutenberg’s mechanical press
and which immediately reduced the room for future transmission errors. Paper was first imported into Europe around the 10th century and was manufactured in the West from the 12th century onwards, with watermarks soon following. Until the development of the printing press and oil-based inks which led to the production of editiones principes – the first editions to exist outside of manuscripts – all written pieces of historical evidence, whether a mighty Bibliotheke, or a pamphlet of anecdotes, ‘were exposed to all the chances and imperfections which attend the scribe and pen’, so commented Falconer Madan in his 1893 treatise on the subject written at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.96
Until 1500 (so convention has it) the incunabula, the books printed using wood blocks or moveable metal typographic sets, were laid out to replicate the manuscript format, complete with the diverse typefaces, abbreviated sentences, columns, margin notes and rubrications; with them were reproduced the decorative and much enlarged chapter-opening letters.97 Although a print-press defect was an error immortalised in every future run, manuscripts were at least now ‘crystallised’ and could not decrepitate further. Mark Twain weighed up the merits of the device that lay behind the literary reinvigoration of the Renaissance:
What the world is today, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source, but we are bound to bring him homage… for the bad that his colossal invention has brought about is overshadowed a thousand times by the good with which mankind has been favoured.98
But the story of the book, like the tale of Alexander, truly commenced in Egypt, the home of papyrus scrolls, with the earliest extant specimens dating to ca. 3,500 BCE.99 Their preparation was lucidly described by the inquisitive Pliny in his Natural History (drawing from Theophrastus’ earlier Enquiry into Plants), the compiling of which he viewed with a weighty gravitas: ‘thesaurus oportet esse, non libros’, ‘there must be treasure houses, not books’.100
The inner rind, biblos, which gave us the word ‘bible’, was cross-braided and bound with glue and then pressed and dried and made ready for ink. Like modern textured paper, papyrus had a front and reverse, with one receptive to ink and the other coarser and less readily written on. This observation is helping modern researchers unravel the life cycles of newly found palimpsests; in one case, what was once considered the ‘original text’ recording a funeral oration we now frequently refer to as (the remarkably eloquent) Hyperides over Leosthenes and his Comrades in the Lamian War, written 322 BCE, the year following Alexander’s death, has now been subordinated to a horoscope from 95 CE, for this occupied the ‘right side’ of the scroll.101 The original would have benefited from having a sillabos, a reference tag explaining the content that Polybius termed a prographe.102
Papyri were best preserved rolled up and housed in jars, a state described by the Latin volumen which gives us our ‘volumes’. In Rome, first-quality papyrus was once termed ‘Augustan’, second quality ‘Livian’ after the Emperor’s wife, and the ‘hieratic’ grade used for administrative records came in third.103 Formats continued to evolve as texts were copied to parchments, finely pressed animal skins, which included vellum from the Latin vitulinum, skin ‘from the calf’. These were more hardwearing and had the added advantage of being scratchable for erasing mistakes. They were more expensive too but their emergence had been necessitated by the restrictions the Ptolemies placed on papyrus exports. In response to the squeeze, Eumenes II, the king of Pergamum where a competing library emerged, had the old art of parchment preparation perfected; they became known as membrana (or charta) pergamena in Latin.104 Parchment was expensive and therefore copyists were fewer and more carefully chosen.
By Arrian’s day the codex had arrived, the new book format that had developed from the old practice of stringing wooden writing tablets together. The codex was first described by the poet Martial in ca. 85/86 CE, when it began the gradual process of replacing the scroll.105 A standard papyrus roll was made from twenty sheets glued together and was some 15 to 20 feet long when fully unravelled. Papyri of major works often ran to unwieldy lengths – 30 feet or more; the last two books of the Iliad alone ran to 25 feet.106 The codices, representing the modern book format, were much more compact, as both sides of each leaf could be read in succession giving us recto and verso pages. The works of Homer, previously housed in fifteen thick scrolls, could be compressed to a practical size, and additionally, specific lines and middle chapters could be more easily accessed. Martial’s amazement at the result is recorded: ‘How small a tablet contains immense Virgil!’
But even the compact codices produced before the turbulence that followed the last of the Severan emperors (Alexander Severus, ruled 222-235 CE) which resulted in a division that produced the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, as well as the rise of the Sassanids, were not guaranteed to survive into the Byzantine era. Today only several of the oldest codices of Virgil survive, and just one copy of Homer. Primary materials that did survive through the 4th and 5th centuries had a better chance for further longevity if they were already ‘codexed’, as these books had the protection of leather covers where scrolled papyri did not. Works that had been hidden, or particularly well prepared, fared better.
The parchment skins of many of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, are still almost white rather than a faded yellow; it is thought they were treated with salt and flour to remove the hair, and then tanned with a gallnut liquid brushed on both surfaces. But the inks of this period were generally still charcoal-based and so were too easily erased by accident or were mendaciously amended. Reed pens gave way to quills in the 6th century, by which time the previously vulnerable ink of soot, gum and water, had evolved into a more permanent mix of gum, gallic acid and iron sulphate, a formula that was in fact used as early as the Herculaneum Scrolls, a collection of carbonised papyri unearthed in 1752 under the volcanic mud of Vesuvius and a find that has been described as the ‘only intact library from antiquity’.
THE FATE AND FALL OF THE CLASSICAL LIBRARY
If political turmoil was often the catalyst behind a historian picking up a pen, sadly it was often the reason for the irrevocable loss of his output. In a sense, libraries were both the saviour and the nemesis of literature, for though their collecting and copying provided some order and safety to the few ancient texts in circulation, the delicate literary eggs were then all in one easily targeted basket. Libraries were prizes of war: Xerxes ferried Peisistratus’ public library (the first in Athens) back to Persia before putting Athens to the torch in 480 BCE; King Perseus’ Macedonian library at Pella went back to Rome with Aemilius Paullus; and Mark Antony gifted the entire contents of the Pergamum library (some 200,000 scrolls) to Cleopatra, in the process ending the literary legacy of the Attalids.107 What was most likely a more modest library at Antioch found by the Seleucids (certainly by the reign of Antiochus III, 222-187 BCE) probably disappeared when Pompey annexed Syria in 64 BCE.
Although more robust parchments were creeping into the scriptoriums, a voluminous world history would have been prohibitively costly for a provincial library to procure on vellum despite the advent of awkward opisthographs, scrolls written on both sides to save space and materials before the codex arrived.108 So cheaper but frailer papyrus remained the copyists’ principal medium well past the arrival of skins, especially in Egypt.109 This meant that the condition of the major Greek works demanded by the Roman literati was already poor. Neleus of Scepsis, to whom Theophrastus bequeathed his own library in his Will – some 232,808 lines of text and which include Aristotle’s collection gifted with the school – absconded sometime around 287 BCE with the scrolls, though as a metoikos (foreign resident) in Athens, Aristotle was not technically able to ‘own’ the Peripatus and neither bequeath its contents in his Will.
The fate of the collection thereafter is uncertain: Neleus’ heirs either had the scrolls hidden in a basement to prevent the princes of Pergamum from appropriating the collection, or as Athenaeus claimed, he sold them to Ptolemy II Philadelphos who i
mported the collection to the Alexandrian Library.110 According to Strabo, however, around 100 BCE the mildewed and worm-eaten remnants of Neleus’ library were sold to Apellicon of Teos, a minor Athenian military leader and a philobiblos, a lover of books. Apellicon, who had fled Athens after stealing a number of rare works to enrich his own shelves, tried to restore the volumes himself.111 He only succeeded in damaging them further when inserting ‘incorrect corrections’ for missing fragments of pages, and otherwise poorly editing the works.’112
A 19th century engraving of the cataloguing of scrolls at the Library in Alexandria.
When the Roman consul and dictator Sulla ‘liberated’ the library to Rome, it needed much salvaging by Tyrannio whom Cicero later employed alongside a full staff to renovate his own private collection.113 These works had already been subjected to editing by Andronicus of Rhodes (floruit ca. 60 BCE), the scholarchos and head of the Peripatetic school who organised Aristotle’s work into the chapter and book divisions that survive today.114 Although Diodorus confirmed the goldmine of resurrected sources when he arrived in Rome from Sicily, the damaging patching-up had already been done.115