Rude Talk in Athens

by Mark Haskell Smith

  Of course we know from Ariphrades’s example that not all the Athenians felt the same way. In fact I would venture that there might have been more equality for women in ancient Athens than we’ll ever know, because so much of the written record was destroyed by dudes who wanted to keep women down and stay in power. The patriarchy protects the patriarchy. Haters gonna hate. Oligarchs gonna garch.

  It’s interesting that the alt-right hasn’t taken to Epicurus. I guess his egalitarian philosophy of a life lived in pursuit of pleasure, with men and women sharing peace, poetry, and lentils, is a bit too hippie-dippie—not enough domination and forced penetration for the fascists.

  Why are these books so popular? Maybe we relate to the ancients because they lived in an imperialist empire built on conquest, exploitation, enslavement, and constant war, and if we look in the mirror, don’t we see the same thing? Has the world really changed? The ruthless extraction and destruction of the natural world, the profound abuses of workers while the oligarchs and Wall Street fat cats get richer and richer, the unending wars and the militarization of everything; it’s all empire all the time. You can’t go to a fucking baseball game without pledging allegiance to the American empire while armed soldiers parade the flag around and fighter jets zoom overhead. Really? Is this necessary? It’s a ball game. But those in power control the story, and right now the story is one of fetishizing the military and the myth of the exceptional state. And this story of empire is as fictional as any novel. The reality of life in the United States and the myth they’re selling have been drifting further and further apart for decades. There are gaps in the plot you could drive a truck through. What would happen if we stopped filling in the gaps with bullshit? Stopped echoing empty platitudes about making America great or the shining city on the hill or the only place where the free are truly free to freely … what? It’s all propagandish sludge that we’ve been spoon-fed since birth. It’s not true. Just open your eyes. The American empire is not exceptional. It’s like every other empire that came before it. How long can we suspend our disbelief? So what if we just said no? What if we disrupted the current narrative, said no thank you to the militarization of everything, and yes to pleasure and shared humanity? Empires fall. It’s what they do. It’s what they always have done. Isn’t it time we changed that by changing our consciousness? Isn’t it time to make room for pleasure, the natural world, and a spirit of egalitarianism?

  End parabasis.

  This Library Is on Fire

  As long as there has been written language, there has been a need for a place to store the writing. Typically it was the people in charge who kept the written word: documents were housed in palaces by the rulers, religious leaders stored scrolls and tablets in temples, wealthy elites stashed manuscripts in their homes, and schools and centers of learning held other important writing. Knowledge was power, and possessing the written word was evidence of that power.

  The Sumerians were reported to have libraries as far back as 3400 BCE, and by the sixth century BCE libraries in ancient Greece were fairly common. In what still holds true today, you just weren’t a proper city if you didn’t have a public library.

  Alexandria, the bustling port in Egypt, decided it wanted the best and biggest library in the world and set out to build it. At its height, in the third and second centuries BCE, the Great Library of Alexandria is reported to have held more than half a million scrolls. The majority of them were writings by Hellenistic, or Greek, writers. They included texts of philosophy, science, medicine, and, naturally, the tragedies and comedies of the Athenian stage.

  Built during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (although the idea apparently came from his father, Ptolemy I Soter), the library was part of a larger center for learning dedicated to the Muses called the Mouseion—not to be confused with Disneyland. It became known for its aggressive acquisition of texts, buying other libraries and forcing visiting ships to surrender any scrolls they might have on board to be copied by the Mouseion scribes. Scholars received royal stipends and were encouraged to work on whatever projects excited them, creating one of the world’s first think tanks. It didn’t hurt that Alexandria was the hub of the papyrus industry; so anything scroll related went through Alexandria. Those really long books you had to read in high school, the Odyssey and the Iliad, you can thank the librarians of Alexandria for preserving Homer’s epic poems.

  Nineteenth-century rendering of the Library of Alexandria by O. Von Corven (Wikimedia Commons).

  I wanted to figure out what might have happened to Ariphrades’s work—and the work of so many Greek comedic writers of that time—so I turned to Matthew Battles, author of Library: An Unquiet History and Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word.1 Matthew is the director of scholarly initiatives at Harvard University’s metaLAB, which calls itself “an idea foundry, knowledge-design lab, and production studio experimenting in the networked arts and humanities,” which sounds a bit like the ancient library at Alexandria. He’s a handsome and slightly scruffy-looking hipster-philosopher who, when he’s not writing books, is involved in projects that range from philosophical rumination on the dark power of the internet to devising ways we might turn invasive plant species into tasty desserts. In other words, he’s the perfect person to talk to about Ariphrades and what might have happened to his plays.

  “Written material was pretty ubiquitous in the ancient world. You saw it in ascriptions, you heard it read out in edicts and in announcements, but it was very difficult to produce and very difficult to share, and people shared it and people shed themselves of it for, I think, quite significant reasons. I mean, both getting rid of something or taking the trouble to produce it meant that there was significant cause. It wasn’t ephemeral and disposable the same way that written materials feel to us now.” Matthew paused before continuing. “For example a poet would often produce a poem in order to impress somebody, somebody who could be a patron or somebody to whom a favor was owed. Those are the kinds of moments that would cause a poem to be copied out. So only a very few copies would have ever existed in the first place.”

  But what about a bawdy comic play?

  “Something that’s perhaps salacious or risqué is less likely to be copied out by one of the slaves. I think you’re probably more likely to just hide it away somewhere.”

  Which makes me think that men have been stashing porno mags under their mattresses since the written word began.

  I mentioned Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern and asked Matthew if the same kind of religion-inspired suppression of manuscripts might’ve happened to the ancient Greek writers.

  As it turns out, this question is something Matthew has spent a lot of time thinking about. “Yeah, I think there are a lot of ways in which manuscript material survives and fails to survive in the ancient world. As you say about Lucretius, suppression is a big part of it. In fact, the Library of Alexandria really suffered its biggest losses not because of accidental fires by Julius Caesar or the invasion of the Muslims, but because Christians began to go through their iconoclastic* moment and took issue not only with certain aspects of knowledge that they thought were transgressive, but knowledge itself. Some of the ways in which these things survive are interesting and I think provide a whole series of mishaps and near misses over the long sweep of time, that at any one point of which work could be snuffed out.”

  I was not raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition. When I was growing up the only religion my family belonged to was the Kansas City Chiefs and our sacrament was Ruffles potato chips and Dr Pepper, although on special occasions my mother would buy a strange sour cream–based clam dip that she liked. We didn’t believe in god, even though the Chiefs won the Super Bowl in 1970. I was never molested by a priest or forced to handle snakes, so I have nothing personal against organized religion. But as an outsider looking in, as an observer surveying the catastrophic damage wrought throughout history by people obsessed with forcing their beliefs on everyone else, I c
an say with confidence that the world would be a better place without it.

  It is well documented that for much of our history organized religion has tried to destroy anything to do with sexuality, sexual liberation, and equal rights for women, so it doesn’t seem so far-fetched to think that they might’ve chucked scrolls of smutty and irreverent Greek comedies into the fireplace. I asked Matthew how pervasive he thought this Christian suppression was.

  “Oh, it had quite a strong effect, and it reached very deep into the written record of the ancient world. That’s a very real force affecting the preservation of these works. I would say that there were other forces as well, and it’s interesting to think about some cults or schools of thought that might also have made somebody get rid of work or made somebody fear being discovered to have work. Stoicism, in particular, was a philosophical tradition that had a certain kind of moral …” He hesitated to find the right word before he said, “It tended to stick its nose up in the air.”

  The Stoics were resolute funwreckers: anti-pleasure, anti-sexual adventuring, anti-everything Epicurus stood for. They were all about virtue and logic and not letting desires influence your decisions—like a philosophy founded by the Starfleet science officer Spock. It’s easy to imagine the Stoics, Christians, and Vulcans disapproving of Ariphrades, albeit for different reasons. Matthew agreed. “Literature largely circulated among the elite, and these are very risk-averse people. Even though it’s the world from which we draw our Western intellectual traditions, and the concept of the liberal arts in particular, we call them that because they’re about books, but also because they’re about the arts of free people, the knowledge forms of free people. That freedom was something that you got by birthright or you got by having somebody buy it for you. It was not a universal commodity.”

  Nowadays we might call that “privilege.” And certainly there was a class dynamic in whose plays were produced and who was entitled to express their point of view on the Athenian stage. I’m not sure things have changed that much—who is given the authority to speak has always depended on class, status, and the approval of the moneyed elite and those in power—although social media has opened the doors for a multitude of voices to sound off.

  The writings of the ancient Greeks were either scratched into clay or written out on papyrus scrolls. These early scrolls looked sort of like a pirate map you might see in a movie. In his book Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus, Duke University professor and member of the American Society of Papyrologists William A. Johnson describes the dimensions of an ancient scroll as roughly eight to ten inches wide and up to twelve inches in diameter—about the same size as one of Yotam Ottolenghi’s cookbooks—and up to thirty-six feet long when unrolled.2 Their weight depended on the quality of the papyrus, naturally. In many ways scrolls were more cumbersome and more delicate than the later codex, which became what we now call a book.

  Matthew continued: “It’s interesting to think about how these things get transmitted, and it’s hard for us, I think, to imagine what a world is like where everything is a manuscript, right? There’s no press. There’s no stamping these things out. If you wanted to disseminate your work you had to figure out ways to disseminate it. You had to write a lot of copies of it and put them into the hands of important people, and it helped to have slaves too.” He paused for a moment then added, “Which militates against the democratic origins of comedy to a certain extent, and yet it’s definitely in the mix.”

  Copies of these works were rare, yet most Greek cities had libraries and many wealthy Athenians maintained private collections. A good example of this is the private library at Herculaneum in what is now Italy. It once held a massive collection of Greek manuscripts, which were destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. Almost two thousand carbonized scrolls have been recovered, and although they look like barbecued dinosaur turds, scientists are finding ways to read them through something called “x-ray phase-contrast tomography,” which is like a CT scan. One of the pleasant surprises from this research is the uncovering of several Epicurean texts written by Philodemus, one of Epicurus’s disciples.

  I’m holding out hope that one of Ariphrades’s plays might be among the carbonized husks entombed in the library. But it leads me to wonder, with all these public and private libraries everywhere, you would think more of these works would have survived. So what happened?

  Matthew had an answer. “It can be big events, like the shifts in religion or in cults, in political regime, but it can also be that just somebody falls out of favor, and you don’t want to have that work around anymore. Or an individual who has got some of this work falls out of favor and gets rid of something in order to make things right.”

  Or maybe a second-century Marie Kondo decided the scrolls no longer “spark joy.”

  Matthew laughed. “There are also interesting ways that things might survive and still never come to light. Two of the major ways in which—and I write about one and a half of these in Library, because I spent a lot of time in Library: An Unquiet History looking at the genizah, which is a repository for discarded manuscript materials in synagogues. They were usually a separate room. They could be as simple as a hole in the floor, but typically they were a room that was walled up except for one hole, and you’d literally push pieces of written material through that hole, and they’d fall into this room that nobody had access to, because there’s no door to it. You’d have to break a wall or go through the hole to get at the stuff in there. And this was done because of prescriptions in Judaism, which were quite common in the times [and] still exist in orthodox communities, against destroying written material because it might have the secret name of god in it. So this taboo was quite strong, particularly in the ancient world, and all of these written materials that were being discarded, they could be things like letters, they could be things like shopping lists. Quite literally, it was the whole range of written material. They’d get pushed into these genizahs, and there they would stay for a long time.”

  I had never heard of genizahs until I’d encountered Matthew’s work, but, simply put, they are storage areas and repositories for texts that come in all shapes and sizes, from an ancient cave in Israel to a modern-day collection container that looks like a drive-through book drop at your local library. There are times when my home office resembles a crude genizah.

  “The most famous of these was one in the Grand Temple in Cairo that was broken into in the late nineteenth century during the British rule of Egypt. These papyrus manuscripts began to get out onto the market, and papyrologists and classicists began to hear that people were selling these things that were manuscripts, fragments of manuscripts that nobody had ever seen before. And so the Cairo genizah ends up furnishing this enormous trove of materials, some of which was material that was known material that was lost. And some of it was brand-new material. It included letters by Maimonides, and lots of fragments of Talmudic texts, and differing interpretations of Torah texts that have passed out of understanding. Also, just lots of demotic stuff, like I said earlier, like the proverbial shopping list, or a recipe, or even things like charms or potions would get written down and pushed into the genizah.

  “Also, a lot of material ended up in trash middens, just in garbage dumps, and particularly stuff that was written on ostraca, these fragments of clay that people would use as a notepad. I mean, writing material itself was hard to come by, and it was usually much easier to just take a broken pot and scratch characters in it than it was to kind of go through the trouble and expense of procuring or making papyrus, or other later forms of writing medium like parchment. So people would throw these things away, and, again in Egypt, there’s a famous trove of papyri, fragments of written material, and ostraca from this town called Oxyrhynchus, which is like the ‘town of the short-nosed fish,’ up the river along the Nile. And that has included some fragments of literary works that had gone missing or had been forgotten.”

  And what might’ve happened to one of Ariphrades’s pl
ays? Matthew had a thought. “It’s fun to imagine a kid having a little mini-genizah of his own under his bed, where salacious material ends up so that his parents’ slaves can’t find it.”

  I love the idea of someone secretly reading Ariphrades—much like someone might read Mad Magazine, or a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, or one of the banned novels by Kathy Acker or William Burroughs. Whether they’re Christian or Stoics or Islamists or concerned parents, the morality police haven’t stopped trying to ban books and suppress ideas that challenge the status quo, especially when it concerns sexuality. What does it say about a supposedly free society when one of the most challenged and banned books of the last decade is a picture book about homosexual penguins?3 This isn’t about protecting the children any more than denying women reproductive freedom is about being pro-life; it’s about controlling the story. The Nazis burned books they deemed degenerate, the People’s Republic of China torches books that are anti-communist, Tipper Gore founded the Parents Music Resource Center to advocate putting warning labels on music after she caught her daughter listening to a Prince song, rednecks drove their pickup trucks over Dixie Chick CDs because the women in the band (now known simply as “the Chicks”) spoke out against the Iraq War, the Taliban blew up giant statues of Buddha in Afghanistan, and Christians have been burning books ever since they figured out how to light a fire. These are all examples of one group or another trying to impose its story, its narrative, on everyone else by destroying anything that runs counter to it. There’s no nuance in a bonfire. Even parents of students at my old high school in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, took a book about a lesbian relationship called Annie on My Mind, by Nancy Garden, and burned it outside the school district’s office. I’m guessing they didn’t see the parallel between what they were doing and the Third Reich.