The complete Greek translation of the Old Testament is known as the Septuagint, from the Latin septuaginta, “seventy.” However, because there were seventy-two elders involved (six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, according to, e.g., St. Cyril Catacheseis 4.34), and since, according to other sources, they completed their task in seventy-two days, it might more accurately be called the Septuaginta Duo.
To enhance Alexandria’s reputation as a center for learning, Ptolemy Euergetes (ruled 246–221 B.C.) instituted games in honor of Apollo and the Muses, with prizes awarded to the winners in musical and literary contests. The spectators unanimously signaled to the judges the contestant that they thought should win the poetry prize. Six of the judges agreed, but the seventh, Aristophanes of Byzantium, said the prize should go to the poet who had pleased the audience least. The king and the crowd were highly indignant, but Aristophanes stood up and accused all the other poets of plagiarism, citing from memory from an infinite number of volumes stored on particular shelves in the Library. The poets confessed, and Aristophanes was given a generous reward and appointed head of the Library (Vitruvius On Architecture 7 Preface).
Aristophanes of Byzantium was one of Alexandria’s greatest scholars. He wrote influential studies on the text of Homer and other poets, on the Greek language, and on many other topics. He was also at least partially responsible for the development of the system of written accents used to denote the pronunciation of Greek, a rather fearsome convention still in force in the modern language until 1982, when the Greek Ministry of Education introduced a much simpler system. Like Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, Aristophanes fell in love with a flower girl. But he had a rival:
Some animals experience wild and frenzied erotic passions, but in others such feelings are refined, delicate, and almost human. For example, the elephant that loved the same flower girl as did the scholar Aristophanes in Alexandria declared its love no less clearly than he did. For it would always bring her fruit as it went through the market and stand beside her for a long time, putting its trunk like a hand inside her clothing and gently fondling her lovely breasts.
(Plutarch Whether Land or Sea Animals Are Cleverer 972d)
Didymus, who wrote more than anyone else has ever done, once objected to some story as being absurd, but then one of his own books was brought forward as the authority for it (Quintilian Education of the Orator 1.8.18). As a reflection on his stamina and perhaps also his lack of sensitivity in writing almost four thousand works, mainly, it seems, digests of other scholars’ writings, Didymus was nicknamed Xαλκέντερος (Chalcenterus, “Bronze Guts”). The incident related by Quintilian earned him a second nickname, βιβλιολάθας (Bibliolathas, “Book Forgetter”).
What is the point of having countless books, if the owner scarcely reads through their titles in his whole lifetime? Their sheer number is an impediment to learning: it is far better to give oneself over to a few authors than to browse through many. Forty thousand books were burned in the fire at the Library in Alexandria. Others may praise that library as the most splendid monument to royal wealth, as Livy did, when he said that it was the outstanding achievement of the good taste and care of the kings. But it was not good taste or care; it was learned decadence—indeed, not even learned, since they had bought the books not for study but for show, just as many people who know less about literature than a child does have books not as tools for study but just to decorate their dining room. So buy books you need, don’t buy them just for show (Seneca On Tranquility of Mind 9.4).
No book will be taken out, for we have sworn it. The Library will be open from the first hour to the sixth (notice in the public library built in the Athenian agora during the Roman period).
When the barbarians captured Athens [in A.D. 267], they gathered all the books in the city together, intending to burn them. But one of them, who was apparently wiser than the rest, persuaded them not to do so, arguing that if the Greeks wasted their time on books, they would neglect military matters and be that much easier to subdue (Zonaras Annals 3.150).
When he was away from home, a friend wrote to a teacher asking him to buy him some books. The teacher neglected the request, and when he met his friend on his return home, he said, “That letter you sent me about the books, I didn’t get it” (Philogelos Joke Book 17).
A snake’s intestine, measuring 120 feet, with both the Iliad and the Odyssey inscribed on it in letters of gold, perished in a fire that destroyed a library of 120,000 books in Constantinople in the late 5th century (Zonaras Annals 14.2).
In order to write in letters of gold without using gold, you need:
One part celandine
One part pure resin
One part gold-colored arsenic
One part pure gum
One part tortoise bile
Five parts egg white.
To twenty measures of these ingredients, dried, add four measures of Cilician saffron.
You can write with it not only on papyrus and parchment, but also on polished marble, and it will have the appearance of gold should you wish to draw a design on any other surface (Leiden Papyrus 10.74).
Thucydides’s History runs to 153,260 words. Demosthenes is said to have copied out the whole work eight times (Lucian Against the Ignorant Book Buyer 4). A 5th-century A.D. orator named Marcellus learned all of Thucydides by heart, but was unable to say anything worth listening to (Damascius Life of Isidore frg. 138).
Dionysius wrote a tragedy, which he called Parthenopaeus, and he attributed it to Sophocles. Heraclides quoted from it in one of his own works as if it really was by Sophocles. Dionysius then told him what he had done. But Heraclides refused to believe him, so Dionysius told him to look at the first letters of the opening eight lines. They spelled “Pancalus,” which was the name of Dionysius’s lover. Heraclides still refused to believe him, saying that it might be mere coincidence, so Dionysius sent him another message telling him that he would also find as acrostics, “An old monkey does not get caught in a trap—actually, it does, but only after a long time” and “Heraclides doesn’t understand writing and yet he’s not ashamed” (Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers 5.92). Heraclides was more perceptive in proposing that the earth revolves on its axis from east to west every twenty-four hours.
Epicharmus left behind him treatises in which he discusses natural philosophy, collects maxims, and writes about medicine. He added acrostics to most of them to prove that he was the author (Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers 8.78).
Anaximenes retaliated against a personal enemy in a way that was both very clever and very nasty. He had a talent for rhetoric and for imitating the style of rhetoricians. He had fallen out with Theopompus, the son of Damasistratus, so he wrote an abusive tract attacking the Athenians, the Spartans, and the Thebans in the style of Theopompus, whose name he inscribed on it as the author. He had copies sent to the various cities, and so Theopompus came to be hated throughout all Greece (Pausanias Guide to Greece 6.18). For Anaximenes’s deviousness, see also p. 77.
The smallest surviving book from antiquity is the Cologne Mani Codex, written on parchment in Egypt in the early 5th century A.D. It consists of 192 pages, each measuring only 3.5 x 4.5 cms, and each with 23 beautifully written lines of Greek. For excellent pictures, visit the Papyrus Collection of the University of Cologne at http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/ifa/NRWakademie/papyrologie/index.html. It is important not simply as an artifact, but also for its content, because it provides much valuable information about Mani, the founder of Manichaeism.
PAPYRI
Nearly all newly discovered papyrus texts are published in academic journals. In recent times, however, there has been a famous exception. In 1992 an Italian bank gave the University of Milan funds to purchase mummy-wrappings, which turned out to contain some 122 epigrams, almost all previously unknown, by the Hellenistic poet Posidippus. A photograph of the papyrus, too small to read, and a translation of four poems appeared in the bank’s glossy rep
ort in 1993, followed in the same year by a deluxe gift edition of twenty-five poems (including the four already known). This was intended for the bank’s investors, but full and authoritative publication did not take place until 2001. The frustration endured by scholars during the long wait was considerable.
Greetings from Theon to his father Theon. You did a fine thing in not taking me with you to the city. If you refuse to take me with you to Alexandria, I won’t write you a letter, or speak to you, or say good-bye to you. When you go to Alexandria, I won’t take your hand, or greet you ever again. That’s what will happen if you won’t take me. It was nice of you to send me presents. Please send me a lyre. If you don’t send me one, I won’t eat, I won’t drink. So there! I hope you stay well (Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 119).
I, Horion, send greetings to my lord brother Macarius. Deliver to the men working on my behalf six jars of local wine. That is, six jars only. I, Horion, have signed for only six jars (Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 3875). The last sentence is a rather anxious countersignature by Horion himself.
I’ve written to you a thousand times telling you to cut down the vines. And yet today I received another letter from you asking what I wish should happen. My reply is: cut them down, cut them down, cut them down, cut them down, cut them down! So there, I’m telling you over and over again (Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 3063).
Senpamonthes greets her brother Pamonthes. I have sent you the embalmed body of Senyris, my mother, with a label around her neck. I paid the shipping costs in full and sent it on the boat belonging to Gales, the father of Hierax. The mummy is marked for identification, with a pink linen shroud and her name written over the stomach. I pray that you are well, my brother (Paris Papyrus 18b). The sender, the addressee, and their mummy all have Egyptian names, but this 2nd- or 3rd-century A.D. letter is written in Greek.
Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 1121 (written in A.D. 295) bears the rather uninformative indication of the date, “Written in the consulship of the present consuls.” The Roman method of signifying the year was by the names of the consuls in office, and hence the document would more properly have been dated, “In the consulship of Nummius Tuscus and Annius Anullinus,” but their appointment may not yet have been known in Oxyrhynchus, a hundred miles upstream from Cairo.
To Apion from Dionysius, greetings. Our divinely fortunate rulers have decreed that the value of the Italian coinage should be halved. So make haste to spend on my behalf all the Italian money you have, buying goods of any sort, whatever the asking price may be. I’ll be sending a clerk to help you. Don’t try to cheat me, for I’ll find out. May you have a long and healthy life, my brother (Rylands Papyrus 4.607, from the early 4th century A.D.). Inflation was a severe problem at many periods, and nervous letters such as this must have been commonplace.
Right in the middle of a 1st-century A.D. papyrus document from Crocodilopolis (London Papyrus 3.604), consisting almost entirely of a relentlessly monotonous list of personal names, someone who is not the original copyist has added the marginal comment ψωλοκοπῶ τὸν ἀναγιγνώσκοντα (psolokopo ton anagignoskonta, “[I do something to?] the reader”). The verb is not known from other sources. Since, however, it is a compound of ψωλός, explained in ancient scholia as either “with an erection” or “circumcised,” and -κοπῶ, which is related to κόπτω “I strike,” it is an easy assumption that the scribe is expressing his exasperation at the tedium of the document’s contents.
Calliorhoe to her ladyship, Sarapias, greetings. I have been doing obeisance to lord Sarapis every day on your behalf. Ever since you have been away, ἐπιζητομέν σου τὰ κόπρια (epizetoumen sou ta kopria), in our longing to see you (Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 1761). So begins a letter from one Egyptian lady to another in the 2nd or 3rd century A.D. Here again the translation is not quite certain, but the power of the sentiment is unmistakable, whether the difficult phrase means “we have been missing your turds” or “we have been looking for your turds.”
XVI
PHILOSOPHERS
Most people fear Greek philosophy the way children fear bogeymen
(St. Clement of Alexandria Stromata 6.10.80).
The priest of Apollo gave Pythagoras an arrow that he had brought with him from the god’s shrine. This arrow would prove useful in helping Pythagoras overcome the difficulties that befell him on his long wanderings. Riding on it, he could traverse trackless regions, such as rivers, lakes, marshes, and mountains, and he used it also to perform purifications and to cause winds and plagues to abate in cities that asked for his help (Iamblichus On the Pythagorean Way of Life 91).
When a deadly snake bit Pythagoras, he bit it in return and killed it (Aristotle frg. 191).
They say that Pythagoras once had pity on a dog that was being beaten, and said, “Stop, don’t strike him, for that is the soul of a dear friend of mine; I recognized him when I heard his voice” (Xenophanes frg. 7, mocking Pythagoras’s belief in the transmigration of souls). Xenophanes and his followers were criticized for making philosophers’ heads very dizzy with their contentious discussions, without adding anything constructive to philosophical enquiry (Aristocles of Messene frg. 1).
A Pythagorean did not get out of bed until he had gone over in his mind everything that had happened to him the day before. This was how he did it: he tried to recall the first thing he said or heard, then the first, second, and third orders he had given to his slave after getting up, and so on for the rest of the day. He also tried to recall who the first person was that he met on going out, and who the second, and then the first, second, and third things that were said, and so on. He tried to recall everything that happened to him during the day, in the order in which each incident occurred. If he had time enough when he woke up, he would go over the events of two days earlier as well. The Pythagoreans exercised their memory because they thought that nothing is as vital for understanding, for science, and for wisdom as is the ability to remember (Iamblichus On the Pythagorean Way of Life 29).
Some people reproached Thales of Miletus for his poverty, as if that were proof that philosophy is useless. But he noticed from his study of the stars while it was still winter that there was going to be a bumper olive harvest. So he took a cheap lease on all the olive-presses in Miletus and on Chios, getting them at a bargain rate since no one bid against him. When harvest-time came and many farmers suddenly needed presses all at the same time, he hired them out on whatever terms he pleased. By making a great deal of money this way, he demonstrated that philosophers can easily become rich if they want to, but that this is not what they are keen to do (Aristotle Politics 1259a).
When Heraclitus realized that he was dying, he lay down in the sun and ordered his slaves to cover him with cow dung. Stretched out in this way, he died on the second day and was buried in the marketplace (Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers 9.3).
Empedocles the philosopher went off to Mt. Etna, and when he reached the crater he jumped in and disappeared, wishing to foster the belief that he had become a god. But the truth became known later, when the volcano threw up one of his sandals. For he used to wear sandals with soles of bronze (Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers 8.69).
Pythagoras required his new students to observe a five-year period of silence (Plutarch On Curiosity 519c).
Greek accounts record that the philosopher Democritus deliberately deprived himself of his eyesight, because he thought that his musings and meditations about nature would be that much sharper and more focused if he freed them from the distractions and obstacles that eyesight entails (Aulus Gellius Attic Nights 10.17).
Democritus was very old and close to death. His sister was upset that he might die during the Thesmophoria, for that would bar her from carrying out her duty to the goddess. He said she should cheer up and told her to bring him warm bread every day. By putting the bread under his nostrils he kept himself alive for the three days of the festival, and as soon as it was over, he passed painlessly away, having lived for one hundred
and nine years (Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers 9.43).
Socrates was exceptional in that he did not discuss the nature of the universe, speculating on the state of what the sophists call the cosmos and on the forces that cause celestial phenomena; on the contrary, he used to point out the foolishness of those who concern themselves about such things (Xenophon Memoirs of Socrates 1.1.11).
When Socrates was asked if the earth was spherical, he replied, “I haven’t popped my head up to look” (Gnomologium Vaticanum 489).
During the Potidaea campaign [432 B.C.], Socrates defended Alcibiades when he fell wounded. In the retreat after the Battle of Delium [424], Alcibiades, who was on horseback, stayed with Socrates and a small group of infantry, to keep them covered when the enemy were pressing hard and killing many of the Athenian soldiers (Plutarch Alcibiades 7).
When a nasty and arrogant young man kicked Socrates, everyone with him was roused to such indignation that they wanted to prosecute him. Socrates merely said, “If a donkey had kicked me, would you have thought that I should kick it back?” But the young man did not get away with what he had done: everyone mocked him and nicknamed him “Kicker,” and so he hanged himself (Plutarch On Educating Children 10c).
A Cabinet Of Greek Curiosities Page 14