Day 183: Book Excerpt: The Swerve: How The World Became Modern

APART FROM THE charred papyrus fragments recovered in Herculaneum, there are no surviving contemporary manuscripts from the ancient Greek and Roman world. Everything that has reached us is a copy, most often very far removed in time, place, and culture from the original. And these copies represent only a small portion of the works even of the most celebrated writers of antiquity. Of Aeschylus’ eighty or ninety plays and the roughly one hundred twenty by Sophocles, only seven each have survived; Euripides and Aristophanes did slightly better: eighteen of ninety-two plays by the former have come down to us; eleven of forty-three by the latter.

These are the great success stories. Virtually the entire output of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace. Scientists, historians, mathematicians, philosophers, and statesmen have left behind some of their achievements—the invention of trigonometry, for example, or the calculation of position by reference to latitude and longitude, or the rational analysis of political power—but their books are gone. The indefatigable scholar Didymus of Alexandria earned the nickname Bronze-Ass (literally, “Brazen-Bowelled”) for having what it took to write more than 3,500 books; apart from a few fragments, all have vanished. At the end of the fifth century ce an ambitious literary editor known as Stobaeus compiled an anthology of prose and poetry by the ancient world’s best authors: out of 1,430 quotations, 1,115 are from works that are now lost.

In this general vanishing, all the works of the brilliant founders of atomism, Leucippus and Democritus, and most of the works of their intellectual heir Epicurus, disappeared. Epicurus had been extraordinarily prolific. He and his principal philosophical opponent, the Stoic Chrysippus, wrote between them, it was said, more than a thousand books. Even if this figure is exaggerated or if it counts as books what we would regard as essays and letters, the written record was clearly massive. That record no longer exists. Apart from three letters quoted by an ancient historian of philosophy, Diogenes Laertius, along with a list of forty maxims, almost nothing by Epicurus has survived. Modern scholarship, since the nineteenth century, has only been able to add some fragments. Some of these were culled from the blackened papyrus rolls found at Herculaneum; others were painstakingly recovered from the broken pieces of an ancient wall. On that wall, discovered in the town of Oenoanda, in the rugged mountains in southwest Turkey, an old man, in the early years of the second century ce, had had his distinctly Epicurean philosophy of life—“a fine anthem to celebrate the fullness of pleasure”—chiseled in stone. But where did all the books go?

The actual material disappearance of the books was largely the effect of climate and pests. Though papyrus and parchment were impressively long-lived (far more so than either our cheap paper or computerized data), books inevitably deteriorated over the centuries, even if they managed to escape the ravages of fire and flood. The ink was a mixture of soot (from burnt lamp wicks), water, and tree gum: that made it cheap and agreeably easy to read, but also water-soluble. (A scribe who made a mistake could erase it with a sponge.) A spilled glass of wine or a heavy downpour, and the text disappeared. And that was only the most common threat. Rolling and unrolling the scrolls or poring over the codices, touching them, dropping them, coughing on them, allowing them to be scorched by fire from the candles, or simply reading them over and over eventually destroyed them.
Carefully sequestering books from excessive use was of little help, for they then became the objects not of intellectual hunger but of a more literal appetite. Tiny animals, Aristotle noted, may be detected in such things as clothes, woolen blankets, and cream cheese. “Others are found,” he observed, “in books, some of them similar to those found in clothes, others like tailless scorpions, very small indeed.” Almost two thousand years later in Micrographia (1655), the scientist Robert Hooke reported with fascination what he saw when he examined one of these creatures under that remarkable new invention, the microscope:

a small white silver-shining Worm or Moth, which I found much conversant among books and papers, and is supposed to be that which corrodes and eats holes through the leaves and covers. Its head appears big and blunt, and its body tapers from it towards the tail, smaller and smaller, being shaped almost like a carrot. . . . It has two long horns before, which are straight, and tapering towards the top, curiously ringed or knobbed. . . . The hinder part is terminated with three tails, in every particular resembling the two longer horns that grow out of the head. The legs are scaled and haired. This animal probably feeds upon the paper and covers of books, and perforates in them several small round holes.

The bookworm—“one of the teeth of time,” as Hooke put it—is no longer familiar to ordinary readers, but the ancients knew it very well. In exile, the Roman poet Ovid likened the “constant gnawing of sorrow” at his heart to the gnawing of the bookworm—“as the book when laid away is nibbled by the worm’s teeth.” His contemporary Horace feared that his book will eventually become “food for vandal moths.” And for the Greek poet Evenus, the bookworm was the symbolic enemy of human culture: “Page-eater, the Muses’ bitterest foe, lurking destroyer, ever feeding on thy thefts from learning, why, black bookworm, dost thou lie concealed among the sacred utterances, producing the image of envy?” Some protective measures, such as sprinkling cedar oil on the pages, were discovered to be effective in warding off damage, but it was widely recognized that the best way to preserve books from being eaten into oblivion was simply to use them and, when they finally wore out, to make more copies.

Though the book trade in the ancient world was entirely about copying, little information has survived about how the enterprise was organized. There were scribes in Athens, as in other cities of the Greek and Hellenistic world, but it is not clear whether they received training in special schools or were apprenticed to master scribes or simply set up on their own. Some were evidently paid for the beauty of their calligraphy; others were paid by the total number of lines written (there are line numbers recorded at the end of some surviving manuscripts). In neither case is the payment likely to have gone directly to the scribe: many, perhaps most, Greek scribes must have been slaves working for a publisher who owned or rented them. (An inventory of the property of a wealthy Roman citizen with an estate in Egypt lists, among his fifty-nine slaves, five notaries, two amanuenses, one scribe, and a book repairer, along with a cook and a barber.) But we do not know whether these scribes generally sat in large groups, writing from dictation, or worked individually from a master copy. And if the author of the work was alive, we do not know if he was involved in checking or correcting the finished copy.

~~The Swerve: How The World Became Modern -by- Stephen Greenblatt

Day 56 : Book Excerpt : The Age of Faith

Gaul, in the fourth and fifth centuries, was materially the most prosperous, intellectually the most advanced, of Roman provinces in the West. The soil was generous, the crafts were skilled, the rivers and the seas bore a teeming trade. State-supported universities flourished at Narbonne, Aries, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Lyons, Marseille, Poitiers, and Trier; teachers and orators, poets and sages enjoyed a status and acclaim usually reserved for politicians and pugilists. With Ausonius and Sidonius, Gaul took over the literary leadership of Europe.

Decimus Magnus Ausonius was the poet and embodiment of this Gallic Silver Age. He was born at Bordeaux about 310, son of its leading physician. He received his education there, and later told the world, in generous hexameters, the virtues of his teachers, remembering their smiles and forgetting their blows. In the even tenor of his years he too became a professor at Bordeaux, taught “grammar” (i.e., literature) and “rhetoric” (i.e., oratory and philosophy) for a generation, and tutored the future Emperor Gratian. The sincere affection with which he writes of his parents, uncles, wife, children, and pupils suggests a home and a life like that of a nineteenth-century university town in the United States. He describes pleasantly the house and fields that he inherited from his father, and where he hopes to spend his declining years. He says to his wife, in the early years of their marriage: “Let us live always as we live now, and let us not abandon the names that we have given each other in our first love. … You and I must always remain young, and you shall always be beautiful to me. We must keep no count of the years.” Soon, however, they lost the first child that she gave him. Years later he commemorated it lovingly: “I will not leave you unwept, my firstborn child, called by my name. Just as you were practicing to change your babbling into the first words of childhood … we had to mourn your death. You lie on your great-grandfather’s bosom, sharing his grave.” His wife died early in their happy marriage, after giving him a daughter and a son. He was so deeply bound to her that he never married again; and in his old age he described with fresh grief the pain of his loss, and the somber silence of the house that had known the care of her hands and the cadence of her feet.

His poems pleased his time by their tender sentiment, their rural pictures, the purity of their Latin, the almost Virgilian smoothness of their verse. Paulinus, the future saint, compared his prose with Cicero’s, and Symmachus could not find in Virgil anything lovelier than Ausonius’Mosella. The poet had grown fond of that river while with Gratian at Trier; he describes it as running through a very Eden of vineyards, orchards, villas, and prospering farms; for a time he makes us feel the verdure of its banks and the music of its flow; then, with all-embracing bathos, he indites a litany to the amiable fish to be found in the stream. This Whitmanesque passion for cataloguing relatives, teachers, pupils, fish is not redeemed by Whitman’s omnivorous feeling and lusty philosophy; Ausonius, after thirty years of grammar, could hardly burn with more than literary passions. His poems are rosaries of friendship, litanies of praise; but those of us who have not known such alluring uncles or seductive professors are rarely exalted by these doxologies.

When Valentinian I died (375), Gratian, now Emperor, called his old tutor to him, and showered him and his with political plums. In quick succession Ausonius was prefect of Illyricum, Italy, Africa, Gaul; finally, at sixty-nine, consul. At his urging, Gratian decreed state aid for education, for poets and physicians, and for the protection of ancient art. Through his influence Symmachus was made prefect of Rome, and Paulinus a provincial governor. Ausonius mourned when Paulinus became a saint; the Empire, threatened everywhere, needed such men. Ausonius too was a Christian, but not too seriously; his tastes, subjects, meters, and mythology were blithely pagan.

At seventy the old poet returned to Bordeaux, to live another twenty years. He was now a grandfather, and could match the filial poems of his youth with the grandparental fondness of age. “Be not afraid,” he counsels his grandson, “though the school resound with many a stroke, and the old master wears a scowling face; let no outcry, or sound of stripes, make you quake as the morning hours move on. That he brandishes the cane for a scepter, that he has a full outfit of birches … is but the outward show to cause idle fears. Your father and mother went through all this in their day, and have lived to soothe my peaceful and serene old age.” Fortunate Ausonius, to have lived and died before the barbarian flood!

Apollinaris Sidonius was to Gallic prose in the fifth century what Ausonius had been to Gallic poetry in the fourth. He burst upon the world at Lyons (432), where his father was prefect of Gaul. His grandfather had filled the same office, and his mother was a relative of that Avitus who would become emperor in 455, and whose daughter Sidonius would marry in 452. It would have been difficult to improve upon these arrangements. Papianilla brought him as dowry a luxurious villa near Clermont. His life for some years was a round of visits to and from his aristocratic friends. They were people of culture and refinement, with a flair for gambling and idleness; they lived in their country houses, and seldom soiled their hands with politics; they were quite incapable of protecting their luxurious ease against the invading Goths. They did not care for city life; already French and British wealth was preferring the country to the town. In these sprawling villas—some with 125 rooms—all comforts and elegances were gathered: mosaic floors, columned halls, landscape murals, sculptures in marble and bronze, great fireplaces and baths, gardens and tennis courts, and environing woods in which ladies and gentlemen might hunt with all the glamour of falconry. Nearly every villa had a good library, containing the classics of pagan antiquity and some respectable Christian texts. Several of Sidonius’ friends were book collectors; and doubtless there were in Gaul, as in Rome, rich men who valued good bindings above mere contents, and were satisfied with the culture they could get from the covers of their books.

Sidonius illustrates the better side of this genteel life—hospitality, courtesy, good cheer, moral decency, with a touch of chiseled poetry and melodious prose. When Avitus went to Rome to be emperor, Sidonius accompanied him, and was chosen to deliver the welcoming panegyric (456). He returned to Gaul a year later with Avitus deposed; but in 468 we find him in Rome again, holding the high office of prefect of the city amid the last convulsions of the state. Moving comfortably through the chaos, he described the high society of Gaul and Rome in letters modeled upon those of Pliny and Symmachus, and matching them in vanity and grace. Literature now had little to say, and said it with such care that nothing remained but form and charm. At their best there is in these letters that genial tolerance and sympathetic understanding of the educated gentleman which has adorned the literature of France since the days when it was not yet French. Sidonius brought into Gaul the Roman love for gracious causeries. From Cicero and Seneca through Pliny, Symmachus, Macrobius, and Sidonius to Montaigne, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Renan, Sainte-Beuve, and Anatole France is one line, almost, by bountiful avatars, one mind.

~~The Age of Faith -by- Will Durant