A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Read online

  For centuries the story has been told that in 47 B.C. Julius Caesar set ships in Alexandria’s harbor on fire to protect his outnumbered garrison against native Macedonians who opposed his occupation, and that the conflagration that followed destroyed much of the waterfront, including the great library. However, because it continued to function for several centuries, this charge has been largely discredited. Strabo, who visited Alexandria twenty-two years later, made no mention of such a catastrophe. Caesar records nothing about it in his Civil Wars, and Cicero—a political rival and dedicated bibliophile who certainly would have commented on such an embarrassment—did not mention the subject in his writings.

  Still, there is persuasive evidence that forty thousand papyrus scrolls stored in temporary quarters on the piers did go up in flames. While this figure is considerable, its significance decreases when it is compared to the library’s total holdings of 700,000 volumes. Just what those books were, and why they were in a harbor warehouse, has aroused speculation that Caesar had made a selection of items and put them aside for shipment to Rome. It is known that Caesar commissioned Marcus Varro to create a public library in Rome at about the same time as the trip to Egypt, and the books may have been earmarked as a seed collection for this enterprise. Or, given the Roman passion for private libraries, they could have been selected for the general’s own amusement. That Caesar loved Greek literature and philosophy is well established, and that he spoke Greek fluently is also documented. His dying words, according to Suetonius, were not “Et tu, Brute,” as Shakespeare would have it, but the Greek Kai su, teknon: “Even you, my child.” The Roman proclivity for plundering the relics of conquered countries is legendary, and likely would have been practiced in Alexandria, especially if an opportunity to winnow material from an unequaled collection had presented itself. The late Edward Alexander Parsons (1878– 1962), a devoted collector of classical history whose fifty thousand-volume Bibliotheca Parsoniana is now at the University of Texas in Austin, suggested that even though the evidence for this scenario is circumstantial, it is compelling nonetheless.

  Parsons imagined an evening in the grand hall of the Alexandrian Library where the proud keepers of books placed rarity after rarity before the visiting dignitary, who on this night preferred to speak not as a general, but as a formidable intellect among equals:

  Caesar, for the nonce, ceased to be the statesman, the soldier, dictator of the world. With almost the enthusiasm of youth his quick mind and glittering eyes assumed a distinct facet of his wonderful personality. He was the student, the scholar, the seeker of knowledge, the lover of books. The men of the library were busy answering his keen questions, amazed at his fund of bibliophilic learning and the sincere interest he evinced. The observant Cleopatra was delighted and never for a moment changed her role: to please, at any price, her lover, the master of the world. As his enthusiasm mounted and the desire of acquisition gleamed from his eyes, the subtle adept of the masculine heart and mind knew just when to strike. Unerringly she read his thoughts and offered him some precious manuscript which he was examining. He declined with due propriety, but she insisted the books were hers, she had so many, she forced them on him, until he, feeling that he had paid sufficient respect to the proprieties, entirely gave way, and before long orders were given for the packing of hundreds of items of the great collection.

  Within two years of the fire, Caesar was dead and Cleopatra was back in Alexandria trying to keep her kingdom out of Roman control. The library continued to function, and in 41 B.C., if a story repeated by Plutarch is correct, it actually became a much stronger institution by virtue of a new suitor’s whimsy. Looking for an appropriate way to please the queen of Egypt, Mark Antony is said to have ordered 200,000 “distinct volumes” removed from the library in the city of Pergamum, which had supported Brutus and Cassius during the civil war that followed Caesar’s assassination. When the republican forces were defeated at Philippi in 42 B.C., the small kingdom paid a costly tribute.

  Though the great rivalry between Alexandria and Pergamum ended abruptly, book collecting continued to flourish in Rome, provoking Seneca’s tirade against people who flaunt their wealth by gathering huge libraries. One old patrician is said to have expressed his love for literature in a particularly inventive manner. Instead of buying “books without number” like everyone else, he spent vast sums filling his house with learned slaves, each of whom he required to become in effect a living edition of a classic work. One servant might recite The Iliad or The Aeneid; another would chant the Odes of Pindar. Every standard author had a distinctive voice. One of the most prominent Roman collectors of all, the emperor Gordian II (192–238), maintained a huge library of 62,000 volumes. He also was the author of numerous learned works and the ardent keeper of twenty-two concubines, disparate interests that prompted this tart remark from Sir Edward Gibbon: “Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.” In a footnote, Gibbon offered this: “By each of his concubines the younger Gordian left three or four children. His literary productions, though less numerous, were by no means contemptible.”

  By the second century A.D., Rome was firmly established as headquarters of the publishing world. Books were in demand, and a plentiful labor force of slaves skilled in copying made producing them inexpensive. Because there were no printing presses, there were no setup costs or expensive corrections to make. Works came directly into the shops from authors and were handed over to the scribes, and copies were produced— often, according to the poet Martial, on the same day. The rhetorician Quintilian was so pleased with the process that he dedicated Institutio oratoria to Trypho, his bookseller. Martial records that his first book of epigrams sold very reasonably for five denari a copy. Cicero wrote to Atticus, the most famous publisher of the day, “You have sold my discourse on Ligarius so well that I shall entrust you with this duty for future works.” Pliny criticized his fellow citizen Regulus for mourning ostentatiously after the loss of a son. “He composes an oration which he is not content with publicly reciting in Rome, but must needs enrich the provinces with a thousand copies of it.”

  In A.D. 529 the School of Athens was closed, effectively ending Greek domination of the continent’s cultural agenda. At Monte Cassino near Naples, however, a learned monk named Benedict established a monastery that decreed strict procedures for the copying of ancient texts. Thus, a medieval institution essential to the preservation of knowledge, the monastic scriptorium, was functioning when Alexandria was captured by Saracen soldiers 111 years later. “I have conquered the great city of the West,” ‘Amr ibn al-‘Ās (known as Amru) wrote to his ruler in Mesopotamia, the caliph Omar. “The Moslems look forward impatiently to enjoying the fruits of their victory.” During the occupation that followed, the commander established a friendship with a Christian commentator on Aristotle called John Philoponus, who asked for mercy on behalf of the books in the library. “You have taken possession of them, but I know that you would not know how to make use of them,” he explained.

  Amru decided he needed guidance on the matter from the caliph and sent a messenger to Mesopotamia. Omar’s answer took the form of a syllogism: “As for the books you mention, here is my reply. If their content 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.” There were, it was said, four thousand public baths in Alexandria, each one heated by well-stoked stoves. Ibn-al-Kifti, a thirteenth-century Arab historian, writes that enough parchment and papyrus was distributed throughout the city to keep the waters comfortable for six months.

  With the fall of the Roman Empire and the flood of barbarian tribes throughout Europe, ancient
literature became an irrelevant pursuit. “The study of letters has perished,” Gregory of Tours declared triumphantly in the sixth century while exhorting his countrymen to “shun the lying fables of the poets.” But a lifeline was maintained nonetheless. Two sixth-century Roman scholars in particular, Boethius and Cassiodorus, provided the example by which so many classical writings escaped oblivion.

  Boethius (ca. 480–524) was the last learned Roman to study the language and literature of Greece, and the first to interpret the logical treatises of Aristotle for later ages. His unorthodox views led to his arrest and imprisonment. Although he served the Ostrogoth king of Italy, Theodoric, he was condemned without a hearing for purportedly advocating the liberation of Rome and was forced to abandon his famous library with its walls of ivory and glass for a dark prison cell in the tower of Pavia. As he awaited execution in 524, Boethius composed the Consolation of Philosophy, a dialogue of thirty-nine short poems in thirteen different meters that paid tribute to the ancient authors and philosophers. Eight hundred years later, Dante placed Boethius in the Fourth Heaven, and in 1535, as Sir Thomas More awaited his own execution in the Tower of London, the Consolation of Boethius provided particular comfort.

  Cassiodorus was another man who served Theodoric in a variety of important positions, including quaestor (private secretary), consul, and praetorian prefect, until sometime in the 540s; subsequently he devoted himself to scholarship and the pursuit of a Christian life. He wrote extensively on the history of the Goths and the seven liberal arts, but his most enduring contribution was to formalize procedures for the copying of manuscripts. The precepts Cassiodorus laid down were adopted by Benedict, founder of the monastery at Monte Cassino and the Benedictine order, which embraced reading as an essential discipline. The scriptorium Benedict established became the model for other monasteries and provided the principal means for preserving ancient literary works.

  “It was the hand of Cassiodorus which gave the literary impetus to the Benedictine Order,” the historian George Haven Putnam wrote in his history of books in the Middle Ages, “and it was from his magnificent collection of manuscripts, rescued from the ruins of libraries in Italy, that was supplied material for the pens of thousands of monastic scribes.” In his landmark history of classical scholarship, Sir John Edwin Sandys compared Cassiodorus and Boethius: “While the gaze of Boethius looks back on the declining day of the old classical world, that of Cassiodorus looks forward to the dawn of the Christian Middle Ages.” Of lasting significance was that each helped prevent “the tradition of a great past from being overwhelmed by the storms of barbarism.” While the “Dark Ages” are often characterized as a long intellectual slumber, there remained a heartbeat. In an influential nineteenth-century study titled History of the Transmission of Ancient Books to Modern Times, the British historian Isaac Taylor insisted that “throughout that period, reason, though often misdirected, was not sleeping: philosophy was rather bewildered than inert; and learning, although immured, was not lost.”

  As a fifteen-year-old student of law at the university of Montpellier in the early 1300s, Francesco di Petracco had a diverting preoccupation that caused increasing concern for his father, a notary who had been banished from Florence by the same decree that sent Dante into exile. Fearful that his son was spending too much time reading the forbidden texts of some ancient Latin authors and neglecting his studies, Pietro di Petracco decided one day to make a surprise visit on the young man. When Pietro spotted a number of suspicious volumes badly concealed in his son’s small dormitory room, he threw them in the fire. Startled by the hysterical reaction that ensued, Pietro removed two scorched volumes from the embers, Virgil’s Aeneid and Cicero’s Rhetoric. “Take the first one as an occasional relaxation for your mind,” he told his son, “and the second as an aid to your law studies.”

  When he described the incident many years later, Francesco di Petracco, by then known as Petrarch, recalled accepting “these restored comrades” with humble gratitude. He made the far-reaching decision to placate his family by biding his time. Petrarch dutifully studied law at Bologna, but immediately following his father’s death in 1326, he abandoned the profession for the pursuits of scholarship, poetry, and life as a formidable man of letters. A fervent patriot as well, he advised monarchs and cardinals, and as the prime mover of Italian humanism he was the architect of a two-hundred-year prelude to the Renaissance known as the Revival of Learning. Petrarch has been called the first modern man. By seeking out the forgotten writings of ancient authors, he also gained fame as a great collector of monastic manuscripts.

  When Petrarch began his scholarly research he came across references to classic works, only to discover that many masterpieces had disappeared. “For every illustrious name that I invoke,” he wrote, “I call to mind a crime of the dark ages that followed! As if their own sterility had not been shame enough, they left the books born of the vigils of our fathers, and the fruits of their genius to perish utterly. That epoch, which produced nothing, did not fear to squander the paternal heritage.”

  In Avignon, which was the temporary seat of the papacy for most of his life, Petrarch secured access to many monasteries and asked others to be on the lookout for manuscripts. “Please, if you love me, find people who are educated and trustworthy and set them to scour Tuscany, to turn out the book-cases of the monks and all the other scholars, and see if anything comes to light which will serve to quench—or, shall I say, increase—my thirst,” he wrote a friend sometime around the year 1346.

  In the same letter, Petrarch confessed that he was fortunate to have been “largely, if not wholly, delivered of nearly every human desire by divine mercy,” with the exception of “one insatiable desire which I so far have been quite unable to control.” That, of course, was books; then there was the frustration of “the impossibility of getting enough” of them. “Maybe I have more than I need,” he allowed,

  but it is the same with books as with everything else—success in finding them spurs one on to greed for more. There is moreover something special about books; gold and silver, jewels and purple raiment, marble halls and well-tended fields, pictures and horses in all their trappings, and everything else of that kind can afford only passing pleasure with nothing to say, whereas books can warm the heart with friendly words and counsel, entering into a close relationship with us which is articulate and alive.

  Petrarch traveled to Milan, Padua, Mantua, Ferrara, Parma, and Venice, where he probed ancient buildings and ruins, then moved on. He told how the sight of some remote monastery always induced giddy anticipation. “I would make my way towards it, always hoping to find some of the works for which I was greedily searching.”

  At the top of his want list were the lost writings of Cicero, and in 1333, after traveling through Paris, the Low Countries, and parts of Germany, he found at Liege two of Cicero’s speeches, one of them the Pro Archia Poeta. While book hunting in Verona he came across a large manuscript containing Cicero’s Letters to Atticus, as well as other correspondence to the orator’s brother Quintus and to Brutus. The codex (the traditional form of the Western book, with folded and cut sheets sewn together in a series of gatherings and enclosed by a binding, as opposed to scrolls) was in a decayed state when Petrarch discovered it buried in an “unexpected place”; and the copy he made became the only source of a revealing correspondence that, L. Paul Wilkinson has suggested, ranks with Rousseau’s Confessions. Petrarch considered the large volume his most precious possession and kept it apart from his other books. He even tripped on the awkward book from time to time, causing painful bruises and infection to his shins. He described how he felt about his manuscript discoveries in a series of impassioned letters he composed to dead authors. The first was addressed to Marcus Tullius Cicero: “Your letters I sought for long and diligently; and finally, where I least expected it, I found them. O Marcus Tullius, saying many things, uttering many lamentations, ranging through many places of thought and feeling, I long had known how exce
llent a guide you have proved for others; at last I was to learn what sort of guidance you gave yourself.”

  There were other notable finds, a badly damaged Quintilian in Arezzo and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History in Mantua among them. He wrote a colleague about his efforts: “Ah, the prayers I have addressed, the money I have sent, not only to Italy, but to France, to Germany, even to Spain and England—nay, would you believe it?— to Greece!” Greece, indeed; Petrarch acquired a Greek manuscript of Homer and sixteen dialogues of Plato, even though he never mastered the language.

  Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) is best known today as the author of the Decameron, but like Petrarch he was a major force in the rescue of classical literature. The half-French son of an Italian merchant, he was raised in Florence, where he embraced the budding principles of humanism. After his father’s business failed he earned extra money as a copyist. When Petrarch passed through Rome in 1350, Boccaccio greeted him at the city gates and initiated what became a lasting friendship. His discovery of an obscure religious work on the life of a saint whom Petrarch was researching brought him added esteem. With Petrarch’s encouragement, Boccaccio learned Greek. One legend holds that Petrarch was found dead in his library slouched over the first Latin version of The Iliad, prepared especially for him by his younger friend.

  When a dying monk condemned poetry as a meaningless exercise, Boccaccio seriously considered renouncing his studies, destroying his writings, giving his library to Petrarch, and taking holy orders. “Be reasonable,” Petrarch wrote him. “I know of many who have attained the highest saintliness without literary culture; I don’t know of any who were excluded from sanctity by culture.” Every journey, he insisted, is “a blessed one,” but “the way of knowledge is certainly more glorious, illumined and lofty. Hence there is no comparison between the simple piety of a rustic and the intellectual faith of a scholar. Give me an example of a saint who arose from the mass of the unlettered, and I will match him with a greater saint of the other sort.”