A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 9

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  Balm for the Soul

  Our written records carry us only a millionth of the way back to the origin of life. Our beginnings, the key events in our early development, are not readily accessible to us. No firsthand accounts have come down to us. They cannot be found in living memory or in the annals of our species. Our time-depth is pathetically, disturbingly shallow. The overwhelming majority of our ancestors are wholly unknown to us. They have no names, no faces, no foibles. No family anecdotes attach to them. They are unreclaimable, lost to us forever.

  —Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan,

  Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

  If it is true that language is the miracle of our species, then it follows that writing is the witness. Words that are recorded endure, whereas those merely spoken dissolve, as Shakespeare’s Prospero would have it, “like an insubstantial pageant faded.” From the time writing first appeared on clay tablets in Mesopotamia five thousand years ago, it has been the object of veneration. During a trip through Thebes in the last century before the birth of Christ, Diodorus Siculus described a hall outside the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II where sacred texts had been kept more than eleven hundred years earlier. Above the portals was inscribed “The house of healing for the soul.”

  As cultures developed, books became instruments of utility and enlightenment, not just guides to ritual and worship. Gradually the ability to read extended beyond wise men and priests to embrace other segments of society. Literacy was so widespread and written material so abundant during the third century B.C. that the Sicilian historian Timaeus, driven into exile by the tyrant Agathocles of Syracuse, spent the last fifty years of his life productively engaged in archival research without ever having to leave Athens. Rome had as many as forty libraries operating during its imperial period, along with a lively book trade that kept everyone adequately supplied.

  With the secularization of books came the craving to possess them, a passion that by classical times was fully developed. For all the value they placed on moderation and restraint, ancient Greeks gathered rarities just as obsessively as collectors of today. Competition was keen, the hunt relentless, and the qualities so coveted now—good condition, scarcity, and significance—were equally prized twenty-five centuries ago. Book madness was so common, in fact, that collectors became the butt of jokes for philosophers, dramatists, and social satirists.

  The historian Xenophon (431–352 B.C.), who carried a box of books with him on the anabasis (the retreat of Greek mercenaries described in his Anabasis), writes in Memorabilia about Euthydemus, a pupil of Socrates who formed an extensive library of poetry and scholarship. “Pray tell me, Euthydemus, is it really true what people tell me, that you have made a large collection of the writings of ‘the wise,’ as they are called?” Socrates once asked the young man.

  “Quite true, Socrates, and I mean to go on collecting until I possess all the books I can possibly lay hold of,” Euthydemus answered.

  “I admire you for wishing to possess treasures of wisdom rather than of gold and silver, which shows that you do not believe gold and silver to be the means of making men better, but that the thoughts of the wise alone enrich with virtue their possessors,” Socrates said. “And what is it in which you desire to excel, Euthydemus, that you collect books?” he then wondered. The pupil offered no reply, and Socrates pressed on: a doctor perhaps, an architect, or maybe a mathematician? Euthydemus remained silent. “Then do you wish to be an astronomer? Or possibly a rhapsodist? For I am told you have the entire works of Homer in your possession.”

  A hundred years later, the Athenian playwright Aristophanes ruthlessly ridiculed the tragedian Euripides’ celebrated appetite for books in The Frogs, a comedy that took first prize at the Lenaea competition in 405 B.C. In the play’s climactic scene, Aeschylus and Euripides, by then both deceased, confront each other in Hades to determine which was the better playwright. Sophocles, the third member of the great dramatic triumvirate, has wisely stepped aside while his former rivals tear apart each other’s language, phrasing, sentence construction, dialogue, music, characterizations, stagecraft, intellectual depth, even syllable divisions and dramatic pauses. Finally, a weary Aeschylus issues an impertinent challenge that includes snide mention of Euripides’ rumored reliance on the slave Cephisophon to help him write his plays:

  Come! No more line for line! Let him bring all,—

  His wife, his children, his Cephisophon,

  And mount the scale himself, with all his books.

  I shall outweigh them with two lines alone.

  Lucian of Samosata, the second-century satirist whom Lord Macaulay called “the last great master of Attic eloquence and Attic wit,” titled one of his biting treatises To an Illiterate Book-Fancier and addressed it to an unnamed collector he accused of being interested more in fashion than in substance. Lucian even mocked the fascination for certain books that today are known as “association” copies. “You think that by buying up all the best books you can lay your hands on, you will pass for a man of literary taste,” he scolded.

  You may get together the works of Demosthenes, and his eight beautiful copies of Thucydides, all in the orator’s own handwriting, and all the manuscripts that Sulla sent away from Athens to Italy—and you will be no nearer to culture at the end of it, though you should sleep with them under your pillow or paste them together and wear them as a garment; an ape is still an ape, says the proverb, though his trappings be of gold. So it is with you: you have always a book in your hand, you are always reading; but what is it all about, you have not an idea; you do prick up asinine ears at the lyre’s sound. Books would be precious things indeed, if the mere possession of them guaranteed culture to their owner.

  Similarly, Decius Magnus Ausonius, a fourth-century Latin writer of some note who taught rhetoric at Bordeaux for thirty years, had occasion to tease an affluent friend who had filled his home with an “Instant Library.” Ausonius wondered, “Because with purchased books thy library is crammed, dost thou think thyself a learned man and scholarly, Philomusus? After this sort wilt thou lay up strings, keys and lyres, and having purchased all, tomorrow thou wilt be a musician?” Seneca, the Stoic poet and philosopher who had the fatal misfortune to serve in Nero’s court, found the obsessive gathering of books just as ludicrous. “Of what use are books without number and complete collections, if their owner barely finds time in the course of his life even to read their titles? Devote yourself to a few books, and do not wander here and there amongst a multitude of them.” Many generations later, another bemused poet would echo the same sentiment. “Bibliophiles,” A.E. Housman sniffed. “An idiotic class.”

  The Roman orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.) embraced a decidedly different opinion on the matter in what is arguably the finest panegyric on literature to emerge from the ancient world. Cicero’s primary purpose in the eloquent speech, known as the Pro Archia Poeta, was to defend a Greek poet named Archias against politically motivated charges that impugned his citizenship. Most of the address, delivered before a court of inquiry in 62 B.C., is a digression that celebrates reading and the reverence for books.

  All literature, all philosophy, all history, abounds with incentives to noble action, incentives which would be buried in black darkness were the light of the written word not flashed upon them.… I am a votary of literature, and make the confession unashamed; shame belongs rather to the bookish recluse, who knows not how to apply his reading to the good of his fellows, or to manifest its fruits to the eyes of all.…[Reading] gives stimulus to our youth and diversion to our old age; this adds a charm to success, and offers a haven of consolation to failure. In the home it delights, in the world it hampers not. Through the night-watches, on all our journeying, and in our hours of country ease, it is our unfailing companion.

  Cicero is known to have maintained a formidable library at his villa in Tusculum, and when Atticus, his close friend and publisher, was living in Athens, he saw an oppor
tunity to acquire some especially desirable Greek books. “I want you to think how you can get a library together for me,” Cicero wrote in 67 B.C. “I place in your kindness all hope of the pleasure I want to have when I come to retire.” Atticus wasted little time in locating the requested books; unfortunately, the cost to procure them greatly exceeded his friend’s budget. When advised of the cost, Cicero pleaded for time. “I am saving up all my little incomings to provide this resource for my old age,” he wrote back. A year later, Cicero released Atticus from any further obligation to him, but expressed the fervent wish that he might yet be able to buy the manuscripts: “Keep your books safe and do not give up hope of my being able to make them mine. If I succeed, I shall surpass Crassus in riches and shall look down on the estates and meadows of all other men.”

  Cleopatra of Egypt has been many things to many artists and writers: a model of feminine virtue to Chaucer, a tragic heroine for Shakespeare, a sex kitten for George Bernard Shaw, a siren of staggering beauty played variously by Claudette Colbert and Elizabeth Taylor. But none of these stereotypes takes into account the woman’s ability to govern effectively during gravely uncertain times or her keen appreciation for knowledge. During her visit to Rome in 45 B.C., Cicero coyly asked whether he could borrow a few treasures from the fabled collection she controlled in Alexandria, which was the envy of the civilized world. Books—many thousands of them—also played a small but telling role in her well-chronicled relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.

  When the daughter of King Ptolemy XII became Queen Cleopatra VII in 51 B.C. at the age of eighteen, the great library and museum in her capital city, Alexandria, had stood as a beacon of learning and discovery for almost 250 years. The library had been founded by her Macedonian ancestors on the daring premise that all the world’s knowledge could be gathered under one roof, and what remains remarkable after all this time is how assiduously the task was pursued and how glorious and enriching were the results. For nine luminous centuries, from around 300 B.C. to the seventh century A.D., Alexandria was a place of inspiration, a vibrant shrine dedicated to the limitless potential of human achievement. Alexandria was by no means the first great book repository, but because it contained antiquity’s most extensive collection of recorded thought, it undoubtedly was the greatest.

  Not long after Alexander the Great entered Egypt and founded the city that would bear his name, he resolved to achieve cultural respectability. Around 300 B.C., a formal academy was established within the palace walls to serve the Muses; known as the Museum, it gave poets, historians, musicians, mathematicians, astronomers, and scientists an opportunity to live and work under royal patronage. The results were awesome. At Alexandria, Euclid worked out the elements of geometry; Ptolemy mapped the heavens; poet and scholar Eratosthenes determined the circumference of the earth; Theocritus drafted the first pastoral poems; the anatomist Herophilius recognized the connection between a heartbeat and a pulse and articulated the difference between arteries and veins; inventor Ctesibius designed a water-clock and built the first keyboard instrument; the mathematician Diophantus formulated the algebraic method; Archimedes refined his theory that explained the weight and displacement of liquids and gases; Callimachus developed the allusive style of poetry and introduced systematic methods of cataloguing and shelving books; Zenodotus produced authentic versions of Homer’s epics by collating every known text that could be obtained.

  In order for this kind of creativity to flourish, books were essential. About 295 B.C., King Ptolemy I Soter enlisted the services of the orator Demetrios Phalereus, a former governor of Athens, and empowered him, according to Flavius Josephus, to “collect, if he could, all the books in the inhabited world.” To support his efforts, the king sent letters to “all the sovereigns and governors on earth” requesting that they furnish works by “poets and prose-writers, rhetoricians and sophists, doctors and soothsayers, historians, and all the others too.”

  Agents were sent out to scout the cities of Asia, North Africa, and Europe, and were authorized to spend whatever was necessary. Every possible source was explored, to the point that foreign vessels calling in at Alexandria were searched routinely for scrolls and manuscripts. Anything of interest found on board was confiscated and copied. Transcripts were returned in due course, but the originals always stayed in the library. A key work of Hippocrates carried by a traveling physician from Pamphylia is said to have entered the collection in this manner. These acquisitions, according to Galen, were so commonplace that they were catalogued under a special heading, “books of the ships.” Galen further asserted that Ptolemy’s representatives borrowed the original dramatic works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from the state archives in Athens by posting fifteen silver talents as a pledge against their safe return. What went back to Athens, however, were copies, the security deposit notwithstanding.

  As material kept coming in, the matter of accessibility arose, and a new bibliographical craft, translation, was institutionalized. An Alexandrian Jew who called himself Aristea records that Demetrios persuaded Ptolemy to acquire an important body of Jewish laws, but before they could be put to productive use, a problem had to be resolved. “They are not written in Syriac, as is generally believed, but in Hebrew, an altogether different language,” the king was told. With Ptolemy’s royal backing, seventy-two scholars were recruited to produce what tradition holds to be the first translation of the Old Testament into Greek, a sacred document still known as the Septuagint.

  Around 250 B.C., Timon of Philius, a Skeptic philosopher and author of barbed lampoons, wrote of Alexandria, without identifying the city by name, that in the “populous land of Egypt they breed a race of bookish scribblers who spend their whole lives pecking away in the cage of the Muses.”

  But not everyone in the ancient world was amused. A few hundred miles away, in northwestern Asia Minor in the kingdom of Pergamum, another library took shape under the enthusiastic patronage of King Eumenes, sparking a spirited competition between the two cities’ institutions. Both kingdoms enjoyed great wealth, and since questions of cost were incidental, a lucrative trade emerged in the manufacture of forgeries. In one embarrassing instance, Pergamum trumpeted its purchase of what appeared to be a richer collection of Demosthenes’ works than anything previously known. The sensational find supposedly included an unrecorded speech, until an alert researcher in Alexandria determined that the “discovery” actually had been copied “to the letter” out of a book of orations by Anaximenes of Lampsacus.

  Just how keenly contested the competition between the two libraries was is underscored by a story that Pliny attributes to Marcus Varro, the scholar whom Caesar wanted to build a great public library in Rome. Since Egypt was the principal source of papyrus, King Ptolemy V Epiphanes, who was pharaoh from 205 to 185 B.C., stopped shipment of the essential product to Eumenes II, king of Pergamum from 197 to 159 B.C. Without papyrus, scrolls could not be manufactured, and without scrolls, manuscripts could not be copied. Instead of crippling the rival library, the ploy occasioned increased production of a durable writing material fabricated from the skins of sheep and goats: vellum, or parchment. Though scholars challenge Strabo’s contention that the costly process was invented in Pergamum—Diodorus Siculus wrote that ancient Persians recorded their national reports on such a material, and Josephus credited the Jews with doing the same—it certainly was improved there; in fact, the term parchment comes from a medieval Latin phrase for “from Pergamum.” In another scheme, Eumenes II persuaded Aristophanes of Byzantium to leave his post as librarian at Alexandria and assume the same position in Pergamum, but when Ptolemy Epiphanes learned of the offer, he had the scholar arrested and imprisoned.

  Perhaps the rivalry can be illustrated best by the lengths to which each library went to acquire an archive that would have been the supreme acquisition of any repository, the unique personal papers of Aristotle, the ancient world’s most influential thinker. In addition to the philosopher’s writings, the col
lection may have included research material gathered for him on the orders of his student, Alexander the Great. The young king is known to have used the vast resources he controlled to supply his former teacher with exotic specimens, including wild animals from Asia and Africa. Aristotle’s books are known to have passed to a favored pupil, Theophrastus, and from him to Neleus, a colleague who refused repeated offers to sell the old master’s library. To appease Ptolemy, Neleus parted with a few lesser items, but the most important scrolls remained with his heirs, who buried them in a cave near their house.

  The geographer Strabo (64 B.C.-A.D. 19) wrote, “At length, but not before the books had been injured by damp and worms, they were sold to Apellicontes of Teos—rather a collector than a philosopher—who, by unskillful attempts at the restoration of defective and mutilated passages in the writings of Aristotle, increased the injury by corrupting the text.” Apellicontes did something that bibliographers of any era would judge unconscionable: he filled in the blanks caused by worms and mold with words that he felt Aristotle might have been inclined to write himself, a cultural counterfeit not unlike the nineteenth-century forger William Henry Ireland’s attempt to write a “lost” Shakespeare play. Still, the fragments that remained were of extraordinary value, and the saga does not end with the man who was “rather a collector than a philosopher.” Apellicontes took Aristotle’s books home to Athens, where he displayed them as a trophy. Posidonius noted that Apellicontes’ library included the works of many authors, not just of Aristotle. On at least one occasion he was accused of stealing some Attic decrees from the state archives.

  Knowledge of Apellicontes’ library, in any case, was certainly no secret, since Posidonius also recorded that when the Roman dictator Sulla sacked Athens in 86 B.C., one of his first targets was this collection, which was seized and carried off to Rome. There it was used by several privileged scholars, Cicero, Atticus, and Tyrannion among them. From Sulla the library passed to Faustus, his spendthrift son, who soon found himself in debt. He sold everything, at which point the books vanished forever.