Recent posts of mine have been hopeful about the survival of ancient texts. This post is meant to bring reality back into the equation... I really like books. Nicholas Basbanes, a writer and former columnist about all things that have to do with books and bibliophilia, has just finished his last book in an extraordinary trilogy about "bibliophilic efforts". The trilogy began in 1995 with A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books followed in 2001 with Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture and it has now just been completed with the book I'm about to discuss (and my favorite of the lot) A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Imperfect World (2003). Much of the book in one way or another has to do with preservation and the first obvious lesson one learns is that the continued existence of a noteworthy text - regardless of its literary or historical value - is dependent on the material upon which it was written. For example "even though church fathers began conserving letters, acts of martys, and various other institutional records during apostolic times" not much original material before the 11th century survived "mainly because the Popes were very slow to change over from traditional if uncertain papyrus to the more durable parchment." In the Greco-Roman world, where papyrus reeds did not grow, the preservation of texts before the widespread use of parchment depended upon scribes making copies. This was not always very successful. Consider, Basbanes writes, the case of the Roman Emperor Marcus Claudius Tacitus who believed he was a descendant of the famous Roman historian Tacitus (c. 56 - c. 120):
As an act of homage to his presumed forebear, the Emperor directed that imperial scribes make ten new copies of the master's works every year and deliver them to various libraries throughout the empire, a sure way, he was convinced, to ensure their long-term suvival. This ambitious scheme did nothing to forestall the inevitable, as only a fraction of Tacitus's works passed on to the age of printing, each of them through circumstances bordering on the miraculous. Books 1 through 6 of the Annals have as their source a single manuscript on vellum now in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence; Annals 11-16 and Histories 1-5 depend on another from the eleventh century.
But Tacitus should be counted lucky to have any of his works survive into our own era. Many others did not. The presocratic philospher Heraclitus (c. 535 - c. 475 BCE) is one example - his writings were in circulation as late as the second or third centuries of the Christian era but are no longer extant (we only have fragments). Basbanes laments all that we've lost:
A hint of just how many great works from antiquity have been lost is available in the most teasing of ways to anyone who takes the time to engage the eclectic ruminations of Aulus Gellius, a Roman writer from the second century AD who filled twenty volumes with his observations and commentary on a formidable variety of subjects, which in many cases included verbatim excerpts from many of the important writings of his time, along with snippets of his own commentary. Of the 275 authors he mentioned in The Attic Nights...fully half produced works that are either lost entirely or known only through fragments.
In an upcoming post, I'll tell the story of the ninth century Byzantine theologian, Photius, and his fortunate work as a literary diarist...