Conspiracies of Rome (18 page)

    He turned back to the book and showed me the joints between the sheets. Papyrus is written on the better side, in columns about two inches wide, each separated by a margin of about one inch. When about thirty sheets have been written, they are glued, side by side, into a very long strip. This is tightly rolled about a wooden spindle with knobs at each end. The outermost sheet is joined to another spindle. The finished book is then sprayed with aromatics to keep insects away and stored in a leather case. Collections of books can be stored in a wooden box. The title is attached as a slip of papyrus to this container. In libraries, such books are stored not on shelves, but in racks, which are often designed to accommodate particular titles.

    ‘The great advantage of papyrus,’ Martin continued, ‘is its cheapness. A standard sheet here in Rome costs no more than the value of what an industrial slave could produce in two or three days. Parchment, of course, is much more expensive. The ancients used papyrus for all their books, and sometimes built up libraries of hundreds of thousands or even millions of books – though they contained only a tenth of the text that our own style of books can hold. Indeed, papyrus was so much the standard that it was the limitation in terms of the number of sheets in one roll that determined the length of ancient books.’

    He stopped his lecture and looked at me, a faintly triumphant smile on his face. Or it might have been more servile politeness. I didn’t grudge him the first.

    I picked the book up and practised unrolling it. The thing was so old, one of the sheets cracked as I handled it. Martin took it back and showed me how to unroll it more gently. I grunted some thanks.

    ‘I don’t know how long the parchment book that we know has been around,’ he said, slipping back into didactic mode. ‘But the ancients tended to look down on it as a vulgar innovation from the oriental races. It was brought into general use by the Church, influenced by its oriental roots. For hundreds of years now, it has been the standard – papyrus used only for supplemental or impermanent writings. Obviously, Anicius has inherited a great store of ancient writings that reached back to before the Triumph of the Church.’

    I had another go with the book. This time, it unrolled and rolled again without breaking. I’m surprised it took so long for the papyrus roll to fall out of general use. Apart from cheapness it has only disadvantages as a book. For example, it can be hard to tell what book you are reading, if the title falls off the case, or if the cases are muddled. The full title is only given on the innermost sheet – so you have to unroll all the way to see what this is. There is no page numbering, which makes any passage hard to find. And it’s much harder to skim a papyrus roll than a parchment book. Another problem is that only one side of the sheet can be used for writing, and papyrus is also far more delicate than parchment. The Church and the barbarians might have killed books. But this was a random and occasional massacre. The really great killer was time. These things just don’t last in a European climate.

    Martin had shown me the basics of reading in the ancient manner. Now he was off again on some errand. I sat alone in the library with a pile of books, carefully unrolling them to see what gems I might find.

    It was all precious treasure. If you rule out some Latin translations of Plato, there was nothing religious here. It was all from the great ages of the past, when men wrote about the world as they saw it, rather than as a pack of life-hating bigots had instructed them to think about it.

    I went through book after book after book. Most of these – the complete Cicero, for example – I set aside for collection and copying. Others, I couldn’t resist reading on the spot. I read and read, and delighted in all that I read. And I’d have read more but for the difficulty of coming to terms with the unfamiliar medium of these books. I read until the light through the high windows began to dim, and one of the Lateran slaves began to talk about going off in search of some lamps.

    Careful as I was, though, the books were in very delicate shape. They were all old, and for a long time had not been stored in anything like good conditions. Some were already in pieces as I took them out of their cases. Some fell apart as I unrolled them. But, unlike in the Lateran, I found almost nothing I wanted to reject. As the light began to fade in earnest, I had several hundred books piled on the floor beside the reading table.

    ‘Oh fuck!’ I muttered in English as another roll cracked apart in my hands. ‘Rub this stuff between your hands, and powder your face with it,’ I continued more politely in Latin.

    I heard a voice behind me. ‘Don’t trouble yourself over it, my dear young fellow. It’s all worthless stuff in these rooms. I wonder you spend so long poring over it.’

    I looked up. An old man had come silently into the room, and stood looking at me from the doorway. Tall, thin, with unkempt hair and beard; this, I supposed, was Anicius. He tottered over and fell into a chair opposite me that I’d rejected for myself as too rickety. It took his weight without a creak. If anything, he was even dirtier than the other nobles, and his stained robe stank of piss. But he had the usual proud look of a noble.

    ‘You have a most remarkable library,’ said I.

    He brushed the compliment aside with a dismissive wave. ‘All worthless,’ he continued: ‘Crumbling books by dead writers from a dead civilisation. There’s nothing here for you.’

    ‘But surely,’ I replied, ‘there is so much beauty and truth in these books. You are fortunate to have them as your friends.’

    ‘There was a time when I might have agreed with you. One of my ancestors certainly would. He used to sit all day at this very table, writing philosophy in Latin and translating from Greek. That was –’ he paused, screwing up his face – ‘a long time ago, when even I was a small boy. He came to a bad end, you know: killed by the barbarian who ruled Italy at the time. My family had a long fight to get his property back from the emperor. By the time we got it restituted, there was little enough left worth the having.’

    I remained silent, hoping he might tell me something worth hearing. At last, he continued: ‘When I was a boy – until I was older than you are now – this was a house of wealth and learning. In those days, Rome was still alive with people. We had baths and fountains and elegant entertainments. You can’t imagine how glorious the city then was. I thought then I was a scholar, and I’d give whole days to communing with the great minds of the past. Nowadays, I know better. What is it your Galilean priests cry out when they see some pleasure they don’t share? Ah yes, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”.’

    ‘They have a point, you know.’ He waved vaguely at the book racks. ‘It took a thousand years to amass all these words. Can you imagine the original work of writing? Can you imagine the continuing work thereafter of copying and recopying to keep them alive? And what do they tell us, now the civilisation for which they were written is dead? They tell us nothing.

    ‘We drowned because of this accumulated weight of learning. It weakened our bodies and minds. It didn’t save us from the emperor’s Wars of Reconquest, nor from the barbarians, nor from the plague.

    ‘You barbarians have neither learning nor the trade that feeds the wants revealed by learning. Your strong bodies resist the plague. We die.’

    I didn’t want to be rude, so held my tongue. But I could have told the old fool he was talking rot. My mother couldn’t read her own name, and had never owned anything produced more than a few miles distant. She’d still vomited her guts out. My dead brothers had dodged class with Auxilius more often than they’d attended, and they could barely give the sounds of the letters. This noble savage and decadent civilisation stuff has been around since the early Greeks. Search me how long it will stay around. Well, unlike most, I’ve tried both – and I know which one I prefer.

18

In Anicius’s library, I let the old man ramble on.

    ‘The plague,’ he said emphatically, ‘was the end of my world. It came just after the beginning of the great reconquest. Even as the Greek soldiers sent here by Justinian were advancing against the Goths, the plague advanced against us all.

    ‘There was a summer without heat. Then the sun and moon had shone in many colours. Then the poor began dying in Rome.’

    He went into a grisly description of the symptoms – fever and a black mottling, followed by swellings in the groin and armpits. ‘All who caught this pestilence sent hither from the city of New Rome died without exception.’

    More rot he was speaking. A summer without heat and blue moons! The first, just possibly; the second, not at all. Claims made so greatly against common sense are always to be at least suspected. As for the rest, I was once in Alexandria during an outbreak of plague, and another time in Ctesiphon. He got the symptoms right. But I know now that not everyone dies.

    Anicius sat spouting about the deaths until the light had well and truly gone – the multitude of bodies lying unburied in the streets, the riotous living of those who weren’t yet stricken, the general collapse of order and morality, the public orgies, as the still living fornicated like rabbits.

    Like all who could afford to, he ran away from the city. The plague followed, and soon the country districts were as ravaged as the towns. Here, the crops withered on the ground, and cows wandered, bellowing with pain when there was no one to milk them. It all sounded very nasty. But it seemed to cheer Anicius.

    ‘And so I am all that is left of the old world,’ he concluded with a smack of his withered lips that screamed complacency.

    There wasn’t much replying to this, so I changed the subject.

    ‘My Lord Anicius,’ I asked with a humble wave around the library, ‘might you have anything by Epicurus?’

    The old man’s eyes widened. He looked at me as if for the first time. ‘And what,’ he asked in a suddenly firm voice, ‘would you want to know about Epicurus?’

    The answer was that I’d pressed every book I could find in Canterbury for mentions of him, and turned over every book I could find in those French monasteries. Now, I was for the first time in a library stuffed with ancient writings. I wanted to know what original works it might contain.

    ‘You’ll find much here in Greek,’ Anicius said after a pause, ‘though I don’t think much at all in Latin, which is not a language well adapted to philosophy. But do tell me – what possible interest could a young and clean-minded barbarian have in that ancient trash?’

    ‘Of all the philosophy I’ve read,’ I answered, ‘Epicurus comes closest to the truth that I feel.’

    Anicius let out a wheezing laugh. He leaned back on the creaking chair. As he gathered his thoughts, he seemed twenty years younger at least. ‘The feelings of an uninstructed mind,’ he said with a surprising precision, ‘are not an appropriate criterion for deciding the truth of a matter. Epicurus was the author of a bestial philosophy. It allows for no nobility of sentiment, no feelings of honour. It preaches a message of individual happiness and of withdrawal from the world.’

    Nothing wrong with that, I told myself. So long as happiness is rightly understood – and I’d learnt enough to know the meaning that Epicurus had intended – there is no finer end in life. As for honour and nobility of sentiment, they are good ultimately only for turning the world into a nightmare.

    I wondered if it would be presumptuous of me to quote one of the doctrines I’d found in a fragmentary encyclopaedia outside Pisa: ‘Of all things that wisdom provides for living one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.’ But the chance had passed. Anicius was warming to his theme.

    ‘You will even find the man’s physical theories defective,’ he said. ‘According to your Epicurus, the world is made of atoms that move through space. As these atoms collide, they form compounds of increasing size and complexity.

    ‘Now if – as Democritus believed – these atoms move constantly in their first course, either they will not collide or they will. If they do not collide, no compounds can be formed, and there will be no universe as we know it. If they do collide, both the collisions and all that flows from them can be known as surely in advance as an archer can tell the flight of his arrow. In this second case, the mind will be trapped in a sequence of absolute necessity, and there can be no room for any freedom of the will.’

    ‘I don’t know about Democritus,’ I said, ‘though I have heard his name. But I do know that Epicurus believed the atoms to swerve from their course in uncaused ways. That surely means—’

    ‘An uncaused swerve?’ Anicius broke in with a sneer. ‘If the atoms can swerve once from their course, why should they not swerve all the time? Why should there be any observed regularity to the world? Why should the atoms not swerve unpredictably together and unpredictably apart? Why should a new universe not come into being with every heartbeat, and be at once dissolved?’