The student of classical antiquity’s literary monuments may find himself perplexed by the relative paucity of its surviving examples.  How could it be, we may wonder, that such a large corpus of celebrated works slipped, nearly unnoticed in the passage of centuries, into oblivion?  Why is it that so many writings held in universally high regard exist today only in fragmentary or mutilated form?  How could these tragedies of indifference and neglect have been permitted?  By what processes are classics “lost”?  These are worthy and difficult questions.  They can be answered; but the answers are unsettling, and carry implications very modern in their relevance. 

In the quest for understanding, the first obstacle we must overcome is our own mental conditioning.  We must free ourselves of modern conceptions of “libraries” and “books.”  We must be reminded that the present information age, which has placed books and knowledge at the edge of every fingertip, is an anomaly in history.  Much of our modern view of education and intellectual betterment is traceable to the Enlightenment.  The ancient and medieval worlds had quite different understandings of education, literacy, and the dissemination of knowledge.  We must not condemn them for this, for their outlook was shaped by the technology and social structures that prevailed at the time.

The production, storage, and collection of books were expensive activities in the ancient world.  Books themselves (what we today would call scrolls) were made from pasted sheets of papyrus, a plant material available in mass quantities only in Egypt.  It is very easy for us today to take for granted the availability of paper and print; but these resources were either unknown or did not exist in antiquity.  Books had to be copied by hand, a laborious and expensive proposition requiring either slave or scribe.  It is not surprising to learn that only wealthy elites could afford and maintain extensive book collections.  Such private “libraries” were few and far between, and could easily be destroyed by insects, inundations of water, or fire.  They could be carted off as plunder in times of war. Only kings and aristocrats possessed substantial quantities of books; after the advent of Christianity, the Church could, to a limited degree, be added to this list, but its focus was on religious works, not on the pagan classics.

But we must realize that our modern concept of a “library,” in which a citizen can enter a facility and have easy access to books for study, existed in the ancient world only in extremely limited form.  Collections of books were prestige ornaments of kings, priests, and aristocrats.  The celebrated collections at Alexandria and Ephesus more resembled private research facilities, or religious institutions, than actual lending libraries.  The education of the masses, and the granting of easy access to written resources, were neither the priorities nor the aspirations of almost all ancient rulers.  Most of them, in fact, were more comfortable denying their people access to knowledge than in granting it.  Ancient libraries did not create generationally self-sustaining reading publics, nor did they foster the formation of professional academic classes.      

There was one notable exception to this prevailing condition.  According to Dr. Clarence Boyd’s Public Libraries and Literary Culture in Ancient Rome, it was Julius Caesar who first conceived the idea of a network of libraries for the benefit of the Roman public.  Suetonius (Caesar 44) makes it clear that Caesar considered public libraries a cornerstone of his ambition to remake Rome.  Caesar was killed before he could bring his idea to fruition, but the Emperor Augustus made substantial progress in implementing his martyred predecessor’s vision.  According to Boyd, in the empire’s fourth century, approximately twenty-eight public libraries existed in Rome.  Nine of these can still be identified by name.  They are:  Bibliotheca in Atrio Libertatis, Bibliotheca Templi Apollinis, Bibliotheca Porticus Octaviae, Bibliotheca Templi Augusti, Bibliotheca Domus Tiberianae, Bibliotheca in Templo Pacis, Bibliotheca in Foro Traiani, Bibliotheca in Capitolio, and the Bibliotheca in Templo Aesculapii.  

But this concern for public betterment would not endure.  To the regular beneficiary of knowledge, familiarity and access inevitably generate indifference; and in the absence of the wise hand of a conservator, even the most luminous trophies of literary excellence may become dimmed in their luster, and consigned to neglectful apathy.  The historian Ammianus Marcellinus tells us that by the fourth century, Rome’s public libraries were permanently closed “in the manner of tombs” (XIV.6.18).  To the nascent Church, the libraries of the pagan world were not important; many of them were converted for use as religious sites. 

Yet the conscientious scholar must reserve his most baleful shudder for the following realization.  According to the comprehensive study Ancient Libraries (König et. al., 2013), it seems clear that even as late as 500 A.D., the majority of Latin literature survived in private or ecclesiastical collections.  “But between 550 and 750 [A.D.], almost no non-Christian manuscripts were recopied, so that when the scholars of the Carolingian renaissance [i.e., Charlemagne’s tenure] began collecting and copying classical books (most of which had probably survived in private collections in Italy) a great part of Latin literature was gone forever.”  This is a shocking apprehension.  For at least two centuries, almost no one bothered to copy the classics of antiquity; and by the time Alcuin at Charlemagne’s court took up the task, there was little left to preserve.  Neither should we overestimate the influence and scope of the “Carolingian renaissance”:  it was a lit candle in a black void of barbarism and ignorance, a noble but limited effort which cannot properly be compared to the Renaissance that began in Italy in the fifteenth century.      

The majority of the ancient classics were lost because there was no one to preserve, protect, and transmit them.  Few understood the cultural context from which they arose; few were receptive to the rhythms of their diction, and fewer still could grasp their subtleties.  The new civilization that came to replace Rome’s empire in the West had other priorities, and could not be bothered with the preservation of competing and despised conceptions of the world.  In the extirpation of the celebrated texts of Greece and Rome, violence and malicious neglect certainly played their respective roles.  But the high executioner of ancient learning was apathy. 

.

.

Read more in the new translation of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, now available in paperback, hardcover, Kindle, or audiobook.