It is right that youth should celebrate its vigor. We do it a grave injustice by shackling its natural ebullience, by attempting to douse its fires with an excess of admonitions and restrictives. Let it, as far as health and safety will permit, taste the light of the open sky, the airs of unexplored mountains, and the swift currents swirling along tropical beaches. For in our elder years we will recall these liberating sensations with an intensity that sustains life itself.
The name of Ibn Fadlan (أحمد بن فضلان بن العباس بن راشد) has received some notoriety in recent years, primarily due to fictionalized accounts of his travels in print and film. Enthusiasts of travel literature who have taken the time to read his work will find, however, that his actual travels have little to do with these sensationalized tales. His book is of great value to modern ethnographers; for it remains the only first-hand account we have of the customs and habits of Viking communities in Russia during the medieval period.
There has been surprisingly little information published on how books were made, edited, distributed, and stored in ancient times. Yet the subject holds real interest for many of us today. My goal in this short essay will be to summarize how books were made and stored during the Greco-Roman period. I am confident that readers will quickly appreciate just how much more convenient our access to written information is in comparison to what our remote ancestors had to contend with.
It is a noble thing to intercede on behalf of another’s worthy cause. But the cause should be a worthy one; we must work to manage expectations; and, when every effort has been exerted, we must know when to let matters take their own course. Advocating on behalf of another in this way could almost be viewed as a form of public service. One of the law’s fundamental rules is the principle of proportionality: a punishment should be reasonably proportional to the crime committed. The reader examining the following anecdote should ask himself whether the punishment was, in fact, proportional to the committed offense.
When considering tales from the lives of the great saints, we should be more mindful of the moral imparted by the story than strictly attentive to the accuracy of its details. We must take into account the perspective of the writer, his proximity to the events he describes, and his moral purposes. To do anything less would defeat the purpose of the anecdote. Yet I am confident that many of the stories related by the biographer of Euthymios the Younger (823 A.D.?–898 A.D.) are based on actual events, and are not the idle speculations of the cloister. One of these stories we will now relate.
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Musa Ibn Nusair (موسى بن نصير) lived from 640 to 716 A.D. and served as the Umayyad governor-general of the province of Afriqiyya (North Africa). It was he who planned and directed the Arab conquest of the Gothic kingdom of Spain. The biographer Ibn Khallikan, writing in Baghdad in 1274, sketched the outline of his career and notable deeds. Ibn Nusair’s full name was Abd al-Rahman Musa Ibn Nusair, and he was noted throughout his life, we are told, “for prudence, generosity, bravery, and piety.” No army under his command was ever defeated.
Abu Faid Muwarrij al-Sadusi was a grammarian from the city of Basra, Iraq. We do not know the precise date of his birth, but he is reliably said to have died in the year A.D. 810 (year 195 in the Islamic calendar). His biographer Ibn Khallikan says that he studied at the school of Abu Zaid al-Ansari, and showed a particular talent for poetry and philology. We are also told that he accompanied the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun to Khorasan, and eventually took up residence in Marw and Nishapur.
We will tell the tale of the Rose of the Alhambra. For many years after the city of Grenada came under the control of the Spanish kings, it remained a quiet and secluded place. Mute and desolate were its haunting spires; and, while every stone bore a secret, they contented themselves with accommodating the restless spirits of an Almoravid past. But this changed with the accession of Philip V. After his marriage to Isabella, he desired to visit Granada with his retinue. The clatter of horses’ hooves, the blaring of courtly trumpets, and the cries of heralds and pages again resounded through the walls of the ancient city.
Of the literary works of classical antiquity, only a fraction have survived to the present day. What fraction this is, we do not know; one estimate places it at one-fourth, but the true figure will never be known. The reader may wonder how it can be that literary masterpieces could have been permitted to fade into obscurity, and then oblivion; but, on further reflection, he will marvel more at the fact that anything at all survived from antiquity than rue the losses we have suffered. Printing and the mass production of books are relatively new inventions. For most of history (in Europe at least) books could only be reproduced as fast as a copyist could transcribe them. Multiplicity was the only insurance against destruction: the more copies in existence, the better the book’s chance of survival.
In 1893 Leo Tolstoy published an essay whose title was rather clumsily translated into English as “Non-Acting.” In it the great novelist compared the relative merits of two positions, one held by Emile Zola, and the other held by Alexandre Dumas. Both Zola and Dumas had been asked to state their opinions on what they believed to be the basic forces that move, or should move, humanity. Tolstoy, mystic that he was, saw these rival opinions in terms of a cosmic competition between “the force of routine, tending to keep humanity in its accustomed path,” and “the force of reason and love, drawing humanity towards the light.”
Quintus Curtius 
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