I’d discussed with Martin the order of our inspections. First, there was to be the Lateran. We’d start the secretaries, and leave them to their copying – we might have the first completed books within ten days if they applied themselves. Then, we’d go off with just two of the general slaves to see Anicius. Martin said he was very old, and might not appreciate a mob of visitors. Because I’d slept in, we were somewhat behind in our inspections. But I decided to continue with the agreed order. It was late afternoon when we set out from the Lateran for the long walk to the house of Anicius on the Quirinal Hill.
Behind its imposing facade, this was largely a ruin. It had once been a very big palace faced with marble and stucco. It must have dominated the surroundings, both in height and with its sprawl down the hill. Now, the marble was stripped, and the stucco falling off. The roof had fallen in on most of the rooms, leaving only the library rooms, which had been built with brick domes, and some small ancillary buildings. All about were the usual piles of rubbish and the smell of dumped sewage. Unlike on the Caelian, there was no running water on the Quirinal.
We were let in through the still standing gate by a young slave. He led us through the unroofed entrance hall into the library rooms. These were mostly in good order. Water had come through in a few places, but the resulting damage was local to the racks directly underneath. All else was largely intact.
The books were nearly all of a kind I hadn’t seen before, and that I doubt you have ever seen. They were made of papyrus. Now, unless you’re reading all this in manuscript, rather than in a copy, you may never have seen a sheet of papyrus – since the Saracens took Egypt, the stuff has been in short supply for us.
Martin looked at me with a smile. I suppressed the look of confusion he could plainly see on my face, and reached for one of the books. It was heavier than I’d expected – nothing like the weight of a modern book, but still heavy. It fell through my fingers and, with a crash, came apart on the floor.
‘Let me help you, sir,’ he said. He reached for another and took it over to a table. ‘Look, you have to take it from the leather case if there is one, and then you take it in your right hand, and unroll it a column at a time, winding it onto the outer spindle with your left. Then you wind it all the way back.’
With practised ease, he unrolled the book, showing the slender columns of text. These are written so narrow to avoid excessive strain on the sheets, which are delicate even when new. The text is written larger than in a modern book because the surface is so much rougher than parchment.
‘What is papyrus?’ I asked. I hated showing ignorance in front of Martin. But I wanted to know.
He stood back from the book he’d opened and let his voice take on a lecturing tone. ‘Papyrus,’ he said, ‘is made from the tall, thick reeds of that name that grow everywhere in the Nile valley. The reeds are harvested. The outer casing is removed, showing a dense inner pith. This is sliced into thin strips, and these are cut into manageable lengths. Strips from the rougher, outer pith are laid lengthways, side by side, into a sheet about fourteen inches across by about eleven high. On top of these are placed further strips from the more tender pith, also side by side, going across. The whole is then pressed very hard and dried. Finally, the better side is rubbed smooth with pumice. The result is a tough, semi-flexible writing sheet.’
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.