The library was much as I’d left it – was that just three days before? It seemed like three months. Martin had arranged for collection of the pile of books I’d left on the floor. I’d now start pulling down more of those precious things.
What I really had in mind was a regular institute of higher learning in England. The Church wanted an army of educated clerics. I’d give that to the Church. Those young men could spend all morning copying manuscripts. In the afternoon, they could discuss the meaning of what they’d read. I’d make England the intellectual heart of the entire West – far away from savage barbarians, and stupid, decayed nobles, and imperial officials too weak and lazy to protect the civilisation that had spawned them as meat in the sun generates maggots, but too active and strong to leave it in peace. Our own youth would learn all I could send them of literature and history and philosophy and mathematics and science, and they would bring it back to the world that had lost it.
Looking round, I noticed an open scroll on the reading table. I didn’t recall leaving anything there. I looked closer. It was another old book. Only this one showed greater signs of use and much evidence of care for its condition. It had been mended in all the cracked places. Some of the fainter ink had recently been gone over in a wavering hand. There was no title on it. I carefully pulled it back to the first column and began reading: e tenebris tantis tam clarum extollere lumen qui primus potuisti inlustrans commoda uitae te sequor o Graiae gentis decus inque tuis nunc ficta pedum pono pressis uestigia signis…
It was a rapturous hymn of praise to Epicurus, I discovered with a shock. It went on to explain how he had freed us from the fear of death, and thereby enabled us to live more happily.
It was an odd sort of poetry – none of the smooth perfection I’d been used to in Vergil and the other old writers. I later discovered it was by someone called Lucretius, who’d lived around the same time as Cicero. And he hadn’t lived to complete his poem.
But what this poetry lacked in smooth refinement, it more than compensated for in overwhelming force. It swept over me like an oncoming tide, in wave after wave of didactic passion. We had no reason to fear death, it proclaimed. After death there was nothing, as Anicius had said, and death itself was nothing.
‘As we felt no woe in times long gone when from all the earth to battle the Carthaginians came, so when we are no more and the mind and body are sundered, we shall feel nothing of what may happen then – not even if the earth is confounded with the sea and the sea with the sky.’
No voice like this can ever have proclaimed the nothingness of the soul after death. Not even Epicurus himself can have thundered this Gospel of Death so loudly. Not even the Church Fathers could have encountered this blast of impassioned eloquence without bending before it. Death is annihilation. Why therefore fear it?
I read the piece through. I rolled back and read it again. It’s at times like this that spacing between the words might be helpful. I read it again, committing it all to memory. Seventy-five years later, I can still remember it. Perhaps I will write it down before I die. It would be a shame if the young students at Jarrow miss out on something so astonishing.
I looked up. Anicius must have been standing over me a long time. He’d put on a robe that was almost clean and, except for his breath, didn’t smell today.
‘Please accept my regrets for your own troubled mind,’ he said. ‘Your friend is at peace, however. On the eccentric principles of yourself and your master, his atoms will be reused, for they at least are immortal. They will form the parts of other living bodies. He is now nothing. We all come to nothing. But different lives will make use of our atoms. And, like runners in a torch race, these atoms will hand on the lamps of life.
‘ Post mortem nihil ipsaque mors nihil. ’
I thanked him for the immense comfort he had brought me. In truth, all the bounce I’d got from surviving that knife attack without a scratch and reaping that nice harvest on the Exchange had been knocked out of me by his words. But I wanted to be polite. I also wanted the rest of the poem. From the last sheet inside the book, I’d found that this was Book Three of a longer poem. Where was the rest?
‘There is more, and -’ he waved at the racks – ‘it may be in that lot somewhere. I’ll not dig it out for you. Far better, I think, if you can find it for yourself. You may find other books there that will bring you to a better appreciation of the truth. Yes, my young scholar,’ he sat down and glanced with a curiously soft look at the racks, ‘there is an educational value all its own in browsing. I used to do that when I was your age. It brought me friends who have lasted nearly the rest of my life.’
He looked back at me. ‘Tell me, my dear boy, what for you is the value of all this knowledge that you seek?’
‘Knowledge,’ I said, trying to choose words that wouldn’t give him an excuse for his logic chopping, ‘allows us to live happily. Knowledge of the world gives us power over the world, and enables us to arrange the world for our own convenience.’
Anicius sat looking at me for a while. ‘And you found that in your Epicurus?’ he asked at length.
As said, I’d found very little yet in Epicurus. I’d had to guess most of it for myself. I didn’t answer, but waited for him to go on.
‘Your Epicurus,’ he said, ‘believed that the sole value of knowledge was to dispel superstitious fear. He encouraged his followers to learn astronomy simply to let us know that heavenly phenomena are natural and predictable effects, not acts of Divine Intervention. Equally his defective theory of the atoms.
‘But all other pure knowledge he despised. He taught against geometry and virtually all mathematics. They do nothing to remove fear, and so have no value.
‘Your positive theory of knowledge has no echo in any of the great philosophers of ancient times. There is a story of the great Euclid. While he was lecturing one day in the Alexandrian Library, a student interrupted him to ask what use the particular geometrical proposition might have.
‘ “Give the man some money,” Euclid said to an assistant, “and throw him into the street”.’
Anicius smiled at the recollection of the story. He went on to make some sniffy comments about where Archimedes had gone wrong in using his mathematical skills to build ‘mere machines’. He made a brief defence of knowledge for the sake of moral improvement.
He saw my look of polite disagreement. He leaned forward and looked closely into my face. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
I steadied my features against the blast of his stinking breath and told him about England. I used its old name, Britain.
‘A strange people, if there are more like you,’ he said with an uncomfortable laugh. ‘You will come again, though, will you not?’ he asked, suddenly earnest. ‘There are so many books here that you will find of value. I will personally dig out some translations of Plato that my uncle made into Latin.’
He paused and looked at me. ‘If you can tell me each time when you’ll be back, I’ll personally find the books you want. I’ll take you through them – that is, if you can bear an old man’s company… Do take whatever you want. I’ll mark the ones I want back after copying. The rest you can keep. I’ll gladly-’
He broke off with a gasp of pain. He lurched backwards, and I only just caught him in time before he hit the tiled floor. Teeth chattering, his face white, he clutched at his lower belly. I later discovered he had kidney stones. By the time he’d recovered from the spasm, he was lapsing out of rational mode.
‘But it’s all worthless,’ he said, back in the whining tone of our first meeting. ‘I envy you your barbarism. Devoid of philosophy, devoid of religion, you are all so pure of heart and mind.’
He prosed on about that learned ancestor of his. So educated, he’d been, yet still he’d met his end by having a cord put around his forehead and tightened till the eyes popped out. ‘Let there be an end to learning, and then we can all be at peace,’ he concluded, hobbling off for what I took at the time, from his quickened movements, to be a piss.
By the door, he turned back and added, now more rational again – almost, indeed, humorous: ‘Never grow old, my little Briton. It really isn’t worth the effort.’
Martin was sitting at a table in one of the other rooms. He had several books open before him.
‘What are those?’ I asked.
‘I’ve found the Greek section, sir,’ he said, pointing down at a scroll written in black with headings in faded gold.
I looked hungrily at the text. ‘What is that one you’re reading?’ I asked.
‘It’s the fifth book of Thucydides – his description of the Sicilian Expedition.’
‘May I see?’ I looked closer over his shoulder.
He stood up and gave me his place. I sat, making sure not to get dust on my fine clothes, and looked at the glued sheets. I could read some of the words, though they were written in a slightly different alphabet from the one Maximin had taught me by scratching in the mud on those French roads. I could understand words here and there. But the whole was in a Greek far more complex than I had learnt. It might for the most important part have been in a foreign language.
I looked up in despair. ‘I can’t read it,’ I said. ‘Can you teach me?’
‘When would you start?’
‘Now?’ I suggested.
Martin went to the racks and brought back another book. ‘This is by Xenophon,’ he explained. ‘The Greek is pure, but simple enough to understand if you can read the Gospels.’
He pulled up another chair, and began the lesson.
So I put myself back into school. Martin was a good teacher. If his father had been even better, no wonder the Greeks had hated them. He read each sentence, giving me his father’s reconstructed sound of the words. I followed him with my own reading. He told me it was important for appreciating the pure language to forget the modern pronunciation I’d got from Maximin. The two languages were often so far apart, it was best to regard them as separate. I could easily switch back into the modern pronunciation for speaking with educated moderns. Then he turned to explaining those difficulties of grammar and syntax that would puzzle a student who knew only the spoken language of the moderns.
It was like swimming in the sea at Richborough – the water was cold, so that wading in was difficult and movement was stiff and awkward at first, but then gradually your strokes became more and more confident. I won’t pretend that I ended that lesson with anything like a perfect grasp of those endlessly complex variations of tense and mood. But I could understand the rising excitement of those brave and resourceful Greek mercenaries who, after so many months of passing through the landlocked realms of the barbarian, at last reached the sea and knew that they would see home again.
As Martin rolled up the book, I asked: ‘How long before I can read your Thucydides?’
‘It can take years of patient study by the modern Greeks to write like him,’ he said. ‘The only modern my father said had perfectly succeeded was a Syrian called Procopius – and he’d studied Greek as a foreign language. But just to read him – I think, at your speed of progress, we can move to him long before the books are all ready for shipping to Canterbury. But you will need to work every day.’
‘Every day and all day, if I must,’ I said firmly.
It was dark outside when we left. This time, we were accompanied back by two of Marcella’s big slaves. And still we were followed. No one else seemed to notice, and I decided to ignore the footsteps behind us.
As we arrived, it began to rain, and I could feel a storm coming on. I hadn’t gone off as agreed to dine with Lucius. Should I set out in the dark and rain? No. I sent him a note of apology, and promised to come to him for breakfast.