Twentieth we shall lead a richer one.
The closing lines morph into an appeal for money or perhaps express the hope that Philodemus will himself be invited to an afternoon of philosophical conversation and expensive wine at Piso"s grand villa. Half-reclining on couches, under the shade of trellised vines and silken canopies, the privileged men and women who were Piso"s guests-for it is entirely possible that some women partic.i.p.ated in the conversation as well-had much to think about. Rome had been afflicted for years by political and social unrest, culminating in several vicious civil wars, and though the violence had abated, the threats to peace and stability were by no means safely past. Ambitious generals relentlessly jockeyed for position; murmuring troops had to be paid in cash and land; the provinces were restive, and rumors of trouble in Egypt had already caused grain prices to soar.
But cosseted by slaves, in the comfort and security of the elegant villa, the proprietor and his guests had the temporary luxury of regarding these menaces as relatively remote, remote enough at least to allow them to pursue civilized conversations. Staring up idly at the plumes of smoke rising from nearby Vesuvius, they may well have felt some queasiness about the future, but they were an elite, living at the center of the world"s greatest power, and one of their most cherished privileges was the cultivation of the life of the mind.
Romans of the late republic were remarkably tenacious about this privilege, which they clung to in circ.u.mstances that would have made others quail and run for cover. For them it seemed to function as a sign that their world was still intact or at least that they were secure in their innermost lives. Like a man who, hearing the distant sound of sirens in the street, sits down at the Bechstein to play a Beethoven sonata, the men and women in the garden affirmed their urbane security by immersing themselves in speculative dialogue.
In the years leading up to the a.s.sa.s.sination of Julius Caesar, philosophical speculation was hardly the only available response to social stress. Religious cults originating in far-off places like Persia, Syria, and Palestine began to make their way to the capital, where they aroused wild fears and expectations, particularly among the plebs. A handful of the elite-those more insecure or simply curious-may have attended with something other than contempt to the prophecies from the east, prophecies of a saviour born of obscure parentage who would be brought low, suffer terribly, and yet ultimately triumph. But most would have regarded such tales as the overheated fantasies of a sect of stiff-necked Jews.
Those of a pious disposition would far more likely have gone as supplicants to the temples and chapels to the G.o.ds that dotted the fertile landscape. It was, in any case, a world in which nature seemed saturated with the presence of the divine, on mountaintops and springs, in the thermal vents that spewed smoke from a mysterious realm under the earth, in ancient groves of trees on whose branches the faithful hung colorful cloths. But though the villa in Herculaneum was in close proximity to this intense religious life, it is unlikely that many of those with the sophisticated intellectual tastes reflected in the library joined processions of pious supplicants. Judging from the contents of the charred papyrus scrolls, the villa"s inhabitants seem to have turned not to ritual but to conversation about the meaning of life.
Ancient Greeks and Romans did not share our idealization of isolated geniuses, working alone to think through the knottiest problems. Such scenes-Descartes in his secret retreat, calling everything into question, or the excommunicated Spinoza quietly reasoning to himself while grinding lenses-would eventually become our dominant emblem of the life of the mind. But this vision of proper intellectual pursuits rested on a profound shift in cultural prestige, one that began with the early Christian hermits who deliberately withdrew from whatever it was that pagans valued: St. Anthony (250356) in the desert or St. Symeon Stylites (390459) perched on his column. Such figures, modern scholars have shown, characteristically had in fact bands of followers, and though they lived apart, they often played a significant role in the life of large communities. But the dominant cultural image that they fashioned-or that came to be fashioned around them-was of radical isolation.
Not so the Greeks and Romans. As thinking and writing generally require quiet and a minimum of distraction, their poets and philosophers must have periodically pulled away from the noise and business of the world in order to accomplish what they did. But the image that they projected was social. Poets depicted themselves as shepherds singing to other shepherds; philosophers depicted themselves engaged in long conversations, often stretching out over several days. The pulling away from the distractions of the everyday world was figured not as a retreat to the solitary cell but as a quiet exchange of words among friends in a garden.
Humans, Aristotle wrote, are social animals: to realize one"s nature as a human then was to partic.i.p.ate in a group activity. And the activity of choice, for cultivated Romans, as for the Greeks before them, was discourse. There is, Cicero remarked at the beginning of a typical philosophical work, a wide diversity of opinion about the most important religious questions. "This has often struck me," Cicero wrote, but it did so with especial force on one occasion, when the topic of the immortal G.o.ds was made the subject of a very searching and thorough discussion at the house of my friend Gaius Cotta.
It was the Latin Festival, and I had come at Cotta"s express invitation to pay him a visit. I found him sitting in an alcove, engaged in debate with Gaius Velleius, a Member of the Senate, accounted by the Epicureans as their chief Roman adherent at the time. With them was Quintus Lucilius Balbus, who was so accomplished a student of Stoicism as to rank with the leading Greek exponents of that system.
Cicero does not want to present his thoughts to his readers as a tract composed after solitary reflection; he wants to present them as an exchange of views among social and intellectual equals, a conversation in which he himself plays only a small part and in which there will be no clear victor.
The end of this dialogue-a long work that would have filled several sizable papyrus rolls-is characteristically inconclusive: "Here the conversation ended, and we parted, Velleius thinking Cotta"s discourse to be the truer, while I felt that that of Balbus approximated more nearly to a semblance of the truth." The inconclusiveness is not intellectual modesty-Cicero was not a modest man-but a strategy of civilized openness among friends. The exchange itself, not its final conclusions, carries much of the meaning. The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness, never descending into gossip or slander and always allowing room for alternative views. "The one who engages in conversation," Cicero wrote, "should not debar others from partic.i.p.ating in it, as if he were entering upon a private monopoly; but, as in other things, so in a general conversation he should think it not unfair for each to have his turn."
The dialogues Cicero and others wrote were not transcriptions of real exchanges, though the characters in them were real, but they were idealized versions of conversations that undoubtedly occurred in places like the villa in Herculaneum. The conversations in that particular setting, to judge from the topics of the charred books found in the buried library, touched on music, painting, poetry, the art of public speaking, and other subjects of perennial interest to cultivated Greeks and Romans. They are likely to have turned as well to more troubling scientific, ethical, and philosophical questions: What is the cause of thunder or earthquakes or eclipses-are they signs from the G.o.ds, as some claim, or do they have an origin in nature? How we can understand the world we inhabit? What goals should we be pursuing in our lives? Does it make sense to devote one"s life to the pursuit of power? How are good and evil to be defined? What happens to us when we die?
That the villa"s powerful owner and his friends took pleasure in grappling with such questions and were willing to devote significant periods of their very busy lives to teasing out possible answers reflects their conception of an existence appropriate for people of their education, cla.s.s, and status. It reflects as well something extraordinary about the mental or spiritual world they inhabited, something noted in one of his letters by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert: "Just when the G.o.ds had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone." No doubt one could quibble with this claim. For many Romans at least, the G.o.ds had not actually ceased to be-even the Epicureans, sometimes reputed to be atheists, thought that G.o.ds existed, though at a far remove from the affairs of mortals-and the "unique moment" to which Flaubert gestures, from Cicero (10643 BCE) to Marcus Aurelius (121180 ce), may have been longer or shorter than the time frame he suggests. But the core perception is eloquently borne out by Cicero"s dialogues and by the works found in the library of Herculaneum. Many of the early readers of those works evidently lacked a fixed repertory of beliefs and practices reinforced by what was said to be the divine will. They were men and women whose lives were unusually free of the dictates of the G.o.ds (or their priests). Standing alone, as Flaubert puts it, they found themselves in the peculiar position of choosing among sharply divergent visions of the nature of things and competing strategies for living.
The charred fragments in the library give us a glimpse of how the villa"s residents made this choice, whom they wished to read, what they are likely to have discussed, whom they might have summoned to enter into the conversation. And here the Norwegian papyrologist"s tiny fragments become deeply resonant. Lucretius was a contemporary of Philodemus and, more important, of Philodemus" patron, who may, when he invited friends to join him for an afternoon on the verdant slopes of the volcano, have shared with them pa.s.sages from On the Nature of Things. Indeed, the wealthy patron with philosophical interests could have wished to meet the author in person. It would have been a small matter to send a few slaves and a litter to carry Lucretius to Herculaneum to join the guests. And therefore it is even remotely possible that, reclining on a couch, Lucretius himself read aloud from the very ma.n.u.script whose fragments survive.
If Lucretius had partic.i.p.ated in the conversations at the villa, it is clear enough what he would have said. His own conclusions would not have been inconclusive or tinged with skepticism, in the manner of Cicero. The answers to all of their questions, he pa.s.sionately argued, were to be found in the work of a man whose portrait bust and writings graced the villa"s library, the philosopher Epicurus.
It was only Epicurus, Lucretius wrote, who could cure the miserable condition of the man who, bored to death at home, rushes off frantically to his country villa only to find that he is just as oppressed in spirit. Indeed, in Lucretius" view, Epicurus, who had died more than two centuries earlier, was nothing less than the saviour. When "human life lay groveling ignominiously in the dust, crushed beneath the grinding weight of superst.i.tion," Lucretius wrote, one supremely brave man arose and became "the first who ventured to confront it boldly." (1.62ff.) This hero-one strikingly at odds with a Roman culture that traditionally prided itself on toughness, pragmatism, and military virtue-was a Greek who triumphed not through the force of arms but through the power of intellect.
On the Nature of Things is the work of a disciple who is transmitting ideas that had been developed centuries earlier. Epicurus, Lucretius" philosophical messiah, was born toward the end of 342 BCE on the Aegean island of Samos where his father, a poor Athenian schoolmaster, had gone as a colonist. Many Greek philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, came from wealthy families and prided themselves on their distinguished ancestry. Epicurus decidedly had no comparable claims. His philosophical enemies, basking in their social superiority, made much of the modesty of his background. He a.s.sisted his father in his school for a pittance, they sneered, and used to go round with his mother to cottages to read charms. One of his brothers, they added, was a pander and lived with a prost.i.tute. This was not a philosopher with whom respectable people should a.s.sociate themselves.
That Lucretius and many others did more than simply a.s.sociate themselves with Epicurus-that they celebrated him as G.o.dlike in his wisdom and courage-depended not on his social credentials but upon what they took to be the saving power of his vision. The core of this vision may be traced back to a single incandescent idea: that everything that has ever existed and everything that will ever exist is put together out of indestructible building blocks, irreducibly small in size, unimaginably vast in number. The Greeks had a word for these invisible building blocks, things that, as they conceived them, could not be divided any further: atoms.
The notion of atoms, which originated in the fifth century BCE with Leucippus of Abdera and his prize student Democritus, was only a dazzling speculation; there was no way to get any empirical proof and wouldn"t be for more than two thousand years. Other philosophers had competing theories: the core matter of the universe, they argued, was fire or water or air or earth, or some combination of these. Others suggested that if you could perceive the smallest particle of a man, you would find an infinitesimally tiny man; and similarly for a horse, a droplet of water, or a blade of gra.s.s. Others again proposed that the intricate order in the universe was evidence of an invisible mind or spirit that carefully put the pieces together according to a preconceived plan. Democritus" conception of an infinite number of atoms that have no qualities except size, figure, and weight-particles then that are not miniature versions of what we see but rather form what we see by combining with each other in an inexhaustible variety of shapes-was a fantastically daring solution to a problem that engaged the great intellects of his world.
It took many generations to think through the implications of this solution. (We have by no means yet thought through them all.) Epicurus began his efforts to do so at the age of twelve, when to his disgust his teachers could not explain to him the meaning of chaos. Democritus" old idea of atoms seemed to him the most promising clue, and he set to work to follow it wherever it would take him. By the age of thirty-two he was ready to found a school. There, in a garden in Athens, Epicurus constructed a whole account of the universe and a philosophy of human life.
In constant motion, atoms collide with each other, Epicurus reasoned, and in certain circ.u.mstances, they form larger and larger bodies. The largest observable bodies-the sun and the moon-are made of atoms, just as are human beings and waterflies and grains of sand. There are no supercategories of matter; no hierarchy of elements. Heavenly bodies are not divine beings who shape our destiny for good or ill, nor do they move through the void under the guidance of G.o.ds: they are simply part of the natural order, enormous structures of atoms subject to the same principles of creation and destruction that govern everything that exists. And if the natural order is unimaginably vast and complex, it is nonetheless possible to understand something of its basic const.i.tutive elements and its universal laws. Indeed, such understanding is one of human life"s deepest pleasures.
This pleasure is perhaps the key to comprehending the powerful impact of Epicurus" philosophy; it was as if he unlocked for his followers an inexhaustible source of gratification hidden within Democritus" atoms. For us, the impact is rather difficult to grasp. For one thing, the pleasure seems too intellectual to reach more than a tiny number of specialists; for another, we have come to a.s.sociate atoms far more with fear than with gratification. But though ancient philosophy was hardly a ma.s.s movement, Epicurus was offering something more than caviar to a handful of particle physicists. Indeed, eschewing the self-enclosed, specialized language of an inner circle of adepts, he insisted on using ordinary language, on addressing the widest circle of listeners, even on proselytizing. And the enlightenment he offered did not require sustained scientific inquiry. You did not need a detailed grasp of the actual laws of the physical universe; you needed only to comprehend that there is a hidden natural explanation for everything that alarms or eludes you. That explanation will inevitably lead you back to atoms. If you can hold on to and repeat to yourself the simplest fact of existence-atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else-your life will change. You will no longer fear Jove"s wrath, whenever you hear a peal of thunder, or suspect that someone has offended Apollo, whenever there is an outbreak of influenza. And you will be freed from a terrible affliction-what Hamlet, many centuries later, described as "the dread of something after death,/The undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns."
The affliction-the fear of some horrendous punishment waiting for one in a realm beyond the grave-no longer weighs heavily on most modern men and women, but it evidently did in the ancient Athens of Epicurus and the ancient Rome of Lucretius, and it did as well in the Christian world inhabited by Poggio. Certainly Poggio would have seen images of such horrors, lovingly carved on the tympanum above the doors to churches or painted on their inner walls. And those horrors were in turn modeled on accounts of the afterlife fashioned in the pagan imagination. To be sure, not everyone in any of these periods, pagan or Christian, believed in such accounts. Aren"t you terrified, one of the characters in a dialogue by Cicero asks, by the underworld, with its terrible three-headed dog, its black river, its hideous punishments? "Do you suppose me so crazy as to believe such tales?" his companion replies. Fear of death is not about the fate of Sisyphus and Tantalus: "Where is the crone so silly as to be afraid" of such scare stories? It is about the dread of suffering and the dread of perishing, and it is difficult to understand, Cicero wrote, why the Epicureans think that they are offering any palliative. To be told that one perishes completely and forever, soul as well as body, is hardly a robust consolation.
Followers of Epicurus responded by recalling the last days of the master, dying from an excruciating obstruction of the bladder but achieving serenity of spirit by recalling all of the pleasures he had experienced in his life. It is not clear that this model was easily imitable-"Who can hold a fire in his hand/By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?" as one of Shakespeare"s characters asks-but then it is not clear that any of the available alternatives, in a world without Demerol or morphine, was more successful at dealing with death agonies. What the Greek philosopher offered was not help in dying but help in living. Liberated from superst.i.tion, Epicurus taught, you would be free to pursue pleasure.
Epicurus" enemies seized upon his celebration of pleasure and invented malicious stories of his debauchery, stories heightened by his unusual inclusion of women as well as men among his followers. He "vomited twice a day from over-indulgence," went one of these stories, and spent a fortune on his feasting. In reality, the philosopher seems to have lived a conspicuously simple and frugal life. "Send me a pot of cheese," he wrote once to a friend, "that, when I like, I may fare sumptuously." So much for the alleged abundance of his table. And he urged a comparable frugality on his students. The motto carved over the door to Epicurus" garden urged the stranger to linger, for "here our highest good is pleasure." But according to the philosopher Seneca, who quotes these words in a famous letter that Poggio and his friends knew and admired, the pa.s.serby who entered would be served a simple meal of barley gruel and water. "When we say, then, that pleasure is the goal," Epicurus wrote in one of his few surviving letters, "we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality." The feverish attempt to satisfy certain appet.i.tes-"an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and of revelry . . . s.e.xual love . . . the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table"-cannot lead to the peace of mind that is the key to enduring pleasure.
"Men suffer the worst evils for the sake of the most alien desires," wrote his disciple Philodemus, in one of the books found in the library at Herculaneum, and "they neglect the most necessary appet.i.tes as if they were the most alien to nature." What are these necessary appet.i.tes that lead to pleasure? It is impossible to live pleasurably, Philodemus continued, "without living prudently and honourably and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends, and without being philanthropic."
This is the voice of an authentic follower of Epicurus, a voice recovered in modern times from a volcano-blackened papyrus roll. But it is hardly the voice that anyone familiar with the term "Epicureanism" would ever expect. In one of his memorable satirical grotesques, Shakespeare"s contemporary Ben Jonson perfectly depicted the spirit in which Epicurus" philosophy was for long centuries widely understood. "I"ll have all my beds blown up, not stuffed," Jonson"s character declares. "Down is too hard."
My meat shall all come in in Indian sh.e.l.ls, Dishes of agate, set in gold, and studded, With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies. . . .
My foot-boy shall eat pheasants, calvered salmons, Knots, G.o.dwits, lampreys. I myself will have The beards of barbels served instead of salads; Oiled mushrooms; and the swelling unctuous paps Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off, Drest with an exquisite and poignant sauce; For which, I"ll say unto my cook, "There"s gold, Go forth and be a knight."
The name Jonson gave to this mad pleasure seeker is Sir Epicure Mammon.
A philosophical claim that life"s ultimate goal is pleasure-even if that pleasure was defined in the most restrained and responsible terms-was a scandal, both for pagans and for their adversaries, the Jews and later the Christians. Pleasure as the highest good? What about worshipping the G.o.ds and ancestors? Serving the family, the city, and the state? Scrupulously observing the laws and commandments? Pursuing virtue or a vision of the divine? These competing claims inevitably entailed forms of ascetic self-denial, self-sacrifice, even self-loathing. None was compatible with the pursuit of pleasure as the highest good. Two thousand years after Epicurus lived and taught, the sense of scandal was still felt intensely enough to generate the manic energy in travesties like Jonson"s.
Behind such travesties lay a half-hidden fear that to maximize pleasure and to avoid pain were in fact appealing goals and might plausibly serve as the rational organizing principles of human life. If they succeeded in doing so, a whole set of time-honored alternative principles-sacrifice, ambition, social status, discipline, piety-would be challenged, along with the inst.i.tutions that such principles served. To push the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure toward grotesque sensual self-indulgence-depicted as the single-minded pursuit of s.e.x or power or money or even (as in Jonson) extravagant, absurdly expensive food-helped to ward off the challenge.
In his secluded garden in Athens, the real Epicurus, dining on cheese, bread, and water, lived a quiet life. Indeed, one of the more legitimate charges against him was that his life was too quiet: he counseled his followers against a full, robust engagement in the affairs of the city. "Some men have sought to become famous and renowned," he wrote, "thinking that thus they would make themselves secure against their fellow-men." If security actually came with fame and renown, then the person who sought them attained a "natural good." But if fame actually brought heightened insecurity, as it did in most cases, then such an achievement was not worth pursuing. From this perspective, Epicurus" critics observed, it would be difficult to justify most of the restless striving and risk taking that leads to a city"s greatness.
Such a criticism of Epicurean quietism may well have been voiced in the sun-drenched garden of Herculaneum: the guests at the Villa of the Papyri, after all, would probably have included their share of those who sought fame and renown at the center of the greatest city in the Western world. But perhaps Julius Caesar"s father-in-law-if Piso was indeed the villa"s owner-and some in his circle of friends were drawn to this philosophical school precisely because it offered an alternative to their stressful endeavors. Rome"s enemies were falling before the might of its legions, but it did not take prophetic powers to perceive ominous signs for the future of the republic. And even for those most safely situated, it was difficult to gainsay one of Epicurus" celebrated aphorisms: "Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city" The key point, as Epicurus" disciple Lucretius wrote in verses of unrivalled beauty, was to abandon the anxious and doomed attempt to build higher and higher walls and to turn instead toward the cultivation of pleasure.
CHAPTER FOUR.
THE TEETH OF TIME.
APART FROM THE charred papyrus fragments recovered in Herculaneum, there are no surviving contemporary ma.n.u.scripts from the ancient Greek and Roman world. Everything that has reached us is a copy, most often very far removed in time, place, and culture from the original. And these copies represent only a small portion of the works even of the most celebrated writers of antiquity. Of Aeschylus" eighty or ninety plays and the roughly one hundred twenty by Sophocles, only seven each have survived; Euripides and Aristophanes did slightly better: eighteen of ninety-two plays by the former have come down to us; eleven of forty-three by the latter.
These are the great success stories. Virtually the entire output of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace. Scientists, historians, mathematicians, philosophers, and statesmen have left behind some of their achievements-the invention of trigonometry, for example, or the calculation of position by reference to lat.i.tude and longitude, or the rational a.n.a.lysis of political power-but their books are gone. The indefatigable scholar Didymus of Alexandria earned the nickname Bronze-a.s.s (literally, "Brazen-Bowelled") for having what it took to write more than 3,500 books; apart from a few fragments, all have vanished. At the end of the fifth century ce an ambitious literary editor known as Stobaeus compiled an anthology of prose and poetry by the ancient world"s best authors: out of 1,430 quotations, 1,115 are from works that are now lost.
In this general vanishing, all the works of the brilliant founders of atomism, Leucippus and Democritus, and most of the works of their intellectual heir Epicurus, disappeared. Epicurus had been extraordinarily prolific. He and his princ.i.p.al philosophical opponent, the Stoic Chrysippus, wrote between them, it was said, more than a thousand books. Even if this figure is exaggerated or if it counts as books what we would regard as essays and letters, the written record was clearly ma.s.sive. That record no longer exists. Apart from three letters quoted by an ancient historian of philosophy, Diogenes Laertius, along with a list of forty maxims, almost nothing by Epicurus has survived. Modern scholarship, since the nineteenth century, has only been able to add some fragments. Some of these were culled from the blackened papyrus rolls found at Herculaneum; others were painstakingly recovered from the broken pieces of an ancient wall. On that wall, discovered in the town of Oenoanda, in the rugged mountains in southwest Turkey, an old man, in the early years of the second century ce, had had his distinctly Epicurean philosophy of life-"a fine anthem to celebrate the fullness of pleasure"-chiseled in stone. But where did all the books go?
The actual material disappearance of the books was largely the effect of climate and pests. Though papyrus and parchment were impressively long-lived (far more so than either our cheap paper or computerized data), books inevitably deteriorated over the centuries, even if they managed to escape the ravages of fire and flood. The ink was a mixture of soot (from burnt lamp wicks), water, and tree gum: that made it cheap and agreeably easy to read, but also water-soluble. (A scribe who made a mistake could erase it with a sponge.) A spilled gla.s.s of wine or a heavy downpour, and the text disappeared. And that was only the most common threat. Rolling and unrolling the scrolls or poring over the codices, touching them, dropping them, coughing on them, allowing them to be scorched by fire from the candles, or simply reading them over and over eventually destroyed them.
Carefully sequestering books from excessive use was of little help, for they then became the objects not of intellectual hunger but of a more literal appet.i.te. Tiny animals, Aristotle noted, may be detected in such things as clothes, woolen blankets, and cream cheese. "Others are found," he observed, "in books, some of them similar to those found in clothes, others like tailless scorpions, very small indeed." Almost two thousand years later in Micrographia (1655), the scientist Robert Hooke reported with fascination what he saw when he examined one of these creatures under that remarkable new invention, the microscope: a small white silver-shining Worm or Moth, which I found much conversant among books and papers, and is supposed to be that which corrodes and eats holes through the leaves and covers. Its head appears big and blunt, and its body tapers from it towards the tail, smaller and smaller, being shaped almost like a carrot. . . . It has two long horns before, which are straight, and tapering towards the top, curiously ringed or k.n.o.bbed. . . . The hinder part is terminated with three tails, in every particular resembling the two longer horns that grow out of the head. The legs are scaled and haired. This animal probably feeds upon the paper and covers of books, and perforates in them several small round holes.
The bookworm-"one of the teeth of time," as Hooke put it-is no longer familiar to ordinary readers, but the ancients knew it very well. In exile, the Roman poet Ovid likened the "constant gnawing of sorrow" at his heart to the gnawing of the bookworm-"as the book when laid away is nibbled by the worm"s teeth." His contemporary Horace feared that his book will eventually become "food for vandal moths." And for the Greek poet Evenus, the bookworm was the symbolic enemy of human culture: "Page-eater, the Muses" bitterest foe, lurking destroyer, ever feeding on thy thefts from learning, why, black bookworm, dost thou lie concealed among the sacred utterances, producing the image of envy?" Some protective measures, such as sprinkling cedar oil on the pages, were discovered to be effective in warding off damage, but it was widely recognized that the best way to preserve books from being eaten into oblivion was simply to use them and, when they finally wore out, to make more copies.
Though the book trade in the ancient world was entirely about copying, little information has survived about how the enterprise was organized. There were scribes in Athens, as in other cities of the Greek and h.e.l.lenistic world, but it is not clear whether they received training in special schools or were apprenticed to master scribes or simply set up on their own. Some were evidently paid for the beauty of their calligraphy; others were paid by the total number of lines written (there are line numbers recorded at the end of some surviving ma.n.u.scripts). In neither case is the payment likely to have gone directly to the scribe: many, perhaps most, Greek scribes must have been slaves working for a publisher who owned or rented them. (An inventory of the property of a wealthy Roman citizen with an estate in Egypt lists, among his fifty-nine slaves, five notaries, two amanuenses, one scribe, and a book repairer, along with a cook and a barber.) But we do not know whether these scribes generally sat in large groups, writing from dictation, or worked individually from a master copy. And if the author of the work was alive, we do not know if he was involved in checking or correcting the finished copy.
Somewhat more is known about the Roman book trade, where a distinction evolved between copyists (librari) and scribes (scribae). The librari generally were slaves or paid laborers who worked for booksellers. The booksellers set up advertis.e.m.e.nts on pillars and sold their wares in shops located in the Roman Forum. The scribae were free citizens; they worked as archivists, government bureaucrats, and personal secretaries. (Julius Caesar had seven scribes who followed him around taking dictation.) Wealthy Romans employed (or owned as slaves) personal librarians and clerks who copied books borrowed from the libraries of their friends. "I have received the book," Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus, who had lent him a copy of a geographical work in verse by Alexander of Ephesus. "He"s incompetent as a poet and he knows nothing; however, he"s of some use. I"m having it copied and I"ll return it."
Authors made nothing from the sale of their books; their profits derived from the wealthy patron to whom the work was dedicated. (The arrangement-which helps to account for the fulsome flattery of dedicatory epistles-seems odd to us, but it had an impressive stability, remaining in place until the invention of copyright in the eighteenth century.) Publishers had to contend, as we have seen, with the widespread copying of books among friends, but the business of producing and marketing books must have been a profitable one: there were bookshops not only in Rome but also in Brindisi, Carthage, Lyons, Reims, and other cities in the empire.
Large numbers of men and women-for there are records of female as well as male copyists-spent their lives bent over paper, with an inkwell, ruler, and hard split-reed pen, satisfying the demand for books. The invention of movable type in the fifteenth century changed the scale of production exponentially, but the book in the ancient world was not a rare commodity: a well-trained slave reading a ma.n.u.script aloud to a roomful of well-trained scribes could produce ma.s.ses of text. Over the course of centuries, tens of thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of copies, were made and sold.
There was a time in the ancient world-a very long time-in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one"s head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst.
Then, not all at once but with the c.u.mulative force of a ma.s.s extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.
The scribes must have been among the first to notice: they had less and less to do. Most of the copying stopped. The slow rains, dripping through the holes in the decaying roofs, washed away the letters in books that the flames had spared, and the worms, those "teeth of time," set to work on what was left. But worms were only the lowliest agents of the Great Vanishing. Other forces were at work to hasten the disappearance of the books, and the crumbling of the shelves themselves into dust and ashes. Poggio and his fellow book hunters were lucky to find anything at all.
The fate of the books in all their vast numbers is epitomized in the fate of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library located not in Italy but in Alexandria, the capital of Egypt and the commercial hub of the eastern Mediterranean. The city had many tourist attractions, including an impressive theater and red-light district, but visitors always took note of something quite exceptional: in the center of the city, at a lavish site known as the Museum, most of the intellectual inheritance of Greek, Latin, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Jewish cultures had been a.s.sembled at enormous cost and carefully archived for research. Starting as early as 300 BCE, the Ptolomaic kings who ruled Alexandria had the inspired idea of luring leading scholars, scientists, and poets to their city by offering them life appointments at the Museum, with handsome salaries, tax exemptions, free food and lodging, and the almost limitless resources of the library.
The recipients of this largesse established remarkably high intellectual standards. Euclid developed his geometry in Alexandria; Archimedes discovered pi and laid the foundation for calculus; Eratosthenes posited that the earth was round and calculated its circ.u.mference to within 1 percent; Galen revolutionized medicine. Alexandrian astronomers postulated a heliocentric universe; geometers deduced that the length of a year was 365 days and proposed adding a "leap day" every fourth year; geographers speculated that it would be possible to reach India by sailing west from Spain; engineers developed hydraulics and pneumatics; anatomists first understood clearly that the brain and the nervous system were a unit, studied the function of the heart and the digestive system, and conducted experiments in nutrition. The level of achievement was staggering.
The Alexandrian library was not a.s.sociated with a particular doctrine or philosophical school; its scope was the entire range of intellectual inquiry. It represented a global cosmopolitanism, a determination to a.s.semble the acc.u.mulated knowledge of the whole world and to perfect and add to this knowledge. Fantastic efforts were made not only to ama.s.s vast numbers of books but also to acquire or establish definitive editions. Alexandrian scholars were famously obsessed with the pursuit of textual accuracy. How was it possible to strip away the corruptions that inevitably seeped into books copied and recopied, for the most part by slaves, for centuries? Generations of dedicated scholars developed elaborate techniques of comparative a.n.a.lysis and painstaking commentary in pursuit of the master texts. They pursued as well access to the knowledge that lay beyond the boundaries of the Greek-speaking world. It is for this reason that an Alexandrian ruler, Ptolomey Philadelphus, is said to have undertaken the expensive and ambitious project of commissioning some seventy scholars to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek. The result-known as the Septuagint (after the Latin for "seventy")-was for many early Christians their princ.i.p.al access to what they came to call the Old Testament.
At its height the Museum contained at least a half-million papyrus rolls systematically organized, labeled, and shelved according to a clever new system that its first director, a Homer scholar named Zenodotus, seems to have invented: the system was alphabetical order. The inst.i.tution extended beyond the Museum"s enormous holdings to a second collection, housed in one of the architectural marvels of the age, the Serapeon, the Temple of Jupiter Serapis. Adorned with elegant, colonnaded courtyards, lecture halls, "almost breathing statues," and many other precious works of art, the Serapeon, in the words of Ammia.n.u.s Marcellinus, the fourth-century historian rediscovered by Poggio, was second in magnificence only to the Capitol in Rome.
The forces that destroyed this inst.i.tution help us understand how it came about that the Lucretius ma.n.u.script recovered in 1417 was almost all that remained of a school of thought that was once eagerly debated in thousands of books. The first blow came as a consequence of war. A part of the library"s collection-possibly only scrolls kept in warehouses near the harbor-was accidentally burned in 48 BCE when Julius Caesar struggled to maintain control of the city. But there were greater threats than military action alone, threats bound up with an inst.i.tution that was part of a temple complex, replete with statues of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, altars, and other paraphernalia of pagan worship. The Museum was, as its name implies, a shrine dedicated to the Muses, the nine G.o.ddesses who embodied human creative achievement. The Serapeon, where the secondary collection was located, housed a colossal statue of the G.o.d Serapis-a masterpiece fashioned in ivory and gold by the famous Greek sculptor Bryaxis-combining the cult of the Roman deity Jupiter with the cult of the Egyptian deities Osiris and Apis.
The Jews and Christians who lived in large numbers in Alexandria were intensely uneasy with this polytheism. They did not doubt that other G.o.ds existed, but those G.o.ds were without exception demons, fiendishly bent on luring gullible humanity away from the sole and universal truth. All other revelations and prayers recorded in those mountains of papyrus rolls were lies. Salvation lay in the Scriptures, which Christians opted to read in a new format: not the old-fashioned scroll (used by Jews and pagans alike) but the compact, convenient, easily portable codex.
Centuries of religious pluralism under paganism-three faiths living side by side in a spirit of mingled rivalry and absorptive tolerance-were coming to an end. In the early fourth century the emperor Constantine began the process whereby Rome"s official religion became Christianity. It was only a matter of time before a zealous successor-Theodosius the Great, beginning in 391 ce-issued edicts forbidding public sacrifices and closing major cultic sites. The state had embarked on the destruction of paganism.
In Alexandria, the spiritual leader of the Christian community, the patriarch Theophilus, heeded the edicts with a vengeance. At once contentious and ruthless, Theophilus unleashed mobs of Christian zealots who roamed through the streets insulting pagans. The pagans responded with predictable shock and anxiety, and tensions between the two communities rose. All that was needed was an appropriately charged incident for matters to be brought to a head, and the incident was not long in coming. Workmen renovating a Christian basilica found an underground sanctuary that still contained pagan cult objects (such a sanctuary-a shrine to Mithras-may be seen today in Rome, deep below the Basilica of S. Clemente). Seeing a chance to expose the secret symbols of pagan "mysteries" to public mockery, Theophilus ordered that the cult objects be paraded through the streets.
Pious pagans erupted in anger: "as though," a contemporary Christian observer wryly noted, "they had drunk a chalice of serpents." The enraged pagans violently attacked Christians and then withdrew behind the locked doors of the Serapeon. Armed with axes and hammers, a comparably frenzied Christian crowd burst into the shrine, overwhelmed its defenders, and smashed the celebrated marble, ivory, and gold statue of the G.o.d. Pieces were taken to different parts of the city to be destroyed; the headless, limbless trunk was dragged to the theater and publicly burned. Theophilus ordered monks to move into the precincts of the pagan temple, whose beautiful buildings would be converted into churches. Where the statue of Serapis had stood, the triumphant Christians would erect reliquaries holding the precious remains of Elijah and John the Baptist.
After the downfall of the Serapeon, a pagan poet, Palladas, expressed his mood of devastation: Is it not true that we are dead, and living only in appearance, We h.e.l.lenes, fallen on disaster, Likening life to a dream, since we remain alive while Our way of life is dead and gone?
The significance of the destruction, as Palladas understood, extended beyond the loss of the single cult image. Whether on this occasion mayhem reached the library is unknown. But libraries, museums, and schools are fragile inst.i.tutions; they cannot long survive violent a.s.saults. A way of life was dying.
A few years later, Theophilus" successor as Christian patriarch, his nephew Cyril, expanded the scope of the attacks, directing pious wrath this time upon the Jews. Violent skirmishes broke out at the theater, in the streets, and in front of churches and synagogues. Jews taunted and threw stones at Christians; Christians broke into and plundered Jewish shops and homes. Emboldened by the arrival from the desert of five hundred monks who joined the already formidable Christian street mobs, Cyril demanded the expulsion of the city"s large Jewish population. Alexandria"s governor Orestes, a moderate Christian, refused, and this refusal was supported by the city"s pagan intellectual elite whose most distinguished representative was the influential and immensely learned Hypatia.
Hypatia was the daughter of a mathematician, one of the Museum"s famous scholars-in-residence. Legendarily beautiful as a young woman, she had become famous for her attainments in astronomy, music, mathematics, and philosophy. Students came from great distances to study the works of Plato and Aristotle under her tutelage. Such was her authority that other philosophers wrote to her and anxiously solicited her approval. "If you decree that I ought to publish my book," wrote one such correspondent to Hypatia, "I will dedicate it to orators and philosophers together." If, on the other hand, "it does not seem to you worthy," the letter continues, "a close and profound darkness will overshadow it, and mankind will never hear it mentioned."
Wrapped in the traditional philosopher"s cloak, called a tribon, and moving about the city in a chariot, Hypatia was one of Alexandria"s most visible public figures. Women in the ancient world often lived sequestered lives, but not she. "Such was her self-possession and ease of manner, arising from the refinement and cultivation of her mind," writes a contemporary, "that she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates." Her easy access to the ruling elite did not mean that she constantly meddled in politics. At the time of the earlier attacks on the cult images, she and her followers evidently held themselves aloof, telling themselves perhaps that the smashing of inanimate statues left intact what really mattered. But with the agitation against the Jews it must have become clear that the flames of fanaticism were not going to die down.
Hypatia"s support for Orestes" refusal to expel the city"s Jewish population may help to explain what happened next. Rumors began to circulate that her absorption in astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy-so strange, after all, in a woman-was sinister: she must be a witch, practicing black magic. In March 415 the crowd, whipped into a frenzy by one of Cyril"s henchmen, erupted. Returning to her house, Hypatia was pulled from her chariot and taken to a church that was formerly a temple to the emperor. (The setting was no accident: it signified the transformation of paganism into the one true faith.) There, after she was stripped of her clothing, her skin was flayed off with broken bits of pottery. The mob then dragged her corpse outside the city walls and burned it. Their hero Cyril was eventually made a saint.
The murder of Hypatia signified more than the end of one remarkable person; it effectively marked the downfall of Alexandrian intellectual life and was the death knell for the whole intellectual tradition that underlay the text that Poggio recovered so many centuries later. The Museum, with its dream of a.s.sembling all texts, all schools, all ideas, was no longer at the protected center of civil society. In the years that followed the library virtually ceased to be mentioned, as if its great collections, virtually the sum of cla.s.sical culture, had vanished without a trace. They had almost certainly not disappeared all at once-such a momentous act of destruction would have been recorded. But if one asks, Where did all the books go? the answer lies not only in the quick work of the soldiers" flames and the long, slow, secret labor of the bookworm. It lies, symbolically at least, in the fate of Hypatia.
The other libraries of the ancient world fared no better. A survey of Rome in the early fourth century listed twenty-eight public libraries, in addition to the unnumbered private collections in aristocratic mansions. Near the century"s end, the historian Ammia.n.u.s Marcellinus complained that Romans had virtually abandoned serious reading. Ammia.n.u.s was not lamenting barbarian raids or Christian fanaticism. No doubt these were at work, somewhere in the background of the phenomena that struck him. But what he observed, as the empire slowly crumbled, was a loss of cultural moorings, a descent into febrile triviality. "In place of the philosopher the singer is called in, and in place of the orator the teacher of stagecraft, and while the libraries are shut up forever like tombs, water-organs are manufactured and lyres as large as carriages." Moreover, he noted sourly, people were driving their chariots at lunatic speed through the crowded streets.
When, after a long, slow death agony, the Roman Empire in the West finally collapsed-the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, quietly resigned in 476 ce-the Germanic tribes that seized one province after another had no tradition of literacy. The barbarians who broke into the public buildings and seized the villas may not have been actively hostile to learning, but they certainly had no interest in preserving its material traces. The former owners of the villas, dragged off to slavery on some remote farmstead, would have had more important household goods to salvage and take with them than books. And, since the conquerors were for the most part Christians, those among them who learned to read and write had no incentive to study the works of the cla.s.sical pagan authors. Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
But a prestigious cultural tradition that has shaped the inner lives of the elite does not disappear easily, even in those who welcome its burial. In a letter written in 384 ce, Jerome-the scholarly saint to whom we owe the story of Lucretius" madness and suicide-described an inner struggle. Ten years earlier, he recalled, he was on his way from Rome to Jerusalem, where he planned to withdraw from all worldly entanglements, but still he took his prized cla.s.sical library with him. He was committed to disciplining his body and saving his soul, but he could not forgo the addictive pleasures of his mind: "I would fast, only to read Cicero afterwards. I would spend many nights in vigil, I would shed bitter tears called from my inmost heart by the remembrance of my past sins; and then I would take up Plautus again." Cicero, Jerome understood, was a pagan who argued for a thoroughgoing skepticism toward all dogmatic claims, including the claims of religion, but the elegance of his prose seemed irresistible. Plautus was, if anything, worse: his comedies were populated by pimps, wh.o.r.es, and hangers-on, but their zany wit was delicious. Delicious but poisonous: whenever Jerome turned from these literary delights to the Scriptures, the holy texts seemed crude and uncultivated. His love for the beauty and elegance of Latin was such that when he determined to learn Hebrew, he initially found the experience almost physically repellant: "From the judicious precepts of Quintilian, the rich and fluent eloquence of Cicero, the graver style of Fronto, and the smoothness of Pliny," he wrote in 411, "I turned to this language of hissing and broken-winded words."
What saved him, Jerome wrote, was a nightmare. He had fallen gravely ill, and in his delirium, he dreamed that he had been dragged before G.o.d"s judgment seat. Asked to state his condition, he replied that he was a Christian. But the Judge sternly replied, "You lie; you are a Ciceronian, not a Christian" (Ciceronia.n.u.s es, non Christia.n.u.s). These terrible words might have signaled his eternal d.a.m.nation, but the Lord, in his mercy, instead ordered that Jerome merely be whipped. The sinner was pardoned, "on the understanding that the extreme of torture should be inflicted on me if ever I read again the works of Gentile authors." When he awoke, Jerome found that his shoulders were black and blue.
Jerome went on to settle in Bethlehem, where he established two monasteries, one for himself and his fellow monks, the other for the pious women who had accompanied him. There he lived for thirty-six years, studying, engaging in vehement theological controversies, and, most importantly, translating Hebrew Scriptures into Latin and revising the Latin translation of the New Testament. His achievement, the great Latin Bible translation known as the Vulgate, was in the sixteenth century declared by the Catholic Church to be "more authentic" than the original.
There is, as Jerome"s nightmare suggests, a distinctly destructive element in his piety. Or rather, from the perspective of his piety, his intense pleasure in pagan literature was destroying him. It was not a matter merely of spending more of his time with Christian texts but of giving up the pagan texts altogether. He bound himself with a solemn oath: "O Lord, if ever again I possess worldly books or read them, I have denied thee." This renunciation of the authors he loved was a personal affair: he had in effect to cure himself of a dangerous addiction in order to save his soul. But the addiction-and hence the need for renunciation-was not his alone. What he found so alluring was what kept many others like him in thrall to pagan authors. He therefore had to persuade others to make the sacrifice he had made. "What has Horace to do with the Psalter," he wrote to one of his followers, "Virgil with the Gospels and Cicero with Paul?"
For many generations, learned Christians remained steeped, as Jerome was, in a culture whose values had been shaped by the pagan cla.s.sics. Platonism contributed to Christianity its model of the soul; Aristotelianism its Prime Mover; Stoicism its model of Providence. All the more reason why those Christians repeated to themselves exemplary stories of renunciation. Through the telling of these stories, they acted out, as in a dream, the abandonment of the rich cultural soil in which they, their parents, and their grandparents were nurtured, until one day they awoke to find that they actually had abandoned it.
The knights of renunciation, as in a popular romance, were almost always glamorous figures who cast off the greatest symbol of their status-their intimate access to an elite education-for the sake of the religion they loved. The moment of renunciation came after rigorous training in grammar and rhetoric, engagement with the literary masterpieces, immersion in the myths. Only in the sixth century did Christians venture to celebrate as heroes those who dispensed entirely with education, and even then one can observe a certain hesitation or compromise. Here is Gregory the Great"s celebration of St. Benedict: He was born in the district of Norcia of distinguished parents, who sent him to Rome for a liberal education. But when he saw many of his fellow students falling headlong into vice, he stepped back from the threshold of the world in which he had just set foot. For he was afraid that if he acquired any of its learning he, too, would later plunge, body and soul, into the dread abyss. In his desire to please G.o.d alone, he turned his back on further studies, gave up home and inheritance and resolved to embrace the religious life. He took this step, well aware of his ignorance, yet wise, uneducated though he was.
What flickers through such moments of abdication is a fear of being laughed at. The threat was not persecution-the official religion of the empire by this time was Christian-but ridicule. A fate no doubt preferable to being thrown to the lions, laughter in the ancient world nonetheless had very sharp teeth. What was ridiculous about Christianity, from the perspective of a cultivated pagan, was not only its language-the crude style of the Gospels" Greek resting on the barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Aramaic-but also its exaltation of divine humiliation and pain conjoined with an arrogant triumphalism.
When Christianity had completely secured its position, it managed to destroy most of the expressions of this hostile laughter. A few traces, however, survive in the quotations and summaries of Christian apologists. Some of the jibes were common to all of Christianity"s polemical enemies-Jesus was born in adultery, his father was a n.o.body, and any claims to divine dignity are manifestly disproved by his poverty and his shameful end-but others bring us closer to the specific strain of mockery that surged up from Epicurean circles, when they encountered the messianic religion from Palestine. That mockery and the particular challenge it posed for early Christians set the stage for the subsequent disappearance of the whole Epicurean school of thought: Plato and Aristotle, pagans who believed in the immortality of the soul, could ultimately be accommodated by a triumphant Christianity; Epicureanism could not.
Epicurus did not deny the existence of G.o.ds. Rather, he thought that if the concept of divinity made any sense at all, the G.o.ds could not possibly be concerned with anything but their own pleasures. Neither creators of the universe nor its destroyers, utterly indifferent to the doings of any beings other than themselves, they were deaf to our prayers or our rituals. The Incarnation, Epicureans scoffed, was a particularly absurd idea. Why should the humans think of themselves as so superior to bees, elephants, ants, or any of the available species, now or in eons to come, that G.o.d should take their form and not another? And why then, among all the varieties of humans, should he have taken the form of a Jew? Why should anyone with any sense credit the idea of Providence, a childish idea contradicted by any rational adult"s experience and observation? Christians are like a council of frogs in a pond, croaking at the top of their lungs, "For our sakes was the world created."
Christians could try, of course, to reverse the mockery. If such doctrines as the Incarnation and the resurrection of the body seemed absurd-"figments of diseased imagination," as one pagan put it, "and the futile fairy-tales invented by poets" fancy"-what about the tales that pagans profess to believe: Vulcan is lame and crippled; Apollo after years and years still beardless . . . Neptune has sea-green eyes; Minerva grey, like a cat"s, Juno those of an ox . . . Ja.n.u.s has two faces, ready to walk backwards; Diana is sometimes short-kilted for the hunt, while at Ephesus she is figured with many b.r.e.a.s.t.s and paps.
But there is, of course, something uncomfortable about the "back-to-you" strategy, since the alleged ridiculousness of one set of beliefs hardly sh.o.r.es up the validity of another.
Christians knew, moreover, that many pagans did not believe in the literal truth of their own myths and that there were some-Epicureans prominent among them-who called into question virtually all religious systems and promises. Such enemies of faith found the doctrine of bodily resurrection particularly risible, since it was contradicted both by their scientific theory of atoms and by the evidence of their own senses: the rotting corpses that testified with nauseating eloquence to the dissolution of the flesh.
The early Church Father Tertullian vehemently insisted that, despite all appearances, everything would come back in the afterlife, down to the last details of the mortal body. He knew all too well the responses he would get from the doubters: What will be the use of the hands themselves and the feet and all the working parts of the body, when even trouble about food will cease? What will be the use of the kidneys . . . and of the other genital organs of both s.e.xes and the dwelling places of the foetus and the streams from the nurse"s b.r.e.a.s.t.s, when s.e.xual intercourse and conception and upbringing alike will cease to be? Finally, what use will the whole body be, which will of course have absolutely nothing to do?
"The crowd mocks," Tertullian wrote, "judging that nothing is left over after death," but they will not have the last laugh: "I will rather laugh at the crowd at the time when they are cruelly burning up themselves." On the Day of Judgment, each man will be brought forth before the heavenly tribunal, not a piece of him, not a shadow, not a symbolic token, but rather the whole of him, as he lived on the earth. And that means teeth and intestines and genitals, whether or not their mortal functions have ceased forever. "Yes!" Tertullian addressed his pagan listeners. "We too in our day laughed at this. We are from among yourselves. Christians are made, not born!"
Some critics pointed out with a derisory smile that many features of the Christian vision were stolen from much more ancient pagan stories: a tribunal in which souls are judged, fire used for punishment in an underground prison house, a divinely beautiful paradise reserved for the spirits of the holy. But Christians replied that these ancient beliefs were all distorted reflections of the true Christian mysteries. The eventual success of this argumentative strategy is suggested by the very word we have been using for those who clung to the old polytheistic faith. Believers in Jupiter, Minerva, and Mars did not think of themselves as "pagans": the word, which appeared in the late fourth century, is etymologically related to the word "peasant." It is an insult, then, a sign that the laughter at rustic ignorance had decisively reversed direction.
The charge of doctrinal plagiarism was easier for Christians to deal with than the charge of absurdity. Pythagoreans who believed in bodily resurrection had the right general idea; it was simply an idea that needed correction. But Epicureans who said that the whole idea of resurrection was a grotesque violation of everything that we know about the physical universe could not be so easily corrected. It made some sense to argue with the former, but the latter were best simply silenced.
Though early Christians, Tertullian among them, found certain features in Epicureanism admirable-the celebration of friendship, the emphasis on charity and forgiveness, a suspicion of worldly ambition-by the early fourth century, the task had become clear: the atomists had to disappear. The followers of Epicurus had already aroused considerable enmity outside the Christian community. When the emperor known as Julian the Apostate (c. 331363), who attempted to revive paganism against the mounting Christian onslaught, drew up a list of works that it was important for pagan priests to read, he also noted some t.i.tles that he explicitly wished to exclude: "Let us not," he wrote, "admit discourses by Epicureans." Jews, likewise, termed anyone who departed from the rabbinic tradition apikoros, an Epicurean.