The Philobiblon
by Richard de Bury
Chapter VII
The complaint of books against the
wars
Almighty Author and Lover of peace, scatter the nations
that delight in war, which is above all plagues injurious to
books. For wars being without the control of reason make a
wild assault on everything they come across, and, lacking
the check of reason they push on without discretion or
distinction to destroy the vessels of reason. Then the wise
Apollo becomes the Python's prey, and Phronesis, the pious
mother, becomes subject to the power of Phrenzy. Then winged
Pegasus is shut up in the stall of Corydon, and eloquent
Mercury is strangled. Then wise Pallas is struck down by the
dagger of error, and the charming Pierides are smitten by
the truculent tyranny of madness. O cruel spectacle! where
you may see the Phoebus of philosophers, the all-wise
Aristotle, whom God Himself made master of the master of the
world, enchained by wicked hands and borne in shameful irons
on the shoulders of gladiators from his sacred home. There
you may see him who was worthy to be lawgiver to the
lawgiver of the world and to hold empire over its emperor,
made the slave of vile buffoons by the most unrighteous laws
of war. O most wicked power of darkness, which does not fear
to undo the approved divinity of Plato, who alone was worthy
to submit to the view of the Creator, before he assuaged the
strife of warring chaos, and before form had put on its garb
of matter, the ideal types, in order to demonstrate the
archetypal universe to its author, so that the world of
sense might be modelled after the supernal pattern. O
tearful sight! where the moral Socrates, whose acts were
virtue and whose discourse was science, who deduced
political justice from the principles of nature, is seen
enslaved to some rascal robber. We bemoan Pythagoras, the
parent of harmony, as, brutally scourged by the harrying
furies of war, he utters not a song but the wailings of a
dove. We mourn, too, for Zeno, who lest he should betray his
secret bit off his tongue and fearlessly spat it out at the
tyrant, and now, alas! is brayed and crushed to death in a
mortar by Diomedon.
In sooth we cannot mourn with the grief that they deserve
all the various books that have perished by the fate of war
in various parts of the world. Yet we must tearfully recount
the dreadful ruin which was caused in Egypt by the
auxiliaries in the Alexandrian war, when seven hundred
thousand volumes were consumed by fire. These volumes had
been collected by the royal Ptolemies through long periods
of time, as Aulus Gellius relates. What an Atlantean progeny
must be supposed to have then perished: including the
motions of the spheres, all the conjunctions of the planets,
the nature of the galaxy, and the prognostic generations of
comets, and all that exists in the heavens or in the ether!
Who would not shudder at such a hapless holocaust, where ink
is offered up instead of blood, where the glowing ashes of
crackling parchment were encarnadined with blood, where the
devouring flames consumed so many thousands of innocents in
whose mouth was no guile, where the unsparing fire turned
into stinking ashes so many shrines of eternal truth! A
lesser crime than this is the sacrifice of Jephthah or
Agamemnon, where a pious daughter is slain by a father's
sword. How many labours of the famous Hercules shall we
suppose then perished, who because of his knowledge of
astronomy is said to have sustained the heaven on his
unyielding neck, when Hercules was now for the second time
cast into the flames. The secrets of the heavens, which
Jonithus learnt not from man or through man but received by
divine inspiration; what his brother Zoroaster, the servant
of unclean spirits, taught the Bactrians; what holy Enoch,
the prefect of Paradise, prophesied before he was taken from
the world, and finally, what the first Adam taught his
children of the things to come, which he had seen when
caught up in an ecstasy in the book of eternity, are
believed to have perished in those horrid flames. The
religion of the Egyptians, which the book of the Perfect
Word so commends; the excellent polity of the older Athens,
which preceded by nine thousand years the Athens of Greece;
the charms of the Chaldaeans; the observations of the Arabs
and Indians; the ceremonies of the Jews; the architecture of
the Babylonians; the agriculture of Noah the magic arts of
Moses; the geometry of Joshua; the enigmas of Samson; the
problems of Solomon from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop;
the antidotes of Aesculapius; the grammar of Cadmus; the
poems of Parnassus; the oracles of Apollo; the argonautics
of Jason; the stratagems of Palamedes, and infinite other
secrets of science are believed to have perished at the time
of this conflagration.
Nay, Aristotle would not have missed the quadrature of
the circle, if only baleful conflicts had spared the books
of the ancients, who knew all the methods of nature. He
would not have left the problem of the eternity of the world
an open question, nor, as is credibly conceived, would he
have had any doubts of the plurality of human intellects and
of their eternity, if the perfect sciences of the ancients
had not been exposed to the calamities of hateful wars. For
by wars we are scattered into foreign lands, are mutilated,
wounded, and shamefully disfigured, are buried under the
earth and overwhelmed in the sea, are devoured by the flames
and destroyed by every kind of death. How much of our blood
was shed by warlike Scipio, when he was eagerly compassing
the overthrow of Carthage, the opponent and rival of the
Roman empire! How many thousands of thousands of us did the
ten years' war of Troy dismiss from the light of day! How
many were driven by Anthony, after the murder of Tully, to
seek hiding places in foreign provinces! How many of us were
scattered by Theodoric, while Boethius was in exile, into
the different quarters of the world, like sheep whose
shepherd has been struck down! How many, when Seneca fell a
victim to the cruelty of Nero, and willing yet unwilling
passed the gates of death, took leave of him and retired in
tears, not even knowing in what quarter to seek for
shelter!
Happy was that translation of books which Xerxes is said
to have made to Persia from Athens, and which Seleucus
brought back again from Persia to Athens. O glad and joyful
return! O wondrous joy, which you might then see in Athens,
when the mother went in triumph to meet her progeny, and
again showed the chambers in which they had been nursed to
her now aging children! Their old homes were restored to
their former inmates, and forthwith boards of cedar with
shelves and beams of gopher wood are most skilfully planed;
inscriptions of gold and ivory are designed for the several
compartments, to which the volumes themselves are reverently
brought and pleasantly arranged, so that no one hinders the
entrance of another or injures its brother by excessive
crowding.
But in truth infinite are the losses which have been
inflicted upon the race of books by wars and tumults. And as
it is by no means possible to enumerate and survey infinity,
we will here finally set up the Gades of our complaint, and
turn again to the prayers with which we began, humbly
imploring that the Ruler of Olympus and the Most High
Governor of all the world will establish peace and dispel
wars and make our days tranquil under His protection.
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- The Philobiblon
by Richard de Bury
Chapter VI
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