Caesar, the disappearance of ancient knowledge, and today’s headlines

In Ghosts in the Machine, I have Big Julius deliberately burning down the great library at Alexandria. He probably was responsible for a fire there in 48 BCE, but it wasn’t devastating: in reality, the institution survived for centuries after that. Alexandria remained a polytheistic city, with many ethnicities and languages and a rich intellectual life, until at least 335 CE. But in that year the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the late Roman Empire, and that set the stage for fanatics to do their work. Beginning in about 390 CE, the Emperor Theodosius the First began to ban pagan rites of all kinds throughout the empire, passed laws that made it economically difficult and even dangerous to be a non-Christian, and encouraged the destruction of pagan temples. Alexandria’s newly monotheist rulers drove out Jews and other non-Christian groups, and — in a startling echo of current policies by radical Sunni Muslims — took it upon themselves to destroy everything pre-Christian in the city, including books, monuments, and even the Serapeum, Alexandria’s most magnificent Greek temple. Hatred of the past, and the firm conviction that you’re right about everything and that only the future of your own faith matters, are not a new invention.

When exactly the great library was destroyed or abandoned is unclear, but its contents were probably lost because of piecemeal destruction followed by long neglect, rather than a single great fire. Whatever the exact cause of the loss, during this period most of ancient culture disappeared. You could fill a big lecture hall with the major ancient figures in geography, medicine, history, mathematics, science, drama, poetry, and philosophy from whose writings we have either fragments or nothing. A few examples: Leucippus and Democritus, who invented atomic theory; the mathematician Pythagoras; the philosophers Democritus, Cleanthes of Assos, Crysippus, and Zeno of Elea; the great polymath Posidonius of Rhodes, who features in The Fire Seekers; the poet Anacreon; last but not least, the most famous woman intellectual of the entire ancient world, the poet Sappho.

The situation in drama sums it up pretty well. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Menander are famous on the basis of 15 surviving plays, plus some fragments. But we know from other evidence that between them they wrote over 300 plays. All the rest have vanished. It’s like knowing the Harry Potter books from one damaged photocopy of the bits about Hagrid.