Isidore had once found a little time for his own poetry. Although its authorship has been disputed, he is believed to have composed several verses outlining his general philosophy of learning, perhaps even of life itself. Reading the lines below, one may imagine him looking around a cathedral library at Seville, or possibly a monastery scriptorium, surrounded by other learned men, intoxicated by the volumes stacked high upon the walls.
These bookcases of ours hold a great many books. Behold and read, you who so desire, if you wish.
Here lay your sluggishness aside, put off your fastidiousness of mind.
Believe me, brother, you will return thence a more learned man.
But perhaps you say, ‘Why do I need this now?
For I would think no study still remains for me:
I have unrolled histories and hurried through all the law.’
Truly, if you say this, then you yourself still know nothing.
BYZANTIUM
What a falling off was there. The relatively barren centuries between Isidore of Seville and the High Middle Ages were necessarily as hazardous towards the notion of encyclopaedias as towards all other secular manuscripts, but our lack of cultural records in this period suggests that because nothing survived therefore nothing existed. What did survive was curiosity and desire, not least the desire to gather and interpret, and we must locate this innate human attribute in other places and forms.
Byzantine culture, declares the Byzantine professor Paul Magdalino, ‘was permanently encyclopaedic in the sense that it was continually collecting, summarising, excerpting and synthesising’. Much of its Orthodox Christian output was a textual collation composed by kings for their heirs, and tutors for their pupils, and although the ninth and tenth centuries produced nothing of a cohesive nature that could be compared to Pliny or Isidore, it did construct plenty of moral and specialised compendiums.*
Our appreciation of these works requires a parallel effort of encyclopaedism, bringing together the surviving excerpts of diverse works commissioned by Leo VI, Constantine VII and Basil II, a list covering law, ecclesiastical teachings and general history.
Emperor Leo VI the Wise (866–912) ruled from Constantinople, and if ever a medieval empire could be said to be sprawling, this was the one: his kingdom, the eastern half of the Roman Empire, extended from the shores of the Bosporus to cover much of the land surrounding the Mediterranean, including what is now Italy, Greece, North Africa and the Middle East, extending north to the Danube and east to Syria. But in the Macedonian Dynasty in which Leo governed, the empire was under constant attack (from Bulgarian and Arab armies; from maritime fleets capturing Sicily and Crete) and his military talents were not equal to his literary and scholarly ones. Indeed, his written histories and treatises may have reflected a desire to instil some sort of order to his kingdom in such a persistent period of turmoil. Leo VI earned his moniker the Wise (he was also called the Philosopher): he attempted to codify all Byzantine law and trading regulations, and his poetry spoke of oracles and visions of the future.
The emperor married four times, in the face of much Church opposition. His illegitimate heir Constantine VII inherited his father’s scholarly zeal, and his writing benefitted greatly from his father’s preparatory work. The finest example, and the one we may classify as encyclopaedic, is now known as the Constantinian Excerpts, a large historical survey sourced from the ancient Greeks Herodotus and Thucydides, through Peter the Patrician (born 500 CE), to George the Monk (ninth century CE). Written in Greek and arranged originally into fifty-three volumes, each with the same preface explaining the intention of the writing that followed: to render historical information both more intelligible and accessible. Composed between 900 and 990, the project was thematic rather than chronological, utilising at least twenty-six credited histories at no little expense: some 10,000 sheep had to be slaughtered and skinned to supply the parchment.*
The emperor and his proudly studious colleagues produced much else of an encyclopaedic nature, not least a history of the empire from 817, the exhaustive agricultural manual Geoponika (with tips on how to grow flowers and plough a turnip field) and De Ceremoniis, a guide to court ceremonies and rituals. The concept of cohesive and comprehensive learning was something young Byzantine students learnt at schooclass="underline" the curriculum, consisting mainly of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and history was indeed called ‘enkyklios paideia’.
The Dark Ages that fell upon Western Europe since the fall of Rome, with Church indoctrination all but eliminating the teachings of classical antiquity, was resisted in the East; in the loosest sense, the Barbarians at the gates were fended off as much with ancient Roman statuary and a belief in the retention of intellectual civilisation as they were with swords and spears. It is likely that Constantine’s historical encyclopaedia was completed by Emperor Basil II some twenty years later around 990, and in this way did the imperial scribes safeguard and promote much of the knowledge that would resurface in the early Renaissance printing press of the fifteenth century.
* Encyclopaedias: Their History Throughout the Ages by Robert Collison (Hafner, New York, 1964).
* See for example Jason König and Greg Woolf (eds) Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
* We do have an account of Cato’s teachings from Pliny, a report of a lecture to his son on the untrustworthiness of his rival Greeks. ‘They are a worthless and unruly tribe. Take this as a prophecy: when those people give us their writings they will corrupt everything … They call us barbarians too, of course …’
* This is but a small sample: an edited summary from books 24 and 25, Loeb Classical Library edition, Harvard University Press, translated by H. Rackham, first published 1952.
* Pliny’s manuscript was reproduced many times, and more than 200 handwritten copies survive. It was no less popular by the time of the printing press: at the end of the fifteenth century there were fifteen different printed editions.
* Then as now, humanism was a term open to interpretation. Isidore’s theology included a book called Against the Jews, an argument designed to convert Jews to Catholicism, which included much criticism of Jewish rituals.
* Translated by Stephen A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach and Oliver Berghof et al. (Cambridge University Press, 2006) from the 1911 Oxford Latin version of the text by W.M. Lindsay.
* In Jason König and Greg Woolf (eds) Encyclopedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
* The estimation of András Németh, The Imperial Systemisation of the Past in Constantinople (in König and Woolf, above). Of the fifty-three volumes, only On Embassies survives in its entirety, alongside fragments of On Virtues and Vices, On Ambushes and On Gnomic Statements.
C
CHALCENTEROCITY
On Wednesday, 14 January 1998, a man called Jeffrey Gibson sent an email to the Classics Listserv registered at Washington University in Seattle. He had a simple and modest request:
‘I’ve probably asked this before, so please forgive duplicate postings: Is there an English translation of the Suda?’