I sat in the gallery looking out across a bell of air, or at the curving walls crammed with extraordinarily interesting-looking books on non-classical subjects, or out the window at the pale stone of All Souls, or, of course, at Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik (Leipzig, 1912). There was not a classicist in sight.
I formed the impression that the sentence meant: It is truly a fallow and new field which the author has trod and ploughed through in handling this subject, so especially might this statement sound in the first moment.
This did not really seem worth the trouble it had taken to work it out, but I had to go on so I went on, or rather I was about to go on when I glanced up and I happened to see, on a shelf to my left, a book on the Thirty Years War which looked extraordinarily interesting. I took it down and it really was extraordinarily interesting and I looked up presently and it was time for lunch.
I went to the Covered Market and spent an hour looking at sweaters.
There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark.
There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.
I saw several interesting sweaters in the Market but they seemed to be rather expensive.
I tore myself away at last and returned to the fray.
It is truly a fallow and new field which the author has trod and ploughed through in handling this subject, so especially might this statement sound in the first moment, I reminded myself.
It seemed extraordinarily uninteresting.
I went on to work through the second sentence, ratio of profit to expense as before, and the sentence after that and the one after that. It took five to ten minutes to read a sentence—an hour a page. Slowly the outlines of the argument loomed out of the mist, like Debussy’s drowned cathedral sortant peu à peu de la brume.
In La Cathédrale Engloutie chords of melancholy grandeur break out, at last, ff !!!! But when, after some 30 hours or so, I began at last to understand—
49 people in the English-speaking world know what lay in wait. No one else knows or cares. And yet how much hangs on this moment of revelation! It is only if we can conceive of the world without Newton, without Einstein, without Mozart, that we can imagine the difference between this world and the world in which I close Aristarchs Athetesen after two sentences and take out Schachnovelle in cool disregard of the terms of my scholarship. If I had not read Roemer I would not have known I could not be a scholar, I would never have met Liberace (no, not the) and the world would be short a—
I am saying more than I know. One thing at a time. I read Roemer day after day, and after 30 hours or so enlightenment came not in an hour of gold but an hour of lead.
Some 2,300 years ago Alexander the Great set out from Macedonia to conquer everything in his path. He conquered his way down to Egypt and founded the city of Alexandria, then went on to conquer his way east and die, leaving his followers to fight over his conquests. Ptolemy was already governor of Egypt, and kept it. He ruled the country from Alexandria, and it was he who set up one of the many splendours of the city: a Library built up through an acquisitions policy of singleminded ruthlessness.
The invention of the printing press lay as far ahead of them as the wonders of the 3700s from us; all books were copied out by hand. Mistakes crept in, especially if you were copying a copy of a copy of a copy; sometimes the copyist would have a bright idea and add bogus lines or even entire bogus passages, and then everyone after him would innocently copy the bright idea along with the rest. One solution was to get as close to the original as you could. The Library paid the Athenian public record office a massive deposit to borrow the original manuscripts of the whole of Greek tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, the lot) and make copies. It then made sure of having the best possible version by the simple expedient of keeping the originals, returning the copies and forfeiting the deposit.
So far, so not wildly exciting, and yet so much could be said, all fascinating, about the Library and Alexandria and the mad people who lived there, for the writers alone must be the most perverse and wilful the world has ever known. There are people who, needing a place to put umbrellas, go to Ikea and purchase an umbrella stand for easy home assembly—and there are people who drive 100 miles to an auction in the heart of Shropshire and spot the potential in an apparently pointless 17th-century farming implement. The Alexandrians would have been bidding against each other at the auction. They loved to rifle the works of the past (conveniently available in a Library built up by a ruthless acquisitions policy), turn up rare words which were no longer understood let alone used, and deploy them as more interesting alternatives to words people might actually understand. They loved myths in which people went berserk or drank magic potions or turned into rocks in moments of stress; they loved scenes in which people who had gone berserk raved in strange, fractured speeches studded with unjustly neglected vocabulary; they loved to focus on some trivial element of a myth and spin it out and skip the myth—they could make a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of any Hamlet. As scholars, as scientists, as mathematicians, as poets who led the flower of Roman youth astray, they crowd their way into books not mainly about them; given a book to themselves they burst out at once into a whole separate volume of footnotes—I speak of course of Fraser’s Ptolemaic Alexandria, a book I would come back from the grave to possess (I asked for it on my deathbed once and didn’t get it). But time is short—the Boy Wonder is watching the video, who knows for how long—what was Roemer’s contribution to this marvellous subject?
Roemer was interested in the Homeric criticism of Aristarchus, who was head of the Library a little after 180 BC (the unpleasantness about the tragedies was before his time). Aristarchus had wanted a perfect text of Homer; since an original manuscript did not exist, ruthlessness and cash were not enough: he had to compare copies and spot mistakes. He marked for deletion (athetised) lines he thought did not belong in the text, and was the first to write down his reasoning in commentaries. Nothing by Aristarchus survived. There were marginal notes on the Iliad that named no names but were probably third-hand extracts from Aristarchus; there were a few other notes that named names.
Some of the third-hand extracts struck Roemer as brilliant: they were clearly by Aristarchus, who was clearly a genius. Other extracts were too stupid for a genius: clearly by someone else. Whenever someone else was said to have said something brilliant he saw instantly that it was really by Aristarchus, and if any brilliant comments happened to be lying around unclaimed he instantly spotted the unnamed mastermind behind them.
Now it is patently, blatantly obvious that this is insane. If you are going to shuffle all the names around so that one person is always the genius, this means that you have decided not to believe your source whenever it says someone else said something good or the genius said something bad—but the source is your only reason for thinking the genius was a genius in the first place. Anyone who had stopped to think for two seconds would have seen the problem, but Roemer had managed to write an entire scholarly treatise without thinking for two seconds. Having settled on stupidity as the criterion of inauthenticity he went on to discard one stupid remark after another as really by Zenodotus or Aristophanes (no, not the) or misquoted by Didymus, with many sarcastic & gleeful asides on the ineptitude of these imbeciles.