CHAPTER FOUR

THE TEETH OF TIME

APART FROM THE charred papyrus fragments recovered in Herculaneum, there are no surviving contemporary manuscripts 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 latitude and longitude, or the rational analysis of political power—but their books are gone. The indefatigable scholar Didymus of Alexandria¹ earned the nickname Bronze-Ass (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 editor² 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.³ He and his principal 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 massive. 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,⁴ 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 glass 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 appetite. Tiny animals, Aristotle noted, may be detected in such things as clothes, woolen blankets, and cream cheese. “Others are found,”⁵ 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-shining⁶ 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 knobbed…. 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 gnawing⁷ 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.”⁸ And for the Greek poet Evenus, the bookworm was the symbolic enemy of human culture: “Page-eater,⁹ 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 Hellenistic 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 manuscripts). In neither case is the payment likely to have gone directly to the scribe: many, perhaps most, Greek scribes¹⁰ 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 advertisements 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,”¹¹ 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,¹² 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—spent¹³ their lives bent over paper, with an inkwell, ruler, and hard split-reed pen, satisfying the demand for books. The invention of movable type¹⁴ 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 manuscript aloud to a roomful of well-trained scribes¹⁵ could produce masses 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 cumulative force of a mass 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,¹⁶ 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 assembled 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 circumference to within 1 percent; Galen revolutionized medicine. Alexandrian astronomers postulated a heliocentric universe; geometers deduced that the length of a year was 365¼ 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 associated with a particular doctrine or philosophical school; its scope was the entire range of intellectual inquiry. It represented a global cosmopolitanism, a determination to assemble¹⁷ the accumulated knowledge of the whole world and to perfect and add to this knowledge. Fantastic efforts were made not only to amass 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 analysis 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 principal 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 institution 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 Ammianus Marcellinus, the fourth-century historian rediscovered by Poggio, was second in magnificence¹⁸ only to the Capitol in Rome.

The forces that destroyed this institution help us understand how it came about that the Lucretius manuscript 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 came¹⁹ 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 institution that was part of a temple complex, replete with statues of gods and goddesses, altars, and other paraphernalia of pagan worship. The Museum was, as its name implies, a shrine dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses who embodied human creative achievement. The Serapeon, where the secondary collection was located, housed a colossal statue of the god 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 gods existed, but those gods 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 time²⁰ 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,”²¹ 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 god. 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 true²² that we are dead, and living only in appearance,

We Hellenes, 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 institutions; they cannot long survive violent assaults. 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 decree²³ 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-possession²⁴ 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 circulate²⁵ 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 knell²⁶ for the whole intellectual tradition that underlay the text that Poggio recovered so many centuries later. The Museum, with its dream of assembling 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 classical 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 Ammianus Marcellinus complained that Romans had virtually abandoned serious reading. Ammianus 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 philosopher²⁷ 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 classical 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 classical 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,²⁸ 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 athoroughgoing 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, whores, 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 precepts²⁹ 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 God’s judgment seat. Asked to state his condition, he replied that he was a Christian. But the Judge sternly replied, “You lie;³⁰ you are a Ciceronian, not a Christian” (Ciceronianus es, non Christianus). These terrible words might have signaled his eternal damnation, 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 ever³¹ 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 alluring³² 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 Horace³³ 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 classics. 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 district³⁴ 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 God 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 nobody, 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,³⁵ 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 gods. Rather, he thought that if the concept of divinity made any sense at all, the gods 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 god 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,”³⁶ 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 … Janus has two faces, ready to walk backwards; Diana is sometimes short-kilted for the hunt, while at Ephesus she is figured with many breasts 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 shores 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 use³⁷ 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 sexes and the dwelling places of the foetus and the streams from the nurse’s breasts, when sexual 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 addressed³⁸ 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,³⁹ 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. 331–363), 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 titles that he explicitly wished to exclude: “Let us not,”⁴⁰ he wrote, “admit discourses by Epicureans.” Jews, likewise, termed anyone who departed from the rabbinic tradition apikoros, an Epicurean.⁴¹

But Christians particularly found Epicureanism a noxious threat. If you grant Epicurus⁴² his claim that the soul is mortal, wrote Tertullian, the whole fabric of Christian morality unravels. For Epicurus, human suffering is always finite: “if it is slight, he [Epicurus] says, you may despise it, if it is great it will not be long.” But to be Christian, Tertullian countered, is to believe that torture and pain last forever: “Epicurus utterly destroys⁴³ religion,” wrote another Church Father; take Providence away, and “confusion and disorder will overtake life.”

Christian polemicists had to find a way to turn the current of mockery against Epicurus and his followers. Ridiculing the pagan pantheon did not work in this case, since Epicureanism eloquently dismantled the whole sacrificial worship of the gods and dismissed the ancient stories. What had to be done was to refashion the account of the founder Epicurus so that he appeared no longer as an apostle of moderation in the service of reasonable pleasure but instead as a Falstaffian figure of riotous excess. He was a fool, a pig, a madman. And his principal Roman disciple, Lucretius, had to be comparably made over.

But it was not enough to blacken the reputations of Epicurus and Lucretius, to repeat endlessly that they were stupid, swinishly self-indulgent, insane, and, finally, suicidal. It was not enough even, by this means, to suppress the reading of their works, to humiliate anyone who might express interest in them, to discourage copies from ever being made. Even more than the theory that the world consisted only of atoms and void, the main problem was the core ethical idea: that the highest good is the pursuit of pleasure and the diminution of pain. What had to be undertaken was the difficult project of making what appeared simply sane and natural—the ordinary impulses of all sentient creatures—seem like the enemy of the truth.

Centuries were required to accomplish this grand design, and it was never fully completed. But the grand outlines may be seen in the late third and early fourth century in the works of a North African convert from paganism to Christianity: Lactantius. Appointed tutor to the son of the emperor Constantine, who had established Christianity as the religion of the empire, Lactantius wrote a series of polemics against Epicureanism. That philosophy had, he acknowledges, a substantial following, “not because it brings⁴⁴ forward any truth, but because the attractive name of pleasure invites many.” Christians must refuse the invitation and understand that pleasure is a code name for vice.

The task, for Lactantius, was not only to draw believers away from their pursuit of human pleasures; it was also to persuade them that God was not, as Epicureans believed, entirely absorbed within the orbit of divine pleasures and hence indifferent to the fate of humans. Instead, as Lactantius wrote in a celebrated work written in 313 CE, God cared about humans, just as a father cared about his wayward child. And the sign of that care, he wrote, was anger. God was enraged at man—that was the characteristic manifestation of His love—and wanted to smite him over and over again, with spectacular, unrelenting violence.

A hatred of pleasure-seeking and a vision of God’s providential rage: these were death knells of Epicureanism, henceforward branded by the faithful as “insane.” Lucretius had urged the person who felt the prompting of sexual desire to satisfy it: “a dash of gentle pleasure sooths the sting.” (4.177) Christianity, as a story rehearsed by Gregory demonstrates, pointed in a different direction. The pious Benedict found himself thinking of a woman he had once seen, and, before he knew what was happening, his desires were aroused:

He then noticed⁴⁵ a thick patch of nettles and briers next to him. Throwing his garment aside he flung himself into the sharp thorns and stinging nettles. There he rolled and tossed until his whole body was in pain and covered with blood. Yet, once he had conquered pleasure through suffering, his torn and bleeding skin served to drain the poison of temptation from his body. Before long, the pain that was burning his whole body had put out the fires of evil in his heart. It was by exchanging these two fires that he gained the victory over sin.

What worked for the saint in the early sixth century would, as monastic rules made clear, work for others. In one of the great cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure.

The infliction of pain⁴⁶ was hardly unknown in the world of Lucretius. The Romans were specialists in it, dedicating vast sums and huge arenas to public spectacles of violence. And it was not only in the Colosseum that Romans could glut themselves on injury, pain, and death. Plays and poems, based on the ancient myths, were often blood-drenched, as were paintings and sculptures. Violence was part of the fabric⁴⁷ of everyday life. Schoolmasters and slaveholders were expected to flog their victims, and whipping was a frequent prelude to Roman executions. This is why in the gospel account, prior to his crucifixion, Jesus was tied to a column and scourged.

But for the pagans, in the great majority of these instances, pain was understood not as a positive value, a stepping stone to salvation, as it was by pious Christians intent on whipping themselves, but as an evil, something visited upon rule-breakers, criminals, captives, unfortunate wretches, and—the only category with dignity—soldiers. Romans honored a brave soldier’s voluntary acceptance of pain, but that acceptance was far different from the ecstatic embrace celebrated in hundreds of convents and monasteries. The heroes of Roman stories willingly met what they could not, in good conscience, avoid or what they felt they had to endure in order to prove to their enemies their dauntless courage. Outside the orbit of that heroic obligation, there lay the special philosophical discipline that enabled the classical sage to regard inescapable pain—of kidney stones, for example—with equanimity. And for everyone, from the most exalted philosopher to the humblest artisan, there was the natural pursuit of pleasure.

In pagan Rome, the most extravagant version of this pursuit of pleasure came together in the gladiatorial arena with the most extravagant infliction and endurance of pain. If Lucretius offered a moralized and purified version of the Roman pleasure principle, Christianity offered a moralized and purified version of the Roman pain principle. Early Christians, brooding on the sufferings of the Saviour, the sinfulness of mankind, and the anger of a just Father, found the attempt to cultivate pleasure manifestly absurd and dangerous. At best a trivial distraction, pleasure was at worst a demonic trap, figured in medieval art by those alluring women beneath whose gowns one can glimpse reptilian claws. The only life truly worth imitating—the life of Jesus—bore ample witness to the inescapable presence in mortal existence of sadness and pain, but not of pleasure. The earliest pictorial depictions of Jesus were uniform in their melancholy sobriety. As every pious reader of Luke’s Gospel knew, Jesus wept, but there were no verses that described him laughing or smiling, let alone pursuing pleasure.

It was not difficult for Christians of the fifth and sixth centuries to find reasons to weep: the cities were falling apart, the fields were soaked in the blood of dying soldiers, robbery and rape were rampant. There had to be some explanation for the catastrophic behavior of human beings over so many generations, as if they were incapable of learning anything from their historical experience. Theology provided an answer deeper and more fundamental than this or that flawed individual or institution: humans were by nature corrupt. Inheritors of the sin of Adam and Eve, they richly deserved every miserable catastrophe that befell them; they needed to be punished; they had coming to them an endless diet of pain. Indeed, it was only through this pain that a small number could find the narrow gate to salvation.

The most ardent early believers in this doctrine, those fired by an explosive mix of fear, hope, and fierce enthusiasm, were determined to make the pain to which all humankind was condemned their active choice. In doing so, they hoped to pay to an angry God the dues of suffering that He justly and implacably demanded. They possessed something of the martial hardness admired by traditional Roman culture, but, with a few exceptions,⁴⁸ the goal was not the achievement of Stoical indifference to pain. On the contrary. Their whole project depended on experiencing an intense sensitivity to hunger, thirst, and loneliness. And when they whipped themselves with thorny branches or struck themselves with jagged stones, they made no effort to suppress their cries of anguish. Those cries were part of the payment, the atonement that would, if they were successful, enable them to recover in the afterlife the happiness that Adam and Eve had lost.

By the year 600⁴⁹ there were over three hundred monasteries and convents in Italy and Gaul. Many of these were still small—little more than fortified villas, with their outbuildings—but they possessed a spiritual rationale and an institutional coherence that conferred upon them stability in an unstable world. Their inhabitants were drawn from those who felt compelled to transform their lives, to atone for their own sins and for the sins of others, to secure eternal bliss by turning their backs on ordinary pleasures. Over time, their numbers were supplemented by many less fervent souls who had in effect been given to the Church by their parents or guardians.

In monasteries and convents driven by the belief that redemption would only come through abasement, it is not surprising that forms of corporal punishment—virgarum verbera (hitting with rods), corporale supplicium (bodily punishment), ictus (blows), vapulatio (cudgeling), disciplina(whipping), and flagellatio—were routinely inflicted on community members who broke the rules. Disciplinary practices that would, in pagan society, have been disgraces inflicted only on social inferiors were meted out with something like democratic indifference to rank. Typically, the guilty party had to carry the rod that was used for the beating, and then sitting on the ground and constantly repeating the words Mea culpa, submit to blows until the abbot or abbess was satisfied.

The insistence that punishment⁵⁰ be actively embraced by the victims—literalized in the kissing of the rod—marked a deliberate Christian trampling on the Epicurean credo of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. After all, the experience of pain was not only punishment; it was a form of pious emulation. Christian hermits, brooding on the sufferings of the Saviour, mortified their flesh, in order to experience in their own bodies the torments that Jesus had had to undergo. Though these acts of self-scourging began to be reported in late antiquity—they were novel and strange enough in the beginning to attract widespread attention—it was not until the eleventh century that a monastic reformer, the Italian Benedictine Peter Damian, established voluntary self-flagellation as a central ascetic practice acceptable to the Church.

It had taken a thousand years to win the struggle and secure the triumph of pain seeking. “Did our Redeemer not endure scourging?” Damian asked those critics who called into question the celebration of the whip. Weren’t the apostles and many of the saints and martyrs flogged? What better way to follow in their footsteps, what surer method of imitating Christ, than to suffer the blows that they suffered? To be sure, Damian concedes, in the case of these glorious predecessors, someone else was doing the whipping. But in a world in which Christianity has triumphed, we have to do the whipping for ourselves. Otherwise the whole dream and doctrine of the imitation of Christ would have to be abandoned. “The body has to be shaped⁵¹ like a piece of wood,” explained one of the many texts that followed in Damian’s wake, “with beatings and whippings, with canes, scourges, and discipline. The body has to be tortured and starved, so that it submits to the spirit and takes perfect shape.” In the pursuit of this spiritual goal, all boundaries, restraints, and inhibitions drop away. Shame at appearing naked before the eyes of others has no place, nor does the embarrassment of being seen trembling, howling, or sobbing.

Here is a description of the Dominican nuns of Colmar, penned at the turn of the fourteenth century by a sister named Catherine von Gebersweiler who had lived in the convent since childhood:

At Advent⁵² and during the whole of Lent, the sisters would make their way after matins into the main hall or some other place devoted to their purpose. There they abused their bodies in the most acute fashion with all manner of scourging instruments until their blood flowed, so that the sound of the blows of the whip rang through the entire convent and rose more sweetly than any other melody to the ears of the Lord.

This is no mere sadomasochistic fantasy: a vast body of evidence confirms that such theaters of pain, the ritualized heirs to St. Benedict’s spontaneous roll in the stinging nettles, were widespread in the late Middle Ages. They were noted again and again as a distinctive mark of holiness. St. Teresa, “although she was slowly wasting away, tormented herself with the most painful whips, frequently rubbed herself with fresh stinging nettles, and even rolled about naked in thorns.” St. Clare of Assisi “tore apart the alabaster container of her body with a whip for forty-two years, and from her wounds there arose heavenly odors that filled the church.” St. Dominic cut into his flesh every night with a whip affixed with three iron chains. St. Ignatius of Loyola recommended whips with relatively thin straps, “summoning pain into the flesh, but not into the bones.” Henry Suso, who carved the name of Jesus on his chest, had an iron cross fixed with nails pressed into his back and whipped himself until the blood flowed. Suso’s contemporary, Elsbeth of Oye, a nun from Zurich, whipped herself so energetically that the bystanders in the chapel were spattered with her blood.

The ordinary self-protective, pleasure-seeking impulses of the lay public could not hold out against the passionate convictions and overwhelming prestige of their spiritual leaders. Beliefs and practices that had been the preserve of religious specialists, men and women set apart from the vulgar, everyday imperatives of the “world,” found their way into the mainstream, where they thrived in societies of flagellants and periodic bursts of mass hysteria. What was once in effect a radical counterculture insisted with remarkable success that it represented the core values of all believing Christians.

Of course, people continued to pursue pleasure—the Old Adam could not be so easily eradicated. In peasants’ huts and the halls of the great, along country lanes, in prelates’ palaces, and behind the high walls of the monasteries, there was drinking, overeating, raucous laughter, merry dancing, and plenty of sex. But virtually no one in moral authority, no one with a public voice, dared speak up to justify any of it. The silence was not, or not only, the consequence of timidity or fear. Pleasure seeking had come to seem philosophically indefensible. Epicurus was dead and buried, almost all of his works destroyed. And after St. Jerome in the fourth century briefly noted that Lucretius had committed suicide, there were no attacks on Epicurus’ great Roman disciple. He was forgotten.

The survival of the disciple’s once celebrated poem was left to fortune. It was by chance that a copy of On the Nature of Things made it into the library of a handful of monasteries, places that had buried, seemingly forever, the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure. It was by chance that a monk laboring in a scriptorium somewhere or other in the ninth century copied the poem before it moldered away forever. And it was by chance that this copy escaped fire and flood and the teeth of time for some five hundred years until, one day in 1417, it came into the hands of the humanist who proudly called himself Poggius Florentinus, Poggio the Florentine.