“Ancient Greeks and Romans did not share our idealization of isolated geniuses, working alone to think through the knottiest problems.”
From Stephen Greenblatt's riveting book, THE SWERVE: HOW THE WORLD BECAME MODERN.
“Such scenes—Descartes in his secret retreat, calling everything into questions, or the excommunicated Spinoza quietly reasoning to himself while grinding lenses—would eventually become our dominant emblem of the life of the mind. But this vision of proper intellectual pursuits rested on a profound shift in cultural prestige, one that began with the early Christian hermits who deliberately withdrew from whatever it was that pagans valued: St. Anthony (250-356) in the desert or St. Symeon Stylites (390-459) perched on his column. Such figures, modern scholars have shown, characteristically had in fact bands of followers, and though they lived apart, they often played a significant role in the life of large communities. But the dominant cultural image that they fashioned—or that came to be fashioned around them—was of radical isolation.”
I maintain that the very notion of the “isolated genius” today—still prominent in contemporary culture—is an absolute fiction. No man is an island, though certain aspects of one's environment or social makeup may drive a person to feel they are an island, but true and genuine absolute islandhood is bound to spell the death of one's creative life.
“Not so the Greeks and Romans. As thinking and writing generally require quiet and a minimum of distraction, their poets and philosophers must have periodically pulled away from the noise and business of the world in order to accomplish what they did.”
The keyword here, being “periodically.”
“But the image that they projected was social. Poets depicted themselves as shepherds singing to other shepherds; philosophers depicted themselves engaged in long conversations, often stretching out over several days. The pulling away from the distractions of the everyday world was figured not as a retreat to the solitary cell but as a quiet exchange of words among friends in a garden.”
House-sitting for friends now, and spotted the book on one of the shelves. Decided to flip through it a few days ago and haven't been able to put it down since.
“The invention of movable type 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 scribes 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 plentitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst.”
Call me a pessimist but I kind of foresee an inevitable halt to the plentitude of data (along with “content”) being collectively churned out by present human civilization as well.
“Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of 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.”
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, after all.
“Starting as early as 300 BCE, the Ptolemaic 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.”
Take me back to ancient Alexandria please.
“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 365 ¼ days and proposed adding a “leap day” every fourth year; geographers speculated that it would be possible to reach India by sailing 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.”
Let us remind ourselves that what inevitably consigned all that achievement to oblivion and brought it all down was the prejudice exercised by the Roman Empire—some 270 years after Ptolemaic rule—against one of its minority groups/cults concentrated in the eastern provinces, and—as the story goes—charging one member of that minority with treason against the empire before executing him.
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