Papyrus paper which keeps the sweet harvest of the mind.
—Cassiodorus
It was not the best of times. The Roman Empire was crumbling under the advance of barbarian hordes. Poor weather conditions prevailed, the most severe and protracted short-term episodes of cooling in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 2,000 years caused crop failures followed by famines that allowed a weakened population to be ravaged by a terrible plague, a disease that killed thousands daily in Constantinople from whence it would spread worldwide.
Within fifty years almost 100 million people would die from this disease as it swept across the civilized world in an epidemic that would empty the cities. Throughout the land ignorance prevailed. The mass of people could neither read nor write. Education and learning had retreated to the seclusion of the monasteries as books were being burned faster than they were being produced and darkness settled over the West.
In the midst of this desert of the mind, several oases stood out: Caesarea in Palestine, Hippo on the Algerian coast, and Aelia in Jerusalem. And, in southern Italy, on the sunny coast of Calabria at Squillace sat the Vivarium, a monastery and library on the estate of Cassiodorus that took its name from the local fishponds. Located near an abundant stream on a little hill immediately overhanging the sea, it looked out toward the rising sun.
Aptly named for a place where fish were kept alive, it would also serve to help keep the flame of learning lit. One of the most ambitious and important enterprises of its time, it was an undertaking intent on turning back the tide, the effort of one man to preserve, expand, and exalt Christian intellectual culture.1 The man who started it, Cassiodorus, was a thinker and writer, and also one of the world’s most famous librarians. Shortly after founding the center, he ensured it was well supplied with manuscripts and maintained a staff of bookbinders employed to “clothe the manuscripts in decorous attire.” He also provided his readers with self-supplying lamps to light their nocturnal studies, and sundials by day and water clocks by night to enable them to regulate their hours. And what better environment for this scholarly enclave than the solitude of a country cloister, whose silence was broken only by the song of birds and the murmur of surf from the Ionian Sea as it lapped the shores below?
MAP 6: The world in the time of Cassiodorus.
Cassiodorus had served Theodoric the Great in Ravenna, then moved on to the Justinian court in Constantinople until his retirement in 554 A.D., when at the age of sixty-five he returned to his Italian retreat. In addition to several cartloads of books, he also carried with him the reputation of a man of proven character. A Christian scholar, Roman statesman, and writer, he would live on in peaceful isolation, dying at the age of ninety.
His staff probably turned out to greet him on the day of his arrival. His thirty-year sojourn had sharpened his thirst and he would throw himself into, among other things, collecting and producing books. Undoubtedly, a number of the books he had already acquired would be made of parchment, but not many, since the price of parchment and vellum had become such that complete copies of a vellum Bible cost as much as a palace or farm. Just one parchment volume of a cosmography cost King Alfred the Great of England an estate of as much land as eight ploughs could till.2 In Bavaria an illuminated missal was exchanged for a vineyard, while a monastery used a missal to buy a large piece of land.3
If Cassiodorus went in that direction, he would soon be out of resources. So, the major portion of the documents in his collection would be handwritten codices made of papyrus, and like many librarians of that ancient Western world, he would virtually live and breathe papyrus paper.
Papyrus was not cheap, but it was affordable and ideal for producing a book that was serviceable rather than beautiful. But by the fifth and sixth centuries even the supply of papyrus had become erratic; the turmoil caused by wars and invasions had taken their toll on trade as well as welfare. We are told that during this period between 550 and 750 A.D., almost no non-Christian manuscripts were recopied, so that when scholars began collecting and copying classical books in the time of Charlemagne, they found a great part of Latin literature had gone forever.4
Luckily the Vivarium was on the sole of Italy’s boot, from here Cassiodorus could arrange for a reliable supply from Egypt perhaps through Tarentum, the thriving port just east of the instep. A former Greek colony, Tarentum connected the Ionian Sea to Rome via the Appian Way and it had trade connections with Egypt that dated back to the time of Ptolemy II.
During all his many years in the imperial government, Cassiodorus had developed an affinity for papyrus. In those days he had drafted, written and copied thousands of documents, letters, notes, books, and reports. Papyrus paper had rolled off his desk for at least forty years. He also was a rare specimen in that he knew the papyrus plant better than most people. Unlike many of the writers, historians, and geographers of his day (and of ours), it is obvious that Cassiodorus had actually seen the plant growing in nature.
How do we know this? In his writings he never mentions any travel to Egypt, or the other places in Africa where it grows. We have a clue in a letter he wrote to a tax collector fifteen or twenty years earlier, in which he expounds on the subject of the plant, its history, and its importance, and he does this in such a way that we know this man has been there. We also have another clue in the fact that at the time of his birth, his father was the governor of Sicily.
By chance, papyrus grows luxuriantly in only two places outside of Africa, in the Jordan valley and in the swamps of Sicily. In both places, the plant yellows during the winter, a sign that it is at the furthest extremity of its growth zone. But in both places the plant does well enough to be used for the production of mats by local farmers. We know also from a letter from no less a figure than Pope Gregory the Great that papyrus was growing in Palermo during the sixth century, and further from a merchant Ibn Haukal who traveled there from Baghdad in 972 A.D. that it was still being used to make rope as well as a small supply of paper for the sultan, “just enough for his needs.”5
From the family estate at Squillace, where he was born, Siracusa in Sicily is only a distance of about one hundred miles, an easy journey for a governor’s son by land and sea. The brilliant blue rivers of the historic city of Siracusa have always attracted tourists. In earlier days the city was called Syracuse, a name that comes from the Greek sirako, referring to the nearby swamps and marshes. The region, which is topographically flat, would have papyrus swamps scattered throughout the river floodplains, and it is not far-fetched to think of Cassiodorus traveling there as a young man before he was quaestor at age seventeen or consul at age twenty-four.
What would he see?
In a papyrus swamp in Africa (Denny, 1985).
First impressions of papyrus in its native habitat differ on many points except one: the flower, or umbel. Here we can refer to a great description of the flowering head by Guy de Maupassant in the 1800s standing perhaps on the same spot as Cassiodorus stood in 500 A.D., or where I found myself one day in the twenty-first century. He could not get over the resemblance of the flowering head to that of human hair “round clusters of green threads, soft and flexible . . . heads that had become plants,” an impression reinforced by the local peasants who called papyrus parucca or “wig.”
For de Maupassant, it looked like a forest of quivering, rustling, and bending hairy heads, a strangely enchanted ancient body with an enormous mane of thick and flowing hair, “such as poets affect.” Cassiodorus was not far off calling them, “the fair tresses of the marsh.”
Another point about papyrus is that most people take their impression from the thin-stemmed, weedy little plants that grow in pots of wet soil in water gardens or in ponds in temperate botanical gardens throughout the world, not realizing that in nature each upright stem appears from the tip of a horizontal stem, or rhizome, and grows upward of fifteen feet. Then the very top of what Cassiodorus calls its “seamless stem” expands and spreads out into a large tuft of slim, flowering branches: the umbel, or “hairy tress” that sways and flows, following the slightest breeze.
Papyrus served as a major natural resource in the Nile valley, and it also served on the other side of the world in places where Roman legionnaires were on the march. They spoke and wrote Latin throughout their new European colonies, and in doing so brought about an interesting development. Latin, as becoming for an official language, had to be used in written and spoken language. All official transactions, notices, signs, census reports, etc., had to be written and passed along in this language. In effect, the colonizers, like the Goths and Visigoths that sacked Rome, were forced to speak it even as their own barbaric languages withered on the vine. Pen, ink, and papyrus paper were always at work keeping spoken Latin alive by allowing it to be written out, a usage that eventually led to the five modern Romance languages that evolved from Latin between the sixth and ninth centuries. Again we have papyrus at work as a medium helping to ease the way of man into the modern world.
In the end, the literature of Greece and Rome survived, but barely. During the Renaissance, scholars rediscovered just seven remaining tragedies by Aeschylus, seven by Sophocles and nineteen by Euripides, while ancient sources show that originally Aeschylus wrote between seventy and eighty, Sophocles wrote 120, and Euripides wrote ninety. Compared to what we now know of these writers’ oeuvre, this is a survival rate of only 10–20 percent.
Without the durability of papyrus paper and its position as the medium of choice for the great writers of antiquity, all might have truly been lost with the advent of the Dark Ages.
In addition to keeping the legacy of antiquity alive, papyrus paper also played a key role in the transmission of news; something Julius Caesar once again played an unwitting part in.