7
Europe’s First Publication
I am grateful for the invitation to give a lecture about books. This is not only because I think that books, and therefore libraries, are the most characteristic and the most important physical things in our European civilization, and perhaps in human civilization as a whole, but also because of the dominating role books have played – and still play – in my own life. When I was five years old, the first volume of Selma Lagerlöf’s book The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (Wunderbare Reise des kleinen Nils Holgersson mit den Wildgdnsen) was read to me. The work had just been published in three green volumes. No other book had such a decisive influence not only on my own character, but also on that of my childhood friend Konrad Lorenz. Konrad fell in love with the wild geese, whilst I fell in love with Selma Lagerlof and her books. Like her I became a school teacher. Both Konrad and I remained true to our loves.
Since those early years, books have played an important role in my life, more important even than music. No other human achievement, not even the greatest creations of literature and of art, seem to me as transcendent of all human powers and at the same time so moving, so miraculous as the great works of classical music. Yet books, I think, are culturally still more important.
I do not wish to speak here about the great European revolution that we owe to Johann Gutenberg (or perhaps to Lauren Janszoon Coster?), whose invention of the printed book was most probably the main force of the humanistic movement and of the Reformation, of the rise of science and, eventually, of democracy.
I shall speak instead about a very similar, although more localized, process that began in Greece two thousand years before Gutenberg and, I conjecture, was the origin of our specifically European civilization.
It was a time that is rightly called the Greek miracle or, more specifically, the Athenian miracle: the sixth and fifth centuries BC, the time of the repulsion of the Persians; the time when the Greek world, by defending freedom, became aware of the idea of freedom; the time that produced Pericles and led to the building of the Parthenon.
A miracle like this can never be fully explained. I have thought about it for many years, and also written about it, and I suggest that a part, certainly only a small part, of the explanation lies in the collision, the clash, of the Greek and the eastern cultures, in what has been termed ‘culture clash’. In any case, Homer’s epics (whose topic was culture clash) and almost all the great new ideas emerged in the eastern Greek colonies on the coast of Asia Minor where the culture clash was most strongly felt. And all this was brought to the West, at least in part, by political and other refugees who were fleeing from the Persians. Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Anaxagoras were such refugees.
But for some time I have had the idea that the Greek miracle, and especially the Athenian miracle, might perhaps be partially explained – and surely only very partially – by the invention of the written book, of book publishing and of the book market.
Writing in various forms had existed for a very long time, and here and there something like a book could be found, especially in the East, although written records on wax, clay and similar materials were not very convenient. There were of course religious scripts. Indeed, for a long time writing was used (apart from letters) mainly for official documents, for religious documents, and perhaps by merchants for making notes, as shown by the lists of goods and other possessions in Pylos and Knossos. It also was sometimes used to record the deeds of great Kings.
According to a hypothesis that I am communicating here for the first time, the specifically European culture began with the publication of the works of Homer in book form.
Homer’s epics had existed for about three hundred years. But they were collected and for the first time written down, and offered for sale to the public, around the year 550 BC. They had been well known as a whole only to professional reciters, the Homerids, the Homeric rhapsodists. Reproduced in many handwritten copies by literate slaves, on papyrus imported from Egypt, they were sold to the public. This was the first publication of a book. It happened in Athens, and as tradition has it, on the initiative of the ruler of Athens, the tyrant Pisistratus.
Pisistratus’ main occupation was to rule Athens – an exceedingly troublesome and arduous task. As a hobby he seems to have adopted book publishing, and thus become the founder and director of a state enterprise comparable, to some extent, to Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. The enterprise did not outlive its founder, but its cultural consequences endured and proved to be of immeasurable significance.
In Athens, with the advent of the first European book, the first European book market came into being. Everybody read Homer, whose works became the first primer and the first bible of Europe. Hesiod, Pindar, Aeschylus and other poets followed. Athenians learnt to read (for a long time, all reading meant reading aloud) and to write, especially prepared speeches and letters, and Athens became a democracy. Books were written, and eager Athenians rushed to buy them. Already by the year 466 BC there followed, apparently in a large edition, the first scientific publication: Anaxagoras’ great work On Nature. (Anaximander’s work apparently was never published, although it seems that the Lyceum had a copy, or perhaps a summary, and that Apollodorus later discovered a copy – perhaps the same one – in an Athenian library. Heraclitus did not publish his work, which was deposited in the Temple of Artemis.) Anaxagoras was a political refugee from Clazomenae, near Smyrna in Ionia, and wrote his work in Athens. We know that copies of the book were sold off cheaply in Athens, sixty-seven years after it was first published; yet it survived for a thousand years. It was, I conjecture, the first book written with the intention of having it published.
Some thirty-seven years after Anaxagoras’ On Nature, the great historical work of Herodotus was published in Athens, accompanied by a public recitation of a part of it by the author himself. This proved that Pericles had been right when, two years earlier, he had referred to Athens as the ‘School of Hellas’.
My hypothesis is that, by making books available for sale in Athens, Pisistratus had put in train a cultural revolution comparable in its importance to that started by Gutenberg two thousand years later; but my hypothesis is of course not testable. The printed book set new values and standards for the whole of Western Europe. Although historical parallels should never be taken too seriously, they are at times astonishingly close. For example, after the publication of his book, Anaxagoras was accused of impiety, as was Galileo two thousand years later. Both were in danger of their lives. Neither was executed, thanks to their personal relations with some unusual men of power: Pericles and the Pope. Owing to the intervention of Pericles (who had been his pupil), Anaxagoras was not executed but was banned from Athens after paying a heavy fine. Themistocles, a great Athenian, who also had been banned from the city, invited Anaxagoras, his former teacher, to Lampsakos. There Anaxagoras died a few years later. In the case of Galileo, his personal relations with the Pope saved him from execution; he too had to spend the rest of his life in banishment.
As yet, nobody seems to have hit upon the idea of burning or banning a dangerous book like Anaxagoras’ treatise On Nature. Books were still too much of a novelty to have become objects of juridical intervention. Thus, owing to the sensational trial of its author, Anaxagoras’ book became a local bestseller; and those parts of the book that were not too abstract became the talk of the town. All the same, by 399 BC interest in the book had waned, and it could be bought on the market for next to nothing (whereas Galileo’s book, which was put on the Index, soon attained scarcity value and shot up in price).
Plato was undoubtedly the first to recognize the powerful influence of the book and its potential political significance (and, in particular, the influence and significance of Homer). This prompted him to suggest that the poets – and especially Homer, whom he admired – should be banned from the city on account of their undesirable political influence.
Part of my information about the fate of Anaxagoras’ book stems from Plato’s book The Apology of Socrates, the most beautiful philosophical work I know. There we can read that only the illiterate are unfamiliar with the content of Anaxagoras’ book, and that the young who are eagerly searching for knowledge ‘can buy copies any time for a drachma, if as much, on the book market’. I doubt whether there were specialized booksellers to be found at the place that Plato indicates – ‘near the orchestra’ (‘ek tēs orchēstras’). More likely there were merchants who, besides selling other goods (snacks or suchlike), also sold books in the form of handwritten papyrus rolls. Historians before the First World War estimated that a drachma was the equivalent of a little less than 10 pence of sterling silver – let’s say perhaps one or two pounds sterling in 1984 – the price of a paperback.
Anaxagoras’ work consisted of at least two, probably three, handwritten rolls of papyrus (‘books’). As Plato suggests, one drachma was an astonishingly low price for a book of this size, and moreover a book that had been the talk of the town.
Perhaps the low price may be explained by the local history. After twenty-seven years of war with Sparta, Athens had come under the puppet government known as the Thirty Tyrants who, within eight months, had murdered one-twelfth of the full citizens of Athens and confiscated their possessions. Many citizens fled; but they returned and conquered the Thirty Tyrants in a battle at the Piraeus, restoring the democracy. Plato’s Apology describes a scene that happened shortly after this. It is possible that, in those bad days, some of the impoverished families were compelled to sell their books.
Nevertheless, more books were written and brought to the market. The great work of Thucydides, describing in eight books twenty-one years of war, the work of Isocrates, and the colossal work of Plato, all are proof of this.
Anaxagoras’ book continued to be read, for at least one copy existed and was still being read in Athens in AD 529, almost exactly a thousand years after it was published. In that year the pagan philosophical schools in Athens were closed by an edict of the Christian Emperor Justinian, and Anaxagoras’ great book disappeared.
But in our time scholars have made efforts to reconstruct its intellectual content. Passages that were quoted or discussed in other books could be thus reconstructed, although the fragments were not sufficient to reassemble into a whole. It is of interest that the man whom I regard as the outstanding expert and restorer of the contents of this book and of Anaxagoras’ thought as a whole, Professor Felix M. Cleve, in 1940 had to flee from Vienna to the West – to New York –just as in 492 BC Anaxagoras had to flee to the West – to Athens.
We see here that a book can outlive its author by a thousand years. In the case of Anaxagoras, the thoughts expressed in his book, its intellectual content, outlived the book by a further fifteen hundred years.
Therein lies part of the immense cultural significance of a book. The thought content that has been reconstructed in our time is something objective. This objective thought content should be clearly distinguished from the subjective thought processes that went on in Anaxagoras’ head and in the heads of his interpreters: from the thought processes that go on in the head of every author.
The objective thought content that is found in a book is what makes it valuable. It is not, as is often believed, the expression of subjective thought, of what goes on in the author’s head. More accurately described, it is the objective product of the human mind, the result of hard mental effort, of mental activity, of an activity that time and again consists in rejecting or improving what has just been written down. Whenever this happens, there is a kind of feedback between the subjective thought processes, the mental activity and the objective thought content. The author creates the written work, but he also learns much from his own work, from his own attempts to formulate his ideas, and especially from his mistakes. And above all, he can learn from the work of others.
Of course there are authors who work in a different way, but as a rule thoughts can be criticized and improved most effectively when one attempts to write them down for the purpose of publication, so that they may be understood by others.
The superficial and misleading theory that a spoken or written sentence is the expression of a subjective thought has had disastrous consequences: it has led to expressionism. Even today it is almost universally accepted that a work of art is the expression of the personality or of the emotions of the artist. Many composers and artists believe in this theory; and this belief has debased and almost destroyed art.
No doubt, everything one does, including brushing one’s teeth or yawning, is an expression of one’s personality and of one’s emotions. But this renders the theory trivial and insignificant.
In reality the great artist is a keen learner who keeps an open mind so that he may learn not only from the work of others but also from his own labours, including the mistakes and failures that neither he nor any other artist can avoid. Almost all great artists have been self-critical and regarded their work as something objective. It is not widely enough known that Haydn, on hearing the first performance of his Creation in the Aula of the old University of Vienna, broke out in tears saying ‘It is not I who wrote this.’
You will understand that I have touched here on an inexhaustible theme. The theme is closely related to the development of Greek art – drawing, painting, sculpture – which, long before Pisistratus, had been influenced by Homer. Yet after the publication of Homer, and especially in Athens, art took a distinct turn, first in the direction of the representational and illustrative art form, and later towards a kind of idealized naturalism.
All this clearly illustrates the immense significance of thought content, of thoughts in the objective sense. They form a world which I have called world 3. I call world 1 the world of material things, the world described by physics and by astronomy, by chemistry and by biology. I call world 2 the world of our personal subjective experiences, of our hopes and aims, of our joys and sorrows, and of our elations, of our thought processes – in the subjective sense; the world that psychology tries to describe and to explain. And I call world 3 the world of the products of the human mind, the products of our mental activity and, above all, the world of our specifically human language, of our objective thought contents, whether spoken or written; and also the world of technology and of art. In thus distinguishing three worlds, I have introduced nothing but a terminology. It is not even a new terminology since it stems from Gottlob Frege. The only new thing is the thesis that our mind, our thinking, our feeling, our world 2, our mental world, develops through interaction with both of the other worlds, and especially by interaction and feedback with that world 3 which man has created himself: the world of language, the world of writing and the world of the objective content of our thoughts; the world of books, and also the world of art; the world of our social institutions, the world of culture.
This thesis of the powerful role of feedback, especially the feedback between the world 3 of books and the world of our mental experiences, is important. That there are such objective contents we owe almost entirely to the invention of our specifically human language. For the first time in the history of the evolution of life on our wonderful planet, the invention of language made it possible for objective thought contents to exist; and by making it possible for us to look upon our thought contents as objects, it became possible for us to criticize them – and so to become critical of ourselves.
The discovery of writing was the next step. But the most momentous step was the invention of the book and of the critical competition between books.
It is not improbable that Pisistratus intended to establish a kind of state monopoly for Homer, as there had been in the East monopolies for books before. Perhaps he did not fully comprehend the situation, and he probably did not anticipate competition from private publishers. But most likely it was his lack of foresight that played the crucial part in starting the evolution of our European science and our European culture.
Note: The lecture following here as an Appendix, and the notes following that lecture, develop the same topic and take it somewhat further.
A lecture delivered on 2 November 1982 in the old Imperial Palace (Hofburg) in Vienna to celebrate the opening of an exhibition of books by Rudolf Kirchschlager, then the President of the Federal Republic of Austria. Translation by Melitta Mew.
Appendix to Chapter 7 on a Little-Known Chapter of Mediterranean History
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great honour, and a great experience, to have been chosen to be the first person to receive the Catalonia International Prize: a newly founded prize whose foundation is of clear historical and symbolic significance for Catalonia. I am now standing before you with two tasks to perform. The first is to thank the Generalitat of Catalonia, the Catalan Institute for Mediterranean Studies, its President and Officers, its Advisory Council, and all others concerned, for having conferred on me so great an honour by judging me, and my work, worthy of this honour. The task of giving thanks is easy to perform; for since I feel abundantly grateful, it is easy for me to say: Thank you very much indeed, thank you for your appreciation of my work, thank you for your good will, and thank you all for your generosity. Thank you also for all the work and all the effort and all the time you have spent in preparing for this solemn ceremony. And I want to thank also all of you who have come here to participate in this great occasion. And finally, let me express my thanks to the people of Catalonia.
My second task is far more difficult. It is my task to address you. But it is obviously impossible for me to make, in a short address, anything like an adequate return to you, much as I wish to do so. When I was preparing this address, I felt this inadequacy as a heavy weight; and I found it very difficult to decide on a topic. Should I talk to you on an abstract subject like the theory of scientific knowledge? Or on democracy? But democracy is something whose value you may appreciate quite as much as I do, so that you may not need me to tell you anything about it. If possible, I should say something interesting about the Mediterranean, I thought, to honour your Institute of Mediterranean Studies; but I know nothing, or very little, about the Mediterranean. So in my mind’s eye I saw myself standing here before you, an old man of eighty-seven before his stern judges, and not a good speaker – rather like Socrates before the 501 stern Athenian judges who condemned him to death.
When I had come so far in my considerations, I suddenly knew what was to be the topic of my address: ‘The Miracle of Athens and the Origin of Athenian Democracy’. This was an appropriate theme, for it was to become the Miracle of Greece, and later, the Miracle of the Mediterranean, of the Mediterranean civilization. It is a topic that combines the themes of democracy and Mediterranean civilization, and it gives me the opportunity of addressing you on a topic to which I myself have made a contribution – a contribution that I have not fully developed before.
Our civilization, which is, essentially, the Mediterranean civilization, derives from the Greeks. This civilization was born in the period from the sixth century to the fourth century before Christ, and it was born in Athens.
The Athenian miracle is staggering. Here we have, in a short period, beginning with Solon at about 600 BC, a number of peaceful political revolutions. Solon saved the city by shaking off the burden of debt from the exploited Athenian citizens, and by forbidding that any Athenian citizen could be made a slave because of his debts. It was the first constitution ever designed to preserve the freedom of the citizens, and it was never forgotten, although the history of Athens shows abundantly clearly that freedom is never secure but always threatened.
Solon was not only a great statesman; he was the first Athenian poet of whom we have knowledge, and he explained his aims in his poetry. He spoke of ‘eunomia’ or ‘good government’, and he explained this as balancing the conflicting interests of the citizens. It was, no doubt, the first time, at least the first time in the Mediterranean region, that a constitution had been shaped with an ethical and humanitarian aim. And what was here at work was the universally valid ethical imperative that Schopenhauer brought into the simple form: Neminem laede into omnes, quantum potes, juva! That is: Hurt no one, but help all, as well as you can!
Like the American Revolution, which came over two thousand years later, Solon’s revolution had in mind the freedom of the citizens only: the slavery of the bought barbarian slaves was in both cases overlooked.
After Solon, Athenian politics were far from stable. Several leading families were contesting for power, and after some unsuc-cessful attempts, Pisistratus, a relation of Solon’s, established himself as a monarch or tyrant in Athens. His great wealth derived from silver mines situated outside Attica, and he used his wealth largely for cultural purposes and for stabilizing the Solonian reforms in Athens. He built a lot of beautiful buildings and instituted festivals, especially the theatrical festivals; to him is due the founding of the performances of tragedies in Athens. And, as we know from Cicero, he organized the writing down of the works of Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey, which previously seem to have existed only in the form of an oral tradition.
It is the main thesis of my address that this was an act that had the most far-reaching consequences; that it was an event of focal significance in the history of our civilization.
For many years, ever since I wrote my Open Society and its Enemies, the Athenian miracle has been a problem that has fascinated me. It is a problem that follows me around and does not let me go. What was it that created our civilization in Athens? What made Athens invent art and literature, tragedy, philosophy, science and democracy, all in a short period of time of less than one hundred years?
I had one answer to this problem, an answer that was undoubtedly true but, I felt, quite insufficient. The answer was: culture clash. When two or more different cultures come into contact, people realize that their ways and manners, so long taken for granted, are not ‘natural’, not the only possible ones, neither decreed by the gods nor part of human nature. They discover that their culture is the work of men and their history. It thus opens a world of new possibilities: it opens the windows and it lets in fresh air. This is a kind of sociological law, and it explains a lot. And it certainly played an important role in Greek history.
Indeed, one of Homer’s main themes in the Iliad, and even more in the Odyssey, is, precisely, this topic of culture clash. And culture clash is of course a main topic also of Herodotus’ History. Its significance for Greek civilization is very great.
And yet this explanation did not satisfy me. And for a long time I felt that I had to give up. A miracle like the Athenian miracle, I felt, cannot be explained, and I still think so, that it cannot be fully explained. Least of all can it be explained by the writing down of the works of Homer, although this certainly had great influence. Books, indeed great books, had been written down before, and at other places, and nothing comparable to the Athenian miracle had happened.
But one day I read again Plato’s Apology of Socrates Before His Judges – the most beautiful philosophical work I know. And rereading a much discussed passage, I had a new idea. The passage [26 D–E] implies that there was a flourishing book market in Athens in the year 399 BC, a market, at any rate, where old books (like Anaxagoras’ book On Nature) were regularly sold, and where they could be bought very cheaply. Eupolis, the great master of the old comedy, even speaks [in a fragment cited by Pollux, Onomastkon IX, 47; cf. VII, 211] of a book market fifty years earlier. Now, when could such a market have arisen and how could it have arisen? It was clear: only after Pisistratus had the works of Homer written down.
Slowly, the whole significance of this event dawned on me: the picture began to unfold. Before Homer had been written down, there were books, but no popular books freely for sale at a market: books were, even where they existed, a great rarity, not commercially copied and distributed, but (like the book written by Heraclitus) kept in a holy place, under the surveillance of priests. But we know that in Athens Homer quickly became popular: everybody read Homer, most knew him by heart, or at least passages of Homer by heart. Homer was the first public entertainment ever! And this was the case mainly in Athens, as we can learn again from Plato, who in his Republic complains about the dangerous entertainment, while in his Laws he satirizes Sparta and Crete for their lack of literary interest: in Sparta, he indicates, Homer’s name was known – just known; and in Crete, he indicates, Homer had hardly been heard of.
The great success of Homer in Athens led to something like commercial book publishing: books, we know, were dictated to groups of literate slaves, who wrote them down on papyrus; the sheets were collected in scrolls or ‘books’, and they were sold in the market, at a place called the ‘Orchestra’.
How did all this start? The simplest hypothesis is that Pisistratus himself, who was a rich man, not only had Homer edited, but had him copied and distributed. By a strange coincidence I stumbled about six years ago across a report saying that the first and very considerable export of papyrus from Egypt to Athens began in a year in which Pisistratus was still ruling at Athens.
Since Pisistratus had been interested in having public recitals of Homer, it is very plausible that he started distributing the newly edited books; and their popularity led to the emergence of other publishers.
Collections of poems written by other poets, and tragedies and comedies followed. None of these had been written deliberately for publication; but books written with that intention followed as soon as publishing became an established practice in Athens, and the book market (biblionia) in the Agora became an established institution. I conjecture that the first book written deliberately for publication was Anaxagoras’ great work On Nature. Anaximander’s work appears never to have been published, although it seems that the Lyceum had a copy – perhaps a summary – and that Apollodorus later discovered a copy – perhaps the same one – in an Athenian library. So I suggest that the publication of the works of Homer was the first publication ever, actually the invention of publication, at least in the Mediterranean region. It not only made Homer’s Iliad the bible (biblion) of Athens – it made it the first instrument of education, the first primer, the first spelling book, the first novel. And it made the Athenians literate.
That this was highly significant for the establishment of the Athenian democratic revolution – the expulsion of Pisistratus’ son Hippias from Athens, and the establishment of a constitution – may be seen from one of the characteristic institutions of the democracy that was established about fifty years after this first publication. I mean the institution of ostracism. For on the one hand, this institution assumed silently that the citizen could write – that he could write on a potsherd the name of the citizen he thought dangerously popular or otherwise prominent. These were the citizens that the Athenians thought could create a tyranny. On the other hand, the institution of ostracism shows that the Athenians, at least during the first century after expelling the tyrant Hippias, regarded as the central problem of their demo cracy the prevention of a tyranny.
This idea comes out very clearly when we realize that the institution of ostracism did not regard the banishment as a punishment. By being ostracized, a citizen retained his honour unblemished, he retained his property and indeed all rights except his right to remain in the city. This right he lost, first for ten years and later for five, though he could be recalled. In a sense, ostracism was a tribute, since it recognized that a citizen was outstanding; and some of the most outstanding leaders were ostracized. Thus the idea was: nobody is irreplaceable in a democracy, and much as we admire leadership, we must be able to do without any particular leader; otherwise he may make himself our master, and it is the main task of our democracy to avoid this. It should be noted that ostracism was not long in use. The first known case was in 488 BC, and the last in 417. All the cases were tragic for the great men who were banished. The period almost coincides with the period of the greatest works of Athenian tragedy, with the period of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, who later banished himself.
So it is my hypothesis that the first publication in Europe was the publication of Homer, and this fortunate fact led to the Greek love of Homer and of the Homeric heroes, to popular literacy and to the Athenian democracy. But I think it did more. Homer was of course popular before; and almost all the vase paintings had been for some time illustrations of his work. So had many sculptures. Homer himself had been a detailed and realistic painter in words of so many vivid and interesting scenes, and as Ernst Gombrich has pointed out, this challenged sculptors and painters to emulate him in their own different media. And the challenge became even greater as detailed knowledge of the Homeric text became more widespread. So the influence upon the arts of the power to read cannot be denied. The influence of Homeric themes upon the Athenian tragedians is evident; and even in the few cases when they used non-Homeric themes, they still continued to choose themes which their audience could be assumed to be familiar with. So I can indeed claim that the cultural influence of the book market was incalculable. All the components of the Athenian cultural miracle were undoubtedly greatly influenced by this market.
But to crown all these arguments, we have a kind of historical experiment. The great invention that, as it were, repeated on a far larger scale the invention of the publication of books was the invention of book printing by Gutenberg, two thousand years after Pisistratus’ invention of book publishing. It is interesting that, even though the invention was made in the North of Europe, the majority of printers who acquired the skill brought it quickly south to the Mediterranean – to Italy. And there they played a decisive role in that great new movement called the Renaissance, which included the development of the new humanist scholarship and the new science that ultimately transformed our whole civilization.
This was a movement on a much larger scale than the movement that I dubbed ‘The Athenian Miracle’. It was, first of all, a movement based on a very much larger edition of books. In 1500, Aldus printed editions of one thousand copies. It was, obviously, the size of the printed editions that was the salient point of this new revolution. But otherwise there is an astonishing analogy, or similarity, between what had started in Athens in, say, 500 BC and had spread from there over the Mediterranean, and what happened in Florence or Venice in, say, 1500 of our era. And the new humanist scholars were aware of this: they wanted to renew the spirit of Athens, and they were proud of their ability to do so, and of their success in doing so.
As in Athens and later in Graecia Magna – and especially in Alexandria, but indeed all over the Mediterranean- scientific and, in particular, cosmological speculation played an important role in these movements. Renaissance mathematicians, such as Commandino, successfully recaptured the lost works of Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, Pappus and Ptolemy, but also of Aristarchus, which led to the Copernican Revolution and so to Galileo, to Kepler, to Newton and to Einstein. If our own civilization is correctly described as the first scientific civilization, then it all comes from the Mediterranean and, I suggest, from Athenian book publishing, and the Athenian book market.
In all this I have badly neglected the contribution of the Arabs, who brought an Indian number system to the Mediterranean. They gave much, but they received as much as they gave, if not more, when they reached the Mediterranean.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have briefly retold a well-known story – well known except for one small yet, I think, significant contribution: the decisive role played by books, and especially by published books, from the very beginning. Our civilization is, indeed, a bookish one: its traditionality and its originality, its seriousness and sense of intellectual responsibility, its unprecedented power of imagination and its creativity, its understanding of freedom and its watchfulness for it – all these rest on our love of books. May short-term fashions, the media and the computers never spoil or even loosen our close personal attachment to our books!
But I do not wish to end with books, however important they are for our civilization. It is most important not to forget that a civilization consists of civilized individual men and women, of individuals who wish to live good lives and civilized lives. It is to this end that books and our civilization must make their contributions. I believe that they are still doing so, and with great success.
I thank you for having come, and I thank you for your attention.
Bibliographical Notes
On Anaxagoras and the controversial problem of his dating, see Felix M. Cleve, The Giants of Pre-Sophistk Greek Philosophy, 2nd edition, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1969, especially pp. 170 ff.; also D. O’Brien, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1968, pp. 93–113. For a different dating see Charles H. Kahn, Anaximander, 2nd edition, Columbia University Press, New York, 1964, especially pp. 164 ff. For Anaximander’s book see Kahn, op. cit., and Olof Gigon, Der Ursprung der griechischen Philosophie, Basel, 1945; also W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, volume I, Cambridge University Press, 1962. On Anaxagoras’ book see the passages collected in Diels–Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokmtiker, 5th edition, 1964; especially Plato, Apology, 26 D–E. Concerning Plato’s suggestion for censorship of literature and music, see my Open Society and Its Enemies, 9th reprint of the 5th edition, Routledge, London, 1991, volume I, chapter 4, notes 39–41, and text. For Homer’s influence on art, see E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 4th reprint of the 5th edition, Phaidon Press, London, 1986, chapter IV, 4. On world 1, world 2 and world 3 see K. R. Popper, Unended Quest, Routledge, London, 1992, sections 38–44; K. R. Popper, Objective Knowledge, 7th edition, Oxford University Press, 1991; and K. R. Popper and J. C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain, Springer International; also Routledge, 1984. For predecessors of my theory of world 3, see Bernard Bolzano, Wissenschaftslehre, Sulzbach 1837 (English extract ed. by Rolf George, Theory of Science, Blackwell, Oxford, 1972); Heinrich Gomperz, Weltanschauungslehre, Bd. II, first half, Eugen Diederichs, Jena 1908; Karl Biihler, Sprachtheorie, Gustav Fischer, Jena 1934; Gottlob Frege, ‘Der Gedanke’, Beitragc zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus, Bd. I, 1918.
Additional Comments (1992)
1. Cicero’s report about Pisistratus’ edition of Homer fits well with all we seem to know about Pisistratus and his cultural activities; and it is corroborated by the Egyptian export of papyrus to Athens.
2. At the time of Pisistratus and of the first publication of Homer (550 BC), and from this time on, considerable amounts of papyrus were imported into Athens from Egypt. (Egyptian exports of papyrus had been since the eleventh century BC a carefully controlled monopoly of the Pharaohs. This is how Egyptologists learnt about these exports.)
3. For many centuries after the first publication of Homer, written material, including books, was usually read aloud. Letters were so read (as emerges from Isocrates), and the reading was not always adequate. Speeches were classified into those prepared by writing and those that were produced extempore: for the first type Isocrates is one of the main authorities; for the second, Alcidamas. (Cf. also Plato’s Phaedrus.) Books were read aloud, or even publicly recited (as in the case of the publication of Herodotus). All these were called logoi. St Augustine was deeply impressed when, nine hundred years after the first publication of Homer, he first saw St Ambrose reading silently. It prevented him, he explains, from asking St Ambrose for help in his religious perplexities. (See Book VI of the Confessions.)
4. Biblos and by bios seem to have been for some time used as synonyms of papyros. Herodotus uses byblos a few times for ‘book’, that is, for a roll of papyrus that forms part of a greater work; but this usage seems to have taken time to be accepted. Although a book market existed in Athens at least since 450 BC, the idea of a book as a saleable unit did not establish itself easily. Written texts were generally read aloud for centuries before silent reading became a universally practised art (see point 3 above). Early written texts were poems (Solon, Homer), juridical laws, dramatic plays, dialogues, letters. The written communication was often regarded as an inferior substitute for an oral communication. All this has a bearing on my hypothesis that Anaxagoras’ book was the first to be written with the intention to have it published. Even Plato thought not only that the best he could say was not in his writings, but that it was impossible fully to communicate one’s ideas by writing; and that written legislation was inferior to legislation that lived by oral tradition. The slow acceptance of a book as a saleable property helps us to understand why Plato, who realizes the political danger of books such as Homer’s (which he considers banning from his ideal city), does not speak of burning them; and it explains the fact that Anaxagoras’ book was not burned.
5. Diogenes Laertius IX, 52 reports that the works of Protagoras were confiscated in Athens and publicly burned. This somewhat late report seems to me to be irreconcilable not only with Plato’s Apology but with many pas sages in Plato and other early sources. Moreover, the event reported by Diogenes would have happened in approximately 411 BC, when Plato was sixteen. It would have left traces on his proposals for censorship.
6. Some scholars have tried to conclude from the low price of one drachma that Anaxagoras’ book (which had definitely been published far more than thirty years previous to Plato’s Apology) was a short book. But such a conclusion is unjustifiable in the case of an antiquarian book; and what we know of its content is incompatible with its being a short book. It contained, among other things, an astronomy and meteorology; a theory of the origin of the world and of the origin and structure of matter; above all a non-atomic theory of molecules and of the infinite divisibility of matter; and of the various more or less homogeneous substances (such as water, metals; sub stances in living creatures like hair, flesh, bones, etc.). The theory of infinite divisibility, which was extremely subtle, contained remarks (which have, I suspect, not been understood until now) about the equivalence of infinite numbers (brought about by division, that is to say ‘enumerable’, as we now call them); a result that was probably not rediscovered until the nineteenth century (Bolzano, Cantor). It was obviously a long book and, as Plato suggests, it went for a song. The most likely explanation for this is that the original edition was large.
7. Only a book market allows anything like publication. But facilities for publication would explain the great attraction of Athens for writers, and the beginning of what we now call literature.
8. I was too old when I started these researches into the beginning of a book market in Athens and, with it, the beginning of publishing and of ‘literature’, to do more than scratch the surface of a whole range of problems. When some years ago I mentioned my ideas to Gregory Vlastos – the only classical scholar whom I told about them – he was fascinated and said that everything was completely new to him. But I had so many quite different problems on my hands that in spite of his encouragement I could not even find any of the existing books related to the subject. I believe that there is much work to be done; and I hope that the hypotheses I have been able to propose here may provoke some classical scholars both to criticism and to further developments.
Translator’s note: This lecture was presented on 24 May 1989 at the Palace of the Generalitat de Catalunya, when the author received the Catalonia International Prize. The English text is by the author.