I blush to think that Amotan of Antioch (or Amotanius as Pausanias calls him), the greediest of antiquity’s collectors, only came to my attention a quarter of a century ago, and then by the most roundabout route.
A steady rain was falling on The Hague as it often does in July. Clouds of gnats were spinning above the murky waters of the Hofvijver, the urban lake that washes against the brick walls of the Dutch parliament. Trams were making squealing turns around the Tournooiveld, the leafy square where, after a hard day’s slog in the National Archives or the Royal Library, I’d ponder the day’s work over a tall glass of pilsner and a plate of the bitterballen you pop into the mouth on the end of a toothpick.
On this visit, I had been trawling through the Royal Library for a rare Dutch book – never, to my knowledge, translated – on bezoars, those coagulate or stony masses that lie in the stomachs of large animals, and were thought precious by Renaissance natural philosophers as an antidote to poison.
This quality, often tested, seldom successfully, recommended the collection of bezoars to princes fearful (with good reason) of their vulnerability to being poisoned. Anatomists and alchemists were also drawn to bezoars for their curious forms and occasional beauty.
The book I was after was the work of a peripatetic physician, Martinus van Busselen, who had ministered to Tsar Peter the Great during his time in Holland. Van Busselen had been a friend of Dr Frederik Ruysch, whose cabinet of curiosities, including stillborn foetuses draped in silk and preserved in formaldehyde, became the gem of the Tsar’s own chamber of curiosities. I had seen a reference to van Busselen’s book Over het bezoar of de knobbelen in de darmen in a nineteenth-century scholarly work on the collection of other curios: outsize, creamily marbleised gallstones and the agates whose random veining suggested mysterious heavenly landscapes.
The great historian of such fancies, and one of my heroes, Jurgen Baltrusaitis, evidently knew van Busselen’s work on the bezoar, but advised in one of his eccentric bibliographies that it was to be found only in the Royal Library in The Hague. There too, however, I was disappointed. It was indeed listed in the old handwritten card catalogue, but after lengthy waits, occupied by perusing seventeenth-century reports of double-headed sheep and women giving birth to rabbits, the librarians, embarrassed, as well they might be, confessed that, alas, van Busselen’s book was not where it was supposed to be shelved, nor anywhere else they could find in the collection. They would, they said, make further searches and promised to let me know should the book be found.
Later, I sat at the Posthoorn café, glumly dabbing the crispy bitterballen with smears of hot mustard. I was halfway through the pile when a sudden memory gave me new hope. My fascination with the collecting of bezoars had been long-standing. I had meant to include the subject in my book about seventeenth-century Dutch culture, The Embarrassment of Riches, probably in the section about popular omens, alongside stranded whales washing up on the North Sea coastline. But I was at a loss to find van Busselen’s all-important reference book. I had mentioned it to the one person whose incomparably encyclopaedic knowledge of the darker, stranger side of Renaissance and Baroque culture made her a likely source of help: Professor Frances Yates of the Warburg Institute, author of many works on the hermetic tradition, alchemy and the occult.
I had not been disappointed. Professor Yates and I were in the Old Combination Room of my college at Cambridge, following a lecture she had given on Giordano Bruno. Putting down her glass of claret a little too hard on the table, so that drops of it flew onto the polished mahogany, she gave out a little shouted laugh and remarked how extraordinary it was that I should ask. She explained that just the day before she had seen van Busselen’s book listed in the catalogue of her favourite Dutch antiquarian bookseller and meant to snap it up – but now that I had expressed interest, that I should do so.
This of course I should have done, but I didn’t.
Things intervened as they do: other papers, other passions. But sitting in the café in The Hague I recalled not only Professor Yates’s tip-off but also that the bookshop was itself a short walk away from where I was sitting, in one of the side streets around the corner from the Mauritshuis art gallery. I summoned the waiter, paid in a hurry and marched to the premises of Felix de Vos, Antiquariaat. I had passed the shop many times during research stays in The Hague but the seventeenth-century maps and fine-bound editions of Renaissance texts had been priced so far above my means that I had never crossed its threshhold. The Antiquariaat seemed as it had been in the 1970s, the last of the old-fashioned shops in the narrow street, sandwiched uncomfortably between frying-oil cafés and woofing music stores like a dowager on a bus sitting between pierced teenagers. There was wood trim around the display window that exhibited, on faded green-velvet cushions, a pair of spectacular Romeyn de Hooghe caricatures of Louis XIV. Like music from the past, the door gave a tiny bell-tinkle as I went in.
De Vos – as he introduced himself, extending a softly cushioned hand – emerged from a back room, puffing on a small cigar, clearly undeterred by the possibility of sending his inventory up in smoke. His hair was white and thick; his cheeks rosy; rimless glasses hung halfway down his fleshy nose. I told him of my failure with van Busselen and that some years before her death in 1981, Dame Frances had been kind enough to mention that she had seen the item in one of his shop’s catalogues. Of course this was a long time ago, I said, but given that it was an item unlikely to have much interest for any but the most specialised collectors, perhaps he might still have it somewhere in his stock?
‘Ach ja,’ he said, puffing and shrugging. ‘Jammer! What a pity, the van Busselen was still here up until just a few weeks ago when I had an order from a gentleman in Abu Dhabi, and I am afraid I sent it off to him just a little while back.’ A long silence of disappointment hung in the air.
‘But would you like a kopje koffie, and a look round to see if anything else might interest you?’ I accepted the offer, and he came back with two little white cups emitting a good strong aroma, with the inevitable (but delicious) Speculaas biscuits sitting on their saucers. De Vos sighed a little sigh and said, ‘It’s such a shame that Dame Frances is no longer with us. Do you know I thought of her just the other day because I made a little discovery concerning a particular interest of hers: the collector Amotanius. She spoke to me often of how appealing the story had been to Renaissance patrons like Alfonso d’Este and Cosimo de’ Medici, the Duke, who recognised in the educated greed of that erstwhile slave something of their own cultural encyclopedism, the craving to bring together the myths and magic of the entire world under one roof, so that when they interlocked, the deep secret of the organisation of the universe might be revealed. It was that impossible ambition, such hubris for a slave, which had foundered in a shipwreck at the very point of realisation.
‘Of course the story was so morally charged that notwithstanding Pausanias treating it (on the basis of a conversation with an elderly scribe in Jerusalem) as true, everyone since had assumed both the Collector and his ship to be just a colourful fable. I remember Dame Frances chuckling when she spoke about the spell it had exercised on her popes and princes as they sent men out to scour the ruins of antiquity for their own collections, or instructed Dominican missionaries and Jewish spice traders on the Coromandel Coast or in distant Ethiopia to hunt for the esoteric remains of Indian and Egyptian antiquities, without which they could scarcely hold up their heads as masters of universal knowledge. Every so often, fragments of alabaster figurines would be sent to their courts, their suppliers pretending them to be of great antiquity – stolen, they said, from Amotan’s cargo before his ship had sailed to its destruction. But, of course, when the pieces were washed of their crust of dirt, it took little cunning to see them for the outrageous fakes they were.
‘It was,’ De Vos went on, ‘just a morality tale, no? We all thought so, Dame Frances especially. But then a week ago I got a letter from my old friend Mrs Hewlett – Horatia; let me see if I can find it for you.’ He disappeared into his back office and returned with the letter. It was written in a tiny, neat hand on pale-blue notepaper with only a slight trace of the spideriness that comes over the best writers as they become old and arthritic. Before I could read much of it, De Vos took it from me.
‘She was, you see, clearing out her cottage in Gloucestershire – ah, so many times I have sat in that garden . . . such an English garden . . . the big hollyhocks, the delphiniums – because she said she could no longer manage on her own and had sold the house, where so many memories lived. The gardener helped her with boxes brought down from the attic, to decide what would go on the bonfire and what she would like to keep. One of those boxes contained letters and diaries from her mother Cynthia, Lady Cynthia Tremain.
‘Before that lady had married James Tremain, the poet, Cynthia Fitzgerald, as she then was, had been a friend of Gertrude Bell – yes, the “Queen of the Desert” – and Rebecca West, and like them had been fearless in her travels. You may have seen photographs of her, in high boots standing in the Hindu Kush, one hand on a rifle. Horatia thought she had read all of her mother’s writings on her journeys, the books and her personal letters. But somehow she had missed the journal for 1910: “My Travels in Cappadocia”. So, she says here’, he poked his cigar-stained finger at the sheet of blue notepaper, ‘that when she opened the diary, a little parcel of folded papers, bound with a purple ribbon, fell out. There were four pages, covered top to bottom with a long list of strange objects:
Medusas, crystal, gold, malachite and more Andromeda, monster
Sphinx (various, two) Hermaphrodite
Foot of Apollo Scorpion, jewelled
Hydra and woman warrior
. . . and finally at the foot of the fourth page, you see, the explanation:
“The cargo of the freedman Amotanias, as loaded onto his vessel Apistos.” ’
De Vos noticed my startled expression. ‘Yes, I was very surprised; very surprised. It could be a joke, you know, but if it is not, then this is the inventory – of course a copy of the original document – of the great lost treasure, drawn up before its owner set sail. You know, Mr Schama, I am a Dutchman. We are the most sceptical people in the world. To know a fake at first sight, this is in our blood. And at night sometimes I wake up and laugh at my silliness. But there are other nights, many other nights, when I wake up as though someone had shaken me and then I think, Why not? Look, you can read these entries from Cynthia’s diary, copied by Horatia, for yourself.’
And so I did.
15 October 1910 – Cappadocia
A brief stop to dismount from the mules, ease our rattled bones and drink a little water from the leather bags, which over the past few days have made its taste foul. We drink it all the same. I am writing this sitting on the boulder most hospitable for my aching posterior. We trot through a universe of ashen lava; wind-driven dust. The terrain is so hard, the weather so harsh and the mules so temperamental (as I suppose all mules must be) that for the first time since we began this journey I wondered whether, after all, it would be worth it; whether the mosaics of St Basil would be as extraordinary as Richard Burton tells us. Exaggeration was second nature to him. My throat aches, my eyes are sore from blowing grit, the grey waste seems to go on forever.
Victoria, slight though she is, endures these trials with more fortitude than I. There she is on her mule swatting away the flies, eager to start again up this endless rubble-filled mountain track. Monty does his best to keep our spirits up but it is of course Victoria for whom he has undertaken this ridiculous pilgrimage, and with every kindness he extends to me I feel the weight of his resentment at having to bring his fiancée’s friend along, especially since her reputation for bearing hardships with equanimity seems unfounded. Still, I am grateful for the schnapps he has brought with him in that silver flask. It burns my throat but, oddly, the smart of the scouring makes me feel better. By Monty’s reckoning we should arrive at the cave monastery, or at least see it, within the hour. But I feel so obliged to his solicitousness (not a feeling to which this woman is accustomed) that I dare not ask him if we can indeed expect to reach shelter before dark. I refuse to give him any reason to condescend to our sex.
16 October 1910 – The Monastery of Saint Macrina
Cynthia (unlike the fresco of the Christ Pantokrator) much restored! Even after a sleepless night – for who needs sleep when one has found a treasure?! The monks are long-bearded and kindly. Their coffee is turbid and their goat cheese stinging. None of this, however, matters beside an astonishing revelation. One of their number – very old, Minas by name – spoke a broken but understandable English in a piping little voice. After our supper of chickpea soup and some bitter greens, this Minas – who had smiled at me through the meal – beckoned me aside and asked me if I would like to share a tea of mountain herbs with him and talk a little ‘of times past’. Really I had no idea what he meant or what he wanted but Monty thought I should listen to what he had to say.
The floor of the monk’s cell was covered with rugs, and he had placed icons on small shelves cut into the soft cave rock, which glowed in the candlelight. Pleasantries were passed between us, together with the sweet tea, drunk from tulip-shaped silver cups. The old man went to a chest on the floor, arranging his robe so he could kneel on the rug, open the lid and pull from it a folded length of crimson velvet. He had some difficulty standing again but brushed off my help. He set the velvet cloth on his lap, opened it and beckoned me to come closer. Inside was a tawny-brown sheet that I recognised right away to be ancient papyrus. It was divided down its length into three columns, each written in a different language. The left column was the fine, clear lettering of Syriac; the middle I could not recognise.
‘Azania, from people of south, Africa,’ Minas said, and the third, startling me, I made out to be Greek.
On the first line I could read ‘Medusa’ and with it was a drawn likeness of the Gorgon’s head: open-mouthed, snake-haired.
‘Treasures,’ Minas said. ‘All the treasures of the slave and his ship; the famous story.’ And immediately in the cave-cell, the story – nonsensical fable I had always thought – of Amotanias and his vast cargo of the world’s myths, magic and monsters, came to me in all its fantastic detail. But none of those who had related the disaster – not the author of the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, not Pausanias, not Claudius Ptolemy – had ever listed the contents of the cargo. How indeed could they have done, since they all supposed it to be a fable?
Of course this long list before me might have been the retrospective fancy of someone adding detail to the tale. Or a laborious hoax? But why then would it be in three languages and why the painstaking list of every item? No, it must have been – and the thought struck me like a thunderbolt – an inventory drawn up before the monstrous cargo was loaded aboard Amotanias’s stupendous vessel. The story of the treasures might then be true! Why should it not be? Was it, after all, any more improbable than the immense collection of the occult-hungry Emperor Rudolf II: animalia and naturalia; mandrakes in miraculous form; vast statues of Pagan deities? That immense collection of marvels was also meant to coalesce into some cosmic illumination, and it too had fallen to disaster, plundered by the Swedes when they took Prague in 1648. Why should an erstwhile Roman slave not have anticipated a Holy Roman Emperor? Why should he not have been driven by the same unconquerable appetite to possess the marvels of the universe, the terrors of men’s minds, the omens of nightmares?
Thunderstruck as I was, I could not ask the old monk to allow me to take his papyrus to scholars who might confirm my excited suspicions or confound them. So since I could make out the ancient Greek, I asked him if I might remain there through the night, transcribing the papyrus lists into English.
‘But you must sleep,’ he said chuckling.
‘No, I must write,’ I said, laughing in my turn. And so I did, the treasures coming into the vision of my dumbfounded mind as I set them down, one by one, a hoard of more than a hundred pieces, yet with only the Medusa drawn to illustrate them.
Why then have I said nothing to Monty and Victoria of my revelation? Why have I tucked the inventory into these pages secretively – and in case something should befall this book, memorised the treasure as well? Because I am afraid of being laughed at for a gullible fool, a woman lost to idle dreams, another victim of a tall tale? Because I want this to be my secret alone until I am ready to bring it into the light of the world?
That was all that Horatia Hewlett had transcribed for De Vos. She had ended her letter by saying that her mother must have decided to postpone the revelation of her discovery forever, and had the diary not lain there in her attic box, it might never have seen the light of day at all. Cynthia had taken no photograph of the papyrus at the Cappadocian monastery. All that she had was her English transcript and that she must have felt was not strong enough to withstand the scepticism or even ridicule of the scholars. But what did he, Felix De Vos, make of it? Might there be something to it? Might Amotan have lived? Might his treasure lie somewhere beneath the waves?
‘I have written to Mrs Hewlett that I didn’t know what to think, but I did know that her mother, Lady Cynthia, had written a beautiful story, true or false.
And then I heard nothing at all back from her. Letters to Gloucestershire came back unopened. She had gone.’ He sighed and lit another cigar. ‘They all go: wonderful Dame Frances – never another like her; Mrs Hewlett; me too, not long I think, and this Antiquariaat.’ He waved a fleshy hand through the smoke. ‘No one comes, no one wants all this; if they do I can send them volumes wrapped up in brown paper, from my home. This, this is too much.’
When I got back to Boston a few weeks later, a letter was waiting for me at my Harvard office from Felix De Vos. I opened it excitedly, thinking perhaps that he had more information about old Mrs Hewlett and her mother’s journal. But no, it was merely the name of the Abu Dhabi buyer of van Busselen’s book on bezoars, should I wish to ask him if he would consider selling it. But my bezoar quest had faded; and like Lady Cynthia Fitzgerald, I also felt the improbability of the story too strongly to ventilate it, even as a fantastic entertainment. I set it aside in a back drawer of my own memory cabinet.
Until, that is, a year ago, when I learned of the gold monkey caught in a fisherman’s trawl off the east African coast some years earlier. This could easily have been a luxury curio, a table charm belonging to one of the merchants who thrived in the busy trading port of Rhapta, the submerged ruins of which lay not far off from the fisherman’s catch. But something about the object pricked at my memory and I remembered, with a sudden leap of the pulse, that just such a golden monkey had been in the cargo inventory translated by Lady Cynthia, after, I believe, foot of Apollo, and hermaphrodite. So when I heard that an expedition had been launched to explore the seabed around the find, and then, almost unimaginably, of the staggering trove hauled from the waters – colossal sculptures, monsters from the deep, rearing serpents, jewelled scorpions, objects drawn from the entirety of the ancient world – I had no doubt that this was indeed the encyclopaedic collection of the ex-slave Amotan, and that what had been for centuries dismissed as mere fantasy had actually been the realised passion of an art-crazed madman.
I doubt Amotan was the first, and he was certainly not the last, to hunger for such a memory theatre, a great arena to house the phantasmagoria that sprang from the myth-bearing mind of men. Lords of many realms from Africa to central Asia: pharaohs and the kings of Persia must have embarked on comparable conquests of the empires of wonder; dragged back to their palaces trophies in onyx, jasper, marble, malachite and gold; arrays of gems; mountainous confections of bronze. Some must have been sealed up inside their tombs. The anomaly of Amotan was merely his original servitude and the lust of the freedman parvenu to acquire the magic of the universe. Brought to light now, his bloated excesses, his feverish passion to acquire, his pornographic ecstasy in the writhing of serpents and the torment of mortals – all seem pretty much in tune with the tastes of our time, do they not? And, for that matter, of all times, so long as men are unafraid to make themselves ridiculous as they abandon themselves to the delirium of obsession.
I wonder now, if I could have been on the dock while crate after crate of the slave’s treasure was being loaded to its doom, and had been bold enough to help myself to one of his objects, what might it have been? Something, I think, on the small side. For the gigantism of heroes and monsters wears me out. I would take something that miniaturises rather than magnifies: perhaps the little golden elephant that may have come from ancient China, carrying as it does, its burden of memory, and to judge from the sudden upthrust of its trunk, and its expression of gloomy resignation, an understanding that art, like life, lies somewhere between an accident waiting to happen and a joke yet to be cracked.