THE COMPLAINT OF BOOKS AGAINST WAR THE COMPLAINT OF BOOKS AGAINST WAR
MOST High Author and Lover of Peace, scatter the nations that seek after war, which harms books beyond all pestilences. For wars, lacking a ground in reason, make furious assaults upon all that is opposed to them, and discarding the governance of reason, proceed without discreet judgment and destroy the vessels of reason. Then the prudent Apollo is cast down beneath the Python, and then the pious mother Phronesis is reduced to the power of frenzy. Then the winged Pegasus is shut up within the stall of Corydon, and the eloquent Mercury is choked to death. Then wise Pallas falls by the sword of error, and the jocund Muses are suppressed by the murderous tyranny of fury.
O cruel spectacle! where you may see the Phoebus of philosophers, the arch-sophist Aristotle, to whom God Himself gave rule over the ruler of the world, chained by wicked hands and fettered by shameful irons, carried from the house of Socrates on the shoulders of gladiators; and he who had by right the mastery over the master of the world and an empire beyond an emperor, is subjected by the most unjust laws of war to a vile hireling soldier! O most iniquitous power of darkness, that fears not to detract from the approved divinity of Plato, who alone was worthy to hold up ideal forms to the sight of the Creator, before the strife of warring chaos should be appeased and matter be endued with form, that he might demonstrate to its Author the archetypal world, so that from this supernal example the sensible world might be derived. O woeful sight! where the moral Socrates, whose acts are virtues and whose speech is doctrine, and who deduced a just public polity from the principles of nature, is seen given over in slavery to some villainous freebooter! We mourn for Pythagoras, the father of music, cruelly scourged by the enraged furies of war and uttering dove-like plaints in place of songs. We pity Zeno, the chief of the Stoics, who, lest he should betray his counsel, bit out his tongue and spat it fearlessly at the tyrant. Alas! he is brayed again in the mortar of Diomedon!
Truly we have not sufficiency to make worthy lament for the separate books which have perished in various parts of the world by the perils of war. Yet we select for mournful mention that awful slaughter which happened in Egypt in the first Alexandrian war under the auxiliaries. There in the flames perished the seventy thousand volumes which were collected through many generations of time under the Ptolemies, as Aulus Gellius recites in the Sixteenth Chapter of the Sixth Book of his Noctes Atticæ. How great a progeny of Atlas may be thought to have perished at that time!—the motions of the orbits, all the conjunctions of the planets, the nature of the Milky Way, and the prognostic generations of the comets, and whatsoever things happened in the heavens or are comprehended in the ether! Who would not shudder at so unholy a burnt offering, where ink is offered up in place of blood, where the glowing ashes of crackling parchment were dyed red with blood, where the devouring flame consumed so many thousands of innocents in whose mouth guile was not found, and where the unsparing fire turned into foul ashes so many receptacles of eternal truth! We reckon a lesser crime the sacrifice of Jeptha or Agamemnon, where the pious virgin daughter was slain by her father's sword. What labours of the famous Hercules, who for his knowledge of astronomy is said to have supported the heaven on his unyielding neck, must we suppose perished then, when now the second time he is cast into the flames!
The secrets of the heavens, which Jonithus learned not from man nor by man, but received by divine inspiration, the things which Zoroaster, his brother, the servant of unclean spirits, disseminated among the Bactrians, whom also the sacred Enoch, the Prefect of Paradise, prophesied ere he was translated from the world, yea, what the first Adam taught his sons, after he was carried away in his deep sleep and had read in the Book of Eternity, are judged with probability to have been destroyed in these shameful flames.
The religion of the Egyptians, which the book Logostilios so remarkably commends, the polity of ancient Athens, which preceded the Athens of Greece by nine thousand years, the incantations of the Chaldeans, the reflections of the Arabians and the Indians, the ceremonies of the Jews, the architecture of the Babylonians, the husbandry of Noah, the magic arts of Moses, the surveying of Joshua, the riddles of Samson, the problems of Solomon, all clearly argued out from the cedar of Lebanon even to the hyssop, the antidotes of Esculapius, the grammar of Cadmus, the poems of Parnassus, the oracles of Apollo, the Argonautics of Jason, the stratagems of Palamedes, and endless other secrets of the sciences are believed to have perished at the time of this conflagration. Think ye the apodictic syllogism regarding the squaring of the circle would have escaped Aristotle in the least, if shameful wars had permitted the books of the ancients, which contain the laws of all nature, to survive? Neither would he have set forth the problem of the eternity of the world as indeterminate, nor, as is believed with plausibility, would he have doubted in any wise of the plurality of human intellects and of their eternity, if the perfect sciences of the ancients had not been exposed to the destruction of hateful wars. For by wars are we dragged away to foreign lands, are killed and wounded and frightfully disfigured, are buried beneath the earth, drowned in the sea, burned in the fire, and slain by every kind of death. How much of our blood was shed by the warlike Scipio, when he eagerly set himself to the overthrowing of Carthage, the opposer and rival of the Roman power! What thousands of thousands the ten years' Trojan war sent out of the light! How many, when Tully was slain, were sent by Antony to seek hiding-places in foreign provinces! How many of us, at the exile of Boethius, were scattered by Theodoric in divers regions of the world, like sheep whose shepherd had been smitten! How many, when Seneca fell before the malice of Nero and, willing yet unwilling, approached the gates of death, were parted from him and withdrew weeping, wholly unknowing in what parts we could seek refuge!
Fortunate was the transfer of those books which Xerxes is said to have taken from Athens to Persia, and which Seleucus brought back again from Persia to Athens. O grateful restoration! O the wondrous joy which was then to be seen in Athens, when the mother went dancing for joy to meet her own offspring, and pointed out again to her now aging children their mother's nursing chamber, assigning anew the old places to their former inhabitants! At once smoothly-planed cedar boards, with polished posts and beams are prepared. Inscriptions are marked out in gold and ivory for the separate compartments into which the volumes themselves are reverently gathered and most pleasantly disposed, so that none should hinder the entrance of another, or harm its neighbour by too close a pressure.
But endless are the losses inflicted on the race of books by the tumults of war, and as it is in no wise possible to survey all the infinite, here let us finally establish the Gades of our complaint and draw rein in our course, turning to the prayers with which we began, humbly asking that the Ruler of Olympus and the Most High Dispenser of all things may insure peace, remove wars, and make the times tranquil under His own protection.