We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays

Over thirty years ago, the Italian poet Eugenio Montale hoped—unavailingly, as he knew—for at least one Italian city of silence, which, immune to the profitable hubbub of current attractions, would allow visitors serene contemplation of its beauty and antiquity. Naples is far from silent. Yet the city’s apparent unconcern with tourism is possibly part of a larger Neapolitan indifference to processed “event” as contrasted with distinct occasion. When it chooses, Naples can meet an occasion in resplendent style. And at such moments it is as though in a moldering theatre a curtain rises on a solemn and beautiful scene whose actors move with complete assurance and whose charm and majesty pervade the audience itself. It was in this spirit that Naples, last spring, gave hospitality in a series of historical settings to a gathering peculiarly congenial to the city’s temperament and story.

A novice attending the Seventeenth International Congress of Papyrology during that alternately hot and stormy week of May might not have expected to find in the five hundred participants the animated and generally youthful assembly—of men and women in almost equal numbers—who discoursed on themes derived from the ancient writings that form their life study. Their discussions ranged from the most consequential events of the ancient world to the humblest details of its daily life: from Homeric texts to the salt tax; from the epigrams of imperial Rome to the composition of a remote Roman garrison; from the price of slaves in the second century before Christ to the installation of Egyptian bishops five centuries later; from ancient musical notation to the tax exemption enjoyed by acolytes of the crocodile god. The names of Plato and Epicurus, of Simonides and Menander, of William Hamilton and Joseph Banks were familiarly invoked as speakers moved from one chosen millennium to another.

Papyrology—a word that, taken literally, would refer to the medium rather than the message—properly designates the study of papyri written in Greek or Latin, papyri in Egyptian script being considered a branch of Egyptology. The vast preponderance of extant classical papyri derive from Egypt—and are in Greek, since Greek remained the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean from the time of Alexander the Great until the close of the Roman Empire. Throughout that period of a thousand years, immense quantities of papyrus shipped from Egypt, where the material was exclusively produced, supplied the needs of Europe. (As late as the seventh century, according to a surviving document, Egyptian papyrus was being procured by Frankish Gaul.) The manufacture of rag paper, long practiced in China and conveyed by the Arabs to the Western world, became usual in Europe only in the Middle Ages.

Use of the papyrus reed by the ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman civilizations as a device for receiving and retaining script so proliferated as to leave, in that resistant medium, a multitude of surviving documents. In the age of the Antonines, as Gibbon tells us, “Homer as well as Virgil were transcribed and studied on the banks of the Rhine and Danube,”¹ and the literary legacy was accompanied by detailed records of empires, communities, and individual lives. Failure of the Egyptian papyrus crop could mean to the Roman world a paralysis of commerce and affairs of state, and suspension of work for innumerable scribes who carried on the enormous labor of transcription. Many of the scribes were, like the father of the Emperor Diocletian, literate slaves; while the cultivated members of Roman society commemorated literacy, as had the Egyptians before them, by occasionally displaying in portraits their diverse writing materials—which, in addition to papyrus, included parchment, wax tablets, and board. (In the fifth century, St. Augustine felt obliged to apologize to a correspondent for a letter written on vellum rather than papyrus.²)

The huge deposits of Greek papyri recovered in Egypt during the late nineteenth century by foreign archeologists and clandestine local diggers dramatically extended the scope and nature of papyrology, and transformed the study of ancient history. Significant new discoveries of ancient writings—such as the leathern Dead Sea Scrolls, or the first surviving complete play by Greek poet Menander (who, by a pleasing irony, appears in a frescoed depiction at Pompeii, manuscript in hand)—continue to fire the public as well as the scholarly imagination, for written evidence from the human past exerts human fascination. In this regard, as with much else at Naples, the city’s associations are peculiarly dramatic—from the narrow survival of Virgil’s epic exaltation of the Neapolitan ambience to the systematic burning by the Germans in the Second World War of capital portions of the city’s ancient archive. Through more than twenty centuries of Neapolitan turmoil, the greatest writers have emerged to report the city’s story with thrilling immediacy. The contemporary historian Roberto Pane (himself, at eighty-six, a Neapolitan legend) once drew my attention to a curious literary “pairing” of two cataclysmic events at Naples described in celebrated letters by two men of genius—the great eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, recounted to Tacitus by the younger Pliny; and the destruction of the port of Naples in the deluge of 1343, magnificently related by Petrarch, within hours of the occurrence, in a letter to his friend Cardinal Giovanni Colonna.

In one respect beyond all others, however, the choice of Naples as the site of the 1983 Congress of Papyrology had intense and excruciating meaning. For that antique city possesses, at the foot of its presiding volcano, a buried repository of ancient documents, broached two centuries ago and subsequently resealed. In 1750, during initial excavations of the Roman towns engulfed in the eruption of 79 AD, the so-called Villa dei Papiri was discovered—an opulent private establishment near Herculaneum containing, together with splendid works of ancient sculpture in marble and bronze, a collection of scrolled Greek and Latin texts denoting an important library. Approached by a process of tunneling from the foot of a shaft twenty-seven meters deep, this Roman villa was only partly penetrated before exhalations of volcanic gas compelled the excavators to close all access to it, in 1765. Statues and decoration removed from the excavation—and today on view at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples—contributed to the neoclassical impact on Western taste and knowledge produced by the great Vesuvian discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii, and at other sites under the volcano. The inscribed scrolls—now catalogued as nearly two thousand items—removed from the library required more perseverance. Carbonized in their long seclusion, they at first defied attempts to unroll them, yielding only to a painstaking technique after dozens had been fatally mangled. The first work to be deciphered—Philodemus’s treatise on music—was gradually followed by discoveries of a philosophical and literary nature, notably on the Epicurean concepts informing Roman thought and society. The scrolls are now conserved, many of them still inexorably furled, in the National Library at Naples.

“One hates writing descriptions that are to be found in every book of travels; but we have seen something today that I am sure you never read of, and perhaps never heard of.” Thus, in June of 1740, Horace Walpole, on the Grand Tour, began his splendid letter describing these first revelations at Herculaneum, where excavations had only recently commenced. “There might certainly be collected great light from this reservoir of antiquities,” he concluded, “if a man of learning had the inspection of it.³ Since 1765, no sustained effort has been made to excavate the Villa dei Papiri, although scholars and poets have continually appealed against its abandoned state. By 1835, Giacomo Leopardi, who was to spend some of his last months of life at a house close to Herculaneum, was calling down “eternal shame and vituperation” on Italy’s neglect of the buried documents.⁴ And Norman Douglas, commenting seventy years ago on the incalculable importance of the villa’s unretrieved library, pessimistically observed that “whoever wishes to consult it must wait till a generation which really possesses the civilization it vaunts, shall rescue it from the lava of Herculaneum.”⁵ Not everyone is prepared to accept such lasting, or everlasting, postponement. At a meeting held at the eighteenth-century Villa Campolieto, near Herculaneum, the 1983 papyrology congress emphatically urged reexcavation. Advanced techniques not only in archaeology but also in the treatment of papyrus (by enzymes, for example) are now available for a task made urgent by deterioration of the treasure underground—and by the imponderable energies of the fateful mountain above.

Informed voices and devoted efforts have not been lacking, at Naples and elsewhere, in support of renewing the excavation; and in recent years a feasibility study was planned, during a transient show of Italian governmental interest. However, following the construction, close to the villa’s site, of an expensive, uncompleted “antiquarium” of grim aspect and dubious utility, the project seems to have lapsed. The Italian government’s neglect of inestimable riches in the immediate vicinity—in much of Pompeii, for example, and in the decaying group of eighteenth-century “Vesuvian villas,” among which Vanvitelli’s Campolieto offers a quite unwonted instance of restoration—and the encroachment of new suburbs at Herculaneum itself give small confidence for a show of official sanity toward the Villa dei Papiri.

Among the beautiful collections of the Getty Museum are just such antiquities as those that adorned the ancient cities of Vesuvius. And, during his own repeated visits to Naples, J. Paul Getty showed particular interest in the excavations at Herculaneum and its neighboring classical sites. It was therefore natural that eyes should turn from Naples to Malibu in hope of assistance in rescuing the Getty’s great precursor and its entombed treasure. As yet, they have turned in vain. In 1974, to an appeal of the kind from Neapolitan authorities, Mr. Getty replied, “My charitable budget is fully committed.” He proposed the 17 million dollars spent on his Malibu reconstruction as sufficient recognition of Herculaneum’s importance, and expressed the hope that “others may be inspired by my example.” The terms of the Getty trust apparently do not exclude future consideration of—in the words of one Getty administrator—“activities in various parts of the world that would be consistent with these commitments.” For the present, however, the title of the Getty’s publication on its architectural genesis, “From Herculaneum to Malibu,” appears to suggest the direction in which Getty is flowing.⁶

As a body, papyrologists seem slow to wrath, and the Getty Museum’s decision not to send a representative to this spring’s congress at Naples was philosophically received. It may be that the profession accustoms its practitioners to the immemorial vagaries of mankind. In our time, papyrologists have been forced to flee their European universities for sanctuary in other lands, bearing their knowledge with them like a faith, while American papyrologists of the older generation—exemplified at the Naples congress by Naphtali Lewis, distinguished professor emeritus of the City University of New York—have seen their profession burgeon in the United States from sparse beginnings into a discipline now comparable, in quality if not yet in magnitude, to its European counterparts.