Roman scribes distributed their copied manuscripts throughout the conquered territories; these far-flung collections would later prove instrumental in preserving the heritage of classical literature. By the latter days of the Roman empire, however, public love of learning began to degrade into an all-out embrace of Greek Epicurianism. Libraries languished as citizensincreasingly devoted their energies to sensory pleasures. Coupled with the pacific influence of Christianity, a love of the good life overwhelmed the old farmer-soldier ethic of the early Republic, and the old ideals—including the long tradition of civic bibliophilia—began to diminish. By 378 AD, Ammianus reported an empire whose citizens had relinquished their former love of knowledge in favor of pleasures of the flesh:
[I]n place of the philosophers the singer is called in, and in place of the orator the teacher of stagecraft, and while the libraries are shut up forever like tombs, water-organs are manufactured and lyres as large as carriages, and flutes and huge instruments for gesticulating actors. 32
In our age of pop music, TV dramas, and Broadway musicals, perhaps some of us can identify with Ammianus’s lament. Just as the old hierarchies of the Roman Empire started falling into decay, so too did its libraries. By the fifth century, Rome’s great public libraries had all but disappeared, either destroyed at the hands of the Vandals or carted away to the new capital in Constantinople. By the sixth century they were gone. The old hierarchies of the Roman empire—and its imperial libraries—gave way to a period of intellectual chaos, creating a fallow ground from which new forms of knowledge would soon emerge.
----
Illuminating the Dark Age
A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
Daniel C. Dennett,
Consciousness Explained
An Irish legend holds that one night in the middle of the sixth century, Saint Columba borrowed a manuscript from his guest Saint Finnian, staying up all night inside the church to copy the rare text. According to the legend, Columba’s fingers shone like candles, lighting up the whole church. 1
With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, Europe lost more than just its imperial government; it also lost thousands of texts—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil—the intellectual foundation of the
Pax Romana
. As the Goths and Vandals swarmed into the city, they burned the libraries and government archives, annihilating the empire’s collective intellectual capital. During the so-called Dark Ages that followed, the scorched earth of the old empire gave way to the reemergence of smaller, close-knit societies not far removed from the tribal chiefdoms of old. While the institutional template of the old imperial bureaucracies persisted in the form of the growing Roman church, daily life for most Europeans reverted to a more tribal mode of existence. The old hierarchies of the state collapsed, and Europe entered a period in which literacy waned, while older oral traditions and kinship networks reasserted themselves. Toinvoke the evolutionary metaphor, the Dark Ages were a period of mutation and drift. Across Europe this seemingly regressive period provided fertile ground for a series of new technologies that would soon begin to take shape. Most of this innovation would happen in a few isolated corners of Christendom, within the cloistered walls of early monasteries.
In the century before the fall of Rome, the unwieldy 12-foot-long papyrus scrolls of Alexandria had started to cede room on the shelves to a new form of document: the codex book, so named because it originated from attempts to “codify” the Roman law in a format that supported easier information retrieval. The new format boasted a more navigable interface, featuring leafed pages bound between durable hard covers. Not only was the new format more resilient than the carefully wound scrolls that preceded
[I]n place of the philosophers the singer is called in, and in place of the orator the teacher of stagecraft, and while the libraries are shut up forever like tombs, water-organs are manufactured and lyres as large as carriages, and flutes and huge instruments for gesticulating actors. 32
In our age of pop music, TV dramas, and Broadway musicals, perhaps some of us can identify with Ammianus’s lament. Just as the old hierarchies of the Roman Empire started falling into decay, so too did its libraries. By the fifth century, Rome’s great public libraries had all but disappeared, either destroyed at the hands of the Vandals or carted away to the new capital in Constantinople. By the sixth century they were gone. The old hierarchies of the Roman empire—and its imperial libraries—gave way to a period of intellectual chaos, creating a fallow ground from which new forms of knowledge would soon emerge.
----
Illuminating the Dark Age
A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
Daniel C. Dennett,
Consciousness Explained
An Irish legend holds that one night in the middle of the sixth century, Saint Columba borrowed a manuscript from his guest Saint Finnian, staying up all night inside the church to copy the rare text. According to the legend, Columba’s fingers shone like candles, lighting up the whole church. 1
With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, Europe lost more than just its imperial government; it also lost thousands of texts—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil—the intellectual foundation of the
Pax Romana
. As the Goths and Vandals swarmed into the city, they burned the libraries and government archives, annihilating the empire’s collective intellectual capital. During the so-called Dark Ages that followed, the scorched earth of the old empire gave way to the reemergence of smaller, close-knit societies not far removed from the tribal chiefdoms of old. While the institutional template of the old imperial bureaucracies persisted in the form of the growing Roman church, daily life for most Europeans reverted to a more tribal mode of existence. The old hierarchies of the state collapsed, and Europe entered a period in which literacy waned, while older oral traditions and kinship networks reasserted themselves. Toinvoke the evolutionary metaphor, the Dark Ages were a period of mutation and drift. Across Europe this seemingly regressive period provided fertile ground for a series of new technologies that would soon begin to take shape. Most of this innovation would happen in a few isolated corners of Christendom, within the cloistered walls of early monasteries.
In the century before the fall of Rome, the unwieldy 12-foot-long papyrus scrolls of Alexandria had started to cede room on the shelves to a new form of document: the codex book, so named because it originated from attempts to “codify” the Roman law in a format that supported easier information retrieval. The new format boasted a more navigable interface, featuring leafed pages bound between durable hard covers. Not only was the new format more resilient than the carefully wound scrolls that preceded
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