THE COMPLAINT OF BOOKS AGAINST WARS
Almighty Author and Lover of peace, scatter the nations that delight in
war, which is above all plagues injurious to books. For wars being
without the control of reason make a wild assault on everything they
come across, and, lacking the check of reason they push on without
discretion or distinction to destroy the vessels of reason. Then the
wise Apollo becomes the Python's prey, and Phronesis, the pious mother,
becomes subject to the power of Phrenzy. Then winged Pegasus is shut
up in the stall of Corydon, and eloquent Mercury is strangled. Then
wise Pallas is struck down by the dagger of error, and the charming
Pierides are smitten by the truculent tyranny of madness. O cruel
spectacle! where you may see the Phoebus of philosophers, the all-wise
Aristotle, whom God Himself made master of the master of the world,
enchained by wicked hands and borne in shameful irons on the shoulders
of gladiators from his sacred home. There you may see him who was
worthy to be lawgiver to the lawgiver of the world and to hold empire
over its emperor, made the slave of vile buffoons by the most
unrighteous laws of war. O most wicked power of darkness, which does
not fear to undo the approved divinity of Plato, who alone was worthy
to submit to the view of the Creator, before he assuaged the strife of
warring chaos, and before form had put on its garb of matter, the ideal
types, in order to demonstrate the archetypal universe to its author,
so that the world of sense might be modelled after the supernal
pattern. O tearful sight! where the moral Socrates, whose acts were
virtue and whose discourse was science, who deduced political justice
from the principles of nature, is seen enslaved to some rascal robber.
We bemoan Pythagoras, the parent of harmony, as, brutally scourged by
the harrying furies of war, he utters not a song but the wailings of a
dove. We mourn, too, for Zeno, who lest he should betray his secret
bit off his tongue and fearlessly spat it out at the tyrant, and now,
alas! is brayed and crushed to death in a mortar by Diomedon.
In sooth we cannot mourn with the grief that they deserve all the
various books that have perished by the fate of war in various parts of
the world. Yet we must tearfully recount the dreadful ruin which was
caused in Egypt by the auxiliaries in the Alexandrian war, when seven
hundred thousand volumes were consumed by fire. These volumes had been
collected by the royal Ptolemies through long periods of time, as Aulus
Gellius relates. What an Atlantean progeny must be supposed to have
then perished: including the motions of the spheres, all the
conjunctions of the planets, the nature of the galaxy, and the
prognostic generations of comets, and all that exists in the heavens or
in the ether! Who would not shudder at such a hapless holocaust, where
ink is offered up instead of blood, where the glowing ashes of
crackling parchment were encarnadined with blood, where the devouring
flames consumed so many thousands of innocents in whose mouth was no
guile, where the unsparing fire turned into stinking ashes so many
shrines of eternal truth! A lesser crime than this is the sacrifice of
Jephthah or Agamemnon, where a pious daughter is slain by a father's
sword. How many labours of the famous Hercules shall we suppose then
perished, who because of his knowledge of astronomy is said to have
sustained the heaven on his unyielding neck, when Hercules was now for
the second time cast into the flames. The secrets of the heavens,
which Jonithus learnt not from man or through man but received by
divine inspiration; what his brother Zoroaster, the servant of unclean
spirits, taught the Bactrians; what holy Enoch, the prefect of
Paradise, prophesied before he was taken from the world, and finally,
what the first Adam taught his children of the things to come, which he
had seen when caught up in an ecstasy in the book of eternity, are
believed to have perished in those horrid flames. The religion of the
Egyptians, which the book of the Perfect Word so commends; the
excellent polity of the older Athens, which preceded by nine thousand
years the Athens of Greece; the charms of the Chaldaeans; the
observations of the Arabs and Indians; the ceremonies of the Jews; the
architecture of the Babylonians; the agriculture of Noah the magic arts
of Moses; the geometry of Joshua; the enigmas of Samson; the problems
of Solomon from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop; the antidotes of
Aesculapius; the grammar of Cadmus; the poems of Parnassus; the oracles
of Apollo; the argonautics of Jason; the stratagems of Palamedes, and
infinite other secrets of science are believed to have perished at the
time of this conflagration.
Nay, Aristotle would not have missed the quadrature of the circle, if
only baleful conflicts had spared the books of the ancients, who knew
all the methods of nature. He would not have left the problem of the
eternity of the world an open question, nor, as is credibly conceived,
would he have had any doubts of the plurality of human intellects and
of their eternity, if the perfect sciences of the ancients had not been
exposed to the calamities of hateful wars. For by wars we are
scattered into foreign lands, are mutilated, wounded, and shamefully
disfigured, are buried under the earth and overwhelmed in the sea, are
devoured by the flames and destroyed by every kind of death. How much
of our blood was shed by warlike Scipio, when he was eagerly compassing
the overthrow of Carthage, the opponent and rival of the Roman empire!
How many thousands of thousands of us did the ten years' war of Troy
dismiss from the light of day! How many were driven by Anthony, after
the murder of Tully, to seek hiding places in foreign provinces! How
many of us were scattered by Theodoric, while Boethius was in exile,
into the different quarters of the world, like sheep whose shepherd has
been struck down! How many, when Seneca fell a victim to the cruelty
of Nero, and willing yet unwilling passed the gates of death, took
leave of him and retired in tears, not even knowing in what quarter to
seek for shelter!
Happy was that translation of books which Xerxes is said to have made
to Persia from Athens, and which Seleucus brought back again from
Persia to Athens. O glad and joyful return! O wondrous joy, which you
might then see in Athens, when the mother went in triumph to meet her
progeny, and again showed the chambers in which they had been nursed to
her now aging children! Their old homes were restored to their former
inmates, and forthwith boards of cedar with shelves and beams of gopher
wood are most skilfully planed; inscriptions of gold and ivory are
designed for the several compartments, to which the volumes themselves
are reverently brought and pleasantly arranged, so that no one hinders
the entrance of another or injures its brother by excessive crowding.
But in truth infinite are the losses which have been inflicted upon the
race of books by wars and tumults. And as it is by no means possible
to enumerate and survey infinity, we will here finally set up the Gades
of our complaint, and turn again to the prayers with which we began,
humbly imploring that the Ruler of Olympus and the Most High Governor
of all the world will establish peace and dispel wars and make our days
tranquil under His protection.