Life Of Caesar

The downfall of Ovid and the rise of Arminius.   Click on the banner and use the coupon code LOC to get 25% off your first three months! Another person who got caught up in all this was the poet Ovid.  He of the Ars Amatoria, in Engligh, the Arse of Love.  Remember him from […]

The downfall of Julia’s surviving children, Agrippa Postumus and Julia the Younger. Click on the banner and use the coupon code LOC to get 25% off your first three months! * The food shortages lasted for several months. * Including Augustus’s birthday, so he refused permission for public feats to be held to celebrate. * […]

* While all this is going on with the Dalmatians, there are problems in other provinces as well. * We hear of campaigning going on in….. Africa. * And also this is the period when Herod’s son Archelaus is so unpopular in Judaea that he’s stripped of his throne and forced into retirement, and Judaea […]

* Apparently this kind of pride was enough for Augustus to decide they had to go. * Bodacious must have seen it coming, because he built up his forces to prepare. * Which of course the Romans noticed, so they thought he was even more of a threat. * The Romans had a large army […]

And overnight, Tibbo goes from being invisible to being the Number Two man in Rome again! * WHO DOES NUMBER TWO WORK FOR * Oh he knows. * Now all of Aug’s successors are either Livia’s sons or her grandsons. * This would lead to rumours that she had organised the deaths of Caius and […]

* By the time news of Caius’ death had reached Rome it was some time in late March, 4 CE. * Aug mourned but also hurried to plan for the future. * Of course, he didn’t have many options left. * Julia and Agrippa had one son left – Agrippa Postumus. * Or Aggy P […]

* Keep in mind that by the standards of the day, jokes about deformities were pretty mild. * Remember those speeches Cicero gave about Mark Antony? The Phillipics? * Here’s just one example: * Let us speak rather of his meaner descriptions of worthlessness. You, with those jaws of yours, and those sides of yours, […]

Augustus stayed in Rome more now, no longer going out on long tours of the provinces, probably because he’s in his sixties, probably because he doesn’t have someone like Agrippa to leave in charge while he’s away. * On his birthday in 2 CE, he wrote an interesting letter to Caius Ninth day before the […]

* It’s the year 1 BCE * Caius Caesar, biological son of Agrippa and Julia, adopted son of Augustus, is 19 years old. * And what do you get for the 19 year old who has everything? * A military command. * In a distant land. * There was a power struggle going on in […]

Our new series, The Renaissance Times, launched on Dec 24, 2017. Here’s the first episode! Go check out the rest of the series at therenaissancetimes.com.

 

At its peak, the Library of Alexandria was estimated to contain somewhere in the order of 500,000 books on philosophy, science, medicine, history, tragedy, comedy, rhetoric and politics.

Across the Roman empire, private and public libraries contained copies of these books. They were read, studied and appreciated. Of course, literacy was a luxury that not all citizens of the empire received. It was contained mostly to the upper classes. But those upper classes had a high estimation of the value of learning and education. They also accepted the worship of many gods in many different ways and they accepted debate and discourse as an important part of being civilized.

But as the Western Roman Empire decayed, partly as a result of corruption, partly by division, partly by Christian influence, and partly by a combination of famine, plague and invasion by illiterate Germanic tribes, most of these books were forgotten and lost. Today we have partial copies of perhaps a one or two percent of them – and many of those are pure luck, as they were written over by Christian scribes and modern scientific techniques has managed to resurrected the ink from two millennia ago.

With the rise of Christianity, it became unfashionable and unprofitable even for the upper classes to read anything other than the books supported by the Christian church – the Christian bible, scriptures, analysis of the bible and scriptures and the miscellaneous writings of Christian scholars. Sure – there were some monks and scholars in some parts of the world, notably Ireland and the Eastern Roman Empire. who still appreciated the ancient works and they kept copies of some of them. And as the Eastern Roman Empire became the Islamic Caliphate, they too valued these ancient texts. But the majority of Christian monks – the only people left who copied books after the rise of the Christian empire – didn’t care to spend time or effort copying pagan texts. When each book needed to be hand-copied, a laborious process that might take a year to copy a single book – why would monastic superiors choose for their monks to spend that year copying a pagan book when they could be copying a Christian one?

Gradually, people lost interest in the writings of the ancients, with a few exceptions. And with that loss of interest, the vast majority of the books themselves were lost to Western Europe.

Some through tragedy, some through deliberate and wanton destruction of anything that didn’t fit neatly into the Christian worldview. But mostly just through neglect.

Ancient texts were typically written on papyrus, made from the pith or centre tissue of the papyrus plant, which is delicate. As a rule of the thumb, we can assume that a scroll had to be copied every century. If parchment was used, replacement could take place less frequently. However, preparing a skin and making parchment was extremely expensive. Most texts were, therefore, written on papyrus and subject to decay and disappearance. If there were many copies of the same text, the chances of survival were greater, but professional writers were expensive and texts usually circulated in small numbers. A surprisingly great number of ancient texts has survived in only one copy, which shows how vulnerable the process of transmission was. Even they couldn’t withstand the ravages of time, especially when they were discarded and forgotten about in the musty depths of cold, damp monasteries, victims of bookworms and mould.

Many survived for centuries in Eastern Europe and the new Islamic empire, but these too were lost eventually, destroyed by the wars between rulers or by invasions by people like Genghis Khan.