The Last Samurai

So far, so not wildly exciting, and yet so much could be said, all fascinating, about the Library and Alexandria and the mad people who lived there, for the writers alone must be the most perverse and wilful the world has ever known. There are people who, needing a place to put umbrellas, go to Ikea and purchase an umbrella stand for easy home assembly—and there are people who drive 100 miles to an auction in the heart of Shropshire and spot the potential in an apparently pointless 17th-century farming implement. The Alexandrians would have been bidding against each other at the auction. They loved to rifle the works of the past (conveniently available in a Library built up by a ruthless acquisitions policy), turn up rare words which were no longer understood let alone used, and deploy them as more interesting alternatives to words people might actually understand. They loved myths in which people went berserk or drank magic potions or turned into rocks in moments of stress; they loved scenes in which people who had gone berserk raved in strange, fractured speeches studded with unjustly neglected vocabulary; they loved to focus on some trivial element of a myth and spin it out and skip the myth—they could make a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of any Hamlet. As scholars, as scientists, as mathematicians, as poets who led the flower of Roman youth astray, they crowd their way into books not mainly about them; given a book to themselves they burst out at once into a whole separate volume of footnotes—I speak of course of Fraser’s Ptolemaic Alexandria, a book I would come back from the grave to possess (I asked for it on my deathbed once and didn’t get it). But time is short—the Boy Wonder is watching the video, who knows for how long—what was Roemer’s contribution to this marvellous subject?

Roemer was interested in the Homeric criticism of Aristarchus, who was head of the Library a little after 180 BC (the unpleasantness about the tragedies was before his time). Aristarchus had wanted a perfect text of Homer; since an original manuscript did not exist, ruthlessness and cash were not enough: he had to compare copies and spot mistakes. He marked for deletion (athetised) lines he thought did not belong in the text, and was the first to write down his reasoning in commentaries. Nothing by Aristarchus survived. There were marginal notes on the Iliad that named no names but were probably third-hand extracts from Aristarchus; there were a few other notes that named names.

Some of the third-hand extracts struck Roemer as brilliant: they were clearly by Aristarchus, who was clearly a genius. Other extracts were too stupid for a genius: clearly by someone else. Whenever someone else was said to have said something brilliant he saw instantly that it was really by Aristarchus, and if any brilliant comments happened to be lying around unclaimed he instantly spotted the unnamed mastermind behind them.

Now it is patently, blatantly obvious that this is insane. If you are going to shuffle all the names around so that one person is always the genius, this means that you have decided not to believe your source whenever it says someone else said something good or the genius said something bad—but the source is your only reason for thinking the genius was a genius in the first place. Anyone who had stopped to think for two seconds would have seen the problem, but Roemer had managed to write an entire scholarly treatise without thinking for two seconds. Having settled on stupidity as the criterion of inauthenticity he went on to discard one stupid remark after another as really by Zenodotus or Aristophanes (no, not the) or misquoted by Didymus, with many sarcastic & gleeful asides on the ineptitude of these imbeciles.

When I first worked out that this was what he was saying I couldn’t believe he could really say it so I read another 50 pages (at a rate of 20 minutes/page, thus adding another 16.66 hours to the total) and he really was saying it. I stared at the page. I closed my eyes.

Say you grow up in the type of place that is excited to be getting its first motel, moving from town to town as one motel is finished and another begun. You are naturally not enthralled by school and achieve a solid B – average. Presently you take Scholastic Aptitude Tests and astound everyone by a degree of scholastic aptitude which places the B – average in an entirely different light. Your teachers take the result as a personal insult. You apply to various colleges, who ask for references, and teachers who have reduced you to speechless torpor write complaining of apathy. You are interviewed on the basis of dazzling scholastic aptitude and you are asked about your interests and you have no interests. You have no extracurricular activities because the extracurricular activity was the Donny Osmond Fan Club. Everyone turns down your application on grounds of apathy.