The Reckless Life of Classics

One of the great twentieth-century scholars of Latin literature, the German Edward Norden, wrote in a famous work: "What remains of Roman, as of Greek, literature is only a heap of ruins, as small in comparison with its original extent as the ruins of the Roman Forum today are in comparison with those of the imperial age. This reality forces us to ask ourselves: 'What forces have acted in the preservation or destruction of ancient literature?'"

The answer to this question can be found in the beautiful essay by Tommaso Braccini Avventure e disavventure dei classici (Carocci editore, 2025, pp. 176) in which, with a beautiful narrative rhythm, the many stories, often incredible, are described that have allowed cornerstones of our culture such as Aristotle, Homer, Plautus or Catullus not to be completely lost in oblivion, but to arrive, perhaps in a patchy and fortuitous way, to the present day.

In fact, for many centuries the Greek and Latin classics could not count on the ease of diffusion and production of copies guaranteed by printing starting in the second half of the fifteenth century. The words of Virgil, Livy, Callimachus and Tacitus had to be copied rigorously by hand. Of course, many copies were made of the most famous authors, but we are always in the order of hundreds of volumes, perhaps a few thousand.

It was easy for something unexpected to happen over the centuries. Print runs were low, in ancient times people wrote on papyrus, an extremely perishable material when it wasn't lost in the frequent fires in libraries where an incautious candle was enough to cause disasters. Then, especially from the Middle Ages, people resorted to parchment, which was more resistant because it was made from sheep's skin. Therefore, to make a volume it was necessary to sacrifice a flock, with very high costs, and a copyist had to work for years to reproduce a text. It has been calculated that to copy a Bible entirely it took the work of a hundred copyists who worked for at least a year, all together.

For this reason, during the Middle Ages, not everything was copied because it was too expensive to pass on all the ancient knowledge, a knowledge that was partly considered obsolete because it did not correspond to the teachings of Christianity. Works written in beautiful Latin were preferred, perhaps on edifying themes while licentious or too pagan texts fell into oblivion.

The few existing copies of little-considered authors aged, literally rotted or the parchment, duly scraped, was reused to write works more in step with the times. Furthermore, the last copies of poems, novels, treatises of antiquity were stolen, smuggled, disguised inside other works and hidden in unthinkable places such as chicken coops and stables. The water of the Nile, the ink of censorship, unscrupulous scholars, even farmyard animals and greedy SS threatened to take them away from us forever.

Braccini's book tells us about these books and others with an even more adventurous existence. Texts found where we least expected them: verses by Plautus hidden between the pages of a Bible, mathematical theorems under (false) Byzantine miniatures, very spicy stories in the library of the monastery of Montecassino, Greek novels on the cover of Afghan books. Not to mention the fakes, like a complete Satyricon that continues to circulate even today as if it were authentic. And then there are the legends that have arisen around the works of antiquity, from Homer, who supposedly plagiarized an ancient Egyptian priestess named Fantasia, to the gigantic historical work by Livy, which is said to be entirely preserved in Istanbul or Morocco... or in the cellars of Castel dell'Ovo in Naples. Adventures and misadventures of the classics tells us about works that have survived despite everything and everyone, the myths that surrounded them, and the men and women who found and saved them. It is thanks to them that the Greeks and Romans, albeit with difficulty, still speak to us today.