The survival of records. In spite the best and worst of human intentions; our hatreds, prejudices and sheer stupidity….
Obviously, there were mechanical hazards to the survival of literature such as the ordeal of transference of script from one type to another and from one format to another. However, there was another, far more destructive, which depended on the will of men. This was censorship.
---The Laurentian Library was named in honor of Lorenzo de’ Medici (aka Il Magnifico), who was a great collector of ancient and modern texts and who greatly expanded Medici library at end of 15th century. He had a famous collection of books that was seized during Medici exile in 1494; it was later recovered and moved to Rome under Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici. The idea for a library at San Lorenzo in Florence seems to go back to 1519 along with creation of the Medici Chapel by Michelangelo in the same complex, but the plan only really took off in 1523 when Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici became Pope Clement VII. As part of his plan to glorify the Medici in the area of Florence traditionally dominated by this family, he wished to bring the Medici book collection back to Florence and unite it under one roof.---Read More:http://www.arttrav.com/florence/laurentian-library/
In pagan Greece we hear very little of censorship: although the emissaries of Antipater brought Demosthenes to his death, they made no effort to destroy his speeches. The emperors of Rome were more touchy. Even the clement Augustus felt himself compelled to exile the orator Cassius Severus and burn his books, which were full of personal attacks on the Roman aristocracy and the imperial court. Labienus’s history of the civil war, which treated Julius Caesar as a traitor to the Republic, was destroyed; and, rather than survive his work, the historian killed himself.
---The third element: in the upper margin of folio V/4r in which the miniature of Ezra, intently writing in his library, is given, we find the couplet: Codicibus sacris hostili clade perustis Esdra Deo fervens hoc reparavit opus; where the verse finds a close analogy in the passage in Bede from In Ezram et Neemiam :...Read More:http://www.florin.ms/aleph4.html
The Christians, although considered an antisocial group by the authorities, were at first not known to possess any books worth destroying. But in the last of the pagan persecutions, A.D. 303 , Diocletian ordered the scriptures to be burned. That persecution, however, soon ended; and we know of no Christian books which were irrevocably lost in it.
A generation later the Christians came to power. Soon they were destroying the books of the pagans. Because of this policy, although we possess a good deal of Christian propaganda from the early centuries, no pagan counter-propaganda is preserved intact. The great Neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyry wrote a destructive analysis of the Christian doctrine and the Christian scripture in fifteen volumes. It was burned by the imperial order, and only a few fragments, quoted by his Christian opponents, now remain.
---The earliest surviving illustrated surgical codex was written and illuminated in Constantinople for the Byzantine physician Niketas (Nicetas) about 900 CE. It contains 30 full-page images illustrating the commentary of Apollonios of Kition on the Hippocratic treatise On Dislocations (Peri Arthron) and 63 smaller images scattered through the pages of the treatise on bandaging of Soranos of Ephesos. The Apollonian paintings represent various manipulations and apparatus employed in reducing dislocations; each of the images is framed in the Byzantine style in an archway of ornate design. According to Karl Sudhoff, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Chirurgie im Mittelalter (1914) 4-7 the origins of these drawings go back to Alexandria or Cyprus where Apollonius wrote his commentary between 81 and 58 BCE, under the patronage of the king Ptolemaius (Ptolemy of Cyprus).---Read More:http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php?category=Collecting+Books%2C+Manuscripts%2C+Art
In the Chrsitian church there was always a sharp division between those who thought all pagan literature vicious and dangerous and would gladly have consigned it to annihilation, and those who believed that some of it was potentially good so that it could, under proper guidance, be used for teaching and study. Christians of the first type were responsible for much wholesale abolition of the Greek and Roman classics. Christians of the second type selected most of the books we now possess, copied them, taught them in schools, and so reserved them for the age of printing.
Of the many thousands of plays enjoyed by Greeks and Romans, all were allowed to rot away except eighty-one: forty-three tragedies, thirty-three of which were Greek, and thirty-eight comedies of which twenty-seven were Roman. One more complete Greek comedy and large fragments of others have been found in the modern era: these were not, however, transmitted through the ages by copying, but preserved as though in a time capsule. Drama was particularly repellent to the early Christians, for many reasons. They therefore banned plays. The professional theater ceased to exist: for a thousand years men forgot the full power and meaning of drama, and the few plays that were permitted to survive were preserved mainly as models of fine Greek and Latin poetic and conversational style.
---Written in Hieratic, the 110 page Papyrus Ebers is the most extensive surviving record of ancient Egyptian medicine. "It contains many incantations meant to turn away disease-causing demons and there is also evidence of a long tradition of empirical practice and observation....Edwin Smith, who also owned the Edwin Smith Papyrus, bought the Ebers Papyrus in 1862. It was said to have been found between the legs of a mummy in the Assassif district of the Theban necropolis. It remained in Smith's collection until at least 1869 when it was offered for sale in the catalog of an a
uities dealer, described as "a large medical papyrus in the possession of Edwin Smith, an American farmer of Luxor." It was purchased in 1872 by the German Egyptologist and novelist Georg Ebers, and is preserved in the University of Leipzig Library....Read More:http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php?category=Manuscripts+%26+Manuscript+Copying
The pagan Greeks and Romans had also loved lyric poetry, which embodies or evokes song and dance. Many of their lyric poems were loving glorifications of carnal experience: an invitation to drink or rapturous desire for a beautiful body. Other were hymns doing honor to pagan deities. Such poems were particularly hateful to devout Christians, so that the vast majority of them were allowed to perish. In Latin we have four books of songs by Horace and half a book by Catullus. In Greek almost all lyric poetry has vanished, or at least until the discoveries were made; only Pindar survived, and only his Victory Odes. The rest disappeared, and even the Victory Odes came through the Dark Ages in one manuscript alone.
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