Conspiracies of Rome Read online

  Martin had shown me the basics of reading in the ancient manner. Now he was off again on some errand. I sat alone in the library with a pile of books, carefully unrolling them to see what gems I might find.

  It was all precious treasure. If you rule out some Latin translations of Plato, there was nothing religious here. It was all from the great ages of the past, when men wrote about the world as they saw it, rather than as a pack of life-hating bigots had instructed them to think about it.

  I went through book after book after book. Most of these – the complete Cicero, for example – I set aside for collection and copying. Others, I couldn’t resist reading on the spot. I read and read, and delighted in all that I read. And I’d have read more but for the difficulty of coming to terms with the unfamiliar medium of these books. I read until the light through the high windows began to dim, and one of the Lateran slaves began to talk about going off in search of some lamps.

  Careful as I was, though, the books were in very delicate shape. They were all old, and for a long time had not been stored in anything like good conditions. Some were already in pieces as I took them out of their cases. Some fell apart as I unrolled them. But, unlike in the Lateran, I found almost nothing I wanted to reject. As the light began to fade in earnest, I had several hundred books piled on the floor beside the reading table.

  ‘Oh fuck!’ I muttered in English as another roll cracked apart in my hands. ‘Rub this stuff between your hands, and powder your face with it,’ I continued more politely in Latin.

  I heard a voice behind me. ‘Don’t trouble yourself over it, my dear young fellow. It’s all worthless stuff in these rooms. I wonder you spend so long poring over it.’

  I looked up. An old man had come silently into the room, and stood looking at me from the doorway. Tall, thin, with unkempt hair and beard; this, I supposed, was Anicius. He tottered over and fell into a chair opposite me that I’d rejected for myself as too rickety. It took his weight without a creak. If anything, he was even dirtier than the other nobles, and his stained robe stank of piss. But he had the usual proud look of a noble.

  ‘You have a most remarkable library,’ said I.

  He brushed the compliment aside with a dismissive wave. ‘All worthless,’ he continued: ‘Crumbling books by dead writers from a dead civilisation. There’s nothing here for you.’

  ‘But surely,’ I replied, ‘there is so much beauty and truth in these books. You are fortunate to have them as your friends.’

  ‘There was a time when I might have agreed with you. One of my ancestors certainly would. He used to sit all day at this very table, writing philosophy in Latin and translating from Greek. That was –’ he paused, screwing up his face – ‘a long time ago, when even I was a small boy. He came to a bad end, you know: killed by the barbarian who ruled Italy at the time. My family had a long fight to get his property back from the emperor. By the time we got it restituted, there was little enough left worth the having.’

  I remained silent, hoping he might tell me something worth hearing. At last, he continued: ‘When I was a boy – until I was older than you are now – this was a house of wealth and learning. In those days, Rome was still alive with people. We had baths and fountains and elegant entertainments. You can’t imagine how glorious the city then was. I thought then I was a scholar, and I’d give whole days to communing with the great minds of the past. Nowadays, I know better. What is it your Galilean priests cry out when they see some pleasure they don’t share? Ah yes, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”.’

  ‘They have a point, you know.’ He waved vaguely at the book racks. ‘It took a thousand years to amass all these words. Can you imagine the original work of writing? Can you imagine the continuing work thereafter of copying and recopying to keep them alive? And what do they tell us, now the civilisation for which they were written is dead? They tell us nothing.

  ‘We drowned because of this accumulated weight of learning. It weakened our bodies and minds. It didn’t save us from the emperor’s Wars of Reconquest, nor from the barbarians, nor from the plague.

  ‘You barbarians have neither learning nor the trade that feeds the wants revealed by learning. Your strong bodies resist the plague. We die.’

  I didn’t want to be rude, so held my tongue. But I could have told the old fool he was talking rot. My mother couldn’t read her own name, and had never owned anything produced more than a few miles distant. She’d still vomited her guts out. My dead brothers had dodged class with Auxilius more often than they’d attended, and they could barely give the sounds of the letters. This noble savage and decadent civilisation stuff has been around since the early Greeks. Search me how long it will stay around. Well, unlike most, I’ve tried both – and I know which one I prefer.

  18

  In Anicius’s library, I let the old man ramble on.

  ‘The plague,’ he said emphatically, ‘was the end of my world. It came just after the beginning of the great reconquest. Even as the Greek soldiers sent here by Justinian were advancing against the Goths, the plague advanced against us all.

  ‘There was a summer without heat. Then the sun and moon had shone in many colours. Then the poor began dying in Rome.’

  He went into a grisly description of the symptoms – fever and a black mottling, followed by swellings in the groin and armpits. ‘All who caught this pestilence sent hither from the city of New Rome died without exception.’

  More rot he was speaking. A summer without heat and blue moons! The first, just possibly; the second, not at all. Claims made so greatly against common sense are always to be at least suspected. As for the rest, I was once in Alexandria during an outbreak of plague, and another time in Ctesiphon. He got the symptoms right. But I know now that not everyone dies.

  Anicius sat spouting about the deaths until the light had well and truly gone – the multitude of bodies lying unburied in the streets, the riotous living of those who weren’t yet stricken, the general collapse of order and morality, the public orgies, as the still living fornicated like rabbits.

  Like all who could afford to, he ran away from the city. The plague followed, and soon the country districts were as ravaged as the towns. Here, the crops withered on the ground, and cows wandered, bellowing with pain when there was no one to milk them. It all sounded very nasty. But it seemed to cheer Anicius.

  ‘And so I am all that is left of the old world,’ he concluded with a smack of his withered lips that screamed complacency.

  There wasn’t much replying to this, so I changed the subject.

  ‘My Lord Anicius,’ I asked with a humble wave around the library, ‘might you have anything by Epicurus?’

  The old man’s eyes widened. He looked at me as if for the first time. ‘And what,’ he asked in a suddenly firm voice, ‘would you want to know about Epicurus?’

  The answer was that I’d pressed every book I could find in Canterbury for mentions of him, and turned over every book I could find in those French monasteries. Now, I was for the first time in a library stuffed with ancient writings. I wanted to know what original works it might contain.

  ‘You’ll find much here in Greek,’ Anicius said after a pause, ‘though I don’t think much at all in Latin, which is not a language well adapted to philosophy. But do tell me – what possible interest could a young and clean-minded barbarian have in that ancient trash?’

  ‘Of all the philosophy I’ve read,’ I answered, ‘Epicurus comes closest to the truth that I feel.’

  Anicius let out a wheezing laugh. He leaned back on the creaking chair. As he gathered his thoughts, he seemed twenty years younger at least. ‘The feelings of an uninstructed mind,’ he said with a surprising precision, ‘are not an appropriate criterion for deciding the truth of a matter. Epicurus was the author of a bestial philosophy. It allows for no nobility of sentiment, no feelings of honour. It preaches a message of individual happiness and of withdrawal from the world.’

  Nothing wrong with that, I told mysel
f. So long as happiness is rightly understood – and I’d learnt enough to know the meaning that Epicurus had intended – there is no finer end in life. As for honour and nobility of sentiment, they are good ultimately only for turning the world into a nightmare.

  I wondered if it would be presumptuous of me to quote one of the doctrines I’d found in a fragmentary encyclopaedia outside Pisa: ‘Of all things that wisdom provides for living one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.’ But the chance had passed. Anicius was warming to his theme.

  ‘You will even find the man’s physical theories defective,’ he said. ‘According to your Epicurus, the world is made of atoms that move through space. As these atoms collide, they form compounds of increasing size and complexity.

  ‘Now if – as Democritus believed – these atoms move constantly in their first course, either they will not collide or they will. If they do not collide, no compounds can be formed, and there will be no universe as we know it. If they do collide, both the collisions and all that flows from them can be known as surely in advance as an archer can tell the flight of his arrow. In this second case, the mind will be trapped in a sequence of absolute necessity, and there can be no room for any freedom of the will.’

  ‘I don’t know about Democritus,’ I said, ‘though I have heard his name. But I do know that Epicurus believed the atoms to swerve from their course in uncaused ways. That surely means—’

  ‘An uncaused swerve?’ Anicius broke in with a sneer. ‘If the atoms can swerve once from their course, why should they not swerve all the time? Why should there be any observed regularity to the world? Why should the atoms not swerve unpredictably together and unpredictably apart? Why should a new universe not come into being with every heartbeat, and be at once dissolved?’

  I hadn’t thought of that. I’d picked up scraps of philosophy here and there. I’d had to join much of this for myself. When you’re young and largely on your own resources, it’s easy to suppose you’ve reached the truth of a matter. It’s invariably a truth that – even if real – doesn’t stand up very well to informed criticism.

  Anicius saw the look of confusion on my face. He got up and began pacing firmly about the library. His age, his infirmities, his evident depression of spirits forgotten, he took me through a lecture on the importance of logical paradox as a guide to the truth.

  Matter could not exist, he told me. There can be no such thing as an indivisible extended atom: whatever has a front side and a back side must also have a middle along which it can be divided. And so if an atom has any extension in space, it must be divisible into two smaller particles. If these have extension, they also must be divisible. This process of division must continue until we are left with an unextended particle. This cannot be further divided.

  But two unextended particles, added together, do not make any degree of extension. Nor do a million unextended particles. Nothing comes of nothing. Therefore, any object containing less than an infinity of atoms must be infinitely small. Anything containing an infinity of atoms must be infinitely large.

  Since an infinitely large object would leave no room for us, there is no such thing. Nor can infinitely small objects exist.

  ‘Therefore,’ Anicius concluded, ‘matter does not exist.’

  This and much else that he said confused me horribly at the time. It didn’t help that Anicius went into Socratic mode – asking me questions that I didn’t understand, and then picking my answers apart. From paradoxes that I could understand but not explain, he led me gradually into a cloud of hot air that I later realised was neoplatonism. Again, I’ll not trouble you with an account of the ‘Single Mind’ and its progressively corrupted emanations. By comparison, you’ll find arguments over the Monophysite heresy relevant to our everyday concerns. In any event, much of this – if under different names – has seeped into the more learned formulations of our own Christian Faith.

  ‘But what does any of this matter?’ Anicius gasped at the end of his lecture. He fell again into his rickety chair and closed his eyes. When they opened again, he was back to normal.

  ‘None of it matters,’ he said mournfully. ‘The ancient times are gone forever. They will never come again. And soon I shall be dead myself,’ he added. ‘I shall be dead, and all this corrupt and useless learning can die with me. Already, there is plague again in the poor districts. It always comes back to feed on the living.’

  I must have given his gloomily satisfied tone a sceptical look. He leaned suddenly across the table and quoted an old poet: ‘After death there is nothing, and death itself is nothing – Post mortem nihil ipsaque mors nihil.’ His breath nearly threw me backwards onto the floor.

  ‘That isn’t your Epicurus,’ he hissed. ‘But that’s what your Epicurus believed. And who knows? Perhaps he was right.’

  There wasn’t much answering that. I had been considering a reply that poured scorn on Plato and all the other hot-air merchants who’d darkened the light of the Greeks. But while I could counter his ill-informed rant about the end of the world, I had just been given a lecture of a brilliance I’d never before encountered. He might be a semi-demented bore, denouncing a world that had settled him on the backs of slaves charged on pain of death to keep him from falling down. But he had once been something much more than that. I didn’t fancy more slicing from that razor mind. I was already feeling rather small.

  But it was now that I conceived my true mission in life. This has not been wealth and sex and pleasure of the bestial kind – though I’ll not deny I’ve managed more than the common share of all these. It is something of which Epicurus himself would have approved. My mission has been to save all that I could of the ancient learning.

  By the time I met Anicius, the civilisation that had produced all that truth and beauty was dead. Much of its produce was still alive, but was often hanging to life by a single thread. How many other libraries were there in Rome like that of Anicius – filled with books that crumbled to dust almost as you read them? How many Church libraries were there, filled with the occasional gem that would one day be washed clean with vinegar, so it could be covered with some extended graffito about Saint Nemo or some meaningless difference over Church doctrine?

  No, the light of learning was going out in Rome. But the Church had big ideas for England. We were to be made into the force that would evangelise the world for it. Why not hitch a ride on that immensely powerful vehicle? What I had copied here in Rome could be stored in England and recopied and recopied again. And when the missionaries went out to convert other lands, they could educate as well.

  I began in my mind to form some hexameters in echo of Vergil:

  Others with buildings grand may please the sight,

  And in their high and gorgeous domes delight;

  A nicer touch to the stretched canvas give,

  And teach their animated rocks to live.

  Let England’s Might stand guard on Learning’s fate,

  And keep each threatened book in pristine state,

  To gather all the rays of setting light,

  And wait the passing of our own world’s night . . .

  And that is what I’ve spent my life doing. Now that I’m old, I can see the tree bear fruit from the seed that I planted. From the monastery where I’m sitting, the missionaries are already preparing for Germany. And they’ll be taking perfect copies of the books that I’ve saved with them. The world wasn’t coming to an end when I was young. It was just going through a rough patch. It had been there before and recovered. Things haven’t much improved since then. Indeed, they’ve grown steadily worse. They may get worse still.

  But the ‘ancient ways’ were not gone forever. They would come again. There will one day be a recovery – though I can’t say when. And I shall have been its father or grandfather or great-grandfather.

  Now, am I hitching a ride on the Church? Or was this always part of the ‘plan’? Was it expected that I, or someone like me, would be there at
the right moment? That I can’t say. But I have no doubt Abbot Benedict and the authorities in Canterbury have been most indulgent hosts. Of course, they knew what sort of old monster they were taking in. And still they took me in.

  I know that Anicius was talking like a burst water pipe in that library. But I wasn’t listening as I conceived my own plan. I’d need more money, I decided. Even in a world where it was so short, that gold wouldn’t begin to pay for what I wanted. Yes, I could get as many books out of Anicius as I wanted. I might get them for free if I’d sit listening to his lectures. But they’d need copying before anything could go off to Canterbury. Even the limited copying I’d ordered earlier in the day would eat up a quarter of what I took on the road from Populonium. How to get more? I’d have to speak to one of the merchants back at Marcella’s.

  Better still, there was that Ethiopian diplomat. He seemed to know more than most, and had been quite friendly in the toilet. There was always money to be made from commerce, I knew.

  ‘You know, young man, you really must come again,’ said Anicius into the pool of light cast by the lamp that had been set beside us. ‘It’s so long since I last had a chance to hear what the young have to say. It’s so very interesting. You must come again. Take whatever of these useless old things you want. But do come again.’

  I looked at the pile of books beside me on the floor. But, as I was divided between the thrill of ownership and the need to compose a speech of appropriate thanks, we were interrupted by one of Marcella’s slaves. He burst into the room, panting hard.

  ‘I came as fast as I could, sir, once I’d found where you were.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Sir, the reverend father went out before nightfall. He was – he was drunk, sir. He hasn’t come back. No one knows where he is. Please come, sir. My lady is worried.’