249: FAHRENHEIT CCCCLI
“When books are burned, men are burned” – Heine, Almansor, 1821, inspired by fiery passages in Milton’s Areopagitica.
(General surveys include two entitled Burning Books, by Haig Bosmajian and Matthew Fishburn, both in 2008, and Kenneth Baker’s On the Burning of Books: How Flames Fail to Destroy the Written Word, 2016. More ancient specifics in FH Cramer, ‘Book Burning and Censorship in Ancient Rome’, Journal of the History of Ideas 6, 1945, pp.157-96 – online – and Judith Herrin, ‘Book Burning as Purification in Early Byzantium,’ ch16 in Margins and Metropolis: Authority across the Byzantine Empire, 2013)
Despite its slogan of Parrhesia (‘Free Speech’, prefiguring the American First Amendment), the Athenian democracy was always suspicious of individuals promoting religious controversy. Hence, the bibliocide that befell Protagoras’s (5th cent. BC) agnostic tract On the Gods, ordered by the authorities to be burned in the Agora (Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, bk1 ch23 para6), Protagoras himself being exiled for good measure.
Roman book-burning had a symmetrical history, being associated with its last king, first emperor, and its top general in late antiquity. Various sources (e.g. Pliny, Natural History, bk13 ch27 para88) say the Sibyl of Cumae offered to sell him nine volumes of her collected prophecies. He refused. She burned three volumes, reoffered the rest at the same price. Another refusal. Three more were burned, the survivors re-presented, price unchanged. Tarquinius gave in – what a double-glazing saleswoman she would have made…
These volumes later – there had been an attempted burning in 186 BC – perished by accidental fire in the Temple of Jupiter (83 BC). Somewhat dubious (Tacitus, Annals, bk6 ch12) replacement copies were acquired. When Augustus (Suetonius, ch31) consigned 2,000 volumes of pontifical texts to the flames, these Sibylline ones were ostentatiously spared.
In 408, Flavius Stilicho (“Last of the Roman generals” – Gibbon), ordered them destroyed (Rutilius Namatianus (On the Return, bk2 vv51-60). His precise motive is unknown. Perhaps he had divined a fateful prophecy for himself? If so, they were bang on – Stilicho was executed later that year.
Augustus’s reign also saw the first Roman writer and his books martyred – detailed account with references and bibliography in Cramer. Historian-orator Titus Labienus excoriated Roman society so furiously that he was nicknamed ‘Rabienus’ (‘The Mad One’). Around AD 6-8, the emperor’s ever-tightening censorial noose fastened upon him and his works, the latter delivered to the stake. Labienus committed suicide, refusing permission to cremate his body, that it be spared the fate of his books, an obviously symbolic message to his persecutor.
A rival orator, Cassius Severus, was so moved by this that he also killed himself, proclaiming that, if they wanted to destroy Labienus’s works, they would have also to burn him alive since he knew them by heart – shades of Ray Bradbury’s book memorisers. In AD 25, under Tiberius, the historian Cremutius Cordus (Tacitus, Annals, bk4 chs34-5) was arraigned “on an unprecedented charge” of writing a treasonable Roman history in which the Caesarcides Brutus and Cassius were extolled. After the Senate ordered its burning, Cordus starved himself to death. However, Tacitus says friends hid some copies, also deriding “the stupidity of people who think today’s authority can destroy tomorrow’s memories” – a timeless remark.
Surprisingly, it was – of all people – Caligula, who de-banned the books of Cordus, Labienus, and Severus, saying that all events should stay on record for all time – not something that has benefited this emperor’s reputation.
Recording the conflagration (AD 59) of Fabricius Veiento’s satires on priests and senators – you’d have thought Nero would have enjoyed these – Tacitus (Annals, bk14 ch50) adds another eternal observation: “These books were much sought after when banned; after their revival, they were ignored” – Forbidden Fruit and all that…
“Books have their destinies” is a slogan from Terentianus Maurus to Umberto Eco. Numerous ancient book-burnings are on record. On the religious side, pagans and Christians are equally guilty, the latter sparing neither classical texts nor ‘heretical’ ones. Emperor Diocletian (AD 302) was both last persecutor of Christians and first to order burning their literature. When a Roman soldier mockingly burned a Torah (c. AD 50), rioting was only averted when his commander had him beheaded. Under Hadrian (117-38), a Jewish rabbi and a Torah were simultaneously incinerated. A key work of Epicurus was burned by the religious charlatan Alexander (cf. Steve Moore, FT27:46-52), being opposed by the latter’s followers in an unlikely alliance with Christians.
Wikipedia’s brobdingnagian list of book burnings managed to overlook Cordus, Labienus, Severus, and Veiento. Weirder yet, it leaves out the best-known story, that of the destruction of the great library at Alexandria. Actually, there had been two previous accidental burnings, associated with Julius Caesar (48 BC) and Emperor Aurelian (270-75) before Caliph Omar (642) ordered a mass bibliocide, proclaiming: “If these books agree with the Koran, we don’t need them; if they disagree, we don’t want them.”
Happily, this is probably not true; cf. L Canfora, The Vanished Library (1990) for full analysis. Sources for this episode are centuries later, and stories of libraries burnt by accident or design go back to Assyrian and Old Testament times. Destruction of books at Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade (1204) is better attested. Indeed, Omar’s literary crime – contrary to the usual mediaeval Arab venerating preservation of classical texts (another strike against the Daesh perversion of Islam) – has been questioned ever since Edward Gibbon, who (DFRE, ch51) began his demolition of the story with “For my own part, I am strongly tempted to deny both the fact and its consequences…”
“Everybody who is attacking something is sailing on a windmill, while denouncing merry-go-rounds” – Fort, Books, p711