Pay it forward
LAURENCE TOTELIN enjoys an evocative account of how learning from the ancient world was passed down the years
The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History in Seven Cities by Violet Moller Picador, 336 pages, £20 In Constantinople in AD 512 the imperial princess Anicia Juliana was presented with a stunningly illustrated manuscript. It contained several Greek texts, including Dioscorides’ important pharmacological treatise, De materia medica, a text that dates from the first century AD. This manuscript remained in Constantinople for around 1,000 years, but in the 16th century it passed to the Holy Roman Empire and has since been kept in Vienna, hence its nickname of ‘Vienna Dioscorides’. Its owners over the centuries annotated the manuscript in Greek, Arabic and Hebrew.
The ‘Vienna Dioscorides’ makes a few appearances in Violet Moller’s exciting new book, which will appeal to anyone interested in the transmission of knowledge over time and space. Starting in the Hellenistic period (323–31 BC) and ending around AD 1500, Moller takes us on a journey around seven significant centres of learning: Alexandria, Baghdad, Córdoba, Toledo, Salerno, Palermo and Venice. On this odyssey, we encounter a cast of fascinating characters and still more exciting ideas, but the focus is loosely on the transmission of three key bodies of work: Euclid on mathematics, Ptolemy on astronomy and astrology, and Galen on medicine. We learn how the ideas of these thinkers survived through changes in book production (from papyrus scroll, to parchment codex, to printed book), through translation into various languages (Greek, Syriac, Arabic and Latin), and through major religious changes that saw the birth and spread of both Christianity and Islam.
Moller’s great mosaic is full of nuance. She attempts whenever she can to stress the contribution of overlooked figures, especially women. Cleopatra and Hypatia are named, but anonymous herbalist women are acknowledged for their significant contribution to medicine. At times, Moller presents her facts with a little too much confidence. For instance, while she acknowledges that there is little evidence on Euclid’s life, she assuredly places him under the reign of Ptolemy I when nothing is less certain. She also misses some opportunities for a good anecdote. Thus, she could have stressed that the original title of Ptolemy’s Almagest was Mathēmatikē Syntaxis (‘Mathematical Systematic Treatise’). Almagest is the work’s Arabic title, where ‘magest’ is a corrupted form of the Greek word for ‘greatest’, megistē.”
Those quibbles aside, Moller’s writing is so evocative that you almost feel the papyrus, vellum and paper she lovingly depicts. In her preface, Moller recounts how she was awakened to the theme of her book as a 21-year-old travelling to Palermo with a friend. Around the same age, I made a similar trip and was told by our hotel host: “If I visited Palermo for the first time, I would fall in love.” Similarly, Moller invites us to fall in love with her subject.