De Tranquillitate Animi, IX, 4 (tr. Basore):
What is the use of having countless books and libraries, whose titles their owners can scarcely read through in a whole lifetime? The learner is not instructed, but burdened by the mass of them, and it is much better to surrender yourself to a few authors than to wander through many.
Well said. But Seneca continues with something that strikes some as dubious:
Forty thousand books were burned at Alexandria; let someone else praise this library as the most noble monument to the wealth of kings, as did Titus Livius, who says that it was the most distinguished achievement of the good taste and solicitude of kings. There was no "good taste" or "solicitude" about it, but only learned luxury -- nay, not even "learned," since they had collected the books, not for the sake of learning, but to make a show, just as many who lack even a child's knowledge of letters use books, not as the tools of learning, but as decorations for the dining room.
It was only for learned luxury? The books were collected non in studium sed in spectaculum? And only forty thousand were burned? See here. Excerpt:
The actual number of books destroyed that Seneca gives is matter of some controversy that we will need to briefly address. In ancient manuscripts it is common for large numbers to be expressed as a dot placed above the numeral for each power of ten. Clearly in copying it is easy to make a mistake with the number of dots and errors by a factor of ten are frequent. That may have happened in the case of On the Tranquillity of the Mind. The manuscript from Monte Cassino actually reads 40,000 books but this is usually corrected to 400,000 by editors as other sources such as Orosius give this figure for the number of scrolls destroyed. I have not seen the manuscript, of course, so do not know if this way the number is expressed. However, even if it was given in words the difference between 40,000 and 400,000 is also pretty small. I propose therefore that the number given by Seneca, and indeed all other ancient sources, should be ruled as inadmissible as evidence because we cannot be sure of what it was originally.
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