The Golden Ass

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Book Reviews

May 2002

St. Augustine: "The Confesions"
Harold Bloom: "The Western Canon"
Cavelli-Sforza:"The History and Geography of Human Genes"
Celine:"Journey to the End of Night"
Charles Dickens: "Bleak House"
Emily Dickinson: "Poems" by Gary Sloan
Ferguson: "The Penguin Rhyming Lexicon"
William Harris: "Ancient Literacy"
Sappho / Mary Barnard: "Poems"
Jonathan Swift: "Gulliver's Travels"

***)"if you are squeamish don't prod the beach rubble"
Sappho (before 610-c.580 BC.) translated by Mary Barnard

Sapho never fails to create the emotional incident around the passion of love from the symptoms which accompany it in real life. And wherein does she show her excellence? In the skill with which she selects and combines the most striking and intense of those symptoms.
Longinus "On the Sublime" (1st. century BC.)

That Man ...
That man is peer of gods, who
face to face sits listening
to your sweet speech and lovely
          laughter.
It is this that rouses a tumult
in my breast. At mere sight of you
my voice falters, my tongue
        is broken.

Straightway, a delicate fire runs in
my limbs, my eyes
are blinded and my ears
        thunder.

Sweat pours out: a trembling hunts
me down. I grow
paler than grass and lack little
         of dying.

by Sappho (* before 610 Ý c.580 BC.)
tr. William Carlos William (18831963) see below *

Is it not wonderful how she summones at the same time, soul, body, hearing, tongue, sight, colour, all as though they had wandered off apart from herself? She feels contradictory sensations, freezes, burns, raves, reasons -- for one that is at the point of death is clearly beside herself. She wants to display not a single emotion but a whole congress of emotions. Lovers all show symptoms as these, but what gives supreme merit to her art, as I said the skill with which she chooses the most striking and combines them into a single whole. It is, I fancy, much in the same way that the poet in describing storms picks out the most alarming circumstances.
Longinus "On the Sublime" (1st. century BC.)

It is the year of the Lord 1073. The two churches celebrate. Pope Gregory VII, the incessant celibate campaigner, and his counterpart in Constantinople, the patriarch Constantine Psellus agree to end the schism. Needless to say, that it didn't last; the Greek Orthodox Church would not stand for impositions from the Vatican. But for the time being it was honeymoon. In both Capitals the clergy immolated the "idolatrous and lewd" legacy of an ancient sorceress and what was believed to be of one of her numerous lovers.

Pope Gregory VII in Rome and Michael Cerularius and Constantine Psellus in Constantinople destroyed simultaneously 11.000 verses of Sappho and Alceius, and thus obliterated, what had escaped till then the Norman raiders, Attila the Hun, the Byzantine iconoclasm, numerous fires and earthquakes and the neglect of the copyists. A continuous tradition of 1,650 years had come to an end. May the names of the holy arsonists be remembered in infamy.

Back in 580 BC we find ourselves in a provincial, deceptively idyllic situation. Across the Aegean and further south, towards the ports of Palestine, the Jewish state had just breathed her last, Jeremiah ended his life as a refuge in Egypt and a young shaman who used to bake his bread over his own turds (Ezek. 4:12) took his first commissions from his Babylonian overlord. Babylon was the cosmopolitan hub of the world, the oyster in heaven, but the skies were high and Babylon far beyond the horizon.

The Greek neighborhood was a loquacious lot, apparently forever divided in blood feuds between aristocratic clans and self-made tyrants who held a precarious mandate based on referenda and silent support by the commoners in tiny townships. Democracy had not been invented yet, continual vendettas and frequent banishments paused only briefly, when the Greek manhood assembled in Olympia. Being a Greek meant to be young and fit and in an unending competition for this one moment of fame.

A time of austere pleasures:

Don't ask me what to wear
I have no embroidered
headband from Sardis to
give you Cleis, such as
I wore

and my mother
always said that in her
day a purple ribbon
looped in the hair was thought
to be high style indeed
but we were dark:
............................ a girl
whose hair is yellower than
torchlight should wear no
headdress but fresh flowers ...

We know very little about Sappho's life: she grew up and died in Lesbos, an island with steep slopes and sweltering olive groves and a ceaseless surf running flat on to the fatigued beaches. There is an orthodox monastery high up in the hills, clusters of sleepy cats survey the blazing scene from the whitewashed garden walls and from the stepping stones of winding village lanes. The people are friendly, and tourists are invited to photograph a marble quarry which had been abandoned in Sappho's time.

I made friends among the locals, I learned to play backgammon, it was my first honeymoon, and a good time to get a seamless suntan. I watched with disapproval the brutal killing of the octopi but had no problem eating them. I began to see why Homer in his epics never uses the word 'blue': the sea there at dawn is black and mother of pearl pink. Sappho too refers to the ocean as "black." The ancients in their esteem gave her the second place next to Homer.

... herdsman of evening

Hesperus, you herd
homeward whatever
Dawn's light dispersed

You herd sheep herd
goats herd children
home to their mothers

Sappho was a member of the local aristocracy and at some point of her life fell victim to the bitter feud between the rising powers of the commoners in the ports and towns and the landed gentry on the estates. After a bloody massacre she, and the surviving members of her clan were sent into exile. We know that she returned after ten years, a long time, when people still use to die young. That's all the positive knowledge we have, the rest is legend.

... waiting where the grove is
pleasantest, by precincts

sacred to you; incense
smokes on the altar, cold
streams murmur through the

apple branches, a young
rose thicket shades the ground
and quivering leaves pour

down deep sleep; in meadows
where horses have grown sleek
among spring flowers, dill

scents the air ...

Some say a cavalry corps,
some infantry, some again,
will maintain that the swift oars

of our fleet are the finest
sight on dark earth; but I say
that whatever one loves, is.

Her poems are composed in syllabic meters partly of her own invention: each 'foot' strictly observes the difference in syllabic length between say "tool" and "toll" or "wheel" and "will" and of course there was no rhyming. The speech accent was comparably free to follow its natural way except for incisions - a little pause - now and then required to structure the line or the stanza. The Sapphic stanza is one closed unit, it can't be dissembled in parts. It goes like this:

long | short | long/short | long | short | short | long | short | long/short
long | short | long/short | long | short | short | long | short | long/short
long | short | long/short | long | short | short | long | short | long/short
long | short | short | long | short

To my knowledge only Thomas Campion (1567-1620), Robert Herrick (1591-1674) and Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) ever attempted something like this in English. Even Auden concedes that this doesn't work in English. So what Mary Barnard in her translation did, was giving us a hybrid based on the principles laid out by William Carlos Williams. I am not saying that this was wrong. It is not how a translation should be, but apparently after so many failures of getting it right, this was the only option left, an option depending on the translator's talents and instincts.

"With his venom
irresistible
and bittersweet

that loosener
of limbs, Love

reptile-like
strikes me down"

Tonight I've watched
the moon and then
the Pleiades
go down

The night is now
half-gone; youth
goes; I am

in bed alone ...

Ms. Barnard has proven herself to be a talented mediator.

* "I have worked with two or three friends in making the translation for I am no Greek scholar but have been veritably shocked by the official British translation of a marvellous poem by one of the greatest poets of all time. How their ears can have sanctioned the enormities that they produced is more than I can understand. American scholars must have been scared off by the difficulties of the job not to have done better. Their prosy versions were little better to my taste. It may be that I also have failed but all I can say is that as far as I have been able to do I have been as accurate as the meaning of the words permitted always with a sense of our own American idiom to instruct me." William Carlos Williams (Collected Poems 2:498-99)

(Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is not my favorite Poet. But I acknowledge her place and importance within the context of American literature the same way as I acknowledge the pivotal attitude behind the character of Huck Fin as a defining element for countless characterizations and attitudes in the American novel since Mark Twain. (A low life character, white trash, confined to biting and chewing his way to the top, yet not just as a picaresque example, but taken serious as an individual and object of empathy. A personae running on the same rail as a defiant adolescent struggling to become an accepted adult.) As for Emily: a poet who does deliberately uglify and refuses to strive for perfection in a medium, where perfection is simply everything, is bound to lose my interest in him or her. She is not a Sappho (c. 620-580 BC), nor a Marianne Moor (1887-1972). But Miss Moor, artistically, as a poetic persona housed in America, was indebted to Emily. It is the American enigma - or should I say trauma?
Michael Sympson

Emily Dickinson: Pagan Sphinx
by Gary Sloan

"That no Flake of [snow] fall on you or them-is a wish that would be a Prayer, were Emily not a Pagan." (letter of 1878 to Catherine Sweetser) "Knew I how to pray, to intercede for your [broken] Foot were intuitive-but I am but a Pagan." (letter of 1885 to Helen Hunt Jackson)

When Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) died, she was virtually unknown to the public. Only seven of her poems had been published, several without permission, and they attracted little notice. Today, she is widely hailed as one of the greatest American poets, perhaps the greatest. Her poems are staple cargo in junior high, high school, and college literature courses. Never married, she spent almost her entire life in the capacious family home in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father was an influential political figure - lawyer, judge, legislator, first citizen. In her later years, she rarely left the house or entertained guests. She communicated mainly by notes and letters. She habitually wore white. Her sequestered lifestyle earned her the epithet Queen Recluse. Few people, then or even now, know she was also Queen Pagan. She died a barbed foe of Christianity.

"All men say 'What' to me," she told Thomas Wentworth Higginson,[i] an eminent litterateur and dutiful correspondent. The phraseology - eccentric, pixie, and oblique - is vintage Dickinson. She meant people were baffled by her, even though, she protested, she couldn't fathom why. Since Higginson - now, through the fiendish vagaries of fortune, branded a doltish mentor oblivious to her genius - would later describe her as his "partially cracked poetess at Amherst" (L570), she had picked a dubious confidant. Recounting his first meeting with her twenty years before, Higginson in a posthumous tribute wrote: "She was much too enigmatical a being for me to solve in an hour's interview" (L476). And, perhaps, in a lifetime.

Dickinson's enigmatic nature shrouds her evolution from Christian manqué to pagan. She had histrionic propensities that obscure the line between her true beliefs and those she feigned. Intermittently in her 1,775 poems and approximately 1,100 extant letters (many poems accompanied the letters), she struck poses and adopted personas. "When I state myself as the Representative of my verse," she told Higginson, "it does not mean me - but a supposed person" (L412). In early professions of impiety, she had a penchant for hyperbole and self-dramatization that render her claims hard to evaluate. Later, an authentic infidel, she accommodated orthodox sensibilities. Long after she had chucked belief in a hereafter, she continued to quote promissory biblical verses to assure bereaved relatives and neighbors they would be reunited with their deceased loved ones. When she was herself bereaved, she accepted the ministrations of clergymen. She even solicited platitudes on immortality, plucking "at a twig of evidence" (P501).

In the late 1850s (she was born in 1830), she began couching her thoughts in a cryptic style that muffled her heterodoxy. "Tell all the truth," she advised, "but tell it slant" (P1129). Occasionally, she was too oblique-some might say cunning-to be scrutable. "The whole truth about Emily Dickinson will elude us always," said Richard Sewall, her biographer. "She seems almost willfully to have seen to that" (S668).

From an early age, the seeds of heresy lay dormant in her. As an adolescent, she had a willful streak that bridled under compulsion. Immensely intelligent and observant, she kept her own counsel. "How," she marveled, "do people live without any thoughts. How do they get the strength to put on their clothes in the morning?" (L474). Her mother she classed with the mindless (L404). She never joined the family church because she couldn't testify to any visitation of the Holy Spirit, the ticket for membership. She stopped attending in her late twenties. She stopped attending in her late twenties because she couldn't testify to any visitation of the Holy Spirit, the ticket for membership. At fifteen, after one of the revivals that periodically convulsed Amherst, she wrote her friend Abiah Root: "I was almost persuaded to be a Christian. I thought I never again could be thoughtless and worldly. But I soon forgot my morning prayer or else it was irksome to me. One by one my old habits returned and I cared less for religion than ever" (L27).

Her disinclination to swap this world for the next one waxed ever stronger: "The world allured me & in an unguarded moment I listened to her siren voice. From that moment I seemed to lose interest in heavenly things. Friends reasoned with me & told me of the danger I was in. I felt my danger & was alarmed, but I had rambled too far to return & ever since my heart has been growing harder" (L30-31).

Anon, the siren world had lured her to the precipice: "I do not feel I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die" (L38).

Shocking words from a fifteen-year-old catechized at the First Church in Amherst, a Congregationalist assembly. There, ministers blazoned hell in all its lurid specificity as the wages of sin. For years, sermons on the Day of Doom spooked Dickinson. At twenty-three, she wrote Elizabeth Holland, an enduring friend and wife of a popular author: "The minister today preached about death and judgment, and what would become of those who behaved improperly-and somehow it scared me. He preached such an awful sermon I didn't think I should ever see you again until the Judgment Day. The subject of perdition seemed to please him somehow" (L309). The Hollands embraced a "creedless, churchless, ministerless christianity" and an avuncular, "sunshiny" God (S600; L713). Their friendship helped Emily slough off lingering anxieties about the fire that never quenches. Hell, she would later write, "defies typography" (P929).

At Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where she spent two terms after she graduated from Amherst Academy in 1847, proselytism was rampant. Thrice weekly, the founder of the school, Mary Lyon, exhorted the students in plenary assembly. Once a week, she counseled them in groups. Guest sermons abounded. "Many," wrote Dickinson, "are flocking to the ark of safety" (L60). She wasn't among them. On the basis of self-inventories, students at Holyoke were classified as Christians, Hopers, or No-Hopers (S361). Dickinson left as she came, a No-Hoper.

After she returned to Amherst in the summer of 1848, she sporadically rued her lapsed state, albeit her sincerity is hard to gauge. In letters to pious schoolmates, she descanted on her intractable naughtiness: "I am one of the lingering bad ones, and so do I slink away, and pause, and ponder, and ponder, and pause, and do work without knowing why-not surely for this brief world, and more sure it is not for heaven-and I ask what this message [of Christ] means" (L98-99). She was a menace to the innocent: "You are out of the way of temptation and out of the way of the tempter - I didn't mean to make you wicked - but I was - and am - and shall be - and I was with you so much that I couldn't help contaminate" (L83).

She simulated the forlorn heroine in a mawkish tearjerker: "What shall we do my darling, when trial grows more, and more, when the dim, lone light expires, and it's dark, so very dark, and we wander, and know not where, and cannot get out of the forest-whose is the hand to help us, and to lead, and forever guide us?" (L98). In the next breath, she segues into an impish identification with the archfiend: "Where do you think I've strayed and from what new errand returned. I have come from 'to and fro, and walking up and down' the same place that Satan hailed from when God asked where he'd been" (L99).

By the mid-1850s, her break with orthodoxy was irreparable. She had embarked on a quest for truth unfettered by doctrinal constraints and herd prescriptions. Like Herman Melville, she forsook the safe port of conventionalism for "landlessness" - deep, earnest, independent, risky musings. The perilous odyssey exhilarated her: "You are nipping in the bud fancies which I let blossom," she wrote Abiah. "The shore is safer, but I love to buffet the sea - I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but oh, I love the danger!" (L104). To her pious friends, that way madness lay. To Dickinson, salvation:

Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense-the starkest Madness -
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail -
Assent-and you are sane -
Demur-you're straightway dangerous -
And handled with a Chain - (P435)

As her paganism ripened, she demurred at Christian nonsense.

She twitted the glitzy New Jerusalem vouchsafed to the elect. It was a thronged "Corporation" devoid of privacy (L374), an interminable Sunday where "recess never comes" (P413). Worse, the voyeuristic proprietor never traveled or slept: "If God could make a visit / Or ever took a Nap / So not to see us - but they say / Himself a telescope / Perennial beholds us" (P413). Even the saints didn't quite believe in the "Heaven further on" - despite opiate assurances from the pulpit: "Narcotics cannot still the Tooth / That nibbles at the soul" (P501).

Everlasting bliss was an oxymoron. Happiness lay in the chase, not the catch: "To possess is past the instant / We achieve the Joy - / Immortality contented / Were anomaly" (P1036). Dickinson had never been keen on eternity. At fifteen, she wrote Abiah: "Does not Eternity appear dreadful to you. I often get to thinking of it and it seems so dark to me that I almost wish there was no Eternity. To think that we must forever live and never cease to be. It seems as if Death would be a relief to so endless a state of existence" (L28). Ecstasy fed on evanescence: "That it will never come again / Is what makes life so sweet" (P1741).

Pluckier than Pascal, Emily wagered on this life: "I cannot help esteem / The 'Bird within the Hand' / Superior to the one / The 'Bush' may yield me / Or may not / Too late to choose again" (P1012). Besides, "Who has not found the heaven below / Will fail of it above" (P1544). Eternity was "obtained in time" not as an infinite temporal progression, but in moments of heightened sensibility to life (P800). The soul, she guessed, is inseparable from the body: "The Spirit lurks within the Flesh / Like Tides within the Sea / That make the Water live, estranged / What would the Either be?" (P1576).

The Christian God she treated with sarcasm, contempt, indignation, and amusement. Her parents, she told Higginson, "address an Eclipse every morning, whom they call their 'Father'" (L404). The Eclipse was also "Papa Above" (P61), "the gentleman in the air" (L217), the "little God with Epaulettes" (L880), a "small Deity" (P694), "our old neighbor" (P623), and - now paraphrasing - a conceited tyrant (P1317), vindictive dunce (P267), thievish scofflaw (P116), lethal intruder (P1462), homicidal burglar (P49), cold assassin (P1624), and sadistic inquisitor (P536).

As in a Kafka novel, the Inquisitor arraigns us for an unspecified offense: "The Crime, from us, is hidden," though "he is presumed to know" (P1601). In an indiscreet moment, he made us wicked, but we must sue him for pardon: "'Heavenly Father'-take to thee / The supreme iniquity / Fashioned by thy candid Hand / In a moment contraband - / Though to trust us seem to us / More respectful - 'We are Dust' - / We apologize to thee for thine own Duplicity" (P1461).

In letters to intimates, Dickinson routinely zinged the duplicitous Papa: "Vinnie [her sister] rocks her Garden and moans that God won't help her. I suppose he is too busy getting angry with the Wicked every day" (L582). "God's little Blond Blessing we have long deemed you, and hope his so-called 'Will' will not compel him to revoke you" (L633). "Why," she mused to Mabel Loomis Todd, who edited a posthumous collection of her poems, "should we censure Othello [for the jealous murder of Desdemona] when the Criterion Lover says, 'Thou shalt have no other Gods before Me'?" (L889). After President Garfield's abortive battle for life, she wrote her cousins Louise and Frances Norcross: "When we think of his lone effort to live and its bleak reward, the mind turns to the myth 'for His mercy endureth forever,' with confiding revulsion" (L711).

Her attitude toward Jesus was mixed. As risen Savior, he was a fickle suitor who pledged his troth then hightailed it: "Within thy Grave! / Oh no, but on some other flight - / Thou only camest to mankind / To rend it with Good night" (P1552). While he gallivanted through the heavens, his followers mourned his sham demise: "Some Arrows slay but whom they strike - / But this slew all but him - / Who so appareled his Escape - / Too trackless for a Tomb" (P1565). Despite promises, he received no callers: "At least to pray is left-is left / Oh Jesus-in the Air - I know not which thy chamber is - / I'm knocking everywhere" (P502).

As Son of Jehovah, he was a pretentious bore. As Son of Sorrow, our compatriot: "When he tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is 'acquainted with grief,' we listen, for that also is an acquaintance of our own" (L837). The Crucifixal Clef was a universal key though only one crucifixion was memorialized: "One Crucifixion is recorded-only - / How many be / Is not affirmed of Mathematics / Or History - / One Calvary-exhibited to Stranger - / As many be / As persons - or Peninsulas" (P553). Gethsemane was "a province in the Being's Center"-Dickinson, the Empress of Calvary, one of its habitués.

When the Amherst sphinx styled herself a pagan, she meant she didn't believe in the biblical God. What sort of deity, if any, she did believe in is hard to pinpoint. Her tracks crisscross.

According to Richard Sewall, in "her own personal theology, the World and Man and God were all but coordinate" (S67). In one place, she chides atheists as benighted souls who "Stake an entire store / Upon a Moment's shallow Rim / While their commuted Feet / The Torrents of Eternity / Do all but inundate" (P1380). Since she equated eternity with heightened consciousness, her atheist could be anyone with straitened perception or unfurnished imagination. Elsewhere, she assimilates God to thought: "The Brain is just the weight of God / For heft them-Pound for Pound - / And they will differ - if they do - / As Syllable from Sound" (P632). She also said, "The Supernatural is only the Natural disclosed" (L424), shades of naturalism or pantheism.

She mocked anthropomorphic conceptions of deity (P1689). She sifted Omnipotence from "God the Father-and the Son": "Omnipotence has not a Tongue- / His lisp is Lightning and the Sun" (P420). Omnipotence was also life itself: "To be alive-is Power - / Existence in itself / Without a further function - / Omnipotence Enough" (P677). She distrusted the Enlightenment claim that the orderly motions of celestial bodies "substantiate" a Designer: "If Aims impel these Astral Ones / The ones allowed to know / Know that which makes them as forgot / As Dawn forgets them now" (P1528).

Still, she did say someone "tailored the nut" and "prepared this mighty show" (P1371, 1644). One of her popular poems, a junior high favorite, reads: "I never saw a Moor - / I never saw the Sea - / Yet know I how the Heather looks / And what a Billow be. / I never spoke with God / Nor visited in Heaven - / Yet certain am I of the spot / As if the checks were given" (P1052). Since the poem was written in the 1860s, it can't be dismissed as a spasm of pious juvenilia. Perhaps the poem was enclosed in a consolatory letter to a believer. Scholars estimate only about one-tenth of Dickinson's letters have survived. (Dickinson kept copies of poems she sent with letters.) She may also be using "Heaven" and "God" figuratively. The "spot" might be within her. Because of her occasional pious effusions (or what seem such), coupled with her friendships with members of sundry sects, scholars have tried to lasso her into Christian Spritualism, conservative Unitarianism, liberal Unitarianism, Episcopalianism, eucharistic Presbyterianism, and "moderate" Evangelicalism.

My guess is she died an agnostic. "Faith is Doubt," she told Susan Dickinson, her sister-in-law and beloved confidante (L912). Emily preferred mystery to certitude, spry to calcified belief: "On subjects of which we know nothing, we both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble" (S462). The ceaseless vacillation galvanized her spirit: "Sweet Skepticism of the Heart / That knows and does not know / And tosses like a Fleet of Balm / Affronted by the snow" (P413).

In a way, Emily Dickinson was a polytheist. She worshiped Nature, Love, Truth, Beauty, and Words-in indeterminate order. "Those who lift their hats shall see Nature," she said, "as devout do God" (S612). "If we love Flowers, are we not 'born again' every day?" (L899). Love was "the joyful little Deity / We are not scourged to serve" (L695). Any human face she loved "put out Jesus'" (P640). Truth was God's "twin identity" (P809). To Beauty, she lifted her prayers: "Have mercy on me / But if I expire today / Let it be in sight of thee" (P1654). The "Word made flesh" was poetry that "breathes distinctly" and "has not the power to die" (P1651).

Her final letter, written to her Norcross cousins shortly before she slipped into a terminal coma, read simply: "Called back."

Cryptic, of course.

References
[i] The Letters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 2, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge: Belknap Pr. of Harvard UP, 1958, p. 415. Subsequent references to Letters are parenthetically indicated in the text by L followed by page number. Letters has three volumes, but the pagination is continuous. Two other sources are similarly cited in the text:
S=Richard Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols., New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974.
P=The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, Boston: Little, Brown, 1960. The number that follows P is the number Johnson gives to the poem, not a page number. Johnson's numbers are used in many anthologies.
(Freestanding secular poems by Dickinson selected by editor. Note the irreverent imagery in her poem about Indian Summer.)

*)A precursor of symbolism
Charles Dickens: "Bleak House"

When I read the first book of Dickens I must have been seven or eight. I never was into children's books and insisted on reading Oliver Twist. I also had the measles and ran a high fever, a fatal combination, especially when Fagin sends his little troopers into your dreams. My mother took away the book and my life was saved. But somehow this has affected my entire attitude when it comes to Dickens, even after full recovery. I saw nothing of his humor and everything of his depressive gloom. I wouldn't touch a book of his with tongs. Over the years this became a ridiculous phobia.

Then one day I made the acquaintance of a London spinster who herself seemed to have jumped straight from a page of Dickens' novels. You know, the bony type with a shrill laughter under a head of wiry hair, but a warrior before the gin bottle. She had an uncanny eye for the idiosyncrasies and little ticks of almost each and everyone and she pointed out to me the whole collection of Dickensian characters walking past my window. These days Mr. Podsnap works on the stock exchange and his flourish still comes in handy when the Dow Johnes is dropping. With the help of this good lady I have seen the Pickwick's whole cast walking the streets in the flesh. It is a gift, and I wish I had it. I decided to have another go at Dickens.

Regardless of genre, there are two types of imaginative literature. Stand-up routines and pieces that try to convey something. Both are legitimate, but personally I prefer the latter. Coming to think of it, as a stand-up routine even "Ulysses" might actually be salvageable. Anyway, Dickens is definitely the stand-up comedian, and he and Shakespeare have this in common, that one reads them both mainly for their turn of phrase. Take away the phrasing from Shakespeare and we are left with silly anecdotes and downright ludicrous nonsense. Denude Dickens of his language and the man presents himself as a pretty ordinary dime novelist.

Seriously! Can you name any one of Dickens' novels you would read for its jaw-dropping thrills? ... Thought so. But I learned to like Dickens, because his "novels" are really sheer poetry, prose-poems of three decker tome size which outshine everything that any poet of the period had written, including Browning and Hopkins. None even remotely has achieved Dickens' variety of rhythm and cadence, or matches his felicity of similes and metaphors. And "Bleak House" is certainly a lonely peak even within Dickens' own production. Just listen to this (make sure you are not running a fever):

"... , these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery. As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing more evil in every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years--though born expressly to do it."

Disgustingly brilliant and highly symbolic! Well that is Dickens. He is one of the few epic geniuses who we gladly forgive that their style is more of a player than a conveyor. No matter which page we turn, it is always Dickens and nothing but Dickens. But what about incident and character? Shouldn't we expect a collection of caricatures in Daumier's fashion? Not in Bleak House - the ghostly cast walking the foggy streets is of flesh and blood or some other juice, but walk they do and convincingly.

Less convincing though are the incidents and concerns. The judicial system which Dickens appeared to criticize was already obsolete in Dickens' own era by at least three decades; the law suit in "Bleak House" is based on a dim memory from the author's own childhood. Many social issues of poverty and poor public housing touched in the book had already been taken care of by a number of reform acts. When Dickens published his novel, London had just opened to the public the first tunnels for a new underground transport system.

No, who means to read "Bleak House," in order to bolster social conscience, better turn to Engels' book on the condition of the working class in Manchester, (a must read in my opinion, but not for its literary merits.) Dickens was first and foremost an artist, and a great artist. For people who like to discuss artistic styles, "Bleak House" is something of a landmark: it introduces the era of symbolism. Not that Dickens had intended to do so - it came naturally to him to write like this, but what for him was an expression of his temperament, became for the generation after Dickens a new method, which in its excesses could take the shape of Mallarmé's oracular poetry.

But this was still a far cry from a distant future. Dickens is anything but oracular. A lord of the language who all his enormous powers had funneled into "Bleak House," and to such extend as we would never see again nor have seen before.

alright - and what has all this to do with art?
Celine: "Journey to the End of Night"

Lashing out is not the answer. And by answer I don't mean anything remotely, like a "solution." Just attitude. I mean it is hard to look with sympathy at your surrounding from the floor of a dumb factory-job. I had been there and I know what Celine is talking about, in the Detroit episode. Being surrounded by determined illiterates (often from one's own family) it is tempting to escape into some mental Cinderella fantasy and walk with an invisible chip on your shoulder.

It is the place you absolutely don't want to be. A steelworker or coal miner with pride in his work? Completely incomprehensible. He must be deluding himself; surely he just has no choice or never been confronted with a glimpse on something better. Well, actually he has. He too went to school at some point in his life. He could have paid attention. He does have choices. It is only harder for him to grab and hold on to his choices, because of the demoralizing circumstances.

It is one of our society's dark little secrets. The most hallowed, most cherished values, designed to keep up moral in social dead-end situations, as a matter of fact, actually demoralize the underprivileged into a situation of obliging stupor. It's just too hard to go through so many sleepless nights and work a second job. Obviously it is easy to be angry, or let slip the reigns on one's sarcasm. But what are the alternatives? Aristocracy? You gotta be joking. Who needs them?

But if I told you that a true aristocrat can walk through hell and come out of it virtually intact, what does this mean? That he has distance and perspective. An attitude admittedly easier acquired when you sit on the top of the hub than in the trenches, and even easier with the old boys network backing you up. But there you are. I really think, a society that has lost a working aristocracy, has lost perspective. Whether as a model for manners and values or as an object of hate, it forms the outlook and expectations of those who are not part of it.

Life has become a lot less colorful, the demeanor a lot more degrading; the expectations deteriorated to the meanest common denominator of completely pointless fluff. I am not a socialist, and I am not a conservative, but even I can see, that something must be fundamentally wrong, if the figure of the stock-broker - that is a compulsive gambler in disguise - suddenly finds himself riding the crest as a model for our highest social ambitions. This is the best we can do?

It is true, self-pity leaves me singularly unimpressed, even if it comes in the guise of gritty epigrams or in litanies laced with vocabulary from the gutter. How could it ever have become so popular? Reading Celine again, I find myself confirmed in my first impression of a twisted individual with an attitude problem, of a whiner finding fault with everybody before he dares looking into a mirror - and I am not amused. Celine is pissed about a lot of things, and he says so, exercising his first amendment.

And being pissed is also supposed to make the model for Henry Miller and Bukowski. But the two Americans are much less of a whiner than Celine. Not that Miller is exactly awe inspiring - but there is more honesty, especially in Bukowski; more awareness of being responsible for their own choices. (And where is the justice in this set-up? Who says the Universe is build on justice?) In the end, everybody has opinions. Opinions are cheap.

On a planet populated by six billion opinionated beings, there should be something for everybody in the haversack. In other words, where it matters, opinions really shouldn't matter. What I do miss in Celine, and what apparently draws the line, is a sense of tragedy. Perhaps, it is beyond his powers to deliver (which is to be expected from a person with his prejudices) or rather, in this our blessed time and age, a foundation has been lost.

Shakespeare is already a wee bit shaky, but from some time on in the early eighteen hundreds, all we manage to produce, are sad stories, but no more tragedies. Same applies to comedies - these days we are funny because we are ridiculous or cynical. That's why our soaps are rightly called "sit-coms." It seems we are even losing the ability to tie together a story which is funny as a story. (I was brought up on a premise that true comedy can turn to tragedy and vice versa.)

***)giants, midgets, cobwebs and the moons of Mars
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), "Gullivers Travels"

"There are unquestionably people who won't appreciate Swift's style but there will also be people who don't appreciate good food, good drink and healthy exercise--all you can do is leave them to their folly and continue apace. No English language writer has ever matched Swift's chainsaw tongue. His misanthropic rage, vented in Gulliver's Travels, hacks away at the tender, maggoty, easily severed parts of pretense and hypocritical morality. Nor does Swift anywhere ask for quarter, as he gives none. Those who don't like his reading are free to continue in their superficiality or their ignorance, and his definition of satire--a looking glass in which people see every face but their own- remains the definitive statement of the art. Swift's lessons on writing are also direct and easy to grasp: write simply. His acid wit eats through everything it touches: academia, politics, literature, modernism...it's a bitter pill, especially if you are one of the few who sees your own face in the mirror."
Seth Davidson

I couldn't say it better. Swift's novel is a marvel of the language and a universe of its own. And sometimes, this clearest of all English writers could be completely enigmatic. Or how are we to explain that Asaph Hall discovered the two sattelites of Mars in 1877, but we read about the planet's companions as early as 1727, the year when Richard Sympson, (yeah, yeah, the Sympsons) published Samuel Gulliver's travel account. How could the author possibly know?

Well he knew of course Newton's physics; it was the talk in polite society, and it was long known that the total mass indicated by Mars' trajectory did not quite tally with observation. The introduction of better optical instruments finally solved the riddle. So Swift took the liberty of a very educated guess. And this coming from the same guy who so hilariously poked fun on the Royal Society of Sciences! The University of Lagado is undoubtedly the heart of the book. Imaginative writing at its best.

Swift is almost always intriguing. The exchange of material tokens to replace the spoken word is not an entirely implausible proposition. The random computer to establish literature from scratch is an ongoing project in our days. Reclaiming nutrient's from stool reminds me of the "food replicators" on the spaceship 'Enterprise.' And what's so special about artificial fibre with the properties of spiderwebs? (For nylons?) Done that, been there!

Dr. Johnson was a great man and a good man, but not entirely free of envy. So we have to take his comments on Swift and Sterne with a pinch of salt. Of course it is true, the idea to place the novel's protagonist first among midgets and then to pitch him against giants with all its potential for satire is really easy to do - - once the method had been discovered. Well, nobody was stopping you, Sir, to do likewise. Anyway, somebody is always the first, and the rest of us can only applaud. Let's rise for a standing ovation.

Worth looking into, but seriously flawed
Harold Bloom: "The Western Canon" by Geoff Puterbaugh

This book amounts to a survey of Western literature since Dante and Shakespeare, and is a typical Bloom-book in being very thought-provoking. His central message is a very important one - Western civilization is apparently at some risk of abandoning its literature. However improbable this may sound, I hasten to assure you that our radicalized universities have done everything in their power to neglect and abandon our literary masterpieces. At a large state university in California, the standard reading list for the "Great Books" course (formerly several dozen books) has been reduced to:

1. Plato's "Symposium"
2. Thoreau's "Walden"
3. Gandhi's "Hind Swaraj"
4. Alice Walker's "The Color Purple"

Even more melancholy is the fact that this list evidently includes one "gay" book, one "environmentalist" book, one "pacifist" book, and one "feminist" book. That three of them are bilge seems not to have occurred to the nominating committee. (Many would deny Thoreau that palm -- I urge them to re-read this idiotic pretentious crack-pate in the company of "Saint Gandhi" and his lunatic prescriptions for India: "Get rid of all the trains and all the doctors:" indeed!)

So, the current situation in American universities is chilling and reminiscent of the Chinese purges during the "Cultural Revolution" (which was actually neither cultural nor a revolution - come to think of it - since it was a counter-revolution instigated by Mao against his enemies, and was explicitly anti-intellectual and anti-cultural. A mob attacked and destroyed the birthplace of Confucious during those palmy days.)

Nevertheless, although Bloom is fighting the good fight, and is extremely erudite and thought-provoking, I must note two very serious objections to this present work:

First, the Greeks and the Romans are mostly absent. I really don't see how you can even pretend to discuss "The Western Canon" and leave out Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles and the rest of the Greeks and the Romans. Especially since Bloom is extremely fond of the Old Testament ("The Yahwist"), this omission is startling.

Second, I strongly object to the presence of Freud in this book. This mountebank first demanded our attention as a scientist - as a man of medicine. To find him transmogrified into a Literary Artist - at Bloom's whim - simply boggles the imagination.

If you put these two faults together, and conclude that Freud has been included at the expense of the Greeks, then the result is a tremendously flawed book. It becomes a presentation of the "Western Canon" which is almost whimsical.

Not highly recommended!

five stars for content, but ...
Rosalind Ferguson: "The Penguin Rhyming Dictionary"

I bought the book in a London book-shop. I had to climb down the narrow stairs to the basement and ask where I could find a rhyming dictionary. A nod sent me to the remotest corner. Halfway, a voice from behind suddenly said: "The Penguin is the best." I don't know whether the people in this place worked on commission if so, they sure lost money on that day, because the man was right!

I found and compared some five or six weighty and expensive dictionaries and an ugly duckling: Ms Ferguson's excellent listing. It is comprehensive, it is easy and quickly accessible, it never let me down in all these years. I had found the tool for the professional translator of poetry. Five stars and beer for everyone! That's the good news.

However: the only available edition is a typical Penguin production: tiny letters, lousy paper, shoddy binding yes you guessed it, I am a snob when it comes to paperbacks, but I especially hate the Penguin way of producing books. And this here is a dictionary for crying out loud!! It requires by definition sturdy boards and good paper and an easy to read typeface to weather rough handling and ceaseless thumping for never ending months and years of work. One star and an aspirin.

But then, on balance - this is the publisher's sly way to make you buy several copies I guess, and you know what: it is worth it. Fergusson's dictionary has been my indispensable companion for many years now. Perhaps we owe Penguin even a debt of gratitude, that they produce it at all ... .

*? Gifted but misguided
St. Augustine: "The Confessions"

The saint in question was undoubtedly one of the sharpest minds of his period. Whenever he attended to a purely philosophical problem, say on the nature of time, or problems of semantics, then he was able to make good sense. He was capable to think for himself and always discovered an original angle to some old problem. He was the first to state Descartes' "cogito" some 1,200 years before Descartes. In the Church's teachings, Augustine is presented as a defender of the doctrine of free will.

This is typical for the Church's methods of dissimulation. In fact Augustine did nothing of the kind. He wrote two treatises on the subject, the first ascribing to the freedom of will before he became a Christian, the second recanting his position in favor of predestination after his conversion. Both essays are object lessons how to argue the case. These gifts made the man one of the most formative thinkers and makers of the Western mind-set. Even the pagan elite acknowledged his talent.

Augustine was a person suffering from a pathological guilt complex and perhaps an abused child. Being who he was, he managed to find for his pet-obsession a vehicle in the teachings of St. Paul. If asked whom I detest most in the The New Testament, I would say St. Paul. But we owe it to Augustine's obsession with sex and ascetism, that someone, who prided himself in his dissimulations and could be "all things to all men" (1 Cor. 9:22), should give cause for so much intellectual and emotional grief over the ages.

So here we have Augustine's autobiography; the man himself reveals his deeply neurotic and problematic nature. The pattern is pretty typical for a child of middle-class parents who lack the means to secure a permanent standing in the upper crust and therefore with considerable sacrifice provide for the best education their money can buy, in the hope that it will help their child to climb the social ladder even further. The case is not unlike that of Virgil. But also with telling differences.

Augustine was born to parents of mixed religious beliefs on November 13, 354 AD at Thagaste, in the African province of Numidia. As a child he complained of wanting to play like other children yet goes on to talk about harsh beatings for neglecting his studies and how his parents "enjoyed" his torment. He never married but had a son from a concubine to whom he was profoundly infatuated. The social custom prohibited to marry her and he grieved for her departure. His father died before he went to Italy.

Augustine's father, Patricius, was a pagan and his mother, while a Christian still held to some pagan ideas. Financed by a family friend at the age of sixteen, Augustine moved to Carthage to study rhetoric. At seventeen he read Cicero's "Hortensius," but he decided to join the Manicheans. He wrote his first work: "On the Beautiful and the Fitting." There is plenty of intellectual solitude and irresolution which after his conversion turned all too eagerly to grandiloquent fantasies of atrocious radicalism.

In a letter to the Manichaean heretic Faustus he wrote: "Why do you object to war? Surely not, because men, who eventually die anyway, are killed in war?" This heartless spirit of unyielding fanaticism found its suitable employed in a lifelong but futile and ultimately unresolved struggle against the Donatist schism. It made him extracting his infamous doctrine of original sin from Paul's letters and write a monumental "justification" for the sack of Rome in 22 books. "Cogite intrare" is an Augustinian doctrine.

Genius is the child that survives inside the adult. Augustine was a genius alright and a privileged brat for most of his childhood and adolescence. Despite his adulations of St. Ambrose (339-397), this aloof church politician with impeccable manners and an iron determination, looked right through Augustine's character, and one senses a certain condescension on Ambrose's part, who if anybody, has a title on being the "Rock of the Church." In his scheme of things, Augustine was not exactly leadership material.

So he recommended him for the thorny but unrewarding post of a provincial diocese, where Augustine got stuck for the rest of his life and died in a city under siege in 430. The "Confessions" are modelled on Jeremiah's autobiography (Jerem. 1:1-12; 11:18-23; 15:10-21; 17:14-18; 20:7-12, 14-18;) and emulate the tenor in Jeremiah's underlining question "why me of all people?" In the case of Jeremiah this is a testimony to intellectual integrity. For his imitator this comes across as a case of very self-conscious posturing.

In the course of his narrative, Augustine is repeatedly taking on an air of continual bewilderment over the most miniscule incidents of his life. It effectively creates a sense for their presumed symbolic significance as turning points of an exceptional life. For the professional writer there is something to learn here. But all too frequent the saint's eloquence becomes shrill and hysterical. Apparently he still needed to drown his niggling doubts by stylistically turning up the volume.

© - 5/9/2002 - by Michael Sympson - all rights reseved

* A common language?
Cavelli-Sforza "The History and Geography of Human Genes" and "Genes, Peoples and Languages"

I. genetic evolution
If I go by the name, then Luigi Luca Cavelli-Sforza (*1922) seems to indicate an old aristocratic family, known at least since the renaissance. So if I am right, his books might be the product of a typically aristocratic pastime: breeding and continuity. And indeed his studies of the transmission of family names in Italy, of the relationship between human genes and languages, of migration and marriage, have become benchmarks for our research in biology and anthropology.

Since the early sixties countless blood samples continue to be collected from all over the world. Mainly for the purpose of completely mapping out the human genome, it has become possible to measure genetic distances between a large number of proteins and DNA sequences. This is not only the keystone for resolving the human family tree, without having to rely on fossil evidence, it establishes even the kinship between different species, because all life on this planet shares the same DNA code.

The good thing is, we look at DNA samples in large quantities: the greater the quantity of measured differences as compared to the odd result from a single sample, the greater the likelihood of a primary correlation with the human race's expansive movements across the globe. This fact alone - of measuring DNA in large quantities - makes it the most reliable and most telling witness-testimony for the evolution not just of our own species but for all life forms in general.

For instance genetically our closest relative some 600 million years ago was the ancestor of the humble cauliflower. It was the time when microscopic organisms were just testing the primeval blueprints for their future development and diversification into separate phyla of animal and plant life. As far as our own species is concerned, the studies have established that at present all of us, Africans, Caucasians, Chinese, in fact all races and colours who share this planet, are the descendants of one single individual.

This is not so very surprising. Statistically Britain's royal family has at present one million and five distant relatives i.e. mostly commoners who could be traced back to some or other legitimate and illegitimate liaison in the House of Hannover. The further back we go, all human bloodlines eventually converge to one individual. However this person was not alone. She was surrounded by her peers but their bloodlines went their separate ways and failed to extend to our present age.

However, because of meiotic recombination and the diploid (bi-parental) inheritance of nuclear DNA, the reconstruction of profiles based on the nuclear genome alone would be very difficult. Incidental changes in very small populations, disease, famine, warfare, can cause the rapid spread and loss of alleles and create marked differences from the parental stock. Fortunately there is an elegant way around. It is called "mitochondrial DNA." It allows us to trace an ancient individual through a living maternal relative.

Nearly every cell of the human body contains scores of mitochondria, tiny organelles that play a key role in a complex series of biochemical pathways including the Krebs cycle and the electron transport chain. When sugars are broken down to release energy, they first enter a pathway in the cytoplasm known as glycolysis which produces a modest amount of adenosine triphosphate ATP. The end product of that pathway, pyruvate, enters the mitochondrion and then proceeds into the so called "Krebs" cycle.

The reactions of this cycle systematically strip high-energy electrons away from the intermediates of the cycle, and these electrons enter the electron transport pathway, which is bound to the inner mitochondrial membrane. The oxygen we breathe serves as the final electron acceptor of the chain. If any part of a human cell truly contains what the ancients called "the fire of life," it's the mitochondrion. Interrupt, even for one moment, the flow of electrons to oxygen, and that fire will go out.

Indeed, some of the most lethal poisons act by blocking mitochondrial electron transport. Mitochondrial DNA cannot be produced by cells from scratch, but instead always arises from the division of preexisting mitochondria; they replicate on their own. And living in the sheltered environment of their cellular hosts, they are less exposed to dramatic interventions by selective forces than the nuclear genome. In other words, mitochondria are more likely to evolve and mutate at a statistically steady rate.

II. selection versus chance
And this is still a bone of content in a principal debate between the scientific camps. Cavelli-Sforza's data do not support the idea of a stern taskmaster in Darwin's universal fitness gym. Already in 1969 Jack King and Thomas Jukes, from the University of California in Berkeley, published in "Science" a paper on "Non Darwinistic Evolution," drawing attention to the Japanese molecular biologist Motoo Kimura (*1925) and his proposal of mutations occurring entirely at random and at a constant rate. In Kimura's* own words:

"It is an amazing fact, that most mutations do not contribute to what makes me different from the fishes in my carp hatchery. Both of us, the carp and I, need hemoglobin for exactly the same task of transporting oxygen through our bodies. But half of the chemical characteristics in my hemoglobin is different from the carp. This unnecessary kind of evolution and my research in the "Evolutionary rate at the molecular level" lead me to conclude, that selection has no reason to prefer one variation over the other."

So why does the ratio of molecular mutations differ between different species, and even within the same species, if the overall rate is supposed to be constant and without any particular advantage or disadvantage over existing molecular variations? Simple: the molecular evolution in primates and man is slower than in rodents because rodents have a higher reproduction rate. Or stray-groups of the same species, if isolated by circumstance or custom, create a numerical difference to the gene-pool.

In a sequestered population with exactly 50% blond haired and 50% black haired people, Mendel's laws make it mathematically inevitable that over a number of generations the entire population will either be black or blond if there is no preference to breed for one or the other hair-color. If in a sequestered population of 1,000, each individual mutates 20 otherwise neutral gene - 10 from the egg, 10 from the sperm - then, after a certain period, 10 of the mutations will completely oust the other 19,990 co-variations.

But if the population is counting only 100 individuals it all will happen much faster, regardless that the ratio remains constant and the same. Higher organisms play the odds with their own respective breeding program. For instance at present we keep track on a colony of seagulls in the Orkney's which separates itself from the gene-pool of the common seagull because for some unknown reason the hens accept only a partner with yellow markings around the eyes. Ordinary seagulls are rejected - we see a new species in the making.

So smaller enclaves from a larger gene-pool, if staying sequestered, can leap ahead in their evolution and even become a decisive factor for change when they reunite with the larger pool without actually being exposed to selective pressures or offering any evolutionary advantage in particular. I must say, I find this intriguing, but the old guard was not amused. When the veteran of genetics and Nobel laureate Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) heard of it he responded with a strangely irrational outburst:

"If this would be so, evolution would be meaningless and going nowhere. For people who try to find meaning in their existence nothing makes sense except evolution by natuaral selection."

What Dobzhansky and his school fail to appreciate, is the simple fact that today's neutral gene, many generations later in changed conditions may become advantageous or prohibitive. But to bring about such changes, a long period of dormant neutral evolution must precede it, otherwise there would be no gene available to suit the new situation.

* in 1983 Motoo Kimura published a book titled "The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution."

III. bloodlines
How did mitochondrial DNA become the DNA of choice for forensic scientists and Cavelli-Sforza's research? Not all the functions of mitochondria are benign. At present mitochondria are known to be the carriers for six hereditary diseases, among them sickle-cell anemia, and "Leber's Hereditary Optic Neuropathy" which causes in the afflicted early blindness. But the fact that the children of males afflicted by Leber's never inherited the disorder, and only women seemed to be able to pass along the disease, provided a crucial clue.

When sperm and egg fuse to form a diploid zygote, the new individual gets half of its genetic information, 23 chromosomes, from each parent. That 50/50 split is the basis of Mendelian inheritance. However, due to the sheer size of the egg cell, nearly all of the mitochondria in the embryo come from the mother: mitochondrial inheritance is maternal. In the gene's total length of 16,569 base pairs there is a 780-base pair region of distinct variability between the individuals, which serves as an unambiguous marker to trace family lineages.

It identifies the link from maternal ancestors to mother and child. Because of its unique mode of maternal inheritance it can reveal ancient population histories, which might include migration patterns, expansion dates, and geographic homelands. Recently mitochondrial DNA was extracted and sequenced from a Neanderthal skeleton. The results allowed anthropologists to say with conviction that modern humans do not share a close relationship with Neanderthals in the human evolutionary tree.

"Eve" lived in Africa, some 200,000 years ago, and she is literally the mother of all mankind. Over time differences in our own as well as in the mitrochondrial genetic makeup have accumulated because populations separated diversified and reunited. The more extensive the measured differences, the greater the time of separation. This correlation between extent of difference and time of separation is our chief tool for reconstructing the human family tree.

So if rates of change are roughly the same for all groups, then the ratio between genetic distance and age of separation should be fairly constant. The problem is how to calibrate the ratio. Cavelly-Sforza worked with three widely cited dates: 35,000 years for the separation of Caucasian and Asiatic (the first discovery of Cro-Magnon people in Europe); 40,000 years for migration to Australia and new Guinea; and 92,000 years for the split from the African stock based on dates from the Qafzeh caves in Israel.

The best mathematician in the business, Masatoshi Nei, a professor at the University of Texas, established that the gene/time ratios for the three events are consistent with the hypothesis of constant rates. Based on this ratio alone, the date for the earliest migration to America moves from the traditional date of roughly 11,000 years back to a target date in the neighborhood of 35,000 years. Archaeological evidence to confirm this date is forthcoming. The Polynesian expansion began with people sailing west from Taiwan.

So it seems that about 90,000 years ago, Eve's immediate descendants, apparently a tiny tribe, teetering on the verge to extinction, took to the sea, and scavanging and fishing the seaboards, left Africa for the Arabic peninsula, then Malaya, Australia, South East Asia, before they turned to the inner reaches of Central Asia, Europe and America. Long before "Eve," man had already discovered the use of fire and tools. It would be a mistake to believe that her people had looked different from the rest of the species.

Cavalli-Sforza's team compiled tables depicting the "genetic distances" which currently separate 2,000 different population pools from each other. For example, assume the genetic distance between the English and the Danes is equal to 1.0. Then the separation between the English and the Italians would be about 2.5 times as large as the English-Danish difference. On this scale, the Iranians would be 9 times more distant genetically from the English than the Danish, and the Japanese 59 times greater.

Finally, the gap between the English and the Bantus, the main group of Africans south of the Shara, is 109 times as large as the distance between the English and the Danish. The genetic distance between Japanese and Bantus is even greater. Cavalli-Sforza's conclusion: "The most important difference in the human gene pool is clearly that between Africans and non-Africans " Btw. what is a race? It is essentially a lineage. A racial group is an extremely extended family that under this definition practices inbreeding.

For some unknown reason "Eve's" tribe kept to themselves, or lingered on in a pocket of evolution originally labelled for extinction. But then Eve's people acquired an edge which helped them to diversify, outgrow and exterminate Homo Erectus, Neanderthal and Peking Man. But what was the factor that gave them this edge? "Eve's" tribe certainly had acquired or inherited the use of language, and it became the one from which all modern tongues evolved. Could it have been the only fully developed lingo around?

IV. a common language?
William Jones in 1786 was the first to note impressive similarities between Sanskrit and the classical languages of Greece and Rome: an Indian king, or "raja," matches "rex" his latin counterpart. A great Indo-European family of languages, apparently rooted in a single, ancient origin, seemed to be spreading from the British isles and Scandinavia to India. The brothers Wilhelm (1786-1859) and Jacob (1785-1863) Grimm - known mainly for their "Fables for the Home and for Children" - unravelled the linguistic pattern.

There are regularities in the changes of the underpinning rootstock into its major subgroups (Romance languages, Germanic tongues, etc.). Grimm's law specifies the characteristic changes in consonants between Proto-Indo-European (as retained in Latin) and the Germanic tongues. Latin p's become f's in Germanic cognates (voiceless stops become voiceless fricatives). The latin plenum becomes "full" (voll, pronounced "foll" in German); piscis turns "fish" (Fisch in German); and pes becomes "foot" (Fuß).

Since English is an amalgam (perhaps created as a creole in the time of the early Norman occupation) of a Germanic stock with Latin-based imports from the Norman conquest, our language has added latin cognates to Anglo-Saxon roots but altered according to Grimm's law: plenty, pristine, and podiatry; or even one for the price of two as in plentiful. In this fashion nearly all the languages of Europe can be joined to a pathway that spread through Persia to India and even further into Central Asia.

But from globally extracted blood samples (or more recently merely saliva samples) we are now in a position to compare the Cavelli-Sforza's census with the results of comparative linguistics, and the basic genetic groups in the census make excellent sense when held against the graphic distribution of Homo Sapiens and the family trees of the seven linguistic phyla. Today we live with a diversity of seemingly very different languages, but there seems to be an excellent reason to look for a common origin.

All our languages must go back to a single root-stratum, not necessarily because it was the only language around but because it was the language of "Eve's" tribe from which we all descended. Which could explain why it is still possible to sensibly translate from one language into the next because certain linguistic routines of syntactic designation, analytical connotation, connecting, and modifying from the primeval tongue are still remaining with us, despite of all the differences in expression and phonetics.

However there are sensible objections to an entirely evolutionary and incidental theory of language. They stem from Chomsky's widely accepted proposition of a universal "metalanguage" which seems to underpin the structures of existing languages. On first sight Chomsky's proposal actually seems to give a nod of approval to an evolutionist approach to the problem. But Noam Chomsky (*1928), who had studied Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Charles Saunders Peirce (1839-1914), argues from a different position.

V. Chomsky's proposal
Chomsky proposed the existence of a "universal grammar," a theory that all languages are rooted in underlying principles of a universal nature said to be innate to all human beings. This theory does not attempt to claim that all human languages have the same grammar, or that all humans are "programmed" with a structure that underlies all surface expressions of human language. Rather, universal grammar proposes that there exists an underlying set of rules that helps children to acquire their particular language(s).

"All children go through the same stages of language development regardless of the language they are learning. ... It is a common observation that a young child of immigrant parents may learn a second language in the streets, from other children, with amazing rapidity, and that his speech may be completely fluent and correct down to the last allophone, while the subtleties that become second nature to the child may elude his parents despite high motivation and continued practice." (Chomsky, 1959, p. 42)

In 1957 Chomsky wrote the book "Syntactic Structures," an elaboration on his doctoral thesis from 1955, in which he introduced transformational grammars. Chomsky considered utterances (words and sentences) to represent the surface structure of deeply rooted concepts inside the brain (surface structure versus deep structure, a distinction he doesn't use anymore). Transformation rules govern the process of creating utterances. The capability to carry out these processes is supposed to be genetic and innate.

Students of universal grammar study a variety of actual grammars with the purpose of abstracting generalizations, often in the form of "If X holds true, then Y occurs." These have been extended to a range of traits, from the phonemes found in languages, to the choice of word orders, to why children exhibit certain linguistic behaviors. At present Chomsky's theory has a strong following in the linguistic community and his disciples believe in an innate "language instinct," that makes us born speakers from the cradle.

Chomsky's theories went through many changes. The most recent account was published under the title "The minimalist program" in 1995. The first chapter deals with the theory of principles and paramaters which is in part speculation, the second emphasizes the role of economy in language. The third states a minimalist program for linguistic theory while the fourth categories and transformations gives an elaboration while at the same time changing a few things layed out previously.

Kant and Saunders Peirce on the other hand, maintained a slightly different position. Kant's table of "categories" is based on the believe that it is an objective necessity to couch your sentence in certain patterns of an underlying logic in order to be comprehensible. This "meta-logic" would be an indispensable requirement whether with or without a biological instinct. Communication would be impossible without such 'a priori' categories, without which nobody could even begin to form a statement.

It is like a series of hard wired sub-routines in a computer: does my statement contain, or at least refer to an element of

(1) quantity [unity, plurality, totality],
(2) quality [reality, negation, limitation],
(3) relation [substance-and-accident, cause-and-effect, reciprocity], or
(4) modality [possibility, existence, necessity]?

If my utterance is positive on at least three of these sub-routines, it is going to be comprehensible. It can even cross a language barrier, because when translated, it answers to the same set of categories, in spite of all the different conventions of syntax and structure. There appears to be a logical necessity, which universally applies, regardless of time and place, and, perhaps, even between different species. The concept is fitting in neatly with an idea of intellectual structures which exist in their own autonomous world.

Both positions are difficult to maintain. For starters: Chomsky's 'meta-language' is in fact so complex and complicated that a hardwired version cannot be explained in terms of development and evolution. (I read a 1200 pages English "grammar" which tabulated this meta-language in Chomskyan terms. It left me with a headache for days.) In fact it fails on many accounts. It is an hypothesis that offers no practical test, no method which would assist teachers and students in their efforts to learn a second language.

The toughest objection comes from history itself: languages undergo continual changes. Especially languages unsupported by script. In some tribes in Australia, tongues can change so rapidly that members who left the tribe and came back 50 years later, no longer readily understood the language their family was speaking. And paradoxically languages contrary to our expectations do not start in a simple form. The oldest languages are also the most complicated and become simpler only over long periods of time.

It is like engineering a new machine: the first solution is usually the least satisfying and improvements mean that we find ways to simplify or down-size the problem. It is true: we know that children whose parents speak just a pidgin, a cross-bread of several languages, develop a brand-new "creole" from scratch, a coherent language which shares less features with each of the parent languages than it does with other creole languages. Does this not point to an inborn language instinct?

But then how do we explain the changes if the subroutines are hardwired into our biological makeup? How do we explain the mere existence of such hardwired program? And why should only our own species be in possession of this fabulous instinct? On the other hand, if our grammar simply follows objectively a given logical requirement, how come that a logic based on syntactical rules, scores so poorly when critically analyzed? Chomsky seems to have a point here.

Because the interesting thing is not the fact that there are flaws in grammatical logic, but that these flaws go across the language barriers, seemingly without changing their shape. There appears to be an agreement on the same errors in different languages. Thank goodness for it, otherwise translating would be impossible, but it seems to devaluate Kant's argument. Could Chomsky be right in the end? Do these flaws lie in the speaker, i.e. his innate program, rather than in an objectively existing logical requirement?

Well this could have been a reasonable assumption if the physiology of our brain would support it. It doesn't. Chomsky's theory was conceived when cad scans were still a matter for science fiction and neuro-physiologists used to compartmentalize our cognitive faculties in neatly mapped out areas underneath the cranium. Accordingly Broca's center became the Holy Grail and cognitive sanctuary for our linguistic faculties. But recent research does not fully support this view.

Terrence Deacon shows in great detail that many more areas of the brain are simultaneously involved in processing language. So even if people suffer brain damage to their Broca area, they often show good recovery rates. In fact if you remove the entire hemisphere in an early enough age, the other half will take over the functions, and you get yourself still a competent speaker. So where exactly is this innate "Language Instinct" located if we can mash up half the brain in a blender and still speak?

What is really significant is the fact that damage to Broca's centre does affect speakers of different tongues differently. People who speak strongly inflective languages have a much better recovery rate than English speakers or speakers of a creole language. English and creole languages require to strictly observe the order of words. Inflective languages are much more flexible and frequently invert the order of words. I think this alone is the coffin nail to Chomsky's hypothesis.

Terrence W. Deacon a neuro-physiologist and professor of biological anthropology in Boston, has pointed out a possibility, which so far had been overlooked entirely, but it is the only hypothesis on offer, which accounts for the fact that languages undergo their own evolution. After a thorough examination of the physiological requirements for speech he turned to the brain and its responses to language training. A language is our vocal interface which we use to operate the world. And we acquire it in a very early age.

The interface on my computer is the underlying code that holds together all my clients and applications. Language uses such underlying code as well. In fact it is this underlying code! But consider the fact how interfaces on the computer have changed over the years. In the beginning there was this gobbledegook thingy of typed out commands in a strange syntax and a forbidding and completely unamusing spelling that only a full time geek could master. (And before that we had punch-cards.)

The Mac I am using now is so much more user friendly. Even Dos is already archaic. In other words the computer interface continually adapts to the human user, it becomes more "intuitive" and less intrusive, and that's of course the way it should be. In return, we all have become expert keyboard users. Language seems to undergo changes along similar lines, as everybody can tell who underwent the pain to learn by rote the declension tables and the six or five cases of ancient Greek or old Latin.

Chaucer's language compares to modern English like Dos from the eighties compares to a Mac-interface in the new millennium. The current English/American user has in his language, a slicker and simpler to use interface than Chaucer would have dreamed of. Antique history is partly the history of elites who spent a considerable portion of their short lives on a rigorous training in their cumbersome interfaces. This must sound like heresy to the ear of a classic linguist, but I honestly doubt if any snobbery is justifiable here:

"Languages must go through the filter of children's reduced associative learning and short term memory constraints in order to be passed on effectively from one generation to the next with any degree of fidelity. Children selectively hear some structures and ignore others, and so provide a major selection force for language structure that is 'child-friendly'." (Terrence W. Deacon.)

That's right: like Chomsky, but from a more practical position, Deacon acknowledges children as the engines of linguistic evolution.

The adult's influence is restricted to insisting on 'proper' speech, and to pull the brakes to prevent this evolution to derail in anarchy.

"To know the "true name" of a thing was thought to be the source of power over it in many traditions. I want to invoke a similar sense of the autonomous power of words over things. I have borrowed this enigmatic biblical phrase out of context in order to describe an evolutionary process, not a divine miracle, but the process I describe is no less miraculous because it is explainable by science.

... The changes in the brain responsible for this miracle were a direct consequence of the use of words. And I don't mean this in a figurative sense. I mean that the major structural and functional innovations that make human brains capable of unprecedented mental feats evolved in response to the use of something as abstract and virtual as the power of words. ... I suggest that an idea changed the brain. Now this may seem inverting our common sense notion of causality that physical changes require physical causes.

But I assure you that it is not. I do not suggest that a disembodied thought acted to change the physical structure of our brains, as might a god in a mythical story, but I do suggest that the first use of symbolic reference by some distant ancestors changed how natural selection has affected hominid brain evolution ever since. So in a very real sense I mean that the physical changes that make us human are the incarnations, so to speak, of the process of using words." Terrence Deacon "The Symbolic Species" © 1997)

I think the man is right. Deacon's theory explains how the brain of a creature originally not designed to be a speaker but anatomically favored with a voice box, can do the decisive step and employ its available faculties for different tasks in order to create the initial elements of "communication," and how this in turn creates the selective drift towards new linguistic abilities. We have learned to interface with this world through a linguistic superstructure, the superstructure in return conditions us to operate the interface.

As a result there exists now a symbolic domain of its own which appears to be a common tradition of the entire species, which explains many features from the theories of an universal grammar. Whatever "great metaphysical meaning" there is, we find it encapsulated in this symbolic domain. Format and form are more than just the vessel for content and come neither in form of a genetically inscribed program, nor as Jungian archetypes of some nebulous collective memory. Acquisition of linguistic skill remains a messy business.

* reading on the walk
William Harris: "Ancient Literacy" (Havard UP, 1989)
"Habet haec res panem" - this thing has bread in it

The invention of a short but effective alphabet made the tasks of learning to read and write almost as easy as they could be. However as subsequent events have repeatedly shown, widespread diffusion of this knowledge does not follow automatically by any means. The history of Western culture has passed through many centuries during which hardly anyone learned these skills, although they are within the capacity of almost every five year old.

Good writing material was scarce, as evidenced by the use of cumbersome potsherds. A serious limitation in writable space if the author was myopic and had to keep his letters big. In early 19th century, all the important towns in Egypt had many schools often supported by charity: the level of male literacy in Cairo was between one quarter and one third, which implies literacy in the countryside below 5%, and for females near zero. The situation in ancient Egypt was barely different.

The school systems of Greco-Roman antiquity were for the most part quite puny. The more advanced of the Greek-Hellenistic cities did in fact experiment with the innovation of subsidized and even universal public education. Under Roman rule however, such schemes apparently faded away, and nowhere in the Empire was there any elaborate network of schools. Diodorus (before 60-36 BC) cites a law by Charondas, a legislator of Catana, "about a matter, previous legislators had neglected:

Charondas laid down that all the sons (sic!) of the citizenry should learn letters, with the city providing the pay for the teachers; for Charondas assumed that people without means, who could not afford the tuition fees, would otherwise be cut off from the nobler pusuits. Because of this, Charondas rated writing above all other forms of knowledge and for good reason: life's business - voting, letters, wills, laws, transactions - is put on the right track in writing.

It is by means of writing that we remember the dead, and it is through the written word that people from the far ends communicate like neighbors. As for treaties, made in times of war between the warring factions, it is the written word that guarantees the survival of the agreement. It is writing that preserves for posterity words of wisdom and oracles of the gods, philosophy and culture. Therefore, while nature is the cause of life, writing is the cause of a good life."

Writing in Antiquity was used to document ownership; maintain accounts, for shop signs and to advertise sales propositions, for receipts, to label commodities and products, indicate weights and measures, ratify contracts, write letters, give instructions to subordinates, jot down notes, make wills, record treaties and laws, issue edicts, display political slogans, mint legends on coins, cast a vote, record trial proceedings and public ceremonies, compile military records and census lists, and award citizenships.

Writing was used to declare manumission, declare birth or death, record the names of magistrates, to apply and petition, to answer petitions, to announce entertainments, honor a distinguished person, for commemoration and on memorials, for dedicating something to a god, to publicize religious calendars, record a prayer, circulate prophecies, cast magic spells and curses, prompt the memory for sacred myths and popular phrases, compose works of literature, compile textbooks and exercise in school.

However oral wills survived throughout the pricipate (A Watson "The Law of Succession under the Later Roman Republic" Oxf. 1971) and learning by rote was common practice. But modern field research with shorthand- and tape-recordings, has unequivocally established that memorizations without written referent are anything but literal. The illiterate Yugoslav epic singer Demo Zogic used to tell his informant that he had reported "the song, word for word," when in a literal sense he had done nothing of the kind. (A.B. Lord "The Singer of Tales" Cambridge Mass. 1960)

Memorized laws, Homer's Iliad, the Vedas, Gautama's sutras must have suffered many transformations before they were put into writing. Joseph C. Miller reports that in recent years the oral genealogies used for settling court disputes among the Tiv people of Nigeria have been found to diverge considerably from the genealogies carefully recorded for the same purpose by the British forty years earlier. But the Tiv tenaciously maintain that their current recollections are accurate. ("The African Past speaks" Hamden, Conn. 1980)

The British administration at the turn of the 20th century also recorded the founding myth of the Gonja in Ghana, according to which the founder of the state, Ndewura Jakpa, is presented as father to seven sons, each the ruler of the then seven territories of the state. Sixty years later, two of the seven territories had disappeared and the myth tells of five sons and makes no mention of the extinct divisions. It became irrelevant for the present and dropped from memory (Goody & Watt "Literacy in Traditional Societies" Cambridge 1968).

On the other hand, the schoolchildren of some Hellenistic cities competed for memorization awards, and the elder Seneca boasts that as a schoolboy he had been able to repeat in a given order a list of 2,000 names which had been read to him and to repeat in reverse order more than 200 single lines of poetry (Seneca Controversae I:praef.2). It was always important for an orator to commit his oration to memory, for which a set of specialized techniques was devised - initially by Simonides of Ceos (556-c.468 BC).

The Athenian POWs in Sicily won favours and even freedom from their captors by reciting passages from Euripides (c.484-406 BC); presumably they had to manage more than a phrase or two. All these feats of memory however, were based on written texts for reference. Speeches and recitations, the performances of plays transferred thoughts from the written text to the listener, but there were severe limitations of space and time. If you missed "Oedipus Tyrant" on the first day, you had to wait a long time for another performance.

If you lived in Capua it was a big thing to attend a contio in Rome. After all, most Greeks and most Romans lived in villages and passed their life in the countryside. The elites relied on the spoken word for purposes which other cultures served by the written word: they frequently dictated letters instead of writing them, which explains the often convoluted style; dictating is an art form of its own. They listened to political news rather than reading it; they attended public recitals and let slaves read to them literary texts.

With the decline of literacy in the Roman Empire after 300 AD, we also observe a decline of the banking system, but an illiterate wage earner from 390 AD could still think it worthwile to have a petition written when he had been assaulted (P.Oxy. 49:3480). There was still a widespread understanding, even at this date, that to obtain legal redress, it was necessary to submit a complaint in writing. Rome received its first systematic law code for many centuries in 291 AD with the Codex Gregorianus.

It was followed in 294 by the Codex Hermogenianus. The convenience of the new form was made possible by the spread of the codex, which was already known in the 1st century AD. But throughout the 2nd century more than 98% of the Greek literary texts which we possess are still written on scrolls. In the 3rd century the figure is 81%, in the 4th it drops to 26%, in the 5th century to 11%. However the eleven biblical papyri from the second century which have survived are exclusively fragments from codices.

Though a codex uses more space for margins, it allows both sides of the papyrus or parchment to be used. To find in a scroll a reference, you would commonly have to unroll up to ten feet of glued together papyrus sheets.

"It is so much easier to mark a page and turn it immediately"

says St. Augustine (Ep. 29:4-10). A codex also lent itself easier to sortilegia - book oracles - "tolle lege" (see St. Augustine Confessions VIII,12:22). But in the 4th century writers like Libanius (*c.314 Ý393) and Gregory of Nyssa (c.330-395) complained about the shortage of copyists.

They were probably referring to a serious and widespread problem. Consequently, St. Augustine (354-430) found many if not all the works by Cicero (c.106-43 BC) impossible to find, even in considerable towns as Hippo (St. Aug. Ep. 118:9). The Roman army regularly compiled elaborate written records until 250 AD. In the collections of military records on papyrus, texts from Dura Europus and Egypt are still numerous in the decade before 250 but cease completely after 256 (when Dura fell to Shapur I.) except for a dubious fragment from 293. (R.O.Fink "Roman Records on Papyrus" Cleveland, 1971)

The bureaucratic system of the army broke down under Valerian and Gallienus. It revived again under the tetrarchy and proper military rosters briefly reappear. But although later papyri tell us a great deal about the army, the detailed bureaucratic records of the earlier period were never equalled. The individual's need to know how to read and write was also diminished by the fact that illiterates and semi-literates were often able to benefit from the written word through intermediaries.

This was a commonplace occurrence among Greeks and Romans, as indeed with many societies of a low level literacy. Aurelius Sakaon of Theadelphia who held important offices at Arsinoe in 310/330 AD, in a petition to the prefect of the province declared himself an illiterate, which didn't stop him to employ the written word in his search for redress. There was no shame in declaring one's illiteracy. But it did compel illiterate people to depend in their written transactions on the honesty of others.

"What does it say" was an often heard question in the streets and public places, and the person asking this question in the Mediterranean cities could expect to find someone to read to him the sign or inscription. A great deal of this second hand literacy depended on public scribes: "I wrote on behalf of X because he doesn't know letters." Sometimes the subscriber says that he is writing on behalf of a client who "writes a slow hand."

Many people in the empire spoke neither Greek nor Latin. At least a dozen languages other than Greek or Latin were sometimes used in written form but an indeterminate number was never put in writing. A slave would commonly find it necessary to communicate in a second language. There is no written word by the Celts from Roman Britain. In Syria, Judea, and Arabia Greek occupies a prominent place. It is the lingo of provincial and city government. It is the language of immigrants and their descendants.

It is not the language of the streets and of the ordinary villager. But Greek was common and widespread in Syria and Judea. The Gospels and Josephus testify to Greek as a standard feature of Judean life. The books of the Maccabees are recorded in Greek, a dead give away for the Hellenistic culture of their authors, despite of all the xenophobic protestations. On the other hand Acts 21:37 depicts a Roman officer who is used to hear Aramaic around him for most of the time.

The most extraordinary epigraphic collection of the Middle East under the Romans are the Safaitic graffiti in southwestern Syria an the north of Jordan. Covering a period from the 1st to the 4th century AD, there are 12,000 rock cut graffiti, more than have been read at Pompei. They were apparently the work of a nomadic population at the fringes of Roman power. There are so many that it raises important questions about ancient literacy in general.

Using and storing materials like ostraca and wooden tablets was obviously tiresome and inconvenient by modern standards. But even people who could have afforded papyrus routinely used wax-coated tablets for exercises at school, as well as for letters, and business documents. One could fill one side with up to fifty words and a multiple set of tablets, as many as ten stringed together to a codex, were worn on the belt. Apparently this material was readily available.

Papyrus was more extensively used by the elite and well to do. But it must have been expensive for people with lower income. In 45-49 AD, the price at Tebtunis in Egypt seems normally to have been 4 drachmas a roll, and a single sheet might have cost two obols. A skilled laborer earned about six obols a day, the unskilled three. The price is comparable to say $ 35.- for a single sheet of paper today. Papyrus was produced in Egypt, the selling price in Italy and Greece, not to mention Spain or Britain was even higher.

So a complete book, written on papyrus was very expensive for every inhabitant of the Roman Empire. Papyrus was not a standard every day material for ordinary citizens. The text of Aristotle's "Athenion Politeia" in the British Museum was written on the back of some farm accounts from the 1st or early 2nd century AD. Of 119 wills catalogued by O. Montevecchi only one was made by an artisan. We enter the bustling world of Roman commerce with the auctioneer as the omnipresent representative.

The smallest transaction recorded on a collection of waxed tablets from Dacia amounts to 50 and 60 denarii (nos 12 & 5 FIRA III, 120,122). These were loans. FIRA II, 137 records the sale of an ox (in Germany 45/58 AD) for 115 sesterces: two centurions sign as witnesses. In Pompei the surviving archives of the financial agent L. Caecilius Jucundus, consist of 153 wax tablets mostly belonging to the years 52-62, suggesting that it was normal to write out receipts for considerable sums.

The median sum realized in the recorded transactions was about 4,500 sesterces, the smallest sums 654 and 342 sesterces. Some clients were illiterates who had texts written for them. Two out of three rental offers advertised on walls at Pompei concern rather substantial properties. During the late Republic real estate agents who put large properties on the market were said to "proscribere" (Cicero, Ad Atticus 4:2,7). Yet advertisements for groceries and labels identifying residents of a building were not a common feature.

The ninety writing tablets found in 1959 at Murecine near Pompei are all business documents for matters of some importance. Neither small shopkeepers nor artisans or their small time customers wrote or read much in the course of business. But in Egypt we find apprenticeships being commuted to writing in a fairly small and remote community such as Soknopaiou Nesos. 20 out of 29 agreements concern a single craft: weaving. Not one of the master weavers who set up the surviving agreements did it in his own hand.

Since the time of Augustus (63 BC-14 AD) the Romans began to use a new form of document for borrowing money. It was the chirographum, normally but not always written in the borrower's hand. As for official documents, the situation often seemed to be in a sorry state. Pliny the Younger (62?c.AD 113) opens a glimpse into the Roman penal system where people cannot be taken into custody nor be released without the proper paperwork (Ep. 10:31 & 32) which used to be exposed to the perils of fire and neglect.

When the Roman Capitol was destroyed by fire in 69 AD, Emperor Vespasian had to institute a search for copies of the 3,000 bronze inscriptions of senatorial decrees, treaties, and privileges - each a document of importance for the constitution of the state; one should expect that numerous copies should have been made readily available by the central archive. They were not. There was no archive. Neither had the republican Senate been in a habit to frequently exchange communications with the provinces.

It was all very homely with hordes of town criers patrolling the streets. Only the principate brought some change. The emperor exercised his powers over his absent subordinates largely through correspondence and indeed used text on a large scale to deal with his subjects. Most of the information he received about the army, the revenues, and about administrative matters outside of Rome itself was transmitted in writing, and so too were his instructions.

Augustus had introduced the compulsory registration of Roman citizens at birth, and held censuses in the province, which made the use of the written word truly important for each and everyone. But none of this actually required ordinary people to do any writing for themselves. All the surviving birth certificates were probably written by professional notaries. Death certificates too, seem to have been compulsory in Egypt. Apart from acts of censorship, not every public incineration of books spelled trouble for the people:

Trajan (53-117), Hadrian (76-138), and Marcus Aurelius (120-180) repeatedly had soldiers burn in public the records of still outstanding taxes owed to the state. It added to the popularity of the emperors, which cared little for written propaganda. But when a poorly educated provincial in Judea made reference to "the scribes & high priests," to the epigraphs on the walls as well as to the portrait on "Caesar's" denarius (Mt. 22:20; Mk. 22:16; Lk. 20:24) he acknowledged the creative and effective use of coin legends.

They were expected to reach all the people with an intelligible message. But it was the army which developed an especially bureaucratized milieu. The principate's army was almost modern in its love of documentation. Rosters of whole units and of smaller detachments, pay records, records of military material, letters about personnal are some of the largest categories of preserved documents. Less evidence is to be found for a literary market of "mass-produced" copies and "publishing houses."

Books were of course frequently copied and distributed for profit, and works of literature spread to every city in the Empire. But when the library of Marcus Terentius Varro (116-29 BC) was plundered during the proscriptions in 43 BC, a substantial number ("aliquam multos") disappered from the 490 books Varro had written. This testifies to the fact that an author, even if wealthy and well received - Varro was popular in his days - might not bother at all to have copies of his work distributed.

The primary way of distributing books was not by means of trade, but through gifts and loans among friends. Strabo (64 BC-23 AD) writes of poor quality copying in Rome and Alexandria (a center of learning then). Seneca (4 BC. - 65 AD: De ira 2:26,2) and Cicero (QF 3:5.6) complained how poorly produced often was what had been available. What less wealthy people had to put up with, can only be imagined. And badly put together as they were, such books still used to be costly.

Dion Chrysostomus (c. 40-112) discribes how, walking through the hippodrome, he encountered people playing the flute, dancing, performing tricks, reading out a poem, singing, and recounting a history or tale. Street performances were a well attested feature in the cities of Imperial Italy. When Augustus had one of his brisk bouts of insomnia "he summoned readers or story-tellers," instead of reaching for a novel as modern person might do. There was no such thing as "popular literature."

Phlegon of Tralles' "Book of Marvels" clearly had been written to entertain his former master, Emperor Hadrian; how many readers it actually managed to reach we have no way of knowing. There are novels and collections of stories, and there are the Mime-iambs by Herondas (c. 3rd cent. BC) written with a deliberately vulgar appeal which seemed to have entertained a remote Roman outpost on guard detail - we recovered Heronda's fragments from their backpacks.

We even have a complet example for deliberate pornography - the novel Daphnis and Chloe by Chariton (3rd cent. AD), a very coy pornography by modern standards. Certainly there must have been a market for such things but it was more likely written for a closed circle of connoisseurs than as a best-seller for the masses. Homer and Virgil became familiar to schoolchildren through dictation and recitation, not through textbook editions. Not that awareness for the possibility of a wider market was missing:

The elder Pliny (23-79 AD) dedicated his "Natural History" to Emperor Vespasian (9-79 AD) stating, that if he had simply published it, he would have defended it from the emperor's criticism by saying that he had written the work for the "humile vulgus," the crowd of farmers and artisans. (Pliny N.H. praef. 6). The whole question is just a matter of simple logic: a literature for the mass market requires a competent literacy in the masses. In antique society this competence was a privilege of the elites - therefore ... .

Most surviving letters were intended to travel considerable distances. The authors of such letters did not necessarily do the writing with their own fair hand. A possible benchmark for the overall literacy of a population could be the frequency of epigraphic inscriptions per 1000 square kilometers. In Italy the highest frequency is found in the Campania with a factor of 410.9 and the lowest in Lucania with a factor of 18.5 from which we conclude an overall level of literacy of 15%.

In semi-literate cultures it is a common thing to record people's ages as ending in five or zero. So the statistical proportion of such age groups seems to be exceeding by far the 20% of the natural population curve: too many people seem to be 20, 25, and so on. This has been also observed throughout the Roman Empire. This tendency of the Romans to round up or down their ages does indeed confirm, that many of them were illiterate.

Soldiers commemorated in the inscriptions at the city of Rome were much more prone to age-rounding than Italian decurions, though less so than ordinary citizens. This is a strong hint, that in spite of the shortage of specific evidence for illiteracy among the praetorian guards and the legionaries, it must have been not uncommon. In geographical terms, age rounding was least common in Italy, in Gaul, in Rome itself, in Africa Proconsularis and Numidia.

The pattern correlates reasonably well to the selective frequency of Latin epigraphs. In this situation we might expect that of all people at least the village clerk (k'omogrammateus) should have been literate in Greek. H. C. Youtie's study reveals the opposite. A certain Petaus, the village clerk of Ptolemais Hormou and other villages during the years 184-187 AD. Petaus could sign a document with the standard formula "homogrammateus epidedoka" (I Petaus, village clerk, have submitted this).

Yet at some point in his tenure, the man was still trying to learn to write this independently of a model to copy from. The papyrus P. Petaus 121 appears to be a worksheet on which he ineptly practised writing the formula. Even if he could read Greek, which is very possible, he was virtually unable to write it. But this didn't stop the local prefect to call on Petaas to investigate another village clerk in the district - Ischyrion of Tamanis - whether he was a unfit for the job as a bankrupt debtor and illiterate.

The prefect evidently thought Petaus to be a capable man. Petaus reported back that all was well and Ischyrion was in fact not illiterate because "he signs all the village papers which he submits to the prefect and others." If Petaus's superiors found this satisfactory, then we can see how they defined the literacy required for a village clerk: as an ability to sign a document. The two clerks were semi-literate at best, but could do their job, because literacy was routinely supplied by an underling.

In the 6th century the senator Cassiodorus (c. 490-585 AD) founded a monastery at Squillace, on the Ionian Sea. Everywhere the world had descended into poverty, famine, epidemics, anarchy. Cassiodorus' main objective was to put his monks to work to rescue for posterity as many manuscripts as possible. Practically all of our existing Latin literature came from monastic enterprises like his. It was never easy. Some of our archetypes had been brutally copied, mark by mark, by copyists who couldn't read the original.

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