Alexandria

duplicates. And of course there were duplicates, because the books came from various collections which must have overlapped or, as you know, darling, plays in particular have more than one copy. When you wrote The Spook Who Spoke, you were scribbling in a hurry - so errors may have crept in, even to your master copy; plus the actors made their own scripts, sometimes only bothering with their own characters and cues.’

‘Their loss!’

‘Oh of course, dearest.’

To retaliate for her sarcasm, I made a lunge; despite her pregnancy, Helena managed to shuffle quickly out of reach. Too drowsy for another attempt, I contributed: ’We know how the Library collection was gathered. The Ptolemies invited the leaders of all the countries in the world to send the literature of their country. They backed that up like pirates. If anybody was sailing near Alexandria, teams of searchers would raid their ships. Any scrolls they found in luggage were confiscated and copied; if the owners were lucky they got back a copy, though rarely their own original. Aulus and I saw some of that today - such works are listed as “from the ships” beside their titles in the Pinakes.’

‘The story is true then?’ Helena demanded. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t argue with a Ptolemy.’

‘Not unless you wanted to be tipped into the harbour. So what’s the controversy nowadays?’

‘Well, you know what happens with copying, Marcus. Some scribes make a bad job of it. At the Library, the staff examined duplicates to decide which copy was the best. In the main, they assumed the oldest scroll was likely to be most accurate. Clarifying authenticity became their specialism. But what started as genuine critique has become debased. Texts are altered arbitrarily. People who feel strongly say that a bunch of ignorant clerks are making ridiculous alterations to works they just don’t have the intellect to understand.’

‘Scandalous!’

‘Be serious, Marcus. Once, literary study in Alexandria was of a very high standard. This persisted until recently. About fifty years ago, Didymus, the son of a fishmonger, was one of the first native Egyptians to become an accomplished scholar. He wrote three and a half thousand commentaries on most of the Greek classics, including the works of Callimachos, the Library’s own cataloguer. Didymus published an authoritative text of Homer, based on Aristarchus’ well-regarded version and his own textual analysis; he wrote a critical commentary on Demosthenes’ Philippics; he created lexicons -’

‘Did Cassius tell you all this?’

Helena blushed. ‘No, I have been reading up myself ... It was a time of excellence. Didymus had contemporaries who were superb literary commentators and grammarians.’

‘All this is not so very long ago.’

‘Exactly, Marcus. In our parents’ lifetime. Scholars here even made the first contact with Pergamum, which in Ptolemaic times had always been shunned by Alexandria because its library was a rival.’

I changed position. ‘You’re saying that only a generation ago, Alexandria was leading the world. So what went wrong? Piss-poor commentaries are being produced by hack reviewers, with ludicrous emendations?’

‘That seems to have happened.’

‘Is it our fault, Helena? We Romans? Did Augustus cause it after Actium? Did that start the rot? Don’t we take enough interest, because Rome is too far distant?’

‘Well, Didymus was later than Augustus, under Tiberius. But maybe with the Emperor as patron and so far away, Museion supervision has failed somewhat.’ Helena had a careful way of trying to keep things right. She spoke slowly now, concentrating. ‘Cassius blames other factors too. Ptolemy Soter had had a glorious ideal. He set out to own every book in the world, so that all the worlds knowledge would be gathered in his Library, available for consultation. We would call that a good motive. But collecting can be obsessive. Totality becomes an end in itself. Possession of all an author’s works, all the works in a set, becomes more important than what the texts actually say. Ideas become irrelevant.’

I puffed out my cheeks. ‘The books are simply objects. It’s all sterile ... I haven’t seen any direct controversy about that. But the librarians here do have a fixation with scroll numbers. Theon had a choking fit when I asked how many scrolls he had, and Timosthenes has been stock-taking.’

Helena pouted. I asked Theon how many scrolls he had.’

‘Right! It doesn’t matter which of us asked -’

Oh yes it did matter. ‘Now you are being dismissive. I hit upon a lucky question - I admit it was lucky’

‘Purely characteristic. You always count the beans.’

‘So you say I am unpleasantly pedantic, while you have intuition and flair . . .’ Helena was not really in the mood for a quarrel; she had something too vital to say. She brushed this niggle aside briskly: ‘Well, Cassius told me that from what he and Fulvius already knew about Theon, before he came to dinner with us, there is an ethical controversy and Theon was part of it. He was fighting the Director, Philetus.’

‘They quarrelled?’

‘Philetus sees scrolls as a commodity. They take up space and gather dust; they need expensive staff to look after them. He asks, what intellectual value do ancient scrolls have, if nobody has consulted them for decades or even centuries?’

‘Can this be relevant to the budget Zenon so carefully kept from me? Is there a financial crisis? And is it the difference of approach that Timosthenes was talking about? I can’t imagine him ever seeing scrolls as dusty wastes of space . . . How does our Cassius know about this?’

‘That was unclear. But he said Philetus was always haranguing Theon about whether they need to keep scrolls nobody sees, or more than one copy. Theon - who already feared his role was being undermined by the Director, remember - fought for the Library to be fully comprehensive. He wanted all known versions; he wanted comparative study of duplicates to be carried out as valid literary criticism.’

I was not entirely sympathetic to that. I dismissed scholars who spent years narrowly comparing works on a line by line basis. Minutely searching for the perfect version seemed to me to add nothing to human knowledge or to the betterment of the human condition. Perhaps it kept the scholars out of the taverns and off the streets - though if it had led directly to Theon being given an oleander nightcap, he might have done better to be away from the Library, just having a dispute about the government with five fishmongers in a downtown bar. Or even staying longer at our house, eating pastries with Uncle Fulvius, come to that.

‘There are others feuding,’ Helena said. ‘The Zoo Keeper, Philadelphion, resents the international kudos that is given to the Great Library at the expense of his scientific institute; he wrangles, or wrangled, with both Philetus and Theon about uplifting the importance of pure science within the Museion. Zenon, the astronomer, thinks studying earth and the heavens is more use than studying animals, so he tussles with Philadelphion. For him, understanding the Nile flood is infinitely more useful than averaging how many eggs are laid by the crocodiles which inhabit the Nile’s banks.’

I nodded. ‘Zenon also knows where the purse pinches - and he must resent having to examine the stars from a chair he made himself while, if what Thalia says is right, Philadelphion can lavish gold on every last breed of fancy ibis. From what you say, love, the Museion is seething with animosity. Our Cassius seems to keep up with gossip. Any other nuggets?’

‘One. The lawyer, Nicanor, lusts after the Zoo Keeper’s mistress.’

‘The fabulous Roxana?’

‘You are salivating, Falco!’

‘I have not even met the woman.’

‘I see you would like to!’

‘Only to evaluate whether her charms might be a motive.’

At this point, perhaps luckily, the hot, restless breeze that had got up while we were conversing began to agitate the undergrowth more wildly, to the extent that it woke our driver. He told us this was the Khamseen, the fifty-day wind that Zenon had speculated might have upset Theon’s mental stability. It certainly was becoming gritty and unpleasant. Helena wrapped her stole around her face. I tried to look brave. The driver hurried us back to the cart and set off for the city, regaling us on the way with tales of how this wicked wind killed babies. There was no need to lure us back with sensational stories. We were ready to go home and check on our daughters.

XXVI