by Jack Lynch
636 C.E.
Encyclopedia both is and is not an ancient word. There was a phrase, enkuklios paideia, in ancient Greek, but (a) it did not mean encyclopedia, and (b) no one is entirely sure what it did mean. It appeared only a few times in ancient literature, and what it refers to is not always clear from context. The roots mean circle and learning, and for a long time, modern writers thought encyclopedia meant “the circle of the sciences,” the organization of all knowledge in a tight bundle. The ancients, however, meant something like “well-rounded education.” Aristotle, for instance, used the phrase enkulia philosophemata to refer to the foundations of philosophy, the things a student should study before getting into the complexities of real philosophy.1
Whatever the word signified in the ancient world, it did not mean a reference book—that was a post-Renaissance development. Encyclopedic works existed, however, aspiring to provide systematic coverage of all knowledge, at least all knowledge in one field or set of fields. Amenemope, an Egyptian in the late second millennium B.C.E., composed a wisdom text called the Instruction, or sometimes A Text to Dispel Ignorance about Everything That Exists. In thirty chapters it covered the known universe, both natural and supernatural, and offered advice on how to live a worthwhile life. Some have called it encyclopedic.2
The Greeks and Romans certainly had works that aspired to be comprehensive. Titles like Pliny’s Natural History had an encyclopedic character, but many writers contend for the title of “first encyclopedist.” Some historians award the laurel to the Greek sage Speusippus, Plato’s nephew, who died in 339 or 338 B.C.E. His work supposedly collected Platonic and Aristotelian ideas about philosophy, mathematics, the sciences, and so on—but we can only speculate, because only a few scraps of the text survive, not enough to tell us anything useful.3
The earliest Latin encyclopedias are equally mysterious. Around 158 B.C.E., Cato the Censor put together a Latin book often called an encyclopedia, though it does not survive. Another lost Latin encyclopedia came from Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 B.C.E.), a soldier, senator, real estate investor, and wide-ranging writer. Quintilian, who knew something about learned Romans, called Varro “the most learned of the Romans.” Saint Augustine later praised Cicero for appealing to the lover of words, and Varro for appealing to the lover of facts.4 One scholar argues that Varro deserves to be called the real founder of the encyclopedia: “Marcus Terentius Varro was not the first Roman to write educationally, but he may reasonably be described as the first one to try to do it encyclopedically.”5
Three of Varro’s seventy-four known works are interesting to readers of reference books. One is the Imagines—Images or Portraits—collecting seven hundred biographical sketches on prominent Greek and Roman figures. Another is Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum libri XLI, or Human and Divine Antiquities in Forty-One Books, which opens with six books on human affairs, six more on locations throughout the Italian peninsula, another six covering the history of Rome, and six on things, with the rest of the work devoted to divine subjects. Most of what we know about the lost Antiquitates comes from Augustine’s attacks on it in his City of God.6 And Varro’s most encyclopedic work of all was Disciplinarum libri IX, or Nine Books of Disciplines,7 one for each of the seven liberal arts, with additions for medicine and architecture. Not enough of this book survives for us to say much about it, but we can gather from the surviving fragments what sort of writer Varro was. Some scholars are exasperated by “his interest in minute details.”8 But Varro certainly had a passion for classifying, for covering a field systematically and drawing up a thorough outline of all the topics he was going to touch on, and he collected as many citations to earlier writers as he could, which puts him squarely in the encyclopedic tradition.
Other important and wide-ranging works of Latin late antiquity are Nonius Marcellus’ Compendious Doctrine, written early in the fourth century, an early example of alphabetical order, and Martianus Capella’s Liber de nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae, or Marriage of Mercury and Philology, probably written early in the fifth century. The Marriage is a bizarre book, a complicated allegorical work mixing prose and verse, in which each of the seven liberal arts is figured as a bridesmaid at the mythological nuptials. It has few devotees today; one modern reader calls it “a fantastically boring mélange.”9
In the first major reference book of the Christian era, Institutiones divinarum et sæcularium litterarum, the sixth-century polymath Flavius Marcus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator sought to reconcile pagan learning with the new divine revelation.
Cassiodorus was born to an aristocratic family in Italy, perhaps of Syrian descent, and as a very young man he began a legal career. He worked with the Germanic conquerors—the so-called “barbarians”—who effectively ran sixth-century Italy. Theoderic the Great, an Ostrogoth, employed the twenty-year-old Cassiodorus as a secretary. From 507 to 511 he held the post of quaestor; in 514 he was named consul; in 526, magister officiorum, or chief of the civil service; and in 533, he was finally named praetorian prefect, a position that amounted almost to prime minister.10
After some years in this position, Cassiodorus went to Constantinople, the center of the Eastern Roman Empire, and passed almost two decades there. But eventually he decided to retire, and he returned to Italy. He applied to Pope Agapetus for permission to open an academy of Christian learning in Rome, modeled on the pagan academies in Antioch and Alexandria but with a new Christian focus. Agapetus was unpersuaded. Cassiodorus therefore retired from Rome at the age of seventy-one, after five decades near the center of power, and headed for the south of Italy. Though a layman, he established a monastery he called the Vivarium, where he encouraged the monks to copy old manuscripts, including those of the pagan literature of pre-Christian Rome. The scriptorium in a monastery, with tonsured, brown-robed monks hunched over desks as they copied old texts, is now such a familiar image that we assume it was somehow inevitable. But the idea, if not original with Cassiodorus, was promoted more energetically by him than by anyone else, and he deserves much of the credit for literary monasticism.11
TITLE: Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum
COMPILER: Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator (c. 490–c. 585)
ORGANIZATION: Book 1, religious practice and reading the Bible; book 2, the seven liberal arts
PUBLISHED: 543–55 C.E.?
VOLUMES: 2
TOTAL WORDS: 28,000
He wrote his two-volume Institutiones divinarum et sæcularium litterarum (Institutes of Divine and Secular Literature) for the monks at the Vivarium. The work “covered everything from commentaries on the Holy Scriptures to geometry and astronomy. He even explained bookbinding, lighting, and timekeeping.”12 The book is largely a reading list, a systematic annotated bibliography for readers of the Bible:
St. Jerome, who enriched the Latin language remarkably, also attended to our interests by his usual admirable translation of the two sermons of Origen on the Canticle of Canticles. And this Rufinus, too, an eloquent translator, expounded more fully in three books by adding some sections up to that precept “Catch us the foxes, the little foxes that damage the vineyards” (Song of Songs 2:15). After those men, Epiphanius, bishop of Cyprus, treated the whole book in one brief volume in Greek. We have had this book and others translated into Latin with the Lord’s aid by our learned friend Epiphanius. I have, therefore, included these most careful commentators on this book in a single volume to offer the reader all extant writers on this work in one place.
The book also includes information about scribal practices. In ancient handwriting, for instance, it was easy to confuse the letters V and B, so Cassiodorus advised his monks, eager “to avoid mixing the great good with faulty words by altering letters,” to read up on “the ancient orthographers.”13
Book 1 is a detailed handbook on religion, the Church, and interpreting both the Bible and secular texts. Each of the first nine chapters is devoted to a book of the Bible, after which comes a chapter on
methodology, and then a series of miscellaneous chapters: discussions of the synods that established authoritative doctrine for Christianity; the biblical canon as it appeared in various writers; even a list of books at the Vivarium. Cassiodorus offered advice on reading Scripture, on understanding history in Christian rather than classical terms, and the greatest teachers in the Christian tradition, from the earliest church fathers to his own contemporaries. His favorites are obvious, including “Blessed Hilary, blessed Ambrose, and blessed Jerome,” as well as “Blessed Augustine, that excellent teacher, warrior against the heretics, defender of the faithful.” The total in book 1 came to thirty-three chapters, “a number acknowledged to correspond with the age of the Lord when he offered eternal life to a world laid low by sin.”14
Book 2, much shorter than the first, covered the seven liberal arts, with four chapters on the quadrivium and three on the trivium. Cassiodorus feels a need to justify this secular learning in a Christian context—the liberal arts were the heart of a pagan education, not a Christian one. But Cassiodorus reminds his readers that “the holy Fathers have not decreed that the study of secular letters should be rejected,” because secular learning is ancillary to religion. Still, it is hard to miss the defensiveness in his tone when he justifies secular knowledge. The personal, even intimate, character of the first book is gone, and the long list of readings is replaced by more specific information.
Here is where the book looks most like an encyclopedia, as Cassiodorus ranges across the liberal arts: “There are six parts in a rhetorical speech: introduction, statement of the facts, division, proof, refutation, conclusion”; “There are six harmonies: (1) the diatessaron; (2) the diapente; (3) the diapason; (4) the diapason and diatessaron; (5) the diapeson and diapente; (6) the disdiapason”; “The backward motion or regression of the stars is what the Greeks call hypopadismon or anapodismon, i.e. when the star in carrying out its motion seems to be moving backward at the same time”—all of this is the stuff of classical Greek and Roman learning. Cassiodorus seems to have seen his mission as translating and transmitting the classical world to the Christian “barbarians” in the West.
Despite Cassiodorus’ profound knowledge and his determination to collect and disseminate information, he reminded the brothers at the Vivarium that “knowledge is not found in letters alone, but that God gives complete wisdom ‘to everyone according as he will’ (1 Corinthians 12:11).” He knew perfectly well that “many illiterate men come to true knowledge and grasp the right faith”; the learned, conversely, are too apt to be misled: “Therefore let the mind be ever intent on the general meanings of the books, and let us set our minds on that contemplation which does not merely make a sound in the ears but lights the interior eye.” The Institutiones is a profoundly learned work, and yet it has a complex, even ambivalent, attitude toward learning—learning is useless if it does not contribute to piety. Cassiodorus is concerned with the differences and relationships between sacred and profane learning, and his book is ultimately about knowledge itself—what we should know and what we need to know. Historian Arnaldo Momigliano calls it “one of the most formative books of the Middle Ages.”15
He has been called the last wise man of the ancient world, and the man on the boundary between the ancient and medieval worlds. His Etymologiæ, also known as Origines, became the most popular reference work of the Middle Ages, being copied by hand countless times and even surviving into the age of print, nearly a thousand years after he wrote.
His name was Isidore—now Saint Isidore—and he came from Spain, where he was born around 560. The Roman Empire still had an official existence at this point, but its administrative powers were only a pale shadow of what they had once been, and in Spain in particular the Empire was in retreat. Isidore’s family came from Cartagena, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, but in the middle of the sixth century the Byzantine Empire assumed control of the region, forcing the family to relocate to Seville. Isidore’s parents died when he was still a child, and he was raised by his brother Leander, an abbot with access to a fine school. Leander had an impressive career before him: around the year 580, he would become bishop of Seville, a position from which he would exercise considerable influence over Church policy. Other members of the family were active in the Church as well: Isidore’s sister Florentina became a nun, and his brother Fulgentius became bishop of Ecija. But Isidore himself had a more distinguished career than any of them. He was learned, with some knowledge of both Greek and Hebrew—probably not much, but this was at a time when very few in the West had any knowledge of either language. He knew not only the major Christian authors but also the works of the great pagan writers, including Pliny’s Historia naturalis. Around the year 600, he succeeded his brother as bishop of Seville.
TITLE: Etymologiarum libri XX
COMPILER: Isidorus Hispalensis (Isidore of Seville) (c. 560–636)
ORGANIZATION: 20 books: (1) grammar, (2) rhetoric, (3) mathematics (including music, geometry, and astronomy), (4) medicine, (5) law, (6) order of Scripture, (7) God and angels, (8) faith and the church, (9) languages, civics, family relations, (10) miscellaneous terms in alphabetical order, (11) human beings, (12) animals, (13) the four elements, (14) the earth, (15) cities, fields, and roads, (16) minerals, (17) agriculture, (18) war and games, (19) ships and trades, (20) food and domestic implements
PUBLISHED: 636 C.E.
VOLUMES: 20
ENTRIES: 463 numbered or lettered chapters, often subdivided
TOTAL WORDS: 191,000
He probably began his Etymologiae sometime around the year 617, and he was certainly at work on it by 622. Isidore kept at it until his death in 636, when it was completed, edited, and published by his student Braulion. The Latin is simple, making the book accessible even to those who were not well educated, and the range of subjects it covered is positively dizzying. It collects useful knowledge from 154 authors and assembles it into a twenty-book compendium covering grammar, mathematics, medicine, languages, geography, zoology, agriculture, and, above all, religious life. Isidore has been called “a bright light in an age which for a number of reasons has been called dark.”16
Working from the assumption that knowledge of words leads to knowledge of things, Isidore explored the world by looking deep into the origins of words. This approach is visible in the opening section of the Etymologies, where he discusses the words discipline and art, relating them to the words for learning, full, knowledge, strict, and virtue:
Discipline and art (De disciplina et arte) 1. A discipline (disciplina) takes its name from “learning” (discere), whence it can also be called “knowledge” (scientia). Now “know” (scire) is named from “learn” (discere), because none of us knows unless we have learned. A discipline is so named in another way, because “the full thing is learned” (discitur plena). 2. And an art (ars, gen. artis) is so called because it consists of strict (artus) precepts and rules. Others say this word is derived by the Greeks from the word ἀρετ [arete], that is, “virtue,” as they termed knowledge.17
As it happens, art does not come from arete, and even if it did, the etymology would not fix the meaning of anything. This is an example of what linguists call the “etymological fallacy,” the idea that the “true” meaning of a word is somehow lurking in its origins rather than in the way it is used by people in the real world. As Isidore himself put it, “The knowledge of a word’s etymology often has an indispensable usefulness for interpreting the word, for when you have seen whence a word has originated, you understand its force more quickly. Indeed, one’s insight into anything is clearer when its etymology is known.” For Isidore, though, etymologies were the key to hidden knowledge. So, for instance, the word medicina (medicine) was supposed by Isidore to come from modus (moderation), because “nature grieves at excess and rejoices at restraint. Hence those who drink potions and remedies copiously and unceasingly are troubled. Anything that is immoderate brings not health but danger.”18 The word medicine itself therefore teac
hes us a valuable medical lesson.
This etymology, alas, is bunk. Although both medicine and moderation come ultimately from the same Indo-European root, *med- ‘to take appropriate measures’, they took very different routes to get there, changing their meanings over the millennia, and neither comes from the other. Besides, *med- is also the root of modest, meditate, mode, modern, and gamete. No one today would make the argument that modernity, modesty, and meditation have some secret connection. But for Isidore, this is where wisdom was to be found. It led him to speculate about words’ histories, with superficial similarities between words serving to link them together. In his discussion of “tiny flying animals,” for instance, he explained that “Bees (apis) are so named either because they cling to each other with their feet (pes), or because they are born without feet (cf. a-, ‘without’), for they develop feet and wings afterwards.”19 The effect is a text richly stocked with seeming puns, but the puns are more than casual wordplay; they are intended to give us a profound insight into the truth—a poet’s understanding of the universe.
Even when Isidore’s facts are not supported by modern scholarship, the Etymologies offers a fascinating glimpse of the way people saw the world in the seventh century. Isidore loved classification, as with warfare: “There are four kinds of war: just, unjust, civil, and more than civil,” or literary works: “There are three genres of ‘literary works’ (opusculum). The first kind are extracts (excerptum), which in Greek are called scholia … The second kind are homilies (homilia), which Latin speakers call ‘talks’ (verbum) … Third are tomes (tomus), which we call books or volumes.”20 Sometimes his taxonomic urge got out of hand, as in this riot of Latin kinship terms:
The originator of my birth is my father, and I am his son or daughter. The father of my father is my grandfather (avis), and I am his grandson (nepos) or granddaughter (neptis). The grandfather of my father is my great-grandfather (proavus), and I am his great-grandson (pronepos) or -daughter (proneptis). The great-grandfather of my father is my great-great-grandfather (abavus) and I am his great-great-grandson (abnepos) or -daughter (abneptis). The great-great-grandfather of my father is my great-great-great-grandfather (atavus), and I am his great-great-great-grandson (adnepos) or -daughter (adneptis). The great-great-great-grandfather of my father is my great-great-great-great-grandfather (tritavus), and I am his great-great-great-great-grandson (trinepos) or -daughter (trineptis).21
