From the Tree to the Labyrinth Read Online Free PDF Page A

intend and will that you acquire a perfect command of languages—first Greek (as Quintilian wishes), secondly Latin, and then Hebrew for the Holy Scriptures, as well as Chaldaean and Arabic likewise—and that, for your Greek, you mould your style by imitating Plato, and for your Latin, Cicero.
    Let there be no history which you do not hold ready in memory: to help you, you have the cosmographies of those who have written on the subject.
    When you were still very young—about five or six—I gave you a foretaste of geometry, arithmetic and music among the liberal arts. Follow that up with the other arts. Know all the canons of astronomy, but leave judicial astrology and the Art of Lullius alone as abuses and vanities.
    I want you to learn all of the beautiful texts of Civil Law by heart and compare them to moral philosophy.
    And as for the knowledge of natural phenomena, I want you to apply yourself to it with curiosity: let there be no sea, river or stream the fishes of which you do not know. Know all the birds of the air, all the trees, bushes and shrubs of the forests, all the herbs in the soil, all the metals hidden deep in the womb of the Earth, the precious stones of all the Orient and the South: let none remain unknown to you.
    Then frequent the books of the ancient medical writers, Greek, Arabic and Latin, without despising the Talmudists or the Cabbalists; and by frequent dissections acquire a perfect knowledge of that other world which is Man.
    And for a few hours every day start to study the Sacred Writings: first the Gospels and Epistles of the Apostles in Greek, then the Old Testament in Hebrew. In short, let me see you an abyss of erudition. 15

    In book II, chapter 20, Thaumastes praises the young Pantagruel’s culture, saying: “I swear he discovered, for my benefit, the true source, well and abyss of the encyclopedia of learning.”
    In 1536 we find the term in Juan Luis Vives’s De disciplinis, in which he calls “encyclopedia” the various things that the educand must know, with explicit reference to Pliny and other classical encyclopedists. 16 As part of the title of a book the word appears in Paulus Scalichius de Lika’s Encyclopediae seu orbis disciplinarum tam sacrarum quam profanarum epistemon (Basel, 1559).

1.3.1.  Pliny and the Model of the Ancient Encyclopedia
    No Greek encyclopedias, at least in the sense of compilations of previous knowledge, have survived. Of course, the works of Aristotle are an encyclopedia, ranging as they do from logic to astronomy and from the study of animals to human psychology. They are not presented, however, as a collection of shared knowledge, but as a fresh offering. Likewise, in a Latin context, rather than an encyclopedic collection of facts, Lucretius’s De rerum natura aspires to be a systematic exposition of “scientific” truths.
    The works that have been seen as examples of Greek encyclopedism are instead expressions, frequently incidental, of curiosity and wonder over fabulous lands and peoples: in this sense an encyclopedic component has been identified in the Odyssey. Encyclopedic interests are definitely present in Herodotus when he describes the marvels of Egypt and of other barbaric peoples. The Greek Alexander Romance, though its actual date is uncertain and its attribution to Callisthenes, a contemporary of Alexander, apocryphal, was probably composed at the beginning of the Hellenistic period and, while claiming to narrate the adventures of the famous Macedonian condottiere, presents itself in fact as a travel guide to marvelous places teeming with extraordinary creatures.
    It was the mature Alexandrian period that produced many works of paradoxography, devoted to the presentation of remarkable things and events, such as the treatise devoted by Strato of Lampsacus to unusual animals, the Mirabilia of Callimachus, or that of Antigonus of Carystus, while the De mirabilibus auscultationibus, an assemblage or miscellany of little-known facts