The Dream of Scipio Read Online Free PDF Page A

Manlius would have given instructions that all his wealth be transferred to the church, for its greater glory, and so he might die in proper poverty.
    Once the body was secure inside the church, therefore, he gave the orders. By evening the next day, Manlius’s great villa was empty; the gold and silver plate (remarkably little of it, in fact, for the deacon did not realize how often his bishop had paid from his own funds to repair roads and walls and waterways) were locked in the church, the furniture also, the lead and tiles stripped from the roofs to be transferred later. Four of the great stone columns from the colonnade were marked for reuse, when a team of bullocks and cart could be found strong enough to pull the load. The statues were left, but the workers, simple townsmen all, were shocked to see that nearly all were pagan imagery, foul and disgusting displays of impiety. These they toppled from their stands and broke with mallets, lest anyone see and scorn their patron. They were determined to guard his reputation in death as well as he had guarded them in life. It was the very least they could do, for they relied on him to guard them in the after-life as well, and did not wish to risk his anger by neglecting to protect his good name.
    Most of Manlius’s great library was burned as well; the old rolls, the newly copied codices alike, were taken into the courtyard and destroyed; an extravagant gesture brought on by haste, for many were on vellum and could have been scraped and used again. The bonfire burned brightly for more than three hours as his precious Ammianus, Tacitus, Ovid, Terence, Plautus went up in the flames so their owner’s purity would burn more brightly to posterity. Also consumed were his treasured Greek texts, his Plato and Aristotle, his two copies of Sophocles, his Xenophon. None were needed, many were scandalous, all should go. Only Christian texts were preserved, winnowed out like wheat from the chaff, lovingly wrapped in cloth and taken back to the church in Vaison, where they rested on a small shelf until, a hundred years later, they were transferred to a monastery outside Marseille.
    Here they remained for two centuries until they, in turn, were consumed by fire. By then, however, some had been copied and, just as Manlius’s commentary was preserved by mere chance after his death, mistaken for a Christian text, so it was by accident that, when a copyist came from a new foundation near Montpellier in 723 to acquire sacred works, one of his team of scribes transcribed it as well, writing so fast that he barely noticed what he was jotting down.
    There were mistakes, bad mistakes, in this version, but the delicate thread that began before Manlius and stretched across the centuries held still. For though this version was, in its turn, destroyed by Protestants during the wars of religion, by then Olivier de Noyen had seen it and copied down most of it, errors and all. The voice that Julien Barneuve heard, when he picked up the manuscript in the Vatican library, was by then weak and feeble but in the echoing sound, and the chatter of other men’s words and opinions, it was still just recognizable, and through it the words of Sophia, half understood or not understood at all, passed down the centuries into his mind.
     
 
 
WHEN OLIVIER de Noyen found the manuscript in the library of a monastery near Montpellier, he suspected it might be of importance, but failed to understand anything of its arguments until he came under the painstaking tutelage of Rabbi Levi ben Gerson. He did not even realize that it was not original. He knew little of philosophy except for the poor versions of Aristotle that were so much a part of the church that many men were virtually unaware that he had been a pagan. Plato was to him but a name, a mysterious, half-legendary creature all but forgotten. Olivier was a clerical courtier and something of a poet, and had as his private goal the purification of letters, the