The Book of Lost Books by Stuart Kelly Read Free Book Online Page A

life, and commissioned his elaborate mausoleum, Li Ssu resolved to do something about “the men of letters who do not model themselves on the present, but study the past in order to criticize the present.” In tandem with Shih Huang-ti’s megalomaniac ambition to ensure that history would begin with his reign, the consequences were inevitable.
    The result was the Burning of the Books, when the Chinese bureaucracy turned destructively against itself. Except for a single copy of each work, to be stored in the emperor’s personal library, Li Ssu initiated a purge. It was a crime to harbor books, and town squares were soon choked with the smoke of massive pyres. People heard discussing books were publicly executed, along with their immediate family. Officials who did not implement the new rules were punished in the same manner as the offenders. Two hundred and sixty Confucian scholars were buried, alive, in a mass grave, in order to prevent them from reconstructing the classics from memory.
    The First Emperor died in 210 B.C.E. Li Ssu and the chief eunuch, Chao Kao, conspired to destroy the emperor’s decree that his eldest son should succeed to the throne, replacing the order with one in favor of the more pliable Hu-hai. Chao Kao then eliminated Li Ssu, forced Hu-hai to commit suicide (after slowly driving him mad with elaborate deceptions), and declared a grandson of Shih Huang-ti to be emperor. New internecine conflicts broke out, which ended with a former police officer establishing the Han dynasty.
    The Han, however, were keen to curb the worst excesses of legalism and encouraged a resurgence in the Confucian system. Scholars re-edited, and occasionally even rewrote, the five remaining Classics.
The
Book of Music
was lost entirely during the burning. Eventually, in 175 B.C.E., a decree was issued that the surviving texts, which for nearly half a century had persisted in the hearts and minds of men, should be engraved on stone.

Aeschylus
    {
c.
525–456 B.C.E.}
    PTOLEMY III (247–222 B.C.E.) had a lot to live up to. His grandfather Ptolemy I had accompanied Alexander the Great on his campaigns and, on the conqueror’s death, acquired the government of Egypt. There he had constructed a new wonder of the world: the Alexandrian Library. The repository grew out of Aristotle’s personal library. In addition, Ptolemy I, called the Preserver, brought such scholars as Euclid the geometer and the grammarian Zenodotus to create the most distinguished academy of literary, historical, philosophical, mathematical, and astronomical knowledge in the known world. The Preserver’s son Ptolemy II secured and expanded the library. According to tradition, to satisfy his desire that the library should be the most complete as well as the most prestigious, he employed seventy Jewish scholars to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. Such endeavors require peace, and Ptolemy II brokered a treaty with the Romans and forged a dynastic alliance with the erstwhile enemy of the Egyptians, Antiochus II of Syria, by giving his daughter Berenice in marriage.
    So, in time, Ptolemy III inherited a legacy of military security and intellectual esteem, along with the urge to outdo his ancestors and further extend the glory of Egypt. As luck would have it, Antiochus II callously divorced and poisoned Berenice as soon as Ptolemy II died, and Ptolemy III waged a war of vengeance, subduing Asia from Mesopotamia to Babylon and recapturing statues of deities stolen throughout the wars between Egypt and Persia. He conquered deep into the south, as far as Ethiopia, and developed a powerful maritime fleet. The garlands of victory were all very well, no doubt, but his predecessors were praised as men of letters as well as heroic conquerors. Ptolemy III turned his attentions to the library.
    Cataloguing the library’s 200,000 scrolls began in earnest, and an anomaly of unthinkable proportions was discovered. Pharaoh had no