Hypatia... I Feel Your Pain... From: Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos', Chapter 13: 'Who Speaks For Earth?'

WillyT

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Sun Jun-12-11 08:04 PM
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Hypatia... I Feel Your Pain... From: Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos', Chapter 13: 'Who Speaks For Earth?'

Edited on Sun Jun-12-11 08:05 PM by WillyT

<snip>

...

Alexandria was the publishing capital of the planet. Of course, there were no
printing presses then. Books were expensive; every one of them was copied by hand. The
Library was the repository of the most accurate copies in the world. The art of critical
editing was invented there. The Old Testament comes down to us mainly from the Greek
translations made in the Alexandrian Library. The Ptolemys devoted much of their
enormous wealth to the acquisition of every Greek book, as well as works from Africa,
Persia, India, Israel and other parts of the world. Ptolemy III Euergetes wished to borrow
from Athens the original manuscripts or official state copies of the great ancient tragedies
of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. To the Athenians, these were a kind of cultural
patrimony - something like the original handwritten copies and first folios of Shakespeare
might be in England. They were reluctant to let the manuscripts out of their hands even for
a moment. Only after Ptolemy guaranteed their return with an enormous cash deposit did
they agree to lend the plays. But Ptolemy valued those scrolls more than gold or silver. He
forfeited the deposit gladly and enshrined, as well he might, the originals in the Library.
The outraged Athenians had to content themselves with the copies that Ptolemy, only a
little shamefacedly, presented to them. Rarely has a state so avidly supported the pursuit of
knowledge.

The Ptolemys did not merely collect established knowledge; they encouraged and
financed scientific research and so generated new knowledge. The results were amazing:
Eratosthenes accurately calculated the size of the Earth, mapped it, and argued that India
could be reached by sailing westward from Spain. Hipparchus anticipated that stars come
into being, slowly move during the course of centuries, and eventually perish; it was he
who first catalogued the positions and magnitudes of the stars to detect such changes.
Euclid produced a textbook on geometry from which humans learned for twenty-three
centuries, a work that was to help awaken the scientific interest of Kepler, Newton and
Einstein. Galen wrote basic works on healing and anatomy which dominated medicine until
the Renaissance. There were, as we have noted, many others. Alexandria was the greatest
city the Western world had ever seen. People of all nations came there to live, to trade,
to learn. On any given day, its harbors were thronged with merchants, scholars and tourists.
This was a city where Greeks, Egyptians, Arabs, Syrians, Hebrews, Persians, Nubians, Phoenicians, Italians, Gauls and Iberians exchanged merchandise and ideas. It is probably here that the word cosmopolitan realized its true meaning - citizen, not just of a nation, but of the Cosmos. To be a citizen of the Cosmos . . .

Here clearly were the seeds of the modern world. What prevented them from taking
root and flourishing? Why instead did the West slumber through a thousand years of
darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work
done in Alexandria? I cannot give you a simple answer. But I do know this: there is no
record, in the entire history of the Library, that any of its illustrious scientists and scholars
ever seriously challenged the political, economic and religious assumptions of their society.
The permanence of the stars was questioned; the justice of slavery was not. Science and
learning in general were the preserve of a privileged few. The vast population of the city
had not the vaguest notion of the great discoveries taking place within the Library. New
findings were not explained or popularized. The research benefited them little. Discoveries
in mechanics and steam technology were applied mainly to the perfection of weapons, the
encouragement of superstition, the amusement of kings. The scientists never grasped the
potential of machines to free people.* The great intellectual achievements of antiquity had
few immediate practical applications. Science never captured the imagination of the
multitude. There was no counterbalance to stagnation, to pessimism, to the most abject
surrenders to mysticism. When, at long last, the mob came to burn the Library down, there
was nobody to stop them.

The last scientist who worked in the Library was a mathematician, astronomer,
physicist and the head of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy - an extraordinary range of
accomplishments for any individual in any age. Her name was Hypatia. She was born in
Alexandria in 370. At a time when women had few options and were treated as property,
Hypatia moved freely and unselfconsciously through traditional male domains. By all
accounts she was a great beauty. She had many suitors but rejected all offers of marriage.
The Alexandria of Hypatia’s time - by then long under Roman rule - was a city under grave
strain. Slavery had sapped classical civilization of its vitality. The growing Christian
Church was consolidating its power and attempting to eradicate pagan influence and
culture. Hypatia stood at the epicenter of these mighty social forces. Cyril, the Archbishop
of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman governor, and
because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the
early Church with paganism. In great personal danger, she continued to teach and publish,
until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril’s
parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with
abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated,
her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.

The glory of the Alexandrian Library is a dim memory. Its last remnants were
destroyed soon after Hypatia’s death. It was as if the entire civilization had undergone some
self-inflicted brain surgery, and most of its memories, discoveries, ideas and passions were
extinguished irrevocably. The loss was incalculable. In some cases, we know only the
tantalizing titles of the works that were destroyed. In most cases, we know neither the titles
nor the authors. We do know that of the 123 plays of Sophocles in the Library, only seven
survived. One of those seven is Oedipus Rex. Similar numbers apply to the works of
Aeschylus and Euripides. It is a little as if the only surviving works of a man named
William Shakespeare wereCoriolanus and A Winter’s Tale, but we had heard that he had
written certain other plays, unknown to us but apparently prized in his time, works entitled
Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet.
Of the physical contents of that glorious Library not a single scroll remains.

...

<snip>

Link: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2513076/Carl-Sagan-Cosmos

Thank you, Carl... for the reminder.