“The Earth,” Alexander the Great proclaimed, “I consider mine.” Shortly after Alexander died in 323 BC, Ptolemy I embarked on a project to realise Alexander’s ambition to possess the world: a library that would hold every single work by every single author since the beginning of time.
The Library of Alexandria’s collection ranged from epic poems to recipe books and its prestige triggered a grandiose act in the world’s most famous love story: Mark Antony tried to woo Cleopatra by laying 200,000 books – a gift for the library – at her feet.
The principal focus of Irene Vallejo’s Papyrus is a heady history of books in ancient Greece and Rome. But her kaleidoscopic canvas stretches from Sumerians in the Fertile Crescent around 3000 BC inscribing signs on clay tablets (some just the size of a credit card) to the revolutionary development of papyrus scrolls (which could contain an entire Greek tragedy) to the Roman writers Virgil and Ovid – the first international stars.
Along the way, we learn that mocking bookworms dates back to the fifth century BC and that a library in medieval Spain warned any potential book thief that “the flames of Hell” would “consume him forever”.
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A writer and classicist, Vallejo counterbalances the breadth of her subject by precisely evoking how books changed her life, starting with her mother’s “act of love” in reading to her as a child, and through succinct chapters, frequently infusing her narrative with a novelistic brio: “Writing is merely the latest flutter of the eyelid of our species, the most recent beat of an ancient heart.”
While her digressions can lend Papyrus a slightly scattergun feel, Vallejo’s vigorous celebration of book culture excels at illuminating the ancient world through contemporary references – including to Margaret Atwood, Bob Dylan and Taxi Driver – and draws revealing parallels between antiquity and today.
JM Coetzee wrote that a classic survives because we can’t “afford to let go of it”, but Papyrus also shows how a classic can make history. Just as Alexander inspired the library that came closest to accumulating every book in existence, he was inspired, as he plotted victorious military campaigns from Africa to Asia, by a book he always carried with him, the most-read Greek book of ancient times – The Iliad.
