Authors and their public in ancient times

by George Haven Putnam

The change first comes when there is a break in the insulation. Gibbon continues: “The nations of Europe and Asia were mingled by the expeditions to the Holy Land, and it is under the Comnenian dynasty that a faint emulation of knowledge and of military virtue was rekindled in the Byzantine Empire.”

The opinion of Lecky is still more emphatic. He says: “The universal verdict of history is that the Byzantine State constituted the most base and despicable form that civilization ever assumed, and there has been no other enduring civilization so absolutely destitute of all the forms of true greatness, none to which the epithet mean may so emphatically be applied.”[297] Is it surprising that in a State thus demoralized there is no record of the existence of a publisher?

It is only proper to add that the historian Oman, a much sounder authority on the subject than Mr. Lecky, and writing with information before him that was not available for Gibbon, contends that the talk about the exceptional demoralization of the Byzantines is largely rubbish, and points out that if the State were really as corrupt as it is painted by Gibbon and by Lecky, it would have fallen to pieces of its own rottenness within two or three generations, instead of enduring as the bulwark of Europe for over a thousand years.

The fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the introduction into Europe of the Turks, was unquestionably a great injury to Europe and to civilization, and the destruction of the collections of manuscripts existing in the capital itself and in monasteries and libraries in other cities of the Empire, was an irreparable loss for literature. For the educational interests and the literary development of Europe there were, however, considerations to offset this serious disaster. Great as was the destruction of manuscripts, a number were preserved by individual scholars and in the hidden recesses of certain convents and monasteries. Many of these were at once taken to Italy, Germany, and France by the scholars flying from the barbarous conquerors of their land, and the works were thus brought to the knowledge and made available for the use of European students. Other manuscripts were secured from their hiding-places years after the capture of the city, by Greek scholars sent back for the purpose on behalf of the publishers of Italy and France, or of the universities of Bologna, Padua, and Paris, while some few valuable parchments were hidden so safely that they have been forgotten for centuries and are only to-day being brought to light from the vaults and attics of old monasteries, so as again to be included in literature accessible for the world.

In addition to the service done to the literary development of Europe by the distribution westward of the texts of the almost forgotten classics of the great Greek writers, there was the further important gain for the scholarship of the continent in securing, for university chairs, for tutorial positions, and for editorial work, the services of hundreds of Greek scholars whose homes had been destroyed, or who were unwilling to live under the rule of the hated Turk. Men of the highest rank in scholarly accomplishments and possessing a thorough knowledge of the literature of their race, either on the ground of impecuniosity or in some instances apparently from an unselfish devotion to the cause of scholarship, found their way to chairs in Bologna, Padua, Paris, Oxford, and other educational centres, and to the Court circles of the more intellectual of the princes and nobles of Italy, and spread in hundreds of channels a knowledge of the Greek language and an enthusiasm for the Greek literature. Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, had therefore played a part by no means unimportant in furthering one phase at least of the Renaissance of the intellectual life of Europe.

It was fortunate for the continued vitality and progress of the movement that the Greek literature thus reintroduced into Europe found already perfected the new art of printing, by means of which the manuscripts that the refugees from the Bosphorus had brought with them could be made generally available for students. It was fortunate also that, within a few years after the teaching of Greek had been entered upon in the principal educational centres, public-spirited and scholarly publishers were found prepared to take upon themselves the very serious business risk involved in the casting of Greek fonts of type and in the printing of editions of the Greek texts.

The first and most important of these publishers, the man who, on the ground of high ideals and of great things accomplished, is properly to be honored as facile princeps in the long list of the great publishers of Europe, was Aldus Manutius of Venice, a worthy successor to Atticus, the friend of Cicero, who, 1550 years earlier, had done his part in introducing to Italy and to the Roman world the classics of Greece.

It is in Venice, with the record of the service rendered by Aldus and his successors in connection with the second introduction into Italy and the world beyond Italy of the treasures of Greek literature; in Bologna and Paris, with some account of the connection of the great universities with the earlier publishing undertakings of Europe; and in Mayence, Frankfort, and Nuremberg, with the story of Gutenberg and his printing-press, that the history of the relations of authors with their public must be continued.

It is my hope to be able in a later volume to trace the development of property in literature from the time of the invention of printing down to the present day. It was, of course, only after the general application of printing to the production of books that authors were placed in a position to enforce any property control over their productions, while for a long period this control was conceded for but brief terms and was restricted to but limited territories. More than four centuries of further development in national morality have been required before the civilization of the world has brought itself to the recognition of the rights of literary producers according to the standard of to-day, a standard which is expressed by the term International Copyright.