THE LOST BOOKS A Saul Vogel mystery

Peter Billig
THE LOST BOOKS
A Saul Vogel Mystery

When a re-run of I Claudius was announced on TV, my Master’s reaction was adverse. Only my solemn assurance that I know Robert Graves’ books the show is based on and that they are excellent made him watch the first episode – and he was captivated! Every Sunday he would wait impatiently for the Roman emperors to appear: the fatherly Augustus, the sex maniac Tiberius, the madman Caligula and the phony idiot Claudius. Also the wives: Livia the poisoner, Julia the drunk, Drusilla the victim and Messalina the whore. The plot was so stimulating that when the show was over, my Master, until now obstinately illiterate (to avoid cluttering up his mind with other thinkers’ philosophies), decided to learn to write and read.
I taught him our alphabet and orthography and he learnt the other orthographies himself: he is fluent in thirty languages and copes with many more: knowing, say, Danish, you grasp Norwegian and Swedish.
He spent his childhood and youth roaming the world as a vagabond with pals of all nationalities.

To get acquainted with all the necessary alphabets and orthographies he was buying dictionaries and grammars by the dozen. Previously virginal, his study now saw three enormous shelves fill up. The breakneck speed of this learning shows to this day: sometimes, he applies Turkish orthography to English.

After six months, Vogel considered himself literate. Never forgetting his objective, he now swallowed up Graves’ I Claudius and Claudius the God and wanted to know where the author had drawn the historical stuff. I suggested Suetonius’ biographies of Roman emperors and Tacitus’ volumes of Roman history. He had experienced some Latin (wandering with a dipsomaniac classical scholar who actually spoke it) and now he systematized it by reading several progressively more difficult constructed Latin texts. Then he jumped into the lives of Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius via Suetonius’ biographies, supported by Lewis’ and Short’s A Latin Dictionary. Next, he took on Tacitus´ Histories, read for several weeks and suddenly came to me in tears: after a few chapters in the Fifth Book of Histories the text abruptly ends, never to reappear. A consultation of the newly bought Oxford Classical Dictionary showed this fact as known to science and much regretted. Tacitus’ Annals Vogel was planning to read next is even more lacerated. All of Caligula period is gone and there are other lacunae comprising whole chapters and even books.
“Also books have their fates.[1] The ones you desire aren’t just misplaced but lost forever,” I elucidated and proceeded to explain a Roman text’s arduous way through history. “Whatever we have has been copied onto parchment by monks in the Middle Ages. Perhaps one monk did not like Caligula? Or monastic mice did like him? Is it Fate that mice like Tacitus more than Cicero? Perhaps it’s much better for posterity not to know about some of Caligula’s hideous crimes and Tiberius’ disgusting sexual deviations?”
“Are you trying to tell an illiterate that there is no way of retrieving these texts?”
“I guess I am, unless a hitherto unknown copy is discovered in a murky corner of some library. Or the Norwegians succeed in unrolling the Herculanum scrolls: you know, from the library buried by lava during the great eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD,” and I proceeded to explain the Norwegian method, which unrolls an inch or so of a scroll a year.
“Many years to wait and only if, incidentally, the Norwegians have taken Tacitus first,” he says.
“They can’t,” I blush. “The volcano erupted in 79 AD and Tacitus began to write after this date, according to your Oxford Classical Dictionary. Sorry, my mistake.”

All next week, Vogel was disconsolate. He was reading everything he could get his eyes on concerning Tacitus: man, oeuvre and times. In order to understand the world of books, he aked me to take him to a library, his first ever, and he talked about Tacitus with me, visualizing the historian. Tacitus the scholar: researching in one of many private and public libraries in Rome and chatting with owners and librarians. Tacitus the politician: he became Governor of a province, a job for high-ranking administrators only – accessing some forgotten corner of Emperors’ Archive where Caligula’s infamous Black Book was once kept. Talking with an old-timer about days long gone. Receiving a secret diary of some long-executed conspirator kept by a sentimental niece. Writing or dictating to his scribe. Talking with the publisher. The manuscript being dictated to 50 “printing presses”: slave-copyists. Two Roman gentlemen meeting shortly after at a party:
“You know the booklet about the Germans by this guy Cornelius Tacitus?[2] You know, one of the praetors three or four years ago?”
“No, but they keep telling me it’s interesting.”
“It’s very informative, old chap. What low-life they are! Our boys do a good job keeping the brutes out up there on the Rhine.”

“Unless you are the incarnation of Tacitus himself and have a sudden flashback, Master, you’ll never know what was in the lost books. Why not face it, accept it as an adult and go back to the business of Philosophy – now as a man of letters?” I said after some more imaginative exercises of that kind.
“I just can’t! I’m not finished with Tacitus, whatever the reason.”
Raising his arms into the Cosmos like antennae, he intoned in a desperate tone:
“Corneli Tacite, libros tuos perditos desidero!”[3]
He went upstairs, presumably to sleep, but a loud vocalization from his study woke me in the middle of the night. I investigated: he was by the desk, reciting Latin into a tape-recorder, and his face was that of an obsessed. He was sentient, though: he saw me and motioned me away.
In the morning, he asked me to put the recording into the computer. I had tried to talk him into upgrading the machine to include voice recognition, but he found the cost prohibitive. I had to type, unceasingly stopping and restarting the tape-recorder. Bored, I was making many mistakes, having forgotten my high-school Latin, so – a hallmark of literacy! – he relieved me at the keyboard. It took weeks.
When finished, he appeared with malt and glasses.
“I heard a voice inside telling me to listen and write down. I did not feel up to writing yet, so I choose to repeat and record. The voice dictated all the lost books, chapters and lines in Tacitus. I am happy to inform you that Robert Graves has been real good at reconstructing missing events. A pity I can’t share the erstwhile lacunae with him!”
It took some booze to accommodate the news.
“Are you telling me that an angel from the celestial Post Office brought these puzzle-pieces to you because you were so sorry they were missing?” I replied finally.
“I think there is a Spiritual Layer where all thoughts are stored.” His face shone with that Special Light he exudes whenever he is speaking Words With Capital First Letters. “In some houses ghosts come into view and enact the same scene every time. I’ve seen it once with my own eyes! If an extremely emotional moment can be recorded in brick or stone and replay itself, why shouldn’t thought-energy get recorded in spirit? A person interested enough gets connected to this Layer on an appropriate level: Rudolf Steiner wanted all events and got the Akashic Records; Graves wanted scenes from imperial characters’ lives and got them as a clairvoyant film, which he called imagination; I needed texts and I got them, the clairaudient way! There are people who in trance speak languages they could not have known!”
“If everybody developed such faculties we would be an entirely different species, Master.”
“I’ll drink to that.”

Some years later, I read that a palimpsest had been discovered with a fragment of a lost Tacitus text. I found the text on the Internet. Not a single word was different from that on Vogel’s old diskette.

Copyright © by Peter Billig, 2007.
[1] Habent sua fata libelli: a popular quotation from Terentius Maurus’ Poetics, where the last book is lost, too.
[2] De origine et situ Germanorum.
[3] Cornelius Tacitus, I desire your lost books!