“The shame of failing to cultivate our own talents, thereby depriving the future of the fruits that they might have yielded, is not enough for us; we must waste and spoil, through our cruel and insufferable neglect, the fruits of your labours too.” (Petrarch).
I chose
this picture because it is a depiction of Cicero doing what he does best, but I
also chose it to point out what his left hand is holding and why I think it is
significant to the renaissance. He is holding onto and unbound piece of writing
material, most likely vellum or parchment as the Romans were beginning to
substitute the two for papyrus as early as 200 B.C. due to the scarcity of
papyrus. Papyrus was becoming scarce in this time period due in part to the
library of a place called Pergamon. This library is compared by some historians
to the great Library of Alexandria, a place of knowledge and learning that was
eventually destroyed during Caesars pursuit of Pompey into Egypt. This event
has been thought of as a great loss of knowledge that captures the essence of what
Petrarch was trying to say in his letter to Cicero from the aforementioned
quote.
It
is interesting to see that societies have been trying to find ways to preserve
knowledge for thousands of years and that information is so valuable that many
inventors spend all of their time trying to create apparatus to retain it. I
wonder if perhaps those at Pergamon thought of their new parchment in a similar
vein that people during the Renaissance viewed paper, and if so, did they too
take pride in building upon inventions of the past the same way that people in the
renaissance did. It seems that every time there is a surge of knowledge-seeking
in a society, there too is a surge of technology that can retain it. Or perhaps
there were other civilizations who achieved similar ideologies, but perhaps they
failed in preserving what was learned and we are robbed, as Petrarch would say,
of the fruit of those labors.
As a linguist, I am often reading about the importance of preserving dying languages. We have already lost thousands of them, and your blog is a reminder that those languages held information that was valuable to future generations. We cannot take lightly the history of any peoples. Both individuals and societies contribute to humanity. The loss of information needs to be something we care about and desire to preserve.
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