If I Do Not Seem Tedious

by Simplicius, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The old man paid by the quire, and he paid before the work, which Mara of Edessa had never known a Greek to do.

Four keratia for eight leaves, ruled and written on both sides, twenty-nine lines to the page. The coins were put on the table one by one, on the corner furthest from the ink, and the old man watched them go down as a man watches seed go into a furrow, without any appearance of grief. Then he pushed across the first gathering of his own draft, which was not on parchment at all but on the backs of tax receipts from Cilicia, the cheap Egyptian papyrus gone the colour of lentil soup, his hand running small and upright between the faded columns of somebody else's arrears.

"You will find places where I have written here the words," he said. "Where you find that, stop, and come and get the book."

Mara had been in Harran three weeks. He had come down from Edessa with a letter from his uncle, who copied psalters for a monastery outside the walls, and with the hope of work from the bishop, who already had two scribes and did not want a third. So he sat in a room off a courtyard in the quarter behind the Sin gate, where a fig tree grew out of the cistern-mouth, and copied the commentary of a pagan on the books of Aristotle concerning nature, for four keratia the quire. Another scribe had begun it, a Harranian who had made nine quires and then gone up to Edessa for a wedding and not come back; Mara took up the draft where he had put it down.

He did not tell the deacon Qura. Qura had asked him on the second Sunday what work he had found, and Mara had said, "Greek, for a householder," which was true.

---

The house belonged to the old man, or he behaved as though it did. There was a woman called Shalmath who cooked, Harranian and of the old faith, who left a dish of oil and a pinch of salt on the roof every new moon and did not hide it; a boy who carried water; a cat. There was a second room, kept shut, from which the old man came out each morning with dust on the hem of his cloak. In the afternoons a man came from the city whose name Mara did not learn, who argued with the old man about the length of the year in a language Mara thought was Greek until he realised it was mostly numbers.

The old man was perhaps sixty. He had all his teeth and used them on bread like a soldier. When he read he held the page away from himself at the full stretch of his arm, and when he wrote he held it close enough to breathe on. He did not pray in front of Mara, and he did not ask whether Mara prayed.

Mara's first quire was Aristotle and the old man talking about Aristotle, and Mara copied it in the house book-hand his uncle had beaten into him, the round upright capitals that do not lean however tired the wrist. It went quickly. The old man's draft was clean. Where he had changed his mind he struck through with a single line that left the first thought legible beneath, and Mara learned to copy the second thought and leave the first where it lay, on the back of a tax receipt, for the cat.

On the fourth day he came to here the words.

---

The book was in the shut room. The old man went in alone and came out with it held flat on both forearms, the way the deacon Qura carried the Gospel to the ambo, and set it down on a cushion he had brought for the purpose. It was a roll, not a codex: papyrus, and old, wound on a stick of dark wood whose knobs had been rubbed bare by hands. The outer turn was brown and split along the fibres. When the old man opened it, flakes the size of a fingernail came away and lay on the cushion, and he did not brush them off; he left them there, and Mara understood that he was not to brush them off either.

"Parmenides of Elea," the old man said. "The verses on what is. From only one tale of a way remains to the opinions of mortals. I have marked the beginning and the end." There was a slip of red thread laid across the papyrus at each place. "Copy them as they stand."

Mara counted. The verses ran to something over fifty lines, the hexameters long, each one a full line of his page and some of them more.

"That is two pages," he said. "Nearly a whole leaf."

"Yes."

"Your reader can find them in the book." Mara meant it helpfully. He had once watched his uncle lose a whole winter's profit on a psalter because the abbot wanted the rubrics in cinnabar. "In the commentary you could put as Parmenides says in the verses on what is, and the first line, and then go on. Anyone who has the book —"

The old man looked at him for some time.

"Which book?" he said.

Mara looked at the roll on its cushion.

"This one," the old man said, "came from Athens in a box with my teacher's things. Before that I do not know where it came from. I looked for another in Alexandria when I was young and did not find one. I have asked in Antioch. I have written to a man in Gaza who once said he had seen one, and he wrote back that he had been thinking of Empedocles." He put one finger, very lightly, on the wooden knob. "If it does not seem tedious, I would gladly write the verses out. For the sake of the argument, so that no one has to trust me about what he says. And because the book is scarce."

He said it the way a man repeats a sentence he has already written down, and Mara found it afterwards in the draft, almost word for word, just above here the words: if I do not seem tedious.

"It is not tedious," Mara said, because he had been paid in advance.

---

He copied the verses over two days, because the old man read each line back against the roll before he would let the next be begun. The papyrus could not be weighted; the old man would not allow it. So the boy held it open, sitting cross-legged on the floor with the roll on the cushion across his knees, turning his face away when he sneezed, and Mara worked bent sideways over his own page with his eyes going down and across, down and across, as if he were crossing a stream on stones.

The Greek was difficult, but not in the way he had expected. Plato he had read with his uncle, and Gospel Greek he could have written asleep. This was something else: old, and rough in the joints, words that wore their endings the way the hill people wore their cloaks, back to front. On the second morning, tired, he came to a word in the old Ionic form and wrote it without thinking the way a reasonable man would write it now, and went on, and three lines later felt the old man standing behind him.

The old man did not speak. He reached past Mara's shoulder and laid the tip of his finger under the word.

"It is the same word," Mara said.

"Then it costs you nothing to write his."

There was a pumice in Mara's case and a small knife. He scraped the word out, the parchment going rough and white under the blade, and blew on it, and rubbed it down with the flat of the knife-handle, and wrote it again the way it stood on the roll. The ink spread a little on the scraped place. It would always look, to anyone who held the leaf to the light, as if something had been corrected there.

"Good," the old man said. "Now they will know that somebody took trouble over it."

That evening, in the street outside the bishop's house, Mara met the deacon Qura, who asked after the Greek householder.

"He is very careful," Mara said.

"About what?"

Mara thought. "About other people's words."

Qura, who had been a notary before he was a deacon, nodded as at something commonplace and asked whether the householder had a wife, and whether he came to church, and Mara answered no both times, and Qura said that Harran was full of such men, that the Persian king had passed through the summer before last and refused the city's money because, he said, its people were not Christians but of the old faith, and that was the kind of compliment a city did not easily live down. Then he blessed Mara and went in.

---

There was a gap in the roll.

It came near the end of the first day: a hole the size of a thumb-joint, where something, a worm or a drop of oil or simply age, had eaten through two turns of the papyrus, so that in four lines in succession the middle words were gone. The edges of the hole were dark and soft as cloth.

Mara stopped. The boy, who had learned the rhythm of the work, looked up.

The old man came and bent over the cushion with the page at the full stretch of his arm, and then, for this, put his face close to the roll, close enough to breathe on it, and held his breath instead.

"Do you know what it said?" Mara asked.

"I know what Alexander says it said. Alexander may have had a better copy than this one, or he may have been remembering." The old man straightened slowly. "And I know what I think it said."

"Then —" Mara had his pen up. He could hear in his own head how the line would go, the metre carrying the gap the way a bridge carries a road; the missing words almost suggested themselves. In Edessa a scribe who left a hole in a psalm was a scribe who had not finished his work.

"Leave the space," the old man said. "Leave as many letters' space as you judge is missing, and put a mark in the margin. In my commentary I will say what Alexander says, and that it is Alexander who says it."

"Nobody will know what goes there."

"Nobody knows now," the old man said. "The difference is whether they know that they do not know."

Mara left four blank spaces in four lines, and in the margin beside them he made the small sign his uncle had used for something wanting, and it looked, on the clean page, like a window into nothing.

---

On the second day the verses ended at the red thread, and the old man rolled the book up himself. He wound it slowly back on its stick with the flat of his hands, and when it was closed he gathered up from the cushion every flake that had fallen in two days, pressed them with a damp fingertip one at a time, and put them into a small box of turned wood with a sliding lid. Then he carried the box and the roll back into the shut room.

Mara had seen relics handled with less care. He did not say so.

They went on through the commentary. Aristotle; the old man on Aristotle; Alexander on Aristotle, quoted at length because, said a note in the draft, his book also is now hard to come by; Porphyry; Eudemus; and the old man again, never long, putting each of them gently in the place where he thought they agreed. When Aristotle was rough with Melissus, the old man was courteous to Melissus. When Aristotle said the early men had seen only matter, the old man went looking among the early men for one who had seen mind, and found Anaxagoras, and quoted him, and Mara copied that too. It was like watching a man make peace at a family supper among relatives who had been dead for a thousand years.

When they had come to the end of the first book, the old man brought out the nine quires the Harranian had made, looked through them at arm's length, and put them aside. "He wrote leaning," he said. "And where he was bored, he shortened." Mara would make them again.

In the second of them, Mara came to Anaximander.

There was no here the words. The words were in the draft, in the old man's small upright hand, and among them a sentence that did not sound like the old man at all:

Out of the things from which there is coming-to-be for the things that are, into these also their perishing happens, according to what is owed; for they give justice and payment to one another for their injustice, according to the ordering of Time.

And then, in the old man's own voice again: so he says, in rather poetic terms.

Mara read it twice. Then he went to the door of the shut room and knocked, which he had never done.

The old man came out with dust on his hem.

"The book," Mara said. "For the Anaximander. To check it against."

"There is no book."

Mara waited.

"There is Theophrastus, who read him, and wrote down what he said; and there are the people who read Theophrastus, and wrote him down, in shorter and shorter books. I have it from one of those. It may be that the man who made my copy had it from another. I have not seen a line of Anaximander's own book. I do not know anyone who has." He looked at the draft in Mara's hands. "That is the sentence. That is all of him I can give you."

"One sentence."

"One sentence is not nothing," the old man said. "It is one sentence more than there would be."

He did not say anything else, and he did not go back into the room. He stood in the doorway with the light from the courtyard on one side of his face, and Mara saw that he was waiting to see the sentence written.

So Mara sat down, and trimmed his pen, which did not need it, and dipped, and wrote. Out of the things from which. He wrote it in the upright capitals, not leaning. Justice and payment to one another. He had copied the Psalms forty times and the Gospel of John nine, and he had never before written a sentence that he knew to be, as far as anyone on the earth could say, the only one. His hand was steady and his back was wet. According to the ordering of Time. He went on, without stopping, into so he says, in rather poetic terms, because to stop there would have been to put a break between the two voices that the old man had not put.

When he looked up the doorway was empty, and Shalmath was calling the boy for the lentils.

---

The commentary was finished after the heat came, in the month the Harranians called by a name Mara did not use. Forty-one quires. The old man paid for the last as he had paid for the first, on the far corner of the table, and then put down one more keration beside the others.

"For the verses," he said.

Mara did not want to take it, and took it.

The old man had already set out a new stack of parchment, cut and folded and not yet ruled, and a new gathering of tax receipts. On the Physics, Book One, it said at the top of the first, in a hand that was beginning, Mara saw now, to shake a little at the ends of the strokes.

"You are going to copy it again?"

"That one is for here. This one goes to a man in Alexandria, if a ship will take it. And then a third, if there is parchment and if I am alive." The old man pulled the top sheet across to Mara and turned it the right way round for him. "Leave a wider margin this time."

"Why?"

"For whoever corrects me."

Mara had been ruling pages since he was eight. He took the straightedge from his case and laid it along the sheet, two fingers' breadth further in than he had laid it for the Physics, and drew the dry point down against it, pressing hard, so the line would hold through both leaves and down into the next.

✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾

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A note on the words. The two sentences the old man asks to have copied exactly are quoted from the real commentary of Simplicius on Aristotle's Physics, in my own English. The first is Anaximander's, together with Simplicius's remark that he says it "in rather poetic terms" (In Phys. 24.13–21, ed. Diels). The second, if I do not seem tedious, introduces his long transcription of Parmenides' verses on being, made, he says, both so that what he claims can be checked and because Parmenides' book was scarce (In Phys. 144.25–28). That Simplicius lived and wrote in Harran after 532 was proposed by Michel Tardieu and is still disputed; the scribe, the household and the gap in the roll are invented. Procopius records that when Chosroes passed through Carrhae in 540 he refused the city's money because most of its people "are not Christians but are of the old faith" (Wars 2.13).

THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Simpliciō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Simplicius, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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