The Twelfth Book

by Porphyry of Tyre, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Genus

The law came to Tyre in the second week of March, in the consulship of Zeno and Postumianus. It came with the rest of the post from Constantinople: two constitutions on the grain levy, a rescript about a disputed inheritance in Sidon, and a single sheet, folded twice. The governor's chief clerk read it standing up. Then he handed it to Zenobios without sitting down.

"Copy it into the register," he said. "Then come and see me."

Zenobios copied it. He was an exceptor, which meant that he could take down a speech in shorthand as fast as a man could make it and write it out fair afterwards in a Latin the capital would not laugh at. He had been in the governor's office nineteen years. He copied the law as he copied everything, word by word, without reading it, and then he read it.

Most of it was about Nestorius, who had been bishop of Constantinople and was not any longer. His followers were to be called Simonians from now on, and his books were to be sought out and burned. Near the end, as if someone had remembered it at the door, came another name. Whatever Porphyry, driven by his madness, or anyone else had written against the religious worship of the Christians, wherever it was found, was to be given to the fire.

He put down the pen and wiped it on the rag. The wind was from the south, and through the window came the smell that came through every window in Tyre when the wind was from the south. It came from the dye-works beyond the Egyptian harbour, where they broke the murex shells and left the meat to rot in the vats. Visitors held their sleeves to their noses. People born in the city did not notice it, except on certain days, when they noticed everything.

The chief clerk was a heavy man from Berytus with a lawyer's habit of putting his fingertips together. He did it now.

"You read the old books," he said. "You had a grammarian when you were a boy. A proper one."

"Kallinikos."

"Kallinikos. Then you know what is Porphyry's and what is not. The bishop is sending a deacon. You go with him: the booksellers first, then any house with a library worth the name. Write down everything you take. What you take one day we burn the next, in the forum, at the third hour, so that it is seen to be done. And I write to the capital that it is done." He looked at Zenobios over his fingertips. "He was from here, wasn't he? Porphyry."

"So it is said."

"Then the city will be watching. Do it properly."

Species

The deacon was called Paulos, and he was perhaps twenty-two. He had a list from the bishop's library written on a strip of papyrus, which he held in both hands like a tool he had not used before. It was a list of Porphyry's books: forty titles, some of them in two or three forms, because the bishop's librarian had not been sure.

They began in the street of the binders behind the Sidonian harbour, where there were three shops that sold books, and a fourth that sold them when it could get them. The first two had nothing. The third was Hesychios's, a long dark room with a counter at the front and shelves of codices lying flat at the back, the way Hesychios said books ought to lie, so that their spines did not break. Hesychios was nearly seventy. He watched them from his stool and did not get up.

Paulos found the copies of the Introduction in a quarter of an hour. There were five of them, small cheap codices on poor parchment, school books, stacked together on the lowest shelf with a grammar and two copies of Menander's maxims. He carried them to the counter and put them down in a pile and opened his list to make his mark.

"Those are not for the fire," Zenobios said.

Paulos looked at him. He looked at the first leaf of the top copy, where the title stood in a hand that sloped to the right: Porphyry's Introduction.

"It says Porphyry."

"It does." Zenobios took the register from his satchel, opened it to the page, and turned it round so that the deacon could read. "Against the religious worship of the Christians. That is what the emperors want burned. Not his name. What he wrote against."

"He wrote against all of it. He was a madman. It says so there."

"Read the first page." Zenobios opened the top codex and laid it flat. "Here. Since it is necessary, Chrysaorius, to know what a genus is and what a difference, and a species, and a property, and an accident. That is the whole book. How to say what a thing is. Which word is its kind, which word marks it off from the others of that kind, what belongs to it always and what only sometimes. Every boy in this province who has done any logic has learned it out of this. Your bishop's secretaries among them, I should think."

Paulos read the opening twice, moving his lips. Then he looked at the other four copies as though they might have something different inside.

"There's nothing in it about us?"

"There's nothing in it about anyone. It is about words. Man is an animal; rational marks him off from the horse. That kind of thing."

The deacon thought about this for some time. Zenobios watched him think, and found that he liked him for doing it. Then Paulos took the five codices back to the lowest shelf and laid them down where they had been, flat, one on top of another, as Hesychios liked.

Hesychios had watched all of this without moving. Now he spoke.

"If it's the other you want," he said, "you won't find it in a shop. Go up to the house of Kallinikos. The widow's. I offered for the library at Epiphany, the week he died, and she wouldn't sell, and I'm glad now that she wouldn't."

Paulos wrote the name on the back of his list. Zenobios did not say that he knew the house, or that he knew the room in it, or the chest.

Difference

The house was in the upper town, below the old walls, on a street that ran crooked because it followed a path older than the city's grid. Thekla opened the door herself. She had always opened the door herself; there had only ever been one slave in that house, a Cilician who did the cooking and a little of everything else. She was smaller than Zenobios remembered and wore the dark mantle of the first year. She knew him at once.

"You've come for the books," she said. "Hesychios has been telling the whole street."

"Not the books. One of them."

She took them through to the room at the back, where the light came in from the court. The room had not changed. There was the table with the inkstand cut out of a single block of red stone, the bench along the wall where boys had sat, and the chest. It was cedar, iron at the corners, with a lock that had not worked in thirty years. Zenobios had sat on that bench at sixteen, the winter his voice broke, and watched Kallinikos take out a codex from the bottom of the chest and hold it on his knees without opening it.

This is the twelfth book of Porphyry against the Christians, Kallinikos had said. It is about the prophet Daniel. When you are older you will read it, and then you will read Eusebius, who answered it, and Apollinaris, who answered it at greater length. Then you will make up your own mind, and you will tell me what you have decided, and I will tell you that you are wrong. Then he had put it back, and they had gone on with Demosthenes.

Zenobios had never read it. He had gone into the governor's office at nineteen, and married, and buried a child, and there had not been a winter afterwards with room in it for Daniel.

He lifted out the other books, a Homer, two volumes of Plato, a Thucydides with the binding gone, Eusebius on the Gospels, and laid them on the bench. The codex was at the bottom, in a wrapper of undyed linen. He unwrapped it on the table.

Paulos bent over the first leaf and read the title aloud, slowly, as if it might be the wrong one: Porphyry, against the Christians, the twelfth book. He let out his breath. It was the first time, Zenobios thought, that the deacon had touched the thing itself and not a list of it.

The text was in a clear hand of a century and more ago, the ink gone brown. But the text was not what one saw first. One saw the margins. They were full, all four of them, on every leaf, in a small hand that Zenobios knew better than his own father's. Black ink and then red ink and then black again, in different years, the earliest notes upright and young, the latest ones loose and shaken. In places the notes ran out of the margin and between the lines and up the gutter into the stitching. On one leaf Kallinikos had glued a strip of papyrus along the edge to give himself room, and filled it, and glued another.

Thekla stood in the doorway.

"His hand is in it," she said. "All down the sides. Forty years. Is that the madness too?"

Paulos straightened. He did not look at her. He looked at Zenobios, and Zenobios saw that the deacon was asking him, as he had asked him in the shop, and that this time he wanted to be told something else.

"The law says what Porphyry wrote," Paulos said. "And this is what he wrote."

"Yes," said Zenobios.

He wrapped the codex in its linen and tied it and sealed the knot with his ring, and wrote in the register the name of the book, the house, the owner, and the hour. He told Paulos that it would go to the fire at the third hour tomorrow with whatever else the day produced, which was the order, and that until then it was in his keeping and under his seal. Paulos agreed. Thekla said nothing at all. She put the Homer and the Plato and the broken Thucydides back in the chest and closed the lid, and stood with her hand on it while they went out.

Property

He worked by one lamp at the table in his own house, after his wife had gone up. He had bought a fresh quire from Hesychios on the way home, eight leaves of good parchment, and paid too much for it, and Hesychios had looked at him and asked nothing.

He broke his own seal. He would have to account for that in the morning, and he would; he was the officer who had set the seal, and he could say that he had opened it to check the contents against the register. It would even be true.

He began at the first leaf. The rule he made was this: he would copy what Kallinikos had written, all of it, in order, with the number of the leaf. He would not copy what Porphyry had written. That was the line the law drew, and he could see where it ran. A man's notes in the margin of a book are not the book.

He kept to the rule for a page and a half. Then he stopped and read what he had written.

Leaf 3. No. Four kingdoms, and he makes the fourth Greek because he needs it to be Greek.

Leaf 3, below. Better than Eusebius allows.

Leaf 4. Read Isaiah again before you say this.

Leaf 4. Yes.

It was like listening to one side of a quarrel through a wall. He could hear that his old master was angry, and that he was being fair, and that for one sentence on the fourth leaf he had simply agreed. But he could not hear with what. What were the four kingdoms? Whose fourth? Yes to what?

He sat back. The lamp needed trimming and he trimmed it.

So he made a second rule. With each note he would copy the words it hung from, but no more than three of them, enough to show where the note was attached and not enough to carry anything across. Three words of a man were not the man's writing. He was fairly sure of that. He was less sure than he had been about the first rule.

Leaf 3. "the fourth beast" — No. He makes the fourth Greek because he needs it to be Greek.

That was better. He went on. On the fifth leaf the margin said only Antiochus, Antiochus, Antiochus, three times, in red, with a line drawn under the last, and he had to read most of a column of the text to find the three words that would let anyone know why. In the reading he understood more than three words' worth. The argument was simple. The prophecies in Daniel were precise about the wars of the Greek kings of Syria and Egypt, precise to the battle and the marriage and the broken treaty. Then, at one point in the reign of Antiochus called Epiphanes, they stopped being precise and became wrong. A man who wrote history and dressed it as prophecy would be right about everything up to the year in which he was writing, and wrong about everything after it. Porphyry had found the year.

Zenobios put the pen down. Nobody had ever told him this. In all his years of church on the Lord's day nobody had ever said it in his hearing. And it had been lying in a chest in the upper town since before he was born, under a Thucydides with a broken binding.

He copied the three words. Leaf 5. "and in the" — Antiochus, Antiochus, Antiochus. It meant nothing. He left it.

On the ninth leaf there was a note that was a single word, in red, in the young upright hand of forty years ago: Ha.

He did not need the three words for that one. He knew the sound of it. Kallinikos had laughed when an opponent was clever, a short bark like a dog surprised. He did it in class when a boy got an answer wrong in an interesting way. He did it once, Zenobios remembered, when he was teaching the Introduction itself and came to the example of a property: what belongs to every man and only to man and always to man. The book said it was being able to laugh. Kallinikos had read that out, and laughed, and said, There. Proved by demonstration.

Zenobios copied it. Leaf 9. Ha. Then, because it was the rule, he looked for the three words it belonged to, and found them, and read the sentence they came from, and did not laugh. He wrote the three words in.

By the time the lamp was nearly dry he had filled six leaves and part of a seventh. The last notes were in the shaken hand. Most were short. The very last, on the inside of the back board, was not attached to anything: I have answered him on most of it. Not on the kings. Methodius did not. Eusebius did not. Do not let anyone tell you they did.

There was no one it was addressed to. It was addressed to whoever opened the book next. Zenobios copied it, and ruled a line under it, and sealed the codex again with his ring.

Accident

He went to the upper town before it was light. Thekla was already up; she opened the door with a lamp in her hand. He gave her the quire, folded once, and told her what it was. She took it to the window, where the grey was beginning, and read the first leaf with her finger under the lines. She read Greek slowly; she had learned it late, listening at the door of her husband's schoolroom.

"These are only his answers," she said.

"Yes."

"What was he answering?"

He began to tell her. He said that there was a prophet called Daniel, and that the book of Daniel spoke about the kings who came after Alexander, and then he stopped, because the next thing he said would be the argument.

"It would take longer than we have," he said.

She looked at him for a moment. Then she folded the quire again along the same fold and put it inside her mantle.

The forum at the third hour had a small crowd, mostly men who had been crossing it anyway. A pile of brushwood had been built on the paving in front of the governor's steps, with a jar of oil beside it, and two of the office slaves stood by with poles. The day's yield was laid on the steps. There were four codices of Nestorius's sermons from a monastery outside the city, a bundle of loose letters from a priest who had been told to bring them in, and Kallinikos's twelfth book in its linen. Paulos was there in a clean tunic. He had brought another deacon, older, who carried nothing and stood a little behind him.

Zenobios showed the chief clerk the broken seal and his own seal over it. He said he had opened it to check the contents against the register. The chief clerk looked at the two seals, and at him, and nodded.

They burned the sermons first, because there were more of them. Then the letters, which went up at once. Then the codex. One of the slaves cut the linen and the stitching with a knife, so that the leaves would separate, and threw them on.

Parchment does not burn the way papyrus burns. Papyrus is a plant, dried; it catches and is gone. Parchment is skin. It shrinks from the heat before it takes fire. It curls and goes hard and dark at the edges and smells exactly of what it is, burnt hide, so that the crowd moved back and some of the men put their sleeves to their faces. They poured more oil on. The slaves turned the leaves with the poles.

Zenobios stood on the second step with the register open on his arm and the pen ready. His task was to write that the book had been consumed, and the hour. He would not write it until it was true.

One leaf would not go. It had curled into a tube in the heat and lifted at one end, and for the space of a breath it stood up out of the fire, half black, and the light came through it. The ink of the text had gone brown and run. But the red of the margin held longer, as red does, and he could read it: one short word in a young upright hand.

Then the slave's pole came down and turned it into the coals, and it was gone.

Zenobios wrote: Consumed by fire, at the third hour, in the presence of the deacons of the church. He blotted it with his sleeve and closed the register.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Nōnās Octōbrēs (3 October 2026), ā Porphyriō Tyriō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Porphyry of Tyre, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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