Lucian's "The Ignorant Book Collector:" When a Classic Hits a Little too Close to Home

My former professor and good friend David Aune recently passed on to me a generous selection of some of the volumes he had collected from the Loeb Classical Library. I was thrilled to receive this kind gift since, as a doctoral student, I had only been able to acquire but a bare minimum of Loeb volumes, and in the intervening years, I have had little need to enhance my collection (being close to a university library at all times). But since my graduate student days I, like many, had become enamored with the sharp wit and incisive prose of Lucian (a second century Greek writer and satirist). My favorite was his "Alexander the False Prophet," and I am proud to say that I did already own the volume that contains that piece. So I was thus quite delighted to find among the volumes that David sent me volume three of the eight volumes of Lucian included in the LCL. Given my predilection for Lucian, this was the first of the volumes David sent me that I chose to spend some time looking through (with my apologies to Homer and Plutarch). On perusing the table of contents I was intrigued to find an essay entitled "The Ignorant Book Collector." As expected, the essay highlights the folly of an individual who prides himself in acquiring a large library of fine volumes in the hopes that he will gain a reputation as a learned and wise man among his peers. As I prepare to unload these green and red Loeb volumes onto my own office shelves, I cannot help but pause to consider the irony of having received this fine set of books in which the first thing I read is an essay which criticizes book owners who are not worthy of the books they possess. And so I'll quote Harmon's translation of a particular convicting paragraph of this essay:

What good, you strange person, will it do you to own them, when you do not understand their beauty and will never make use of it one whit more than a blind man would enjoy beauty in favourites ? To be sure you look at your books with your eyes open and quite as much as you like, and you read some of them aloud with great fluency, keeping your eyes in advance of your lips; but I do not consider that enough, unless you know the merits and defects of each passage in their contents, unless you understand what every sentence means, how to construe the words, what expressions have been accurately turned by the writer in accordance with the canon of good use, and what are false, illegitimate, and counterfeit. (Lucian, Vol. 3, LCL, p. 177 trans Harmon)

Ouch. To be sure, Lucian raises a high standard of what it would take to really be counted as a learned and erudite reader of ancient texts. I don't dare to hope to go so far as to "know the merits and defects of each passage" in my new collection of Loeb volumes. But I am reminded by his sarcasm and wit, once again, that the value of the classics for a scholar of Christianity and Judaism in antiquity is not so much in understanding the origins of key words or interesting parallels or giving in to "parallelomania," but rather in coming to grips with the thought world which informs ancient Greek and Roman authors of all stripes. With such a broad understanding, scholars of early Judaism and early Christianity can more fully appreciate the world in which educated Jews and Christians contributed their own works and can more effectively articulate the kind of meaningful connections by which these authors engaged the thoughts and hopes and fears of that world in light of their understanding of the actions of the God of Israel in history.

Accordingly, I am grateful to David for this kind gift. And I am energized, once again, as I aim not to be deserving of being counted as a distant descendant of Lucian's ignorant book collector, but instead to be counted among those who truly benefit from wide reading. Not to be known as someone with a passion for expensive books, but rather to be known as one who has begun to take the time to understand these books in ways that open up understanding and enhance my ability to think carefully, critically, and creatively. But for now, I should probably set as my first goal just to unpack the boxes and start reading.