The Book of Spies

LITERARY TREASURES THE LIBRARY OF GOLD COULD CONTAIN

THIS BOOK is fiction, of course, but all the historical references and anecdotes are either factual or based on fact. For instance, the Emperor Trajan did erect the awe-inspiring monument to his successful wars, Trajan’s Column, between two peaceful galleries of Rome’s library, which he also built. And Cassius Dio Cocceianus, a Roman administrator and great historian, wrote Romaika, the most important history of the last years of the Roman Republic and early Empire. It encompassed eighty books, but only volumes thirty-six through sixty survive. If Cassius Dio wrote about Trajan’s Column, I postulate the story would have appeared in book seventy-seven.

At the same time all of this is true: Julius Caesar did receive a list of conspirators planning to assassinate him-but never read it. Hannibal did rampage across Rome’s countryside, destroying everything except Fabius’s properties. As a result, Fabius had his hands full with a near-mutinous Rome. And in his send-up play The Clouds, Aristophanes does depict the revered philosopher Socrates as a clown teaching students how to scam their way out of debt.

The one major exception is the volume I call The Book of Spies. However, since Ivan the Terrible had books created and was intrigued by spies and assassins, it’s possible he would have ordered such a work compiled.

History is available to us only through oral tradition and the written word. What was lost over the millennia from war, fires, looting, wanton destruction, deliberate obliteration, and censorship is tragic. Our history is the history of lost books.

If I could have my wish, the Library of Gold would exist, would be discovered, and not only would the lost books I name in the novel be found in it, but at least the work of these early six would, too:

· Sappho (c. 610 B.C. to c. 570 B.C.) was the lauded Greek poet whose life is recounted in myths based upon her lyrical and passionate love verses. The pinnacle of female accomplishment in poetry, her surviving work was collected and published in nine books sometime in the third or second century B.C., but by the eighth or nine century A.D. it was represented only by quotations in other authors’ works.

· Classical Athens had three great tragic playwrights, all contemporaries-Aeschylus (525 or 524 B.C. to 456 or 455 B.C.), Sophocles (c. 495 B.C. to 406 B.C.), and Euripides (480 B.C. to 406 B.C.). The father of modern drama, Aeschylus wrote more than eighty plays, lifting the art of tragedy with poetry and fresh theatrical power. He introduced a second actor on stage-thus giving birth to dialogue, dramatic conflict, and dramatized plot. The Athenians had the only copy of his Complete Works and loaned it for copying to Alexandria, where Ptolemy III had other ideas-he ordered it left untranscribed and not returned. Scholars flocked. Centuries passed. Then the Alexandria libraries burned, and the scrolls died in flames. Only seven of Aeschylus’s plays have survived.

· The author of 123 plays, including Oedipus Rex, Sophocles used scenery, increased the size of the chorus, and introduced a third actor, significantly widening the scope and complexity of theater. Sophocles said he showed men as they ought to be, while his younger contemporary, Euripides, showed them as they were. Only seven of Sophocles’ plays survive.

· Dressing kings as beggars and showing women as intelligent and complex, Euripides used traditional stories to display humanity and ethics. He wrote more than ninety plays, which were remarkable for realistically reflecting his era. Reading them would tell us much about Athens. Only eighteen survive.

· Confucius (551 B.C. to 479 B.C.) was venerated over the centuries for his wisdom and his revolutionary idea that humaneness was central to how we should treat one another. He wrote “Six Works”: The Book of Poetry, The Book of Rituals, The Book of Music, The Book of History, The Book of Changes, and The Spring and Autumn Annals, which formed a full curriculum of education. But the perfection of his vision is incomplete, since The Book of Music has disappeared.

· The first Roman emperor, Augustus (63 B.C. to A.D. 14), was one of the globe’s finest administrative geniuses, reorganizing, transforming, and enlarging the reeling Roman Republic into a powerhouse empire with easy communications, thousands of miles of paved roads, and flourishing tourism and trade. A cultured man, he supported the arts and wrote many works. Most have vanished. A particular tragedy is the loss of his thirteen-volume My Autobiography, perhaps containing the inside views of the man who over-saw and directed one of the world’s greatest civilizations during a long and critical period of history.