René Amat
Parting Words

[The only surviving scrap of papyrus
from the library of Alexandria: ]

Head Librarian,

            I hate to intrude on your vacation,
but the stacks are on fire.

I hope the weather is fine

            in Pamukkale. I have heard
the flow of water has been slowing down

            in the last few years. There is
a very fine restaurant in Hierapolis
by the name of


            [fragment missing]

vomiting on the boat. But the trip
wasn't all bad,

            the kids enjoyed it.

In any event, the library is gone. Caesar
accidentally burned it down a few days ago.

He set several boats on fire, or something.
Worse than that, his boats were uninsured.

            Almost all of the old Greek works
have already been destroyed, except
all our cheap paperback copies of Aeschylus.

We'll have to order more once the repairs are finished.

            Unfortunately, the Greek works weren't
the only losses.


            Take a deep breath. We lost everything.
We only managed to save two of the books in Homer's
old "Adventures of Odysseus" series.

                        I know, they're out of print.
            We'll never really know the losses,
either, except by memory—the indices were burnt, too.

In retrospect, our policy of keeping all twelve copies

            of the index of scrolls and codices
next to each other, in adjacent cubbies,

            wasn't such a good idea. Most
of the assistant librarians quit.

You will be relieved, I know, to hear that I did manage
to save the most important book of all, however, a single copy
of

            [fragment ends]

_ _

Editor Emma Forbes writes: René Amat was a soldier in Caesar’s army, and part of a unit ordered to set fire to boats in the harbor at Alexandria whose owners had neglected their tax obligations. According to legend, he was devastated when the flames were carried by the wind to shore, and eventually to the walls and roof of the famous library. He assisted efforts to rescue scrolls and tablets, but was only successful in sparing a few items from ruin. According to the Historia Compendiosa Dynastiarum by Christian Syriac historian Bar-Hebraeus (also known as Abu'l Faraj), Amat alone among all representatives of Rome offered the priest-librarians an apology for the destruction. (Notably, no mention of Amat is made in Al-Qifti's History of Learned Men, the primary source for much of the lore recorded by Bar-Hebraeus.) The poem appearing in this issue was translated by Izzy Amat, of Bodie, California, latest heir to her ancestor's Alexandrian remnants. Provenance records ccompanying the inheritance establish a clear chain of ownership within the family as far back as 1576.

NB: This poem can only tentatively be assigned to René Amat, since there is no signature on the fragment the poem was transcribed from.

Back to Issue 19, 2016