Knowledge

Tonight was the first night of one of my new night classes, and I learned something completely unknown. I now know what was regained when the Renaissance came in. Before tonight, I had always been taught that it was just the "rebirth of knowledge" or the "rediscovery of Greek and Latin classical texts." My professor tonight taught me that in the West, the last scholars of Greek, actually, the very last, had been killed off by his students, and the reading and speaking knowledge of the language had died. For a couple of hundred years, nobody could read Homer or Plato or Socrates. Nobody could get to the stories of the Iliad or the Odyssey or Medea or Antigone, and oh, how they wanted to... The Italians, heirs to the legacy of Rome, understood that the Romans had based much of their culture on the foundations that Greece had painstakingly laid, but those texts were mute since the language in which they were written was a dead one for them.

Can you imagine it? We take it for granted that we can walk into a bookstore and lay hands on volume after volume of knowledge in our own language. I watch school kids casually discard or groan under the study of these same stories that were almost completely lost forever during the time after the fall of the Roman Empire.

I didn't know that until tonight. I didn't know how close we came to losing them forever. I always assumed that when the textbooks said they were rediscovered during the Renaissance, that the real meaning was that people finally had enough time to stop worrying about disease, war, and famine carrying them away long enough to pick up something extraneous to survival again, and that was indeed part of it. More to the point, though, is that until they found the Greek-speaking-and-reading refugees from Constantinople's Orthodox churches, there was nobody who could begin the process of unlocking the rich wonders within those ancient texts for them.

No wonder the Renaissance authors were so crazy about translations and getting their hands on every ancient text they could. They probably wanted to make sure the same thing could never happen again as well as feeding that deep hunger for knowledge. Who can read a little of the Odyssey and not want more? Who can start the Oedipus cycle and not want to know how it turns out for the poor, fate-doomed man?

It was a good night of class, and to be honest, I'm looking forward to going back despite the huge amount of work this class is going to be (a play a week). If I can pick up something this monumental every week, it will be time well spent. Maybe this is something everybody else in the world already knew, but I missed it somehow. I'm glad to know it now.