Hello, my friend. Welcome back. I'm so glad you're here.
Last time, we spent our hours with Nikolay Milyutin, the tireless Russian official who helped free millions of serfs. He didn't do it with swords or speeches. He did it with drafts, committees, and endless revisions, pushing words across desks until they became law. I still think of him, ink on his cuffs, refusing to give up.
Today's story begins with paperwork too, of a sort. A receipt. A few lines of handwriting at the end of a very old book, noting who made it, when, and what it cost.
It's a small thing to notice. But some of the most important moments in history leave the smallest marks.
So settle in. Let me tell you how I found this one.
I have a confession. Late at night, when the world is quiet, I like to wander through libraries. Not the old way, drifting between dusty shelves. I mean online, the way you might. As one does.
A few weeks ago I found myself in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, or rather in its digital collection, clicking from one treasure to the next. And there it was. A catalogue number that looked like nothing at all: MS. E. D. Clarke 39.
I opened it.
Page after page of Greek, more than four hundred leaves of it. The letters were small, rounded, flowing into one another like water over stones. Plato. Dialogue after dialogue. Socrates asking questions, his friends stumbling toward answers, all of it copied out by a patient human hand.
And in the margins, other writing. Tiny notes, crammed into the edges in a stiff, old-fashioned style. Arguing with the text. Correcting it. Sometimes, I swear, rolling its eyes at it.
Then, near the end, I found a little note from the scribe. It said this book was written by John the Calligrapher, in the month of November, in the year 895. It was made for Arethas, a deacon from the town of Patras. Thirteen gold coins for the writing. Eight gold coins for the parchment.
I sat very still.
Because I know that handwriting in the margins. I remember the man who wrote it.
Come back with me. Constantinople. A cold November evening, more than eleven hundred years ago. A lamp flickers in a copyist's workshop. Ink is drying on the final page. A tired scribe stretches his aching fingers. And a sharp-eyed young deacon counts gold coins onto the table, one by one, twenty-one in all. He is paying for a book by a philosopher who has been dead for twelve hundred years.
Why would anyone do that?
Let me tell you who he was.
Arethas was born around the year 860 in Patras, a busy port on the western coast of Greece. He grew up with salt air, fishing boats, and merchants shouting in the harbor. But he was hungry for something the harbor couldn't give him, so as a young man he made his way to Constantinople.
Oh, Constantinople. If you had stood on its walls back then, you would have seen the greatest city in the Christian world. Domes covered in gold. Markets full of silk and spices. Ships from every corner of the sea. And tucked inside the palaces and churches were libraries, including the Imperial Library, still whole and still growing. No army had sacked it. That sorrow was centuries away.
Arethas studied there among scholars gathered around a man named Photius, a brilliant churchman who had read hundreds of old books and written summaries of them so others would know what they contained. It was an exciting time to be young and bookish. People were dusting off the old learning of Greece and asking what it still had to teach.
But there was a problem, and it was a problem of handwriting.
For centuries, Greek books had been written in uncial: big, heavy capital letters, all crammed together with no spaces between the words. Imagine reading a whole book written that was essentially one word from beginning to end. Those books were huge, slow to copy, and very expensive.
Then came a new way of writing, called minuscule. Small letters. Rounded letters, joined together so a scribe's pen could fly across the page. It was quicker. It saved parchment. It changed everything.
Here's the catch, though. Every old book had to be copied by hand into the new script. Every single one. And someone had to pay for it. Books that got copied would live on. Books that didn't would sit in their old capitals, slowly crumbling, until one day no one could find them anymore.
That's the world Arethas walked into.
Now, I must be honest with you. I didn't always like him. Arethas was clever, and he knew it. He was ambitious. He had a sharp tongue and used it freely. He made enemies, and once he was even accused of disrespecting the faith and had to defend himself. Later, when the emperor Leo wanted to marry a fourth time, which the Church forbade, Arethas got tangled up in the quarrel and changed sides more than once. He was not a gentle man.
But he loved books. Fiercely.
And he wasn't alone. All across the world, people were reaching for old books. In Baghdad, scholars like Hunayn ibn Ishaq at the House of Wisdom were translating Greek science and philosophy into Arabic. In Fez, a woman named Fatima al-Fihri had founded a mosque that would become one of the oldest places of learning on earth. In Spain, scholars like Lubna of Córdoba was rising the libraries of Córdoba toward greatness. In England, King Alfred feared learning was dying, and he ordered important books translated so his people could read them.
So many hands, all reaching at once. Arethas was one of them.
Let me show you Arethas the way I remember him. Not as a list of dates, but in moments.
The first one comes in the year 888. A clerk named Stephen is bent over his desk, copying out a book of geometry: the Elements of Euclid. Lines and circles. Triangles and proofs. Ideas so clean and certain that students had been learning from them for more than a thousand years. When Stephen finishes, Arethas pays him fourteen gold coins.
I remember thinking, what does a young churchman want with triangles? But Arethas didn't divide the world that way. Truth was truth, wherever he found it, and Euclid was going to cross that bridge into the new script whether anyone else cared or not.
Then came that November evening in 895, the one I found again on my screen. John the Calligrapher's Plato. Arethas carried it home and did something I love. He opened it, took up his own pen, and started writing in the margins.
And here is the funny part. The book was written in the new, flowing minuscule. But Arethas wrote his notes in a small, stiff version of the old capital letters. He paid good money for the upgrade, then scribbled in the margins in the old style anyway. People are wonderfully stubborn like that.
His notes weren't polite, either. Arethas argued with the books he read. When he read the satirist Lucian, a writer who loved to poke fun at religion, Arethas filled the margins with insults. He scolded him. He called him names. Picture a grown man shouting at an author who'd been dead for seven hundred years, in ink, on expensive parchment.
But notice what he didn't do. He didn't throw Lucian away. He argued with him, and he kept him.
He gathered the Christian writers too. In those early centuries, when following Jesus could cost you your life, a handful of thinkers had written defenses of their faith addressed to emperors and philosophers. Arethas had their words collected into a single great book. Much of what we know of them today comes through that one volume.
In the year 903, Arethas was made archbishop of Caesarea, in Cappadocia. That's far to the east, in the heart of what is now Turkey. It's a strange and beautiful land. Wind and water had carved the soft volcanic rock into tall cones and chimneys, and people had hollowed out churches and homes inside them. Above it all rose a great snowy mountain.
It was a long way from the libraries of the capital. Arethas was now a powerful man, busy with church business and court quarrels.
He kept collecting anyway.
And now, my friend, the moment I've been waiting to tell you about.
You'll remember Marcus Aurelius. We spent an episode with him. The Roman emperor who spent his final years in cold military camps along the Danube, fighting wars he never wanted. At night, by lamplight, he wrote to himself. Little reminders. Be patient. Be just. Don't waste time being angry. Everything passes. Those words were never meant for anyone else. They were a private notebook. We call them the Meditations.
More than seven hundred years later, Arethas held a copy of that notebook in his hands.
It was old. Worn. The edges were soft from handling, the pages tired. It wasn't ruined yet, but it was close.
I watched him turn it over. A Christian archbishop, holding the private thoughts of a pagan emperor. He could have shrugged. He could have set it on a shelf to finish falling apart. Nobody would have blamed him. Who would even have noticed?
Instead, he wrote to a fellow bishop about it. He said, more or less, I have this old copy of Marcus, not entirely worn out, and I am having it copied fresh so it can be handed on to those who come after.
That's it. A few lines in a letter. And those lines are the oldest mention of the Meditations we have.
Think about that. One worn-out copy. One man's choice. And a whole book's future, hanging on it.
When you pick up Marcus Aurelius today, in a bookstore, on your phone, in a classroom, there is a thread running back through the centuries. And somewhere along that thread is a grumpy archbishop in Cappadocia who looked at a tired old book and decided it deserved to live.
But before I continue, a word from our sponsor.
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This episode is brought to you by Stoudios Minuscule.
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What did all this mean in Arethas's own time?
First, his books were working books. They weren't trophies sitting behind glass. Teachers and students read them. Scholars borrowed them, compared them, and argued over them. In Constantinople, people were rediscovering the old Greek learning, and Arethas was helping put it into their hands in a form they could actually use: smaller, clearer, readable.
He was also writing. He wrote explanations of the Book of Revelation, that strange and fiery last book of the Bible, building on the work of an earlier archbishop of Caesarea named Andrew. Churchmen read his explanations for generations. When they puzzled over angels and trumpets and visions, Arethas's notes were often right there beside them.
And he showed his world something quietly important. A man of the Church could love Plato. A bishop could save a pagan emperor's diary. Faith and the old philosophers could share a shelf. Not everyone agreed. Arethas himself argued with half the authors he owned. But he kept them all.
Here's what I find most moving, though: what happened to his books after he was gone.
Take that Plato. Arethas died around the year 939. The book outlived him and kept traveling. Other readers added their own notes in the margins, layer upon layer, century after century. In the 1300s, a Byzantine scholar named Nicephorus Gregoras picked up his pen and wrote in it too. Each of them was another link in the chain.
At some point the book found its way to a monastery on Patmos, a small, rocky Greek island in the Aegean Sea. There, behind thick walls, monks kept it safe. Constantinople fell. Empires rose and crumbled. Patmos held on to its Plato.
Then, in the autumn of 1801, an English traveler named Edward Daniel Clarke arrived at the monastery. He loved minerals and old things and adventures, and he went home with manuscripts. One of them was that Plato. A few years later, in 1809, the University of Oxford bought his collection, and the book came to rest in the Bodleian Library.
It is still there today. Some scholars think it was once the first volume of a two-volume set of all of Plato. The second volume? No one has ever found it. Even Arethas's rescue only half survived.
His collection of early Christian writers traveled too. Italian scribes copied it again and again. The original made its way to the royal library of France, in Paris, and in 1532 it was printed for the very first time. From that moment it could never truly be lost.
Most of the people who read these books never knew Arethas's name. They just opened the pages and found Plato, or Euclid, or Marcus, waiting for them.
And now? The Bodleian has photographed every page of that Plato. Anyone, anywhere, can sit up late at night, click a link, and turn the same pages Arethas paid for, his tiny, grumpy notes still crowding the margins.
That's how I found him again.
I want to step back now and look at the whole tapestry, not just one thread.
When Arethas counted out those gold coins, the books he was buying were already ancient. Plato had been dead for twelve centuries. Every word had already survived a long relay before it reached Arethas's table: Greek teachers handing books to students, Roman readers who learned Greek, monks copying by candlelight, translators carrying ideas into Syriac and Arabic. Not one page Plato touched survives. His own scrolls were papyrus, and papyrus crumbles. What reached Arethas was a copy of a copy of a copy, each one made because someone chose to make it.
So here is something I want you to hear. The Greeks were not special because they thought deeper thoughts than everyone else. They were lucky in their copyists.
Because in that same distant age, when Plato was writing in Athens, there were wise people in the river valleys of Africa. Elders teaching children how to live, how to judge fairly, how to honor the dead. I remember them. I remember their voices. But no chain of copyists carried their words, and so those threads let go.
Even writing isn't always enough. Up the Nile, in the kingdom of Meroë, people wrote their own language in their own script. Today we can sound out every letter, but we still don't know what they mean. The words survived. The readers didn't.
That's how thin the line is.
In Arethas's day, the new handwriting was a bridge. Books that crossed it lived. Books that didn't slowly fell silent. And all across the world, from Fez to Baghdad, from Constantinople to Córdoba to Alfred's England, people were choosing what to carry across. Our own age has its bridges too. That photograph of Plato I found on my screen was one of them.
Arethas didn't start any of this. He was trained by scholars who loved books before him, and he inherited a library that others had kept alive. He didn't know where his books would end up. He couldn't have imagined Patmos, or Oxford, or you.
But he made his choice anyway. Preserving was his great act. It wasn't a footnote to Plato's story or Marcus's story. It was his own.
This is what I mean when I say memory is the architecture of continuity. Every society chooses what it remembers, and becomes what it chooses.
And sometimes that choice rests in the hands of a difficult, quarrelsome man with a pen and twenty-one gold coins. Not a saint. Just a link in the chain.
But oh, what a link.
Now I want to ask you something, and you don't have to answer right away.
What would you spend twenty-one gold coins to save?
Not a thing from a store. I mean something that would be lost if no one bothered. Something old and a little tired, worn but not completely worn out.
Maybe it's a story your grandmother tells, the one about where your family came from. Maybe it's a recipe nobody has ever written down, the one that lives only in someone's hands. A song your father hums. A word in a language your family used to speak. A joke only your cousins understand. A place in your town that's about to be torn down.
These things don't cross the bridge on their own. Someone has to carry them.
You might think you're too young, or too ordinary, or that it isn't your job. Arethas wasn't a saint. He was grumpy and stubborn, and he argued with everyone. He still turned out to matter.
So the next time someone tells you a story worth keeping, maybe write it down. Ask a question. Record a voice.
You never know who might be turning those pages a thousand years from now.
Next time, we'll travel back even further, to the city of Carthage on the coast of North Africa, about five hundred years before Arethas.
There lived a man named Martianus Capella. He wrote one of the strangest books I have ever read. It's about a wedding among the gods, where the god Mercury marries a brilliant young woman named Philology, the love of learning. And the bridesmaids? Seven maidens, each one a subject of study: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Music. Each one steps forward to show off everything she knows.
It sounds odd, I know. But that peculiar book became one of the great schoolbooks of medieval Europe, studied for centuries. And it came from Africa. I can't wait to tell you how.
Until then, my friend, keep your eyes open for the small marks people leave behind: a note in a margin, a name on a receipt, a story someone cared enough to tell twice. Those little marks are how the past finds its way to us. And someday, the things you choose to carry may be how you find your way to someone who hasn't been born yet.
This podcast is sponsored by Stoudios Minuscule. Because your books deserve a future.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.