Βουστροφηδόν rarely sparks continued interest as a topic of conversation in our present time and yet the whole point of this writing style, literally “as the oxen plow,” is to avoid ending a line of text and, by extension a line of thought, by veering downward and writing on the next line in the opposite lateral order. As cultures became more attuned to written phonetic texts opposed to language written as pictograms, the inverted order of βουστροφηδόν became annoying to our ancestors’ νοῦς and was quietly blotted out by scribes. The end of a line no longer allowed stylistically the uncircumscribed margin. A line of text now had its limit, and when scrolls became bound folios, indeed, the bottom of the page turned the whole process of writing upside down.
Whether as a furled scroll or a bound tome, the containment of literary contents came to be known as a book, in Latin “liber,” a curious name for so mercurial a device. Books broadly speaking were free despite their pages being bound. Texts engraved in stone, excluding a certain two tablets written on the Sinai Peninsula, are generally fixed in place. Their durability prized for the codification of the laws and edicts they often conveyed. Books, however, could be shared, transported, and compared through space and time, provided new copies were commissioned as their organic media went the way of the Medes. The connection between the book, liber, and liberty and further still the liberal arts remains, nevertheless, something of an enigma of meaning and purpose, the unraveling of which our purpose here.
I recall my first reflective response to the question posed to me by a professor in college as to the original of the term liberal arts. The course of my thought led me to consider whether “liberal” referred to such arts as particularly suited for children, stemming from the Latin word for children, “liberi”. This solution was, however, abandoned by my near certainty that the liberal arts were so termed on account of their direct dependence upon books as in the Latin “liber.” My response, as it turned out, was charitably corrected by my professor, who directed my attention to liberty or libertas in Latin, for the liberal arts stand in contrast to the servile arts, a term that is presently vanishing from public discourse, while those latter arts themselves are still advanced and advancing.
Despite the correction that I received from my professor, is there still some underlying relation between “liberi” and “libertas,” particularly from ancient Roman society where these terms developed. At first glance, the traditional right of patria potestas stands clearly in the way of interpreting child liberty in the modern sense. According to patria potestas or the paternal authority, a father was granted the authority to discipline his children with corporal punishment and in some cases even death. To consider children free when their very lives were held at the discretion of their father is unthinkable for most today.
Still, if the plight of freeborn children is compared to that of children born into servitude, the relative liberty of the former is able to come into perspective. A child born into the ancient Roman senatorial or equestrian orders could expect some period of leisure before he was expected to bear the duties of the res publica. The child of a servant or slave could expect a lifetime of manual labor from the moment he could carry a water bucket. A slave or servant child was likely to be called simply “puer,” by those of superior rank regardless of his age similar to the expression “Boy,” in English. In general, the overwhelming majority of children born into the servant class opposed to the senatorial and equestrian orders contributed to the blurring of the distinction between childhood and adulthood. Children of servitude developed according to their capacity for servitude, that is, their perfection in the servile arts, while children of liberty and means were able to postpone their affairs for the purpose of study in the liberal arts.
As a symbol of status alone, it is a little wonder that the study of the liberal arts has long been the educational rage in the United States so founded on meritorious opportunity and a rejection of generational class systems. It remains to be explained as to what purpose besides social status the liberal arts fulfill, and for that matter books themselves.
What purpose do books fulfill? A book as opposed to verbal, demonstrative education requires a degree of abstraction from the merely sensible, and it is upon this distinction that the historical status of books in relation to society made an interesting transition. It is notable that the great libraries and archives of antiquity were either private or public in name but restricted to and brought about for the benefit of the governing orders. Books or scrolls were an expensive luxury as was the ability to read them, and so for both economic reasons and the reality of the illiterate multitudes, books were commonly beyond the reach of the servant class and slaves.
In the place of books, the great majority of city dwellers enjoyed the ephemeral benefits of bread and the circus. What stood in the place of the freedom for advancement through education allotted to the learned elites was the cultivation or rather unchecked growth of man’s appetite for the joy of warm bread in the stomach and the sight of warm blood spilt on the arena sand. It is a sad and sobering reality that this aspect of human nature has not been corrected in two thousand years.
Despite its technological advances, the modern entertainment industry still generates bread and circuses. Yet unlike in ancient days when they were provided to the crowded urban masses as a means of quelling civil unrest, they are now no longer given gratis but packaged to consumers or by packaging consumers for as much as the market will bear. Books, in contrast, have taken an inverse economic turn. With the invention of the printing press and digital media extending the transmission and preservation of literary texts beyond the hand and will of the scribe, books are more economically affordable and globally available than ever before.
Still, the philanthropic ideal of Andrew Carnegie has already begun to crumble as the many public libraries he brought into existence have either closed or redirected their collections toward the acquisition of the very ephemeral media which bind societies to the slavery of the sensible. It is through the study of the liberal arts, particularly in the tradition of the Great Books, that one is free to transcend the limitations of the senses, of space and time, and engage in dialogues with the great thinkers of the past. It is the freedom to speak and write of a Florentine Beatrice or a Venetian Shylock without having to tell the entire tale, for the reference is as one at home with the audience, a common cultural memory. This freedom from our social planners, our behavioral conditioners, remains available for mere pennies in late fees, but it is still the few who choose this kind of aristocratic cultivation.
Through this choice to rise up beyond the limitations of the algorithms funneling our digital consumption, to be undefined as a mere means of production, the spirit of Βουστροφηδόν returns. It is the allure of the endless line, endless possibilities, endless choices within an endless life. To this unbridled freedom, the wide vista granted to the young college graduate at the onset of a career, discerning a vocation, to whom all is yet still possible, the Tradition has long counseled: memento mori, remember to die. “Mori” is a deponent infinitive, and so the grammatical voice, whether active, passive, or, dare we suggest, middle voice of its meaning remains open, in some sense, to our interpretation and, indeed, meditation. What is clear, however, is that choice comes to an end, both temporally and ontologically.
Choice is of the means, not the end. The linear passage of time toward a terminus, an ἔσχᾰτον, inevitably results in a reduction of choices. As our final end draws near, approaches, for the human family collectively yet each individually, we find that there will come a moment, which despite being sempiternal in consequence, will signify and enact the complete elimination of choice, as entering a threshold upon arrival removes the choice of route. Such is the situation for both affirmers of the immortality of the soul and such deniers. If, as the epicurean states, “death is nothing to us,” since there is no us, only a conjunction of consciousness, an end to such consciousness is an end to all conscious choice. Yet if the soul remains, whether as a shade or manes excised from the body or with it resurrected, the peace in which it may requiesce is a certain repose from choosing the means having gained the end long sought.
Is this terminal and teleological existence, however, rightly and properly called free? Perhaps the question itself is a peculiarity of the American Experiment in which even declared independence is founded on externally endowed rights. There is an instilled premium on liberty circumscribing these shores, a price paid in toil, blood, and treasure, a confederacy of purpose pledged into existence by men who offered the whole of their worldly wealth and sacred honor.
Perhaps we confuse choice for liberty; we revel in the alea iactura at the expense of heeding the alea iacta. Was Caesar more free south of the Rubicon, as an outlaw, than he was in deliberation prior to its crossing? Was not Sir Thomas More imprisoned in the Tower more free once his dissent became by novel law unambiguous and his martyrdom certain? Choice of the means means that the end eludes us, and the ludus or interludus continues. The chess game fraught with so many successive choices, hypotheticals, and conditions, ends with checkmate, we are told, meaning “the king is dead.” Indeed, the King did die, but that was not the end. Checkmate, the King is dead; Checkmate, the King is wed—a union ratified and awaiting consummation. The Church His Bride draws near to Him, all encumbrances removed, free and freed in full self-donation, gifts of self freely given, freely received, recorded in the Book of Life unending.
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