Homo Sum — Complete Read online

  Produced by David Widger

  HOMO SUM, Complete

  By Georg Ebers

  Translated by Clara Bell

  PREFACE.

  In the course of my labors preparatory to writing a history of theSinaitic peninsula, the study of the first centuries of Christianityfor a long time claimed my attention; and in the mass of martyrology,of ascetic writings, and of histories of saints and monks, which it wasnecessary to work through and sift for my strictly limited object, Icame upon a narrative (in Cotelerius Ecclesiae Grecae Monumenta) whichseemed to me peculiar and touching notwithstanding its improbability.Sinai and the oasis of Pharan which lies at its foot were the scene ofaction.

  When, in my journey through Arabia Petraea, I saw the caves of theanchorites of Sinai with my own eyes and trod their soil with my ownfeet, that story recurred to my mind and did not cease to haunt me whileI travelled on farther in the desert.

  A soul's problem of the most exceptional type seemed to me to be offeredby the simple course of this little history.

  An anchorite, falsely accused instead of another, takes his punishmentof expulsion on himself without exculpating himself, and his innocencebecomes known only through the confession of the real culprit.

  There was a peculiar fascination in imagining what the emotions of asoul might be which could lead to such apathy, to such an annihilationof all sensibility; and while the very deeds and thoughts of the strangecave-dweller grew more and more vivid in my mind the figure of Paulustook form, as it were as an example, and soon a crowd of ideas gatheredround it, growing at last to a distinct entity, which excited and urgedme on till I ventured to give it artistic expression in the form of anarrative. I was prompted to elaborate this subject--which had long beenshaping itself to perfect conception in my mind as ripe material for aromance--by my readings in Coptic monkish annals, to which I was led byAbel's Coptic studies; and I afterwards received a further stimulusfrom the small but weighty essay by H. Weingarten on the origin ofmonasticism, in which I still study the early centuries of Christianity,especially in Egypt.

  This is not the place in which to indicate the points on which I feelmyself obliged to differ from Weingarten. My acute fellow-laborer atBreslau clears away much which does not deserve to remain, but in manyparts of his book he seems to me to sweep with too hard a broom.

  Easy as it would have been to lay the date of my story in the beginningof the fortieth year of the fourth century instead of the thirtieth, Ihave forborne from doing so because I feel able to prove with certaintythat at the time which I have chosen there were not only heathenrecluses in the temples of Serapis but also Christian anchorites;I fully agree with him that the beginnings of organized Christianmonasticism can in no case be dated earlier than the year 350.

  The Paulus of my story must not be confounded with the "first hermit,"Paulus of Thebes, whom Weingarten has with good reason struck out ofthe category of historical personages. He, with all the figures inthis narrative is a purely fictitious person, the vehicle for an idea,neither more nor less. I selected no particular model for my hero, andI claim for him no attribute but that of his having been possible at theperiod; least of all did I think of Saint Anthony, who is now deprivedeven of his distinguished biographer Athanasius, and who is representedas a man of very sound judgment but of so scant an education that he wasmaster only of Egyptian.

  The dogmatic controversies which were already kindled at the time of mystory I have, on careful consideration, avoided mentioning. The dwellerson Sinai and in the oasis took an eager part in them at a later date.

  That Mount Sinai to which I desire to transport the reader must not beconfounded with the mountain which lies at a long day's journey to thesouth of it. It is this that has borne the name, at any rate since thetime of Justinian; the celebrated convent of the Transfiguration lies atits foot, and it has been commonly accepted as the Sinai of Scripture.In the description of my journey through Arabia Petraea I haveendeavored to bring fresh proof of the view, first introduced byLepsius, that the giant-mountain, now called Serbal, must be regarded asthe mount on which the law was given--and was indeed so regarded beforethe time of Justinian--and not the Sinai of the monks.

  As regards the stone house of the Senator Petrus, with its windowsopening on the street--contrary to eastern custom--I may remark, inanticipation of well founded doubts, that to this day wonderfullywell-preserved fire-proof walls stand in the oasis of Pharan, theremains of a pretty large number of similar buildings.

  But these and such external details hold a quite secondary place in thisstudy of a soul. While in my earlier romances the scholar was compelledto make concessions to the poet and the poet to the scholar, in this oneI have not attempted to instruct, nor sought to clothe the outcome of mystudies in forms of flesh and blood; I have aimed at absolutely nothingbut to give artistic expression to the vivid realization of an idea thathad deeply stirred my soul. The simple figures whose inmost being I haveendeavored to reveal to the reader fill the canvas of a picture where,in the dark background, rolls the flowing ocean of the world's history.

  The Latin title was suggested to me by an often used motto whichexactly agrees with the fundamental view to which I have been led bymy meditations on the mind and being of man; even of those men who deemthat they have climbed the very highest steps of that stair which leadsinto the Heavens.

  In the Heautontimorumenos of Terence, Chremes answers his neighborMenedemus (Act I, SC. I, v. 25) "Homo sum; humani nil a me alienumputo," which Donner translates literally:

  "I am human, nothing that is human can I regard as alien to me."

  But Cicero and Seneca already used this line as a proverb, and in asense which far transcends that which it would seem to convey in contextwith the passage whence it is taken; and as I coincide with them, I havetransferred it to the title-page of this book with this meaning:

  "I am a man; and I feel that I am above all else a man."

  Leipzig, November 11, 1877.

  GEORG EBERS.

  HOMO SUM