Whispers from the dust.
By Bohan Gao
Illustration by Isabelle Oh
Morior. The Latin verb for illustrating the opening maw of loss, the shape of solitude, the body’s gradual progression toward death. How does one word carry the weight of inevitability? My curiosity began with a comment from my Latin professor as we were studying Ancient Roman funerary inscriptions in class. He mentioned that Butler Library’s sixth floor collection was open to students, though he noted, almost as an afterthought, it hardly gets visited. The thought lingered: a collection of ancient inscriptions, steeped in history, resting in a building I passed by every day. I felt an acute sense of irony. Funerary memorials are timeless traditions, yet they have been forgotten on this campus.
Butler’s sixth floor is a profound excavation of the liminal spaces between history and modernity. It is an exploration within the rooms of life and memory, of life’s singular end, of the lineage of cemeteries. In this repository of long-forgotten fragments, one can feel the echoes of archaic texts, preserved against the odds of history. Yet it holds a sense of absence, as if inviting us to contemplate not only what has survived from antiquity, but also what has been lost.
Dr. Brett Stine, a Columbia professor in the classics department, offered insight into the selective survival of these texts. Before the invention of the printing press, the preservation of texts relied on the painstaking process of hand-copying. In the Roman era, manuscripts were commonly inscribed on wax tablets or papyrus sheets—materials especially prone to decay in humid climates. Their ephemeral nature has left much of what survives today more fragmentary than complete, with survival dependent on what was deemed worthy by audiences. As Stine noted, Cicero, Virgil, and Homer—whose works remain central to the Core Curriculum—are among the few names that have endured across centuries, due to the frequent transcription of their writings. “I think the only thing copied more than Homer in the ancient world is the New Testament,” Stine remarked.
This circularity is striking. The texts we read in class today have survived precisely because they were deemed important centuries ago. In turn, their prominence reinforces their preservation. This cyclicality raised questions: To what extent is what we study shaped by historical happenstance rather than an intrinsic universality?
Deeper in the archives, I found funerary inscriptions, ancient conversations with the dead. Stine noted that, unlike manuscripts, funerary inscriptions are formulaic objects. These monuments are about more than remembrance; they are negotiations of social and familial structures. In a sense, funerary inscriptions stand as enduring testaments to identities that resisted erasure. I was suddenly reminded of Sappho’s fragmented verses. In both cases—the intimacy of poetry and the gravitas of inscriptions—a delicate tension persists between presence and absence, permanence and fragility.
As I walked through these remnants of ancient writing, presence within absence took on a new significance. Each text bears witness to centuries of cultural memory, even if those memories reach us in pieces, already deconstructed. Stine viewed the holes within manuscripts as “a space for creativity and play,” noting that the gaps in Sappho’s poetry invite interpretations that would otherwise be closed off by a complete text. In Literature Humanities, students read If Not, Winter, a translation of Sappho’s poetry by Anne Carson. This particular translation, Stine mentions, leans into the void left by history, utilizing the poetry’s fragmentary nature to produce a sense of longing. Unfortunately, these gaps are too often perceived as detriments to learning rather than additional avenues for it. We must understand that this loss, this absence, is part of its seductive fantasy—inviting us to imagine what history has left unsaid.
The continuity of ancient texts is in many ways a mirage. In truth, what survives of Cicero or Sappho is as much a result of their enduring influence as it is of chance and selective memory. The fragments of antiquity we have now are the result of countless chance occurrences—texts lost or copied, overlooked or cherished. Manuscripts attributed to Sappho or Homer are merely placeholders, attempts to fill the gaps left by centuries of decay. Libraries such as Butler like to present these remnants as part of a grand historical lineage, but in reality they are assembled from texts whose missing parts will likely never be recovered.
In our reverence for antiquity, we often overlook a critical question: Who decides the survival of history? We are awed by what we see on display, yet it is what we cannot see—the layers of absence and erasure—that forms the foundation of the archive. Between torn papyrus and broken lines, the artifacts speak, forcing us to confront those who once copied and cherished them, those who have been lost. The manuscripts in Butler’s sixth floor may be rarely visited, but they bear witness to centuries of collective memory. In the quiet of the library, the surviving pieces of Rome and Greece remind us that memory endures not in spite of what’s missing, but because of it.
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