“New publisher Spines aims to ‘disrupt’ industry by using AI to publish 8,000 books in 2025 alone“
You don’t need computers to do this. you just need a colon made of bronze
From the Suda
“Didymus, son of Didymus the fishmonger. He was an Aristarchian grammarian in Alexandria. He lived around the time of Antony and Cicero until the age of Augustus. He was called “Bronze-guts” because of his sedulousness for books: they claim that he wrote over three thousand, five-hundred books.”
Δίδυμος, Διδύμου ταριχοπώλου, γραμματικὸς ᾿Αριστάρχειος,᾿Αλεξανδρεύς, γεγονὼς ἐπὶ ᾿Αντωνίου καὶ Κικέρωνος καὶ ἕως Αὐγούστου· Χαλκέντερος κληθεὶς διὰ τὴν περὶ τὰ βιβλία ἐπιμονήν· φασὶ γὰρ αὐτὸν συγγεγραφέναι ὑπὲρ τὰ τρισχίλια πεντακόσια βιβλία.
Seneca, Moral Epistle 88
“But, truly, the knowledge of many disciplines is pleasurable”. Ok, then, let’s keep only what is necessary from these arts. Do you think that the person who considers superficial matters equal to useful ones and for this reason makes his home a museum of expensive products is reprehensible but not the man who is obsessed with the superfluous aspects of academia? To want to know more than is enough is a kind of excessive delusion.
Why? Well, this extreme pursuit of the liberal arts makes people annoying, wordy, bad-mannered, and overly self-satisfied, even though they have not learned the basics because they pursue the useless.
The scholar Didymus wrote four thousand books. I would pity him if had only read that many useless works. In these books he searched for Homer’s homeland, the real mother of Aeneas, whether Anacreon is more licentious or just drunk, whether Sappho was promiscuous and other various questions which, if you learned them, would have been necessarily forgotten. Go on, don’t say life is long. No, when you turn to your own people too, I will show you many things which should be pruned back with an ax.”
“At enim delectat artium notitia multarum.” Tantum itaque ex illis retineamus, quantum necessarium est. An tu existimas reprendendum, qui supervacua usibus conparat et pretiosarum rerum pompam in domo explicat, non putas eum, qui occupatus est in supervacua litterarum supellectile? Plus scire velle quam sit satis, intemperantiae genus est.
Quid? Quod ista liberalium artium consectatio molestos, verbosos, intempestivos, sibi placentes facit et ideo non discentes necessaria, quia supervacua didicerunt. Quattuor milia librorum Didymus grammaticus scripsit. Misererer, si tam multa supervacua legisset. In his libris de patria Homeri quaeritur, in his de Aeneae matre vera, in his libidinosior Anacreon an ebriosior vixerit, in his an Sappho publica fuerit, et alia, quae erant dediscenda, si scires. I nunc et longam esse vitam nega. Sed ad nostros quoque cum perveneris, ostendam multa securibus recidenda.
