Ancient lights, a balm for the conscience? Or how to swim against the current of the digital flood and its eddies...
- Ariane Bilheran
- 5 days ago
- 8 min read
La Licorne (the Unicorn) No. 24 by Ariane Bilheran, November 15, 2025.
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Our humanity is currently experiencing a crisis of conscience, and I will illustrate this with a single example. We possess manuscripts that have nearly three thousand years of history and transmission. I am thinking, for example, of the masterpieces that are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, but also Hesiod's Theogony. These manuscripts have survived the ages, against all odds; they were copied by hand, by candlelight, in the days before electricity, onto papyrus, wax tablets, then parchment and codices (books with bound pages), until the invention of printing in the Renaissance. Between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD, the scroll was abandoned in favor of the codex, which was much less bulky: Plato's Symposium had to fit… on a seven-meter scroll!
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