LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES	53
Christian students of the Hellenic literature, and thereafter for Western
students of it in their turn; the actual number of works noticed in this
literary digest is 280; and, according to Photius's own account, these
were merely the books that happened to have been read, studied, dis-
cussed, and appraised in his literary circle during the temporary absence
of his brother, to whom the Library is dedicated as a compte rendu of the
transactions in which the absentee had been unable to participate person-
ally. Even if we were to suspect that this dedication was a literary jeu
d'esprit, and that the contents of the Library represented a larger part
of Photius's life-long literary output than the small fraction that they
purport to be,1 the extent of Photius's acquaintance with the Hellenic
literature would still remain portentous by comparison with the ignor-
ance of this pioneer scholar's own immediate predecessors.
An independent private scholar of the stature of a Photius is not, how-
ever, the characteristic figure in the landscape of a dawning literary
renaissance. The pioneer enterprise of reoccupying a long since derelict
literary empire is a piece of titan's work that may require the mobiliza-
tion of a living political empire's organized collective resources; the
typical monument of a literary renaissance in its first or second phase is
an anthology, thesaurus, corpus, lexicon, or encyclopaedia compiled by
a team of scholars at the instance of a prince; and the princely patron of
such works of co-operative scholarship as these has, more often than not,
been the ruler of a resuscitated universal state that has, itself, been the
product of a renaissance on the political plane. Of the five outstandingly
eminent representatives of the type who had appeared on the stage of
History down to the time of writing—namely, Asshurbanipal, Constan-
tine Porphyrogenitus, Yung Lo, K'ang Hsi, and Ch'ien Lung—the last
four had all been emperors of imperia redwiva.
In the execution of the preliminary task of collecting, editing, anno-
tating, and publishing the surviving works of a 'dead' classical literature,
the Far Eastern emperors of a resuscitated Sinic universal state had
not only far outdistanced all their competitors up to date but had raised
paper monuments whose pyramid-like mass could not easily have been
equalled even by the output of a post-Modern Western World with its
unprecedented capacity for material production.
It is true that the size of Asshurbanipal's two clay libraries of Sumer-
ian and Akkadian classical literature was an unknown and unknowable
quantity for the latter-day Western archaeologists who had learnt of the
assemblage and dispersal of these two great Assyrian collections by re-
covering some of the tablets in the course of their excavations on the
site of Nineveh; for, within perhaps not more than sixteen years of the
royal scholar-criminal's death, the contents of both his libraries had
been 'scattered broadcast over the ruins'2 of a hateful city that had been
stormed, sacked, and devastated in 612 b.c. by the infuriated victims of
the last and most atrocious bout of Assyrian militarism.3 Asshurbanipal's
collection may have been larger than the Confucian Canon of the Sinic
 1	See Krumbacher, op. cit, p. 510.
 2	Thompson, R. Campbell, in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. iii (Cambridge
1925, University Press), p. 206.	3 See IV. iv. 468-70 and 483-4.