This reading has forced me to reconsider a couple of points. Firstly, not too long ago, I wrote a post suggesting that the scarcity of books in the Middle Ages was in part a result of the decline of slavery. I can only shake my head at my own stupidity.
Books were created by copying previous books; the shortage of books was explained by the shortage of templates; I argued that if indeed this was the case, the supply of books should increase exponentially over time; this is, in fact, exactly what happened. Moreover, my suggestion that slavery had anything to do with the proliferation of books was predicated on the incorrect idea that the cost of using a literate slave to copy a book was the cost of the manual labor the slave could otherwise have been doing.
Such a thing is never true. Imagine that you live in classical Greece, and have a literate slave. You can either hire him out as a scribe in the local bank for $20 a year, or keep him in your house and have him copy a book from your library, one book a year. What is the cost of the book? It’s the opportunity cost of the other labor the slave could have been doing, namely $20 a year for clerical work at the bank.
In any case, to return to another previous post, I recently observed the dramatic shift in philosophy from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The shift is from religion to humanism, from concern with the next world to concern with this one. As the term renaissance suggests, this is not the first such shift. Between classical times and the Middle Ages, the shift was from paganism to Christianity, and from a religion relatively lacking in ethical strictures to one loaded with them. In classical times, the question of right conduct was almost independent of religion – consider Plato and Aristotle – whereas in the Middle Ages, religion was the final arbiter of right conduct.
I write all of this to suggest that there are three – perhaps four – great phases in human history. First (This is the one I’m not sure I count…) there was the long, slow rise from animal to civilization, littered with superstition and all the bizarreries of religion imaginable. Second, there was classical Greece and Rome, in which man for a time sought to understand nature, and sought a natural ethic for conduct, ignoring the occult and traditional answers to these problems. Third, there was the Middle Ages; a return to superstition, a time in which the art of the individual, and the exploration of nature and ethics declined. Fourth, there was the Renaissance and all that follows: the rebirth of the art of the individual, the free exploration once again of all questions, scientific and ethical. The release from the chains of religion is an ongoing process, not complete even now.
All of this is merely a circuitous way of saying that I view the Renaissance as the beginning of the modern era. Here, forward progress began again, and has not ceased even until now.
And so I come to another retraction. I once suggested that patronage was a time-honored method of producing superior artwork. In the first great patrons of the modern age, the House of Medici, I have found a compelling argument against patronage. The House of Medici seems to have supported nearly every great artist of the early Renaissance, from Politian to Michelangelo. The Medicis did not do this with the earnings of tired but brilliant lives, but rather by means of inherited wealth and a near-total control over the political machinery of Florence. The first great Medicis, Cosimo and Lorenzo, found their own finances so inextricably linked with Florence’s as a result of their long rule that they could not abandon politics for fear of ruin. Although this was a new paradigm at the time, it recalls nothing more than the fear of the departing incumbents, and the witch-hunts for graft that inevitably follow changes of power, in the modern era.
Therefore, it seems that we shall have to await future eras in history for examples of patronage that we may find morally acceptable.
Edit: for lamentably, humiliatingly bad spelling.
Posted by Catiline 
