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By Root 2164 0

a Stationers' regime. The implications of a mundane craft corporation's autonomy extended only to revenue; but the Stationers dealt in belief. That was what made their assertions of autonomy, epitomized by the register, so dangerous. As he was writing, moreover, Parliament was agonizing precisely over petitions from brewers' companies against royal prerogative in the form of excise duties.28 "If the Brewers, who at most can but steal away a Fleg- matick part of the King's Revenue, deserve the serious Consideration of the Supreme Council of England," Atkyns reasoned, "how much more these, that do not onely bereave the King of his Good-Name, but of the very Hearts of His People"? In short, between a brewer and a Stationer "there is as much oddes, as between a Pyrate that robs a Ship or two, and Alexander that robs the whole World."

That line marked the culmination ofAtkyns's long argument- the crux of his bid to restructure the culture of print in genteel, Tory, absolutist terms. It also marked the beginning of the long history of intellectual piracy.

ENEMIES OF ALL MANKIND

Atkyns himself did not say where his reference to Alexander and the pirate came from. But in fact it had a specific source, and it evoked fears with ancient origins. The word piracy derives from a distant Indo-European root meaning a trial or attempt, or (presumably by extension) an experience or experiment. It is an irony of history that in the distant past it meant something so close to the creativity to which it is now reckoned antithetical. By Thucydides' time peiratos was being used to refer to seagoing coastal warlords. The great historian began his work on the Peloponnesian war by explaining how the need to limit the havoc caused by pirates had been the key stimulus to the development of the Greek citystate, and hence to that of civilization itself. Before the rise of Athens, Thucydides related, piracyhad been seen as honorable. It was in opposing pirates that "the Athenians were the first that laid by their Armour, and growing civill, passed into a more tender kind oflife." Civilization was the antithesis to piracy.29

Ancient writers bequeathed two principal associations of the word pirate. Pirateswere seagoing thieves, certainly. But there was more to them than that. They were irritants to the civilized order itself. Their very existence amounted to a test of that order. Cicero, for example, invoked the pirate as his ,,r-criminal -he who declined even the honor that supposedly obtained among thieves. The thing about pirates, for Cicero, was that they lay beyond all society. They had no set place, and owed no customary allegiance to legitimate authority. Their existence required that society distinguish itself and its conduct from all that they did. One did not have to honor promises made to pirates, he remarked, since "a pirate is not counted as an enemy proper, but is the common foe of all." This was a telling measure of their outlawry, since Cicero generally held truthful conversation to be the essential foundation for society itself. Indeed, it was their sheer unsociability that for him seemed the defining characteristic of pirates. He routinely identified land-based brigands with seagoing ones on this basis.30 And that idea came to be formalized into Roman law. As rendered injustinian's reign, the law accounted pirates hitinani generis hostel-enemies to humankind ingeneral.31 In this sense, ships were incidental: they simply made excellent instruments with which to achieve this status.

The storyAtkyns referred to seems to have been something of a commonplace in the ancient world. It was spoken of by Cicero, and repeated in detail by Augustine.32 It was Augustine's version that survived beyond antiquity, and undoubtedly this was what Atkyns had in mind. The tale occupied a pivotal point at the heart of the City of God. Augustine had finished defending Christianity from accusations of responsibility for Rome's fall, and was moving on to address those pagans who attributed the earlier prowess of the empire to piety for the old gods. He wanted