translator of texts (that was a low-status activity of slaves), he was patron of
the slave-curators and editors of Greek manuscripts, and reaped the fame of
the Greek philosophers by expounding several of them with literary polish for
his Roman audience. Varro did much the same for Greek science. Lucretius
was the competitive counterweight to Cicero in his generation, giving literary
expression to Epicurean philosophy, the one major Greek position Cicero did
not appropriate. Rounding out the range of oppositions of the Roman intel-
lectual community were their first Stoics. There were no indigenous creators,
as the entire field was divided up among the idea importers.
We see similar negative effects on indigenous creativity in each case where
imports dominate the attention space. In China during the early centuries of
the Buddhist period, local schools of thought were merely imports of Indian
schools. Similarly, for the first half-dozen generations in Japan, the notable
names were merely those who imported one of the Buddhist schools from
China. In Muslim Spain it was not a question of translating texts from a foreign
language, but nevertheless texts had to be imported from the east; there was
a lag of three generations between the founding of the Córdoba library,
providing a material base for intellectual life, and the emergence of creative
philosophers. In Carolingian Europe, virtually all the well-known scholars
were textual importers, from the founder of the Jarrow monastery in England,
who journeyed repeatedly to Rome for books, through Bede and the York
scholars, to Alcuin, who transplanted this learning to the Continent at the
Carolingian court (Gilson, 1944: 187–227). The usual lineage of masters and
pupils dominated intellectual life, only in this case their ideas were imported
rather than created. Innovation finally broke out in the fifth generation, when
Alcuin’s followers split into rival centers. The most notable name is John Scotus
Eriugena, though he is known mainly for reworking the philosophy of pseudo-
Dionysus, which he had translated from the Greek; Eriugena’s reputation is,
so to speak, another pseudo-reputation. In high medieval Christendom the
generations of most intense importing from the Arab world form a trough in
indigenous philosophy, the break in the networks in the late 1100s and early
1200s that we see in Figures 9.3 and 9.4. There is another trough at the end
of the period, during the breakdown of the medieval university base, when the
Humanists again focused attention on ancient texts.
These are cases of imports swamping the entire attention space. A phe-
nomenon peculiar to these periods is that the biggest stars are typically eclec-
tics, importing several mutually incompatible philosophies. In early Buddhist
China the famous figure is the translator Kumarajiva, who has a central
position in the vertical and horizontal networks and oppositions just like any
other notable creator, although his own work is unoriginal. Kumarajiva is like
Cicero in that he imported not just one but two main factions of alien
Tensions of Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom^ •^447