This adaptation is published with the authorization of Professor Xu Shanwei. It is an AI-assisted contemporary editorial adaptation by Clio Walker, based on Xu’s book and sources actually consulted, using a first-person guide’s voice. It is neither a new personal travelogue by the professor nor a chapter-by-chapter reproduction. Authorization does not imply his individual approval of every additional interpretation.

When medieval monks copied old books, they sometimes ran into a passage of strange, curling letters.

The best-known story is that they wrote a Latin phrase in its place: Graecum non legitur. Professor Xu Shanwei renders it, "Greek — I cannot read it."

Then they skipped ahead and kept copying.

What they skipped was an entire alphabet. And the philosophy, medicine and astronomy the West would later call its own had first been written in that alphabet.

I. The last man who meant to bring the Greek books across

In the early sixth century there were still people in Rome who read Greek with ease.

Boethius was born around 475–477, at about the time the last Western Roman emperor was deposed. He came from the Roman aristocracy and had been thoroughly schooled in Greek. Italy was then ruled by the Ostrogothic king Theoderic, who let the old Roman families keep their traditions, and Boethius spent most of his life in learned leisure, translating and commenting on philosophy.

Historians usually hold that around 516, in his second commentary on Aristotle's On Interpretation, he announced a vast plan: to translate all the writings of Plato and Aristotle into Latin and comment on each of them.

He began with logic. In Xu's table of Aristotle's Latin translations, the Categories, the Prior Analytics, the Topics and the Sophistical Refutations are all credited to Boethius, about 510–522.

The plan was never finished.

He became Theoderic's Master of Offices, one of the most senior posts at court, and soon fell out with many others there, probably because he attacked their corruption. Accused of treason and of practicing magic, he was imprisoned and executed, probably in 526. Before he died, he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in prison.

The Boethius scholar John Marenbon sees something more: Boethius seems to have been absorbed by logic, writing more than one commentary on a single work and composing extra textbooks, and the grand scheme for all of Plato and Aristotle was hardly practicable in the first place.

Xu's table makes what followed plain. After Boethius, the next Latin translations of these books did not come until the twelfth century.

II. The alphabet vanishes

For some six hundred years, the page is nearly blank.

Xu quotes research holding that by the end of the sixth century, in the Latin West, "almost all Greek learned and cultural works in the original Greek had been lost; even knowledge of the Greek language itself had vanished almost without exception."

Charlemagne tried to revive learning. Yet even in the Carolingian age, Westerners' ignorance of Greek writings and of the body of philosophical and scientific thought was close to total poverty, in the words Xu cites.

Xu also gives a startlingly short list. From the late sixth century to the end of the tenth, across the whole of Latin Christendom, apart from Alcuin and a few of his pupils, Bede, Gerbert and the physicians of the medical school at Salerno, there were no scholars worth mentioning. In the late sixth century and the early tenth, not a single scientist worth writing about appeared. What science the West had was picked up from the remnants of Roman classical works.

The French historian of medieval philosophy Étienne Gilson held that one major cause of this decline was that the Latin West had all but cut its ties to Greek science and philosophy.

Xu writes that he finds this persuasive.

III. A boy and his teacher

By the eleventh century, the West was changing.

Farming grew more productive, population rose, trade and crafts flourished, and towns revived. Rulers at every level needed educated officials; towns needed secretaries in large numbers; a growing number of courts needed judges; merchants needed people who could reckon.

Trained people were not there to meet the demand.

A boy in northern France left a record of that gap. His name was Guibert. He later became abbot of Nogent, and around 1115 he finished his memoirs. Xu quotes one passage, which reads in the 1925 English translation:

"There was a little before that time, and in a measure there is still in my time, such a scarcity of grammarians that in the towns hardly anyone, and in the cities very few, could be found, and those who by good hap could be discovered, had but slight knowledge and could not be compared with the itinerant clerks of these days."

Guibert goes on to describe his own teacher.

The man his mother engaged had begun to learn grammar late in life, and having taken in so little of it when young, he was all the less skilled. He was, at least, an upright man. Guibert's mother paid him more to give up his other pupils and teach her son alone. The schoolroom was the family's dining hall.

The teacher kept him on a tight rein. The boy was not to leave his side, not to eat anywhere but at home, and not to accept gifts from anyone without leave. While other boys roamed and played, Guibert sat in his little clerical robe and watched.

But the teacher himself could not compose prose or verse. Guibert remembered being pelted almost every day with "a hail of blows and hard words," because the man was forcing him to learn what he could not teach. Nearly six years passed in that fruitless struggle.

One evening, after a beating harsher than he had deserved, he went to his mother's knees. She asked, as she always did, whether he had been whipped that day. Not wanting to tell tales, he denied it.

She pulled off his inner shirt and saw his little arms blackened and the skin of his back swollen everywhere with the cuts of the switches.

Weeping, she said: "You shall never become a clerk, nor any more suffer so much to get learning."

The boy looked at her and answered: "If I had to die on the spot, I would not give up learning my book and becoming a clerk."

She had long promised that if he wanted to be a knight, she would give him arms and equipment when he came of age. He turned it all down.

Years later, Guibert summed up that teacher: the man took cruel vengeance on him for not knowing what the man did not know himself.

IV. The hungry infant

There is not a single Greek letter in this story.

A family of standing, willing to pay well, could find a teacher who could not even teach Latin composition. Greek was out of the question.

Xu offers an image: Westerners of the early Middle Ages were like a crying, hungry infant whose undernourished mother could not give it enough milk.

This, he argues, was the deep social force that drove the West to seek out foreign learning. Its own source had run dry, so it had to look elsewhere.

The doors were pushed open by war and trade. The Christian reconquest in Spain, the Norman conquest of Sicily and the Crusades gave the West control of the Mediterranean again. Toledo, Sicily and Constantinople, which earlier stories in this series visited, were those doors.

V. Greek by a detour

The doors opened, but the Greek learning that came through first was mostly not in Greek.

Xu writes that in their own "century of translation," the Arabs had already rendered the main works of Greek science and philosophy into Arabic and added a great many commentaries. From the mid-eleventh century to the first half of the twelfth, Westerners came to know the Greek classics chiefly by translating Arabic into Latin.

A direct road from Greek into Latin existed too, mainly in southern Italy and Sicily. But in the twelfth century, translation from Arabic into Latin dominated.

Unable to read Greek, the West first read Greek in Arabic.

In the second half of the eleventh century, a man known as Constantine the African set to work in southern Italy translating Arabic works into Latin. Xu counts him as the beginning of the translation movement. That is the next story.

VI. Epilogue

Centuries later, the unreadable phrase was still alive.

In 1599, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Casca is asked what Cicero said. Cicero spoke Greek, Casca answers; those who understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads, "but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me."

The English saying is often thought to come from that Latin note of the copyists.

A Roman aristocrat like Boethius could still read Greek with ease; in Shakespeare's hands, a Roman could no longer follow it. Closing that gap took the West several centuries and a long detour.

Sources and editorial boundaries

1. Authorized base text: Xu Shanwei, The Eastern Learning Moving West and the Revival of Western Culture (东学西渐与西方文化的复兴), chapter 2, section 1 on the social and cultural background of the translation movement (the list of scholars from the sixth to tenth centuries, eleventh-century social demand, the Guibert passage, Gilson's judgment, "Graecum non legitur," the two quotations on the sixth century and the Carolingian age, the image of the hungry infant, and expansion opening the doors); the opening of section 2 (Constantine as the start of the movement; the dominance of Arabic-to-Latin translation in the twelfth century); the passage on the three language channels for Greek works; and table 2–12 of Aristotle's Latin translations (Boethius, c. 510–522; the next translations in the twelfth century). Read in full. The original footnotes of the studies Xu cites are not in the text supplied, so every quotation from the base text is given as Xu's citation, not as a check of the original books. English renderings of Xu's Chinese are the editor's. 2. Primary narrative: Guibert of Nogent, Monodiae (memoirs), book 1, chapters 4–6, in C. C. Swinton Bland's translation, The Autobiography of Guibert, Abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy (London: Routledge, 1925), full text in Fordham University's Internet Medieval Sourcebook: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/guibert-vita.asp. Read in full for these chapters. The page notes that Bland worked from D'Achery's 1651 Latin edition and made errors; the Latin text, Benton's revision and Archambault's newer translation were not consulted. 3. John Marenbon, "Boethius," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 2005; substantive revision 14 October 2026): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/boethius/. Read for Boethius's birth, Greek education, life under Theoderic, the plan announced c. 516 as historians usually hold, his office, accusations, execution (probably 526), the Consolation, and the judgment that the plan was hardly practicable. 4. Guibert's dates: English Wikipedia, "Guibert of Nogent" (born c. 1055 at Clermont-en-Beauvaisis; abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy from 1104; died 1124; the Monodies completed in 1115 according to Jay Rubinstein's 2011 Penguin introduction as quoted there), used only for dates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guibert_of_Nogent. Xu's base text dates the memoir to about 1150, which cannot be right for an author who died c. 1124; this version follows c. 1115. Birth years vary between sources, so none is given in the story. 5. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, act 1, scene 2, MIT public-domain text: https://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/julius_caesar.1.2.html. The idea that the English idiom grew out of medieval copyists' marginal notes is a common belief, flagged as such and unsourced in English Wikipedia's "Greek to me": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_to_me. The story presents the copyists' phrase as a tradition and identifies no particular manuscript. 6. Boundaries: no copying scene, date, place or person is invented, and no dialogue or feelings beyond Guibert's memoir are added. "Some six hundred years, nearly blank" summarizes Xu's two quotations and his table; it does not claim no one in the West knew Greek in that time, and Xu's own list has exceptions. "Those doors" refers to stories 002, 004 and 007 of this series. 7. Map: the point for c. 510–522 is the city of Rome, standing only for the Roman aristocratic world Boethius belonged to; the research consulted does not name where he translated, so confidence is low. The point for 1104 is the Coucy-le-Château-Auffrique area (Aisne, France), for Guibert's election as abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy. The place of Boethius's execution was not checked, and Guibert's memoir does not name the town of his schooling; neither is mapped.